I squirted more water into my mouth, spat again, then drank. Stared hard across the landscape, remembering the stink of severed bowels, the expression on his face as his life ran out, the weight of the blade as I opened his abdomen.
Butchery.
'Would you feel better if you had died?'
For the first time since the fight I looked directly at her. Felt the tug of a wry smile at my mouth. Trust Delilah to put it in perspective.
'You don't have to like it,' she said. 'If you did, if you began to, I would not share your bed. But this, too, is survival, and in its rawest, most primitive form. There will be others. Kill them quickly, Tiger, and ruthlessly. Show them no mercy. Because they will surely show none to you.'
What she didn't say, what she didn't need to say, was that some of those others would be better than Khashi.
SIX
DELwas initially resistent to going after my jivatma. She truly saw no sense in it, since very likely the sword was buried under tons of rock, and we had new blades. I still hadn't told her about the dreams of the woman commanding me to take up the sword, because I couldn't find words that didn't make me sound like a sandsick fool. Instead, I relied on Del's own respect for the Northern blades and on the loss of Boreal. As I had by declaring elaii- ali-ma, she had made the only choice possible in breaking the sword, but that didn't mean she was immune to regret. Eventually she gave in.
There was not a road where we wanted to go, because no one else, apparently, had ever wanted to go there. Del and I made our own way, recalling the direction from our visit to Shaka Obre's domain nearly a year before. We left behind the flat but relatively lush desert of Julah and traded it for foothills, the precursors of the mountain where we had encountered strong magic, where Chosa Dei, living in my sword, had vacated it first to fill —and kill—Sabra, then to encounter his brother. They hadn't been living beings, Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, merely power incarnate, but that was enough. What was left of them battled fiercely within the hollowed rock formation that shaped, inside a huge chimney of stone, a circle. And Del and Chosa Dei, using my sword, my body, had danced.
Here there was rock in place of soil, intermixed with hardpan and seasonings of sand. Drifts of stone were like the bones of the earth peeping through the flesh, but there were tumbled piles of it as well as that beneath the dirt. Brownish, porous smokerock, the variegations of slate, sharply faceted shale, the milky glow of quartz, the glitter of mica coupled with glinting splashes of false gold. The Punja, with its crystalline sands, was yet miles away. This was a land of rock swelling like boils into looming stone formations crowning ragged foothills, merging slowly into mountains. Not the high, huge ranges of Del's North, shaped of wind and snow and ice, but the whimsy of Southron nature in sudden bubbles of burst rock, scattered remnants of wholeness and order, abrupt, towering upthrustings of striated stone shoved loose from the desert floor.
Movement against the uneven horizon of foothills and rock formations caught my eye. I looked, saw, and reined in sharply. Del, not watching me as she and her gelding picked their way through, nearly allowed her gelding to walk into the back of the stud. There was a moment of tension in the body beneath me, but he, too, knew what lay before us was far more threatening than what was behind.
'What—' Del began; but then she, like me, held her silence, and waited.
I had half expected it. We were in the land of the Vashni. No one knew where the borders were, or even if there were borders, but there was always the awareness of risk when one traveled here.
Four warriors. Vashni are not large, nor are their horses. But size wasn't what mattered. It was the willingness to kill, and the way in which they did it.
Four warriors, kilted in leather, wearing wreaths of fingerbone pectorals against oiled chests. Black hair was also oiled, worn in single, fur-wrapped plaits. Bone-handled knives and swords decorated their persons.
Del's voice was a breath of sound. 'Could these be the same four who met us when we had Sabra?'
I answered as quietly. 'I don't know. Maybe. No one sees the Vashni often enough to recognize individuals.' At least, no one lived long enough to recognize individuals.
The warriors eased their small, dark horses into motion. They rode down from the rocky hilltop and approached, marking our faces, harnesses, swords. I felt the first tickle of sweat springing up on my skin.
Is it possible to fight a Vashni? Of course. I imagine it has happened. But no one, no one has ever survived the battle. They are killed, then boiled. When the bones are free of flesh, the Vashni make jewelry and weapons of it. The flesh is fed to dogs.
The only reason I know this is the Vashni don't kill children. It is their 'mercy' to take children into their villages, to feed them, have them watch what becomes of their parents, then deliver them to a road where they will be found by others.
If they are found. Some of them have been.
Del and I had been in a Vashni village once, when searching for her brother. They had treated us with honor; Jamail was considered a holy man, and she was his sister. Jamail, castrated, mute, had not wanted to leave the people who gave him a twisted sort of kindness after years of slavery elsewhere. Later—known by then as the Oracle—he had been killed, but it hadn't been Vashni doing. They revered his memory.
'Del,' I said quietly, 'come up beside me so they can see you better.'
She didn't question it; possibly she also realized safety might lie in her resemblence to the Oracle, her brother. She moved the gelding out from behind the stud, guided him next to me, and reined in. Again, we waited.
That triggered a response in the Vashni. One of them stayed back, but three others rode down. One stationed himself in front of me, approximately three paces away; the other two took up positions on either side of us.
The fourth rode down then. When he was close enough, I saw his eyes were lighter than the others, the shape of his face somewhat different. I'd never heard of Vashni breeding with other tribes, but anything was possible. They had taken a Northerner into their midst. Del's brother, by the time we found him, had become one of them.
The warrior pulled up near Del. This close, we could smell them. Apparently rancid oil was considered perfume in Vashni circles.
The warrior's eyes were a dark gray. He looked hard at Del, then at me. Something moved in those eyes. He raised a hand to his face and touched one cheek, mimicking my scars.
I took it as invitation. 'Sandtiger,' I said.
Now he looked at Del. Now the hand rose to his hair, then indicated his eyes.
Blue-eyed, fair-haired Del said, 'The Oracle's sister.'
The Vashni closed in. We followed—or were made to understand it was wise to follow—the man with gray eyes.
It was a camp, not a village. A tiny clearing surrounded by boulders, a grove of twisted, many-limbed trees, a fire ring set in the middle with blankets thrown down around it. The stink of blood and entrails as well as the piles of hides told us the Vashni were a hunting party, as did the skinned carcasses hanging from the trees. Likely the village was a day's ride. Perhaps it was even the one where Jamail had been held.
Once in camp, Del and I were motioned off our horses. We dismounted, and one of the warriors led the stud and gelding away to tie them to a tree lacking the ornamentation of meat. The stud was not happy, but he didn't protest. Del's black-painted, fringe-bedecked gelding went placidly and stood where he was tied, lowering his head to forage in thatches of webby green grass spreading beneath the tree. The Vashni mounts were turned loose once their bridles were slipped; apparently even they knew better than to test a warrior's mood.
Gravely the gray-eyed man unsheathed knife and sword and set them down upon a woven blanket. The other warriors followed suit. Then it was our turn.