Chapter 37

Ghrasia Madah preferred fighting blinding-trees to questioning skittish Raonas. But she had three dead sparrows in her pocket and a description of the man who’d returned them to the clan’s primary dealer three days before. It was the best lead on the men who might be assassinating people in Dhai that she had had in days, and with a lead that fresh, she knew she had to work quickly, even if it meant spreading her people beyond the clan fence to suss out the stranger.

She walked with a young parajista named Halimey, a big-eyed, plump-cheeked young man who put her in mind of her own daughter. The militia was stretched thin, and the Oras she brought with her were even thinner. She had started out breaking them into teams of four – two militia, a parajista, and another Ora whose star was descendent. But the ground they had to cover around Clan Raona was substantial, and time was short. With no other leads beyond the vague description of the stranger, there was nothing to report to the Kai. The Kai, not Ahkio, she had to keep reminding herself. Because when she thought of him as Ahkio, it stirred up her memory of him at the fountain, and that stirred up a good many more feelings best left shuttered up. She’d gotten word of his marriage a few days before. A fine political match. She wished them much success. But she had far larger concerns.

“So, you haven’t seen anyone with that description?” Ghrasia asked the matronly woman on the steps of her gill-topped home. Best Ghrasia could figure, the house was actually a tirajista-trained mushroom, very old.

“I’d remember a stranger like that with yellow eyes, missing three teeth,” the woman said. “I’ll remember your faces a good long time, too, and they aren’t half so colorful.”

“I’m sure,” Ghrasia said.

“You don’t look the way I imagined,” the woman said, and Ghrasia regretted introducing herself with her full name. Sometimes, it opened more doors. But on occasion, it did get her into trouble. “Thought you’d be taller. And have larger arms.”

“I hear that a lot,” Ghrasia said.

“Thank you for your time,” Ghrasia said.

“Feed this boy something,” the matron said. “He looks too thin.”

“I’ll do that,” Ghrasia said.

Once they were clear of the house, Halimey snickered. “Feed me, Mother!”

“Call me that again and I’ll fix you up a proper mud pie,” she said. He could have been hers, though. He wasn’t more than eighteen or nineteen.

“Next one’s two miles farther on,” Ghrasia said. “You want a rest?”

Halimey glanced up at the sky. The suns were winding down toward the horizon. “If we’re going to finish one more before dark, we better press on.”

“Then hurry on, now.”

Halimey hopped after her. Ghrasia was tired, but knowing they only had one more house for the day gave her the extra bit of energy she needed to push forward.

“Why is it you don’t dance?” Halimey said. He fished around in his pocket for one of his scorch pods and threw it off into the brush. It made a loud popping sound.

“They have dancing at the council house every night,” Halimey said. “Everyone goes. Clan Raona is happy to host us.”

Ghrasia had her own impression of just how happy Clan Raona was to have them. The local militia had spent much of its time since their arrival running around, curbing spurious storefronts, like the ones selling tax-free liquor and at least one illegal butcher shop, whose existence alone made Ghrasia’s stomach lurch. It took four days to assure them she was more interested in the sparrow buyers than in collecting taxes. Tax collection was not the business of the Liona militia.

“You can dance for both of us,” Ghrasia said.

“Was it some terrible accident?” Halimey said. He tossed another pod. Another pop.

“Was it because you were dancing and some bear attacked you? Or did you fall into a wine barrel while doing a Garika jig? My sister once–”

“Ah,” Halimey said. “You see? You do laugh.”

“I laugh a lot when I’m not tracking assassins, Halimey. I’ll leave the talking to you, then.”

Halimey chattered on for the rest of the long walk while Ghrasia kept watch for creeping vines and floxflass. The temperatures were cool but still mild. It didn’t snow much in Dhai, which contributed to the problem with the plants. They never experienced a hard freeze.

As they neared the end of the road, the low whine of the mock cicadas went suddenly quiet. Ghrasia came up short, but Halimey walked on. She heard something crashing far off – the sound of a small herd of walking trees. She listened for a while, but they seemed to have stopped.

Halimey paused ahead of her, looked back. “What is it?”

“Just worried we’d run into some walking trees. They’ve stopped now, probably to bed down for the night. The suns are setting. Hurry, now.” She was jumpy, she knew. It had been a long, boring day knocking on doors.

The last homestead of the day lay at the end of a winding path overhung in mossy bonsa trees and weeping green bamboo. The house was thirty feet up the side of a bonsa tree, built on the ledge of a massive calcified fungus. It looked like a fairly large working homestead. Broad, tirajista-trained vines snaked up the surrounding trees. They supported open-mouthed grub boxes that collected the fat parasites that fed on the trees. Dorinahs considered them a delicacy, and they were among Dhai’s chief exports. Walking trees liked them, too. No wonder there was a herd of them so close. They likely sensed the wriggling worms in the cages.

“Hope you aren’t afraid of heights,” Ghrasia said.

“I’m a parajista,” Halimey said. “I could fly if I wanted to.”

They walked up the narrow stair to the porch of the house. Ghrasia saw two more buildings linked with the main house, hugging up to the side of the tree. Outside the clan fences, the safest places to live were the trees, especially as a grub farmer that would draw herds of walking trees.

She reached for the door handle. The door was locked.

Ghrasia reflexively reached for the hilt of her sword.

“What’s wrong?” Halimey asked.

“Locked,” Ghrasia said.

Halimey reached up and knocked. “They’re grub farmers,” he said. “Anyone who lives outside a clan fence is a little odd. Lots of semi-sentient things crawl around out here.”

“I’m Halimey Farai Sorila and this is Ghrasia Madah. We’re from the Liona militia and–” He stopped.

The man at the door was about Halimey’s height, thin, with a shadow of a beard and matted black hair. His eyes were not gray or brown but yellow. His lips were parted, and Ghrasia saw the gap on the right side, where three teeth were missing. How the matron they last spoke to had not seen this man living just two miles from her home…

“We’re looking for a woman about your height,” Ghrasia interrupted. “She has long dark hair, about here,” Ghrasia said, putting a hand to her waist. “Maybe forty-odd years old, high forehead, sloping nose, plump like my friend.” Ghrasia realized she had described Javia, the former Kai.

“No one like that here,” the man said, squinting. “What did they do to bring the Liona militia all the way out here?”

“I’m afraid we can’t discuss it,” Ghrasia said. If this man was a foreign assassin, she needed three more Oras and half a dozen militia on hand. She could have Halimey call them up once they were out of sight of the house, post a watch overnight, and overtake him in the morning with a mounted force.

“Thank you for your time,” she said.

Halimey made a choked sound of distress. He groped at his throat and tumbled backward. Ghrasia grabbed his coat. A massive force thumped her from behind. The railing broke. They fell. Ghrasia had a long, sickening moment of freefall, just enough time to wonder how much it was going to hurt. She released Halimey. Relaxed her body. Bent her knees and prepared for impact.

She landed hard on the balls of her feet. Pain jolted up her legs. The air rushed from her lungs. Halimey thumped beside her. Ghrasia’s right ankle throbbed, but she felt no shattering pain. As she struggled to breathe, the assassin leapt from the railing and fell slowly to the ground beside her. She yanked at her sword, still gasping.

The assassin stepped on her scabbard. She followed his look to Halimey. Blood flecked the boy’s mouth. He had fallen hard on his right side. She could tell from the angle of the arm pinned beneath him that it was broken. A parajista could only fly if she was not wrapped in the powerful grip of another parajista.

“You wanted to talk,” the assassin said. “It would be impolite not to invite you inside.”

He yanked Ghrasia’s sword from its sheath. The everpine branch curled around his wrist. He ran Halimey through with it.

Ghrasia cried out. The man plunged the blade a second, a third, a fourth time into the boy’s prone body.

She turned over and clawed forward, ignoring the pain in her ankle. The assassin grabbed the knot of her hair and yanked her back.

“Not you,” he said. “You’re a gift to the dogs. The great Dhai hero. Even I have heard that name.”

He thumped Ghrasia over the head with the butt of her everpine sword. Blackness pooled across her vision. She lost her balance, collapsed. She was suddenly weightless, wrapped in a skein of air and propelled into the sky so quickly, she blacked out.

When she came to, she was lying on her side on a scuffed floor in front of a wooden fence. Her hands were tied in front of her with stout fireweed cord. Her ankle and head ached. What was a fence doing inside a house? She looked through the fence and saw a line of small kennels, like one would use for an adolescent dog. The room was mostly dark. A thin line of light came in through ventilation slits high up on the ceiling. The stink of the place was overpowering. It smelled like urine and old feces and unwashed bodies. Ghrasia gagged.

She heard a thump and looked to the other end of the room. The assassin sat at a broad, bloody table. The remains of Halimey’s body littered the floor, tangled in his blue tunic and trousers and gray coat. The assassin was hacking up hunks of the boy’s leg on the table.

A massive wave of terror seized her. Ghrasia tried to sit up. She punched it back down and breathed through it. She heard a soft whimpering sound from the kennels.

“They haven’t eaten in days,” the assassin said. “They’re very hungry.”

Ghrasia tried to think of something clever. The door lay between her and the assassin. She saw a large, intricate padlock on it, the sort that only came on crates from Dorinah. No one used that type of lock in Dhai. They required an exacting series of actions to remove them, pushing sliders and rotating pins in the correct order.

“How long have you been here?” Ghrasia asked. Talking made her head hurt more, but she suspected not talking would ease the headache far sooner than she wished.

“Many years,” he said. “My brothers and I.”

“Where are your brothers now? They help you farm this place?”

“There are a dozen of us,” he said. “We have worked in Raona longer than you could imagine. You are not the first to find us. Only the most famous.”

He raised his cleaver. “I am a good boy. Loyal to the Kai. But she did not say we’d be killing our own people. No, she did not say.”

“Kai Kirana is long dead,” Ghrasia said.

“Your Kirana is dead, yes. Not mine.”

Something moaned from the kennels. It didn’t sound like a dog.

“They all made me the messenger,” he said. “Passing their notes to one another. But I’m more than that. Stronger.” The cleaver came down. Bone crunched.

Ghrasia flinched. “That boy was a friend of mine,” she said.

The assassin threw a hunk of Halimey’s thigh over the fence. It landed with a wet thud on the floor. She heard more whimpering from the kennels. An excited stir of movement.

Dirty, matted figures burst from the kennels. They loped out on all fours, sniffing and snarling behind long matted hair. Dirt and feces and dried blood covered their bodies and the tattered remains of what could have been some old tunic or sack mended for the purpose.

The three creatures descended on the thigh, howling.

Ghrasia’s gorge rose. Their fingers dug into the meat.

The creatures were human. Or had once been.

They fought and snarled over their prize. Great pools of twisted flesh made puckered scars around where their eyes should have been. They were young, in their teens, perhaps. Living exclusively on human flesh in such conditions might have stunted them, though. For all she knew, they had lived this way for a century.

“I’m freeing them,” the assassin said. He threw another hunk of Halimey over the fence. Another frenzy ensued. “They know now that they are just animals. Weak beasts, to be cared for and to serve a superior people. I am training them, you see. The way you will all be trained to serve us.”

Ghrasia left herself then. It was a strange, detached feeling, like watching some other little woman holed up in a tree house with a madman while children feasted like wild dogs on the desecrated remains of her companion. From the outside, it was easier to understand what she needed to do. She focused on Halimey’s coat and the bulging pocket of scorch pods.

“It must have taken great strength to live here all alone,” she said, looking away from the coat.

The assassin reached for another of Halimey’s limbs, disturbing the coat. He slapped a long, tattered arm onto the table. She listened to the chewing, crunching sound of his captives gnawing on what he’d fed them.

“Strength beyond measure,” he said. He peered at her. “You’ll do, I think.”

“I’ve been wondering what to do with you,” he said. “Feed you to them… or make you one of them. What do you think? The great Dhai hero, one of my dogs.”

“I expect that will make you very happy,” Ghrasia said. “Are you going to blind me with your bare hands? I suspect there’s a better way to do that.”

“Oh, there is,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

He moved toward her. Ghrasia tensed. She had no defense against him. He was gifted and she was not. If she moved quickly enough to cause him serious pain, she might be able to break his concentration, but she would have to be fast.

The assassin grabbed the lock on the door. Ghrasia tried to watch the sequence of pins and knobs he manipulated, but he stood in front of the lock, his back to her. The lock clicked. He opened the door, then shut it behind him. Ghrasia waited a breath, long enough to hear his footsteps on the stairs leading to one of the other houses – she wasn’t sure which level she was on – and then she crept across the room to Halimey’s butchered body.

The things behind the fence snarled at her. One flung itself at the fence. Ghrasia worked quickly. She grabbed two fistfuls of the scorch pods from Halimey’s pocket with her bound hands and smashed them against the floor with all her strength. The heat was nothing, at first – an inconvenience.

She heard the assassin’s footsteps on the stairs.

Ghrasia murmured a prayer to Oma.

The scorch pods burst into flame beneath her hands. She smelled burning flesh and clothing, and rolled away, fearing she was on fire. But when she looked up, she saw it was Halimey’s coat that was on fire.

The creatures on the other side of the fence bayed and howled.

Ghrasia threw herself against the door, fingers seeking the padlock, her range of motion limited by her bonds.

The assassin’s steps on the porch quickened. He pushed against the door.

Ghrasia clicked the padlock into place.

The fire licked at Halimey’s coat, warming the collection of pods inside. They began to crack and hiss. Flaming pods popped from the pile, arcing across the room. The creatures were screaming now. Smoke began to fill the room. The floor caught fire. One pod landed in a creature’s hair. It began to smoke. They screamed and screamed.

The assassin pounded on the door. Ghrasia scurried back into the far corner of the room, away from the fire. She kicked at the fence.

The door blew off its hinges with such force that it burst apart the fence for her. Ragged splinters knifed into her right side. She cringed away.

The assassin’s burst of air and shower of kindling only fueled the fire. Ghrasia choked on smoke. His captives were running around in mad circles, squealing.

The assassin turned toward Ghrasia. He carried an awl in his hand.

One of the creatures bounded onto the top of the door and across the broken fence. It leapt onto the assassin’s back and clamped onto his throat. He cried out and flailed. The second creature came after the first. They began to tear him apart.

Ghrasia crawled past him and pushed herself out the door. She came up short, reeling at the drop off the porch. They were in the topmost of the three buildings that wound up the tree. She inhaled a gasp of fresh air. With her hands tied, she couldn’t mount the ladder. She looked down at the roof of the building below. Ten feet. Her ankle was still sore, possibly only twisted. If she landed on it again, it was possible she’d break it.

The assassin roared behind her over the sound of the flames.

Ghrasia saw more fire licking up the outside of the building. She gritted her teeth and thrust her hands into the fire. She smelled burning flesh as the flames seared her hands – and her bonds. Pain throbbed. She twisted her hands until the singed cord snapped.

The assassin fell out the door, clawing his way toward her. His creatures were still hooked into him, bloody and beaten. One’s arm looked dislocated.

Ghrasia jumped onto the ladder and climbed down, hissing through the pain of her scorched hands. She slid the last few feet and stumbled onto the porch of the second house. She pushed inside and saw the room was dominated by a large table. Various types of plants lay dissected on its surface. She smelled rotting flesh, too, and found bits of birds and rodents mortifying in cages hung from the ceiling. She heard a rustling sound and saw a line of twelve tiny cages set along the floor. A single Dhai character was painted on the outside of each – initials. Inside the cages were sparrows. Tirajista-trained sparrows could be compelled to return to the same locations – or even the same person – time and again.

What had he said about his brothers and being a messenger?

She heard the assassin screaming. Heard him trampling down the ladder.

Ghrasia bolted from the room, favoring her injured ankle, and slid into the lowest house. She banged open the door. So long as she stayed out of the assassin’s sight, it would be harder for him to net her in some cone of air.

She hopped down the front stairs and rolled onto the bare ground. She kissed it. Looked up at the long lines of grub cages running up and down the big trees. Under the cover of the bonsa trees, it was almost full dark, but she could see their outlines in the dappled shadows.

Ghrasia climbed onto the vine at the base of the bonsa tree and began kicking over the worm cages. They dropped to the ground and burst. She followed the long line of the vine, spiraling up and around the tree, staying out of sight of the assassin. She could hear him screaming at her from the ground.

Then she heard another sound.

Ghrasia pressed her back to the tree behind her and held her breath. Her injured hands burned as if they were still on fire.

A crashing, keening cry came from the woods. She felt a blast of air nearby. She clung to the tree and prayed the assassin was too injured to concentrate properly.

Hungry walking trees burst into the sea of wriggling grubs like a sentient tide. Their limbs moaned and creaked. A lashing tendril whipped the tree she hid up on, narrowly missing her face.

The assassin screamed. The air felt heavy. Ghrasia heard bursting trunks. Shattered branches.

The air pressure normalized.

The massive tide of walking trees continued to pour into the homestead, greedily snapping up the grubs with sappy tendrils and dropping them into the toxic bladders that hung from their crowns.

Ghrasia let out a single agonized sob.

She lay there all through the night while the walking trees fed. A few hours before dawn, the walking trees moved on. Ghrasia waited until there was enough light to see by and then gazed down into the wrecked clearing. She saw dozens of trampled grubs and the remains of a bloody, smashed body.

Ghrasia made her way back down the vine. She approached the body hesitantly, until she saw that its entire torso had been mashed in by the feet of the trees. It made her bolder. She stood beside the assassin’s pulverized body. Then she went over to the house and picked up a rock. She wanted to mash his face in. His yellow eyes, shot through with blood now, stared blankly out at the tree she had spent the night in.

She lowered the rock. If she mutilated him now, was she any better than him?

Ghrasia looked back up at the house. The topmost house had burned down to its foundation in the night. The bonsa tree it clung to had fared much better. It was scorched and the nearest leaves had turned black, but the fire had burned itself out after that.

She made the painful walk back up into the second house, the one with the cages. She opened the door and held her breath.

The sparrows were still alive.

“Ghrasia Madah to see you, Kai.”

“Where has she been?” Ahkio said. He half expected to hear Clan Leader Talisa had shuttered her up in some gaol for two days while she completed her tax-free trading. Ahkio had never seen a clan openly thwart so many national prohibitions.

“You see,” Talisa said, “she’s quite fine. Ghrasia Madah can handle herself quite–”

Ahkio didn’t wait for her to finish. He followed Caisa outside, pulling on his coat as he went. He saw Ghrasia limping into the town square alone. He came up short. She was covered in soot and blood, and there was some kind of… creature following a hundred yards behind her. It almost looked human.