How many? thought Tori, holding his own small command in check with a raised hand. Fifty thousand? More? Double the Host, at least.
But no one was attacking from the east, the direction from whence they had come. The vacancy there drew the troops like a cool draft in that scorching cauldron. Another trap, or were they being invited to retreat? Genjar was shouting, gesticulating. Slowly, reluctantly, his forces withdrew eastward, taking their wounded and dead with them. He raised his glance to the west and for a moment locked eyes with Tori up on the basin’s rim.
Yes, here we are, Tori thought. Remember us?
But Genjar turned away and his gestures grew more frantic. Now he was pushing through the Host, trailed by his command staff, in flight, drawing the others reluctantly after him. They poured out of the cauldron, the rear rank guarding against a pursuit that did not follow.
Tori sighed. “We’re on our own now,” he said to his followers.
Duke Far gave him a wide-eyed stare, then bolted in pursuit of the retreating forces. His men threw down their weapons with a clatter and ran after him, unimpeded.
Tori stood aside for another moment, but no one else followed, nor were they hindered on the way back to the vanguard. It felt like reentering a dark, breathless room and closing the door behind them. Kneeling beside Harn, Tori brushed the bloody hair off the Kendar’s forehead. Someone had bound up the loose flap of skin with a strip of cloth. Harn twitched and began the disconcerting snore of the deeply concussed.
“What now?” Tori asked him, expecting no answer, receiving none.
“Blackie. Look.”
Dark-clad figures had silently emerged from around the hollow and on top of the rocks that surrounded it, more and more of them, ranks deep. It seemed as if the entire Karnid horde had followed them back, but it neither charged nor made any sound.
“I said that we would meet again.”
Tori suppressed a start at that deep, rich voice, speaking so close to him, too softly for most to hear. He squinted up into the setting sun, at a figure standing silhouetted in fire on a rock behind him.
“Shall I offer you a bargain, Grayling’s son? Of these all, only you interest me. Your life for theirs.”
Rowan caught his sleeve. “Don’t listen to him, Blackie. He’s lying. We’ll take our chances.”
Tori indicated the silent horde surrounding them. “What chance is this?”
His heart was in his throat, threatening to choke him. Could he really walk away from his friends, into enemy hands? What would they do to him? Then again, what did it matter if he could buy his followers’ freedom? He swallowed.
“Your word on it, Prophet?”
The other nodded solemnly. “My word on it.”
Karnids advanced and seized his arms.
“On second thought,” said the Prophet, “take a quarter of them prisoner. Kill the rest.”
Tori twisted in his captors’ grip, aghast. “You swore!”
“You may also remember that I said honor was a failed concept.”
Karnids swarmed into the cauldron, no longer silent. The Kencyr shouted back their defiance, each in the battle cry of his house—the Brandans’ deep, sure note, the Edirrs’ jeering shriek, the Cainerons’ bellow, the Daniors’ howl, the Jarans’ defiant cry in High Kens: “The shadows are burning!” and on and on, until the uproar of battle swallowed them.
Tori used water-flowing to free himself. He started back into the fight, but hands gripped him again. Then the back of his skull seemed to explode and he fell into darkness.
This is just a bad dream, he told himself, over and over. Wake up wake up wake up . . .
His chafed wrists were chained to the wall, pinioned too low for him to stand upright, so he sat with his numb arms raised. Water trickled down his sleeves and puddled under his buttocks. His clothes rotted. Sometimes the room seemed cavernous, sometimes as small as a closet, and it stank like spoiled meat.
Voices echoed in the corridor outside. Some called back and forth to each other in Kens: words of encouragement, words of despair. Some swore, others cried. Not long ago, black-robed Karnids had passed carrying an incandescent branding iron.
“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . .” had come their murmur down the hall. “Then we must convince you, for your own good.”
With that, he had heard Rowan scream.
. . . the dead, ripe and rotting in piles in that cauldron under the scorching sun—no, don’t think of them. It does no good, no good . . .
Somewhere, someone breathed heavily, almost in a snore. Harn? The rasping noise stopped and Tori held his own breath.
Breathe, Harn, breathe! Oh Trinity, don’t be dead . . .
The sound started up again. And stopped. And started, in an echo of his own anxious breath.
They were coming for him now as they had day after day, week after week, month after year. Sandaled feet shuffled on the floor. Hooded figures entered the room and stood in a crescent facing him, themselves faceless.
“Do you recant your belief in your false, triune god?” asked the leader, soft-voiced. After so many days of exhortation, he sounded almost bored.
“. . . recant, recant, recant . . .” murmured his followers.
“Do you profess the Prophet of the Shadows to be your true lord and master?”
“. . . profess, profess, profess . . .”
He could say yes. He could lie. But that would truly make him one of them.
What choice had his own Three-Faced God given him in such matters? Where was that god now, for him, for any of them?
Honor is a failed concept.
No. Whatever his god or his father had done to him, there was a core that remained his alone, and its name was Honor.
“Then we must convince you,” came the relentless response, “for your own good.”
The semicircle opened. Two carried a small furnace, out of which others lifted gloves of red-hot wire. They advanced on him, carrying them.
Wake up wake up wake up . . .
“Oh god, my hands!”
His own voice woke him, crying out in a cold tower room. Yce nudged under his arm and licked his face to reassure him, but still he held up his hands with their aching lacework of scars.
“My hands, my hands . . .”
XIV
Winter Solstice
The winter solstice occurred five days later. The Kencyrath didn’t pay much attention to it, trusting rather to its own imposed dates such as Midwinter, but Kothifir seethed as it prepared for the year’s longest night and the turn toward spring.
Jame took a lift cage Overcliff close to midnight when the festivities were due to start. It was very dark with an overcast sky and no moon. Lightning flickered behind the mountains over the Wastes, answered by the fizz and pop of fireworks set off at random from the Overcliff.
Once there, she wandered about the main avenue, munching on a paper cone full of grilled garlic snails and observing the scurry of townsfolk. Many wore elaborate costumes and masks reminiscent of the Old Pantheon gods whom she had seen Undercliff on the summer solstice. A few had on giant heads that required support or waved oversized hands that tried to swat the children who swarmed around them, jeering. Others, all but naked, were painted red or blue or green, touched here and there with luminous dust from the caves below. Imps, she thought, most of them guild apprentices and journeymen. Did that mean that their masters were under those more elaborate costumes? Firelight washed over all, regardless of their rank, from torches and bonfires, and the windows and balconies above were full of spectators, who threw down trinkets to encourage the capering hoard below.