Yaril eeled up to Brann’s shoulder, breathed, “Jaril’s started for the far side. I’ll tell you when he’s ready. All you have to do is get close to that sentry, touch him before he can yell. Then we can take the rest.”
Brann started sweating. Abruptly deserted by rage and grief, no longer comfortably numb, she had to face the reality of those men whose life forces she was going to suck away. For all her eleven years her parents had taught her reverence for life. Slya’s strictures demanded awareness of responsibility for all life stopped; she remembered how desperately the malouch had clung to life and how easily she’d stripped that life away and how nauseated she felt about it later. But there was no going back.
Yaril wriggled close, warm and alive in her eerie way. “Look at his face, that sentry coming toward you,” she breathed.
When the guard came out of shadow, she saw the face of the man who’d taken Ruan by her heels and swung her twice against the Oak, thrown her away like a weed onto a compost heap.
“Be ready,” Yaril said, her words a thread of sound by Brann’s ear. “When this one has his back turned Jaril will bite the other.”
The sentry walked past her. “Go.” Urged on by the whispered word, Brann raced after the sentry, slapped her hand against the bare flesh of his arm before he had a chance to cry out, landed her other hand, began drawing the life from him, the fire hammering into her differing in quality and force from that she’d taken from the smaller, less deadly beasts. This was a predator among predators, a killer horn as much as bred, only slightly tamed by the discipline of the Temueng army. She read that in the flash as his life-force roared into her. A second later he fell dead. Breathing hard, struggling to quell heinausea, Brann looked for the other sentry. He was down also, silently dead. In their serpent forms the children distilled from their substance a venom that killed between one breath and the next, a minuscule drop in poison sacs yet enough for the death of a dozen men.
“It’s time,” Yaril whispered. “Don’t think, Bramlet, just do. It’s the only way to keep your people safe. These murderers have earned death, more than you know.” She touched Brann’s arm, then ran ahead of her to the lines of sleeping soldiers. A shimmer of pale light and she was a serpent crawling in the dust, in the dim starlight, dust-colored and nearly invisible except when her viper’s head rose above a sleeping man and darted down.
Brann nerved herself and followed. Man to man she went, setting her hands on those the children had not touched, taking their life into her, a burning unending river flooding her. She drank and drank until there were no more lives to take, trying as she stooped and touched to ignore the pleasure currents curling turgidly through her. It didn’t seem right. Her vengeance should be pure, untainted by anything but righteous wrath.
The children rose from serpent form and came to her, their hands melting into hers as they took and took from her until she could think coherently again and move without feeling bloated and unwieldy. She turned to look at the dead. Two rows of them, fifty men falling to snake and whatever it was she was now, with hardly a sound and no struggle at all, they might have been sleeping still. Silent herself she went to stand beside the Temueng pimush, the leader of these invaders, the one who’d given the orders for all they’d done-calmly asleep, untroubled by dreams or remorse. You know why, she thought, but how do I ask you, what do I ask you? He made a small spluttering sound, moved his hands. She jumped back into shadow, but he didn’t wake. Jaril tugged at her arm. She leaned down. “What?” she whispered.
“Take from him but not all, enough only to sap his will so we can move him away from them.” He nodded at the sleeping captives.
Brann looked down and was surprised to see her hands glowing in the hushed darkness before the dawn, rather like the round porcelain lamps her father made for nightlights. She knelt beside the pimush and took his head between her hands. He started to wake but faded into a daze as she pressed the slow drain. “Enough,” Jaril said, touched her hand. She sighed and sat back on her heels. “What now?”
“Into the trees. He’ll walk if we prod him.”
With the children’s help she led the pimush a short distance from the camp clearing and propped him against the high roots of an old oak. “That’s done. Where from here?”
“Give him back.”
“Huh?”
“You want him able to talk, don’t you? Reverse the flow. All you have to do is touch and will, Bramble, it’s as easy as breathing.”
“Which I think you don’t do.”
Jaril grinned at her. “Not like you, anyway.”
She rubbed a grubby forefinger by the corner of her mouth. The Temueng was tall, head and shoulders higher than most Arth Slya men, the flesh hard and tight on his bones. She shivered. “He looks like he could snap me in two without half trying. Shouldn’t we tie him or something?”
“No.” Jaril changed, flowed upon the Temueng’s chest, coil by coil, his broad triangular viper’s head raised and swaying, poison fangs displayed and ready. Yaril moved around until she was kneeling by the Temueng’s right arm, drawing over her the feral look of a hungry weasel. It sat comfortably on her delicate child’s face, made her more terrifying than a raging male three times her size. Brann looked from child to serpent, wiped her hand across her face, scraping away a new film of sweat. “Why don’t I feel safer?” she whispered, then giggled nervously.
The dawn breeze was beginning to stir, rustling among the leaves, here and there a bird’s sleepy twitter broke the hush. Yaril clicked her teeth. “Brann, you waiting for it to rain or something?”
Kneeling beside the Temueng, Brann put her hand on his brow and found that Jaril was right, it was easy; the fire crackling under her skin went out through her fingertips into him. His pale face darkened, flushing with renewed vigor. She jumped hastily to her feet and moved back a few paces.
He opened his eyes. The flush receded leaving him pale as he saw the serpent head rising over his; he stiffened and stopped breathing.
“Man.” Yaril said.
“What?” His narrow dark eyes flicked about, going to the viper swaying gently but without that extra tension that meant readiness to strike, to the feral child showing her pointed teeth, to Brann filled with moonfire. He didn’t move; he was afraid, but mastering his fear, calculating, seeking a way to slide out of this peril.
“We are Drinker of Souls and the Mountain’s Children,” Yaril cooed at him. She caught hold of his hand, the strength in her dainty fingers as frightening as the rest of her. She folded the hand into a fist and wrapped her hands about it, gazing at him with an impersonal hungry interest. “You killed our mortal cousins and took others away. You bloodied and befouled our mother. Why?” Her high light voice was calm, conversational. “Answer me, man.” She tightened her hands about his fist, watched him struggle to keep still, sweat popping thick on his long narrow face. “Why?” She eased her grip. “Why?”
“It was something to do,” he said when he could speak again. “To pass the time.”
Yaril gestured at the viper and it changed to a giant worm with daintily feathered wings little larger than a man’s hand flirting on either side of an angular dragon’s head. Forked tongue flicking, a whiffing and fluttering of the opalescent feathers, the great worm grew heavier and heavier on the Temueng’s chest, the coils spilling off him onto the roots of the oak. As the pimush stared, mouth clamped shut but eyes wide with the fear he couldn’t deny, smoking oily liquid ran down one of the dragon’s dagger fangs, gathered at the tip, then dripped off onto his chest. The venom burned through his shirt and into his flesh. His body jerked and spasmed as much as it could, one hand held prisoned by Yaril in a grip he had no chance of breaking, legs and lower body pinned by the punishing weight of the worm.
Yaril passed her hand across the bubbling liquid, drew it into herself. The pain subsided, the man lay still again. “Why?” she said. “We sent the tribute to Grannsha every year without fail, the compact between Arth Slya and the Kumaliyn has never been broken though a thousand years have passed since it was made. Why did you come to Arth Slya?”