splashed out in a crimson curve. The color splattered over the crowd, starting wide and thinning as it went, whipping all the way around and snapping out high on the bleachers above the royal dais. The people touched by it writhed. They clutched at themselves and reached out for others, most of whom pulled back in horror. It took Barad a moment for his eyes to understand what had happened. They had not been covered in something. The color had been revealed because they had been stripped of their skin. Flayed alive. Hundreds of them.
Nualo glared at the royal siblings with narrowed eyes. “You did that. Not I. You did that! You make us defend ourselves. You see that, don’t you? We will defend ourselves. Every time. Give us The Song and stop this!”
Queen Corinn stared at the raw corpse that was Jason, and let her eyes follow the bloody path away from him, her face pale, her expression bleak and naked. She and those directly around her were the only ones standing still. The rest of the crowd became a shrieking, maddened mob, clawing to escape, ripping and tearing at one another.
The other Santoth moved to form a ring around Nualo. They began to sing. They built their garbled version of the song and let it loose in the air around them. Barad could not understand a word of it, but it was horrible. He hated it, and he pushed into it with his eyes. It was pain and suffering. It was hunger and rage and spite. It was venom and fire, the breath of monsters and the claws of demons, disease and rot. And there was something else. Something he could almost taste with his eyes. Something he could almost grasp. It was something in the disparity between what they claimed and what was in their sorcery. Their song was corrupted, yes. Even Barad could tell that. He did not need to understand the language to know how wrong it was, how warped and cancerous.
“If you send the song against us, we will throw it like seeds atop your people. Corrupted seeds. Are you such fools? We would give you the entire world, but you scorn us! You want us to return to exile? Why should we do that?” Nualo’s voice slowed. His words gnawed their way through the spell-thick air. “We only ever did what Tinhadin asked of us.”
No, Barad thought. He was certain the answer should be no. He wanted to shout it, but he had no language…
“We were only ever faithful. For that we were exiled? Not again! I say it one last time. After this we will not ask again.”
And then Barad had it. Language. That was what was different between Corinn’s song and the Santoth’s. They were not speaking the same language. Their sorcery was the night to Corinn’s day. It was not a corrupted version of the same. It was fundamentally different. They spoke a different sorcerers’ language, one that was by its very nature warped and horrible. They had power, yes, but nothing like what they would have if they studied the true Song.
“Will you give us The Song of Elenet?”
Another one of them said, “If you will not, we will ask the same question of your son. We will ask it of Aliver. Of Shen. We will ask until we get our answer.”
She is defeated, Barad thought.
“I can’t give it to you,” she whispered. “It’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
Don’t tell them! Barad shouted, but only inside himself. He could not move his tongue. Not open his mouth or push forward toward her. He desperately tried to make his body do this, but he could not.
“In Senival,” she answered.
Noooo! Barad wailed. Silently. Motionless.
“At Calfa Ven.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Delivegu had never been a soldier. He considered himself a dangerous individual, good in a brawl, quick with a knife, capable of staring down the most belligerent of drunken louts, with a sharp enough mind to outwit even an Alecian senatorial whore. He was his own man, and he rather liked things that way. What use was the discipline of the military? Taking orders; chain of command; subservience to officers; blind, meaningless courage in the face of danger? None of that suited him.
But standing near the Santoth sorcerers throughout their exchange with Corinn, jostled by the nobles around him who were bolting for the exit, he would happily have folded himself under the wing of a commanding officer. He would have run away himself, but his scrotum packed up and climbed inside him when Nualo swept Corinn’s spell out across the crowd, ripping people’s skin from them. And when they stood in that terrible circle, Nualo at the center demanding that Corinn give them some book, Delivegu had wanted to shout at the queen to hand it over. Whatever it was, give them the damn thing! He knew there must be some reason not to, but he just wanted them gone.
Relief, then, when she named the place. Calfa Ven. Having been there so recently, he remembered it well. He thought for a moment of Bralyn, but only for a moment.
Nualo stared hard at the queen. “Calfa Ven?”
“You know the place, surely,” Corinn responded, derision twisting around her words.
“We do.”
“Then go! Leave my sight!”
Delivegu had to acknowledge it. If she had looked at him with such complete scorn, he would have withered and skulked away.
The sorcerers did not even notice. Instead, they flashed glances at one another. Nualo scowled and others scowled back, more like animals that communicated through growls and bared teeth than like men. Whatever they had said with those grimaces, they reached consensus quickly.
“No!” The voice boomed up from at the entry causeway. The place was in turmoil, people still trying to flee, trampling one another, but few of them actually getting anywhere.
The one who spoke worked against this. For a moment Delivegu thought he was another Santoth. He dressed similarly, and he moved with inhuman speed. He seemed to run on top of people’s shoulders and heads, light and nimble, his robes flapping behind him. “Noooo! Nualo, hear me! I can get you what you want.”
Nualo just barely held in whatever foulness he was prepared to scream down on the man, letting him come, until the man stood on one of the torch pillars, near enough to be seen clearly. His features were normal, battered and aged, those of a man who had seen most of his living days already.
And who, exactly, are you, old man? Delivegu wondered.
“What, Leeka?” Nualo asked. “What knowledge have you? Speak quickly!”
“Leeka?” It was Aliver, looking more stunned than ever.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, bowing low. “I have been with these ones all these years. I know them well, even if they hid the truth from me. They did do that. They hid-”
“What?” Nualo roared. “Speak only to me!”
Leeka held out a moment longer. He did not speak, but he kept his eyes on the two monarchs, looking grave and mournful and strong all at once. Then he turned to the sorcerers. “My knowledge is this: you cannot kill any of Tinhadin’s line. They have only to know that they are safe from death at your hands for it to be true. And now they know.” He looked back at Aliver. “And they cannot-”
Whatever he was going to add he did not get to finish. The sorcerers spat fury at him. When the spell hit, it tore his body to pieces and sprayed him in chunks and splatters across a great swath of people.
“You people!” Nualo yelled. “You see what you make us do!”
Nualo swung back toward Corinn. His hand rose behind him and hurtled over his head, as if he were a hunter wielding a throwing stick. He roared as he did so, a sound that was simultaneously earsplitting and indistinct. Sharp but muffled by the echoes of time and space. Delivegu was certain that the rapidity of Nualo’s throw altered as he released whatever he snapped from the ends of his fingers. Blinding speed one moment; a blurred, slow, tortured syrup of a long moment just after. Corinn’s head reared back, her mouth open and speaking. And then something happened around her mouth. She turned away and fell back into her soldiers too quickly for Delivegu to see. He knew that something had been done to her. He just could not say what.
“Stupid woman,” Nualo said, his features jagged and cruel and-for the first time-mirthful. “It’s true that I
