In one shared capsule of thought, Nualo explained that the Giver’s tongue was ever deceiving. Men were not meant to possess it. They should never have studied it. The power they wielded was a dangerous thing even at the best of times, even when they had The Song of Elenet to read from. No matter what good they tried to do, it always became corrupted somehow. Tinhadin had not banished them without reason. No Santoth wished to tempt the dangers of using their knowledge for violence now. If they began it, they could not say where it would end.
Nualo said, The prince knew that we could do nothing without first studying The Song of Elenet…
Dariel cut in. “Why are we having this discussion?” He lifted his gaze and took in the northern view, thronging now with Meins, loud with their singing and their taunts. Snapping back to the Santoth, he held his words with a clamped mouth and communicated with them as Mena was. Aliver is dead! That army is coming to destroy us. You see them, don’t you? Explain to me how you have any hope of coming in from banishment if we die? You’ve no hope at all, and you know it.
Nualo turned his complete attention on the younger Akaran. A crease formed on the Santoth’s forehead and slithered down across his eyeball and changed the shape of his nose and bent one corner of his lips before he swallowed it. Leeka knew that that crease was an expression of anger, of desperation, and a sign of how hard it was for these banished ones to inhabit this physical world. He heard Nualo say, You do not know what you are asking. Watching him, Leeka believed that to be a true statement.
Exasperated, Dariel turned and set off toward the Meins, calling for others to do the same. He gathered up his things when he passed his tent. A few answered him, but Mena stayed focused on Nualo. Maybe he doesn’t, she said, but you do. I called and you came. You didn’t come here to do nothing, did you? Do what you can now. Later, when the world is at peace, we’ll find The Song of Elenet. You’ll be able to speak pure again. Then you can undo any wrong.
Nualo and the others sat with this for some time. Their faces changing ever more quickly now-creasing, morphing, becoming pocked, peeling, and then healing, their features impermanent and shifting. They were agitated, angry, hungry. Yes, they were hungry, too. They spoke among themselves.
Leeka heard the clash of the battle just beginning. He felt the pull toward it. He could not let Dariel die without him. He had turned and begun to move away when he heard Nualo say, Others have made the mistake of believing that good comes from evil. It is not so. Nothing today will be any different.
Leeka kept walking. He put his hand on his sword and felt the contours of the grip in his hand. He knew there was more coming from the Santoth, though. He knew how to sense anger, knew how it drove people to action, and he felt it pulsing behind him with a growing intensity. They were going to do it. No matter their wisdom and wish for peace, beneath it all, they were human. They raged against their fate. They mourned their savior’s death. They wanted revenge. And they wanted to do the one thing that had been denied them for generations. They wanted to open their mouths and speak.
Whatever happens, Nualo said, stay behind us. Do not follow and do not look. It will be better for you if you do not look.
Leeka was still moving forward when the Santoth strode past him. One of them gestured with his hand in a way that pushed the old general back, almost knocking him from his feet. They did this to others also and to those in front of them. With motions of their fingers and hands they grabbed soldiers from right in the fray and yanked them back from the Meins. Leeka saw Dariel seemingly get pinched up by the head and moved across the ground, ending up dropped on his bottom beside where his sister stood. Mena helped him rise, and then she turned him away from the battle. She cried for others to do the same.
“Nualo said not to look!” she said. “Do as he said. Whatever happens, do not look.”
Leeka had to consider what he was about to do for only a few seconds. He did not truly weigh the decision. Nor did he intend even the slightest disrespect with his act of disobedience. But he had woken that morning intent on death, sure that he was stepping into the sunlight for the last time. Now, presented with what was to be a sight for the ages, he could not turn his back on it. Let it be the last thing he ever witnessed, if it had to be. He turned from Mena and Dariel and from the huddled back of the Acacian forces. He followed the sorcerers into battle.
He was among them as they fanned out across the field, close enough to see that they worked with their eyes closed. Their lips moved. They spoke. No, they sang. They filled the air with a twisting, twining, melodious confusion of words and sounds. Their song had a physical density to it. Musical tones brushed past Leeka with an audible slither, with a texture like the spiny contours on a serpent’s back. Every now and then, one of the sorcerers moved a hand through the air, a slow gesture as if he wished to feel the substance of the ether with his fingertips.
The Meins backed away, bewildered, hesitating. A few of their generals tried to restore order and press the assault, but they did not get a chance to. The Santoth all attacked at the same moment. They strode forward without breaking their composed gaits, but they covered distance in leaps and jerks hard to measure. They shouted out their strange, incomprehensible words as they went. They waved their arms and swatted the air like madmen plagued by invisible demons.
Leeka ran to stay with them. He was behind a Santoth as he approached a group of blond-haired soldiers. They were ready to meet him, feet set wide, their swords in their two-handed grip, elbows cocked. But with one swipe of his arm the Santoth stripped the armor, the clothing, and even the skin from two soldiers. They dropped their swords and stood uncomprehending, the striations of their facial muscles and tendons and cartilage raw to the air, their abdomens so completely opened that their inner organs slipped out of them in a tangle. The Santoth was past them before they fell, and he did the same to others beyond.
Another sorcerer punched at the air, a strange motion with no immediate opponent. A second later a whole cluster of soldiers a hundred yards before him liquefied. They each became thousands of pea-sized balls of fluid clustered in human form. The drops fell to the ground, each bursting on impact, leaving the earth pooled from a red-tainted rain. Another wizard blew his fury straight from the back of his throat with a force that warped the air in front of him and tore a bloody path as straight and limb-snapping as a rolling boulder’s.
In the space of a few seconds everything had changed. The Meins fled in chaos. Many of them dropped their weapons and tore free their helmets. They clawed at their fellow soldiers. They trampled others in their hysteria. They pushed and shoved, fear in complete control of their actions. It was clear that they were utterly defeated. Whatever they saw in the faces of the sorcerers shot them through with terror. And the Santoth followed, pursuing. As they did so, their fury grew. They moved faster, made grander gestures, roared out more powerfully. They stamped their feet, making the ground buck and shift around them. Slabs of earth tilted up, as if the earth’s crust were made of cheap board and axes were smashing up from underneath it, throwing soldiers somersaulting in the air.
Leeka muttered to himself that this was not possible. It could not be. He refuted it over and over again. It was not possible, even if it all felt intimately familiar to him. It was akin to his fever time, when he had burned with nightmares in that pile of dead bodies high up on the Mein Plateau. The images that had raged in his mind then were much like the ones around him now. But those dreams had not been real. They were delusions. He wanted to believe that these visions were also tricks of his mind. He should not accept them, could not trust them. If his eyes were to be believed, the world was a mural painted on a flimsy canvas. It could be ripped to shreds. According to his eyes, rents could tear through the sky and into the earth and sometimes shred through the flesh of those caught with it. These scars mended just as quickly as they began, but the sight and sound of them was an amazing horror. And, if his eyes did not lie, the sky poured down a deluge of serpentine horrors. Snakes, worms, centipedes the size of ancient pine trees, eel-like creatures pulled up from the black depths of some great ocean: all of these thudded down to the ground. They twisted and writhed, batting the Mein legions about, flattening men. The beasts rolled and came up with soldiers smashed paper thin against their sides. And he knew that his eyes were not seeing the worst of it. The real horrors, he was sure, were just at the edges of his vision, just outside his capacity to focus. No matter that he snapped his head from side to side, eyes darting, frantic. Still, he never saw the complete ghastliness he felt was there just beyond.