Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (18 page)

She imagined trying to go east or west to set the rods—but the birds were so thick. Only to the south was a path open, and it led into the territory of the blood eaters.

She turned south, and Phylomon followed her through the rocks, past a forest of sinister trees, white as bone.

They stopped in hills of round rocks, and looked down over a city. Among clearings between single-celled huts, the blood eaters tended their gardens, beautiful pairs of brothers and sisters.

But something seemed odd. The beach down in the bay was filled with boats, hundreds of small coracles with white sails, and thousands of the blood eaters worked on the beach, fixing masts to the boats, preparing for an expedition.

Darrissea glanced at Phylomon, at his fair skin. He stood a head taller than the blood eaters. Darrissea asked, “How bold are you?”

No mere Blade Kin ushered Tull from the palace. Instead, six Crimson Knights in their red body armor, faces masked with black iron, unchained him from Fava and dragged him outside.

Fava screamed, “Tull,” and grabbed his hand, trying to hold him, but a knight stepped on her wrist cruelly while others pulled her back. As they dragged him out the door, she screamed, “
Ay-zhoken-thrall!
You gave me the love that enslaves.”

Tull shouted back, “
Ay-zhoken-thrall! Ay-zhoken-Pwirandi!
You gave me the love that enslaves. You gave me love that made me crazy.”

Her eyes met his, and he tried to bore the knowledge of his love deep inside her.

Outside the sky was clear blue, the day sunny, and they dragged Tull by his feet along a green lawn wet with dew from the winter snows.

As they dragged, he kept hitting bumps, white rocks in the lawn, but as he passed one, the mud scraped away and he saw that it was not a rock at all, but a human bone buried under the grass.

They dragged him up a hill, higher and higher, where soon there was no grass at all to hide the hill of bones, and they pulled him into a cage and dropped him, left him in his manacles and irons, slammed the door, then stood outside in a circle, watching.

The cage was too low for Tull to stand straight, so he got up and had to stoop. Dried feces and clumps of dark-brown human hair littered the floor—as if someone had torn out his own hair and left it.

The cage was shaped like an inverted bowl, with bars of human bones painted thickly with some white resin. The bars crossed and recrossed in triangles and squares. The door had no hinges, only three massive iron chains wrapped around it many times, then bound by locks.

Tull pulled some of the bars, hit one with his hand. The paint on the bones somehow made them unnaturally strong, harder than mere cement. He checked the floor. There were no bowls for food or water.

He found that he was breathing hard as he realized that they would starve him, so he closed his eyes and leaned his head back, sung his true name, searching for that clear peace inside. It was still there, very deep, but he found it.

Yet, holding it, trying to retain his calm, became a battle.

He thought of Fava, of her upcoming slavery. She would be aching for him now, mourning, and Tull found it hard to remain calm knowing that.

Downhill, Tull could see the Street of Dissidents with its wall of skulls. Thralls had begun to gather there by the hundreds, lining the streets to gawk. Behind him in the distance, bright-green hayfields alternated in bands with unplanted farmsteads in swaths of brown.

Flocks of gulls flew about the fields, following slaves who were hooked to plows. Closer to Tantos’s palace, barren oaks covered the hills, and Tull mused, realizing that within a few weeks, the oaks would be green with new leaf buds.

The palace itself was beautiful, all gleaming white stone with spires and sweeping arches. Only the ancient Starfarers could have designed such a thing.

The knot of people on the streets grew thicker, and Tull wondered why.

It would take him days to die, yet they had all come for a show. He recalled how Etanai had shown a picture of himself in this cage, and how it had affected the Pwi back at Smilodon Bay. It had seemed the ultimate horror, yet Tull did not feel it. Instead, he took refuge in his calm.

Dying here, of lack of water, would be an easy death.

A few moments later, half a dozen Blade Kin came and set a large fire only a dozen feet in front of Tull’s cage, then brought out a great black cauldron and a tripod and began to cook what looked like white paint.

Tull compared the paint to the color of the unnaturally white bones in his cage, saw it was the same.

“What are you doing?” he asked the men.

A Blade Kin sergeant with a wolf badge on his leather cuirass looked up from where his men stirred the pot. “We must add bones to your cage.”

“My bones?” Tull asked.

“No,” the Blade Kin replied. He whispered to an inferior, and the man went to the palace. Moments later he and several others brought Fava, dragging her by the feet, and laid her beside the pot.

Fava stared around with wide eyes, looking to the people on the street below for help, calling out softly.

The Blade Kin worked quickly, pounding deep stakes into the ground, then fastened Fava’s manacles and leg irons to the stakes so that she was pinned flat to the ground. Fava was breathing rapidly, sweating and pulling at her manacles, reciting bits of songs and muttering to herself, and then the Blade Kin sergeant pulled his knife and looked down at Fava, and Fava softly sang an old death song,

“Heavy loads are made for martyrs,
May the gods grant me something I can bear,
Behold the winters growing harder,
I feel the frostfire burn the air.”

A second Blade Kin moved close to Fava, ran his fingers under the curve of her breast, and she shouted something, closed her eyes.

“Leave her be!” Tull yelled. The Blade Kin laughed. Two of them took Fava’s arm.

The sergeant wiped the blade of the knife, looked up at Tull and said, “We’ll take the right arm first.”

He knelt on his knees and cut into Fava’s wrist, preparing to remove the bones. With three men leaning above Fava, Tull could not see much. He heard more than saw the act, heard a little squirting noise, and specks of blood pumped out, splattering the sergeant’s face.

Fava whined pitifully like a child, “God slap you! I swear, I’ll destroy Bashevgo!” She muttered the oath that she refused to make back in Smilodon Bay. She grunted and struggled and her chains rattled.

Clearly before his eyes, Tull saw the redwoods back in Smilodon Bay, recalled the young men of town drunk and boasting in their beers of how they would someday destroy Bashevgo.

All for nothing. Smilodon Bay now lay in cinders, and all her children were here in chains.

Peace left Tull then, and he was filled with a grief that could not be spoken. He didn’t want to live to see Fava die.

He turned away, and though the skies above were blue, in the north he could see great black clouds on the horizon, hurtling toward them. A storm, he thought. He knelt in dung and bones, holding onto the bars of the cage.

Fava screamed, and Tull looked down at the bones littering the hill.

When I was young I’d hoped for children at my knee, and here are the bones of someone’s children. I wanted to be wrapped in the arms of a lover, and now the bones of her arms shall wrap me in this cage.
His breath came ragged, and Tull’s chest ached.
I no longer fear my own death. Atherkula must know that, so instead he shows me the death of beauty and goodness in the world.

Tull pulled at the bars, straining to rip them from the cage, yanking at their thinnest places, hoping they would snap, and nothing would yield. He felt the muscles tear in his own arm, and thought wildly that if he died first, perhaps the Blade Kin would spare Fava.

Tull screamed and smashed his head against one of the bars. He pulled back, saw his own blood spattered against the supremely white bones, and he slammed his head again and again and again.

One of the guards shouted at Tull to stop, and Tull beat his skull against the bones and the guard rushed forward, jabbing with his spear, trying to force Tull away from the bars, and Tull struck his head again and grabbed the spear.

“I swear by my blood to free Bashevgo before I die!” Tull screamed.

He yanked the spear and slammed its tip into his own belly. He jerked the spear free from the Blade Kin and stabbed himself again and again.

***

Chapter 32: No More Darkness

Tull felt lightheaded, and the world began to spin. The Blade Kin managed to grasp his spear, pull it away and step back in surprise.

Tull clung to the bars of the cage over his head. “I swear,” Tull said. He looked down at his belly, at his tunic slit open and the red blood gushing from the blue skin, and around him the skies seemed to dim.

He only hoped that with his own death, he might buy Fava’s life. Yet he fainted, and felt himself dropping.…

The city became a red plain of stone, and the Blade Kin before him were dark orbs, engaged in eating Fava’s tendrils of light. The sun shone as an iridescent lavender flower in the skies, and across the land, the spirits of grass and trees glowed with a flickering purple light.

All around to the south, a spirit city rose—blocks of red stone set against a black sky—the dreams and plans of the millions of Slave Lords and Blade Kin and Thralls.

Sinuous towers snaked overhead, joined by tedious causeways, huge and dark and misshapen.

The designs of the domes and towers and causeways were overwhelming in their bulkiness, monotonous, as if they were monuments to brutality, built by fools.

Below him, on the Street of Dissidents, the ghoulish Thralls appeared as a crowd of green flames over black orbs, scared witless by this spectacle, and all about him Tull could see a thousand hues of green within the clots of the slaves’ souls.

The guards that hovered over Fava gazed up at Tull, hesitating, and Tull decided to stop them once and for all—immediately the fingers of fire that made up the lightning of his soul leapt out.

He recalled how Atherkula had tried to control him, pulling on Tull’s own lightning, and Tull ripped through the veneer of darkness over the Blade Kin, then grasped the tendrils of light still hidden within them, pulled them out straight, so that the Blade Kin rose from the ground and hovered in mid air, unable to move.

He quickly saw that he was using more than his normal twenty-two fingers of light—everywhere tendrils of light erupted from him in a great cloud, such was his wrath—and he clenched the Blade Kin that circled him all at once and snapped off the lightning of their souls—tore into their blackness and shredded it, watched their empty husks, the clot of their bodies, fall to the ground, as insubstantial as dead jellyfish that had washed up on a beach after a storm.

Tull did not understand what was happening. He had heard how Terrazin Dragontamer had slain entire armies with a thought, and he felt that power within him.

I shall destroy this world,
he thought, and he did not feel guilty.

Like Terrazin the Talent Warrior of old, Tull sent tendrils of light from himself, until the black skies of the Land of Shapes filled with light.

Every man, woman, and child,
he told himself—and the tendrils shot across continents as he connected.

Simultaneously, he became a Slave Lord in Craal raping a servant, a young woman in the wilderness nursing an infant child, Chaa running blindly toward Atherkula’s palace, a fisherman falling off a boat, an old woman in her sickbed breathing her last, an infant girl gazing at a newt in a clear pool while filled with a sense of wonder, a human in South Bay savoring a bowl of fresh peas, a young Thrall trying to escape Craal in hip-deep snow over the White Mountains, an infant screaming from the womb, an old Neanderthal with a toothache, a teenage Thrall girl sleeping in the tangled arms of her lover, a human tailor sewing green peacock feathers into a dress of black cotton, an old woman studiously biting her nails, Wayan huddled in a cell in the wilderness, a lone Okanjara warrior tossing a spear at an imperial lion.

Everywhere, everywhere, there were people—sleeping, loving, shitting, breeding, dying, waking to life or love or wonder or their own mortality—too many images to flash before his eyes at once, too many lives to conceive. The light from him filled the Land of Shapes like fire. He took them all, grasped the lightning of their souls and prepared to rend them as Terrazin had, thinking it merciful to send them shrieking into nonexistence.

***

Chapter 33: The Clarion Call

Phylomon and Darrissea walked through the town of blood eaters in the broad light of day, strolling casually like all the others, yet Darrissea could not restrain herself from taking Phylomon’s hand. She found her breath coming ragged, and knew that her face had gone red. Sooner or later, someone would spot the impostors.

They ambled down to the beach, mingled with others. Hundreds of coracles waited all around them, masts rising from the beach like an odd forest. Some blood eaters glanced at them, but none raised a cry.

Phylomon led her to a secluded spot, checked the sails on a small boat. Darrissea stroked the cloth, mimicking the strange, sedate actions of a blood eater. Her hands trembled, and she stifled a whimper.

“Take care, be strong,” Phylomon whispered and began pushing the boat down the sand toward the water. Darrissea casually helped, and nearby a man and woman looked at them, obviously distressed.

Simultaneously, several things happened: One nearby blood eater, a Neanderthal man with a red face, sniffed the air and turned, looked directly at Phylomon and asked, “Food?”

Above them on the mountain, a sound like blaring horns rang out, and everyone stopped, mesmerized by the noise. It was a call of some kind, a signal that Darrissea felt ringing through her bones, shuddering though her muscles, crying, “Move! Move! Move!”

Around the island, gray birds rose in clouds and started heading inland toward the volcano, and from three separate fissures, something oozed from the ground—pale shapes that flowed like milk down the mountainside, the gray worms Phylomon had warned about. Darrissea did not need to guess what would happen when the birds reached their worms.

Phylomon shouted, “Run!” and shoved the boat down the beach with his might so that it almost seemed to sing as it scraped over sand.

Darrissea grabbed a gunwale, pulling. The red-faced Neanderthal frowned at them, loped forward with a strange glassy look in his eye.

Darrissea’s feet hit water and she pulled the boat out a step, tumbled in. Phylomon gave it a shove from behind, and the blood eater leapt—jumping in the air and arcing forward, crossing two hundred feet of ground in only three leaps. He let out a strange piercing cry that raised the hair on Darrissea’s neck, and all across the city, startled blood eaters responded to the call by racing toward them.

Phylomon tossed the blue rod onto the floor of the boat, drew his bent sword and prepared to meet the blood eaters.

“Now!” he shouted, “Drop the rod before we die!”

Darrissea grabbed the rod. The blood eater seemed almost to fly through the air, and Phylomon plunged the blade. Blood sprayed over the boat as the blood eater collided with Phylomon, throwing him overboard into the shallows. The boat was still only a dozen feet from shore, and everywhere the blood eaters rushed toward them.

Darrissea saw that she could not stop them, would not have time to escape. She twisted the two halves of the blue rod, as Phylomon had shown her, and tossed it into the ocean.

Immediately her ears rang, a dull throbbing, as if her ear drums itched. She felt as if a great vise had been placed over her head, pressing in.

Along the beach, the blood eaters faltered, covered their ears and fell, shrieking in pain and wonder.

Phylomon lurched up from the water, fumbled into the boat, hoisted the sail.

When Darrissea could stand the pressure no longer, she covered her own ears with her hands, caved in on herself, yet it did not help.

The throbbing seemed to come from inside, penetrating every fiber of her body. The ground rumbled. Trees snapped along the shore. Rocks and scree broke from the mountain in walls, and then the earth began to shudder deep beneath them.

***