Karavans (3 page)

“Cursed Shoia,” Hezriah muttered, wishing them to Alisanos along with the worthless horseflies. “The world would be an easier place if they died just once, like everyone else!”

But Shoia did not die just once. And there were numerous tales of how various murdered Shoia, rousing back into life, avenged themselves on their killers.

“Seven times. Seven times dead, dead for good.
Then
I could have the bones.”

The bones, and everything else. He could dole out the body to various divination denominations. Teeth, hair, nails, certainly the entrails. Plus other bits and pieces.

But Hezriah would be a very wealthy man even if all he got were the bones. The practitioners of the Kantica were supremely generous when it came to buying Shoia bones. Everything else was gravy.

BRODHI WAS AWARE of others eyeing him as he strode into the ale tent. It never stopped, the watching. Oh, those grown accustomed to his race, to his presence among them, had learned to mitigate to some degree the overt fear, the perverse fascination, but none of them was ever entirely successful at obscuring their fervid interest. They wondered, he knew, how Shoia magic manifested, how it worked, and what it felt like.

In truth, magic didn’t feel like anything in particular. It resided within his bones and blood the way breath lived in his lungs, the way his heart beat: steadily, unceasing, wholly unremarkable. It
was
, nothing more.

But they were human, and thus, like children, attracted by that which they could not understand. By that denied their kind.

“Brodhi! The usual?”

He glanced across at Mikal in his traditional spot behind a plank of adze-planed and waxed wood resting atop two ale barrels. The human was big, broad, missing an eye and two of his teeth, but his comfortable equanimity was always present. His opinion of his customers was shaped only by behavior, not by race. Or the presence of magic.

“Yes.” It was close inside the faded green tent, redolent of unwashed humans, of ale, of dirt, of redleaf chewed and spat. With due deliberation, unrushed by his audience, Brodhi unhooked the heavy silver badge at his right shoulder—a leaping horse surrounded by a flattened circle—and unslung the rich blue mantle of his rank. Summerweight wool, lacking the heft of winter-weave. He tossed it across the nearest unoccupied table, though only an instant before the table had hosted two men. But they had, of course, vacated immediately upon recognizing him—or what he was, if not who. Men, mortals, either hated or feared his kind. Occasionally both. Either response resulted in a swift retreat from Brodhi’s immediate vicinity, lest he be minded to protest their presence.

Or, he reflected, recalling his kinsman’s comment, perhaps they merely
disliked
him. Trust Rhuan to know; humans were his hobby.

Brodhi never protested when it came to humans. They were what they were; dealing with mortals required no small amount of patience, but he had learned that even before arriving in Sancorra province.

Though Rhuan, upon more than one occasion, declared Brodhi claimed no such thing as patience. But then Rhuan was nothing even approximating something—or some
one
—to be trusted in his opinions, even if he was close kin.

By the time Brodhi reached the crude bar, threading his way through the spittle-fouled dirt aisle amid low mutters of protective invocations, Mikal had poured his ale. Foam mustached the rim of the dented pewter tankard, then spilled over in a lazy, tendriled beard. Brodhi took the tankard, comfortably cool in his hand, tested the foam with his tongue, inhaled the heavy, bittersweet tang, then drank down several deep swallows. A common beverage,
human ale, but immensely satisfying in its own way after days spent on the road breathing dust more often than air. Ale was his one willing concession to human habits and affectations.

At least of those concessions and compromises that his service did not require.

“News?” Mikal inquired in his deep, slow voice, wiping down the plank with a tattered clump of burlap. Big, divoted knuckles sprouted wiry strands of black hair.

Brodhi took another generous draft, then employed a very human gesture to rid his upper lip of foam: He backhanded it away. “News,” he agreed, and everyone in the tent fell instantly silent. They had been specifically waiting for what he had to say.

News.
It was the coinage with which silver-badged and blue-mantled couriers purchased ale and food on the roads through the provinces. Though his myriad tightly woven braids were weighted with the flat, hammered brass and silver rings that were the currency of the world, they remained threaded on thin leather thongs plaited, Shoiastyle, along with beads, into his waist-length copper-colored hair. For him and his like, who was Rhuan, the rings were ornaments, not coinage.

“Well?” Mikal asked, dark brows drawing together.

Brodhi pitched his clear voice, trained to override even the raucousness of drunken revelers, though none here reveled. They waited.

“The war,” he said, “is over.”

Tension sprang up among the humans. There came a stirring in the tent. He heard a derisive mutter that mentioned old news not worth hearing; someone else hissed the man into silence.

Brodhi merely glanced over the tent’s occupants. “The war is over.” This time with a slight emphasis on the final word. “Sancorra of Sancorra has been executed.”

Save for sharp, startled inhalations, all remained silent and still. Indeed,
this
news was unquestionably fresh. Fresh as the blood of the province’s former lord. Brodhi himself had seen it spurt but a matter of weeks before. Senior
couriers were required to witness all such executions, so their news was accurate and untainted by rumor.

“Therefore the Hecari of Hecari says,” —he paused and deftly assumed the remembered inflections— “‘If you wish to make war with me, you shall have to find a new lord. The one you had now lacks a head, and is therefore unable to help.’”

Silence was palpable a moment, then was replaced by the faint, familiar sounds of men reaching for and chanting over protective amulets. Brodhi smiled derisively as he heard the chiming, the clicking, the rattling, the rustling, the muted whispers of renewed invocations. He wore no such thing, trusting to himself rather than to the various false godlings humans worshipped.

Brodhi tossed back the rest of the ale, then set the mug down with the soft thunk of metal on wood. Even Mikal was stunned.

Sancorra of Sancorra has been executed.

He looked upon them even as they looked at him. Expressions were slack with shock, or twisted by worry. Grimy hands clutched amulets and charms strung around throats, wrists, waists. He noted how lips moved, mouthing prayers and petitions. In the doorway, suspended from the ridge pole, a string of bones and beads and feathers stirred in the faintest of breezes. Mikal’s own charm against the hazards of the world.

This time Brodhi spoke for himself, not in trained courier cadences. “You knew he would do it. It was war, and no one is better at waging it than the Hecari of Hecari, who has, with his armies, already overrun three provinces. Only a fool—or a dreamer—could believe it would fall out otherwise. Sancorra was fortunate to have lasted as long as he did.” He eyed those present, marking the stolid resistance of humankind as their faces closed against his words. He did not take pity on men such as these, mortal and unimportant, but he did offer simple intelligence. “Accept defeat,” he advised, “and you may survive. The Hecari of Hecari is neither a patient man, nor a merciful one.”

It was as clear a warning as he would ever give. It was
suggestion. Simple observation. They would take it as they would, as they were inclined, depending on their substance. But of one thing Brodhi was certain: they would blame
him
. It was illogical to do so, and wholly bootless; as courier he was sworn to neutrality, trained to divulge no opinion while on the road. But he brought word, and often bad. He was the messenger, and thus proxy for whomever the others disliked, distrusted, feared.

He was in from the road now, the message delivered. He could now state his own opinion. This settlement, this haphazard assemblage of flimsy oilcloth structures that existed on no maps because it was too new and undoubtedly impermanent, was his final stopping place. Now the province knew.

Sancorra of Sancorra was executed. The war was truly over.

The Hecari warlord, called Hecari of Hecari in the fashion of the provinces, was a ruthless butcher, a man proved capable of any atrocity. His victory here was complete, as it had been in the other three neighboring provinces. But while Sancorra
the man
had lived, even in defeat, hope for Sancorra the province survived. Now hope would die. It made lordship easier for the man who had wrested it—and a province—from a popular hero.

A hero without a head.

Because Brodhi knew the humans needed to speak, to curse, to threaten, to complain, to argue over which of their myriad gods might yet save them—and that they would do none of those things in his presence—he calmly collected his courier’s mantle and exited the tent.

They were all of them fools. Any man was, who put his trust in a lord rather than in himself. Better to trust no one at all, unless he be enemy. Then one knew where one stood.

But humans were weak. Were fallible. Humans
dreamed

T
HE SETTLEMENT, SUCH as it was, existed because there was water, and also because it was temperate in climate, provided lush pasturage for a thousand head of livestock, and groves of trees for wood and shade. It existed also because the people of a province had arrived to depart, and departure required an appropriate gathering place. A place of farewell. A place of ending as well as of beginning.

Tents. Hundreds of them, oilcloth and wooden poles, spread across the land like a creeping tide. Dyed every color and pattern imaginable: solid, patchwork, peak-roofed, sun-faded, rain-streaked, poked with holes or intact; the door and ridge poles painted or carved with protective glyphs.

Audrun, sitting inside a high-sided wagon with her tow-headed, blue-eyed children—they took after their father, not her, with her dark gold hair and brown eyes—supposed once there had been but a few tents, and likely lined up in simple straight rows along either side of the road, just up from the modest river attended by groves of trees. But time and other arrivals had expanded those rows into a flood tide, blots of colored oilcloth interconnected by tangled, skeinlike canyons of foot-packed pathways. People thronged those pathways, weaving in and out and around the tents.

It was a true settlement, but impermanent. People remained because other people departed. It was a gathering place of refugees, both ending and beginning. The old life discarded. The new life embraced.

Or the new life dreaded.

Davyn had called it the “jumping-off point.” Here, her husband said, was where everyone
jumped off
the main road through Sancorra province to the individual routes that would lead to their destinations.

Strange, Audrun reflected, shoving a fallen strand of hair behind an ear, that the act of departing a war-divided land united it. Surely the gods would take pity on them all and decide to keep the people whole; could they not see what it was doing to Sancorra province?

But the gods had not spoken of such things; the gods had, in fact, suggested by silence, by lack of intercession, by speaking to no diviners of any denomination despite thousands of rituals and rites over the months of war, that this was what they intended. Even the diviners had been baffled, for their own auguries predicted victory.

But there was no victory, save for the enemy. Thus the province had been sundered. Sancorra of Sancorra surrendered his holdings—and his life. The enemy held the province now, and many had determined in rage, in sorrow, in loss, in bitter admission of defeat, that they could not bear to see worse done to their land than had been done already. It was best to go.

Just—
go
. Elsewhere. Away. Where the enemy did not rule. Where the enemy did not take their pasture lands, their fields, their crops, their gardens, their wells; where the enemy did not overprice such things as a family had to have, so that they could afford no better than the meanest portions of what they themselves had grown; where the enemy did not dictate how they should serve the warlordcum-king, be it by taxing them into starvation or taking their sons for its armies. Nothing remained for them in this homeland. It was time they found another.

But oh, it was difficult to leave! More difficult than she had
dreamed.
Audrun felt the roots of her heart being torn
out one by one, ripped from fertile ground until waste was left in its place, a rupture of the soul. She did not hate, she did not wish vengeance, she did not curse the enemy with every breath, did not buy the time of diviners to find an answer for why her people had lost. But she acknowledged the terrible pain of the ending of what she knew, of what she had known all of her life. What she had expected to know forever.