Water Witch (2 page)

She wished it didn't have to be like this.

Desiccated, a human looked like strangely
tanned leather; this man was no different. He had a tattau beneath his right
arm, that much she could tell; that alone made him different from any other man
she'd killed. She paused to trace the line of inked-in soot stretching from
tricep to hip in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line -- or could have
been perfectly straight if not tightened into a warped ribbon of ink.

The tattau made her fidget. She herself had
a ribbon of ink stretched into a perfect line. Her own may have been stretched
across her chin, but it was too much of a coincidence to ignore. She leaned in
for closer study; it would be far too much coincidence if his tattau also
showed stampings of skin through the ribbon, as hers did, mouthing flesh-words
in a language she had never learned to decipher.

There, just discernible down the length of
his ribcage were the symbols: not the exact same as her own, but similar enough
that she knew the ribbon had been tattaued around open symbols. It was a
strange mix, uncommon.

She looked up and scanned the grounds,
letting the pools of rain drip down her bare shoulders. Through the cascade she
saw a dozen other men lying at varying distances from her. She couldn't tell
from her vantage spot if they too were tattaued, but she could see they'd each
been in various pursuits when she'd attacked them. Daily pursuits. Pursuits of
regular living. One had a spilled basket of oval stones that had probably once
been gathered eggs before she'd psyched the water from them; another lay next
to a bundle of kindling, one clutched a spear, another a child. She squeezed
her eyes shut at that one. The children always bothered her.

So. It was true, her belief that they had
no idea they were about to face The Deities.

Past the dozen men who had been at toil when
she'd arrived, sprawled now in unexpected death, squatted what she thought
could be a dwelling. From her killing distance, she'd thought it was a hill;
from this close, she could tell it had a maw of a door with desiccated thatch
atop. A mud house, she thought, something that in Sarum, with its erections of
stone and cement, she'd never seen, but recognized from early childhood stories
her nurse told of, spinning sleeping tales about where she'd come from.

She lost herself in thought, trying vainly
to catch the specter of memory and coax it into the light. What was it Nohma
had said? It had something to do with those huts and these tattaus. Something
about spirit fires and brown magic.

A crackle through dead brush startled her
from her reverie, but she didn't need to turn around to know who it was. She
could smell him; the red tobacco on his flesh, the musk of a dozen women, the
sourness of a nursing babe that was his new favorite heir.

"It's you," she said and shifted
so she could see him. She met her father's blue-eyed gaze with all the courage
she could muster. He didn't usually come to witness her work, not since she had
been very young and unreliable.

"I hadn't thought to see you,
Father."

His gaze slid over her so quickly she
doubted he saw her at all. It fell instead on the seeds nestled together in her
palm.

"I come to see the battlefield, not to
court a witch."

It stung. It always stung, that
condescension. She should be used to it by now, but even eighteen years
couldn't blunt the edge of that sword.

"A witch was useful enough for you on
this battleground."

"Is there another use for a
witch?"

She ignored the words. "Who were they,
Father?"

He shrugged and rain ran off his shoulder
to pool on the top of his boot.

"I see you've let the fluid
return." He spread his arms to indicate the gathering storm.

It was her turn to shrug. "It always
returns. It has nothing to do with me."

"So you always say." It was a
simple statement, but it held a note of accusation. She knew he believed more
of her.

Still, this was more than he'd spoken to
her in a year and even though she hated herself for it, she pressed forward.

"This was no battlefield."

"A battlefield -- a war -- has many
forms."

"And one of its forms is a peaceful
village?"

He cocked his head as his gaze met hers,
his hair so like his albino mount's mane, long and thick and tangled, plastered
from the rain against his skull. He looked like a vulture then, with his great
hooked nose and hooded brow. She should have seen the resemblance before. He
was a bird of scavenge, not of prey.

"What were they to you, Father, these
peaceful people?"

"Who said they were peaceful? And who
said they were people? You know as well as any warrior, targets are things, not
people." He turned on his heel in dismissal, kicked the hand of the prone
corpse at her feet. "Now collect the seeds of yours and bring them for the
count."

He took what she thought were deliberate
steps toward his mount, but she caught him stealing a surreptitious glance at
the horizon where the vultures were gathering, where the copse of trees was,
where the fluid still rested in the fibers of each living thing there, and she
saw him worry his bottom lip with his teeth.

And she wondered in that moment
what might have Yuri, fierce Leader of a Thousand, Conqueror of Hordes so
concerned.

The village was a small, mobile one. If she
could name it, she'd have to call it nomadic except it showed signs of having
put down roots recently that didn't seem to show an inclination of movement for
a while. She was right about the mud hut. No community of people would take the
time to pile all soil into one place and hollow it out and thatch the top just
to move on when the food source had thinned. In full view, she could tell that
great care had been put into its erection; it could have been perfectly oval
with vertical slits for air.

Yet there were signs of travel too: many
dwellings were the stick and skin kind that allowed for easy tear down and set
up. And these were scattered in what was once a grassy clearing at the opening
mouth of a great forest.

It had taken her father's camp and riders
five days from Sarum to find a site close enough to the coming battle she would
only have one full day of riding to reach this village. They'd been on campaign
for most of the season already, and had stopped in Sarum for a mere five days
when his scouts returned. There had been a flurry of activity then; she'd seen
it from Barruch's stall as she mucked it out and Barruch watched her with a
sense of entitlement she'd come to expect. She'd known the men would be moving
out again soon; she'd traveled much in her years as Tool to the Emir, and she
recognized the appearance of an army about to pull out.

She knew this clearing too and she knew the
woods beyond. Both were on the cusp of a great body of water stretching farther
than she could see and larger than she could drain.

Alaysha had collected fifteen sets of eyes
by the time she'd reached the hut: ten men, two children, and three women. Two
of the children had been infants clutched in a woman's arms. She'd been
pregnant, so she supposed she should increase the count to sixteen even though
she'd have to explain to her father why she didn't have that many pairs of
seeds.

The hut held another three, all settled
around a fire pit still smoking from newly spent ashes. She stood next to the
pit and peered up. Smoke puddled at the ceiling, trying to make its way out of
the small hole left for ventilation so the inhabitants didn't have to worry
about falling sick from inhaling smoke-filled air.

She was so weary; she felt like every
emotion in her body was somehow trying to do the same thing as the smoke.

Alaysha found herself squatting next to one
of the women hunched lifeless next to the fire pit. The old woman stared
unseeing at her own eyes that had fallen to the ground in front of her. They
were larger than the others she'd collected and were not nearly as shrivelled,
but there they lay just the same. About an inch apart, but one slightly offside
as if it had rolled about after it had fallen.

She reached down to scoop them and said, as
much to hear her own voice as to apologize to the disrespect of another,
"Sorry, Mother." She palmed the two seeds and tightened her fist
around them. "I need to take these from you." She had an insane urge
to pat the old woman on the shoulder in condolence, but resisted. Once more she
wondered why she had been sent to destroy these people.

The old woman kept her counsel as Alaysha
expected, but there was a subtle shifting of the smoke so it seemed to collect
itself from the ceiling and the air around her only to snake around the woman's
throat. It was so subtle at first that Alaysha didn't realize anything had
changed in the hut until she thought to recheck the ceiling and discovered it
was clear. She knew then it was no ordinary smoke.

She fixed her attention again on the fire
pit. Ashes, yes, and bits of blackened wood, but something else too. She closed
her eyes and breathed in: frankincense, rosemary, sage. They could be merely
for fragrance to rid the air of the stagnant musk of wet soil. Yes. Perhaps.
She inhaled again, this time more deliberately, more focused. Concentrating.
Another scent: an older one than mere herbs. The smell of souls roasting, she
thought. Sulfur, then.

"Who were you, old crone," she
said out loud. "That you could mask that stink?"

Better question might be why she would be
burning sulfur in the first place.

She craned her neck, trying to peer under
and up at the old woman's face. No eyes, of course; Alaysha had those in her
hand. The cheeks were hollowed in from age as well as the leathering of the
battle. The mouth hung open, jaws as unhinged as a serpent's readying for a
meal. The chin --

Alaysha scrambled to her feet so fast she
fell on her backside twice before she found solid footing. By then, she'd
backed into the wall and her palm had contacted the cracks of dry dirt. Her
hand went through and half the wall released itself in a shower of earth. It
caked at her feet as the rain streamed in and kissed her cheeks with wet.

"Who are you, old crone?"

She stumbled back to the fire pit, afraid
the whole wall would cave in and with it the whole hut, and she'd be trapped
there under the weight of dry soil getting ever heavier as the rain soaked it.

The old woman remained just as quiet as her
death demanded, so too did her companions, both of them hunched forward, their
hands stretched out before them on the ground, palms up, supplicating almost.
Their eyes also awaited collection.

Alaysha had to steel herself to press
closer and reach for the seeds. She had to force herself to peer under and up
at their faces too.

Tattaus. Each one just like the first.
Stretched in ribbons across their chins and into their hairline. Tattaus filled
with symbols of flesh showing through, of an ancient language that seemed
familiar but unlearned.

Tattaus even more like hers than the man
outside.

She couldn't see the smoke anymore. It must
have found its way out of the crumbling hole she'd made in the wall. She shook
the seeds around in her palm, staring out the hole and watching the rain
collect in the crevices made of the cracked earth. It puddled up through some,
collected in holes and started to move like something alive. The gap itself
started to melt and the wall split further. The torrent would collect in any
riverbeds outside and sweep this village and its bodies into outlying areas,
scatter everything until it was unrecognizable anymore. And this hut would
collapse on her soon if she didn't get out.

Still, these women, these crones -- elders
they must be -- had a secret she desperately wanted to know, and she wasn't
leaving without at least one of them.

Without thinking of respect or propriety,
she began yanking one by the arm, dragging her along the earth toward the door,
and when the rain and dirt had mixed into a slick mud that stole her grip from
the leathered arm, she grabbed a foot and buck-yanked until she managed to get
the woman halfway through the opening.

Too late, the mud hut collapsed on itself,
the weight of the rain turning the caked dirt into a muck that greedily held
onto everything beneath it.

She fell backwards onto hard wet ground. It
couldn't be. Not this close. Not this close. She'd nearly had her.

A sob got stuck somewhere between her chest
and throat. She choked. Even as the torrent plastered her hair and made her
limbs immobile from cold, she felt the hot tears mingle on her cheek.

She could have sat there for ten minutes or
more, letting the rain course down over her chest, but the sense that she was
completely nude and hip deep in a puddle of muddy water tempted her to stand.
She swiped her eyes with the back of her forearm. She'd been foolish letting a
few dead women bother her so. Hadn't she seen dead women plenty of times? Yes,
she told herself -- so much it should have made her complacent by now.

If it just hadn't been for those tattaus.
That was the trouble. She hated crying, had learned to steel the tears long
ago, had learned to steel almost every emotion that could bring the power, but
these women, these markings -- they discomforted her.