The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [43]
“We have prepared for this day in many ways. There are those among you who were chosen to pave the path we must follow, others to walk its length.” He scanned the multitude of eager faces that had turned back toward him. “Daramad@an!”
A large, heavyset man pushed his way through the assembly to the center of the chamber. Few of the Guardians had ever met this man, but everyone knew of him by another name; his inclusion in the order had never been revealed before.
“Are you with us?” asked Kierad@an. It was a ritual question, but the answer had never carried so much weight as it did tonight.
“I am with you,” said the one that most of DiWahn knew as Admiral Jakat. “As are my forces.”
“Hai!” A chorus of voices scattered throughout the crowd attested to the loyalty of the senior officers Daramad@an had brought into the order.
Bowing his head in a gesture of subservience, the admiral of the DiWahn space fleet asked, “Where are we to go, Master?”
“To the Appointed Place,” said Kierad@an.
At his touch, the brittle leather ties circling the scroll crumbled into dust. He unfurled the sheet and held it high so all could see what was drawn on its surface.
It was a map filled with stars and a single blazing comet.
CHAPTER 13
The sighing winds carried aloft the moans and cries of the dying as if beseeching the heavens for pity, but the red sun was merciless. Blazing in noonday splendor, it dried the throats and tongues of men too weak to crawl toward shelter, and beat down upon bodies that had no warmth of their own. Small fires smoldered in the blood-sodden ground, then guttered out in trails of dark, foul smoke. Here and there across the littered field were flutters of movement the trembling of limbs as death finally took hold of an eviscerated warrior, the lazy flap of wings as a carrion-eater feasted on the carna ge, the rippling of a clan banner whose broken staff was driven through the chest of the standard-bearer.
As the sun tipped over on its westward descent toward the jagged peaks of Mt.
Selaya, and the dry desert breezes gathered strength, one lone figure broke the taut line of the horizon. He picked his way carefully, stepping over the fallen warriors if possible, skirting around them when the mounds of intertwined bodies grew too deep. His tunic was clean, unspotted, untorn, but his legs and sandal laces were streaked with the olive color of drying gore.
The boy stopped for a moment, winded by his long run from the mountain village and his tortured progress through the battlefield of Ishaya; closed eyes gave respite to his mind. His mother and the healers had demanded that he stay in isk’Kahr, but he had twisted out of T’Leia’s grasp and raced away.
“Wait!” they had cried after him. “You are too young,” they had Called into his mind when he passed beyond hearing.
He was much older now.
In the last hour he had learned that the colorful scenes of clashing armies intricately embroidered in tapestries and the lilting melody of the War Ballads were all treats for children, just like the tales of wise old sehlats who talked to lost hunters. Emerald-green thread shimmered in lamplight, but the blood that covered his own legs was not so pretty, and armor had no luster when it was splattered with gore. Five Vulcan clans had emptied their veins into this sandy plain, sullying its air with the stink of putrefaction; few survived to sing tales of bravery, or even of treachery. Where was the glory in this silence?
Come.
The need to continue pressed against his mind again.
He had mistaken the desire for his own curiosity, for his own willfulness, but now he recognized that the summons was from without, a Call from someone alive and adrift in this sea of corpses. He opened his eyes and scanned the torn landscape.
“Father?”
He was answered by a visceral tug toward the north, as if a hand plucked weakly at his sleeve when lips could no longer form