Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [78]
“Land!” he called out to Arzosah. “At that first burnt farm there. Maybe someone’s left alive.”
No one was, and in the event, he was glad of it. When they landed in another huge scatter of ravens, he found the ruins of house and barns cold, with only wisps of gray ash, not smoke, blowing in the evening wind. Over everything hung the sickly sweet reek of burning, tinged with dead flesh. He walked back and forth, his silver dagger in his hand just for the comfort of it, saw here and there a dead man, lying hacked or broken, killed, all of them, from cuts of some bladed weapon wielded from above—he could postulate a horseback charge with long swords. Some of the corpses still clutched flails or wood-cutting axes, the only poor weapons they could grab. Some the flames had reached, but whether they were mercifully dead or only wounded when they’d caught fire, he couldn’t tell.
Beyond the largest heap of timbers and crashed walls he could see what seemed to be poles of some sort, standing stuck in the ground, and he could make out shapes attached to them. His stomach clenched, anticipating.
“It’s not pretty,” Arzosah said. “What they do to prisoners they take alive, I mean. I found some once, flying over Horsekin country.”
With the dragon padding after, Rhodry forced himself to walk round and see for himself. He’d been expecting severed heads; what he found was much worse, a thicket of death, twelve poles and corpses in all, each pole stained black with old blood. Each prisoner had been stripped and then impaled, while still alive judging from the agony in their twisted faces, on long spears that had been thrust into each man’s anus and straight on through, so that the iron tip now stuck out between their shoulder blades just at the neck. Each corpse hung half-eaten by ravens, the remaining skin a mottled gray, and the flesh the maroon of cut meat.
“They stand them up and let them die,” Arzosah said. “Do you think it takes a long time?”
“Anything more than a bare moment would be too long.” Rhodry was surprised that he could speak at all. “Why? Ye gods, why?”
Arzosah lifted her wings in the long rustle that did her for a shrug. Rhodry found himself staring at each man in turn; he’d shared a meal with them, when he was on his way to Haen Marn. Here hung the young lad who’d served cheese from a basket lined with herbs; there, the old man who’d joked with him about his elven blood. All at once, Rhodry realized that he was dreading a specific thing. He strode forward, weaving his way through the spears from corpse to corpse.
“What are you doing?” Arzosah called out.
“Looking for friends. But thanks be to every god in the sky and under it, they’re not here.”
“We saw other burnt places.”
“So we did, but we don’t dare take the time to look for them there.”
“Who?”
“These two friends of mine. Otho and young Mic. They had an errand to run, taking payment for a debt to Haen Marn, you see, after I left it to look for you. Then they had to get home again.”
“Well, let’s hope the Horsekin didn’t catch them on the road.”
“Just so. Let’s get out of here. I’m too sick even to swear, and for a silver dagger, that’s a bad omen.”
By then, the summer light lay golden over the rums and the dead, and bright on the grass, green beyond the burning. When Rhodry looked up, he saw the sun picking out drifts of cloud in the western sky. He clambered