Tavi grunted, but nodded. "One thing more. One of my men is hurt. He needs a healer before we go any farther."
"He can't have one," Durias snapped. He took a deep, steadying breath. "That is, there are none at the city in any case. They're all in the field, and we're already heading their way."
"The ruins?" Tavi guessed.
"Just keep up." Durias nudged his horse into a trot for a few steps, drawing ahead of Tavi.
They traveled for three hours that way, Durias leading them, though Tavi became aware that the countryside on either side of the track they followed was far from empty. Once in a while, he managed to catch vague, flickering glimpses out of the corner of his eyes; movement in a stand of tall grass, or a slightly too-solid shadow among the trees. They were being watched, presumably by Durias's scouts, concealing themselves behind woodcraftings of varying skill.
The track began to show much heavier signs of use as they went. When they rounded a final hilltop and came into view of the ruins on their hill, and the battleground Nasaug had chosen to once more pit his forces against the Legions of Alera, Tavi drew up short for a second, unconsciously stopping his horse. He wished like the crows that Max had been nearby to provide a vision crafting for him, so that he might see the besieged hilltop in greater detail, but a few things were obvious, even from there.
The Legions had been hard-pressed, and their outer palisade wall shattered. They'd taken serious losses while doing so. Tavi could see the gleaming armor of fallen legionares lying in rough groups and singly, as often as not mixed with the dark-furred forms of fallen Canim. Presumably, they'd died while buying time for the engineering cohort to reinforce the walls of the ruins, which now stood at a conspicuously uniform, formidable height.
A sea of Canim surrounded the hilltop, and even a glance showed Tavi that Nasaug had trained his conscripts into disciplined troops and equipped them with uniform weaponry-even with their own armor, if lighter than that of the warrior Canim or Aleran legionares.
Worse, the Canim had brought forth their ritualists again. Streamers of violet fire fell upon the hilltop in what was almost a regular cadence, slamming onto the walls and blasting great gouges from the stones, or from the earth when they struck the ground-and presumably from any Aleran unfortunate enough to be beneath one. Sharp, crackling reports resounded from the hilltop in a steady, hollow-sounding thunder.
"Bloody crows," Tavi whispered.
Kitai stared at the hilltop, her expression closed, but he could feel the sudden surge of fear and anger in her.
Durias looked over his shoulder, and said, harshly, "Keep moving."
They pressed on, passing through several checkpoints, where the Canim sentries seemed to have been expecting them. They waved Durias through without speech, though Tavi could feel their bloody eyes tracking his movements.
As they approached what Tavi recognized as the command area of the Canim force, they came upon a nightmare made flesh.
At the base of a small hillock, the Canim were piling bodies.
There were so many corpses that at first Tavi thought that they had been stacking bags of grain, or sand. Hundreds of dead Alerans lay in the oncoming sunset. The smell was something hideous, and both Tavi's and Durias's horses began to shy away from the stench, nervous at the smell of death. Tavi had to dismount, and moved to the horse's head, holding the bridle and murmuring quietly to soothe the beast.
Tavi wanted to look away from the bodies, but he couldn't. Most of them were legionares. Many of them wore the slightly differently styled armor of the Senatorial Guard, but many others wore the achingly familiar armor of the First Aleran.
And still others were dressed in the clothing of common holders.
Tavi stared. Among the dead were the elderly. Women. Children. Their clothing was stained with blood, their bodies mangled by brutally violent attacks. If he didn't retch his guts out on the ground, it was only because he'd had so much practice holding them in over the past two years.
It took him a moment longer, but he realized that the Canim were… putting the bodies through some kind of process. A pair of ritualists in their pale mantles stood at two separate tables-no, they were more like wide, shallow, elevated basins, tilted at a sharp angle. As Tavi watched, two other Canim, older laborers of the maker caste, by their simple clothing and greying fur, gently picked up the body of a holder woman. They carried it to one of the tables and laid it down on the basin, with her head positioned at the basin's lower end.
The ritualist murmured something, a musical-sounding, even meditative growl-and then reached down with a curved knife and cut the dead woman's throat on both sides.
Blood trickled from the corpse. It drained down the shallow basin, where it gathered and flowed down through a hole at the bottom of the basin, out of a small spigot. There, it poured into a wide-mouthed stone jar.
Tavi could only stare at it in mute astonishment, unable to quite believe what he was seeing. The laborers fetched another corpse for the second basin. As Tavi watched, the first ritualist beckoned a nearby Cane, a young male not more than six feet tall, and far more wiry than an adult. The young Cane gathered up the stone jar, replacing it with another one from a row of similar vessels nearby. Then he turned and loped rapidly away, toward the sorcery-blasted hilltop.
A moment later, the ritualist nodded to another set of workers-only these were half a dozen or so Alerans, also wearing the clothing of holders. They gently removed the woman's body, wrapped it in sackcloth, and carried it to an open wagon, typical of those used as an improvised hearse on the battlefield, where they laid it down beside several other similarly wrapped figures.
Tavi looked up to find Durias watching him from where he stood at his own mount's head. The centurion's face was bleak, but Tavi could read nothing from it, nor sense any of the young man's emotions through his own shock, revulsion, and growing anger.
"What is this?" Tavi demanded. His voice came out confident and cold, though he hadn't meant it to be.
The muscles in Durias's jaws flexed a few times. Then he said, "Wait here." He led his horse away.
Tavi watched him go, then averted his eyes from the basins and the stacked corpses. He walked his weary mount back to the wagon to give it the company of the mules drawing it.
"Varg?" Tavi asked quietly.
Varg watched the ritualists with a rigidly neutral body posture. "Blood into jars," he rumbled.
"This is where their power comes from," Tavi said softly. "Isn't it?"
Varg flicked his ears in assent, as bodies continued to be drained and runners continued to carry the filled jars toward the battle lines.
"This is how they used power against us at the Elinarch," Tavi snarled. "They killed our people after they landed and used their blood against the Legion."
"Take no particular offense, Aleran," Varg rumbled. "They are not choosy about which blood they take, so long as it is from a reasoning being. The ritualists have killed more of my people than the whole of your race. The sorceries they used to assault your shores, block your skies, redden your stars would have required millions upon millions of lives."
"And you allow them to exist?" Tavi spat.
"They serve a purpose," Varg replied. "They have the power to bless bloodlines. Increase fertility in our females. Increase the bounty of crops, and to lessen the ravages of storms, droughts, plagues."
"And you are willing to sacrifice your peoples lives for them to do it?"
"My people are willing to make a gift of their blood upon death," Varg growled. "Though there are times when a particularly powerful ritualist forgets that his power should be used to serve his people. Not the other way around."
"There are women there," Tavi said, his mouth tight. "Children. I thought better of Nasaug."