“My lord,” Arnem manages to reply, “I can assure you, this duty comes as no surprise. We—I—have long expected it.”
“Yes, but you cannot have understood the reasons that now compel us to act. All the reasons. I intend to be candid with you, Arnem—for you share many of Korsar’s opinions, I know, but not all. And you must know why you should share none. You go to war to achieve far more than the destruction of the Bane, Sentek, and easier access to their goods—you go to protect all that you hold dear.”
And with that, Baster-kin strides away into the apse, evidently expecting Arnem—who must puzzle over the Merchant Lord’s last remark, even as he adjusts to the altered circumstances of his own life—to match his pace toward the tall bronze doors of the Temple.
In Davon Wood, the Specter of the Death …
THE MAD LAUGHTER had been unmistakable: it had come from Heldo-Bah, who had crept undetected around and below the entire area of activity on the rocky shelf above the Ayerzesswerten, clinging to ledges of wet, nearly sheer stone, then coming up on the flank of the Outrager Welferek. Although Keera and Veloc had been relieved to hear his voice, they had not been surprised by his appearance: it would have been unlike Heldo-Bah to run from such a confrontation or to abandon his closest (indeed, his only) friends, particularly at such a pass. The only remaining mystery had been how he had managed to immobilize the powerful Welferek; and when Veloc and Keera had approached the oak—Veloc to retrieve the Outrager’s short-sword, Keera to snatch the dagger from Welferek’s waist, along with a quiver of arrows from beneath his cloak—they had found their answer: two marauder knives had expertly pierced each of the Outrager’s muscular forearms just below the half-sleeves of his mail shirt, and then plunged deep into the tree. The first blade had been a particularly fine throw, catching Welferek’s outstretched sword arm against a stout lower limb of the tree; the second fixed his left arm to the tree’s trunk. Welferek had tried to wrench the knives free, but the movements had only caused the double-edged blades to cut further into his flesh and increase his bleeding; and so he had decided to wait, in order to discover the identity of his attacker.
Heldo-Bah now stands on the moss-covered ledge, soaked from head to foot in the waters of the Ayerzess-werten, which he tries to shake from himself like some unhappy animal. Keera and Veloc run toward him, Veloc ready with a friendly taunt:
“Heldo-Bah! As timely as ever, I see.”
Heldo-Bah keeps his third marauder knife ready, his eyes upon the form of the Outrager, who, from the mossy ledge, is a dark shadow within the larger shape of the oak. “You’re lucky I got here at all, philanderer,” he says. “I had to climb all round those damnable rocks.” He indicates his boots, which are strapped about his neck, and his trousers, the feet of which are torn away. “With my feet bare, no less—look what it’s done to my trousers! There were spots where I had no more purchase than two toes’ worth.” He nods to the oak. “What do we know of him?”
“An Outrager, although that’s obvious,” replies Keera. “He claims to be someone called Welferek, Lord of the Woodland Knights.”
Heldo-Bah shows a delighted eye. “Welferek? He gave that name?”
“I could hardly dream it up, Heldo-Bah. Why? Do you know him? Great Moon, do you have an active feud with every Outrager?”
“No, no, Keera,” Heldo-Bah replies, with transparent disingenuousness. “We met once. That’s all.” He pulls on his boots, somehow making even that simple action seem furtive. “Our bags are still in the rocks—why don’t you ready them, and your brother’s bow, too, while Veloc and I glean what we can from this ‘woodland lord’?”
For an instant, Keera looks as though she will object; but a meaningful glance from her brother tells her that things may now occur in which she will wish to play no part—indeed, that she may not even want to witness. “This knight represents our only chance to determine what is happening in Okot, Keera,” Veloc says, taking care not to further alarm his sister. “He will tell us what he knows, that I promise you.”
Keera realizes that her brother is correct; and her concern for her family combines with this knowledge to overcome her usual repugnance at the bedeviling of any creature—even an Outrager. “Well, then,” she says hesitantly. “Work fast, Heldo-Bah—we’ve lost enough time here. And if he has nothing to tell us, do not bring divine wrath upon us by so tormenting him that he lies, simply to put a stop to it.”
“No, no, Keera,” Heldo-Bah answers quickly. “In his case, I’ll not need to go so far; nor will I require much time. As for tormenting him—past what I’ve already done—when have you known me to abuse my enemies? Although the Outragers never stop at such behavior.”
“I trust, then, that you will not let your hatred of them make you behave as despicably as do they.”
Keera gets a vague inclination of Heldo-Bah’s head in return, and remains uncertain of his true intent; but she does not press the issue, and sets off toward the crag, wishing to remain unaware of what may now take place under the oak, and deciding that the chore of organizing the foraging bags may take a little longer than usual. Even so, her ever-keen ears cannot but hear one final exchange between her brother and Heldo-Bah:
“We can’t kill him, Heldo-Bah,” Veloc says. “We’ve as good as slain a soldier of Broken already, this night—we can’t have Keera mixed up in murdering an Outrager, as well.”
For her brother’s consideration, Keera is grateful; yet she must confess that there is something in her heart that almost hopes Heldo-Bah will reply as he would on any other night—as, indeed, he does now:
“And who will know that it was we who killed him, Veloc, once the bastard’s body is in the Ayerzess-werten? No—you leave this matter to me. Whatever we must do to find out if Tayo and the children are safe, that we shall do.” And then, he moves merrily toward the oak, calling out in full voice: “Welferek! Imagine our meeting out here like this. But what’s happened to you—great Moon, man, you look like the Lord God of the Lumun-jani!”
Keera is relieved by these statements, yet at the same instant feels even more anxious at the mere intimation that her family may be in danger. She moves faster toward the crag, and when she reaches it, she finds that the words of her companions have once again vanished into the thunder of the Ayerzess-werten: a fact for which she is grateful.
The next few minutes are difficult for Keera, although not in any physical sense: her responsibilities as the Bane’s finest tracker, along with the numerous foraging terms that she has been forced to undertake with her brother and Heldo-Bah, have made her as strong as almost any male member of the tribe. The retrieval of her party’s three deerskin sacks is a cumbersome affair, but one easily managed, and she almost effortlessly draws Veloc’s powerful bow, in order to sling it over her head and onto one shoulder. She replaces his uniquely well-made arrows in their quiver and straps it to her waist beside the shafts she took from Welferek, after which, Keera is ready to begin the final stage of the homeward run; but she realizes that she must wait, and allow the process of questioning the Outrager to proceed as it was always fated to do, given Welferek’s arrogance, his apparent acquaintance with Heldo-Bah, and the latter’s fiery hatred of all Outragers.
The specific causes of that hatred are largely a mystery, to Keera, although she knows as much as anyone in the Bane tribe about Heldo-Bah: about his eternal dissatisfaction with and grumbling over all aspects of his existence, and about his powerful yen for violence. Both Keera and Veloc were born in Davon Wood, of parents whose own parents had been exiles; and they are therefore counted among the most respected of tribesmen, the “natural” or “native” Bane (for even a tribe of exiles must have its hierarchies). Heldo-Bah’s origins, by contrast, could scarcely be humbler, or more troubling, and it is his place in Bane society, Keera knows, along with how he was relegated to that place, which holds the explanation for her friend’s eternal rage.
The secondary, or “fated,” class of Bane tribesmen is made up of those wh
o were born in Broken, but exiled to Davon Wood and to presumed death because they were afflicted with what the Kafran priests term “imperfections”: weaknesses of body or mind, unusually small stature, the bearing of evil markings at birth, a tendency toward recurring illness—the list is almost endless, and is kept in the Sacristy of the High Temple in Broken. But there is a class of exiles that are viewed as lower even than the fated—the “accidental” Bane—and it was out of these dregs that Heldo-Bah arose.
The ranks of the accidental Bane are regularly replenished, not by the birth of new members, but by misfortune that befalls young children far from Davon Wood. Sold into slavery outside the frontiers of Broken (for the buying and selling of humans is unlawful, in the kingdom of the Tall), such children are brought into the wealthy kingdom by men who pass as “labor dealers,” and who offer their young commodities as indentured servants within the letter of Broken law. But the lives of these “servants” are as unrewarding and as devoid of choice as are those of the more honestly styled “slaves” in such great empires as Lumun-jan. And, as an uncertain Moon (or, perhaps, a capricious Kafra) would have it, some of these unfortunate children, after being sold, are further revealed as marred by some one or several of the physical afflictions that are intolerable to the Kafran faith; and they thus go from the betrayal of being sold as slaves by their own families, to lies told about them by the labor dealers, and finally, to a culminating sentence of exile to Davon Wood.
Ordinarily, such exile is the last of these misfortunes, and the unfortunates, if they survive the Wood long enough to be located by the Bane, are welcomed into the tribe as fated members. But once in a great while, the most cursed of these children also demonstrate, while in Broken, flaws greater than those of the body alone: flaws of character so flagrant that their punishments, the priests of Kafra say, cannot stop at mere exile.
In Heldo-Bah’s case, the physical indication of his unworthiness was stunted growth: a “fault” that he was able to hide for several years by telling simple lies about his age to the First District merchant who held his indentureship, and who enjoyed having the alert boy attend to the horses in his stable. But when Heldo-Bah also displayed, over time, a far greater talent for thievery than for grooming horses, even the merchant could not protect him. Heldo-Bah was doubly cursed by Kafra, pronounced the priests; and as such he was marked, not for exile, but for death. The Grand Layzin of the God-King Izairn—predecessor of the current Layzin, just as Izairn preceded Saylal on the Broken throne—elaborated on this judgment (while making sure that his opinion never reached the ears of Second Minister Caliphestros, who was known to oppose the banishments, especially of children), and declared that only the influence of the malevolent spirits that were still believed to inhabit the lower slopes of Broken’s mountain could so pervert a boy not yet thirteen years of age. The remedy? Death by drowning in the Cat’s Paw, which, if carefully carried out, would ensure (or so the priests said) that the demons would be trapped in the furious river, once their host was dead.
During the whole of this time, Keera and Veloc continued to enjoy a childhood that contrasted sharply with Heldo-Bah’s: passed in one of the small communities to the south of Okot, this childhood included hard work for the whole of the family, without question; but it also offered Keera and Veloc time for exploration and adventure. And it was only through the siblings’ curiosity and daring that Heldo-Bah was ultimately saved. For events so conspired as to find the two young Bane one day fishing along a relatively calm stretch of the Cat’s Paw, below the Ayerzess-werten. The priests and soldiers assigned to the ritual of drowning Heldo-Bah lost the nerve to face those dangerous cascades, and they agreed among themselves to obey the spirit rather than the letter of Bane law, by binding the boy’s hands and feet and placing him in a coarse sack, closed with a few winds of rope. They then threw him into the waters east of the Ayerzess-werten and departed—not knowing they were observed all the while by a pair of very curious Bane children.
Once certain that the party of Tall priests and soldiers were indeed gone, Veloc and Keera snatched the wriggling sack from the river; and when they cut Heldo-Bah out of his soft instrument of execution, they found that the boy was close to dead from breathing in the cold waters of the Cat’s Paw. They carried him home; and for as long as was needed for Heldo-Bah to recover, he lived in Keera and Veloc’s home, was fed by their parents, and behaved with gratitude commensurate to their kindness. Even so, after several years, the tug of a mischief-maker’s life proved too strong for the boy who was, in truth, neither Tall nor Bane (indeed, Heldo-Bah has never known precisely who his people are; nor has he ever voiced a grain of interest concerning the matter to Keera or Veloc). He accepted membership in the tribe readily enough, and he did not steal from Bane households; rather, his unshakable preoccupation became vexing the Tall in any way he could, and his activities more than once brought real trouble from the soldiers of Broken, not only for the Bane’s own soldiers (for the tribe did have an army, in those days, although it scarcely merited the name), but for foragers, traders, fishermen, and hunters, as well.
Asked by Keera and Veloc’s parents to leave their home when old enough to see to his own needs, Heldo-Bah took to passing his summers in the Wood and his winters in abandoned huts. And, while he remained fast friends with his childhood rescuers, he was all the while honing his talent for raids across the Cat’s Paw, in those smaller Broken villages that served as way stations between the city on the mountain and its principal trading center on the river Meloderna, the walled town of Daurawah. These villages usually consisted of a small collection of earthen houses, stone storage and trading stations, and a large tavern or inn: activity enough to attract Heldo-Bah’s taste for mayhem. As he reached manhood, he added gambling and brawling to his recreations, on those occasions when there was nothing present worth simple stealing, or when Broken soldiers presented themselves as victims. When Veloc became a man, he began accompanying Heldo-Bah on these adventures, which grew in scope to include nocturnal forays into Broken itself, raids during which the handsome Veloc seduced lonely Tall women (who had often been told mythical tales of the remarkable physical appetites of the Bane—myths that happened, in Veloc’s case, to be true) while Heldo-Bah emptied the distracted mistresses’ houses of anything of value that would not slow a hasty escape.
Yet none of this explained the special anger that Heldo-Bah reserved for those “blessèd” men back in Okot who were periodically chosen by the Priestess of the Moon for entry into the Outragers. Heldo-Bah would often speak of that hatred, first to Veloc and, later, to Keera, when she began to slip away from her tracking duties and join her brother and the friend they had known since childhood on their increasingly infamous forays across the Cat’s Paw. After Keera married Tayo (a young tanner and butcher who made good use of the game that Keera hunted) and gave birth, in rapid succession, to three children, her participation became more limited, as was natural; but on occasion, she would still find herself drawn into the many arguments with the Outragers that Heldo-Bah and Veloc indulged in wherever they went; and if apprehended, she shared their terms of foraging. Yet through all these years and the many adventures and punishments that the three experienced together, neither Keera nor Veloc ever learned the reason behind Heldo-Bah’s hatred for the knights, which rivaled even his loathing of the Tall.
A sharp scream suddenly interrupts the monotonous roar of the Ayerzess-werten, along with Keera’s remembrances, and causes the tracker to bolt upright from her seat on the rocky lip of the crag. Is it a cry of pain, Keera wonders, or merely of terror? Not that it is of consequence; she has no intention of returning to the spot until her companions call for her. Keera has seen enough of death and blood and strange events, this night, and she will be happy to get home to the good-hearted Tayo and their three playfully obstreperous children: two boys who have, thankfully, taken after their father, and a girl, the youngest, who, just as thankfully, is much like her mother. Keera sits again, listening t
o the predawn chatter of birds that are nested close by the Ayerzess-werten and chiding herself for having once again gotten mixed up in trouble between Veloc and Heldo-Bah and a group of Outragers, and thus securing for herself a place on this term of foraging. She does not seriously believe that either she or Veloc will ever so associate themselves with Heldo-Bah’s troublesome ways as to earn lifetime terms of foraging, as he has already done; but such consolation does not free her of the shame and heartache of being absent from her children. How would she feel, she sometimes wonders, if the situation were reversed? If her children ran away, even for a short time, leaving her naught to do save await their return? Keera cannot imagine life without the little creatures of her flesh, who have already begun to learn to hunt, and hunt properly: with respect for the Wood, for the spirits of the game, and finally for those other, far less visible spirits that lurk in the forest. How could she ever exist without the companionship of those pieces of herself?
A bad churning in her stomach, a cold rattling up her spine: the mere notion has frightened Keera more seriously than any of the night’s other peculiar events. She remembers, too, that she has not yet reasoned out any adequate explanation for the many soundings of the Voice of the Moon, but has been left with the shapeless dread of some sort of attack on Okot. With these considerations in mind, she decides to brave the short screams that continue to emanate from the direction of the oak, and begins to gather up all her party’s goods, ready to tell her brother and Heldo-Bah that she will continue on her way home immediately, whether they accompany her or not. The weight of her bag so customary as to be unnoticed, she seizes the other two sacks and easily lifts what would be a taxing load even for a strong Bane man, then races round the crag and heads directly for where Veloc and Heldo-Bah—both with gutting blades in hand—kneel to some urgent task. A few more steps, and Keera can see that the Outrager Welferek is no longer held to the tree by Heldo-Bah’s knives: he is lying on the ground between his two captors, looking quite dead.