The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (The Lays of Anuskaya) (7 page)

Anahid had been his stalwart companion on this trip. She and Avil and Mikhalai were the only ones still flying with him from his time with Prince Nikandr. Truly they deserved their own ships, but Styophan trusted them too much. When this was all done, he told himself, he would see to it that they became kapitans.

Styophan decided to take a single skiff; more and it would be seen as aggression. He loaded it with trusted men—Avil and Mikhalai and his own cousin, Rodion—and then Anahid guided them down. The smoke stopped as they approached, a clear indicator that they’d been spotted.

And now, for a reason he couldn’t quite define, Styophan became nervous. He had no idea how the Haelish would view him. It was said that they were little better than barbarians, but Styophan had spoken to Isaak, the Duke’s seneschal, in the days before leaving Khalakovo. He’d said that while they had been driven to primitive ways by their long war with Yrstanla, it wasn’t always so. They had a rich history, and there were those among them that would remember. Few could read or write among the Haelish, but their history, passed down in song from father to son and mother to daughter, was a thing they took great pride in. If they didn’t, Isaak had said, they would long ago have abandoned this war and succumbed to the might of Yrstanla.

They landed the skiff within a copse of linden trees and disembarked. Ten men plus Anahid. They took to the hill, which was thick with willow and oak and birch. Styophan took the lead, with the others walking single file behind him.

“Weapons at the ready,” he said, “but no one draws until I say.”

“
Da
, Kapitan,” his men replied.

Anahid still had her circlet upon her brow, and in the setting there was an opal, glowing ever so softly under the light of day. She was bonded still with her dhoshahezhan. It was a weapon of sorts, but not one he would have her release. He felt better with her bonded to a spirit that might protect them.

When he glanced back at the men, he saw how tight they were. These were hardened men, and yet their eyes darted nervously about the forest. Avil was the worst of them. In a way, Styophan understood. They were as far from help as they could be. But the Haelish had agreed to accept weapons and gems from Anuskaya in return for their help here in the west.

“Avil,” Styophan said. “Come with me.” He strode ahead, far enough that they wouldn’t be overheard. Avil caught up to him with a short jog. “I’ve seen you fight ten men with no fear,” Styophan said to him. “Why do the Haelish affect you so?”

“They’re heathens, Styopha. Bloody heathens. They practice foul rituals. When they capture their enemies, they take them to their villages and hang them up by their wrists and gut them while they’re still alive. They take their blood and use it to peer into the future, and when they take to the battlefield once more, the misery of those they took find release. The screams of the dead pour from the throats of the Haelish warriors, for the dying had no chance to do so. They worship trees and hills, and they claim wives from their brothers and cousins. We shouldn’t walk into their lands like this, a mere handful, weapons sheathed.”

“We’re here to ask for their help, Avil.”

“We don’t need help from the likes of them.”

Styophan wished that were true. He didn’t like coming here any more than Avil did, but there was no choice, and not simply because this had been a direct order from his Lord Duke. The Haelish could help turn the tide against Yrstanla. The Empire might be a wounded lion, but its claws could still rend flesh.

Still, Avil was merely voicing his fears, fears most of the men shared. Fears Styophan shared as well, though perhaps not to the same degree. The Haelish were fierce warriors—they were not to be taken lightly—but tales always grew in the telling. And besides, it was the
Empire
that had to worry about them, not the Grand Duchy.

As they hiked up the slope, the sounds of trilling and strange looping calls filled the forest. Had they not been walking to meet the Haelish, Styophan might not have known, but the timing was too convenient, so he began searching the landscape carefully for the first of them. He found them moments later. Tall men stepped out from behind trees, some near, some far. They wore breeches of thick leather, but no shirts. The skin on their chests and arms and faces were covered with a grey-green mud—even their hair was thick with it—making them difficult to see even though Styophan was staring right at them. They were muscular, these men, not the heavy muscles that landsmen who lifted cargo all day developed, but like windsmen who spent their days climbing rigging. They were lithe, with muscles like corded rope.

They slipped forward through the trees, their gait odd, like a cat’s. They seemed barely aware of how carefully they were choosing their course over the leaf- and branch-strewn ground, but he was sure they were perfectly aware of just how silent they were, each and every one of them. Winter was coming—frost was on the ground—and yet they wore no shoes. Styophan was a man closely acquainted with the bitter winters of the islands, but he got cold just watching them approach.

“Hands clear of your weapons,” Styophan said in Anuskayan. Then he raised both hands slowly.

Styophan was no small man, but one of the Haelish stood a full head taller than him. This one approached while the others stopped behind him. Styophan could see beneath the grey-green mud that his hair was a reddish brown. His eyes were the green of new summer growth, and though they might not be charitable, neither were they wicked.

“Are you Kürad?” Styophan asked in Yrstanlan.

“I am Datha,” he replied in a thick accent, “but the King awaits us.” He held out his hand and the two of them gripped one another’s forearms in the way of the Haelish. His grip was short, perfunctory, as if he could barely stomach the presence of Anuskayan men in his lands. Datha, after looking over the streltsi, pointed to the crest of the slope behind him. “Come.”

Styophan hadn’t been sure until that moment whether these men were the ones they were supposed to meet. The fighting Haelish moved so often it was difficult to tell, and with Princess Ishkyna so occupied by the nascent war on Yrstanla’s southeastern coast, he’d had no word to verify the final location where they would meet.

They went uphill for a quarter-league and then went down slope into another long valley that doglegged at a pond overrun with cattails. In a section of the forest dominated by twisted oak trees stood dozens of Haelish yurts. Their roofs were made of oiled leather, the walls of woven reed. It was strangely quiet, as if most had been killed, leaving the rest to grieve in silence. Somewhere in the distance a babe cried, but beyond this he heard little more than the soft clatter of the bright beads that hung from the arched entryways to the yurts.

As they were led toward a massive yurt at the center of the village, several children poked their heads around doorways. Some were pulled back by their mothers; others merely stared, their eyes hard as they sized up these strangers who had entered their home.

When they reached the yurt, Datha pulled aside the strings of wooden beads, as if he meant Styophan to enter, but before he could, Datha pointed to Avil and the others. “You may bring one other.”

Styophan considered, and then motioned for Anahid to join him. She was the only one who’d been in Haelish lands before, even if it had been when she was young. Plus, she was learned; he’d come to value her counsel.

Together they ducked inside the yurt, where reed mats covered the earthen floor. Bright blankets with curving designs woven into them hung from the walls. Two dozen men and a handful of women sat in narrow chairs with low backs around a small, well-tended fire from which no smoke rose. The men wore thick leggings of leather, as the men outside did, and they also wore no shirts. There was no mud upon them, but several had umber paint in intricate designs over the skin of their chest and arms and neck. The designs reminded him of the traceries of the Aramahn, and though these were more primitive, they had that same feeling of being connected somehow to earth or sky or sea. The paint glittered like liquid gold.

One of these men, the one sitting on the far side, directly facing the entryway, wore a crown upon his head. The crown was not made of gold or silver or even brass, but of thick brown vines with sharp thorns. He wore the umber paint as well. It matched his deep brown eyes and his stony gaze. He was as old as Styophan’s father. Like the other men gathered here, like the warriors that had greeted Styophan in the forest, he was lithe and muscular and clean-shaven.

No doubt this was Kürad.

The women wore soft clothes of buckskin and necklaces made from the same auburn-colored beads that hung from the doorways. One of them—the one sitting to the left of Kürad—drew Styophan’s eye, for her eyes were sunken. She had hair the color of the beads around her neck, an auburn color so rich it reminded him of the boldest autumn leaves. Her cheeks were gaunt, her skin sallow, and she had that same grim look that Styophan had seen among the islands so often, especially of late.

The wasting, Styophan realized. The wasting had come even here, to Haelish lands.

Kürad stood as Styophan and Anahid approached. He spoke in Haelish, a language Styophan knew nothing of. Anahid said she knew some, but would be unable to reliably translate. The language was heavy and guttural. It sounded like the land here, simple and pristine. Primal.

When he finished, the diseased woman sitting to his right spoke in near-perfect Yrstanlan. “Kürad, son of Külesh, King of Clan Eidihla, bids you welcome. He asks if you’ve brought the promised stones.”

Styophan could only stare. He’d brought them, of course—they’d demanded this of Ishkyna when she’d come to treat with them—but still, he’d expected introductions, perhaps a ceremonial greeting of some kind. Anything but this.

“My Lord,” Styophan said, bowing his head to Kürad. “Perhaps we could discuss the state of affairs here in the west, and I could do the same for the war brewing in the east.”

“The stones,” the woman said.

Styophan reached into the leather satchel that hung from over his shoulder and held it out for the woman to take. She accepted it and brought it to Kürad, who opened the satchel and peered inside. He pulled out one of the tied silken bags within and untied the drawstring.

“Those are but a taste,” Styophan said. “The rest are in chests on my ship.”

The woman translated, and Kürad glanced over to Styophan, his gaze resting for a moment on Styophan’s eye patch, and then he proceeded to spill the opals from the bag onto his upturned palm. He looked at them, tilting his palm this way and that under the sunlight that came in through the smoke hole above. He spoke his guttural tongue, and the woman nodded.

“Are the rest like this?” she asked.

“They are,” Styophan said. And it was true. He’d looked at them all himself, and he’d chosen those that went into the bag, making sure they were neither the best nor the worst. The Haelish had for some reason asked for uncut stones. He knew they crushed the gemstones and worked them into paint that they slathered over their skin before battle. It imbued them, it was said, with the abilities of hezhan without communing with them directly as the Aramahn did. Their wicked magic was how they’d survived so long against Yrstanla, but Yrstanla had been successful at taking and holding the land that held much of Hael’s gemstone mines, slowly tilting the war in their favor.

The woman, as tall as Styophan himself, gave Kürad his answer. Kürad closed the bag and hefted two of the others before dropping them into the satchel and turning to Styophan. He took one deep breath, and then met Styophan’s gaze. His look was like stone—uncaring, resolute—but it wasn’t until he nodded to the warrior standing at the beaded doorway that Styophan was certain something had gone terribly wrong.

The warrior turned and left. Styophan heard the call of a bird, the same lonely cry he’d heard earlier in the forest. In the distance he heard it picked up and repeated. And then, barely, he heard it again.

Styophan’s pulse quickened. A message was being passed through the forest, no doubt to those who’d been set to watch his ships. Had he done something to offend Kürad?

“My Lord—“

Styophan managed no more than this, for just then he heard the sound of a cannon in the distance. Another came shortly after. And then a barrage of them came, one after the other.

Like the pounding of the drums of war.

CHAPTER FOUR

Styophan pulled the flintlock pistol from his belt and pointed it at Kürad’s chest as a cry from his men outside the yurt filtered in through the doorway.

“Tell them to stop!” Styophan cried.

The cannons continued to boom in the distance.

“Tell them to stop!”

But the Haelish did not listen. They merely stared, especially Kürad. It was as if he were
begging
Styophan to fire.

Styophan pulled the trigger. The shot boomed in the enclosed space and exploded against Kürad’s chest, flaking away some of the glittering umber paint. His skin
cracked
, as if it were made of so much stone. Blood seeped through the fissures, but the shot itself—by the ancients who protect—had impacted and fallen with a thump to the reed-covered floor.

Anahid, the gem upon her brow glowing, raised her hands above her head. Between them, white lightning formed. Men ran at her, but before they could grab her, lightning arced out and ran through three of them. They fell to the ground, the first one unmoving, the other two twitching.

Styophan dropped his pistol and tried to pull his shashka to run them through, but the Haelish men nearby grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. He struggled as one of the women rushed forward and struck Anahid on the crown of her head with the hilt of her wood-handled knife.

The lightning vanished with a resonant buzz, and Anahid slumped to the ground.

“Leave her!” Styophan cried.

The Haelish men twisted his arms more painfully until he was on his toes to keep them from pulling an arm from its socket.