Elves: Once Walked With Gods (15 page)

‘You want us to leave the command post?’ asked Merrat. ‘What about Olmaat and the healers?’

‘When we’re done at the temple I want us to leave the city altogether. Olmaat is safe enough. They will not enter the playhouse. They fear what happened here. Tais, we move.’

Katyett led them. She headed for a corner of the roof, swung out and climbed down to the arch above the doorway faster than most could descend a ladder. With a quick glance towards the approaching torches, she jumped the last twenty feet, landing silently and running away towards the piazza, meaning to enter it at the northern end by the temple of Shorth.

Down at street level, Katyett felt blind. She had the eight with her and there were three other cells in the city monitoring trouble. A young TaiGethen came up to her left shoulder.

‘I’ve got the best route to the piazza,’ she said. ‘We can avoid the mobs and come in between Shorth and Gyal, up the stairs by the western sunken gardens.’

‘Thank you, Faleen, lead on. Merrat, Graf, I need you to trace the other cells. Bring them to the piazza as soon as you can.’

‘Consider it done.’

Katyett’s cell split left and right, sprinting away into the night. She followed Faleen, who darted down a tight alleyway that led south and east between houses and the walls of the Gardens of Appos. She felt more comfortable here. Temporarily, the noise of violence was muted and the high walls leaned in like a blessing from Cefu.

The alley led out onto a quiet street, cobbled and with small businesses and low, domed housing on either side. There were a few lights but most places were dark and silent. Ordinary elves were hiding indoors, frightened and anxious about what was happening in their city, to their way of life.

Here in streets like this was where the anger at what had consumed the city settled most deeply on Katyett. Ula and iad, young and old, parent and child. Every thread would be represented behind the closed doors and shuttered windows. Scant hours before, they had been going about their normal lives. Secure in the knowledge that Yniss blessed their every step and the harmony was with them, unbreakable. The silent, invisible security blanket that wrapped them all.

And then the denouncement had happened, and those who had determined it to be the moment the world of the elves returned to the days before the War of Bloods held sway in the city. Those who had organised the murder of Jarinn and Lorius had ensured the blood of all threads would be spilled.

Katyett had no idea if there was a way out for the innocents she passed by with her brothers and sisters. She had no idea if the harmony would survive this onslaught, and she couldn’t understand why any elf would want to rip it apart. Katyett could recall all too clearly the atrocities of the War of Bloods. They were at the root of her nervousness now. She could still feel the tears.

A TaiGethen warrior ran into the street from the left, sprinting hard, sliding to a stop when he saw them.

‘Yniss bless us, we may just be in time,’ he said.

‘Pakiir. Run with us,’ said Katyett. ‘Tell me.’

‘They’re coming from all over. Crowding the temple piazza. Al-Arynaar are trying to hold them but they are too few. They mean to burn the temple of Yniss.’

Katyett’s body went cold.

‘Not again,’ she whispered. ‘Tais, run. Run hard.’

The sky towards the piazza was glowing with torchlight. Katyett ran alongside Faleen. The nearer they got the worse Katyett felt. They could hear the noise of the mob. She could almost taste the intent. A chant started. A line of the ancient tongue.

Chilmatta nun kerene.

Immortals die screaming.

She swore and pushed yet harder, forging ahead of Faleen. Still two hundred yards and more, and she could hear fighting. The clash of weapons. Screams of pain above the roar of the mob. An intensification of the mood. Blood was flowing. Elves were dying.

‘Up to the roof of Shorth,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘Let’s see what we’re up against.’

Pakiir was going to be proved wrong. They were not going to get there in time. Katyett heard a roar of triumph that could only mean the defence was broken. Immediately after, there was a whooshing sound and the stink of burning oil filled the air. The roar intensified.

Katyett tore around the back of Shorth’s Temple, pounded through the sunken garden with the yelling of the mob all around her, above her and ahead of her. She led the TaiGethen up the side of the temple, using the thick liana that grew there. She ran along the arm and down the body, pulling up at the temple’s edge and looking down on mass murder.

Rioters surrounded Yniss. Doorways and windows had been blocked by heavy drums and upturned wagons. Oil rained down on the building and torches were flicking into the fuel in their hundreds. The temple had caught with a ferocity that surprised even the rioters. Katyett could see those within the temple trying to beat their way out but the barricading was horribly effective. It rocked but did not fall.

Hundreds would be inside, believing themselves safe. But thousands were outside. Thousands.

‘We’ve got to get down there,’ she said. ‘Get those doors open.’

‘We’ll be overrun,’ said Pakiir. ‘Look at them. Look at their faces.’

Ugly, twisted fury. Some of them upturned to the TaiGethen. Fingers pointed up while dozens of others added more fuel to the fire, which had already set the roof alight. Paint was blistering. There was screaming from inside. The piazza was choked with elves, safe in their numbers, taunting the TaiGethen. Yelling their hate of the Ynissul.

Down at the edges of the apron a few Al-Arynaar still fought, trying to keep the rioters away. Three broke from the crowd, racing to the barricades to try to pull them away from the main doors. Forty elves engulfed them. She saw fists and feet fly in and the flash of a blade.

A bloodied Al-Arynaar body was lifted aloft and thrown onto the flames. A second was raised, still struggling. Katyett snarled. Pelyn. Fighting hard. The rioters dropped her. More fists and raking fingers went in.

‘Yniss save us. Tais, we move.’

Katyett backed up two paces, ran to the temple edge and jumped, her blades in her hands and the will to use them in her heart. Her leap carried her out over the narrow path between Shorth and the Yniss apron, over the heads of the rioters. She wouldn’t clear them all, that leap would have been prodigious even for a TaiGethen. She just hoped her arrival would be enough to cause a measure of disruption.

Katyett was coming down from a height of around forty feet. She yelled for space and saw elves begin to scatter. The heat down here was already intense. The screaming and yelling was an assault on the ears. The sheer violence of the atmosphere was a physical shock.

Katyett drew her arms across her chest in an X, her blades resting against her cheeks. She hit the ground immediately behind an ula who was pushing forward, desperate to gain himself some space. Katyett absorbed the impact throughout her body, crouching low then standing and bringing her blades back across her body to ready by her sides.

She ran forward while others landed behind her, shouting for space that none wanted to cede. Katyett found her way blocked almost immediately. She lashed out with a foot, catching an ula behind the knee. He pitched forward. Katyett ran up his body. She slammed the hilt of one blade into the back of an
iad
’s neck. She dropped unconscious. Katyett hurdled the body, feeling her feet on the temple apron.

The atmosphere was clogged with ash and smoke. The heat was incredible. She’d broken through the main rioter line. Directly ahead was the group of elves fighting the remaining Al-Arynaar. Pelyn struggled on. A big ula, a Beethan, had wrapped his arms around her midriff. She struck at him again and again with the back of her head while her feet lashed out, catching another square in the face.

Katyett ran straight into the melee, shoulder-charging an iad from in front of Pelyn. TaiGethen ran to either side, heading for the barricades, casting around for something with which to drag them aside.

‘Drop her right now,’ called Katyett.

The ula turned his bloodied face to Katyett. A contemptuous smile twisted his face. He turned instead towards the fire. Pelyn screamed, knowing his intent. So did Katyett. She took a single pace and thrashed a blade through the back of the man’s hamstrings. Simultaneously, Pakiir darted across in front of him, snatching Pelyn from his grasp as he opened his mouth to scream. He fell forward, head catching the burning barricade a glancing blow. His hair smoked, caught fire.

Katyett moved left to defend Pakiir. Pelyn was shouting to be let go. Pakiir complied. Pelyn hit the ground and was already turning back to the burning temple. Katyett saw the aching pain in her face, the singeing of her brows and hair. The smudges across her armour. Pelyn ran towards the front doors. TaiGethen who had been trying to break through the flaming obstacle bore her backwards with them as they came, beaten back by the sheer heat.

Rioters on the apron had begun to fall back. A TaiGethen foot whipped out, catching one in the gut, sending him sprawling. A jaqrui whispered away, catching another in the upper arm, forcing her to drop her blade. Al-Arynaar bodies littered the ground. Twenty of them. Katyett blinked away the stinging tears of smoke.

Out in the piazza, the fury was undimmed. Missiles were being hurled towards them and the temple. The building itself and all within it were lost. The roof had begun to collapse and the doors were burned in. Any screaming from within had ceased. TaiGethen still tried to breach the inferno.

Katyett felt tears on her face. The scene took on an echoing, unreal quality for her. Shouts sounded distant. Everything in her vision appeared to slow. She turned her head to see the flames towering into the night sky, pushing clouds of thick black smoke before them. Inside, three hundred and more Ynissul. Innocent elves. Bakers, potters, coopers, priests, healers. Children. Burned to death.

The Arch of the TaiGethen turned back to the crowd, letting the sight of her desecrated temple settle in her memory. She was aware of others joining her - Grafyrre and Merrat with those they had sought elsewhere in the city. Pakiir. Faleen. Standing in a line to stare at those for whom they protected the rainforest, for whom they had sworn to keep the elven people safe.

Wind was getting up. Picking at the clothing of the fallen. Fanning the flames in advance of Gyal’s arrival. Her tears would be bitter when they came. The gods would turn from the elves. Angry, betrayed. Their faith insulted, their mercy ignored. The elves would walk alone now. And the path would run with their blood.

A rumbling crack filled the night. Katyett swung round. The front of the temple of Yniss collapsed inwards on a carpet of sparks and threw up clawed hands of fire chasing a wreath of smoke. The symbol of the harmony in Ysundeneth, destroyed by malign hand.

This time when Katyett returned her gaze to the mob, seeing it confused, not knowing what to do next, she felt it. The emotion she reserved for heretics. For thieves and, of course, for murderers. Hate.

And the TaiGethen existed to cleanse Yniss’s land of such vermin.

‘Tais,’ she said. ‘We strike.’

Chapter 12

A leader must at all times know the state of the body on which his subordinates gaze when receiving orders to risk their lives.

Takaar recoiled from the guarana as if it was burning hot. He blew on his fingertips before he could stop himself, realising a fraction too late what a ridiculous reaction it was. But he was hot. Burning up like in the worst clutches of a missiata-inspired fever. Sweat had burst out all over his body.

He sat back on the roughly made wooden chair in his bivouac, shivering and breathing hard. Unbidden, an intense sadness swept through him so hard it made him gasp. Like the anguished cry of a god, it reverberated in his mind and body. A shrieking disbelief. A horror from the darkness.

Takaar held his head in his hands, his tears falling onto the ground between his feet. He sobbed and wailed, the emotion uncontrollable, surging within him like flood water over rocks. It flung him back to the days of realisation following his fleeing of the Tul-Kenerit. And further back to the morning he had found his father murdered in his sleep by Tuali rebels.

That day, through the grief, he had sworn to unite the threads so that no other elf should suffer as he suffered. Today, he had no such direction but the pain was of equal intensity. More so because he was lost.

‘What do you want of me?’

His cry set birds to flight and silenced for a moment the hoots of monkeys and the rattling of lizards and frogs.

No one wants anything of you barring your death. Why do you ask the gods? They have long since turned from you.

‘Then why do I feel this way?’

It is merely your guilt come to remind you of your crimes. Accept it. The leap to your salvation is near.

Takaar shook his head.

‘No. Not me. Messages. Messages through the ground and through the air. Calling to me.’

Listen to yourself. Messages coming to you through the ground? Absolutely. And monkeys dress you every morning.

‘Get away from me, get away from me!’

Takaar got up and ran. Branches, leaves and thorns caught at his face and arms. He ducked his head and put his arms ahead of him, crashing through the undergrowth. The heat within him was unbearable. The sick pain and intense grief and fury overwhelming. His heart was thrashing. He couldn’t drag in a breath deep enough to satisfy him.

He burst through the last of the brush and slid to a desperate stop on the edge of the cliffs down to the roaring River Shorth. He was gasping, shaking and crying, unable to control his emotion. Such a crime, but he didn’t know what or where it had happened. His senses were completely deluged, drowning his directional ability.

‘What are they doing, what are they doing?’

Takaar clutched at his knees and rocked back and forth, pleading for the heat and sorrow to ease.

A familiar pose. Roll a bit further forward, why don’t you? It’s merely the entire elven race reminding you of the scale of your betrayal. They will rip themselves apart. Destroy each other. Leave nothing to remember them by. All because of you. All because you ran. All because you are a coward.