Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (8 page)

Chapter 12: A Generous Spirit

Fava woke in a sickroom with a dozen blankets piled over her. She shivered so violently that no part of her body would hold still.

Her teeth chattered so hard she feared they would break, and for a long time she could not recall her name. Someone poured hot tea down her throat, and she choked, yet it felt good. A moment later she begged for more.

“Whose command are you in?” a man asked, and Fava looked up into the eyes of a Neanderthal, a man with such tender blue eyes that when she saw his ear missing, she could not believe he was Blade Kin.

“I … I … don’t know,” she answered.

“Do you know your name? Do you know where you are?”

“Ca … can’t remember. I … can’t.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” the man said. “I am a healer. I shall make you whole soon enough.”

He placed his hand on her head, touching her temples with his fingers, cupping her jaw with his thumb, and he hummed wordlessly deep in his throat, making a sound that was almost a growl.

His hands seemed very warm, and gentle.

Something stirred within her, and Fava suddenly felt herself warm too, as if she were bathed in a heated mist.

Over the next few minutes her trembling faded completely so that she felt only warmth, a pleasant sensation not unlike drunkenness that engulfed her as surely as the ocean had engulfed her.

The healer began trembling, and at last he moved his hand away from her head, and he shivered.

He studied Fava from the corners of his eyes, still shaking, just watching her.

A psychic healer,
she realized, here among the Blade Kin. She was too tired to feel amazed. As Fava lay still, she could hear the cries of men and women in pain around her, the sounds of a sick house with hundreds of injured.

“What is your name?” the healer asked.

“Fava.”

He wrapped a blanket around himself, and just sat, watching her. His eyes were deep-set under his brows, so that the blue eyes seemed to glow from within a shadowed cave. “You have a good spirit,” he whispered. “Generous, like the winter pear tree.”

He emphasized the Pwi word for
generous
, Fava.

She nodded, rested her eyes. People cried all around, yet the healer sat next to Fava, unmoving. She looked at the room—large enough so thousands of people who lay on the straw-covered floors, and every twenty feet beams of dark wood supported the ceiling.

Each beam had an iron peg in it that held a lantern. The injured were spread in great lines, wrapped in bundles.

“Others need help,” she said.

“I have touched their spirits, and I know what is in them,” he answered. “Aside from the girl who brought you in, let them die.”

She looked up at the healer sharply, ready to reprove him, but saw that he spoke only the truth.

Though he professed to be a healer, he would let them die. How long had it been since a healer like him had walked among the Pwi?

Not in many years. Fava felt warm, comfortable, but her head spun, and she closed her eyes, just breathed. The healer went to a fire a dozen yards off, then returned and handed her a cup of warm broth.

“Wertha,” the healer said in answer to her unspoken question. “My name is Wertha. I may be a healer, but I am not as generous as you. I will not heal those who would destroy my people.”

He placed his hand on her head and sang in Pwi, using words that she recognized as ancient forms, words that her grandfathers had not spoken for generations. “Still, even here in Bashevgo, you can find some light if you look for it.”

“I am not looking for light,” Fava said.

“Yet the light is coming,” Wertha argued. “Long ago, a great Spirit Walker named Pwichutwi said,

When the mountains walk on water
when the blue undying sun lies broken,
the Mother of Evil a son shall deliver,
And this shall be the Okansharai’s token:
Delivered from death in a spray of blood,
Call his name, Generous, and he shall rise,
Light shall drench the earth, as if a flood,
And all shall behold the Okansharai.”

Fava looked at him reprovingly. The healer was not young, and he kept his blond hair in small tight braids like a dozen strings that crept down his back.

“Who is this Okansharai?” Fava asked. Her heart leapt within her.

“How can you not know who the Okansharai is? Every child of Bashevgo learns the poem at his mother’s feet, for this
city
is the Mother of Evil, and every slave woman hopes that her son will be the Okansharai. You are obviously not of this city, Fava.”

He leaned forward and whispered, “And if you were Blade Kin, you’d arrest me now, for I have just spoken the forbidden prophecy in your hearing.”

Fava lurched back, wondering if this were a trap. “Are you not Blade Kin?” Fava asked. “I could not arrest another Blade Kin for this.”

“I must be,” Wertha said, “for like you, I am missing an ear. And like you, I wear the uniform of a Blade Kin.”

The healer was shivering, hunched with a blanket wrapped about him. He did not look dangerous, though he spoke of dangerous things.

“Who is the Okansharai?”

Wertha said, “The Okansharai, it is said, is the freer of all. He will destroy the nation of Craal and her mother Bashevgo, then free the slaves. Some hold that there will be a great flood before he comes, so that it will appear that the mountains walk on water. Some say that his mother’s name will be Fava, and that she will call him from her womb by the power of her own will. I do not profess to understand such things, and the Spirit Walker who foretold this died hundreds of years ago, and he was quite mad.

“Still”—he leaned forward and breathed in her ear—“Phylomon is finally slain. Has not the blue undying sun been broken? And last night I looked from the walls and saw mammoths running over the ice through the fog, and I must wonder: did not the mountains walk on water, carrying you here, into the city that all Thralls call ‘The Mother of Evil’? And is your name not Fava? Perhaps the prophecy is coming to pass, and you shall bear the child that will free us. When I healed you, I touched your womb. You carry a child within you.”

“No!” Fava cried, for she had not known she was pregnant, and she did not want her child to be born in this city, condemned by some ancient prophecy to live as a warrior in hopes of freeing the world.

“It’s true. You carry the child,” Wertha said. “He shall bring light to the world.”

“You’re mad!” Fava countered.

“I know it is true: last night, I dreamed a dream that reminded me of the prophecy. If not for it, I would never have found you here.”

“What dream?” Fava asked.

“I dreamed that a great black crow flew over the land, reciting the words to the prophecy. The crow landed on this building. Now, I’ve long been a healer, but I would never have come to this building if not for the crow.”

“Why not?” Fava asked, and she knew the crow could have only been her father, Chaa, sending a message. She breathed deeply, trying to stanch the flow of tears that threatened to escape her at the thought.

“Because this is a barn where slavers store fodder for cattle,” Wertha explained, and Fava suddenly realized she was lying on a hard floor, thinly covered with hay. At first she’d thought it must just be the way of the slavers, to house their wounded like animals, but now she saw that it was a necessity.

She lay still for a bit. “Will you help me?” Fava asked.

Wertha pulled a knife from a sheath at his waist. Before Fava realized what he was doing, he sliced off his left ear.

It began to bleed, but he placed a hand over it, took it away a second later, and the blood flow stopped.

“I’m yours to command, My Lady,” he said, “even to death. Others in this city also wait for the light. We will serve you.” He laid the severed ear on her lap, a bloody token of his devotion.

She didn’t trust him fully yet, but she couldn’t ignore this show of devotion. Nor did she dare refuse his offer.

“Then help me find my husband,” she begged, “a slave recently captured in Smilodon Bay. His name is Tull Genet. And I have others I am looking for, too, friends.”

“As you command,” Wertha said, and he got up, still wrapped in his blanket. “Though I do not know where to look for one slave in so large a city. The ships brought the captives in over a week ago. Tull could be anywhere by now—he could even have been sold into Craal.”

Fava lay a moment, wondering, drinking the warm broth. Wertha stood by her, as if afraid to leave.

Now that he had found the mother of his savior, it seemed that he wanted only to be with her. “My husband killed four Blade Kin when they tried to take him. I think they will punish him.”

Wertha closed his eyes thoughtfully. “They may send him to the mines. I will begin searching for him at once.”

Wertha stalked away, his eyes gleaming with the strange compelling light of a fanatic on a mission from God. Fava could not help but think he would get in trouble.

If it were against the law to speak the ancient prophecy, then how much more so would it be to declare that the prophecy was coming to pass and to search among the mines for the father of the Okansharai.

For several minutes she rested, then realized that she was lying under the blankets in damp clothes. She searched among her belongings, found the packs Phylomon had given them with all nine rods.

Yet something was missing: her fader brooch.

She recalled how Darrissea had grabbed for Fava’s cape in the water, found the spot where the brooch had ripped free from the red wool. Fava closed her eyes.

The powerful brooch must have fallen to the bottom of the ocean.

***

Chapter 13: Born of Evil

Tull climbed stone steps up from a hole in the ground, into a great amphitheater of black basalt—ancient, exotic, Decadent in design.

At each end of the oval theater were enormous reclining statues of Thrall women, their delicate breasts jutting skyward, their wombs swollen with child, their agonized faces gazing up into heaven.

Tull had just walked out of an opening in the statue’s womb. Blade Kin in lacquered leather armor and crimson robes filled the stands.

Bodies of losers littered the arena sands, which were stained the color of iron with dry blood.

From the stands Blade Kin shouted, and Tull stood for a moment peering up at the sky, tasting the air, feeling empty and dazed.

The morning was cold, with a wet wind that smelled of coming rain. He hadn’t seen daylight in weeks, and for some reason his swollen hands felt disconnected from his arms.

His stomach knotted with fear.
They want to kill you,
he thought. Tull wondered whom he would have to face, what crime the man had committed.

Flocks of white gulls wheeled above the stadium, and during the lull several of them landed to grasp hungrily at animal bones and other tidbits that the Blade Kin had thrown into the arena.

An announcer shouted Tull’s name, listed his crimes. All morning long Tull had waited below, waiting for his first fight, listening to the cries from the stands.

None of the other warriors today could lay claim to having killed so many Blade Kin as Tull, and as the announcer listed Tull’s crimes, the Blade Kin rose to their feet in salute and shouted their approval.

On the far side of the arena, from between the legs of a great stone mother, came Khur.

He strode forward, muscles rippling, flashing his sword overhead.

He saw Tull and faltered. He quit smiling a moment, and as the announcer listed Khur’s single crime of wounding a human, Tull realized that he was being asked to kill a friend.

The Blade Kin had matched them because they shared a common wall to their cell.

What do you want of life?
Tull asked himself.
What do you want? You can die at Khur’s hand and win only death, or you can kill him and win what: guilt for murdering a fool, or perhaps half a life as a Blade Kin?

Phylomon’s words rang in Tull’s memory, “You must get free!”

Khur advanced on Tull, circling slowly. “You are a worthy adversary,” Khur said.

He feinted a thrust with his sword, and Tull leapt back.

Khur smiled. “We must give them a good show! They will reward us afterward, should one of us live to become Blade Kin.”

Khur leapt in, thrusting. Tull sought to parry, but Khur twisted his blade so that it slashed Tull’s chest, then reversed the blade, trying to slice deeper on the back swing.

Tull leapt aside just in time, and Khur grinned ferociously. Tull realized that Khur had tried to cajole him into lowering his guard.

Tull thrust his sword, and Khur deftly parried, slashed up, catching Tull’s elbow.

Tull asked, “Where did you learn to fight?”

Khur grinned. “When I was not sleeping with my lady, I guarded her.”

He leapt forward, slashing and chopping with an agility that astonished Tull; it was all he could do to parry the blows and step back. “I am sorry that in all the days we slept side by side, I forgot to mention this. But then, I suspected that this day would come.”

Tull stumbled, blocking a blow.

Each time he parried, his swollen thumb spasmed in pain. He managed to kick at Khur, forcing him back, but the young Neanderthal slashed at Tull’s legs, and Tull tripped. All of his weeks, sitting chained, had left him not only weak, but clumsy.

Khur swung viciously; Tull tried to duck beneath the blow and parry simultaneously. The crowd roared in awe, and Tull never knew what hit him.

Tull fell on his back, stunned, bleeding from the scalp. Khur stood over him, waving his sword in triumph before dealing the death blow, and the crowd cheered, went silent.

Yet one voice continued shouting: Fava’s, “Get up, Tull. Kill him! Get up!”

Khur stepped back, eyes flashing dangerously, and raised his sword, begging the audience for more applause.

Tull twisted his head groggily, saw Fava on the lowest seats. She was dressed as a Blade Kin. He wanted to go to her, but as Fava shouted his name, there was such fear and horror on her face. His mind cleared, suddenly recognizing the danger.

He rolled to his knees, faced Khur, and the young Neanderthal grinned down at him. “So you wish to make a fight of it, my friend?”

In one moment of clarity Tull saw that there was no goodness left in Khur, only madness disguised as innocence. Khur would willingly chop him up.

Tull laughed, for it all made sense. The Blade Kin allowed only the most promising criminals into the arenas, and Khur showed promise at becoming Blade Kin. All of these men would be like him, morally stained.

“I’ll make a fight of it, if you let me,” Tull said. He could hardly grip the sword with his broken thumb, so he ripped a strip of cloth from his tunic, then wrapped it around his sword and his hand, giving him some purchase.

Khur stepped back, waving his sword at the audience. The Blade Kin howled and applauded the spectacle.

When Tull finished, he held out his sword, circled cautiously, watching Khur’s eyes.

Khur leapt in with a series of feints, testing, then leapt back. Tull
shouted and charged, slicing down with all his might. Khur tried to slap the blade away, parry it, but he did not count on Tull’s incredible strength.

Khur’s sword snapped at the hilt, and Tull’s blade pierced Khur’s skull, slit him from head to belly, so that blood sprayed across the crowd.

The Blade Kin roared and stomped their feet, screaming in approbation, and Tull raised his bloody sword overhead, walked the ring in a circle, and did not halt when he saw Fava, standing in the crowd next to Darrissea and some strange young man.

In the stands Wertha gasped. Fava turned to him, saw his face go pale and his mouth fall open in excitement. He suddenly leaned forward and whispered in Fava’s ear:

“And this shall be the Okansharai’s token:
Delivered from the earth in a spray of blood,
Call his name, Generous, and he shall rise.”

Wertha did not have to recite more of the prophecy. There was awe in the man’s voice, as he suddenly saw that Tull had fulfilled the words—rising from the tunnels under the stadium, spraying the audience with blood once Fava had called his name.

Fava watched Tull turn away and stalk underground.

When he had first come out, he had looked weak, defeated. Now he was tense, coiled.

She had never seen her husband looking so dangerous, never seen that manic gleam in his eyes so close to escaping. When he had paraded past with his bloody sword, she remembered the words that had been spoken of him back in Smilodon Bay: “He has revolution in his eyes.”

The madness was still there, the blood lust, and at that moment he looked like the Blade Kin who howled around her.

He’d become a predator, and she felt as if she were still prey. Her skin crawled at the thought of being near so many of these men, of having the Blade Kin brush her as they passed.

She’d spent weeks hunting for Tull and this is what it had brought her, only shame.

Fava had not imagined such a reunion.

Tull fought three more times over the next five hours. As a big Tcho-Pwi, he stood taller than Neanderthals, and he was broader of shoulder and more powerful than any of the humans.

He did not finesse his opponents, and instead opted for speed and power. He did not give them time to think, but charged across the arena sands as soon as they let him out of his gate.

He slit two men open with ease, but engaged in a longer fight with the third.

In late afternoon Tull looked as if he had begun to tire.

In the last encounter of the day, fought in the gloom of a setting sun, as the final six pairs of combatants all approached one another carefully, calculating.

They used longspears for this round, a weapon Tull did not fancy.

He showed it in the arena, taking the spear and breaking it over his knee. He threw the halves to the ground and beckoned his opponent with open hands, lulling the man into a false sense of security.

Tull’s opponent was small, a human with speed and deftness, and he attacked too quickly, feinting a lunge.

Tull grasped the end of his opponents spear quicker than the little man could believe, ripped it from his hands, and drove the butt end into the man’s chest, burying it two feet, then he flipped the little man high into the air, tossing him over the arena walls into the crowd.

The Blade Kin rose to their feet, chanting Tull’s name, over and over. Tull marched around the arena twice, and then stopped before Fava. He looked up past her head as he took the spear, cut off a tip of his own ear, and tossed it into the stands.

Fava thought he had thrown the thing to her, but it landed in the crowd behind.

Tull stalked back down to the dungeon looking refreshed, invigorated. He was a man reborn.

Fava watched the final two rounds in silence.

As the crowd rose to depart, Wertha ventured, “Tomorrow Tull will win a place among the Blade Kin. When all the others lie slain, he will be standing.”

“I think Thakunka will best him,” a man said from the crowd behind, interrupting their conversation. “Tull has strength and speed, but Thakunka has more skill and versatility.”

Fava began to rebuke the stranger, but Darrissea took her arm, calming her.

Darrissea suggested, “Perhaps Tull would have more skill and versatility if his thumbs had not been broken before the fight. I’d have liked to have seen him fight without being hampered.”

The man grunted, and Fava looked up. It was an old Neanderthal with a deep voice, a black cloak and a patch over his eye.

Wertha pounded his chest in salute, and Fava followed his lead uncertainly.

“Omnipotent,” Wertha mouthed.

The Black Cyclops waved his hand, muttering for them to be at ease, but Fava could not unbow her neck. She was far too aware that this man was supposed to be her lord, her master, and she feared that he would recognize her as a stranger.

“I caught Tull in the Rough,” Mahkawn said, “and believe me, too many of my men have seen him fight unhampered. He is a good warrior—as is Thakunka. I will grieve when one of them dies.”

He pulled something from his robe, a bit of flesh, and Fava realized that it was part of Tull’s ear, the small piece he had tossed into the crowd. Tull had thrown it to the Omnipotent.

“What of Tull’s family?” Fava asked. “Has he spoken of it? Does he have younger brothers or sisters of such size and caliber that might be brought into the brotherhood? Perhaps a child that he has sired, even one still waiting in some woman’s belly?”

“No,” Mahkawn answered, “I fear not. I would pay well for such offspring.”

He raised his head, as if he had just gotten an idea. Without a farewell, he turned and departed through the crowd.

***