The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (23 page)

Upon entering the defile, they fell into shadow.

They were protected for the time being, but the enemy would be on them soon.

Nikandr whistled and waved to catch Soroush’s and Goeh’s attention. He waved them back, and then he looked to Ashan. “Please, Ashan, take her.”

Ashan did, slipping behind Nikandr in the saddle and taking Atiana from him. Nikandr then climbed down and grabbed his musket from its holster behind the saddle and ran to stand beside Goeh and Soroush.

As the others continued down the trail, the three of them waited.

“I’ll take the first. Soroush, the second.”

Soroush nodded, and just then Nikandr saw the first of them. He thought of taking down the mounts—it was a much easier shot—but with their extras it would be a waste. It was vital that they take men out while they could. As the lead man came more fully into view, he sighted carefully and pulled the trigger. The shot caught the soldier of Yrstanla fully in the chest and sent him reeling back and over the rump of his mount. Even before he’d collapsed to the ground, Soroush fired, taking the second in line. Nikandr was reloading when Goeh took the third.

Nikandr fired again as the janissaries began returning fire. Soroush fired shortly after. Goeh was slower. Nikandr and Soroush were both able to fire one more time before Goeh raised his musket to his shoulder. Just as Goeh fired, the shot striking the red earth of the dry cliffs, the janissaries called a charge.

“Quickly,” Nikandr called, retreating toward their ab-sair. “We’ll try again ahead.”

But Nikandr knew that such a thing would be difficult. They’d dropped only four of the men, leaving at least twenty. And with the speed the janissaries would put on now, there would most likely be no time. They’d be lucky to make it out of this defile, much less reach level ground below.

They rode hard. Their ab-sair were winded, but they’d heard the pounding of hooves behind them; they’d heard the gunfire—they were every bit as scared as Nikandr, and their pace showed a renewed strength because of it.

Even so, it couldn’t last long. The winding path through the defile—so close at times his arms brushed the red rock of the sheer cliff walls—took them lower and lower, and then it opened up into a valley of sorts. The rock formations here were strange. Some were short. Others were hundreds of feet tall. Their bases widened and were somewhat rough, but the higher they went the smoother the stone became until they looked like needles ready to pierce the fabric of the deep blue sky.

The janissaries were only a hundred paces behind them now.

They could not outrun them.

If they tried, they would all be killed one by one, or their mounts shot out from underneath them.

Nikandr glanced back. Several janissaries, now that the path had widened, were spaced more widely and were sighting along their muskets once more.

Just then Nikandr noticed, toward the desert plain, a form rising from behind one of the strange rock formations. It was a man wearing robes the same color as the red stone from which the columns were made, the same red as this entire desert seemed to be made. He bore a musket with beads and braided rope decorating the barrel. His face was hidden by a red scarf so that only his eyes were revealed. He lowered his musket and aimed it toward Nikandr. Before Nikandr could react, a white puff of smoke issued from the barrel.

Nikandr ducked instinctively, but shortly after he heard one of the janissaries’ mounts scream. He looked back and saw the ab-sair rolling in the dry earth. The rider was caught in the tumble and was lost a moment later to the dust that rose up around them. The other riders steered wide, one of them firing his musket at the red-robed man, but as he did, a dozen others rose up, then more, and more. There must have been forty of them. Fifty.

Unlike the first who had fired, these men bore curving bows made from beautiful black wood. They pulled the strings back, sighting for a moment, before releasing their arrows in tight succession. They took down a dozen janissaries in mere seconds.

The surviving janissaries pulled their mounts to a halt. They looked, wide-eyed, for only a moment before one of them called retreat. The rest needed no convincing. They turned and urged their mounts to head back toward the defile. And soon, they were gone.

Leaving Nikandr and the rest alone with these men from the heart of the desert. These men of Kohor.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

That night Styophan’s hands and feet were bound, and he was tied to an iron ring set into the central posts of a large yurt. Anahid was with him. Rodion and Edik and Galeb were brought in soon after, but Vyagos and Oleg were not. Guards were set outside the yurt, but no others stayed inside with them. It was a large space for five people, which made Styophan nervous. Something had changed, no doubt due to the expectations of Bahett, or perhaps King Brechan. Or perhaps it was simply that Kürad felt his debt to the fates had been paid in full, and it was time Styophan be treated like any other prisoner of war.

“Where are the others?” Styophan asked Rodion.

Rodion shook his head, his eyes expressing the worry seething inside him. “They were taken northward through the yurts while we were led here.”

Styophan’s gut tightened like a skein of wet yarn left drying in the sun. “Why?” he managed to get out.

“They spoke to one another in Haelish, but I don’t know what they said, Styopha.”

Anahid stared on with a harried look about her.

“Speak,” Styophan snapped. “We don’t have time to dance around the issue.”

She glanced toward the entrance. When she spoke, it was barely loud enough for Styophan to hear. “I’ve told you some of the details of their wodjana.” She licked her lips. “But not all. I never thought it necessary, as I thought they would become our allies. Many men of Yrstanla have suffered greatly under their attention. They use foul magic with the blood of those they take. They bleed them, keeping them alive for hours or days at a time, using them to scry. There are those among the Aramahn that believe the soul of the tortured is drained in this process. We fear that the soul becomes lost, perhaps never to be reborn.”

“They won’t do that to us.”

“They will.” Her neck muscles were taut. Her eyes were wild, and her nostrils flared. “They will think me more powerful than the men. They will think you more powerful than me. We’ll be saved for last. They’ll hope to find what they want, but if they don’t, they’ll continue with us, one by one, bleeding us to see their future.”

“We’re too valuable to Bahett.” He looked to the men. “
All
of us. He’ll take us back with him to Alekeşir, and he’ll ransom us back to the Grand Duchy.”

“You, perhaps,” Anahid said. “Not me. Not Rodion or Vyagos or Oleg.”

“I won’t let them leave you.”

“You are a
prisoner
!” Anahid shouted. “A prisoner! Do you hear me? You have no sway among these people! We came here arms extended in friendship and they cut our hands from our wrists. Do not think that I for my Aramahn blood, nor you for your Anuskayan, will be spared from their attentions. We will not. Look beyond their kings, Styophan Andrashayev. They are guided by their wodjan, and only them, and they will demand blood at a time like this, upon this embrace between Hael and Yrstanla. It can be no other way. And they will use us to do so, for we are at the heart of their troubles.”

Styophan had never seen Anahid in such a state. She always seemed so calm and centered. He could only think of shaking her, to draw her away from the horrors in her mind, but all of them were bound to iron rings, separated by leagues though they sat mere steps away from one another.

“They’ll—”

He stopped, for just then a wailing carried to them from the direction of the Place of Kings and its menhir. Though soft at first, it was a mere precursor to the outpouring of suffering that followed. It was joined moments later by another voice. He recognized them both. Vyagos’s higher voice joined by Oleg’s baritone, the two of them rising and falling in a terrible rhythm.

He’d been so sure of what he’d been telling Anahid, but he realized now it had all been a foolish hope. He knew as well as Anahid how cruel the Haelish could be. He just hadn’t wanted to give up hope. Not yet.

He fell against the post to which he was bound. He closed his left eye tight—feeling the muscles around his ruined right eye pinch—and knocked his head against the wood, praying to his long-dead father to make this stop. The wailing scoured him from the inside. It gnawed, as if his men were trapped within him and were digging their way out with teeth and nails.

These were his men. His. He had taken them on as his sons the moment he’d nodded his head to Ranos, the Duke of Khalakovo, in his throne room. Dear Fathers, how he’d failed them…

He stood, though it was difficult and awkward to do so. He pulled at his restraints, pulled against the stout yurt pole, yanking again and again until his wrists screamed from it. Eventually the sound clawed its way up his throat and found release in a long outpouring of grief and rage and regret. He threw himself into these simple motions, becoming little more than a beast of bone and muscle, pulling against bonds that utterly refused to release him.

His head tilted up toward the sky as the cries of his men reached a new crescendo. “Leave them!” he cried to the worked leather of the yurt’s roof. “Leave them be!”

But the sound of pain continued, on and on and on.

He strained harder than ever. He thought surely his limbs would break, that his joints would fail, leaving him powerless once more, but then the pole moved. A scrape no wider than his thumb showed as the massive pole gouged the earth. This energized him. He pulled again, this time keeping more of his rage pent up within him. A long grunt escaped him, for he could not keep it all bound within, but the pole moved further.

But then one of the voices fell silent.

Oleg. He no longer heard Oleg’s cries.

He locked eyes with Rodion and Edik, who stared back with venom in their eyes. Galeb, however, stared down at the hard-packed ground, nostrils flaring, the apple in his throat bobbing up and down, up and down. Galeb was one of the youngest of his men. He’d been a good fighter, and eager to prove himself, but this was more than he could handle. He was completely and utterly stricken with fear.

Before Styophan could speak to him the yurt flap opened and in stepped Datha and three other warriors, each of them dressed in leggings only—no shoes, no shirt, the crushed and glittering remains of yellow jasper spread across their chests in tight, swirling patterns. The warriors were unfamiliar to Styophan. This in itself wasn’t strange, but they wore their hair differently than did the people of Clan Eidihla, and their leggings were of a different style, made from different leather. These men were even different from one another. Telling, then, that Datha had come with them. It showed how little power Kürad had when his men could not be trusted to perform this simple task—the gathering of sacrifices to slake the wodjan’s thirst for sacrificial blood.

Datha’s eyes were bright and fierce and in no way sympathetic. Such a change, Styophan thought, from the long trek to Skolohalla. Styophan could smell upon his breath something earthy, perhaps a tincture given to the chief among this infernal ritual’s participants.

“You will come with us,” Datha said to Styophan.

Datha and one of the warriors began untying Styophan’s restraints while the other two went to Anahid.

“
Nyet
!” Styophan screamed. “Leave her!”

Datha brought his fist across Styophan’s cheek. His hand was as hard as stone—it dazed Styophan into silence, and in that moment, he found some small amount of clarity. Datha
could
have struck him much harder.

“Do not speak,” Datha said to Styophan. “Not until you’re spoken to by the wodjan.”

Styophan spit at him, and nearly unleashed a stampede of hatred against him, but there was something in Datha’s eyes. Not sympathy, but a concentration, as if he dearly hoped, and not for his own sake, that Styophan would obey, and it made Styophan wonder through his haze of anger whether he’d been wrong. Datha was expressing to him, in the only way he could, the way to save himself.
I cannot save the men who were taken
, he said,
but you might yet be spared.

He hoped it was so, for if Datha were fooling him, and he was allowing himself to be taken, he would deserve the shame to himself and his family that would follow his death.

The other Haelish took him, their fingers digging into his arm like steel clamps. Despite his struggling they hobbled his legs and tied his wrists and guided him out of the yurt and into the cold night air. They did so with an ease and a disregard that made it clear just how powerless he was to prevent them. He was a lone sapling, they the avalanche, and they were charging down toward the base of the mountain, toward something momentous and terrible.

They wove through the yurts, and soon came to the Place of Kings, the vast depression with its menhir pointing like a single, accusing finger toward an uncaring sky. In the middle ground, circling the menhir, were dozens of massive braziers. Each held a tall wood fire atop it, and the collective light showed the Haelish warriors—hundreds of them—standing like sentinels around the great circle’s edge. Their eyes were closed, and they hummed in low tones, the sound of it collecting until it was very much like the massive wooden horns the mountain villages of Anuskaya used to warn one another of danger.

With Datha leading the way, his warriors led Styophan and Anahid toward the menhir. Grouped around the standing stone itself were dozens of wodjan. They wore leather skirts, but like the men, their torsos were bare. Their skin was covered in patterns of black paint that glittered opalescent beneath the light of the braziers. Their faces were covered as well, the bold, intricate lines making them look animalistic. He saw the face of a badger on one, the face of a hawk on another, each with the reddened eyes of a woman who’d been breathing in the heady smoking leaves of the wodjan.