Torn By War: 4 (The Death Wizard Chronicles) Read online

  “Soko me appamaano (My sorrow is boundless),” Aya said. “The Tugars would have arrived sooner, if we were able. How long ago did these events occur? And where?”

  “We were assailed yesterday eve, just ten leagues to the west.”

  “Then the fiends have already entered Tējo,” Aya mused.

  “Yes. But the tidings are worse than that.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “Most of the fiends, as you call them, resembled citizens of Senasana, fish folk from the Ogha, or farmers from the Green Plains. But others were among them: Beydoos, Kurfs, Kalliks, and Takans. The army grows. And our people, including some of our children, march with it.”

  Despite the Beydoo’s dire words, the Tugars stayed put. The heat of the midafternoon could weaken even the stoutest of warriors, and Aya wanted his contingent to be as fresh as possible. If the army of fiends was indeed twenty thousand strong, it would be no easy task to defeat, even for the Kantaara Yodhas. And it was possible that the fiends were scattered beyond a core group, which meant days or weeks of searching and destroying. Given time, was a single fiend capable of infecting others and creating yet another army? The monsters were a cancer that had to be eradicated completely, or they would sprout again and again, perhaps where least expected.

  One hundred slow breaths before dusk, the Tugars departed their resting place among the boulders, having no choice but to leave the Beydoos to fend for themselves. Though Aya did his best to maintain discipline, his warriors were anxious to confront the enemy, and they quickened their pace to a jog, which was tough work on the spongy sand. Now they were less than twenty leagues from where Aya had first seen the fiends in the heart of Barranca, but that was six days past. Even moving slowly, the army of monsters would be far distant from where Aya remembered. But soon it became apparent where the fiends were headed. From the southwest, hundreds of panicked desert dwellers scrambled into the heart of Tējo.

  “You are not enough,” a Takan woman screamed at Aya, without slowing her retreat.

  “All the Tugars in the world are not enough,” her male companion said.

  “My own daughter tried to eat me,” a grandmotherly type said to Aya. Then she sprinted off faster than most of the others.

  “These people flee into the desert without sufficient water or food,” a Tugar warrior said to his leader. “They will die there just as surely as at the hands of the fiends. Should some of us remain behind to aid their retreat?”

  “They have gotten this far without our help,” Aya said. “Do not underestimate their ability to survive. No . . . we stay together.”

  THE DAY AFTER Kithar reached Wuul, the Tugarian warrior named Silah strode north along the eastern border of Barranca in the late afternoon. In terms of finding help, she had had less success than Kithar. The few she encountered were in no condition to lend aid, though many told her disturbing stories of an army of fiends invading Tējo from the north.

  To her left, a line of smoke rose into the desert sky. From the color and quantity, Silah discerned that this was no ordinary campfire. Someone or something must have ignited a large patch of brush within Barranca; there wasn’t enough wood in all of the wastelands to build a fire of such intensity.

  A tall limestone ridge blocked her view. She briskly scaled the rock face, slid through a crevice, and stepped onto a dusty ledge. What she saw far below—with her superhuman eyesight—caused her to gasp. Ten tribesmen, Takans from the looks of them, were huddled on a bald within a burning patch of acacias. Just outside the fire were a dozen fiends of various shapes and sizes, including one that appeared to be a child of no more than five summers. The fiends were unable to breach the burning bushes, but the flames were diminishing, and soon the monsters would be able to find an opening.

  Silah scrambled down the interior of the ridge and sprinted across the jagged floor of Barranca. The Takans were at least two miles away. Silah ran until her lungs burned, but she was losing her race against time. She screamed with all her might, hoping to distract the predators, but they seemed not to hear, too intent on their prey to heed her approach. Even from a quarter-mile away, she could see that one of the fiends had stumbled through the flames and was tussling with the people inside.

  While still in a sprint, Silah brought out her sling, loaded a bead in the leather pouch, and whirled it above her head. Her aim, as usual, was magnificent. The nearest fiend fell, its skull pierced from back to front. Six more shots, in succession, dropped six more monsters, though it was only a temporary slowdown. Soon after tumbling to the ground, they staggered to their feet to resume the hunt.

  However, the beads accomplished what her shouting had not. Now the fiends were aware of her. Silah slowed her pace enough to catch her breath, tucked her sling back into her belt, and removed her uttara. In the sunlight of late afternoon, the blade gleamed like red death.

  The fiends were disgusting to behold—bruised, bloodied, and in most cases, partially eaten. But a Tugar never shied from a fight. Silah had undergone fifty years of training. Even against monsters, battle brought exhilaration instead of fear.

  One of the fiends, formerly a powerfully built teenage boy, had separated from the others and was the first to greet her. From five paces away, Silah leaped, locked her elbows, and whipped the striking area of her blade into the lumpy protrusion at the front of the boy’s neck. With astounding ease, the uttara cut through cartilage and bone. The force of the blow caused the fiend’s head to spring high into the air. Black blood spurted from the severed neck, while its body crumpled forward and struck the gravel with a thud. Silah barely noticed. There was more killing to be done before she would have time to examine the carnage.

  Ten more fiends came toward her, though they slowed their approach. Discretion, apparently, was a part of their adaptability. The next within striking distance was a wiry woman who was naked except for a black head-covering. Bite marks were visible all over her body, and one of her small breasts had been ripped completely off. Silah tightened her two-handed grip inward as her uttara swung downward. The blade sundered the woman’s skull and drove past bone, flesh, and gristle all the way to the sternum. For less than a second, the uttara became entangled in muscle and sinew, forcing Silah to twist it slightly before yanking it free. This short delay gave the next fiend just enough time to reach her and bite her left forearm with jaws as strong as a desert Lyon’s. But they were still no match for the dense flesh of a Tugar. Silah caved in the man’s chest with a kick. He tumbled backward and lay temporarily still.

  The nine who remained, including the child, fanned out in front of her, a move she had not expected. Apparently the fiends were able to think and learn, at least in rudimentary fashion. Even so, they remained easy marks.

  Silah’s vision drifted slightly out of focus, enabling her to watch all of her adversaries’ movements—their eyes, arms, hands, legs, and feet—rather than focus on anything specific. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, steadying her breath and clearing her mind. Her body and sword became one.

  The largest of the men came first. Silah assumed a stable stance, rotated her hips, and swung the blade in perfect alignment, removing his head from his body with one clean stroke. Two more men and a woman came next. Silah stabbed the men in their hearts to slow them down, decapitated the woman, and then finished off the first two.

  Four fiends remained, not including the one still engaged in a snarling battle with the Takans and the other whose chest she had crushed with a kick. Three went easily, but the Tugar hesitated when it came to the child. Instead, Silah raced past her, leapt over the smoldering bushes, and entered the bald.

  Two “normal” men were struggling to hold the fiend’s arms, though he thrashed, snarled, and snapped at their faces. An injured woman was crumpled on her side, and she trembled and moaned. Two other women knelt beside her, wrapping a strip of torn cloth around her forearm to slow the bleeding from a ragged bite on her wrist. The five other Takans stood uselessly to the side,
overcome by terror.

  “Release it and step away,” Silah ordered.

  The men did as they were told, and the warrior ended the fiend’s existence. One of the women, who was attempting to help the injured one, screamed, “Silah, stay back!”

  The Tugar was amazed, wondering how the woman knew her name. But then the warrior realized, with horror, that she shared her name with the child who had become a fiend. The girl approached, her face twisted in a snarl. The sight smote Silah’s heart, freezing her just long enough for the woman—the mother—to run sobbing toward the girl and lift her in her arms. But Silah the Fiend cared nothing for tears. She bit down on her mother’s neck and swallowed the juicy mess. The mother wobbled and then collapsed, tumbling into the smoldering brush, with her former daughter still in her arms.

  “Somebody kill her,” one of the men screamed. Silah the Tugar took three large strides, lifted Silah the Fiend by her hair, and removed the child’s carnivorous head. When the mother began to rise, the Tugar ended her existence, as well.

  During the commotion, the fiend with the caved-in chest had managed to crawl within five paces. Though his torso was twisted, he still was intent on feeding. Silah removed this threat with a single stroke.

  The survivors were in various states of shock. The bravest among them huddled near the bleeding woman. Several others simply wandered off. Silah towered over the injured victim.

  “I must eliminate her. Whenever a bite draws blood, even a small amount such as this, there is change, though some take longer than others.”

  “No,” one of the men shouted. “When I tried to stab one of the monsters, I cut her accidentally.” Then he stood and drew a dagger from his belt. “She wasn’t bitten.”

  “Those are teeth marks.”

  He waved the dagger menacingly. “She wasn’t bitten. If you touch her, I will kill you.”

  “Sujana,” another man said. “Put away your blade. All of us together are no match for this warrior. Besides, she speaks the truth. Your wife is lost. Stand aside and allow the Tugar to end her life before her true misery begins. You will reunite with her in your next existence.”

  “I cannot bear it,” the man said with a last gasp of defiance, but then he lowered the dagger and dropped it, his spirit crushed.

  As if in response, the injured woman rose up on her knees and snarled. The survivors backed away, giving Silah the room she needed. A whizzing stroke put Sujana’s wife out of her misery.

  Silah flicked the blood off her blade and slid her uttara back into its scabbard.

  “Soko me appamaano (My sorrow is boundless),” she said to the Takans.

  Sujana fell to his knees. In a gruesome display of love, he cradled his wife’s head in his lap.

  “What do we do now, Kantaara Yodha?” one of the women said. “Is any place safe?”

  “Make for Wuul,” Silah said. “There will be men and women there who can fight. In the meantime, I will continue north.”

  As Silah turned to leave, she was surprised to find that she had a visitor. A chestnut gelding cantered over and bowed his head, his back and flanks lathered.

  “Chieftain!” Silah said, remembering him well. “How came you here?”

  The gelding nickered but had no other answer.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Nimm wasn’t lost, after all. Instead, the girl had crawled deep into the cave, trying to get as far as possible from the sight of her mother’s death.

  Tāseti searched about in a near panic before finally hearing the girl’s squeaky voice coming from the far reaches of darkness. “Did you kill my mommy yet?” Nimm said, poking her head out of an impossibly small hole.

  “She awaits you in her next life,” the Asēkha said.

  “Do I have to look at her?”

  “No, little one. Remember her the way she was before. I think that’s what she would have wanted. Will you come out?”

  “I found water,” Nimm said matter-of-factly.

  “What?”

  “It’s only a trickle, but it tastes real good.”

  Tāseti was far too large to squeeze into the tunnel, but claustrophobia and darkness did not seem to faze Nimm. Tāseti handed the girl the untainted skin and had her fill it. Then she filled her own skin from the good one and had Nimm refill hers again. After that, they watered the camel, ate a small meal, and resumed their search.

  That had been two days ago. Now she and the girl were emerging from the eastern rim of Barranca at the same time that Silah was saving the Takans less than three leagues to the south.

  Tāseti already had killed six more fiends, including Huta, the girl’s brother. Every time Tathagata slowed her progress to feed, Tāseti was forced to stop later on and clean up the mess, which, combined with taking care of Nimm’s needs and finding time for the camel to forage, made it increasingly difficult to gain ground on her quarry.

  Occasionally, Tāseti had found footprints twice as large as her own. Not only was Tathagata continuing to eat, she appeared to be physically growing. This must have made her far more dangerous than the people she infected.

  With Barranca at her back, Tāseti dismounted and studied the signs. A pool of black blood speckled with worms was splashed on the cream-colored sand, but already it was dry and partially obscured. Though Tathagata was leaving behind a grisly trail of gore, the fiend now would become more difficult to track. The windblown sands of Tējo quickly covered footprints.

  From the look and texture of the blood, Tāseti guessed that Tathagata had passed this way around noon.

  “Still half a day,” Tāseti whined. “No matter how hard I try, I cannot catch you, Amanusso-Pabhavo (Demon-Spawn)!”

  “It’s because of me,” Nimm said timidly.

  Tāseti did not respond.

  “You can leave me here and come back when you’re done,” the girl said, trying to sound brave. “As long as I have water and some of that cactus, I’ll be okay. If I see any more monsters, I’ll hide in a cave. If I crawl in deep enough, they won’t be able to get me.”

  Tāseti felt an unexpected swell of affection for the girl. “I’d prefer you stay with me, if that’s all right.”

  Nimm smiled. “My mommy always taught me to say thank you. So . . . thank you.”

  “Let’s keep moving,” Tāseti said. “We have a monster to catch.”

  Then the warrior, the girl, and the camel entered the desert.

  THE FARTHER southwest the Tugars journeyed, the more refugees they encountered. Several hundred had grown into several thousand. The bravest among them offered to join the Kantaara Yodhas. But Aya refused.

  “If you truly wish to help, then follow the others into the desert and assist whoever you can.”

  Near dawn, the Tugars encountered the first of the fiends, a once-beautiful woman stumbling along the steep side of a dune. When she saw the Tugars standing on its knife-like crest, she crawled upward as if determined to devour them all. Aya motioned to a warrior, who stepped down and cut the fiend in half.

  “One down, twenty thousand to go,” she shouted to the others.

  “Ema! Ema!” they called back.

  “Let’s hope it’s twenty thousand . . . and no more,” Aya whispered.

  In the final breaths before the rising of the sun, at least one hundred more of the fiends ran straight into Tugarian blades. It only got worse. When the warriors surmounted the towering crest of a fossil dune twice as tall as its neighbors, they looked down upon a playa several leagues in diameter. The flat surface of the dry lakebed swarmed with fiends.

  Not twenty thousand, Aya surmised, but thirty thousand or more.

  The Tugars could see no normal people anywhere near. Without the scent of prey to enrage them, the fiends moved sluggishly. At first, the enormous dune cast a shadow over most of the playa, but when the sun crept over the crest, the lakebed blazed to life. Like a single organism, the monsters turned in unison and gazed at the coming of day. The bright sunlight silhouetted twenty-five score Tugars. The fiends screamed an
d then charged.

  Aya grunted. “We shall meet them on the crest. If we are overcome, fall back to the next dune, and the third. Kill any and all who come near, from youngest to eldest. And don’t get fancy. Take only their heads.”

  They stood and waited for the battle to begin.

  APPAM WAS WEARY. It had been ten days since he had left Tāseti and the noble ones and set off on his own to the Tent City, and he had moved with great haste. Finally, Appam came within sight of the oasis that contained the most-recent version of Anna. The Tugarian warrior, who was one hundred and seventy years old and fifth in line to ascend to the rank of Asēkha, was amazed by what he beheld. The Simōōn had been lowered, leaving the Tent City vulnerable to attack, though the desert warriors had formed Mandala (The Circle) and were beginning its regeneration. Still, only the slightest wisps had begun to rise from the sand, and Appam could see that it would take several more days to recreate the magical barrier.

  Appam recognized Dvipa immediately. The Asēkha was shouting instructions as he strode from Tugar to Tugar, each warrior spinning right to left with blurring rapidity. A Simōōn could be re-grown only under the direction of one of the Viisati (The Twenty). When all ten thousand warriors worked together, the magical barrier would rise in a day. But with just twenty-five score, it could take a week. Appam guessed they had begun the process two days before his arrival.

  Dvipa saw Appam and rushed toward him, clasping his forearm. “Warrior.”

  “Asēkha.”

  Dvipa smiled. “One day soon, you will preside in my place, my son.”

  “Father, I desire to attain your rank, but not at your expense.”

  Dvipa laughed. “I was born to be an Asēkha, but you were born to lead them.”