Mai knew all about the nine caves of hells, where demons festered and fed on the souls of those who hadn't the strength to be reborn. 'What about other lands? Are there places north of the Hundred?'
'I suppose there must be. West of Heaven's Ridge they say it's barren country, nothing but dry grass and rolling hills with no end to it, and only beasts and barbarians roaming the land. North of the Hundred lies the sea. I hear there are folk living far away, to the northwest, beyond Heaven's Ridge and the sea, but it's very cold there, so the tale says. People actually die of it being so cold. Imagine that!'
Mai sighed. 'Best we stay in Olossi, then?' But she wondered if Olossi was far enough from Sirniaka. 'Is anywhere safe?' she added plaintively.
Tannadit slapped her on the buttocks. Mai yelped, for the old woman still had a strong arm.
But Tannadit only laughed. 'Don't you worry. A pretty girl like you can always find a man to take her in.'
34
It took Keshad and Zubaidit a while to reach the spot where the crows and vultures had gathered. The road descended into a hollow where debris lay strewn to either side like so much flood wrack. At first it was difficult for Kesh to make sense of what they saw, but shapes came clear as they moved closer. Corpses were beginning to bloat in the sun. An overturned kettle had tumbled off a cart with a broken wheel. A dead dog lay on its back, its legs stiffening. Orange silk fluttered, caught in the claws of a thornberry bush. These were the ruins of a caravan, hit by ospreys, as at Dast Korumbos. It smelled like a latrine.
Bai strode into the carnage as if she were wading into storm-tossed waters: careful to keep her balance. The ginnies seemed to be trying to flatten themselves against her shoulders. There were about a dozen open-bed wagons, at least as many handcarts, and no animals except two hands of dogs, all dead. It was a fresh kill. The bodies hadn't yet started to rot, but they would. Kesh kept to the road, which remained clear except for a pair of wagons tipped off the verge.
The line of march, in trying to escape the slaughter, had spilled onto the cleared ground that lay between the road and the straggling pipe-brush and pine forest. At least twenty vultures had settled to feast. They eyed the intruders irritably, and as Bai explored, all but one flapped away to wait in the branches of the nearby trees.
This was not the same kind of attack that had hit the caravan in Dast Korumbos. Kesh fished for a kerchief in his sleeve and tied it over his nose and mouth. There, arched backward over a mound of thick grass, sprawled a girl not more than ten or twelve years of age. Her hands had been chopped off.
He retched into the kerchief, although nothing came up.
Bai knelt, and lifted a baby, but by the way its delicate limbs dangled, it too was dead. At first he thought it wore dull red silk, and then he saw it was naked, covered in dried blood. The beds of those wagons did not carry merchandise; they carried dead people: an eyeless old woman, her toothless, shrunken mouth pulled back in a death's grimace; a pair of boys, each lacking a right hand; a man with a crutch thrown across him, the angle of a tipped wagon concealing his legs. Baskets had tumbled off carts, spilling grain in heaps and mounds. A bladder of ale had been trampled and punctured, and the smell of its good yeasty brew still brushed the air as the last leaked out into puddles. All the harness for the wagons had been cut. What had become of the beasts once pulling them he could not tell.
All was silent except for the buzzing of flies. Even the wind had died, as if in deference to blood and death. If he did not think, he could move past. His hands were cold, but his face was hot in the sun, and his eyes hurt so badly he thought he would go blind.
Bai circled back to him, her expression serene. The ginnies remained hunkered down against her, gone a dull gray color. She seemed undisturbed, as if this were simply a ghastly mural painted on a wall that one might look at, or away from, as one pleased.
If he did not speak, he would be sick. 'I've never seen… They cut off their hands!' He pressed the kerchief to his mouth as bile rose and tears burned in the corners of his eyes.
'No, they didn't. If you look at the stumps, you'll see they're healed. Some better, some worse, some more recent than others. These people had already taken those injuries, days or months ago. Look what they have with them: grain, tools, blankets. These are refugees. I wonder what horror they were fleeing from. Out of the north.'
'I guess it caught them up.' Then the heaves hit, and he doubled over, ripped away the kerchief, and threw up on the road.
She stepped away neatly and waited him out. When he stopped retching, she said, 'What of the village we passed through late yesterday? They'll be in the path of these wolves. And after them, all those other villages we passed. We have to go back. Try to warn them.'
'I don't want to go back,' he gasped. His mouth tasted horrible, although he'd had little except bile to vomit. He was dizzy; he could not get the world to stay still beneath him. 'We'll take what we need from these supplies.' He faltered. She was staring at him as if he had begun in truth to spin. 'This will only go to rot, or be eaten by animals! I'm not a thief. The valuables they can keep, not that they can carry them in death. We have to go on! You must see that. I don't want to go back to Olossi!'
'Neither do I. No need to alert the Olossi militia, or any holy officials to preside over the passing ceremony. No need even to drag the dead to a Sorrowing Tower, for you see-' She gestured toward the waiting vultures. '-the acolytes of the Merciless One are already come. They and the beetles and the open air will scour these poor dead bodies properly.'
'You're heartless!'
'I am? You're the one who wants to loot the murdered dead and keep on walking as if nothing happened.'
'We can do nothing for them! If we go back, we risk falling into slavery again. You know that!'
'It's true. It's a risk I'm not sure I'm willing to take. What do you suggest, then, Keshad?'
There was no way to look away from the scattered dead. Even if he closed his eyes, the bitter taste in his mouth and the smell rising in the air reminded him of the death that surrounded them. He wiped his eyes with the heel of a hand and found that core of orderly determination that had kept him going for twelve long years of servitude.
'So. So. We can continue on West Track through the Aua Gap and to Horn.'
'Where all the trouble lies.'
'So we hear. We can walk along West Track another couple of days until we reach the Passage. That road will take us north through the East Riding into Sohayil. Or we can walk south into the Lending.'
'There are no paths in the grasslands.'
'We can retrace our steps to Olossi and take the Rice Walk, maybe walk all the way to Sund or Sardia. Or we can walk southwest, back to Old Fort. At Old Fort, there's a track that leads south along the foothills and eventually comes to the southern coast and West Farro.'
Bai walked to the nearest wagon and nudged a corpse of a woman with the end of her walking stick. The woman's mouth gaped, and flies crawled in and out. She had no left hand, only a scarred stump. Bai was right: these were old wounds, poorly healed. The dead woman had been so poor that she was wearing an undyed hempen-cloth taloos, not even a coarse silk weave. The taloos had been mostly pulled off her, yanked up above her hips, and it was evident by the bloodstains on her thighs and pudenda that she had been raped multiple times before they had slit her throat.
'It seems foolish to go into the north, when that's where all this trouble is coming from.' Bai set down the ginnies. She knelt beside the dead woman and tidied the taloos, pulling it down, straightening it. Then she crumbled the dry leaves of a sprig of lavender onto the corpse's pale lips. The rest of the lavender was wedged where the chin had fallen against the shoulder. 'See, here.' She pinched up a trifle between forefinger and thumb, whispered a prayer, and blew the fragments to the winds. 'I saw lavender sprinkled on the other bodies, too. Some holy person has spoken the ceremonies over the dead, succored their ghosts, and opened a path through Spirit Gate. I suppose it was that Lady's mendicant we saw last night. Aren't you glad, now, that we gave her coin? It would have been blood money, otherwise, us clutching it to ourselves now that we've seen this.'
He sighed, touching his blessing bowl. Now was not the time to tell Bai that he no longer believed in the gods
