'Don't wet your trousers,' one of the soldiers nearby said, guffawing. 'Look at the lot of you. Gape mouthed like so many carp!'
Another added a remark about the smell of soiled undergarments. Still another-a bit farther away and moving forward with his arms outstretched to push the children in-made a joke about the enormous chopping block approaching them.
'Why are they doing that?' Ravi wondered aloud. 'Why frighten us still more?'
His sister, holding his hand, did not respond.
The barges came on. The figures standing on the raised platform were more visible now. They were cloaked in hooded garments of the same dead gray as the vessels. The surf struggling beneath the crafts billowed out, grasping at the children's feet. They began to draw back, felt the pressure of others behind them, and began to panic. It spread as quick as touch. Over the rising confusion, Ravi heard the soldiers increasing their taunts. They knew this would happen. They were enjoying it!
This realization brought a shout to his mouth. 'We are not slaves!' Without knowing he was doing so, he yanked his hand free of his sister's. He spun around, calling out over the heads of the mostly smaller children in all directions. 'Do you hear? We are not slaves!'
His voice must have carried well, for many faces turned and stared at him-round faces, gaunt ones, sunken eyed and grime caked. In their eyes he thought he saw hunger, agreement. He thought he could stir that into certainty. 'Just because they say we are doesn't make it true. We are not slaves just because they say we are!' His voice grew stronger. He asked them to look around. See how many they were. They were hundreds. Down the beach were thousands! The soldiers were few. How could they enslave so many?
He answered himself: 'Because we let them!'
The soldiers noticed. They shouted to one another, to him. He saw two converging on him from different directions. The nearest was a bull, his shoulders bulbous and enormous, as if all his anger were gathering atop his frame.
Ravi grabbed Mor and pulled her away, both of them agile as anchovies. He slipped through the crowd, repeating again and again that they were not slaves. He told the others to fight, to run, to do anything but not give in. He couldn't tell if they were really understanding, or if the chaos had crashed over them, but all around the children jostled and scurried. They punched at the men who grabbed them and wrenched themselves free. A tide of them had pushed over a fallen man, and many small feet were trampling him as they surged down the beach.
Toward freedom, Ravi thought. He knew that Mor was beseeching him, but it didn't matter. He had her by the wrist and he was doing what he had to. He was changing everything.
'They cannot stop us all! Run to your homes!'
He had just spun around once more, mouth open, ready to flee if the soldier was too near. He was thinking it was time to join the others escaping down the beach. That's what Mor wanted, he was sure, and they would do it now.
He turned just in time to receive the full force of a soldier's tossed baton across his forehead. It had been thrown from a distance with great force and uncanny accuracy. It knocked Ravi's head back and turned his eyes to the cloud-heavy sky. Suddenly he had no legs. His body fell so that the back of his head was the first part of him to hit the hard sand. It left him stunned, breathless, one arm upstretched, his hand, which had just held Mor's, empty.
And then a fist closed over his hand, and a shape blocked the sky. The soldier yanked Ravi upward, spinning him in the air, then drove him face-first into the sand. He pressed his knee into Ravi's back, the full weight of him. Ravi's mouth formed an oval as the air inside him escaped. He gasped for more, but the man pressed him like he wanted to drive his knee through him into the ground.
'What to do with him?' he asked.
'End him,' another of the soldiers answered, his voice calm. 'It's a waste, but we'll still have her. The numbers will be right anyway.'
Ravi, his head to the side on the damp sand, his lungs pressed flat, and his eyes rimmed with tears, watched a knife cut into view. And past it, he saw his sister, watching him, her face heartbreaking, desolate. A soldier had her by the shoulder, though it was clear there was no fight in her. Ravi wanted to tell her not to look, but he could not. And he did not have to. Something else caught her attention, someone whom Ravi could not see but whom she stared at with no lessening of her distress.
'Wait,' another voice called. Ravi did not know whose it was, but the voice carried authority. It was a strange voice, inflected with sharp edges even though the speaker was unhurried.
The blade hung above him, waiting.
'He's got the spirit that eats death in him,' the voice said. The speaker paused for a few moments. 'He's got life in greater measure than most. I see another use for him. I think the Auldek will like this one.'
CHAPTER ONE
When the Balbara lookout shouted the alarm, Princess Mena Akaran was up from her campstool in an instant. She broke from the circle where she had been sitting with her officers and climbed the ridge at a run. She drew close to the sharp-eyed young man, sighting down his slim, brown arm and out from his pointing finger across the arid expanse that was central Talay. It took her a moment to see what he did. Even then, it was neither the creature itself she saw nor the party who hunted it. They were too far away. What marked their progress were the billows of smoke from the torches the runners carried-that and a yellow smudge at the rim of the world that must have been dust kicked up by their feet. They seemed to be as far off as the horizon, but the princess knew they would close that distance quickly.
She half slid down the sandy slope and regrouped with her officers. One captain, Melio Sharratt, she assigned to the farthest southern beacon; to the other, Kelis of Umae, went the northern beacon. They already knew what to do, she told them. It was only a matter of seeing it accomplished, timing it perfectly, and having luck on their side. She left it to them to get the others in position and remind them of their instructions, but before she dismissed them she urged them both to act with caution.
'Do you hear me?' she asked, leaning close to the small group. She took Melio by the wrist to remind him of this but did not look in his face. She knew his grin would hold constant, dismissive of the danger moving across the plain toward them. He may have become the head of the Elite, but the role had done nothing to alter him. His longish hair would be cast casually across an eye, often swept aside only to fall in place again. They had wed five years earlier. She had never hidden her love of him from others, but neither did she let it distract her at moments like this. She spoke as if her words were meant for all the hunting party, as, in truth, they were.
'I want nobody dead. Only the foulthing dies today,' she said.
'Those words coming from you?' Melio asked. 'Will you abide by them yourself, or will this be like last time, with that-'
Mena spoke as if she had not heard him. 'Nobody else. That order falls on each of you personally. We've lost too many already.'
Her eyes settled on Kelis. The Talayan's gaze was as calm as ever, his skin dark and smooth, his eyes slow moving. It was a face she had grown to deeply care for. In a strange way this Talayan was a living reminder of her eldest brother. Aliver had grown to manhood with him as his companion. Kelis had known her brother during the years that she had been separated from him. Even now, after all the evenings they had spent talking about what her brother had been like then, she still did not feel they had conversed enough. She hoped they would have many evenings more.
She made a point of not meeting Melio's eyes as he moved away. If they were together again, whole, at the end of the day, she would show him just how much she felt for him with all her body. That was the way it had been with them lately: distant as they faced danger, enraptured with each other in the short reprieves afterward.
The next half hour was a whirl of preparations. Moving among soldiers, shouting instructions, checking everything personally, Mena was as slim and leanly muscled and sun burnished as she had been during the war with Hanish Mein. She still wore the sword with which she had swum ashore on Vumu as a girl, but she was far from being that girl. Only an unobservant eye could fail to see that her lithe form contained within it a coiled energy
