Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (4 page)

Convinced she would find no meaningful conversation with him,
Weaver clucked her tongue and rubbed her fingers together to bring Meldi to the
fireside. The filly whickered softly as she stroked her face and neck. “There
we are. That’s my good girl.”

Lokes’s eyes flicked up from his work. “You think you can go
one night without smothering that poor animal? You ever leave her, she gonna
wander around in circles ‘til she drops dead.”

“At least someone around here would be sad to see me go.”

Lokes rolled his eyes and resumed his picking.

Silence stretched out for a few minutes, until finally Weaver
could take no more. “Does anything I do ever make you happy?”

“Happy ain’t my thing,” Lokes said. “If this Toler dway is in
Unterberg, we got a long way to go—and fast, if we want to be back in Belmond
in time to meet the southerner and pay off Fink. I ain’t trying to lose out on
that bounty on account of Toler not being where he was s’posed to.”

“Relax, honey. We got plenty of time.”

Lokes poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a flurry of
embers. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

“For Infernal’s sake, Will. I can’t say a word to you anymore
without you going buzzards on me.”

Lokes said nothing as he returned to cleaning his
fingernails. Once he got into one of his moods, there was little use trying to
get him out of it. Weaver let him stew in his own juices while she retrieved
her pack from Meldi’s saddle, laid out her bedroll, and sent the horse back
into the scrub to graze.

After a time of meditation, Weaver readied herself for bed.
Lokes didn’t look up when she slipped out of her leather jerkin and slid into
her bedroll. She lay awake for a long time, staring up into a field of
twinkling stars, bright and full in the wasteland’s perfect darkness. Soon she
heard him snoring and turned to find him leaning against the slanted rock, exactly
where he had been an hour earlier. He’d put on his hat and pulled it down over
his eyes.

She rolled over and unfolded her extra blanket, insulating
herself against the night’s wind. She tossed and turned all night until
splashes of pink heralded the light-star’s coming on the eastern horizon. She
gave up trying to sleep and trudged off into the scrub to take care of business
before Lokes woke up.

They packed their things and headed west before dawn,
galloping through the early morning hours while the heat was still low. Their
midday rest was the first time Lokes spoke to her all day. He discussed only
shelter and food in a tone that was curt and impersonal, as if he possessed no
desire to right what had gone wrong between them the night before. Weaver was
hesitant to spark his ire anew, so she answered him in kind and said nothing
more.

That night when they made camp, his demeanor changed. After
he’d built the fire, he came over to sit beside her. When he put his arm around
her, she knew what he wanted. She tried not to flinch away. His touch was what
she’d longed for, but not like this. There was no tenderness in it; no love or
forgiveness or atonement. It was lust, and it made her skin crawl.

“You mad at me or something?” he asked. “You been quiet all day.”

Weaver couldn’t believe he’d said something so dense. Could
he really be that oblivious to the way she was feeling? How did he not realize
he’d hurt her? They’d barely said ten words to one another all day, and yet it
was as if he hardly noticed; as if he hadn’t been suffering from their
estrangement at all.

He kissed her beside the ear, where her hair fell in thin
dark wisps. His lips were soft, the whiskers above and below hard and scratchy.
She could smell his sweat from the day’s ride, a man’s sharp, striking musk. He
squeezed her and kissed her neck, sending a tingle through her.

“
I’ve
been quiet?” she said. “What about you? You’ve
been snippety as a jackal ever since last night.”

“Aw. You know I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” He put a hand on
her breast and spoke to her between kisses. “Come on, sugar. You know I love
you.”

She inhaled, trying to rid herself of the sick feeling in her
stomach. What she got instead was a lungful of peppery wood smoke. How Lokes
could be so heartless, so ignorant of such important things, she would never
understand. Had she overreacted—made this a larger issue than it ought to have
been?

Lokes was a hard man in every sense of the word—hard to live
with and hard to please. Yet compared to all the cowards and chumps and over-easy
dways she had known in her life, his equal was hard to find. He was always open
when it came to talking about his life before her, but he closed up tight as a
trap whenever she pressed him about the future, or even the now. Right now, his
lips and his hands were all over her, and it was all she could do to keep from
taking her frustrations out on him.

She considered burying Lokes like she’d done with the
shepherd the previous night. She imagined him sinking into the sand, still
breathing, still alive, and listening to him squirm and struggle through his
last breaths. Those thoughts always made her feel disgusting and deranged. She
hated herself for even thinking them. She didn’t hate Lokes; she didn’t want
him to die. She just wanted him to care. Sometimes she felt like the only way
he ever would was if she forced him to. She stopped resisting him and let him
have his way.

Afterwards, Weaver couldn’t help but feel used. Part of her
wanted to cry. Mostly she was just glad he was done with her. She would get no
further attention from him tonight, she knew. She waited until he fell asleep
and spent the rest of the evening trying to think back to what had caused their
fight in the first place. If she could find the cause, maybe she could break
the cycle. It was a theory she’d tried to puzzle out before. Hours later, her
results were no different, and she gave up.

The days of their journey passed, and the cycle continued.
Lokes grew more irritable and impatient as their deadline loomed. Finally, in
the bright dawn of a cloudless day, they crested a low ridge on the edge of the
scrubland, from which they could see the drab, foreboding spires of the Black
City in the distance. Unterberg was all black steel and sharp lines, its
skyscrapers vaulting toward the clouds and plunging through the gray rock of
the mountainside to join with the network of caves and concrete tunnels below,
where the hundred rivers ran like snakes through the below-world, bringing
trade and fresh water to the Inner East’s northernmost settlements.

When they reached the wide funnel of rock that led into the
foothills of the city, Weaver reined up, unable to make herself go any further.
Meldi threw her head and danced sideways, sensing her fear. A little farther
on, Lokes realized she had stopped and wheeled his mount to look at her.

“Aw, come on, you pansy,” he said. “You ain’t getting all
yellow again, are you?”

Weaver hated leaving the sands. The touch of stone or
pavement underfoot made her feel like a sailor on dry land. She gulped, then
shook her reins and nudged the filly onward.

Lokes shook his head as she came near. “I swear, you must be
the only person alive who’s afear’d of stepping on stones.”

As they wove their way up the path, the streets filled with
people. Unterberg was one of the wealthiest and safest cities in the Inner
East, a result of both the Vantanible trading empire and the convergence of the
hundred rivers. In truth, fewer than two dozen rivers ran through the city’s
below-world districts, but their tributaries numbered in the thousands.

There was no barrier to entry in the Black City, no blockades
to keep out the unwanteds. All who brought trade were welcome, and all who
caused no disturbance could expect no maltreatment in return. It was
Vantanible’s police force who dispensed punishment to those who went against
his will. The police were agreeable to those who stayed in line. To those who
didn’t, the authorities often resorted to brutal beatings and other displays of
cruelty in the streets.

Vantanible himself was known to be swift and hard-nosed,
though his discipline tended to fit the crime. Coming to Unterberg made Jallika
Weaver nervous for more than its lack of sand. Almost on principal, Lokes held
an utter lack of respect for any symbol of authority. Whenever they came to the
Black City, Weaver always seemed to have her hands full trying to keep him out
of one scuffle or another. She often found herself living in an unfortunate
reality where Lokes was unable to take his anger out on whatever dway had
slighted him, and was thus more likely to take it out on her.

They tied Meldi and Gish to the hitching rail outside
Brannon’s Pub, Lokes’s favorite local watering hole, which was set into the
side of a decaying high-rise. The building’s deteriorating stature made Weaver so
dizzy she could hardly stand to look up at it. The pub’s wainscoted frontage
was so weathered as to be nearly worn away. Its carved profiles had been
resurfaced so many times they’d turned to shapeless lumps below layers of
peeling brown paint.

They entered the dimly lit pub and were greeted by the sour
smell of spilled beer and the dry yellow film of second-hand smoke. Lokes
ordered two rounds of a local brew, a pale lager that was hard to find in the
desert cities due to their lack of cold storage. Laughter and drunken
conversation rang through the hollows of the room as they took their seats at a
high-top table to wait out the midday heat.

“Now where do you s’pect we might find a dirty rotten
shepherd like this Toler dway?” Lokes asked, his mustache lathered in suds.

Weaver laughed at him. She tried to wipe a thumb across his
upper lip, but she only got halfway along before he swatted her hand away.

“Geh,” he grunted. “Leave me be, woman.” Now there was froth
on half his mustache, which made him look all the more ridiculous.

Weave clapped a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter.

Lokes gave her a dopey grin, which came as a relief.
Sometimes he didn’t take so well to her teasing.

“We’re in a tough spot,” she said. “Picking a shepherd out of
a trade caravan is hard enough as it is. This city’s full of shepherds coming
and going, day and night. Must be a thousand of ‘em walking around here at any
given time.”

“Well, we don’t got all year to find him, so we ought to
start asking around sooner than later.”

“Hold your horses,” said Weaver. “Have yourself a drink and a
cooldown, then we’ll settle in and get down to business.”

Three drinks later, Lokes was feeling better about their
prospects. That didn’t last long, however. A man bumped into him as he was walking
past their table, spilling a fat gob of cold stout across his back. Lokes
arched his spine and gasped at the chilly surprise. The man began to apologize,
but Lokes wasn’t having it. Weaver saw the flush rising in his cheeks as he
twisted in his seat to give the stranger a one-armed shove.

Aw, shit. There it went
.

The man stumbled backward into a table. Beer splashed from
the three mugs he was holding, bathing his hands and tunic in its dark ochre.
His brow creased. He set the mugs on the table and lurched toward Lokes.

Even if he hadn’t been the least bit drunk, Lokes would’ve
been too fast for him. He slipped off his stool and inverted it, using the legs
to catch the man’s belly like a hunk of meat in the prongs of a fork. Lokes
braced the stool against his thigh, keeping the man at a distance. He caught
the man’s swing and popped him a straight one in the nose, loosing spatters of
blood across both cheeks like whiskers on a cat. He threw the fist aside and
shoved the stool with his hip to send the man toppling into a crowd of
onlookers.

Lokes stretched his shoulders and wrung out his hand. Just as
he was about to dive in and start the real beating, Weaver came up behind and
yanked him away. He yelled and cursed all through the room, stopping only after
she’d dragged him out the front door and into the street.

A wall of heat smacked them in the face, so thick it was hard
to breathe. The shadows had fallen away and left the upper side of the street
bare, catching Meldi and Gish in an inescapable sliver of daylight. The horses
were visibly uncomfortable, shifty and anxious.

Weaver and her troublemaking beau mounted and turned down a
side street, where the dark steel of a dozen gargantuan, eroding skyscrapers
gleamed like crystal in the face of Infernal’s rage. With all the pedestrians
descending to the lower side to escape direct light, they broke into a canter
down the empty stretch of road to escape both the light-star and the prying
eyes of any police officers who might’ve heard the disturbance.

“You gotta quit doing that,” she said when they’d turned
another corner and slowed to a trot. “We can’t be getting into trouble if you
wanna find that shepherd.”

Lokes was swaying a little in his saddle. He wiped his nose
and spat. “Son-bitch should’ve looked where he was going.”

“I know honey, I know.”

“We gonna find this Toler dway, alright,” Lokes said. “And he
ain’t gonna like it, neither.”

CHAPTER 4

Battle of the Brinescales

Lizneth’s lungs were burning by the time she reached
the mouth of the tunnel. There were many paths to the blind-world, but taking
an anxious
calai
army unawares seemed a poor route to travel, if she
wanted to live long enough to deliver her news to Neacal Griogan. When the
sentries at the opening pointed their spears and shouted at her in the
calai
tongue, she raised her hands and said, “Neacal Griogan expects me.” They
relaxed and took her to their lord without another word.

Morning was coming on, the light-star peeking red and gold
through a haze of low mountain clouds. Lizneth yawned. She’d been running
around all night and hadn’t slept, apart from whatever period of trance or
hypnosis Sniverlik had brought upon her with his Zithstone Scepter. From the
top of the ridge she could see the nomads’ cooking fires dotting the hills, a
view of their numbers she hadn’t beheld while she was among them. There were
more
calaihn
than she’d thought, a far greater army than Sniverlik could
boast without the aid of the burrow-kin and his other allies.  

Lizneth was starting to remember the harshness of the light-star.
The day was growing too hot for her, and without Mama Jak’s potions she was
left with only Zhigdain’s goggles as protection. The sentries dropped her off
at the edge of the camp, where other
calaihn
escorted her the rest of
the way past niches and firepits where warriors were gathering up their things
and sharpening their steel. At one of the crossings, several
calaihn
were pulling strings of chain from a wide wooden box and laying them out on the
ground, side by side.

“You came back, little one,” Neacal said when her escorts
brought her before him. He was wearing a necklace of polished beads and white
feathers, and Lizneth could see that the warlock had been painting him for
battle. Colored smudges decorated his face and arms and chest, giving him the
resemblance of some garish bird in full plumage.

He still calls me little one, as though I’m less of a
zhe
than he is
.

“What news from Sniverlik? Has he surrendered?”

Neacal spoke with tenderness in his voice, but all Lizneth
could think about were the chains she’d seen a few moments before. All she
could hear were the words Neacal had spoken to her days ago.
Because I need
you
. That was why he hadn’t taken her captive yet. He was using her. He
didn’t care about her family or her village. He was here to kill Sniverlik,
their guardian, and enslave them. The thought of it made her regret her
decision to come back. She should’ve gone home. She should’ve returned to her
family. “Are you here to take slaves?” she asked.

Neacal was irritated. “What do you mean?”

“Are you here to take slaves?” she repeated. “Is that why
your master-king sent you?”

“I told you, little one. We are here for Sniverlik.” Neacal
knelt, the beads on his necklace tinkling. “What did he say to you?”

Lizneth looked into the
calai
’s deep brown eyes, which
were searching hers in much the same way. Eyes in such a peculiar face, with
its tiny pointed snout and sharp cheeks. Eyes that seemed so honest and kind,
despite their strangeness. She wanted to tell him Sniverlik’s plan; to warn him.
She wanted the
calaihn
to win and set her village free. Yet something
made her hesitate.
Those chains
.

Neacal grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Tell me,
little one. What did he say?” He was gripping her hard enough to pinch the fur
on her arms, clamping his fingers around her like vices. “Tell me. Tell me.
What did he say? Tell me.”

Lizneth shook free of him. When he stumbled forward and tried
to grab at her leg, she shifted away. Then she was running again, but she
didn’t get far. A line of
calai
warriors hemmed her in and wrestled her
to the ground. She chittered and struggled against them, but they were much too
strong. Neacal came to stand over her, brushing himself off and grimacing as
though she’d injured him somehow.

“Did you even deliver my message at all?” he asked, his tone
raw and bitter. “I hope you did, or you have ruined everything. You little
rat
.”

Lizneth had never felt a pain in her chest like the one that
struck her in that moment. It was true, then; this hu-man who had seemed to like
her so much actually valued her very little. He despised her. She saw that now.
Neacal Griogan and all the other
calaihn
hated the
ikzhehn
so
much they had reduced them to mere prisoners and thralls. Neacal could tell her
again that this was about Sniverlik, but the cold zeal in his eyes said
otherwise.

“I delivered your message,” Lizneth choked out, as the
calaihn
held her to the ground with knees and hands and elbows. “The Marauders will
never surrender while Sniverlik still lives. If you chase him into the
below-world, he’ll kill you all. If you wait here, you’ll rot in the heat and
never find him. Run back to your home and don’t ever come north again. He won’t
let you live next time.”

Neacal gave her a broad, open-mouthed smile, full of venom.
“Welcome to my service, little one. You have the honor of being my first
prisoner of war.”

Lizneth felt cold iron at her throat and ankles. The manacles
clinked shut, pinching fur and skin, and the
calaihn
hoisted her to her
feet. The familiar sound and weight of the chains dangling from her body made
her feel weaker and more powerless than ever. She was too numb to cry out, too
exhausted and wracked with despair to do anything but stand there, hunched and
defeated.

“Now,” Neacal said, glowering down at her. “The first thing
you will do as my prisoner is to lead us to Sniverlik’s stronghold. Hold your
chains while you move, little one. If you make noise, you will be flogged. Go.”

Lizneth didn’t go. She sat where she was and stared off into
the distant mountains, uncaring. She didn’t know where she’d summoned the
courage to do it. Perhaps she’d forgotten the bite of the scourge, or she’d
become suddenly aware that the thought of walking all that way again without a
wink of sleep made her want to die.
I really do want to die
, she
realized. But no, it was neither impudence nor tiredness which had given her
the strength to defy him. It was hope. Hope for something better, even if that
something was death. She knew then for a certainty that no amount of pain or
fear could break a heart filled with hope.

Someone put a whip in Neacal’s hand. Lizneth could hear the
leather braid creaking as he stretched the coils. A crowd was gathering, the
warriors and porters and cooks and warlocks standing still and silent as death.
With the whip still coiled, Neacal landed a single firm slap on Lizneth’s
shoulder. He waited for her to stand.

She didn’t move.

He hit her harder, in the same place.

This time the blow stung, but she didn’t let herself make a
sound.

“Up,” he said. “On your feet.”

Lizneth ignored him.

He gave her a whack across the head, then dropped the coil
and let it dangle in front of her, making sure she could see it. He circled
around behind her. She heard him take two long backward strides. The whip
climbed, then broke the air like thunder.

A slash of pain ran down Lizneth’s spine. Anguish surged
within her, sharpening to unbearable heights within the span of a few seconds.
She felt the wound open, felt a trickle of blood run down her back.

Neacal was perplexed. “Are you so determined to be stubborn?
It would go better for you if—”

A lookout shoved his way through the crowd and stood before
Neacal. “
Gisheino
,” the
calai
said, out of breath. “
Muirrhadi…
yarutrobaid
.”

The crowd erupted into a churning maelstrom. The hu-mans scattered,
and the battle call went up. “
Trobaid muirrhadi! Trobaid muirrhadi!
”

Lizneth turned to the east, where the light-star had risen to
an orange ball of liquid fire above the mountains. Sniverlik had told her he
didn’t take advice from
parikuahn
. Yet he was attacking the
calaihn
in the blind-world in broad daylight. What was his aim, if not to take Neacal
by surprise? His Marauders would suffer in the heat, making any possible
victory a hard-fought one. Lizneth had risked everything to report back to
Neacal, but now she didn’t know whose side she was on—whose side she
should
be on. Neacal really
was
here to take slaves. For the first time in
Lizneth’s life, she had begun to think of Sniverlik and his Marauders as a
protective force rather than an oppressive one.

When she stood, no one noticed.
Calaihn
were running
past her in every direction, frantic and unprepared. She’d been forgotten in
the uproar. Maybe she didn’t have to take sides just yet…

The
calaihn
had been using a massive boulder as a
lookout post from which to keep an eye on the valley below. With the Marauders
on the move, the lookouts were abandoning their stations and advancing to
bolster the front lines. That boulder might be the perfect place for Lizneth to
hide—and it would give her a bird’s eye view of the proceedings. She gathered
up her chains to keep them from rattling, just as Neacal had instructed. The
clamor in the camp would’ve masked the sound anyway, but there was still the
chance she could run into a few straggling guards coming up from the rear.

On several occasions she had to duck behind a rock or crag to
avoid being seen, but she soon found that the
calaihn
were less
concerned with her than with the threat of the impending attack. She moved at a
steady, brisk pace. No one gave her more than a brief glance as they passed.

The boulder was not hard to climb, even bound as she was. Her
manacles were large enough for a
calai
, so the cuffs hung loose around
her ankles, and the length of chain between them was more than adequate to let
her stretch out her arms and legs as she climbed. She made it to the top and
lay down, both to rest and to make herself harder to see from below. The
calaihn
were massing on the lower ridge, pacing about and pounding their chests as they
shouted and howled their fury. Lizneth found the behavior odd, something they
did as a show of strength when it was probably more suited toward staving off
their fear.

When the sound of the Marauders’ horns blatted across the
mountainside, none of the
calaihn
reacted. To Lizneth it seemed that
many of them hadn’t even heard the horn; half of them had to be tapped on the
shoulder by the other half, who were pointing toward the upper ridge. Before
her eyes, a flood of
ikzhehn
began to gush forth from the depths; a
fearsome sight, if not also impressive. The Marauders had the benefit of both
timing and gravity behind them, and they’d soon accelerated to a startling clip
down the rocks. Most of them ran on all fours, blades glinting from forearms
and scabbards and hidden pockets forced open by the wind. The
calaihn
began to trudge up the incline, but they were loose and disorganized, and their
plodding advance made a lackluster counter-charge at best.

Behind the Marauders, a lumbering black shape crested the
ridgetop and started down the rocks on two feet, his greened copper armor
giving off a drab, muted sheen. When Sniverlik thrust the Zithstone Scepter
high above his head, Lizneth suddenly knew the reason he had chosen to attack
the
calaihn
during the day’s brightest hour. Where the Zithstone
should’ve glinted in the morning light, it dulled the air around itself to a
gray blemish instead. For a moment Lizneth felt as though she were staring at a
dark smudge on a pane of glass. Then Sniverlik twisted his wrist, and the daylight
curved and split into a tangle of hollow ribbons.
Calaihn
for dozens of
fathoms around staggered and began to slow. The Marauders, who were wearing
dark studded goggles over their eyes, only charged in the faster.

Lizneth adjusted her own goggles and watched as the
calai
warriors wilted like heat-stressed flowers, their battle rage softening to a
stupor. Their arms dropped to their sides, weapons clattered to the ground, and
in an instant many were hunch-backed and shambling. Some even fell forward and slid
down the slope on their bellies.

Sniverlik’s Marauders washed over them like a black tide,
blades singing. Even with her goggles on, Lizneth couldn’t look directly at the
Zithstone for long without feeling sick and achy. Sniverlik’s tumor-like paunch
had grown—or so it appeared. He gave an abrasive chittering laugh as his
keguzpikhehn
leapt over the stones and slashed bloody torrents through the lines of
apathetic
calaihn
.

Soon the Marauders had fought their way to the extremities of
the scepter’s influence, where the unaffected
calaihn
still had their
wits about them. It was there that true battle was joined. The nomads were
tough, and they fought like fiends, sustaining many wounds before they fell.
Each
calai
who went down brought three
ikzhehn
with him, some
slaying as many as half a dozen or more before meeting their end.

Lizneth saw now why the
eh-calaihn
called them
savages. They roared and shrieked as they fought, cutting Marauders down as if
their armor were made of cloth, their own bare bronze chests glistening with
blood and scars and sweat. Sniverlik was advancing, however, and with him came
the Zithstone, its every gyration twisting the light into sinuous curls of
shadow.
That’s something crueler than shadow
, Lizneth observed, as its
threads fluttered through the
calaihn
ranks, malignant in the hands of
the
ikzhe
chieftain.
Papa was wrong about the scepter, and Mama was
right. There
is
some kind of depraved power in the thing
.