as huge, heavy shapes, dark in the storm and night, stepped toward them. Tavi recognized the smell before he could make out the exact shape of the creatures: gargants.
The Marat who had carried Tavi, evidently the leader of the group, slapped the nearest gargant on the shoulder, and the great beast knelt down with ponderous gentility, teeth idly working over several pounds of cud. The Marat again spoke to the others and then picked Tavi up. Tavi looked around and saw a second Marat lifting Fade.
The Marat carried him under one arm as he put a foot in the joint of the gargant's foreleg and half-jumped up to the great beast's sloped back, where he settled onto some sort of riding saddle consisting of a heavy mat woven of the same coarse cords as the ones that bound Tavi, made out of gargant-hair.
He tossed Tavi belly-down over the mat and whipped a few more cords around the boy, as casually as any muleteer packing his charges. Tavi looked up at the Marat. He had broad, rather ugly features, and his eyes were dark, dark brown. Though he was not as tall as Tavi's uncle, his shoulders and chest would make Bernard seem positively skinny, and slabs of heavy muscle moved beneath his pale skin. His coarse, colorless hair had been gathered back into a braid. He looked down at Tavi, as he settled onto the gargant, and the beast began to rise, without any apparent signal from its rider. The Marat smiled, and his teeth were broad and white and square. He rumbled something in that same language, and the other Marat let out rough, coughing laughs, as they mounted their own gargants.
The great beasts rose and set out at a swift pace in a single file, their huge strides eating up ground faster than Tavi could run, steady and tireless as the stars in the sky. Tavi could just make out Fade's shape, tied on the gargant behind them. He grimaced and wished he could at least be with the slave. Surely Fade was terrified-he always was.
They rode for a length of time Tavi could hardly guess at, considering that he had been tied face down, and he saw little more than one leg of the gargant and the snowy white ground rolling by beneath him. A sudden, low whistle broke the monotony. Tavi glanced toward the source of the sound and then up at his captor. The Marat shifted his weight slightly backward, and the gargant slowed its steps by degrees, coming to a ponderous halt.
The Marat did not bother to have the gargant kneel, but swung from a braided cord, knotted every foot or so, down from the saddle, and gave a low whistle in answer.
From the darkness emerged another Marat, broad of shoulder and deep of chest, panting, as though from a run. His expression seemed, to Tavi, to be sickened, even afraid. He said something in the guttural Marat tongue, and Tavi's captor put a hand on the younger Marat's shoulder, making him repeat himself.
Once he had, Tavi's captor gave a short whistle, and another Marat from down the row of gargants swung down from his saddle, carrying what Tavi recognized as a torch and a firebox of Aleran manufacture. The Marat knelt, holding the torch up with his thighs, and with a stone struck sparks from the firebox and lit the torch. He passed it over to Tavi's captor, who kept his hand on the young Marat's shoulder and nodded to him.
Tavi watched as the younger Marat led his captor to a vague form in the snow. Tavi could see little of it, other than that the snow over it had been stained with red. The Marat took a few paces more. Then a few more. More lumps in the snow became evident.
Tavi's stomach twisted with a slow shock of understanding. They were people. The Marat were looking at people on the ground, people dead so recently that their blood still stained the newly fallen snow. Tavi looked up and thought he saw light from the Marat's torch reflected from water not far away. The lake, then.
Aldoholt.
Tavi watched the Marat walk a quick circle, the light of his torch at one point catching the sloped walls of the steadholt proper. Bodies lay in a line leading from the steadholt gates, one by one, as though the holders had made a last-moment effort to run, only to be dragged down, one at a