Scavenger of Souls (21 page)

Again her father ignored her. “My warriors you have slain, their bodies left to waste away under a cruel sun,” he
said, his voice modulating to convey the impression of sorrow. “You have come bearing the weapons of the despoilers, desecrating with unholy fire the valley of the blessed. What punishment befits such a crime?”

“Step away from the kids for a second,” I said, “and you'll find out.”

His smile never wavered. “But these young ones are mine. And your presence here poses a grave threat to their safety. Those other deaths I might forgive, but never the deaths of ones so innocent as these. So again it behooves us to ask: what punishment should we mete out to an intruder who so threatens our way of life?”

“Feed him, father,” Bea sang sleepily. In her cave-dweller clothes, her tiny figure looked less like a girl than a girl's doll. “Feed him to the Scavenger of Souls.”

Asunder gazed affectionately at her. Yet when he spoke, his hand strayed to the staff of bone, caressing it as if he was stroking a child's hair.

“It is just, my daughter,” he said softly. “It is the way of our people.”

“You tried that once before,” I said. “What makes you think it'll work any better now?”

At that, Asunder's fingers fell from the staff, his eyes springing to mine. Behind their feverish lenses I glimpsed a fragment of pain, some small part of what he'd felt when his real daughter's body had shattered under his hands. Remembering the same look in his father's eyes, I wondered if there
was any struggle left in him, any part of him the Skaldi hadn't claimed. But then the look vanished, and he sent his voice booming across the waste.

“We will rest here till nightfall, then feed the traitors to the almighty one,” he announced, his voice echoing from stone to stone. “With the death of Querry Genn, none will remain to stand in our way. His destruction will mark the dawn of a new era, one in which the blessings of the chosen people will be fulfilled for all time.”

Mercy took a step toward her father, but she didn't get any closer than that. Archangel's hands descended on us with a grip of steel and dragged us away.

We sat by the base of the altar, waiting for night to come. Our jailer stood within view, a silent sentinel as massive, and as motionless, as one of the desert's basalt forms. Asunder's warriors had disappeared up the stairs to prepare the ritual of our sacrifice. Faint sounds of revelry—chanting, drumming—floated down from above. Their leader had retreated a short distance into the black rock desert, supposedly to pray. The children from our combined colonies had stayed behind, watched by the girl I'd once known. She stared into the falling sun as if she no longer felt its piercing rays.

Mercy glanced at her, then turned to me. “So that's Nessa.”

“What about her?”

“No, she's cute,” she said. “When she's not, like, groveling at Asunder's feet and licking the ground clean.”

“That's not her,” I said. “That's the power of the staff.”

“Still, you'd think she'd have a little more dignity,” she yawned. “But actually, you're wrong about her. She knows exactly what she's doing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let's see if I can explain this in simple terms,” she said. “Look, if she was completely under his power, his wish would be her command, right? No coercion necessary. In which case she wouldn't need the knife.”

My heart jumped. “I didn't see a knife.”

“That's because you were too busy moping about Goldilocks and the big bad wolf. But she's got one, all right. And she's keeping it where she can get to it fast.”

“Where?”

“A lady doesn't tell,” she snorted. “But trust me, if he tries anything ungentlemanly, he'll find himself getting a nasty little paper cut.”

For the first time since I'd seen Nessa at the altar stairs, hope flared in my chest. “I wouldn't put it past her. When we were in the canyon, she—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Mercy said. “I'm sure she's going to make a wonderful hostess someday. And I'm sure a guy as awesome and powerful and good-looking as you will be at the top of her wish list.”

I grinned despite everything. My blush felt as bright as Adem's. “You think I'm good-looking?”

“Did I say that?” Before I could react, she leaned forward
and kissed me. Her lips were softer than I expected, and they coaxed mine to part before withdrawing just as fast. “Oops. You and Barbie aren't an item, are you?”

“Who's Barbie?”

She shook her head and laughed. “You really are adorable, you know that?”

I laughed with her. “And you really are nuts.”

Her eyes flashed before lowering in what I could have sworn was embarrassment. “So they tell me,” she said. “But then, it runs in the family.”

I guess I was doomed never to sleep in the land of the blessed.

Mercy crawled into a cranny at the altar's base and, with her soldier's training, dropped off in an instant. I lay with my hands clasped on my chest, heart beating madly, thoughts zooming forward and backward like a protograph gone haywire. I imagined the power building in me, flowing outward like a shower of glowing tears.

For the first time, it seemed to me, I saw what it meant to be the leader of a survival colony. To be a man like Laman, a woman like Aleka. Even a man like Udain. To try to hold it all together when everything around you was trying to tear it apart. To know, deep down, that no matter how hard you tried, things would get broken, hopes would fall short, lives would slip through your fingers. There were so many people I would have saved if I could have. Soon. Wali. Laman. Korah. And every one of them I'd lost.

I glanced across at Mercy's sleeping form. In a few hours, I might lose her, too. I might lose me. The thought of my own death felt more real than it ever had. Facing the Skaldi at the nest, in the cage, I hadn't had time to think about death. I'd been too busy fighting for my life.

I sat up, hands between my knees. I remembered something Laman had said to me before he died:
There is no luck left in this world
. That was just like him, gloomy and bitter to the end. But he'd also said, the very last words to leave his mouth:
You can't choose the life you're given. But you can choose the kind of man you want to be
. There might be no luck, no way out, no chance. But there was still choice.

Not Asunder's version of choice. Not Udain's. A
real
choice. A choice that came from me.

I rose and went to Mercy, stroked a dark curl that had fallen across her forehead. Her fingers laced through mine, whether in sleep or not I couldn't tell. Her arm contracted, pulling me down beside her. I couldn't hold her with my hands bound, but I moved as close to her as possible, felt her wriggle until the curve of her body shaped itself to my chest. We lay like that for hours, me listening to the sounds of her quiet breathing and my own thudding heartbeat, however many hundreds of breaths and hundreds of beats it takes to fill up a night. I wondered if, reversing the breaths and the beats, that's what her night was filled with too. Her soft inhalations and exhalations had the ease of sleep, but the pulse in her arm had quickened to a desperate, silent whine.

That's how Archangel found us when the moon rose and the fires sprang to life at the altar's crest.

“The Scavenger awaits,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft in the perfect stillness of night. “Come with me now, and all will be revealed.”

Nessa had hidden her knife
beneath her chest covering.

When her arm lay flat against her side, you could barely see it. She kept her arm by her side almost all the time.

Still, I couldn't convince myself Mercy was right. The blankness in Nessa's green eyes, the eerie floating movements of her tanned limbs made it seem she'd surrendered. Try as I might to catch a hint of anything familiar, she ignored me entirely, gliding behind Asunder up the silvery stairs as if he was a heavenly body guiding her orbit.

At least she was spared the manhandling me and my companion suffered. “Come with me” apparently meant something unique to the colossus Mercy called her brother: he'd no sooner spoken than he yanked us to our feet by the cords around our wrists and wrenched us around to face their children and ours, who jeered at the sight, their faces pale in the light of the moon. Then he shoved us up the stairs,
paying no regard to the fact that they yawed dangerously, gaps showing where stone had crumbled away. The children followed us to the altar's summit, muttering a low, wordless chant in tune with the cadence of their feet. Mercy cried out to our giant captor as his rough hands threw us ahead of him.

“Ardan!” she said. “It's me. It's Mercy. You don't have to do this!”

He looked away, her words only doubling the force he applied to our backs.

“Ardan.” She tried once more. “This isn't you. I know this isn't you. Don't listen to him!”

But he didn't respond, and though I wanted to believe his averted eyes meant he was ashamed, I'd have had an easier time believing a rock could feel shame. When I glanced across his broad chest at Mercy, I saw she'd given up her efforts to reach him, a calm resolve settling on her face that I tried to match. It dawned on me that I might have to choose between her and my colony, the family I'd found seven months ago and the friend I'd sworn to help. I might even have to choose between her and Nessa. The choice had seemed a lot easier when it wasn't right in front of me.

Another few steps, and we exited the staircase at the altar's peak.

We stood on a bare, circular sheet of stone, as much as fifty feet across and hundreds of feet above the plain. The twin horns of the altar loomed above us, seeming to sway in the red glare of the torches. Twenty or more members of
Asunder's colony crowded the platform, the children deserting us to join them. It was then that I saw Nekane, her hands behind her back and a rope around her neck, standing with bruised limbs and frightened eyes in front of the horns. There was still no sign of the old woman. I had no time to communicate anything with Mercy before Asunder stepped forward, Nessa moving to his side. He threw his cloak behind him and raised his arms to the torch-lit sky, the staff of bone pointing upward like a claw protruding from his closed fist.

“Now you come to your trial at last, Querry Genn,” he said. “You have imagined you might elude the one who waits. You have trusted to the ways of the despoilers, thinking their power the only one that holds sway over these lands. But as ever, you underestimate the might of the Scavenger of Souls, and you hope in vain.”

Flourishing the staff, he pointed at the altar's horns.

“Behold!” he cried. “His vengeance comes!”

His voice echoed and died. Nekane was flung aside as if the sound had physically struck her. I struggled to free myself from Archangel's grasp, but I couldn't do it without risking a burst of power. Then I saw that something hung between the horns of the altar.

It took me a second to recognize the shape as a human body.

Its skin flared as red as the flame-soaked rock, so that its naked arms and legs seemed to form an
X
of flesh and stone. At first I thought it was covered with blood, until I realized
the red was the color of its own flesh, a solid red without the tiniest hint of whatever hue its skin might originally have been. Its head had fallen to its breast, masking its features. But it wasn't dead. Its chest gasped for air, and its blood-red hands, bound tightly to the surrounding rock, flexed feebly. Something on its chest caught the light of the torches and flashed with a light not their own.

Archangel's hands fell away. Asunder smiled and let me approach. The apparition raised its head, and though its face was puffy and scarlet I knew who it was.

Wali.

I tried to say his name. The word grated in my mouth like shards of stone.