"It is done."Karia sat down in the gra.s.s. He was tired beyond reasoning. When was the last time he had eaten? They slept whenever they had a chance but without food sleep helped less than he would have thought. Fighting in the mountains was never this bad. Long days of waiting followed by moments of frantic fighting, but never the endless hunt before the killing began. Executions more than fights.
He rose and swept the plains for more prey. None to be seen, none left. They had kept count. Not a single man lived to brag about **** and murder. Wherever she went after death Nakora was avenged.
Strange then that he should only feel tired. When they started the strange game of predator and prey he had hoped for satisfaction, but that emotion never emerged. Somewhere he understood that they had become even less than animals, because only an unthinking avenger could have managed the eightdays of horrors they had brought upon the hunted as well as themselves.
"Gring, we"re done. What now?"
She walked back from the last corpse, trampling gra.s.s ahead of her. "Don"t know. We created honour, but I feel dirty, and we"re not done yet. More dirt will cling to me before we are finished."
Karia looked at her. Taller than any of his sworn men, tusks red with blood after she ripped the throat out of the last of the murderers and more human than most he had ever known. Maybe she was right about humanity after all.
"Then what?" he asked. "Ri Khi, to bring vengeance to their very homes?"
"Ri Khi," she confirmed. "This must be paid in full. Honour demands it. We are but tools."
There it was. She liked this even less than he. Too much killing. More than he"d been involved in during years of campaigns against his enemies. Khraga like Gring.
"So be it. Could we at least rest, feed and wash. My men follow me out of loyalty, but I have forced them far beyond that border. It is not fair. I," he faltered. "I would dishonour them otherwise," he finished when he realized what he wanted said.
Gring nodded. "You are right. I apologize. We rest."
Karia turned and went through the high gra.s.s in search of his men. Blood everywhere. The last they found had crawled and begged. Two even weapon less. It never mattered. The very last, the one Gring killed with her tusks, tried to flee with only his hands. He couldn"t walk with two shattered legs.
Karia wondered what made someone using the very last of his body that way. They must have known the end was coming, and still.
"Aphitus, make camp upwind. We"re finished here," he said when he saw one of his riders. We"re finished, and so are my men. Seven alive. Twelve dead. Why did we have to run into those nomads?
He walked to his horse and dug for some sc.r.a.p of food he knew he wouldn"t find. It graced while he searched his pack. Searching was more important than finding. It gave him something to do. Something to occupy his mind with.
They would rest for a day or two. Hunt perhaps and then west. Trailing the caravan, he guessed. If they could even find its tracks. The hunt had taken them far, far out into the Sea of Gra.s.s, and he no longer knew where they were. Gring did. She always did.
#
Gring wiped her tusks with gra.s.s, spat some out and swallowed some. She would throw it all up later, but she had a need to clean her throat as well.
In her mind she thanked Karia. She owed him more than he could ever guess. Truly he was no halfman. His humour and make pretend stupidity kept her sane when otherwise she would have broken. No human should kill this much and not feed once. Prey lived to be eaten. They were precious and it grated in her consciousness to kill only for the killing.
She didn"t even have coins as an excuse. Halfmen did. They could argue almost any deed was worth doing if only the money was right, or power. She couldn"t. That was not her world.
She owed Karia more than her own sanity. Of the men sworn to him less than half lived. They had fought like true humans and died to keep his promise. She should have known of course. His was a strange lot. Every summer they fought her own on equal terms in the snow where humans had the benefit of strength as well as resistance to cold. She had heard rumours of the halfmen warriors but always discarded them as exaggerations. No halfman born took up arms against those odds, or so she believed. Now she knew she was wrong. Those who valued loyalty higher than life would. It was almost like honour Just a different kind, this loyalty.
So much to learn about the world. So many years squandered protecting her honour That way lay ignorance, and in its wake followed a danger she was only grasping the edges of.
First vengeance, though. After that she had an entire life to learn and relearn. A vague feeling of disapproval settled in her mind, but she firmly pushed it aside. All great humans had met with disapproval, and she slowly understood why. There were truths that hurt and secrets buried deep inside human ways. The greatest maybe that halfmen lived lives so short they were forced to learn that much faster, and so, as a whole, they had learned more than humans. If her kind didn"t catch up a day would come when this world had no place for them. Just a different kind of the hunter"s game, and prey who didn"t learn became meals.
She growled a laughter and released a full burst from her predator"s glands. Prey! She had seen her own become prey even before they left Braka. Those villages would be nothing but broken wrecks by now.
Random thoughts flew through her mind as she gathered gra.s.s. Time to make a nest. She would burrow deep inside it and sleep. Tomorrow her fur would need cleaning. Picking straws took a long time, but she didn"t care. The need to grow young again, if only for a single night was too strong. She wished she could nestle into her mother"s embrace. Memories of days lost flashed through her, and smells of safety, and love.