For just a second, a tiny chill ran along Ringil’s spine. He put it away, shrugged to shake it off. He pitched the stub of his krinzanz twig away into the nighttime garden below and stared after the ember.
“Well, I’ve seen beauty, too,” he said somberly. “And that never stopped me killing anything that got in my way, either.”
CHAPTER 6
By the time they made camp, a clouded darkness held the sky above the steppe.
The news of the runner attack had reached the tents ahead of them; the night herdsmen who came out to relieve them included a cousin of Runi’s who rode back at speed to tell his other kin. Egar followed on foot, leading his horse with Runi’s body slung over it while Klarn rode at a respectful distance, watchful as a raven. When they reached the Skaranak encampment, there were torches burning everywhere and practically the whole clan gathered with Runi’s family at their head. Even Poltar was there, the gaunt, shaven-skulled shaman and his acolytes standing aloof from the throng, the implements of consecration ready in their hands. There had been a subdued muttering back and forth among those waiting, but it died away to nothing when they saw the blood-soaked form of their clanmaster leading the horse into the glow of the torches.
The steppe ghouls had died hard. Their marks were on the Dragonbane from head to foot.
Egar lowered his eyes so he would not have to look at Narma and Jural. Neither Runi’s mother nor father had wanted their son to ride herd so early, but in council Egar would not forbid it since the boy was of age. Runi had promise, he was an enthusiastic boy, and he’d had a way with the animals since he could walk.
Added to which, anything was preferable to having him slouch around with the other sons of buffalo-wealthy Skaranak, swilling rice wine and yelling unimaginative abuse at passing women. Right, Clanmaster? Better that young Runi pack that in and start making something of himself.
And now Runi was torn apart and already cooling as Egar lifted his roughly bound body from the horse’s back. The Dragonbane shifted his burden, bore it up in both arms, wincing as the weight pressed back against slash wounds on chest and upper arms. He came forward one numb step at a time to present Runi to his parents.
Narma broke down crying and fell on her son’s exposed face, so it was hard for Egar to keep the body in his arms. He tried not to stagger. Jural turned his face away, hid his tears in the darkness so he would not be shamed before the clan.
It was at times like this that the Dragonbane wished heartily he’d never fucking returned from the south or assumed the mantle of clanmaster.
“He died a warrior’s death.”
He intoned the ritual words, cursing inwardly at the idiocy of it all. A sixteen-year-old boy, for fuck’s sake. If he’d had the time to become a warrior, maybe he’d have lived through the raid. “He will be honored with the name of clan defender forever in our hearts.” He hesitated and mumbled, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry, Narma.”
Her wailing went up a notch. It was that moment that Poltar the shaman chose to assert his own formalized role.
“Woman, be still. Will the Dwellers look with favor on a warrior so beset with female noisemaking? Even now he looks down on you from the Sky Road to his forefathers, and is shamed before them by this hubbub. Get away and light candles for him, as a woman should.”
What happened next was by no means clear in anybody’s mind afterward, least of all Egar’s own. Narma, it seemed, was not going to relinquish her hold on Runi’s corpse. Poltar stepped closer and tried to persuade her by main force. There was a brief scuffle, an escalation of weeping, and the flat cracking sound of a palm against a face. Runi tumbled from Egar’s arms and hit the earth with a dull thud, headfirst. Narma started screaming at the shaman and Poltar hit her openhanded. She collapsed over her son like a badly tied bundle of firewood. Egar pivoted, guilt and undispelled rage surging for release, and decked the shaman with every ounce of strength left in his right arm. Poltar flew fully five feet backward from the end of the Dragonbane’s fist and hit the ground on his back.
There was a breath-choked pause while everyone caught up.
One of the acolytes took a step toward Egar and then thought better of it as he saw the look on the Dragonbane’s bloodied face. The other three hurried to Poltar’s side and helped him to sit up. The crowd murmured uneasily, a word slithering on the edge of being pronounced. The shaman spat blood and said it for them.
“Sacrilege!”
“Oh, give it a rest.” Egar, drawling but a lot less unconcerned than he made out. Because Poltar was about to be a fucking problem.
If there was one force on the steppes that the Majak acknowledged equal to their own general toughness, it was the shifty, lightning-blast power of the Sky Dwellers. The Dwellers were not like the southerners’ God in His meticulous, archive-keeping imperialism. They were jealous, fickle, and unpredictably violent, and had no time for such clerkish, inclusive ways—they sent storms or plagues at random to remind the Majak of their place in the scheme of things, set men against each other for amusement, and then played dice with one another to decide who would live or die. In short, they acted not unlike the leisured and powerful among men, and the shaman was their only empowered messenger under the sky. To offend the shaman was to offend the Dwellers, and those who offended, it was understood, would sooner or later pay a heavy price.
Now the oldest acolyte took it up, brandishing his summoning stick at the assembled Skaranak.
“Sacrilege! Sacrilege has been done! Who will atone?”
“You’ll fucking atone if you don’t shut up.” Egar strode toward the speaker, determined to nip this in the bud. The acolyte stood his ground, eyes wide with fear and insane faith.
“Urann the Gray will—”
Egar grabbed him by the throat. “I said shut up. Where was Urann the Gray when I needed him out there? Where was Urann when this boy needed his help?” He cast a glance around at the frightened faces in the torchlight, and for the first time in his life he felt an overpowering contempt for his own people. His voice rang louder. ‘Where is fucking Urann every time we need him, heh? Where was he, Garath, when the runners took your brother? When the wolves stole your daughter from her cradle, Inmath? Where was he when the coughing fever came and the smoke from the funeral pyres rose on every horizon from here to Ishlin-ichan. Where was that gray motherfucker when my father died?”
Then Poltar was back on his feet and facing him.
“You speak as a child,” he said in a quiet, deadly voice that nonetheless carried to the whole watching crowd. Consummately staged—it was the man’s profession after all. “Your time in the south has corrupted you to our ways, and now you’d bring disaster on the Skaranak with your sacrilege. You are no longer fit to govern as clanmaster. The Grey One speaks it with the death of this boy.”
The crowd murmured, but it was a confused sound. There were plenty of them who had little time for Poltar and the leisurely lifestyle his status brought him. Egar wasn’t the only cynic on the steppe, nor the only Skaranak warrior to have gone south and come back with a wider picture of how the world worked. Three or four of the associate herd owners had themselves been mercenary captains for Yhelteth, and one of them, Marnak, had fought beside the Dragonbane at Gallows Gap. He was older than Egar by at least a decade, but still whiplash-swift when it was needed, and his loyalty was forged deeper than anything the shaman could call on. Egar spotted his grim, leathered face there in the torchlight, watchful and ready to skin steel. Marnak caught his clanmaster’s look and nodded, just once. Egar felt gratitude sting at his eyes.