‘Please accept this offering and smile upon us, great Queen! Protect us. Turn aside your Avenger.’
The priest drew a curved blade and rested a hand upon the goat’s side.
Pon-lor jerked then, muffling a cry, as the blade flashed and sank into the chest of the boy.
Toru leaped up drawing his sword at once. ‘What?’ he demanded, bleary, half-awake.
Pon-lor could not take his eyes from the horrifying tableau. He swallowed the acid in his throat and managed to answer, his voice thick, ‘Nothing. A shadow. Just a shadow.’
Toru grunted, a touch irritated, and lay down once more.
The boy had clasped the priest’s wrist. His expression was one of startled surprise and hurt. The priest now hugged the child and, weeping silently, gently lowered him to the ground.
The eldest youth present, a girl, held out a bowl to the priest. The children all gathered round, eager, their lean faces full of hunger.
Pon-lor found himself slowly rising, a formless revulsion choking him, backing away. His gorge rose in his throat, his heart clenched so tight it could not beat, yet he could not pull his gaze away. Ancient Demon-King forgive them … not even you …
To his relief, the priest yanked the blade free to slash the goat’s throat. The girl held the bowl to the neck while blood pumped and jetted, darkening her hands. The children pressed close, cupping their hands and hungrily licking. Meanwhile, the corpse of the boy lay unremarked as if forgotten.
Pon-lor forced his eyes aside and wiped a cold wetness from his cheeks.
Chopping sounded and Pon-lor glanced back to see the priest using a stone hatchet to cut the goat’s head free. This he set among the stones exactly where a bleached fleshless skull now rested. The youths picked up the goat carcass and hurried off with it. The priest reverently gathered up the boy. Turning, he gave one last bow to the shrine, and backed away into a screen of shimmering trees that no longer existed, a sort of orchard, well tended and maintained.
Pon-lor watched the phantoms slip away then sat without moving, hugging himself, hands inside his robes for warmth. Never, even in the most rabid denunciations of the Queen of Monsters, was there any hint of human sacrifice. Could his forebears have been so ignorant of the degenerate practices hidden away here within this green abyss? Yet the priest had been weeping, a man close to breaking. All of them sick and starving. Histories told of plague sweeping though the jungles generations ago. Could it have been this appalling? Blind desperation. He had witnessed a people driven to the edge and it felt as if a hot knife had carved out his heart.
He hugged himself tighter and leaned forward to rest his sweaty brow against his knees.
The next thing he knew stirrings from behind woke him and he turned to see Toru searching among their meagre supplies. He cleared his throat. ‘Have we anything?’
‘Little enough,’ the man grunted. He lowered a pouch. ‘Magister, for a time I kept an eye on you. You … saw something in the night?’
Pon-lor struggled to rise on legs numb and stiff. ‘A tragedy, Toru. I was allowed — or cursed with — a vision of tragedy.’
The guard said nothing, merely handed over a few scraps of dried meat and a knot of stale rice wrapped in leaves. After this brief meal, Pon-lor taking tiny bites and chewing as long as possible, they took sips from the one remaining skin of water and resumed their march.
Toru led. He returned to the animal path. It was so well-trodden that it curved along as naked red-tinted dirt weaving between the thick hard-barked roots. Yet they met no animals. Pon-lor imagined their clumsy tramping must be driving them away.
Towards midmorning, the unseen sun’s heat driving straight down upon their heads, Toru, a good few paces ahead, disappeared amid a great crashing of dry branches followed by a gasped cry of agony. Pon-lor charged forward to find a shallow pit. Toru had managed to turn slightly as he fell and he lay on sharpened stakes impaled through his side along his torso and legs. Pon-lor threw himself flat and reached out to the man. ‘Take my hand!’
The guard struggled to speak but only coughed up a great gout of blood that exploded across his face and chest. He pointed, his lips working. A scuff sounded next to Pon-lor and something cracked on his skull. Flashes of light exploded in his vision and all went to dark.
*
Stinging awoke him. Sharp stinging impacts across his face. He opened his eyes just in time to see a woman slap him once more. He sat propped up against a tree, his hands tied behind his back, a gag across his mouth. The woman who peered down at him with open hate and a touch of fear was the ugliest he had ever seen. Pox scars from a savage encounter with that illness gouged her cheeks and brow, and a cleft lip, a harelip, pulled her mouth into a permanent open twist. That she was quite young only made the disfigurements all the more painful to see. Straightening, she kicked him in the crotch, doubling him over, hardly able to breathe.
‘He’s awake!’ she yelled.
Pon-lor merely thanked the gods he hadn’t vomited from the pain. He would have asphyxiated behind the gag. Blinking the tears from his eyes he saw someone new crouched on his haunches beside him. Looking up, his eyes met the grinning familiar features of their erstwhile guide, Jak.
The youth was squatting with his hands hanging loose before his knees. He cocked his head, making a show of looking Pon-lor up and down. ‘You don’t look so good right now, mister rich pretty brat. You know, you should be more careful wandering around the woods when you got no idea what you’re doing.’
He leaned forward to push a stiffened finger into Pon-lor’s side. The mage yelled behind his gag.
‘Yeah. I knew Loor tagged you good there. Damned Thaumaturgs. What in the Abyss does it take to kill you?’
Another youth came shambling up, skinny and awkward. This one wore oversized blood-spattered armour of banded hauberk, helm, and greaves that Pon-lor recognized: Toru’s. ‘We should just kill ’im,’ he whined. ‘They’re dangerous-’
‘Course he’s dangerous,’ Jak sneered. ‘He’d be worthless otherwise, wouldn’t he? Just like you,’ and he slapped the youth’s side. Unnoticed by the crouching Jak, anger suffused the lad’s narrow face but was quickly hidden behind a morose dejection. The lad shuffled away. ‘Find the damned witch’s trail, Thet!’ Jak shouted after him.
Pon-lor relaxed his tight shoulders, unclenched his fisted hands and eased back against the trunk. He was suddenly glad he’d delayed unleashing his own outrage against these ragtag castoffs — for that was what he recognized them as: squatters, runaways, or outright criminal exiles from the eastern villages. So far he’d counted eleven in the group.
Then it struck him and he laughed as loud as he could behind the lashings of cloth tied across his mouth. Of course! Too rich! Oh, so very rich!
Jak rose, uneasy. ‘What’s so funny?’
Pon-lor snorted. Kenjak Ashevajak — the Bandit Lord! Ha!
‘What!’ Jak demanded, kicking him.
‘Hanthet Hord,’ Pon-lor mouthed behind his gag. And he laughed anew, more at himself than at this skinny young man quivering in rage before him.
Jak’s face darkened as understanding came and he lashed out again, connecting with the side of Pon-lor’s head and sending him down. Po-lor, however, continued to laugh even with his face pressed into the dirt. ‘Watch him, Myint,’ the youth snarled and marched off.
Hands none too gently yanked Pon-lor upright. The woman regarded him closely. This near, her scarred battleground face was even more of a horror. Could have had that cured at the capital, Pon-lor thought. Not something to mention, though. Her sharp deep eyes studied him and he saw a keen intelligence behind them. Dangerous, this one.