Silence, then. She stood amidst the gruesome, human carnage she had wrought, and looked about. She felt amazingly calm. Sound seemed to come at her as though from underwater. Colours appeared strange, almost tactile. The black smoke roiling above seemed impossibly black, and ominous. The blood that spurted and flooded about her boots was the deepest, reddest of reds she'd ever seen. She swung slowly in her stance, a sliding pivot in the centre of the dirt courtyard between neighbouring buildings and the burning hall. Behind, guardsmen were staring at her. Blades limp at their sides, paused as if halted in mid-rush, having come to her aid but finding themselves far too late for assistance.
Jaryd Nyvar was at their head, staring as if he'd seen a ghost. Sasha took a long, slow breath and stepped carefully past the ruined corpses, her boots already splattered red with blood. Jaryd made the Verenthane holy sign repeatedly. A Verenthane guardsman did likewise. Another made the spirit sign, then another. Further along, a guardsman had removed the rider she had knifed from his mount. He sat upon the dirt now, clutching the knife wound in his side, guarded at blade point. The wound, she noted coldly, appeared several finger-breadths away from his heart. More throwing practice was in order, it seemed.
“Your Highness…” Jaryd said hoarsely as she passed, eyes filled with utter disbelief. “I…please, Your Highness…”
From the verandah of the inn, a crowd of villagers stared and gasped amongst themselves.
“Synnich-ahn,” she heard the reverent, frightened murmur. “Synnich-ahn.” With wonder.
She paused before the fallen rider. He stared up at her from within a grimacing, battle-stained face. Hatred and fear battled for supremacy in his eyes. Sasha met his gaze directly with a stare of utter contempt.
“Where are your gods now?” she said.
THE COLUMN RODE FROM PERYS in the early afternoon, short five of their number. Two were dead, and another three bore wounds too severe for them to continue. All remained in Perys, confident of the goodwill and care of their hosts. Thirty-one to three. It was, Sasha reflected, an abject lesson in the importance of basic tactics.
She was almost surprised at herself for finding the time to think on such things through the turmoil and heartbreak of the scene at Perys. But above the suffering, and any simple human compassion, there was strategy. Such was the lesson that Kessligh had driven into her—that the lives of soldiers, and indeed the lives of an entire people, would in times of war become dependent upon something so simple as a commander's decisions and deployments. If Kessligh and Captain Tyrun had not been so competent many more families of Tyree would have been mourning the loss of a son, brother or father at Perys.
They left their Hadryn prisoners within the care of a Verenthane monastery along the valley from Perys. Leaving them in Perys, to the tender mercies of the townsfolk whose families they had slaughtered, was out of the question.
Sasha gazed along the old monastery walls as she rode beside them, turning back in her saddle to contemplate the single spire that thrust skyward above a magnificent sprawl of Lenay hillside. With its small, arched windows placed high in the walls, the monastery seemed as much to shun its beautiful surroundings as to revel in them. The Goeren-yai in her soul rebelled at the feel of it—dark, worn stone, unsmiling and welcomeless.
“How long has it been here, do you think?” she asked Kessligh, as they rode two abreast behind Damon and Captain Tyrun, the forward guard in full armour and banners ahead of them. Not that the banners could be seen for any distance through the thick pine forest…but then, there was always the prospect of ambush from Taneryns thinking them a Hadryn column, or vice-versa.
“Torovans have been coming here for centuries,” Kessligh replied, eyeing the monastery's dark walls with an unreadable eye. “Verenthaneism moved from the Bacosh into Torovan perhaps six hundred years ago. There was a century then, before the Cherrovan Empire, when Lenayin was wide open to Torovan missionaries. Goeren-yai didn't take any more kindly to attempted conversions then than they do now…but if these foreigners wanted to spend the effort hewing stone and living alone in the wilderness, well, they weren't bothering anyone. I'd guess this one is somewhere between five and six hundred years old.”
Sasha nodded—it had that look to it, of age and constant use. “Damon,” she thought to call forward. Damon glanced