was amongst the caravan. He must have had many sleepless nights.
Which was good.
“I am here to guard you, for now.” I placed the butt of the axe against the floor, and folded my hands around the top. “Killing you now would not help me understand where my family may be.”
He remained quiet for a while, so I took the axe and hit the bars with it. He jumped back. “Your family is lost to you,” he snapped.
“Why do you say that?” I demanded, getting off the bench I’d sat on. “I didn’t come this far to turn back!”
He moved away from the bars.
I moved closer. “I will not kill you, but I think maybe I will come to maim you before we reach Paika. I think an arm would be acceptable to me. You could still talk after that, right? I don’t know, because I’ve never tried anything like that before. But I think an arm is a fair thing, after all, what is an arm compared to a family? We can live both our lives incomplete.”
The Paikan raider stepped forward to the bars. “You’d risk it all, for this quest?”
I looked him in the eyes. “Yes.”
“I have nothing good to tell you,” he said. “Because I doubt you’ll catch your children.”
“You would have sold them by now?” I asked. “Is that what you do, you twisted creatures…”
“No one young is sold,” the Paikan said, a note of outrage seeping into his voice. “Their minds are moldable, they can be taught. The young can be saved.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Your sons will have been taken to the aftans of Paika. There they are taught the Way with hundreds, no thousands, of youths from all over these diseased lands, every day, until the moment their minds crack open, and the inherent truth of the Way falls upon them. It is then that they earn the right to go to the Southern Isles, far from these coasts.”
“Why would they want to go there?”
“A pilgrimage. To see the lands where the Way is all. To see where we came from, long before we took the city of Paika and made it our home. Your children will be closer to the end of their time at the aftan than at the beginning, now.”
I wanted to hit him with the butt of the axe, but restrained myself. He was talking. Even if I didn’t want to hear it, he was talking about what was happening right now to Duram and Set.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do your people do all this? Why steal my children?”
The prisoner’s voice crackled with anger. “Because you don’t deserve them.” He grabbed the bars. “We have them heavily guarded and protected. And when the Way gives itself over to them, they will leave for their pilgrimage. And when they return, they will bring light to this darkened land you have created.”
“What are you talking about?” I sat face to face with his fiery anger.
“Look around you,” he whispered. “Your towns are fallen, bramble eats and chokes at all you do. And still you can’t release yourselves from the grip of the sickness that causes it.”
“Magic?” I asked. “You’re talking about magic. It’s outlawed. That is why I was an executioner. We control it.”
“You control nothing, or your greatest empire would not have fallen. You are all sick with magic’s use.”
“And you are not?” I said.
“No,” he insisted. “Your peoples try to use fear and death to stop magic but it will always continue. The individual will always have a use that seems to be needed, even when compared to the good of all. You have no true beliefs like the Way to guide you. Just heapings of gods that take you long after you destroy everything in this life. As long as your afterlives are pleasant, what reason do you have to ever stop the bramble?”
“You are all missionaries, here to spread this thing you call the ‘Way’ by kidnapping our children? Is that what this madness is all about? Is that why you have destroyed my family and my town?” I wanted to kill him then.
“It is to save you from yourselves,” he said sadly, as if I were a child who did not know any better. “You want to know why I came here, to this cursed land? Let me tell you. One morning, far off in the Southern Isles, I woke up and found a small, gray thorn growing in the wall around my yard. And over time it grew, its needles spreading. And chopping it back did nothing, its roots continued to spread. One day my wife, and my son took it upon themselves to pull up every root by hand, and slipped into the deepest sleep, and then from there to death. That is why I am here, Executioness.”
He trembled, and I understood his rage. “I’m sorry to hear about your family.”
The Paikan continued. “I’m here because my people forgot magic, and left it behind us when we settled the islands and left the Northern Coasts. I’m here because we believe Borzai judges all that we do, including what we do to this world that the gods love. I’m here because like the Jhandparan Empire, you can’t help yourselves, and we suffer all together as a result. So we try to stop you from killing us, as well as yourselves.”
“This is all about magic. And bramble,” I said.
“What else could it be about?” the man inside the cell asked.
A trumpeting sound came from the distance.
The Paikan sucked in his breath. “The cavalry is here,” he said. “That is no small Culling party, but an army. You should leave this place, and go back to where you came from. Start a new life.”
“I am too old to start a new life, or family,” I said.
“Then that is a shame,” he said. “But there is nothing for you in Paika.”
“My children are in Paika,” I hissed. “There is everything for me there.”
I could hear a distant thudding. “They’re not stopping, they’re not stopping,” someone screamed from up the caravan.
I stepped away from the inside of the wagon and pulled myself up the side so I could look down the road.
Forms lumbered out of the dark in front of the fire crew’s wagon. Elephants with armored tusks swinging from side to side as they charged forward.
They ran. And they were, indeed, not stopping.
The aurochs harnessed to the wagons up front screamed and threw themselves against their harnesses. The Roadmaster’s wagon toppled over as the beasts fought to get free.
Bojdan’s men raised their arquebuses as one, and fired. The leading elephant shrieked and reared, then brought its massive feet down on the wagon, splintering and destroying it, throwing men from it like so much chaff in the wind.
I jumped down and ran alongside the caravan toward them, seeing more elephants moving through the large cloud of smoke left by the fired arquebuses. The dominating creatures had slowed down in the smoke. They walked three abreast, and four rows deep.
I saw Jal and Bojdan duck for cover behind the Roadmaster’s wagon as a sudden flurry of crossbow bolts thwacked into the wooden sides and clattered off the road.
I joined them, slamming my shoulder next to Jal’s against the ruins of his wagon. “I don’t understand,” he repeated. “I don’t understand. They couldn’t have found out we sold those rebel scouts supplies so soon, could they, Bojdan?”
The warrior shrugged. “There are many other sins they could have decided to call you on, Jal.”
“But I bribed them all, Bojdan!” the Roadmaster spat. “We make them rich. I use none of the magics they despise.”
“Can you guarantee that no one else in this caravan ever used any magic?” Bojdan asked.
An elephant bellowed. Jal glanced over his shoulder and muttered, “Borzai be merciful when I meet you today.”
Bojdan looked behind us. “We need to retreat,” he said. “They’re getting ready for another charge.”
The remains of the guard wagon exploded and lit the entire night. The fireball blistered us with heat and roiled overhead, blunted by the now burning carcass of the Roadmaster’s wagon “Arquebus powder,” Bojdan explained, with a sudden smile. “That will give us cover, now run!”
Elephants shrieked, and I could hear cursing.
Several arrows clattered around as we stood and ran. Jal gurgled, then pitched back, looking like a pincushion: his ample body pierced from all angles by crossbow bolts. He was still alive, amazingly, crawling along
