He scanned the field again. Dariel was nowhere in sight. Mena he caught a glimpse of in the distance. She was running, sprinting after one of the creatures, hunting it, though it paid her no mind at all, there being so many bodies to rip apart. In the space of a few minutes the antoks had killed hundreds. They showed no fatigue. No interest in pausing over the dead. No desire to eat, even. They simply wanted to kill. He watched one of the antoks pin a soldier’s lower body beneath its hoof. It contemplated the thrashing for a moment and then bit down. It ripped the man in half, shook the torso about as if it were a plaything, and flung it in the air.
Aliver knew he had to do something. The entire throng was gathered here in his name. He could not let them die. He pushed a steadying chant up and tried to hold the thought on his forehead. The Santoth. If he could reach them, they could provide protection. He could explain to them what was happening and they could work their sorcery to shrivel the beasts where they stood. He tried to contact them. Twice he felt his call unfurl from his body like great coils of rope tossed into the air, but both times the connection snapped. It was so hard to focus with shouts of horror buffeting him in waves.
He had just started to try a third time when Kelis shouted for him. “Look,” he said, pointing with his chin at something off to the northeast. “Others come.”
“What others?”
Following the Talayan’s direction, Aliver spotted a company of men nearing the northern edge of the battlefield. His first thought was that it was the enemy coming, though the direction of their approach was not from Maeander’s camp nor were they very numerous. In the half second it took him to lift the spyglass to his eye, he considered the tremulous possibility that it was the Santoth already answering their desperate need. He searched the enlarged, jittery view of the world through the spyglass and realized it was neither of those two possibilities.
What approached was a force of perhaps a hundred soldiers. They jogged across the plain directly toward the carnage. They were nearly naked, most of them brown-skinned and short of stature and slight. They carried no banner and wore no colors and were lightly armed with what looked like wooden training swords.
One of the antoks had spotted the arriving soldiers. It peeled away from the swathe of destruction it had been carving and ran at them with a burst of joyous speed. Aliver tried to steady his spyglass. The soldiers, seeing the beast coming, stopped. They spoke among themselves, frantic, debating, their eyes never leaving the antok for long. One of them, taller than the rest, touched something in Aliver. He was familiar in some way, but he could not pause to consider it.
For most of its sprint it looked like the antok would barrel right into the newcomers. But as it neared it slowed, slowed, and then broke its forward motion completely. It slid across the dry soil and skidded to a halt just before them. The soldiers held their wooden swords before them. Each stood still, unflinching, their torsos naked and brown and utterly defenseless. They were absurdly brave, and Aliver twisted with shame at what was about to happen to them.
But it did not happen. The antok did not attack at all. It moved in close to them, sniffed, tilted its head this way and that. It walked some distance along the line of them. It pawed the earth in what looked like confusion, studied them from several angles, found none of them satisfactory. Then it turned and began to trot back toward the main army.
Aliver-thankful, amazed, grateful-could not pull his eyes away from these newcomers. The antok had not touched them. Hadn’t harmed a hair on any of them! It had stood inches from their naked chests, before weapons that could not possibly have harmed it, and…and…what? There was a thought pressing against the back of his consciousness. It was almost painful knowing it was there, feeling the ridge of it trying to break through, something so very important. Something about the newcomers…and also about the handlers still standing beside the cages… It was the reason they were not being attacked.
He jerked his spyglass from the newcomers back to his army. The visual impact of this was all it took. He realized what it was. He only mulled it a moment. That was how long it took for him to become as sure of it as if he had trained the beasts himself. He whispered it to Kelis, and then lifted his voice to shout it to the others.
CHAPTER
Mena had been pursuing the same antok for what already seemed like hours. There should have been guards beside her every step of the way, but she had bolted so quickly they lost her from the start. She had run across a field with the dead, slipping in their blood, at times tangled in entrails. She’d jumped over bodies and slammed through the screams and pleas of the injured. Drenched in sweat, her legs burning and chest heaving with the effort, she refused to stop. She tried not to hear or see anything but the creature she hunted, knowing that if she did, the horror of it all would be too much.
No matter how she chose her course she never managed to close on her prey. Nor did she know what she would do if she did, except that it involved channeling her anger through the steel edge of her sword. She felt no fear of the creature at all. Her hatred was too complete. Maeben lashed at her from the inside, trying to burst through and rip the beast apart with furious talons, cursing Mena’s feeble body: wingless, short legged, slight as it was. This made the princess even more angry.
She stopped long enough only to hear her brother’s instructions because a hand clamped on her shoulder. The pincer grip locked the joint to that particular spot in the world. The rest of her body had no choice but to snap to a halt. She spun, ready to lash whomever it was with her tongue. The face that met her was such a mask of creviced and fatigued stoicism-firm, soldierly, entreating, and irrefutable all at once-that her words evaporated.
“Princess,” Leeka Alain said, “stop all your running about.” A handful of guards clustered behind him, panting and sweat drenched. To her surprise, they used the pause to begin unbuckling their armor vests, tilting off helmets, cutting the orange bicep bands from their arms. The general said, “Tell me, what people go to war nearly naked, with wooden swords? A brown-skinned, black-haired people?”
The answer was out of her mouth before she had any grasp of why he would ask such a thing. “My people-Vumuans, I mean.”
Leeka grunted. “Yes, well, your people have come after you, Princess. Good thing, too, because they’ve shown Aliver the way.”
“The way to what?” Mena asked, distracted. Her eyes lifted and searched out the antok, its ridged back cutting through the masses like a shark’s fin jutting out of the sea.
“The way to calm the bloody hogs and then, perhaps, to kill them. To begin with you must strip.”
Her attention snapped back to him. “What?”
“Down to the skin.”
“Are you serious?”
The old soldier frowned. “It’s not that my eyes won’t welcome it, Princess, but the order comes from your brother. Strip and follow me. It’s a mad idea, but it may be the only way to survive the day. You won’t be alone in nakedness.”
He took off at a trot, ripping off his mail vest as he went. Mena followed, sheltered within the corps of disrobing soldiers protecting him, watching as the man yanked his undershirt over his head and tossed it away. He undid his sword belt, drew the blade, and let the scabbard fall. She was about to ask him what he could be thinking when he glanced back at her. He explained what had happened while she had been bent on her hunt. As she listened she took in the changing scene around her.
The antoks still rampaged, still sent soldiers fleeing, still tossed shattered bodies into the air, but everyone not directly facing the beasts had found a singular purpose. They were all shedding their clothing. They tore off garments, stamped themselves out of trousers and cut armbands free with daggers. People tossed the fabric from their bodies as if it scorched them with its touch. Only when they stood naked to the world did the army begin to regroup, not as the units they had been sectioned into. Instead they formed large, seething islands of humanity, standing shoulder to shoulder.