To Sunandi, Ehiru heard Gehanu shout, “Go!”
To which Sunandi replied, “I’ll never make it.”
“Try, damn you! We will hold them here.”
But already Ehiru could see that the double-line of horses had split, some veering to the east and the others west to flank them. The minstrels would never be able to hold all of the soldiers, and it would take only one to break off from the two-pronged attack and run Sunandi down.
“Merik’s Fires, they’re not slowing at all—” Ehiru heard one of the minstrels gasp, and then the soldiers were upon them.
Somewhere in the chaos that followed, Ehiru flung himself off the camel and rolled to his feet in the sand. He could fight better on the ground. A soldier rode at him with sword drawn; he braced himself. It took all his strength and skill to capture the flat of the blade between his hands when the soldier swung at his head. He threw his weight to one side and twisted the sword sharply; surprise and momentum made the soldier lose his grip on the hilt as the horse rode past. Ehiru threw the blade aside—and then gasped as his sight blurred, another landscape superimposing itself on the present. A forest out of nightmare: ferns whose tendrils reached for him, palm fronds dripping poison…
No! Not now! Not—
“—That one, damn you!” Ehiru pulled himself out of the vision to see a soldier on the other side of the chaos, reining in his horse to shout at the man who’d just tried to decapitate Ehiru. This one wore no livery—none of them did—but the stamp of the Gujaareen military caste was plain in his sharp features and heavy jaw. Something in his manner hinted at command. “Orders are to bring him back alive!”
Then Ehiru had no more time for thought. Dust and cacophony filled the air, human cries mingling with animal panic and the clang of metal. Around him life and death flickered in vignettes: Gehanu’s son Kanek struggling to control his frightened mount while a soldier bore down on him from behind. The singer Annon desperately using her precious harp as a shield while a soldier hacked at it with his sword. A dancer whose name Ehiru did not know screaming on the ground with his belly open and intestines laid out before him.
His sight locked on the last. A Gathering would be more merciful than the death the dancer faced now. Pivoting on his toes Ehiru stalked toward the man, the battle around him fading into so much background noise. “There are no Sharers here,” he whispered to himself. The words rang hollow despite their truth. He pushed aside guilt and tried to focus on his duty. “It must be done.”
But before he could reach the man there was a flurry of something at the edge of his vision. A distraction; he ignored it. But then it moved into view and he saw a soldier, horse wheeling away from a minstrel with a whip—
NO!
—And the dancer made no sound as the horse’s hoof came down on his head. Brain and bone sprayed the ground, the essence of a man’s whole self scattered to the dust.
Ehiru was not prepared for the rage, a flood of hatred so savage that his head pounded with it. But the soldier who had stolen his tithebearer had ridden off into the fray already.
Kill him, said the voice.
And Ehiru replied, “Yes, I shall.”
He ran after the soldier, silent, intent. Something moved across his vision and blocked his path, a different soldier brandishing a sword, words about surrender. He batted the sword aside and took hold of the arm that held it, ramming the heel of his free hand into the elbow. The wet pop of the breaking joint sounded like the head of the dancer, who might have been sentenced to an eternity in the shadowlands by a soldier’s carelessness. “I shall avenge you,” he whispered to the dancer’s soul, yanking the screaming, broken-armed soldier off the horse. The soldier kept screaming, writhing on the ground and holding the flopping ruin of his arm. Ehiru contemplated him for a moment, then remembered that this was not the soldier he wanted. He stepped around the riderless horse and continued after his prey.
Another soldier fell to the ground at his feet, choking and spitting blood. Nijiri ran into view, poised to strike again, though he held the blow when he saw that the soldier was disabled. Ehiru smiled at the sight.
“Brother!” The boy was wild-eyed. “There are more soldiers approaching from the south, a Kisuati patrol. If we can hold out a bit longer—” He caught his breath and whirled away as another soldier rode at him.
“Good,” Ehiru said, gliding onward. The boy was a Gatherer; he could take care of himself.
He spotted the soldier he’d marked near the center of the madness—perilously near Talithele’s palanquin. “You shall not,” he whispered, and charged past a riderless camel to grab the man’s leather half-torso under the arm. He hauled with all his weight and the startled soldier tumbled to the ground, confused but still trying to raise his sword. Ehiru stepped on the sword and put one knee on the man’s chest to pin him down. Then he took hold of the man’s hair and chin to break his neck—
Take him.
He frowned, pausing.
For the Goddess. A tithe was lost; here is another.
Around Ehiru the world was chaos. The soldiers had spotted the Kisuati patrol and were beginning to withdraw, harried by the surviving minstrels. Gehanu was on the ground, holding Kanek’s body and screaming her grief.
So much death and waste. The woman’s corruption and the Superior’s lies and Eninket he is Eninket.
“You should have trusted me,” Ehiru snarled at the face below him. The soldier’s eyes widened. Then Ehiru put his hand on the man’s face—
mother
—and forced his eyelids shut—
Hananja I beg you for peace
—and then he was inside the soldier and the taste of dreamblood was a sweet shock, like the first splatter of rain after a long drought. And after the taste, a torrent. He threw back his head and shouted in ecstasy as the self of the soldier poured into the aching hollowness within him, sending life surging from his core out to the very tips of his fingers and toes. So delicious it was, so powerful that his head reeled and his groin throbbed and his scalp tingled and OH GODDESS YES he needed more, so much more that he shoved aside the soul to look for it. There was nothing left save what little the soul needed to remain intact but what did that matter? He snapped the tether and sucked what spilled and crushed the soul and swallowed that too, and when nothing remained but tatters of mortal anguish, only then was he satisfied.
And then horror smashed up from the depths of Ehiru’s consciousness and shattered the bliss with a single word. The name for his sin:
Reaper.
27
Inunru, first Gatherer and founder of Gujaareh, creator of narcomancy, father of healing: the details of his murder have been lost, like patterns in sand.
As the soldiers bore down on them, Gehanu grabbed Sunandi’s arm. “Into the palanquin.”
Sunandi struggled to force her camel to turn; the anxious beast still wanted to run. “Hide with a sick old woman? I’m not a coward—”
“Don’t argue with me, fool woman! Get in there and maybe you’ll survive to warn your land!”
There was no arguing with that. Swallowing her pride, Sunandi dismounted and ran to the palanquin. Two of the minstrels were helping Talithele inside, piling saddlebags around the palanquin to help shield it. She joined them and climbed inside the flimsy cloth-and-balsa enclosure with the old woman. An instant later the sounds of chaos erupted around them, shouts and clanging metal and the whistling of frightened camels. The palanquin shuddered with the vibrations of hooves and bodies against the ground.