The Other Lands (24 page)

“Don’t,” Mena said, softly. “Don’t talk about that now.”

“And we can live our lives,” he completed. “Why not now? Now is exactly the time to remember it. I have loved you since the afternoon I saw you striding along the dock in Vumu, bare chested and all, a priestess of Maeben. I loved you then, and I love you now. You are angry you’re not going to die today? Put that aside, Mena. Let’s go finish this, and then go home.

The preparations took very little time. Her officers had been readying the men and supplies from the first news of the sighting. By the time Mena confirmed they were to proceed, the troops were arriving, weapons in hand. Not wanting missiles to end up zinging willy-nilly through the orchard if the creature bolted, she chose her twenty best crossbowmen and explained to them a variation on the original plan. She sent the trackers and extra soldiers to ring the entire vale to keep the creature hemmed in. With the main group she followed a contingent of excited local boys who led them through a hidden wash and in toward the center of the orchard, low enough to remain unseen by the creature. They crept with increasing stealth, which was no easy task considering the way they were encumbered.

The bowmen walked with their weapons pointed toward the sky, each of them connected by a cord that ran from the bolt and into coils held in their seconds’ palms. The line did not stop there, but trailed farther to a third, and sometimes fourth, assistant. These men carried stones cradled to their chests. A few had them in slings over their backs. Some of the rocks were large enough that two men strained to carry them, waddling together, their muscles taut and brows dripping with sweat. Each of these stones had a hole through it. It was this to which the cords from the bows were secured.

Mena kept them all in a tight group, close enough that she could communicate with gestures: a raised palm, a clenched fist, just enough of a beckoning motion with her fingers to move them forward on silent feet. When they reached the final rise that separated them from the grove the creature was feeding in, she made eye contact with them all, touched a finger to her lips, and then turned and led them forward. She drew her sword carefully as she did. She moved into the ordered rows of orange trees, smelling the tang of them, the sickly ripeness of the split fruit that dotted the ground.

Her hand snapped up. Without looking, she heard the group behind her pause, not so much a sound but the sudden absence of whatever sound had been there before to indicate them. She had spotted the foulthing. It was but fifty yards away, on the hillside facing them. It moved casually through the trees, its long neck curving selectively among the branches and leaves. Its back was to them. Mena waved her fingers in the air, and the group moved again, more stealthily now than ever.

As they got nearer, Mena had the hunting party fan out to either side. She slowed the center and let the flanks swing forward, making the group a crescent that half surrounded the foulthing. She knew they could not hope to get much closer, but she moved on light feet, thankful for every inch gained. She could now see that the creature was feathered, a close, tight coating that revealed the muscled contours and bone structure beneath a slick sheen of light plumage.

Without really realizing she was doing it, Mena drew to a halt, staring, curious now instead of angry or excited or frightened. The creature had knobby formations high on its back, and an indication of violet crest feathers running up its long neck. Despite these avian features, it was equally reptilian. Its body stretched long and lizardlike, with a tail that tapered to a thin point. For the first time, Mena realized, she did not feel the stomach-turning nausea the other foulthings had always invoked. She suddenly wanted to watch this one, to study it, to call back the slow-creeping crossbowmen and reconsider. She did not get to.

In the end it was not sound that gave them away. It was the breeze. It shifted. Mena felt it happen, felt a playful arm of the wind reach out and swipe at them and pull their scent and sprinkle it over the creature. The others must have sensed it, too. They stood frozen, breathing hushed, eyes wide.

The beast stopped feeding. Its head sank a few feet, and then it lifted its snout and inhaled through a few silent nostril flares. Without moving its body, it turned its head around and looked over the ridgeline of its back, its neck as supple as a snake. It saw them. Mena knew it saw them both because it looked right at them and because its eyes grew larger.

They were near enough, Mena decided. She lifted her hand to signal the crossbowmen, but realized they might not see her, as focused as they were on the lizard bird. They might not see her, but the creature did. Its gaze snapped to her, met hers, and held her with an intensity that was both animal savage and intelligent. Again, Mena wished she could back away. She could not have said exactly why. This was a foulthing. It was unnatural. It was a threat that did not belong in the world. Before, each time she had looked into one of these mutated beast’s eyes, she had seen a perverted malevolence that had to be extinguished. That was not what was looking at her now. She needed time to—

The creature, responding to the motion of several of the crossbowmen, who were setting up to take aim, spun around. Its mouth fell open, hissing, and the plumes along its neck bristled forward, framing its head in a violet, feathered mane. The creature shook its torso savagely, stepping forward as it did so. The knobs on its back cracked away and unfurled to either side. The motion was so rapid and dramatic that it sucked the words of command out of Mena’s mouth. Wings! It did have wings! They rolled out as if the bones were joints of a curled whip unfurling. Each short length of bone snapped into place with an audible cracking and popping. It took only a second or two, but in that time the creature was completely transformed. Its wings stretched out above the tree height, enormous and delicate at the same time. The wing bones were finger thin, a skeletal frame that supported a membrane so diaphanous that Mena could see the world through it. It leaped into the air.

“Shoot!” Mena found her voice again. “Stop it from escaping! Shoot it now!”

Crossbow bolts flew up after it, cords trailing behind. Several missed. A few snagged in the trees. One punched through the creature’s wing membrane. Two slammed into its belly. One sank deep into the flesh of its thigh. Another nicked its neck. The creature lost its upward momentum. It hovered for a moment, a confused target into which another bolt sank home. The creature arched against the pain. Its mouth gaped as if it were roaring, but no sound came out. It slammed its wings down with force enough to snap branches and send oranges raining down. The one stroke lifted it up, pulling the lines secured to it. The ropes snapped taut, yanking the stones from the ground. The anchors crashed through branches and bounced off tree trunks. One knocked a soldier from his feet. Another smashed an arm that had been upraised against it.

Mena yelled for them to fall back, but most were already diving for cover, running down the hill, hiding behind trees and in hollows to wait for the rock anchors to pull the beast down. That had been the plan: to weight the animal with so many stones that it could not fly, or could not fly far. They could then kill it at leisure, safely. When she thought it wingless, Mena had modified the plan, thinking a less numerous team could get close enough and then essentially capture it the same way.

For a few moments during the wing-flapping chaos Mena thought the plan was working, but with each wingbeat the creature seemed to gain strength and resolve. It strained against the ropes, yanking them through the branches. It would soon clear the trees. She shouted for more bolts to be shot, but the crossbowmen were struggling to reload while keeping their eyes upon the moving beast. She would have taken a shot herself if she had a bow. Something else caught her eye. The creature’s tail hung near the ground. It snapped and curled and stretched beneath the flying form, like a living rope looking for a hand to grab it. So that’s what Mena did.

She walked forward and grasped it in a clenched fist. She did not exactly plan to. It was so near, so easy to do. She did not think, but some part of her imagined she might hold the creature down. The narrow tip of the tail curled around her wrist, almost playfully, as if it had a mind of its own and would tickle her. She noticed this even amid the motion, even though it lasted only a few seconds.

That’s all the time she had before she was yanked into the air. She knew then—as the earth fell away beneath her churning legs—that neither the stones nor her body weight was nearly enough to keep the creature earthbound. It soared upward, taking her with it.

T
he messenger sent by Sangae Umae had surprised Kelis every day since they began their overland journey together. Naamen had dashed out of the camp in Halaly at a pace that Kelis was sure he would not be able to hold for long. But he had. Kelis had thought himself still in his prime; but midway through his first day he had cause to doubt it. The older man kept abreast of the younger only by digging deep into his running memory finding the rhythm, and searching for the quiet meditative space that he had tapped to help him through his longest runs, like the one he took at Aliver’s side in search of the Santoth.

While Aliver had been largely a silent companion, Naamen was inclined to chatter. He made observations on the landscape, talked of random memories, asked questions, and then seemed content to answer them himself. It had frustrated Kelis at first; he suspected that the adolescent was purposefully trying to distract him and to demonstrate that the work did not even wind him. But by the third or fourth day Naamen’s voice had become a feature of the journey, inseparable from the pounding of their feet and swing of their arms and the slow unfurling of the land through which they kicked their dusty progress.

Outside the Halaly lake region, the plains baked beneath a dry sun that oppressed the land, as if the heat were a heavy blanket pressing down on the world. Umae, which they passed near, had always been arid, but such heat was unusual this early in the season. Across the flat stretch of land to Denben they found water only in a few wells, the rivers like dry scars cut in the earth by some meandering knife. Along the busy route between Denben and Bocoum it was easier to forget the plains, especially as the roads often took them within sight of the Inner Sea. Still, Kelis knew that things were not right in his homeland. The foulthings were one sign of it but not the only one.

Naamen was just as adept among the urban bustle of Bocoum as he was running across open expanses. Kelis followed the young man as he slipped through the crowd with the fluidity of an eel through a coral reef. The city, sprawling along the coastline for buttressed miles, was technically the seat of government control of the province of Talay, although with the region’s tribal variation any central control was loose. More fundamentally, it was the agricultural and commercial hub of Talay. It thronged with merchants and traders and craftsmen; with foodstuffs, warehouses, and luxurious estates. None of these things interested Kelis. He did not really feel at home hemmed in by walls and buildings and crowds, and considered the flaunted wealth of the townsfolk to be obscenely extravagant. In the past, he had always breezed through the city, engaged in some errand or another. He did not intend this trip to be any different.

“Here it is,” Naamen said, motioning with his stunted arm.

It took Kelis a moment to sort out what he meant. They had come up one of the high streets of the city center, a busy corridor lined with multistoried buildings. Working their way forward, Kelis picked out the carved image of a lion on a crest above the gatehouse entrance at the end of the lane. It was the Ou lion. It was hardly an original totem animal, but it was distinctive in that the figure stood upright on a body that looked more human than feline. The head, however, was massively maned, the cat’s mouth opened in an everlasting roar. It could have been a secondary entrance to an Acacian palace, such was the grandeur of the carved granite archway. Two guards stood at attention at either side, long pikes set on the ground before them and stretching to spear points well above their heads.

“You would think they were royalty,” Kelis murmured.

Naamen turned and set his mirthful eyes on him. “Oh, yes, and, believe me, the Ous do think themselves royalty. You need not bow before them, though. Not yet, at least.”

The guards held them outside the gate for several minutes, until a secretary met them. He curtly dismissed Naamen, then led Kelis through the elaborate interior gardens, around pools of fish and under palms, between rows of flowering bushes. Inside the main building, the extravagance continued. For Kelis—who had spent most of the last several years in camps, sleeping on mats with bare ground beneath him—the tapestry-hung walls, the incense-heavy air, the rich carpet underfoot, and the dark crimson and gold of so much of the furniture closed in on him like some elaborate trap. He had to breathe deeply to disguise his racing heartbeat and his desire to run away.

The secretary left him in a room filled with couches and ornate chairs, directing him to sit and relax. Kelis eyed a couch, draped with zebra skins. He did not sit. Instead, he moved out onto the balcony and sucked in the salt-tinged air. The Inner Sea stretched out to the horizon, the green waters dotted with sailing vessels of all sizes and shapes. In the distance great trading barges sat on the water, looking like oddly geometric islands. Leaning on the railing, Kelis took in the sweep of the harbor below, the coastline crowded with rank upon rank of white-roofed buildings. The structures were built so tightly together they looked like a throng jostling to tilt themselves into the mirror that was the sea.

How many people lived in this city? Kelis had no idea. Likely, the number would mean little to him anyway. How very different it was from a village like Umae, where he could name every adult, and every child could name him. That was the size of community that felt right to him. He wondered again why Sangae had summoned him here.