"Slave, that one is too ill for the purpose. Find another to use." The voice was gravelly but quiet and with a feminine tone. The voice spoke in Haddad's native tongue, but the words sounded foreign, as if whoever was speaking them hadn't known the language for very long. He turned his head slowly to see the speaker. It was a Keldon, but this one was different from the warriors he had seen charging the line. She was a woman, six feet tall and dressed in dyed leathers. The red and orange tones were bright and jarring to his eyes. Her features were coarse, and her gray skin was wet ash in the shadows of the vehicle. She turned and looked at him with eyes rimmed with kohl. A hand shoved his head, and his vision clouded at the fresh pain. The cursing he heard became shouts of anger behind him. A struggle was occurring, and he turned to see what was happening. He found a man of his own nation crouched by him. The poor state of his clothes and the resignation in his body were obvious even to Haddad's still blurry vision. This was a man who had been with the Keldons far longer than Haddad cared to imagine.
"Don't look at them directly, boy," the man said as he looked off to the left of Haddad's face. Haddad tried to see what was happening as the sounds of struggle died down. The brightly clad woman was standing in front of a League officer restrained by two men. His mouth was bleeding, and he bared his teeth in challenge. The Keldon smashed his face with her gloves, which were heavy and studded. He fell to his knees, and the two men kept his head bowed as he began cursing in broken, incoherent mutterings.
"He challenged her with his eyes. Never meet their eyes.
Now she'll make him suffer." All this was delivered by the crouching man in a low voice that Haddad strained to hear as he looked around.
He must be in one of the large vehicles he had seen on the battlefield, Haddad thought. He was on a long deck that stretched maybe sixty feet from end to end. One side of the vehicle opened to the outside through several large doors, which allowed light inside. The landscape flowed by at a fair clip, and Haddad realized motion sickness contributed to his nausea. The vehicle he was in was packed with League prisoners. The captives were lying down, and only a few were not obviously injured or dazed. There was only a small group of what must be Keldon servants-all raggedly dressed men. They seemed rather stoic at the Keldon victory, and Haddad wondered what their status really was. Loud horns sounded outside the vehicle, and Haddad felt a moment of hope as he imagined it signaling the arrival of League forces.
"Hold his hand still," the alien woman said. Both servants rammed the officer's hand to the deck, and Haddad wanted to protest, but he couldn't drag a single sound from his parched throat. The woman drew back her metalshod stave and then slammed it down on the man's fingers. The officer inhaled to scream, and he reared his head up, staring into her eyes. Before he could voice his pain, the stave rose and crushed his other hand. He did not scream but seemed to dissolve into the wooden deck. When the woman spoke she didn't even sound angry.
"Over the side with him." She gestured to an opening, and the body was flung clear. "Walking speed and a wide circle," she called, and the command was relayed by others, presumably carrying it to the driver of the craft. The passage of landscape slowed, and Haddad became more aware of the craft's curious gait. He could see other vehicles moving into his line of sight as the craft began to turn. The image that sprang to mind was of hermit crabs using toy boats as shells. The vehicles were overturned hulls in shape with wide doors and windows showing. He could see the gray faces of Keldons, in contrast with the captives, looking out. The land vehicles were balanced on dozens of legs, and the rhythmical sight of them made his motion sickness worse as the female Keldon spoke.
"I am Latulla, and you will obey," she said loudly but without any particular emphasis. "I will not be questioned or challenged. All other Keldons will receive the same obedience and respect, or you will be punished." Haddad watched other men being thrown from what he decided to call land barges. Some were limp and did not rise. Others got up and started collecting themselves.
"Some of you might be thinking of escape. Try and you will be punished, as I punished the slave without respect. Even if you should succeed, you will only find death." As she finished, Haddad could see groups of something breaking into the large circle of moving land barges. The timing was too perfect, and he realized he was seeing a planned performance and not some impromptu expression of rage or cruelty. This was carefully staged, and only his weakness and passivity had saved him from a similar fate.
The land birds of the wastes were now only a legend in the civilized cities of the League where Haddad had grown up. They had been relegated to the status of monsters of fairy tales, spoken of only to scare children. But in the wilds of the east, they were the primary danger faced by League patrols before the Keldons began raiding. They hunted in pairs or small groups, and their presence in a district meant panic. All that Haddad knew of the parea, called the running death by some, flowed through his mind. Then the beasts spread out and fell onto the men stumbling on the ground.
The birds overtook their victims, and when they reached the running men, they knocked them down with what appeared playful nudges of their beaks. Full-grown men fell and tumbled head over heels as a result of those love taps. Other birds snapped at flailing limbs and dismembered men as neatly and quickly as slaughtered chickens in the mess hall. More parea darted in, and Haddad wondered where they had all come from. At more than five hundred pounds apiece, the surrounding landscape couldn't support many of the vicious birds. He coughed and spit several times before he could make a sound.
"It's like a flock of sparrows hunting a field," Haddad said. The juxtaposition of that homey memory against the hellish scene was grotesque. "Where are they all coming from?" He was talking to himself, but the crouching slave- that was what he must be-answered him.
"Every trip they dispose of the troublemakers or the dead here. The parea can sprint past a galloping horse and run for hours. They come from miles around whenever the Keldons enter the wastes. Latulla takes advantage of the birds' hunger to shatter the spirits of the captives. I'd curse them all if I didn't know I'd end up out there."
The birds that straggled in found no moving prey and fell upon the bodies of the League officers and slaves. The unconscious victims mercifully died without seeing their devourers. The birds leaped and tore in a territorial display to keep other gorging birds away. Keldon warriors handled barbed lances to drive away birds that might come too near the barges. Another round of horns sounded.
"The lesson is over. Let it never be forgotten," Latulla intoned. Haddad knew he would always remember and swore vengeance, but he swore it silently and with eyes cast down in apparent submission.
"Into traveling column and trail speed," she called and was once again echoed to wherever the control or helm was located. The barge straightened out, and Haddad's last view of the bloody scene was of the parea snatching meat from each other's kills.