Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [77]
“Rhodry?” Arzosah said. “I don’t suppose you’d mind if I finished up that horse.”
“Yen! It’s all gassy and overripe!”
“I rather enjoy meat that way. It’s a savory, like.”
“Well, it’s no good to anyone else, sure enough. You’ll be able to fly, though, if you eat it?”
“After a bit of a rest, not much more than one of your hand’s breadths of the sun moving in the sky.”
He’d ridden to war too often to risk starving his mount when combat lay ahead.
“Eat away. Just watch out for maggots.”
“Why? I like maggots.”
“Whatever pleases you, then.”
Even though the dragon was a tidy feeder, slicing her meat with a delicate fang, then chewing quietly, Rhodry preferred to get away from the smell of rotted horse while she ate. He wandered over to the marker stone and swore aloud. Moss and the pitting of weather had mottled its once-slick face with white and green; rain had worn the slab itself away, shrunk it down and dug out its shoulders. He had to run his fingertips over the pictographs to find them and trace them out. It seemed that a thousand years had passed over this stone while he’d spent but the turning of two moons away from it. If Evandar hadn’t told him of the siege of Cengarn, he would have panicked, wondering if he’d been cast into a magical sleep like the heroes of old tales. As it was, he supposed that everything linked to Haen Marn had suffered at its leaving.
“No hope for it now,” he said aloud. “Angmar, my love, I only pray you’re well, wherever you may be.”
Tears burned in his throat, but he choked them back. With a toss of his head, he strode back to the broken wagon to see if he could learn anything about the enemies he was facing.
Quite a lot, as it turned out. Behind the heap of slats and shattered wheels lay smashed wooden boxes and a long narrow bundle, covered with a cow’s hide that had been painted with strange runes. Rhodry flipped the hide away, then staggered back, Underneath a dead man, and a human being at that, lay on his back, but he was no victim of the wagon accident. As battle-hardened as Rhodry was, the sight nearly made him retch. The fellow had been stripped naked, then staked out, hands and feet pierced through with iron-tipped spikes. From breech to breastbone he’d been slit, then opened like a book, a few inches at a time, it seemed, and his internal organs pulled free to lie in tidy rows to either side—guts by his hips, liver and stomach to either side his waist, lungs split and laid beside his chest. His heart, however, was missing. Judging by the agony still graved into his face—his tongue and lips were so caked with black blood that he must have bitten them repeatedly—he had lasted a good long time. Ants swarmed over everything.
Rhodry shuddered like a wet dog and moved away. He swore a couple of times, spat on the ground for good measure, then looked up to find Arzosah considering him with one coppery eye.
“That’s how they send messages to their gods,” she said. “After they stake him, they chant the message over and over, then send him off to the Deathworld to deliver it.”
“If I were him, I’d lie, just for revenge. What do they do with the heart?”
“I have no idea. Eat it, maybe, or work magic with it? I watched them do the message rite once—up in the mountains, that was—but then they put the heart in a box and took it away.”
“I see. Here, can you fly a little ways? I don’t want to stay here with this thing.”
“I can manage a few flaps, but then I’ll have to rest.”
“Fine. Let me just wash my hands in the stream.”
“Why? You didn’t touch that thing, did you?”
“Of course not. I just feel like I need a bit of a wash.”
Worse lay in store for them later that afternoon. After Arzosah’s rest, they headed south again, flapping and