The Edge of the World (18 page)

The Iborian shipwright, a weathered and meticulous man named Kjelnar, directed the establishment of a construction camp after
leaving instructions for the placement of the drifting fresh-cut pine logs that he had ushered all the way from the northern
forests. His first command was to erect the sawmills so that he and his burly northmen could process the logs into lumber.

Kjelnar spoke in a low accented voice to Baine as they watched crowds swarm into the wreckage of the city to see what they
could salvage. “The volunteers are anxious to get to work, Prester-Marshall, but if we are going to rebuild a city, we should
start with a plan.”

“Ishalem originally rose without a plan,” Baine pointed out. “Houses and churches sprang up around the Arkship atop the hill.
Pilgrims came and settled over the centuries.”

Kjelnar raised his bushy ash-blond eyebrows. “Yes, and those people stripped all the wood from the surrounding hills, which
has left the area barren and eroded. The dwellings they built were cramped, and the place was a firetrap. This time, we’ll
do better. We can improve it. Isn’t that what the Book of Aiden says to do?”

Baine took heart from Kjelnar’s confidence. “You are the master builder. You create ships—now create a city that will be the
ship of our faith. May the Compass guide you.”

The shipwright gazed up at the hills, the blackened streets, the maze of pathways and canals that were now choked with debris
and charred timbers, and the tumble of skeletal frameworks that had once been houses and kirks. Kjelnar squared his shoulders,
hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “As you command, Prester-Marshall.”

Their volunteers cleared out the old wells, and soon had fresh water to drink. Every day, people cast nets for fish or walked
among the rocks below Aiden’s Lighthouse to harvest mussels and catch crabs. Without trade, Ishalem had no other food supply.

A handful of original inhabitants lingered like ghosts at the site of the obliterated city; many had fled into the surrounding
hills, living like hermits, with little to eat. Prester-Marshall Baine determined that they were scavengers who had remained
to pick through the wreckage. They fled whenever members of the reconstruction crew came near.

The ruins were full of bodies, blackened horrors trapped by the blaze, their clothes and features torn away by fire and leaving
only bones and staring skulls. Whether Aidenist or Urecari, they all looked the same. Workers gathered all the corpses they
found, dragged them off to a barren hillside that they made into a cemetery, and gave each one an Aidenist burial in a separate
grave. The prester-marshall felt it was best to be safe and give them all the correct blessings.

For days, while bricks and tools were unloaded from the waiting ships, the people rebuilt the piers so that the Tierran ships
could dock. Some pilgrims went to the top of the hill, hoping to find remnants of the Arkship, but though they returned with
blackened lumps of old wood, no one could say if those were the true remains of the Arkship, or other fallen timbers.

One dedicated work party excavated the wreckage of the Aidenist kirk, which had burned to its foundations, and Prester-Marshall
Baine decided that they would rebuild the kirk first. Sawmills began to whine, cutting the Iborian lumber…

During the first month, the crew made a great deal of progress, and the prester-marshall was pleased with what he saw. Fresh
pine frameworks outlined the walls of a new kirk. The temporary camp tents were replaced by new barracks and a communal hall,
so that the volunteers could live comfortably after an exhausting day at work. Each dawn, the prester-marshall gathered the
workers and praised Ondun. Ishalem began to rise from the ashes.

Then the Urecari raiding party swept down upon them.

Fifty lean soldiers, covered with dust and riding powerful horses, charged up the coast from Outer Wahilir. Across their chests,
they wore bright red battle sashes emblazoned with the unfurling fern symbol of Urec; white silk olbas covered their heads
to reflect the hot sun. Seeing the encampment, the new buildings, and the unarmed workers, the raiders let out a howl of challenge,
drew their long sharp swords, and rode in. Soldan Attar himself, the leader of Outer Wahilir, rode at the front of the scouting
party, damning the Aidenists for returning like parasites to the city they had burned.

Prester-Marshall Baine understood some of the Uraban language, but not enough to speak it. It was clear, though, that Attar
had no interest in communicating as his men encircled the camp.

The prester-marshall stepped up to the soldan, a sour-faced man with a thin scar on one cheek and deep wrinkles around his
dark eyes, who sat high on his black horse. Baine touched the fishhook pendant at his throat and raised his hand in a gesture
of peace. He spoke slowly, pointing to the new buildings and the piled fresh lumber and stacks of bricks. “We came to build,
not to harm.”

Astride his horse, Soldan Attar gave no sign that he understood.

“Not to harm,” Baine repeated. “To
build
.”

The volunteer workers had gathered close, either offering protection or seeking reassurance. Other men, seeing the group of
mounted soldiers, rushed down from the site of the half-constructed kirk, clutching their hammers, shovels, and axes, though
they were not fighters.

The prester-marshall spread his hands, a pleading expression on his face. “You can help us,” he continued in his most soothing
voice. “Your men can help restore Ishalem for the glory of Ondun—Aidenist and Urecari together.”

Wearing a sneer of disgust, Soldan Attar raised his sword, turned the blade flat, and brought it down hard on the prester-marshall’s
forehead. As he collapsed in an explosion of pain, Baine heard screaming, the horses neighing, the charge of hooves—and more
screaming. Then he sank into blackness.

* * *

He did not awaken until most of the slaughter was already done.

Blood crusted his forehead and eyes, and he choked on a stench in the air as thick and as foul as the Butchers’ District on
a hot summer afternoon. His hands were tied, but he could turn his head to see red-splattered bodies all around him: severed
limbs, stumps of necks, lifeless eyes staring from loose heads that had been piled on the ground.

Baine made a strangled noise. What had they done? He heard a pounding sound against wood, as though workers were driving piles
for a new pier. He saw that he had been dragged to the construction site of the new kirk.

Laughing, their fine uniforms covered with blood, the Urecari soldiers were erecting posts in the ground, at least fifty of
them. They had used logs of Iborian pine brought in from the harbor. That wood had been meant for new buildings, but the prester-marshall
felt ice in his chest as he saw other captives and guessed what lay in store for them. They moaned and wept, each one as bound
and helpless as he was.

Unbidden, tears flowed down his cheeks, and he felt an even greater sorrow than he had experienced upon seeing the burned
city. The fire could have been an accident, flames blown out of control by the winds. But this massacre was deliberate, the
work of human hands.

“Why are you doing this?” Baine said, his voice a dry croak, as if his throat had filled with ashes. Nobody answered. The
soldan’s men gave no sign that they understood him.

With their horses tethered, the Urecari raiders walked about kicking dead bodies out of the way. Baine made a rough count
of the corpses and the remaining captives, and realized that many of his people must have escaped, either into the hills or
on the ships in the harbor. But not all of them.

He turned his gaze toward the coast, looking at the bright sunlight that flashed on the Oceansea, and saw one of the Iborian
boats—Kjelnar’s craft—withdrawing from the harbor. Soldan Attar’s soldiers stood on the newly built piers and fired flaming
arrows that fell short of the ship.

“Ondun protect us,” Baine muttered. He hoped the ship-wright had gotten away. Maybe he would make it back to Calay and tell
King Korastine what had happened here…

When all the wooden posts were erected in a circle around the framework of the kirk, Soldan Attar walked among the prisoners,
shouting at them. He took Prester-Marshall Baine first, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to his feet. He spoke in
an angry tone, but Baine understood little of what Attar said.

“We wanted to build,” Baine said, his voice carrying an immense weight of weariness.

The soldan brought one of his soldiers forward. The man spoke in barely comprehensible Tierran. “We want no Aidenist help.
You destroyed Ishalem. Heretics must be punished.”

Using blacksmiths’ tools and anvils that the reconstruction crew had brought from Calay, Attar’s people had previously fashioned
thick, sharp fishhooks in a cruel mockery of the Aidenist symbol, each the size of a man’s hand, which they strung with rope.

Carrying the captives forward to the fresh posts pounded into the ground, the Urecari raiders suspended the poor victims on
the hooks, jabbing barbed points into throats and letting the bodies dangle against the posts, struggling and gurgling briefly.

Baine begged the soldan to not kill any more of his people, but Attar pretended not to understand. Another captive was hooked
through the throat and suspended with feet just barely touching the ground, then another and another. Some of the victims
died immediately, but as the Urecari soldiers grew more practiced in their torture, they were able to keep the luckless captives
alive for longer.

They saved Baine for last, making him watch. Soldan Attar’s men were very careful as they thrust the sharpened hook under
his jaw, avoiding his major blood vessels, catching the barb on his bones. Then they hoisted him up and tied off the ropes.
Slow blood flowed down his chest in a thick stream, and he dangled, kicking his feet, twitching like a hooked fish.

Baine knew he would be a long time dying. And though his voice would no longer work, he mouthed a prayer for forgiveness,
a hope that Ondun would welcome these poor Aidenist souls who had never imagined they might become martyrs. Against the wooden
post, his back was to the partially built kirk and the hill that had once held the Arkship. He could not turn his head, could
not even look back to what he most wanted to see.

Instead he simply stared with burning eyes, and all he could see were the ashes of Ishalem.

In the center of Olabar, crowds gathered to answer the priestess’s strident call. The humid air made the sunlight sparkle
off of whitewashed buildings and cobblestoned streets. Clad in brilliant red robes, Ur-Sikara Lukai raised her arms and finished
her benediction. Her loud and angry prayer made the crowd even more restless. Everyone felt the pain of Ishalem, the outrage
and fervor against the Aidenists.

Soldan-Shah Imir wished it had not come to this.

He stood with his son Omra in the shadow of the towering bronze statue. The handsome and muscular figure of Oenar, Imir’s
great-grandfather (and probably not an accurate representation of the man’s features), stood as tall as three men. As a leader
of Uraba, the former soldan-shah’s only memorable accomplishment had been to commission this giant statue of himself, a towering
work of cast bronze eclipsed only by the statue of Urec on the other side of Olabar’s central square. Urec’s statue was an
arm’s length taller, since it would be blasphemy for any soldan-shah to elevate himself above Urec.

Imir had never paid much attention to the grandiose statue, the shape of Oenar’s nose, the stylized beard, the metal draping
of his regal robes. Even so, all of Olabar was going to miss it once it was melted down.

Ur-Sikara Lukai turned to bless the giant metal figure. “This statue was a gift so that we might remember a great man and
our great heritage. Now it is another gift, a gift that will serve in the cause of war, a gift that will grant us a thousand
swords!” The people cheered.

“We will need more than a thousand swords,” Zarif Omra muttered, just loudly enough for his father to hear. The soldan-shah
knew his son was right, especially after the news he’d recently heard. He’d been outraged to learn what Soldan Attar had done
to the Aidenist reconstruction crew in Ishalem. Attar had crowed about his accomplishment, expecting cheers and praise… and
many Urabans had rejoiced at the first decisive blow being struck against the enemy.

Imir, however, thought it an indescribably foolish thing to do. Attar had always been a hothead, and he’d wanted any excuse
to take revenge on the Aidenists for killing his equally foolish brother Fillok at the beginning of this mess. Now, thanks
to the provocative act—made even worse by the fact that one of the victims was Prester-Marshall Baine himself—Imir had to
prepare a full-scale army for the conflict that would likely escalate.

As soldan-shah, he had expected to rule a rich land in times of prosperity, facing and solving problems that were by no means
insurmountable. He did not want to fight a war, although his people, his priestesses, his advisers all cried out for blood,
excited by the
idea
of a crusade against the Aidenists without guessing the harsh reality of it.

After a courier had brought news of the massacre in Ishalem, Imir raged against Attar privately in his quarters, smashing
pots, tearing down hangings, shouting at the walls. When he had finally calmed enough to consider the possibilities, he summoned
Giladen, the ambassador who had already helped to broker the Edict treaty with King Korastine. After Fillok’s ill-considered
attack on a Tierran trading ship, the Aidenist ruler would have been within his rights to go to war, and yet Korastine had
been willing to stop the sparks of hatred before they burst into a raging fire. The burning of Ishalem, an even greater conflagration,
was now eclipsed by the slaughter of those Aidenists, including the leader of their church. Imir’s stomach lurched at the
thought of it.