‘Oh, Tulan. Ephran, you believe this too? Helias is a traitor. Cascarg, like he called me. But he’s worse than that. There isn’t even a word to describe him. He’s-’
‘Pelyn,’ said Tulan sharply. ‘No. You can’t talk like that.’
‘I want to hear,’ said Ephran.
‘Who’s upstairs, Eph?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Probably-’
‘Exactly. You don’t know. Helias has loyals everywhere already. He works fast.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Pelyn. ‘This has been in the plot for years. Probably a decade.’
‘Pelyn…’
‘If you want to shut me up, come over here and do it. Otherwise let me tell you that Helias is in with the rogue Ynissul and they are led by Llyron. Yes, Ephran, Llyron. Believe it or don’t, I hardly care. A fleet of mercenary ships is about to land. Helias is going to hand over the Tuali aggressors just to save his own rotten skin.
‘But you know what? I don’t think I’ll bother saying any more. Why don’t we all just sit back, relax and watch the sun come up amidst the deluge of man’s magic. Hey, if we go upstairs we’ll get an even better view of the last dawn of the elves.
‘What do you think?’
Chapter 22
The shame of a coward lies in the eyes of the innocents he condemns. The staging camp had been abandoned and forgotten for over nine years, ever since the last of the refugees from Hausolis had been housed elsewhere. Nine years was a long time in the rainforest. Beeth had been hard at work. Growth had been voracious but the canopy above was still thin.
The camp lay an hour into the forest beyond the southern wall of the Ultan. It had been fashioned in a natural clearing, expanded to house twelve long low dormitory buildings made of mud, timber and thatch and one large covered area for eating, resting and sheltering. The latrines and baths had been located inside buildings attached to each dormitory.
At its busiest, the camp had housed over fifteen hundred people. Katyett walked in with more than twice that number and found the camp in worse repair than her scout had intimated. From a quick glance, she knew that four dormitory roofs had collapsed, that the open-sided covered area was unsafe with the sheer weight of ivy, vine, lichen and mould swamping it, and that the four-foot-high grass and undergrowth would be a happy hunting ground for every predator in the forest.
But it was the best they were able to provide beyond a forced march to Taanepol, which, at the pace of the Ynissul civilians, would have taken at least six days. The attrition rate among those they’d saved would have been appalling. It might be dangerous here for a while but at least it was manageable.
Katyett looked back at the column and closed her eyes at the numbers she saw. She sent TaiGethen into the camp to beat the grass and scare off whatever they could before bringing them all in and making them find their own spots. TaiGethen then patrolled through them while others searched every building, trying to identify where the civilians could go.
Olmaat was set down among the civilians and was immediately fussed over by Ynissul iads, who produced cloth and salve from seemingly nowhere. Katyett saw a smile on his face that touched his eyes for the first time since he’d left the Gardaryn with Jarinn and Lorius.
‘Graf, Merrat, Pakiir, Faleen.’ The four TaiGethen trotted over. ‘We need to work fast. We’re lucky because the rain isn’t coming back for an hour or two. Not until dawn has broken anyway. I need you to find every willing iad and ula you can and divide them, one group to each spare Tai. By spare I mean all those not engaged protecting the rest.
‘I need working parties to clear vegetation from the dormitories that are viable and, if you’re feeling brave, from the bivouac roof. If we can make that safe, we can billet a lot of people there.
‘I want others to start collecting food. Yniss knows we need Beeth to provide us a bounty beyond imagining. So berries, roots, herbs. Not just for food, medicine too. Let’s not be naive. We’re here with people who will get bitten, scratched, stung and infested. We’ll need pots of the critical stuff. Tea tree, vismia, verbena and pareira as a minimum.
‘I want others to get down to the river. We’ve got spears with us so we can attach vines and fish. I need traps for meat. Tual save me, I don’t need to tell you. As much as you can as often as you can. Pass your knowledge as you need to. We have to keep the camp smoke-and flame-free, so teach steaming and how to build a rock oven, clay stoves, anything. Get them involved in their own survival. Let them sit and fester and they’ll get desperate and difficult. Inspire and survive, as Takaar would have said. We’re only three miles from the Ultan. We don’t need wanderers and we don’t need attention.
‘Anything else?’
Merrat chuckled. ‘No, we understand. And that just leaves you to do the talk, right?’
‘Which talk?’
Merrat spread her hands. ‘Rainforest survival, naturally. Just a pity you haven’t got all your skins, shells and paintings, isn’t it?’
Katyett thinned her lips and glowered at Merrat, though there was a little warmth of humour in her gut.
‘And you, Merrat, can take your party to do the most important job in the camp.’
Merrat’s mirth dissipated. ‘I don’t want to ask, do I?’
Katyett shook her head. ‘No, but I am ordering you to ask just the same.’
Merrat laughed. ‘My Arch Katyett, leader of the TaiGethen. Which is the most important job in the camp?’
‘Latrines,’ said Katyett. ‘Latrines for three thousand elves unused to trail food and exposure to heat and rain. And you’ll be close enough to hear my talk too. How lucky you are. Sorry, Merrat, I didn’t catch that.’
‘I said Yniss blesses me with the tasks he sets.’
‘He does, my Tai. He really does.’ Pelyn hadn’t persuaded them to go upstairs. In the end it didn’t matter. If there was one thing for which Sildaan could be relied on, it was punctuality. The skies had remained clear for her too. The sun was banishing shadows from the top of the canopy behind them. It rose to sparkle against the tall spire of the Gardaryn.
Down on the approaches to the harbour, in the quarters of the city the Cefans and Orrans had cornered for their own in a loose alliance, or so Tulan had grudgingly revealed, it didn’t matter that the skies were clear. It rained anyway. Teardrops of pure, beautiful and terrifying dark yellow. They fell dense and heavy like Gyal’s grief, trailing smoke.
Behind them, orbs of brown and green traced up high into the sky, crashing down on buildings or disappearing from sight, their impacts told by the rumbles and echoes of detonation. The rain set alight everything it touched. Quickly, the whole of Harbour Side and Salt were ablaze. Thick smoke fled into the heavens.
Pelyn had stood and walked to the window to get a closer look. The three of them had belatedly moved onto a balcony, their unfettered view all the more terrifying. Pelyn thought she could hear screams and the clash of weapons. It was hard to be sure. But she knew what she felt.
Yniss had turned from them. Tual had retreated to his fastness in the forest. Shorth’s arms would have to be wide indeed to embrace all the souls heading his way. Men and magic were rampaging through the elven first city. She watched their castings rise and fall. She felt heat from the fire and cold from the ice.
She felt a terror so deep it reached through her and back into history. It chilled the souls of the ancients in the halls of the dead. It rooted her where she stood and meant she cared little that her cloak was hanging open or that her erstwhile guards were standing at her shoulders. Not as captors, as Al-Arynaar behind their Arch.
Pelyn stared while the echoes of light danced on the backs of her eyes. She stood as the skies began to darken for the first rains of the day and the streets drummed already with the sound of the footsteps of elves fleeing they knew not where. And then she turned from the raw power battering her streets and stared straight into Tulan’s stupefied eyes.
‘So do you still think you should serve me up to be raped by every Tuali ula in Ysundeneth, or are you going to go and find me some clothes and a sword?’ Katyett and the TaiGethen had been drawn to the north end of the camp some time before dawn as if in response to a growing threat. The nose for danger was, Takaar said, the single biggest difference between a Tai warrior and any other elf. Katyett disagreed, preferring to think of her speed and reactions as her greatest assets.