All was silent except for the buzzing of flies. Even the wind had died, as if in deference to blood and death. If he did not think, he could move past. His hands were cold, but his face was hot in the sun, and his eyes hurt so badly he thought he would go blind.
Bai circled back to him, her expression serene. The ginnies remained hunkered down against her, gone a dull gray color. She seemed undisturbed, as if this were simply a ghastly mural painted on a wall that one might look at, or away from, as one pleased.
If he did not speak, he would be sick. "I've never seen… They cut off their hands!" He pressed the kerchief to his mouth as bile rose and tears burned in the corners of his eyes.
"No, they didn't. If you look at the stumps, you'll see they're healed. Some better, some worse, some more recent than others. These people had already taken those injuries, days or months ago. Look what they have with them: grain, tools, blankets. These are refugees. I wonder what horror they were fleeing from. Out of the north."
"I guess it caught them up." Then the heaves hit, and he doubled over, ripped away the kerchief, and threw up on the road.
She stepped away neatly and waited him out. When he stopped retching, she said, "What of the village we passed through late yesterday? They'll be in the path of these wolves. And after them, all those other villages we passed. We have to go back. Try to warn them."
"I don't want to go back," he gasped. His mouth tasted horrible, although he'd had little except bile to vomit. He was dizzy; he could not get the world to stay still beneath him. "We'll take what we need from these supplies." He faltered. She was staring at him as if he had begun in truth to spin. "This will only go to rot, or be eaten by animals! I'm not a thief. The valuables they can keep, not that they can carry them in death. We have to go on! You must see that. I don't want to go back to Olossi!"
"Neither do I. No need to alert the Olossi militia, or any holy officials to preside over the passing ceremony. No need even to drag the dead to a Sorrowing Tower, for you see-" She gestured toward the waiting vultures. "-the acolytes of the Merciless One are already come. They and the beetles and the open air will scour these poor dead bodies properly."
"You're heartless!"
"I am? You're the one who wants to loot the murdered dead and keep on walking as if nothing happened."
"We can do nothing for them! If we go back, we risk falling into slavery again. You know that!"
"It's true. It's a risk I'm not sure I'm willing to take. What do you suggest, then, Keshad?"
There was no way to look away from the scattered dead. Even if he closed his eyes, the bitter taste in his mouth and the smell rising in the air reminded him of the death that surrounded them. He wiped his eyes with the heel of a hand and found that core of orderly determination that had kept him going for twelve long years of servitude.
"So. So. We can continue on West Track through the Aua Gap and to Horn."
"Where all the trouble lies."
"So we hear. We can walk along West Track another couple of days until we reach the Passage. That road will take us north through the East Riding into Sohayil. Or we can walk south into the Lending."
"There are no paths in the grasslands."
"We can retrace our steps to Olossi and take the Rice Walk, maybe walk all the way to Sund or Sardia. Or we can walk southwest, back to Old Fort. At Old Fort, there's a track that leads south along the foothills and eventually comes to the southern coast and West Farro."
Bai walked to the nearest wagon and nudged a corpse of a woman with the end of her walking stick. The woman's mouth gaped, and flies crawled in and out. She had no left hand, only a scarred stump. Bai was right: these were old wounds, poorly healed. The dead woman had been so poor that she was wearing an undyed hempen-cloth taloos, not even a coarse silk weave. The taloos had been mostly pulled off her, yanked up above her hips, and it was evident by the bloodstains on her thighs and pudenda that she had been raped multiple times before they had slit her throat.
"It seems foolish to go into the north, when that's where all this trouble is coming from." Bai set down the ginnies. She knelt beside the dead woman and tidied the taloos, pulling it down, straightening it. Then she crumbled the dry leaves of a sprig of lavender onto the corpse's pale lips. The rest of the lavender was wedged where the chin had fallen against the shoulder. "See, here." She pinched up a trifle between forefinger and thumb, whispered a prayer, and blew the fragments to the winds. "I saw lavender sprinkled on the other bodies, too. Some holy person has spoken the ceremonies over the dead, succored their ghosts, and opened a path through Spirit Gate. I suppose it was that Lady's mendicant we saw last night. Aren't you glad, now, that we gave her coin? It would have been blood money, otherwise, us clutching it to ourselves now that we've seen this."
He sighed, touching his blessing bowl. Now was not the time to tell Bai that he no longer believed in the gods of the Hundred, because they had abandoned him.
Magic hissed, crest flaring, and opened his mouth wide as he turned to face Olossiward, staring intently west along the road. Mischief whipped her tail so fast that she seemed to turn around in a flash; she scuttled off the road and vanished into the brush. Magic looked at Bai, and abruptly Kesh understood the eye, the look, the color, the posture: Can't we go now? How much longer do I have to stand here to protect you and your idiot brother?
"Trouble." Bai scooped up Magic. "Off the road. Now."
Numb, he followed her as she wove around the wreckage: the staring eyes that did not see the blue sky; a young child stabbed through the back; women, girls, and boys raped before, or after, they were murdered; an old man with his throat cut so deep, severing his spine, that his head had begun to roll off his shoulder because of the slope of the ground. The horror rang in his skull to the throbbing of his pulse. But he must not think on it. He and Bai had to save themselves. These dead could not be saved.
They pushed into the trees, following Mischief's trail, but the pipe-brush and pine saplings gave little cover here in the month before the wet, when plants turned gold and brown as they withered. Back a way they ran, and shoved at last into a thicket of pipe-brush crowded close enough that they could crouch down in their center and peep out between thick stalks. Mischief was waiting here. As soon as Bai set down Magic, the female ginny pushed in close beside him. Bai scritched them, talking a low, soothing voice. They quieted. All went still.
Feet trampled the earth in a steady rhythm, moving fast but without the erratic thunder of the panicked. Bai put a hand on his shoulder as the first rank appeared, coming from the direction of Olossi and marching Hornward. Reminded by the pressure of her fingers, he stopped himself from crying out. There were about thirty armed wolves and at least that many unarmed youths and children bound by ropes and stumbling along with blank expressions of shock. The wolves pushed past the massacre without a glance to either side. These were hard-faced men, and a few women, most dressed variously in leather coats, or in coats with rings sewn on for added protection, or in lacquered hide coats molded to fit the torso; caps of hide curved around heads, held on with a chin strap. The rest wore short robes woven of hempen cloth and had bare feet and bare heads, hair tied up in knots of linen. All carried either spears or swords except one woman who rested a woodcutter's axe on her left shoulder. A few handled wooden shields, while others held lacquered shields cut from hide. All of the shields had a bright red mark on them, a blurry crescent moon that looked as if it had been smeared there with fresh blood.