Path of Bones (36 page)

She was worried about him.  While part of her was happy he was being more assertive she knew he was barely holding on, and she was afraid he’d do something foolish.  She had no doubts he’d protect and aid her, but she also knew he felt he had little to live for, and she was glad Malath had decided not to come to Corinth.

They ate in silence.  Ijanna nibbled on the bread, lost in thought.  Rumor had it Malath had changed since the death camps, and not for the better.  If the stories were true he’d become a sadist and a butcher, a man who ordered the torture of prisoners and targeted women and children so he could inflict as much pain on the Jlantrian Empire as possible.  He’d taken it upon himself to repay the White Dragon for what she’d done to hundreds of Bloodspeakers in the mountains, even if she still denied her involvement. 

Ijanna remembered him in the camps, shaken and sickened, nothing like the hardened outlaw and killer he’d become.  The Dawn Knights had been searching for him, but they’d never even known they had him as a prisoner.  If they had, Ijanna doubted he would have lasted a day.  At the time the Red Hand had just been a group of thieves with a supposedly political agenda, a mob of Veil-yielding brigands who argued that the Empire’s persecution of Bloodspeakers had driven them to their actions.  Most of their time had been spent smuggling other Bloodspeakers to safety, but since they continued to gain some support the Empress decided to act. 

Now, in the wake of the camps, the Red Hand were considered a potent threat to Jlantrian authority.  Their daring raids, assassinations and military-style ambushes had gained them notoriety, and even after the Dawn Knights were disbanded for supposedly acting without Azaean’s blessing the general hatred and fear of Bloodspeakers had risen to levels never before imagined. 

The Red Hand were shaped by Malath’s experiences in the camps.  Empress Azaean inadvertently created the very monster she and her Empire had mistakenly believed existed all along. 

Ijanna nibbled on the cheese and enjoyed a cup of strong wine.  She understood where Malath was coming from, at least to a certain degree, but she couldn’t condone the slaying of innocents, and for that reason she knew she and the Red Hand could never be more than temporary allies. 

She watched Kath.  He kept his eyes on his food, trying not to look at any of the Bloodspeakers.  She thought about his family.  The sight of his baby sister’s severed and rotting head had been like a knife in her chest.

The air was grave, and for some reason Ijanna felt like the Red Hand were eating their last.  How much did they really know about Kala?  What was she doing in Corinth, especially with so much support?  It was clear she was searching for something, but Ijanna couldn’t begin to imagine what, especially since she knew so little about the Princess except that she secretly consorted with known criminals and held a power that connected her to both Ijanna and Chul Gaerog. 

Could Kala’s being there have something to do with the Blood Queen?  Or had something else drawn her to Corinth?

Worry gnawed at Ijanna’s stomach, and her pulse quickened.  Now that she was so close to finding Kala she wasn’t sure what to do.  She’d tried reasoning with the Witch Mother, and that had ultimately led to the death of Kath’s family at the hands of the Chul.

What am I doing?

She had to get Kala alone after the Princess met with Gilder and the Red Hand.  Ijanna needed to get a feel for what the Princess was like and see if she could learn what the woman was doing in Corinth.  Then, when the opportunity presented itself, Ijanna would reveal the bond they shared and see if the woman had learned anything about their fate that Ijanna didn’t already know.

I just hope I’m not making another terrible mistake.

“
Are you all right?” Kath asked her quietly.  A few murmured conversations rose among the stone-faced Red Hand now that they’d finished eating. 

“
I think so,” she said.  “Are
you
?” 

“
I’ll get by,” he said. 

The tent flap pulled open, and bloody light poured in around the dark silhouette of a slender man standing outside.  He was Allaji, with long white hair and skin as pale as the moon.  His cloak and clothing were pitch, and he wore a double-bladed Den’nari
raak’ma
slung across his back. 

Gilder nodded to the stranger, then stood and addressed the assembled Bloodspeakers.

“My friends,” he said.  “This is Drazzek Ma’al, ally of Kala Azaean.”

Forty-Six

Where am I?

Pain flashed across his body.  His eyes were crusted over with blood, and his skin flaked and oozed brackish puss.  His gnarled wrists and ankles twisted against his bonds. 

He stared into the darkness, and remembered.

As a boy growing up in a devout Goddess-fearing household, Dane had often wondered if there truly was a hell.  The Church of the One Goddess certainly thought so, and his youth was filled with lessons about the unfaithful being thrown into fire-laced pits where they’d suffer and burn for all eternity.  He’d stopped going to Church a few years before he’d joined the White Dragon Army, and he recalled little of what he’d been taught aside from those images of perdition. 

Is any of that real?
he’d wondered. 
Or was it something they just told us so we’d behave?

Dane was less inclined to believe in hell as he grew older, even as the stark and bitter realities of the world came into clearer focus.  War was a demon, disease was a monster, famine was a bastard, all of them very real problems he’d witnessed firsthand, brutal truths which made the notion of burning pits filled with non-believers seem ridiculous by comparison. 

Up in the Razortooth Mountains, surrounded by the screams of the dying and wading through rivers of blood, Dane finally realized the truth: hell wasn’t a place.  It was the cruelty of the world, the darkness in men’s souls.  It was suffering and want, revenge and hatred.  There were personal hells and collective hells, all of them unique, all of them terrible in their own way. 

Each person would know many hells over the course of their life.  Dane himself had known quite a few. 

The first had been the death camps, a place where a part of him would remain trapped until the end of his days.  He could never block out the sight of the dying, the burning, the sound of women being raped and children being tortured, not even if he gouged out his eyes and tore his ears from his head, which was surely the least he deserved. 

He lived with one hand on the cold presence of the Veil; it kept his mind in a haze, and he used it to numb himself the way other men dulled their senses with drink. 

Even that hadn’t been enough, for the death camps had scarred his soul.  He felt
wrong
, tainted.  A sense of dread weighted his lungs like he’d breathed poison.  Whenever he slept his flesh crawled, and even if he didn’t dream of the man with the black face he still woke bathed in sweat.  When he wasn’t held in magic’s embrace his mind was overwhelmed with dread. 

Dane hated himself.  He’d never be clean again, and memory of what he’d done played in his mind day and night.  He saw men roasting in open pits of hot oil; women stuck in spiked iron cages; people impaled on tall wooden stakes to slowly slide to their doom.  They'd spread the remains of the dead into shallow and unmarked holes. 

All because they’d been born with black tongues.

He’d only been one of the architects of that madness.  The Dawn Knights were guilty – no lone individual was responsible for their blindly following the Empress’s insane directive.  General Crinn may have given the orders, but they followed his commands without hesitation, even when their devotion drove them to torture those they thought less human than themselves.

It hadn’t been like that in the beginning.  There had been days of pride and honor.  The Dawn Knights weren’t just soldiers but champions of the Empire, the elite of the vaunted White Dragon Army.  They were selected for missions no other soldiers could do.

Or would do.

Now the name of their order was a curse.  The Empress betrayed them when the camps were discovered and revealed to the people of the Empire.  By that point, most of them were already dead. 

Dane remembered feeling his heart swell with pride as they carried out the Empress’ will.  He’d watched in her name as teenaged girls burned and men were dragged naked across fields of sharp stone.  He vaguely recalled crushing a young boy’s skull beneath his boot. 

It didn’t seem real, didn’t seem like it had been
him,
but someone else, some dark and stained creature who wore his skin. 

Dane and a few others – Hask, Gavyn, Arkav, Traeger, Kraegen, Ghost, Corva – decided to put a stop to things, even though by that point it had already gone too far.  He couldn’t remember what it was that had finally pushed them back to reality: too many dead children, too many screams for mercy that had gone unanswered, the overwhelming stench of the dead, the gritty taste of burning bones.  It didn’t really matter – they’d decided they needed to get out, to end the insanity.  They couldn’t just run away, for there were people still alive, people who didn’t deserve to die.

They had to decide when and how to stage the coup, how to subdue Crinn and stop the killings without having to face the other Dawn Knights…their comrades, people they trusted and loved, whom they’d battled next to and risked their lives for.  He and the others met in secret and tried to come up with a way.

They never had the chance.  That night the Red Hand attacked, taking the death camps completely by surprise.  The militant Bloodspeakers were well-armed and determined.  Crinn responded with brutal force, repelling the outlaws and ordering that all remaining prisoners to be brutally slain. 

Most of what happened after that was a blur.  The Red Hand routed, and many died, including most of the Dawn Knights.  Not a single Bloodspeaker walked out of the death camps alive.  Dane and the others tried to stem the slaughter by hacking Crinn to pieces. 

The earth was soaked red by the time it was all finished.  Smoldering bodies filled the sky with smoke.  Dane and his co-conspirators stumbled away from the ruins of the camp, losing each other in the bloody mists, off to roam their own personal hells.

Dane was deathly ill for a week.  His dreams burned, and his stomach was empty.  No sleep, and no respite from the screams and the stench of innocent blood. 

He’d crawled into an isolated cave on a barren peak high in the Razortooth Mountains.  He was without food or water.   Dane cried for days, begging forgiveness from the One Goddess, knowing he didn’t deserve it.  He vomited into the snow, his skin freezing in the icy wind.   

What have I become?

The weight of the lives he’d taken threatened to crush him: every child who’d never grow up, who’d never know love, who’d never hold their parents.  Families gone, promises broken, futures that would never happen.  Every death sent ripples, lives ruined and hopes lost.  His body burned with sorrow.

Winter wind whipped through the cavern.  There was no easy way down, and he refused to Touch the Veil. 

He wanted to die.  He
deserved
to die.  But he didn’t have the courage to do it himself. 

Dane stripped naked and stayed in the cold, freezing, starving, alone.  And yet he didn’t die.  He couldn’t.  The Veil healed him when he slept, preventing his extremities from turning black and falling off and keeping his skin just warm enough for him to survive.  He lay in pain, lacking the will to move, hoping that if he filled his mind with images of death his dreaming self would let it happen.  But he kept waking up, healed and clinging to his pathetic existence. 

He was covered with frost but dripping with sweat, his skin cracked and bleeding.  Dane remembered the black face, the image of The Dark Angel.  Corvinia’s assassin, sent from the heavens to strike in the name of justice. 

The Dark Angel had visited them.  He’d taken the form of Marros Slayne.

Slayne had come from a more tarnished history than the rest of the Dawn Knights.  He wasn’t really one of them, just a mercenary who’d been imprisoned and offered freedom in exchange for serving the Empire.  Most of the others took even his presence as an insult.  Slayne trained to use the Veil, though his gifts were never well-honed, and he was given a
vra’taar
, the Dawn Knight’s traditional weapon, a symbol of their unity and sense of order.  Though Slayne never actually used the sword, preferring his short blades and
ring’tai,
the other knights still took offense, and the mercenary certainly didn’t help matters with his cold and distant personality.  But in spite of what the others thought of him Slayne worked with calculated efficiency and professionalism and never overstepped his bounds.  He was a peerless tracker and scout. 

Slayne’s own wife had been among the prisoners he’d help round up for the camps.  He’d taken her himself...she
was
a Bloodspeaker, after all.

How could they have been so blind, all of them?  Dane had wracked his mind wondering how he could have allowed himself to do the things he’d done.  Maybe Azaean had used the Veil to twist their minds.