Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) (21 page)

When she saw, she turned away.

The tree he was looking at had fed well before it died; its maw gaped partway open, with the remains of a victim blocking the mouth and preventing it from closing. Inside, the bloated bodies of the Keyu’s prey—men, women, and children—hung tangled in its silky webs. Hung and rotted—one it had captured recently had died still reaching for the freedom of light and air. The stench around the tree was unbearable, and Faia shoved her erda against her face and drew fresher air through the coarse felt.

“Get away from here,” she said. “You can’t do anything now.”

Delmuirie was frozen—pale and shaking, he couldn’t move. “You were telling the truth,” he said.

“Of course I was telling the truth, you idiot.” Faia grabbed his arm and dragged him after her, across what had once been a crop field—though now it was parched and overgrown with weeds. No doubt it had been neglected since the arrival of the Keyu. She heard Bytoris running in her wake.

She looked back just as he caught up with her; she saw fear in his eyes—but fresh fear, of a present danger. She stared at the Keyu behind her, but they stayed dead. “What—” she started to ask, but Bytoris merely shook his head and pointed upward.

“Run!” he croaked. “Find cover.”

Delmuirie looked where Bytoris pointed and gasped—air hissed between his teeth. He lunged at Faia, grabbed her around the waist, and knocked her into a tangle of weeds and deep grass behind a small hillock. She pummeled him and shrieked, “You bas—” but he clamped one hand over her mouth and whispered, “Quiet, or we’re dead.”

He pointed, keeping his movements small, close, and careful. She followed the direction he indicated, and quit fighting.

“I thought you said they were gone,” he whispered, and then he grew silent.

Faia got the chance to look up. High overhead, but dropping fast, monsters arrived on brilliantly colored wings. The air was suddenly full of leathery beating, of roars and rough deep bellows. Creatures from nightmare dropped out of the sky, screeching and thundering, bent on attacking the city. Faia saw Bytoris leap into tall grass nearby, and prayed that the monsters had not seen him.

The beasts were huge, lean, and muscular; their hides sparkled as if they’d been formed of gems—and indeed, the monsters came in every imaginable gemstone color, and a few besides: ruby red tipped in black, glittering emerald green, deep violet, striped orange and copper, richest sapphire blue, sun-bright yellow tipped out in emerald green, and more. But their eyes were stony, sparkling black, and their ivory teeth and adamantine claws were long and sharp.

The warriors on the wall fought back with a hailstorm of arrows, bolts, and fire, and a few of the monsters fell screaming into the moat or onto the embankment—Faia could feel the earth shake each time one hit—but the monsters had the advantage of flight and ferocity. They would not be turned. They snapped up and tore apart all the warriors they could catch, and seemed to revel in the screams and sobs of the dying. They chased after the wall defenders, bellowing as they flew mere handbreadths above the parapet; they swept bowmen from the wall with gutting slashes of their taloned forelegs, or picked them up and dropped them from great height to watch them spatter on the rock below. They dove and dipped and soared, beautiful and terrible beyond anything Faia had ever imagined. Though they had flattered themselves in their artwork, she knew what they were—she felt the certainty in her bones. They were the First Folk. Klaue. Klogs.

Faia pressed her face into the grass and cried silently; she was afraid—she could hear people moaning and sobbing from the battlements and from the ground around them. Terrible things had happened and were happening. The Klaue were going to find her. They were going to lift her into the air and rip her limb from limb. She would never see Kirtha again.

Beside her, Delmuirie moved an arm around her and held her tightly—and she was grateful for the comfort he gave.

The earth beneath them shook, and nearby a Klog roared. That hellish roar was a sound that made a pack of hunting kellinks sound gentle by comparison. Faia prayed she would never hear it again.

Then the Klogs lifted as one, as if to a silent signal, and still screaming, flapped away with slow, steady wingbeats toward the east.

For long moments neither Faia nor Edrouss Delmuirie moved. Then Edrouss sat up and pulled her close. He held her for a moment, and she rested against his chest and shook. He was crying, too, she realized, and he trembled as well.

“I’ve never seen them like that,” he whispered. “They were like animals.”

“They
were
animals,” Faia whispered with conviction.

“They weren’t before,” he said. “I knew them before. They were vicious bastards… but not like that.”

They lay still a few moments longer, while the sobbing and shouting along the city walls went on and on. At last Faia felt her courage return, and she pulled free of Delmuirie’s embrace. They rose. The hillock behind which they’d hidden was just high enough to make it good cover. Faia was grateful—without it, she and Delmuirie might have been dead. They walked to the top of it, hoping to see where Bytoris had hidden.

Right in front of them, red and black and half as long as Faia was tall, a monster’s head slashed out at them from the place where it had been hidden by the other side of the embankment. The giant mouth spread open and teeth gleamed. The downed Klaue lay where it had fallen, mortally wounded but not yet dead enough.

Faia didn’t think; she reacted. She hurled her staff as if it were a javelin, straight down the beast’s throat. The Klog gagged and tossed its head from side to side; neither Faia nor Edrouss Delmuirie stayed to see if it freed itself from the obstruction. They both ran full out until they reached the place where Faia’s half-brother had hidden.

He crawled out from under the thorn shrubs where he had hidden as soon as he saw them, and wrapped his arms around Faia by way of greeting.

“Bytoris!” She was sincerely glad to find him unharmed.

“Faia!”

His dirt-caked cheeks were tear-streaked, but he managed a sincere smile for her. “We must hurry,” he told her. “I have to check on the rest of my family.”

THE cantilevered arch of the gate before Faia rose higher than the wall. Men of old had carved the forms of humans and beasts into its grey stone, and the eyes of those pocked and worn faces stared warily at Faia as she approached. This, too, was an ancient place, she thought—though not as old as the First Folk ruins. And it lacked about it the feeling of alienness those distant ruins had. Two burly men leaned beneath each side of the carved arch, their hands resting on the pommels of swords or the hafts of long spears. A fifth sat at a small table to one side. His helmet rested on the flat paving stones at his feet. He had weary eyes, Faia thought. Weary—and sad.

Gyels hurried ahead of the rest of them. He stepped up to the seated guard and whispered a word. The guard nodded, his face expressionless—and Gyels passed into the walled city and immediately strode through the midst of a group of bickering merchants, where he disappeared into the crowd.

Bytoris frowned, Faia noticed, but he didn’t say anything. He walked up to the seated guard and addressed the man. Faia, standing in the background waiting, paid no attention to her brother—she stared up at the gate arch over her head, fascinated. More stone faces stared down at her—the faces of imaginary demons and all-too-real monsters, their mouths open in silent, eternal screams. The hollows of their mouths extended further into the stone than normal carving could account for, and the teeth and insides of the mouths, bleached white in the otherwise grey stone, told her the rest of the story. She realized suddenly that those mouths were hollowed tubes. Weapons. The soldiers on the arch above could, at any time, pour boiling water or acid or liquid fire on the people below. She shuddered and looked away; those disguised weapons seemed to her a sly and evil use of art.

“What do you
mean
, I cannot take them in?” Bytoris suddenly shouted.

All the guards looked at him with eyes no longer bored or weary. “Rules since the change,” the seated one snapped. “None but citizens or their families in.”

Bytoris opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. “Come,” he said to Faia and Delmuirie, and turned away from the gate.

They walked in silence alongside the wall. Bytoris was clearly angry; he clamped his jaw tightly, and Faia could see the muscles twitch. He stormed along, saying nothing. Delmuirie prudently kept quiet, and Faia decided to follow the same path of wisdom herself. She and Delmuirie nearly had to run to keep up. They came to a good-sized stream that fed into the moat. Bytoris led them along it, away from Bonton and toward a little bridge and a pleasant-looking copse of trees not too far away.

They crossed the bridge and achieved the cover of the trees. Bytoris threw his pack on the ground, opened it, and began rummaging for something. Faia watched him, puzzled; He had a cold smile on his face, and he kept muttering, “I’ll show them. Won’t let
my
people in, hey? Who do they think pays their salaries, tell me that?” At last he found the thing he sought. He gave a satisfied snort and sat back on his haunches, and held up his find for both of them to see.

“What is it?” Faia asked when her brother didn’t explain.

Bytoris looked past her, to Edrouss Delmuirie. “Stick this in your pack. It’s your citizen’s pass. When the soldiers at the next gate ask, you’re Geos Rull, collector and language expert from the House of Antiquities and Artifacts.”

Faia felt her eyes widen. “I thought Geos was a scholar.”

“He was.” Bytoris looked suddenly grim. “He was also
employed
—being a scholar pays nothing here in Bonton. But there’s money enough to be had in collecting curios.”

Stealing them, more likely. Faia thought of the contents of Geos’s pack, which Bytoris had moved to his own when no one was watching and had subsequently carried without complaint. It must have been full of artifacts from the First Folk ruins, she realized. And, likely, her brother’s pack had contained even more of the same. Medwind and the other scholars would have been furious had they known what the Bontonard “scholars” had actually been doing in the ruins.

Edrouss Delmuirie nodded and shoved the little plate into his pack.

Bytoris, meanwhile, pulled out a piece of drypress and a scritore, and began scratching out a note of some sort. He looked up at Faia once, assessing her, then began to write again.

“What are you doing?” Faia asked him.

“Forging a bride-price paper. Says that Edro—ah,
Geos
, here, picked you up from traders moving from Omwimmee Trade to the Forst Province. That makes you Fisher—they’re the only folks who sell their women. So you can’t speak at all, right? Because I’m betting you don’t speak Spavvekith.”

Faia nodded. “You bet right.”

“And your name is Reeluu. Every woman I’ve ever met from the Fisher Province had been named either Malleth or Reeluu.” He sighed. “I’d take you myself, but I already have a wife and a whole crew of kids, and I can’t afford the extra taxes another wife would cost me—even temporarily.” Bytoris stood. “Anyway, that will be enough to get us through the gate. We’ll have to make you and—er,
Geos
—” He frowned at Delmuirie. “You and Geos permanent. The laws of Bonton don’t look kindly on men buying wives unless they then make them citizens—and we’ll have to do that fast.” He finished his forgery, told Delmuirie to sign it, then blew on the whole thing until the ink dried. When he was satisfied it wouldn’t smudge, he handed the paper to Delmuirie, who put it in his pack with his own pass.

Faia frowned at Bytoris and protested, “But I’m your sister. The guard at the gate said family. I shouldn’t need to have to pretend to be…” she spat the word,
“property.”

“You and I have nothing to prove that we are brother and sister,” Bytoris said. “And I’m betting more than one man has tried to claim ‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’ he didn’t have in order to help friends outside the city get inside.” He shook his head “No. This is best. Just play along while we’re here.”

They rose, and Faia, patently unhappy, turned to go back the way they’d come.

Bytoris said, “We aren’t going back to the Doweth Ecclesiastic Gate. The guards
might
be off their shift, but they might not be, too, and I don’t want to take a chance of running into them again. Besides, I think we’d get better treatment from the guards of a gate that hadn’t so recently been under attack by Klogs.”

He led them through the woods along a well-worn path, down to a rutted cart-road that ran between fields of summer wheat and cherticorn. “Timnett Merchanter is a better gate, anyway,” he added

It was a very
different
gate, at least. Faia noted that the cantilevered arch was the same, but the carvings were of trade goods—bolts of cloth, pack and draft animals, herd beasts, fruits and grains, amphoras and jugs. The gate was prettier, the carved faces of the few people on it not so crazed-looking. Yet when she stood underneath it and stared upward—while Delmuirie and Bytoris talked to the guards—she could see that the bottom jugs were tipped and angled and hollow, aimed to pour destruction down on anyone beneath. She frowned. Ariss had not resorted to such mundane means of defense—the mages and sajes guarded the city magically.

“Reeluu!” Delmuirie said. Faia ignored him.

The mages and sajes
had
guarded Ariss magically, she thought. Then she wondered how Ariss, magically built on a magical hill in the middle of a nasty swamp, was faring. Probably the whole bedamned city had sunk beneath the water and everyone in it had drowned. She had hoped to do something that would make her welcome in Ariss again. Instead, it seemed more than likely she would never be able to set foot near that city—if any of it remained—for as long as she lived.

“Reeluu!”

She decided not to think about Ariss.

“REELUU!” Delmuirie ran over to her, grabbed her arm, and dragged her back to the guards. “I’m not sure she can even hear,” he told them with an apologetic smile. “Perhaps that’s why the Fishers sold her to me. But she’s pretty, isn’t she?”