Kelis wished he could feel some of that himself, but he had only to catch sight of a Santoth to feel his insides knot with worry. He could not imagine them passing from boat to jovial boat. Nor was that what they intended.
The sound, at first, was like the start of some holy man’s prayer to the Giver. Kelis heard it but did not turn his head immediately. It was not until a second and then third and then more voices merged with the first that he snapped around. He was stunned twice by what he saw.
The Santoth were singing. They had gathered in one group, standing as still as a choir, and each of them intoned the same song, if song it could be called. It was a mixture of foreign words and sounds that were like notes. These had an almost physical presence. The air around them rippled with it. It was transfixing, but there was no beauty in it. There was a garbled under-tune, something that gurgled and squirmed within the music. An evil thing like a snake slithering quicksilver fast through and around and over the notes.
The Santoth looked different. Their robes were not the colorless garments they had been. Now they bloomed with a rich orange, like dye seeping into the fabric even as he watched. For the first time Kelis could see their faces. The roiling emptiness that had obscured their features was all but gone. Instead, he saw them for the men they were, with cavernous cheeks and eyes that seemed absurdly bulbous. Ancient and weathered, their skin had been burned by the Talayan sun, brutally creviced and parched as desert soil, stretched over the bones beneath. They looked every bit their great age. Like dead things standing and walking… and singing.
Kelis jumped from the crates and waded through a pen full of pigs to where Leeka stood staring openmouthed at the sorcerers. “Leeka, what are they saying?”
The old warrior was still for a long moment, staring at one of the figures in particular. Instead of answering, he approached the sorcerer. “Nualo? Aged one, what work is this? What do you-”
The Santoth swept his hand in the man’s direction, his fingers flicking whiplike. Leeka staggered. Nualo’s mouth still contoured around the song, but anger burned in the sorcerer’s eyes. He flicked his fingers again, and Leeka flew back, lifting into the air so that only his toes dragged on the deck. A pen railing clipped his ankles and he spilled over on the backs of several startled pigs. He was up from beneath the squealing swine a moment later, his face a carved exaggeration of fear.
Then the barge began to move. It jerked forward once, throwing people off balance and sending panic through the pigs. And then it began a more steady progress. In seconds the linked barges collided with the nearest vessels. A skiff overturned, tossing the youths onboard into the water, and was promptly run over by the barge itself. The barge pressed the shell down and smashed into the side of a larger ship beyond it. This one leaned toward them as though the masts would crash down atop the Santoth, but it only came so far before stopping abruptly, as if colliding with an invisible barrier. The ship slid to one side and around the barge, which carried on with increasing speed.
Kelis heard Naamen exclaim, half hopefully, that the Santoth were clearing a way for them. It was true. They were heading toward Acacia. But this was all wrong. Kelis knew it without doubt. Whatever the Santoth intended had evil slithering within it. They were wrong, and Kelis could not let them continue. He had made an enormous mistake in letting them come this far. Any doubt he had about it was gone now. He struggled toward them, his eyes on the one Leeka had named Nualo.
“Stop!” he said. “You must stop!”
Nualo did not answer. Closer to him now, Kelis could see that his skin still crawled with tremors and crevasses, but the face they distorted was emerging. The jagged peaks of his hairline, the strong hook of his nose, eyes the color of an overcast winter sky: his features were that of one man, flesh and bone, born of a woman. For the first time to Kelis’s eyes one of the Santoth looked like a human, not a phantom in the guise of a man.
“Stop!” Kelis roared. He realized he had his spear in hand. Though he did not remember snatching it up, he held it now in his right hand, gripped to throw.
Nualo’s gray eyes found him. His mouth kept at the song, in chaotic time with the others, but he spoke directly into Kelis’s mind. Soundlessly, he said, You are nothing. You know nothing. You will learn.
“I will not let you pass.”
The girl released us, Nualo thought-spoke. You already have let us pass.
Kelis raised his spear, balanced it on his strong dark fingers. The Santoth were flesh now. He could pierce them. They always had been, but now he knew it.
We are again. We are again, and the world is ours again!
The sorcerer extended one arm toward Kelis and squeezed his hand into a fist, saying something different from the others for just a moment. The spear in Kelis’s hand went suddenly molten. Not hot, but as soft as melting wax. The shaft and point drooped as if they would drip to the deck, then instead they curved back in time with the twisting motion of Nualo’s fist. Kelis cried out and tried to release the spear, but it would not come loose. The shaft wrapped around and around his hand until it and his wrist were encased in ribbons of soft metal. Then it went hard, forming a cage of iron.
Trouble me no more, Nualo told him. With that, his attention moved away. He rejoined the others fully, Kelis forgotten.
Kelis stared at his hand, expecting pain but feeling none. It felt different, trapped, immobile, but not in any way he had experienced before. He knew that the song continued. He had not stopped anything. He felt the impact of the barge against other vessels, grinding through or over them. People cried out, some in anger and some in fear and many in confusion. Benabe and Naamen reached him. Naamen pulled him back while Benabe tried to get her fingers under the metal gauntlet. She couldn’t. There was no separation between it and his flesh. As she tugged and scratched, Kelis could feel her fingernails through the metal. Not on it, but through it. It was part of him now. In that instant he knew that it forever would be.
Shen started toward the Santoth, who had carried on with their song as if nothing else mattered to them. Kelis grabbed her with his unchanged hand. He was surprised at how steady his voice was. “No, don’t. They are not your friends anymore. You can see that, can’t you?”
He expected the girl to protest, but she did not. She stayed silent. Her face, for the first time, was stricken with doubt. Kelis knew from it that she had heard what Nualo thought to him. It was written there in the skin around her eyes and in the slight tremble of her lower lip. His heart rushed out to her. He searched for the words to convince her that whatever was happening was not her fault.
The barge smashed against the bow of the whaling ship. The jolt sent them all reeling. The bow of the whaler rose above them as the ship’s stern jammed against something else. It crashed off to one side of the barge, just beside the Santoth, crushing a pen of pigs and grinding them across the deck in squealing confusion.
Kelis yelled for them to move. They rushed toward the rear of the barge. It picked up speed as they stumbled over the railings and shoved through the increasingly frantic swine. Kelis managed to swing Shen onto his back. She clung there as he kicked savagely at pigs, fearing they would bite. One tried to, and he smashed it across the snout with his metal-clad hand. Kelis clustered with several others at the rear. They hunkered down and watched as the barge crashed its way forward, propelled by sounds mightier than any wind.
The chaos of the smashed and overturned boats and the screaming people was so overwhelming that Kelis did not see Acacia until they were upon it. Their barge splintered through the last few vessels, tightly packed and firmly secured to the docks of the main harbor. When they could go no farther because of the sheer bulk of compressed debris and wood and iron, the Santoth ended the song. It dropped into nothingness instantly. The next moment Kelis realized he had already forgotten what it sounded like. He would never be able to describe it. It had been horrible, but he would not be able to explain how in any detail.
“Look,” Naamen said. “They’re going.”
Kelis shot to his feet. “Come with me,” he said to Naamen. To Benabe and Shen he added, “Stay here. Right here. Do not move until one of us comes back. Agreed?”
Benabe nodded. Shen, for her part, stayed curled in a ball trapped within her mother’s arms.
Leeka was already at the barge’s railing when Kelis and Naamen joined him. For a moment they all watched the backs of the receding sorcerers. The Santoth had already cleared most of the packed ships and debris. They climbed over the ships. In some places they scrabbled over obstructions like excited children. In others they leaped gaps as if finding purchase on the air itself. Kelis still had no idea what their intention was, but there was no doubting the eager fervor with which they pursued it.
The sorcerers leaped onto the dock and began shoving their way furiously into the crowd. The people were too closely packed to flee, but they drew back before the figures as best they could. The impact of their progress pushed through the multitude in waves. Those who saw them pressed back to avoid them, causing still more
