Page 11 of Queen Demon
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Is Vartasias your master? Did he send you after me?”
This was the first time Kai had managed to get another expositor’s name, and it was even more intriguing that it was one apparently associated with captive demons. “I wouldn’t be a very obedient demon if I revealed all my master’s secrets,” Kai stalled while trying to think of what else to say.
“Is he at Dashar now? What does he want of me?”
Dashar was a fort near Descar-arik on the coast. “Are there demons at Dashar?” Kai knew it was a mistake as soon as the words came out, but it was too late.
“You weren’t sent…” The man’s face went on a whole journey through outrage, horror, disgust. “The dross have their own demons.” He said it in realization, not as if he was talking to Kai. “How do they control you, tell me—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kai tried.
The expositor’s expression turned cunning. “I can be a valuable prisoner. Take me to your masters, they’ll surely reward you.”
If only that were possible. Expositors were just too dangerous to keep alive. “Maybe, if you tell me what that intention does.” But Kai felt the stir of another intention forming. He huffed out an annoyed breath. He couldn’t afford to let the expositor set an intention on him, no matter how much information the man might have. “I’ll just have to figure it out for myself.” And he drained the rest of the man’s life.
The body sank into a desiccated husk, and Kai clambered to his feet, trying not to slip on the wet rock. At least he hadn’t landed in the stream, which might have made the fight more difficult. Though with the underearth still closed to him, it was hard to tell. Salatel was at the top of the defile now. She said encouragingly, “Did he say anything, Fourth Prince?”
“A little, he gave me a name.” Kai wasn’t pleased with his effort. He should have been able to prolong the conversation but subterfuge wasn’t something that came naturally to him. “Don’t come down yet, there’s an intention here somewhere.”
She signaled that she understood and retreated back to gather the others.
Kai searched for the intention, stepping back and forth over the stream and slipping on the slick mud along the shallow bank. He found it sunk deep in the grass just above where his first leap had taken him. Invisible to mortal eyes, it looked to Kai like a word ina language he didn’t understand, written in sunlight melted over the green stalks. He poked it a little, but he would have to unravel the design to understand what it did, and that took time. He lifted it carefully and set it on his chest for safekeeping, along with the four others he was saving from the battle last night. “You can come down now,” he said, and Salatel and the others started the awkward climb to join him.
Arsha and Telare went ahead to join Cerala, stepping matter-of-factly past the corpse. They were well used to Kai’s method of fighting now; he wasn’t sure how much they had been appalled by it, since the first time they saw it he had been killing Cantenios, an expositor who would have murdered all of them. However they felt, they had never objected.
Kai and Salatel searched the corpse while Nirana and Hartel kept watch further up the hill. There would be scatters of lost legionaries out here too, survivors of the running battle that had started in the south toward Seidel-arik.
After the evacuation of Benais-arik, Bashasa had been luring the legionaries to places where he wasn’t, making them split and exhaust their forces in this part of the Arik, setting traps where he could. This battle had been aimed at distracting the Seidel-arik legionary garrison and allowing the artisan guilds in the city to smuggle out refugees and supplies.
Kai dug through the pockets in the expositor’s richly embroidered coat, tossing things to Salatel to look at more closely once he was sure they were safe for her to touch. “No maps, no letters,” he concluded, pushing to his feet. He stretched his back with a wince. Until he had ended up in this body, he had no idea how much being even ten or so years older affected mortals. This was probably part of the reason Bashasa drank.
“I wonder how much they’re trusted with valuable information,” Salatel said, dusting her hands as she stood. “I think the expositors they send out on patrols are not much prized.”
“The stronger ones aren’t going to leave a city, even if there’snot a Hierarch there.” Kai squinted at the lightening sky, where gray was just beginning to give way to blue. They needed to get moving. “Let’s get his body away from the stream.”
Flies already buzzed around them as they dragged it down the defile into a gully toward the side of the road. They stripped it, and Salatel bashed the face in with a rock. If it was found by legionaries, they would have no idea who the man had been. It was an important part of keeping the Hierarchs’ forces in the Arik guessing. If they could throw doubt into the legionary command, make them think their expositors were taking opportunities to leave, all the better. Salatel tossed the bundle of the expositor’s clothes to Arsha, who stuffed them in a bag.
They buried the corpse under a shallow layer of loose gravel and brush, which would keep it from being seen from the road, but not stop the lizards and other carrion scavengers from finding it. With that finished, Kai climbed back on his growling horse. He didn’t need to give many orders, the soldiers knew better what to do as a cadre than he did; all he had to do was indicate to Salatel what he wanted to do next. He said, “Let’s get back to the others.”
Salatel lifted her hand in a signal and led the way down the defile toward the plain. Kai waited for his horse to hack up an undigested pellet of rodent and lizard bones, then nudged it to follow her.
It was late morning when they caught up with Bashasa’s troop. The sky to the west was filling with gray clouds, a cool breeze making the grasses ripple over the hills. Kai saw a flicker of movement in the brush as they rode down out of the rocks. It was one of their scouts, who the Arike called vanguarders, trailing the main troop to keep watch for pursuit. Salatel acknowledged the movement with a subtle hand gesture. Kai shook his head to let the hood of his coat fall back, mostly for the benefit of any wind-devils Ziede had sent to keep watch, so she would know it was him.
Kai had made sure he was recognizable. The soldiers wore long tunics and coats and loose leggings of cotton and grass silk, in sun-faded rust or brown-green, pale yellows and tans, colors that faded into the landscape. Kai wore the male version of the same, with a split-skirt made to be easily tucked or tied out of the way. But he had taken a black embroidered coat from one of the expositors he had killed in Benais-arik, now mottled where the bloodstains had been mostly washed out, and he wore Talamines’ emerald pins in his long mane of hair. Everyone, from Bashasa through to the people who were too old or incapacitated to fight, but who made the camps and tended wounds and managed the supplies, had told him that it made him a target. Which was Kai’s intention. He wanted their allies and enemies to see him, Bashasa’s demon prince. To know they would have to go through Kai to get to Bashasa.
They headed down to a wide strip that cut through the edge of the rocky terrain, running along a gully carved by a fast, shallow stream, and sheltered by the scrub and tree-covered hills rising all around. According to the maps it was an old trade route that had been long abandoned, its stones buried under decades of dirt and growing things. The legionaries brought to the Arik from across the straits far to the south were unlikely to know it was here, and it allowed the troops to move faster.
Once they were down on the road, Kai urged his horse to a quicker pace and Salatel and the others followed suit. After a little distance, Kai spotted a wallwalker, its dark-furred bulk disappearing where the road curved around a rocky bluff.
Kai and the cadre reached the rearguard, the soldiers waving greetings, then passed it and drew even with the wallwalker. He still hated the things, the stink of their fur and their lizard-like hide, their giant teeth, the crushing step of their clawed feet. Even the angry Arike horses were better.
A supply officer hung off the wallwalker’s cargo netting, handing out fresh waterskins and bags of food to returning patrols. Kai nodded to Salatel and she split off with the rest of the cadre toget their share. Kai continued up toward the front, past the other wallwalkers and the riders alongside them, a mix of now-familiar Arike soldiers and civilians who had joined them from the cities and towns along the way.
They had withdrawn from Benais-arik two months ago as planned, leaving the evacuated city behind them. As Bashasa had led them north, killing the legionary patrols they encountered, he had sent vanguarders to warn villages and towns and isolated farmsteads.
The disheartening thing was that many of those villages and towns were empty, and others were barely populated at all, often only with people who had fled the cities looking for shelter with family or friends, and had found their homes empty. Other times, the vanguarders didn’t even know they were approaching the burned ruin of a settlement until they realized the horses were walking through overgrown plowed plots, or unharvested crops left to rot on the ground.
While some of the Arike soldiers tried to tell themselves many of the missing might have left on their own, Kai and most of the others thought the more obvious explanation was the right one. Despite the agreements, supposed treaties, and sending of hostages, the Hierarchs had started to kill off the inhabitants of the Arik region that they didn’t see a use for, and they had begun this at least a year before the destruction of the Summer Halls. The Arike city-states were running out of time.
