climbing up after him and several slaves directing him, Rialus scaled their frekete’s back. Slaves pushed him into position, shoving his limbs through straps, buckling him down. Before he knew it he was spread-eagled against the creature’s back, immobile. Devoth took up a position just behind him, pressing against him in a more intimate position than Rialus had ever experienced with a man. Rialus set his cheek against the frekete’s warm skin, closed his eyes, and tried to think of…
The frekete bellowed. Rialus felt the vibrations through his cheek and chest and thighs, a sound so complete it became everything for a few moments. As it faded, the creature shifted from leg to leg. The muscles in its back quivered, and then it leaped. Rialus’s internal organs tried to slip out of him and stay earthbound. They caught down around his groin and went hurdling into the air with the rest of him.
For a few seconds it seemed they would just rise indefinitely with the power of that first leap, but then the momentum slowed. They reached a zenith and the mighty wings flared. They flew, slanting away with a speed that this time shoved Rialus’s insides up against one side of his rib cage. Devoth howled in pleasure; the frekete answered; Rialus clung, eyes still shut, miserable.
For a time the frekete pounded its wings vigorously. The beasts called to one another, and the riders on them shouted as if to top them. Soon they developed a slow rhythm, one wingbeat followed by a long pause before the next. Judging by the way wind ripped at him and howled in his ears, they must have been moving at great speed. Rialus could not know for sure, though. He kept his hood fastened tight and endured the passing hours and constant motion as best he could.
The expedition took nearly a week. They flew east along the ragged, ice-choked coast, camping on the boulder-strewn beach with a wall of stone pressing them toward the sea. Massive rivers of ice choked the few gaps in the mountains. Fissured. Groaning and cracking as if alive. Impenetrable. Beautiful in a way that confounded Rialus. The ice glistened blue, clear as glass in some places, touched with swirls of red in others. Certain formations he would have thought sculpted by artists, save the scale was too massive. It was a work out of proportion for human contemplation, as was his view of it on the occasions he looked down from thousands of feet in the air.
For a few days Rialus felt a bubbling of hope and fear in his chest. He knew that farther south the mountains jutted right out into the sea. No rolling army could pass there. Perhaps there was no route. Perhaps they would have to turn back and Calrach would lose his head and Rialus would… well, he would spend the rest of his days in Ushen Brae.
It was a short-lived notion. Flying on south, they found the gap in the stone barricade, the very one that Calrach insisted existed. No river of ice flowed in this one. Perhaps it once had, but now it just lay before them, the long tongue of a peaceful valley. They turned inland, scouting a route through the mountains and eventually out onto the Ice Fields. The Auldek became more and more pleased with everything they observed. The route through the mountains was navigable. The ice of the fields was solid enough for all their structures and beasts to roll over. Everything was as Calrach had said. Because of it, his stature among the small group grew in direct proportion to the degree to which Rialus’s hopes shriveled.
Their destination before returning to the war column was Tavirith, the northernmost trading outpost along the Candovian coast. Rialus himself had named the place a few days before they flew out. He had been there only once while governor of the Mein satrapy. He had never thought he would return.
When Bitten touched down, Rialus did not really believe they had made it that far. They had been flying long enough that he had lost track of time and distance, but at some level he could not believe these arctic wastes would ever end. He did not so much feel as if they were hiking toward one world as he felt they were marching out of the world entirely, into endless nothing.
Devoth dismounted before him, and was off conferring with the other Auldek by the time Rialus touched his feet to the ice-crusted stones of the windswept beach. He moved away from Bitten, not trusting the beast without Devoth beside him. He found himself too close to one of the other hulking freketes, so he moved forward and a little to the side of where the Auldek stood conferring. He tried to make sense of the low, dull light, but he could not even say what time of day it was. They could be anyplace. Anyplace at all in this forsaken barrenness.
He had just begun to turn and look toward the north when something caught his eye. Shapes huddled in the shadow of the dunes to the south. A cluster of geometry just ordered enough to stand out. As he stared, the details became clearer and clearer. A village. There a second cluster of houses. What looked like large stones on the shore were the hulls of beached boats, and that clutter of sticks was actually an old pier. Smoke rose from several chimneys. The moment he spotted the plumes he smelled them as well. Embedded in the side of one building was a square of glowing yellow light. He had been inside that building. He had looked out of that very window.
“Is this it?” Howlk asked. “Tavirith?”
The Auldek had gathered to either side of him, studying the same view he was studying. Rialus yanked his eyes away, as if he could deny that he had seen anything. He did not want to answer. And yet, there it was, a piece of the Known World again.
“Rialus, tell us,” Sabeer said. “Is that Tavirith?”
He only meant to acknowledge it to himself, but the word escaped him. “Yes.”
“Yeesss!” Howlk hissed. “Yeesss! I knew it. I can smell Acacians.”
The people of Tavirith were hardly Acacians-more a mix of ancestral Candovians, combined with some of the Scav who were their own race, perhaps a few of Meinish stock and a motley collection of others, misfits who had fled the real world and washed up here.
The Auldek shouted something at the freketes, and then pointed toward the village. The creatures followed the gestures. They glanced at one another as if coming to their own agreement on the order, and then rose one by one into the air. They flew for the village. Devoth had never looked happier. His eyes followed them with childish amazement, as if he somehow were not the architect of all this but just a witness. Then he marched after them without a word of direction to Rialus. As he strode, he reached around and yanked free the long sword strapped to his back. The other Auldek also freed their various weapons.
Rialus almost stayed where he was, an act of protest against whatever was about to happen. But as the Auldek got farther away, the howling emptiness at his back shifted closer. His feet moved of their own accord. He stumbled forward. The freketes circled above the village. A few of them touched down. Several alighted on the structures’ roofs. The Auldek lumbered forward, getting faster. Rialus himself began to run. On the one hand he hated being pulled forward. On the other he wanted to shout an alarm, to somehow alert the villagers to the enemy upon them and to explain that he was not one of them. He did not get to do any of this. Instead, he was in place to watch what followed.
One of the freketes on a roof leaped into the air and, holding its wings angled up vertically, slammed down on the structure. The houses, Rialus knew, were built around a framework of pinewood and whalebone, layered with a latticework of beams and skins and covered with turf. The house being attacked was solid enough that the frekete needed to leap several times before it punched through. It half disappeared inside. Only its wings protruded as the rest of its body twisted and slashed around inside.
The others went wild. One shattered another roof. Another punched in a door and shoved an arm in. The first to break through climbed out of the wreckage, a flailing body clenched in its jaws. When its upper body was clear of the rooftop, it grabbed the person in one hand and hurled him out toward the onrushing Auldek. The man screamed as he tumbled through the air and crashed down. Howlk slammed his spear into the man’s abdomen, pinning him to the ground for the moment it took before he strode over him, yanking the weapon out as he did so.
The Auldek reached the village as the inhabitants began to emerge. A man burst through a door and ran roaring into the open. He carried an ax in one hand, raised above his head not so much in an attack as in a gesture of warning. Rialus could tell it was not a war ax. It was one for chipping away ice. Devoth, who was standing directly in the man’s path, spun to one side. As the man passed him, he swung his sword around, angled it up, and severed the man’s arm at the elbow. It and the ax looped away. The man ran forward a few strides, waving his stump as if it still held the ax. Devoth let him turn, spraying blood in a circle around him. He let him understand a portion of what was happening, then he sliced his legs out from under him.
Other men followed, to variations of the same fate. Women and children died the same way. The villagers fought as best they could, or they begged for mercy. The Auldek were like cats playing with baby mice. When the villagers stood still, the Auldek smiled and laughed and said incomprehensible things to them. When they dropped to their knees or ran or lashed out, the Auldek slashed them to pieces. Sabeer was just as gleeful as Devoth or Howlk. Menteus Nemre worked his own bloody havoc. He dove into houses and chased out the inhabitants. He shoved them savagely toward waiting Auldek, slicing to pieces any who ran in a whirling dance of butchery, his face
