They had taken slaves in the ancient way, known in story but since outlawed according to the decree on Law Rock: No one shall take a slave as a prize in war. This was obviously part of that group which had passed Kesh and Bai last night, marching Olossiward. Now they marched back Hornward with their prize. What lay in the north, that wolves could bring war-gotten slaves to the hearths of honest, or dishonest, citizens? How far and how deep had the shadows fallen?
He swayed, but Bai leaned against him to steady him. The ginnies were absolutely still. He was the only one whimpering under his breath. The wind had come up without him noticing, and the rustle of leaves hid his faint noises.
A child trotting along raised its eyes and saw the bodies sprawled everywhere. It gasped out a sob. The man walking next to it slapped it without breaking stride, and it hunched its shoulder and bit on a hand while the other young ones stared with wide eyes and bitten lips, and bent their stride to walk faster. Children never walked in so much silence. He looked at Bai, but he could see nothing familiar in her. She was a stranger, maybe not Bai at all but some demon who had taken Bai's shape and now traveled with him on its own errand. Demons weren't necessarily malicious. They simply had their own ways and their own hopes and fears, none of which had anything to do with humanity.
The party of slavers moved out of sight, leaving the dust to settle behind them. The orange silk caught in the thornberry fluttered, one corner twisting up and twisting down as it tried to wriggle free. It too was captive. In the trees, the vultures waited with the patience known to all servants of the gods. More had joined them, their scabrous heads light among the dark branches. The boldest lifted, and flapped awkwardly down to land next to a child's body.
He began to shift, to go out there, but Bai caught his wrist in a fierce grip and stopped him. Magic had opened his mouth wide. Kesh was panting, his throat sour and his stomach heaving, but he swallowed it down until his eyes watered and he thought he would pass out.
The vulture exploded off the ground, taking wing.
They came at a trot, in the wake of the cadre. The two men wore short robes but no armor, and each one carried a bow, with a long knife strapped to his belt. Although the others had tramped past without stopping, these two slowed and paused, drawn at once to the bile Kesh had vomited up. They surveyed the ground; they conferred in low voices; bent over, they scoured the road's dust for signs. Like their comrades, they ignored the bodies and the buzzing flies as easily if it were a sight they saw everyday, and perhaps it was.
Magic pressed himself against Bai's side as one of the men, on hands and knees, followed the faint trail left by Kesh and Bai's passage down the sloping verge and into the grassy cleared space between road and forest. His companion had an arrow ready, and he scanned the trees with a hard gaze that seemed to pierce right through the foliage.
Bai lifted both ginnies and fixed them on Kesh's shoulders. He stifled a yelp. Mischief's tongue flicked against his ear. Magic grunted, displeased to be dumped on this unappetizing male rival. But they stayed with claws clutching Kesh's robe, gazes rising as Bai rose smoothly to her feet. She unfastened the top two ties on her sleeveless jacket, and pushed out of the thicket of pipe-brush. Once away from him, she made as much noise as she could pushing through branches as she approached the cleared verge.
Kesh was frozen, a coward, too stunned to respond as she placed herself in the open.
"Whew!" she said as the men saw her and the crawling one straightened with a leer on his face that made Kesh shiver with disgust. "I hate peeing in the woods."
The way her jacket set on her shoulders changed somehow, its tight curve over her shoulders relaxing away as, he supposed, the front gaped open. The two men dropped their gazes right down to her breasts.
She leaped. She had a knife in her hand. Light winked on the blade. It sank into the chest of the closest man before Kesh could blink. Yet when he did blink, two or three times, as if he had a midge in his eye, afterward he saw a new movement, already begun. The other man had lunged, with hand gripped to the arrow. He thrust the arrow as though the barbed arrowhead were a spear. She sidestepped the thrust, kicked up into his groin so hard that bone snapped, and spun away as he howled and doubled over. Meanwhile, as if he had just realized he was dead, the first man collapsed in a flaccid heap, spirit fled.
A knife blade flashed. Somehow, the other man had unsheathed his own knife. Despite his injuries, he cut at her. She sprang, actually flipped twice-hands feet hands feet-and ended up on the other side of the dead man. With a graceful sweep, she bent low and came up with his sword. Blades clashed as long knife met short sword. She twisted hers, and flipped her wrist. The knife went flying and hit the ground with a thunk. He yelped, stumbled out of range, but went down with his companion's sword buried up to its hilt in his gut. She shoved him onto his back as she let go the sword, scooped up his knife, and straddled him.
Face contorted with fear and pain, he thrashed, begging for mercy: "-pray you, Lady, I pray you-be merciful-"
"So I will be. You will be paid, in the same coin you took." She cut his throat, jumped back as blood spilled, and tossed his knife onto his twitching body.
Turning, she raised a hand to wave. How strange, thought Kesh, that there was no blood on her palms. "Come on! Quickly! There may be another set of scouts."
He rose, but his legs could only be moved in a shuffling stagger. The ginnies weighed heavily on his shoulders. He had to lean on her walking staff to stay upright.
She gave him a look, fastened up her ties, and hit the wreckage like a scavenging dog. She collected six bladders of drink and a basket with shoulder straps which she filled with wedges of cheese, flat bread, rice balls wrapped in se leaves, several precious pouches marked with the ideogram for dried tea leaves, and oilcloth wrapped around what was surely dried fish. His stomach hurt, just looking at it. His gaze skimmed across the open eyes and rictus grins of the dead, elided the splashes of dried blood. All at once, he dropped. The ginnies scrambled off as he heaved again. There was nothing in his stomach to lose.
She came back to him while he was still kneeling at the side of the road with a hand shading his eyes and his stomach clenched, all sharp pain.
"Blood takes people that way sometimes," she said, setting the basket down by her feet.
Her voice could not be that of his sister. Zubaidit, whom he had once known, would have been screaming with hysterics. It infuriated him that this lilu had taken over Bai's form and done violence with hands that ought to have belonged to gentle little Bai.
"I've never killed a man," he said accusingly.
"Yet how many out of the empire have you sold into slavery over the years to buy us free from our debt?" she asked him. "Isn't that a way of killing the life a person once had? Isn't that what happened to us? And at least Hundred folk sell only their labor and have a hope of earning out their time. Those slaves from the south will never go home."
The bile rising in his throat choked him.
Was it the same? No, not at all. Not at all.
"Where do we go?" he asked. All his determination had fled. The buzzing of the flies had sapped him. He was empty. A vulture, seeing them stay still for so long, sailed down to land beside a corpse, and bent its head to tear.
"We have to go back. Think of that village we came through yesterday in the afternoon."
"It isn't our fault their Ladytree rotted through and fell three years back and the new one is only a sapling. They ought to have allowed us to shelter for no coin in their empty council hall, instead of wanting to charge us just because they're greedy."
"It doesn't matter how they treated us. We have to go back because it would be wrong to go on, knowing others will be used in this same way. Come on. I found food enough to last us a few days."