The White Dragon (20 page)

"Six," Najdan mused. "Yes, even wounded, perhaps he could defeat six."

"But if he survived, then where in the Fires is he?" Lann wondered.

Tansen knew something was terribly wrong even as he and Armian approached the village. There was no activity, no call of greeting. No old men sat outside the tavern at the edge of the village to exchange stories, share news, and play obscure Kintish games of strategy with intricately carved pieces worn smooth by years of handling. There were no children on the mountain path, no women at the water well, no shepherds on the hillside...

And then they entered the main square of Gamalan and saw the site of the massacre. Dozens of bodies. Everyone who had lived in this obscure, impoverished village, a community badly depleted by its long bloodfeud with the Sirdari clan.

The stench of death was unbelievable. The bodies lay under the merciless Silerian sun while flies swarmed around them, the ceaseless buzzing creating a thrumming drone which further disoriented Tan's stunned senses.

"No!" he cried. "No! No!" Over and over. No other word penetrated his thoughts, no other sound could emerge from his lips.

"Outlookers!" Armian warned suddenly.
 

"No!"

Tansen felt Armian's grip and struggled against it. He felt Armian grasp something in his
jashar
and heard him mutter, "I need your
yahr
." He stumbled as Armian shoved him and said, "Stay behind me." He didn't understand, didn't care, knew nothing but the horror roaring through his veins.

"No! No!" He broke away from Armian, ran to the mute corpses, and started handling the stinking, heavy, blood-soaked bodies, looking for his own family. "No!"

"Tan, get back!
Tansen!
"

He saw the Outlookers then, their gray tunics, their clipped hair, their short Valdani swords. He didn't care. "No!"

Armian's
shir
glittered in the sunlight, its water-born blade slitting the throat of the first Outlooker to venture close to him. He swung Tansen's
yahr
at one who hung back slightly. The wood lashed through the air and connected with the Valdan's nose. Blood sprayed across Armian's face just before he whirled to confront another attacker.
 

Tansen turned his back on them and continued looking for the proud flow of his grandfather's white mane, the tapered elegance of his peasant mother's work-roughened hands, and the womanly curves of his once-skinny elder sister. He found friends, cousins, and aunts among the dead, but not his family.

"Are they here?" Armian asked. His voice was breathless.

Tansen looked up, barely able to see him through the flow of his tears.
 

"Your family," Armian clarified. "Are they here?"

He shook his head, staring. Three Outlookers lay motionless around Armian. The fourth was on his knees. Armian held him by the hair and pressed the
shir
against his throat.

"Are they dead?" Tansen asked blankly, looking at the three Outlookers lying on the ground.

"Two are dead," Armian said tersely. "The other will be dead soon, and why should I make it quicker for him?"

Hatred seared Tansen's blood as he looked at the Outlooker kneeling before Armian. A boiling rage flooded him, a thirst for vengeance so fierce it choked him. "Let me kill this one."

"Later, when we're done with him," Armian promised. He yanked the Outlooker's hair and prompted in Valdan, "Where is the boy's family?"

"I don't—"

Armian drew blood with the
shir
. The Outlooker screamed in pain, then babbled, "I didn't participate in the interrogation. I swear I didn't! I was just left behind to take you in case you came here, after all. We waited for two whole days, and then our commanding officer decided you weren't coming. He said you'd either died at sea or were already on your way to your destination. So he took the rest of his men with him and left us behind to—"

"How did he know about me?" Armian snapped.

"The pirate."

"Aljuna?" Tansen blurted.

"We had information, and when we caught the pirate at sea and you weren't on board anymore, we took him into custody before burning his ship. He broke under torture."

Tansen suddenly remembered the way Aljuna had squealed like a pig when they'd cut his palm for the bloodpact. It had seemed funny at the time. "He couldn't take pain," he said in a daze.

"What did the pirate tell you?" Armian demanded.

"A boy and an old man from a mountain village called Gamalan. He was coming ashore to meet them that night. Smugglers. They might have helped you if you made it to shore." The Outlooker's voice was shaking. He was panting with fear. "Please! I'll tell you anything you want to know."

"You certainly will," Armian said grimly.

"Only don't kill me!"

Tansen felt sick. "They're dead, aren't they?" When the Outlooker didn't reply, Tansen said, "Dead?" in Valdan, unable to choke out more.

"Who?" the man bleated. "The pirate? Yes."

Armian threw him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach. "The boy's family, you dung-eater!"

"Three have mercy, don't kill me!" The Outlooker started weeping with fear. "Please! I swear I had nothing to do with the interrogation! Don't kill me!"

Tansen felt even sicker. He had never seen a man beg for his life.

"This wasn't interrogation, you festering worm," Armian snarled. "This was a massacre!" He yanked the Outlooker's head up by the hair again and forced him to look at the dead of Gamalan. "There are children there, you maggot! Women and old men, girls and unarmed boys!"

"What..." Tansen swallowed and tried again, already knowing, in his churning gut, what the answer would be. "What interrogation?"

"The old s—sm—smuggler and h—his women," the Outlooker stammered, his eyes rolling with terror.

Tansen met Armian's gaze. "My grandfather. My mo... My..." He couldn't say it. Bile rose in his throat. His heart pounded with horror.

"My commander wanted to know wh—where the b—boy was," the Outlooker said, still weeping. "But they w—woul—would..."

"Wouldn't talk." Armian's voice was flat and hard.

"N—No."

Armian pulled on the Outlooker's hair until he was standing up, then said, "Show me." When Tansen followed, Armian turned and said to him, "Stay here."

"No."

"Tan—"

"They are my family."

Armian hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. "Show us," he ordered the Outlooker.

"Please..." the man whispered. "P—please,
soron
..."

"It's
siran
, you pig. And don't pollute our language with your filthy tongue."

"I'm sorr—"

"Shut up," Armian snapped.

The Outlooker led them into the best house in the village, a three-room dwelling in good repair. Tansen saw the village headman, who had lived here, dead inside.
 

Along with Tansen's grandfather, his mother, and his sister.

It was worse than anything he could have imagined. He would see it in his nightmares as long as he lived. He would never forget, never forgive, and never recover from what the Valdani had done to his family while he tended Armian in a coastal cave, blissfully ignorant of the slaughter of the innocents in Gamalan.

His beautiful, work-worn mother, with her small hands and her soft brown eyes, now lay gutted, her entrails streaming away from her corpse. They had raped his sister and stained her bruised thighs with her own blood. He tried to arrange her clothes, lest any man see what only her husband should...

"Tansen," Armian said.

... but she would never marry now. He looked away from her lifeless body and turned to his grandfather. They had broken all the old man's fingers and gouged out his eyes.

"But you did not... tell them... wh... where I w..." Tansen couldn't stop crying, couldn't draw enough breath, couldn't look away from the old man's ruined face, from the empty, blood-drenched eye sockets.

"I didn't do this, I didn't do this, I swear to you, I didn't do this," the Outlooker kept repeating, his strained voice the only sound besides Tansen's choked sobs in this dead village.

"We must burn them," Tansen finally said.

"No," Armian replied. "We will let others do that."

"No, I must burn them. My grandfather says a person cannot journey to the Otherworld if the body is not purified through fire, and we can't just—"

"People should see the Outlookers' work," Armian said. "The murder of women and children. The torture of an unarmed old man..." He put a hand on Tansen's shoulder and tried to make him understand. "If you burn them all, no one will know. The Valdani can claim it was disease or sorcery or a bloodfeud."

"I don't care what they cl—"

"We want people to know," Armian said. "When they see this, when the mountains talk of it, then people will hate them as much as you and I do."

"People hate them already," Tansen said dully.

"Not enough," Armian said. "Not yet."

Tansen looked around, his mind blank with shock. "Then... we will just leave them like this?"

"Yes," Armian said. "I'm sorry."
 

"Do you think..." He met Armian's eyes. "If I had been here..."

"You'd be dead, too."

"Perhaps I c—"

"You'd be dead, too," Armian repeated. "Even if we hadn't met, even if you had come straight home from the coast..." Armian shook his head. "The Valdani came here on a hunch. They did all this—" He gestured to the devastation around them. "—on a chance, a guess."

Tansen's eyes clouded with tears again.

"You couldn't have stopped them," Armian told him. "I couldn't have stopped them."

"Then..." He took his last look at his murdered loved ones. "Then I am left alive to avenge them."

"Yes. We will avenge them," Armian promised.

When they emerged from the headman's house, dragging the quivering Outlooker with them, Armian asked Tansen, "Is there anything you want to get from your own house before we go?"