He straightened, got his balance on his bent knees, turned, and looked back toward the group.
Menteus Nemre watched him. The Lvin warrior sat outside the carnivore’s circle, not participating in the banquet but not perturbed by it. He stared at Rialus. No expression that Rialus could read on his thick, tattooed-white features. He stared, but he communicated nothing at all through the stare. And then he lifted his gaze over Rialus’s shoulder.
“I see you, leagueman,” a voice beside his head whispered. Rialus tried to spin, but a body pressed against his back and an arm clenched him immobile. “You think us wretched,” Devoth said, speaking close to his ear. “You think us animals. We make you sick. Isn’t that so, Rialus leagueman?” Devoth squeezed him, but did not wait for an answer. “This is no custom of ours. It was an abomination. A violation of our long laws. You understand? Numrek were banished for eating quota. We took away their totem and sent them into exile. We thought them just as wretched as you think us now. But that was before they came to your lands and returned to us with Allek, a child to prove they were fertile again. Everything is different now. This is why.”
Devoth’s other hand swung into view, a piece of human flesh squeezed in his fist. Blood seeped around his fingers and dripped to the ground. “Coming here, killing your people, eating this meat: these things will give us full lives again. You cannot blame us for wanting that. Are you any different? Don’t you want things, leagueman? Of course you do. If I said to you, ‘Here, eat this. Just one bite and you will have what you most want to have.’ ” He held the flesh close to Rialus’s face, near enough that he could smell the wet rawness of it. “Take a bite, and you can go home. Take a bite and you can have your woman beside you. You can fly in the air to your queen and tell her the secrets of how to defeat us. Take a bite, and I will drop dead just here. I’ll soil myself and shake with fear and collapse in pain and die, right here. And you would be a hero. What would you do if a bite of this meat offered you that?”
Rialus said, “You don’t… you don’t know that this will cure you.”
“It’s what the Numrek did. True, they were starving when they did so, but who is to say that the flesh of the fertile didn’t help them? Who is to say? Can you say? No. So if this deed will bring us what we most want… Well, what would you do? You would eat, that’s what. Tell me if I lie.”
Rialus said nothing.
“That’s right, my leagueman. That’s right. You would eat. I know you would.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aliver has returned. Aliver has returned. Aliver has…
Since leaving Bocoum, Kelis kept forming the sentence in his mind, making it a chant. The three words made him light-headed with joy. If it was true, it was wonderful beyond anything he had ever dreamed possible. Aliver could pick up where he left off. He could take the crown from Corinn and shape the world back toward what he had always dreamed. Kelis could love him again in life, not just mourn him as a memory. He would deliver Shen, and Aliver would know that Kelis had cared for her from the moment he knew she lived. Even the Santoth would bow to him, a king who has walked the afterdeath and returned to the living.
But as he drew near the hiding place at which he had left the others, a knot of doubt like an enormous knuckle root took shape low in his abdomen. He paused atop a hillock not far from the ravine in which the others camped. Before him, the plains stretched under the dark of the night. Behind him, a copse of trees in whose star shadows he hesitated, trying to shape his thoughts and decide what to say or not when questioned. Some small creature moved in the trees, a ground bird, perhaps, stirring the leaves. He ignored it. He had been all euphoria at first, yet now he could not help but wonder why Corinn brought her brother back. She might love him in her crooked way, but she would never let go of power. What did she…
When he realized what the sound in the trees had become, it was too late. The man hit him at a run, smashing into his side with his shoulder. The attacker was fast. As they fell, he jabbed his fist repeatedly into Kelis’s abdomen. By the time Kelis hit the ground, scraping across the dirt with the other man’s weight on him, the man had Kelis knotted within the hard limbs of his body. They came to rest, panting, with the attacker’s chin pressed like a weapon against Kelis’s temple, pinning his head to the ground. All this in a few seconds.
“Fool!” another man said. He appeared suddenly, out of breath. “We could have followed him to her!”
“Shut up!” the first hissed. His chin ground Kelis’s skin as he spoke. “Gag him.”
The other punched Kelis in the jaw several times and then jammed a wad of cloth in. He secured it with a leather strap that tied behind Kelis’s head. The first man changed position. He squirmed across Kelis’s back, as intimate as a lover, except that his movements were all sharp pressure and corded muscle. For a moment Kelis felt one of his wrists slip free of the man’s pincer grip. He slipped his hand around and tried to get purchase on the ground with it.
The man pressed the flat of a knife to Kelis’s throat. The back-curved point cut into the skin to touch his lower jawbone. “No,” the man whispered. “Don’t do that.” The man pulled Kelis up to his knees, the knife at his neck the whole time. “Bind him.”
The second man did so. Once Kelis’s hands were tied, the two attackers changed positions. The second man slipped his own dagger into place, clamping his other hand on Kelis’s shoulder and driving one bony knee down on his calf. Kelis fought not to wince at the pain.
“Kelis of Umae, I’m assuming,” the first man said. He stood tall in the starlight, his black skin silvered in sharp highlights. His teeth flashed when he smiled. Kelis wanted to make out his features, but his vision blurred, his eyes clogged with dirt and tears. “I am not impressed. Was such an important one really put in your hands? Oh, but you can’t answer, can you?”
“We should have followed him,” the second said.
“They’re near. I could see it in the way he was moving-a daydreamer wasting time. That’s why I took him down. We won’t have to deal with him when we grab her. One less.”
“No!” Kelis screamed into his stuffed mouth. He raised his bound hands before him, a begging gesture.
“What?” the first man said. “Are you not Kelis of Umae? Do you not protect a girl called Shen? This may all be a mistake, yes? Just tell us so if it is.”
There was a trick in the question, Kelis knew. He tried to figure it out, but the possibilities of it seemed as knotted as the wrestling moves that had trapped him.
“Tell us that the girl is not hidden down in the ravine just there.”
Kelis writhed as much as he dared, gesturing with his eyes, touching his fingertips to the gag. Let me talk, he tried to say. Let me talk! He did not know what he would say, but he needed to try.
The man spat in his face. “Ioma said I was not to kill you, but I piss on that. You’ve kept me waiting here too long. This story is yours no longer. Bleed him for the jackals.” The man grinned.
He was still doing so the moment his teeth exploded from his mouth. They flew to the side in a wet spray, propelled by a black shaft that shot through his cheek and out of sight in an instant. The man dropped in a howl of pain, falling away down the slope of the hillock.
Kelis planted his two hands on the dirt and bucked up against the man who held him down. Getting his feet under him, he used the bunched strength of his bent legs and smashed his backside into the man’s torso. He collapsed his upper body into a roll as he did so. The man’s feet went flailing into the air, and he fell headfirst over Kelis to the ground. Kelis rolled, got onto his two hands, and popped up again. He came back on the man before he could rise. He shot out a low, thrusting kick. It caught the man’s head against his heel and snapped it to the side. Solid contact, but the man scrambled up, slashing the air between them with his knife. Kelis circled away, trying hard not to trip. His hands were still bound. Going down again could be the end of him.