Enéas cu’Kinnear
IF HE WERE DEAD, the afterlife wasn’t anything like
the one the téni had promised to the faithful.
Enéas’ afterlife was
illuminated by dim, ruddy light, and it stank of rotting flesh and
brimstone. The ground on which he lay was wet and hard, with fists
of stone that poked into his back. The téni had always said how all
a person’s bodily ills would be healed when he finally rested in
Cénzi’s arms, that those who had lost limbs would have them
restored, that there would be no more pain.
But Enéas’ breath
rattled in his lungs, and when he tried to move, the agony made him
cry out.
He heard wings
flapping in response, punctuated with hoarse squawks of alarm.
Enéas blinked, and the redness moved with his eyelids. He slowly
lifted a protesting hand and wiped at his eyes. The red filter
cleared somewhat, and he realized that he’d been looking through a
film of sticky blood at a moonlit landscape, his head on muddy
ground. An umber mountain lifted a scant finger’s distance from
him. He blinked again, squinting: a fallen, dead horse: his
destrier. Cénzi, you left me alive. As
the realization came to him, two clawed feet appeared at the summit
of the equine mountain, followed by another irritated squawk, and
Enéas moved his gaze to see one of the Hellins’ carrion birds, the
creature soldiers called rippers: ugly birds with a wingspan of two
mens’ height or more, great hooked beaks set in a featherless,
spectrally-white face, expressionless eyes like black marbles, and
curved talons to rip open the corpses on which they preferred to
feast. There was nothing like these beasts in the
Holdings.
The bird stared at
him as if contemplating a fine meal set before it. Enéas propped
himself up on his elbows; it was the closest he could manage to
sitting up; the bird screeched in annoyance and flapped off. Enéas
could feel the foul wind stirred by its wings.
Not dead. Not yet. Praise Cénzi.
He tried to remember
how he’d come to be here, but it was a muddle in his head. He
remembered talking to A’Offizier ca’Matin, and the start of the
charge, the rush downhill toward the Westlander force. Then . . .
then . . .
Nothing.
He shook his head to
shake loose the memory. That was a mistake. The world whirled
around him, the redness returned, and pain shot through his
temples. He caught himself before he fell back down to the ground
again and waited for the earth to stop spinning. Again, he pushed
himself to a full sitting position and touched his head
tentatively; his hair was crusted with dried blood and his fingers
could feel the jagged outline of a long, deep cut. Enéas started to
feel sick. He let his hand drop, closed his eyes, and took long,
slow sips of air until the nausea passed, reciting the Prayer of
Acceptance to calm himself. He opened his eyes again, looking
carefully around.
There were rippers
everywhere; in the dim moonlight, the field seemed alive with them,
the ground humped with the black hills of Enéas’ fallen companions
and their horses. The sickening, wet, tearing sound the birds made
as they fed on the bodies was one he knew would haunt his
nightmares forever. Far off, down the slope on which he sat, Enéas
could see the gleam of a campfire, and around it the dark shapes of
people moving. There was another sound, fainter:
singing?
The figures outlined
in the flame wore feathered devices on their heads, Enéas saw. They
were Westlanders, then. “Tehuantin,” as they called themselves. All
the bodies around him wore the gold-trimmed uniforms of Nessantico,
black with blood and dim moonlight rather than the brilliant blue
they should have been.
We lost. We were slaughtered here, and those in Munereo
may not know the outcome yet. Cénzi, is that why You saved me, so I
could warn them . . . ?
Enéas tried to move;
his legs didn’t want to cooperate, and he realized that one leg was
still trapped underneath the horse he’d been riding. As silently as
he could, he pushed at the carcass, shoving against it with his
good leg, and eventually the leg came free. His ankle was swollen
and tender; he wasn’t certain he could walk on it.
He found his sword
half-buried in the mud an arm’s length away. He shoved the filthy
blade into the scabbard lashed to his belt. Grimacing, he crawled
toward the flames, half-dragging himself around the
destrier.
Part of him screamed
warning. He was moving toward the enemy; they would kill him if
they saw him. The a’offiziers all spoke of how the Westlanders had
walked the battlefield after Lake Malik, how they’d killed all the
gardai who were still alive but crippled or badly wounded. Those
who were only slightly injured they’d taken captive. The whispers
of what they’d done to them were far, far worse.
The bonfire—immense
and furious—crackled at the bottom of the slope, and gathered
around it were Westlanders: thousands of them, while smaller fires
dotted the landscape past the great conflagration where they were
encamped. Enéas saw a group of horses lashed together to one side
of the bonfire, a bit away from those seated around the
flames.
If he could not walk,
he could still ride.
The journey seemed to
take ages. The stars wheeled around the Sailing Star, the moon rose
to zenith and began to fall, the rippers continued their long
bloody feast. Exhausted, Enéas rested behind the shield of a pile
of logs. The horses nickered nearby; he could smell them and hear
their restless movements. The singing was louder now, a low-pitched
and dissonant melody, the words they were chanting strange and
unknown: a thousand voices, all singing together. The drone was
maddeningly loud; the music vibrated in his chest and seemed to
make the ground itself shake. He could see the Westlanders: skin
bronzed like those from Namarro, their bamboo armor set with iron
rings clashing as they sang and swayed. The massive logs of the
pyre collapsed, sending sparks roaring upward.
One of the
Westlanders at the front of the ranks rose to his feet and strode
forward, raising bare muscular arms. Like the others, he wore a
bamboo helmet adorned with bright, long feathers. A large, beaten
silver plate lay on his chest from a chain around his neck, adorned
with painted figures: that identified the man as one of the
Westlander offiziers. His singing faded as he proclaimed something
in a loud voice. Two more Westlander warriors came forward from the
darkness on the other side of the fire, dragging between them the
bloodied form of a man. The head lifted as they came into the
firelight, and even at his distance Enéas recognized A’Offizier
ca’Matin. He’d been stripped to the waist, and now they forced him
to his knees in front of the Westlander offizier. Enéas heard
ca’Matin praying to Cénzi, his face staring up at the sparks, the
stars, and the moon, anywhere but at the Westlander.
The Westlander spoke
to ca’Matin as he removed an odd device from a pouch on his belt.
Enéas squinted, trying to see it as the offizier held it up,
displaying it to the gathered troops. A short, curved barrel like
the horn of a bull gleamed the color of ivory, the device set in a
wooden handle. The offizier proffered the device to ca’Matin,
handle foremost. When ca’Matin took it, his hands shaking visibly,
his face uncertain, the warrior turned the ivory horn—Enéas heard a
distinct, metallic click—and stepped
back. He made a gesture as if he were reversing the device, then
touching the tip of the horn to his abdomen. Ca’Matin shook his
head, and the Westlander offizier sighed. His face seemed almost
sympathetic as he took the instrument and reversed it in ca’Matin’s
hands. He nodded encouragingly as he pushed ca’Matin’s hands back.
The horn touched ca’Matin’s stomach.
There was a flash
that illuminated the entire landscape as if by a lightning stroke,
and a booming thunderclap that drowned out Enéas’ involuntary cry
and sent the horses whinnying nervously and pulling against their
hobbles. Ca’Matin’s eyes and mouth went wide, though his expression
seemed strangely ecstatic to Enéas, as if in his final moment Cénzi
had touched him with glory.
Ca’Matin toppled, the
device falling from his hands. His stomach was a bloody cavity,
torn open as if a clawed fist had ripped him apart. Gore and blood
spattered the ground underneath him, as well as the legs of
Westlanders around him. The Westlander offizier raised his hands
again, as the singing began once more. With a strange reverence,
the two soldiers who had brought ca’Matin to the fire now wrapped
his body in a cloth dyed with bright colors set in geometric
patterns. They hurried the bundled corpse away into the
shadows.
Enéas forced himself
to move again, more desperately now. He didn’t know what sorcery
had been forced on ca’Matin, but he had to find a way back to
Munereo: to warn them. Help me do this, Cénzi.
. . . He began to crawl toward the horses. If he could pull
himself up on one and throw his injured leg over . . . They might
pursue him, but he knew this land as well as the Westlanders,
perhaps better, and night would cover him.
He was to the horses
now. These were captured Nessantican destriers, fitted with the
livery he knew well, and more importantly, still harnessed with
their bits and saddles. They were slower than the Westlanders’ own
steeds, but hardier. If he could get enough of a head start, the
Westlander horses might tire before they could catch
him.
With Cénzi’s help . . .
Enéas unhobbled the
legs of a large gray, keeping the animal between himself and the
fire. The destrier nickered, showing the whites of her eyes in the
moonlight, and Enéas whispered softly to her. “Shh . . . shh . . .
It’s all right . . . You’ll be fine . . .” He grasped at the straps
of the saddle and pulled himself upright, keeping weight off his
injured ankle. He took the reins in one hand, stroking the animal’s
neck. “Shh . . . Quiet, now . . .” He would have to balance himself
at least partially on his bad ankle to get a foot into the stirrup;
gently, he put the foot on the ground and slowly gave it weight,
biting his lower lip in his teeth at the pain. He could do it, for
a moment. That was all it would take. . . .
He lifted his good
foot and put it in the stirrup. A wave of knife cuts lanced from
his ankle up his leg as for a moment it held all his weight, and
the agony nearly made him faint. Desperately, he swung the bad leg
over the horse’s spine, almost crying out as the ankle slammed
against the animal’s thick body on the other side. But he was on
the destrier now, half-laying on the mount’s thick, muscular neck.
He flicked the reins, kicking with his good leg. “Slow . . .” he
told the gray. “Very slow now. Quietly . . .”
The gray tossed her
head, then began to walk away from the other horses, heading back
up the slope and away from the firelight and the encampment. The
singing of the Westlanders covered the sound of iron-clad hooves on
the ground. As soon as he was in the darkness again, as soon as he
could put the shoulder of one of these hills between himself and
the Westlanders, he could kick her into full gallop.
He was beginning to
dare to think it was possible.
He nearly didn’t
notice the shape that moved to his left, the fragment of darkness
that suddenly lifted and hurtled itself at him. He caught only a
glimpse of a grim face before the man struck him from the side and
bore him off the saddle. Light flared behind his eyes as he struck
the ground, and Enéas screamed with the pain of his tormented leg,
twisted underneath him. He heard the destrier galloping away,
riderless, and then the shadow of a Westlander warrior was standing
over him, his arm raised, and Enéas fell again into the
dark.