“Don’t worry,” Tuksaad says. “I took care of them.”
“Then we must leave.” Salo visibly gathers himself. “If you don’t have a mount, Tuk, you may ride with me.”
But Tuksaad grins and turns his head toward the gates. “You can bring her out, friend,” he shouts. “I need to get going.”
A visibly shaken Kudi comes out of the gates, pulling tensely at the reins of a muscular zebroid warmount with a jet-black coat and metallic stripes. By its size and the two great horns that curve like sickles from its head, the creature must be an abada. Its lower legs are all exposed metal musculature, with hooves so bulky they could probably pulverize bone. Looking at the warmount, Ilapara figures it is probably worth the whole moongold coin.
Kudi’s jaw drops when he sees the giant cat, even more when he sees Salo approaching and then mounting it. He shakes his head in horrified disbelief. “What the devil is going on, Ilira? What did you do—did you give me stolen money?”
What Ilapara has done is defy the will of a warlord’s disciple, and in Umadiland, there is only one way that can end. But now’s not the time for regrets.
“Go home, Kudi,” she tells him. “The money’s clean. Go home and stay there until this is over.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice. “I want no part in whatever this is.” He quickly hands Tuksaad the abada’s reins and makes himself scarce.
“Follow me and stay close,” Ilapara tells Salo and Tuksaad, then spurs Ingacha down the crescent road and leads them west toward the boneyards.
The implications of what she’s done don’t hit her until moments later, when she has to weather a powerful surge of sorrow that wells up inside her without warning, the deeply discomforting realization that this will be her last time in this town, for there is no way she could ever return.
The boneyards rest upon a mountain sited in the west such that its shadow creeps over the town like a pall every dusk as the suns sink behind it. To the wise of Seresa, this deathly shadow is always a reminder of what can happen to those who forget their place, those fools who think they can get away with breaking the rules.
Ilapara once vowed that she’d never be counted with such ill-advised company, and yet in the end, all it took for her to break that vow was a desperate Yerezi boy.
And it just had to be a Yerezi tribesman, didn’t it. So much for leaving the past behind and forging a new future for herself.
A rocky path skirts the boneyards on their northern boundary. Ilapara has never used it before, but she’s heard the route’s the best way to get over and behind the mountain and hence the quickest way to disappear from town.
So she leads Salo and Tuksaad due west of Seresa, first at a canter through the poorest, most desperate part of town, where the shacks are cramped together and the streets are winding. Then they fall into a gallop when the town ends abruptly, giving way to massive rubbish heaps.
The incumbent authorities never care enough to dig pits for the proper disposal and recycling of rubbish, so it all ends up piling up at the edge of town to putrefy or get scavenged by rats and the utterly destitute, a vile sea of refuse sloping westward, a pervasive shroud of noxious stench, and the mountain is like an island rising out of it.
They ride in silence. To keep her thoughts from spiraling into depressing territory, Ilapara focuses on moving her weight in tandem with Ingacha’s fast lope, on the clatter of his hooves as they race away from the life she worked so hard to build. Even when the ascent grows steeper and they slow down to a trot, the town quickly falling away beneath them, no one speaks, and Ilapara is grateful for the silence.
They almost crest the mountain in this manner, and Ilapara’s certain she’s seen the last of the town, and a part of her wants to break into a gallop again just to get it over with, but then Salo gasps loudly behind her and says, “The coins.”
A fork in the rocky path just ahead, right next to a gnarled acacia tree. The path branching right and upward must lead to the boneyards, so the one going left and downward must be the one they need to take. Ilapara doesn’t stop.
“The coins! One of them is back! I can feel it.”
Ilapara stops, takes a moment before she looks back, takes another moment to realize that she’s furious—furious with Salo, this boy who’s taken everything from her with his recklessness. She breathes in deeply, breathes out.
I am not my emotions.
She looks back.
Salo has come to a complete stop. His expression is pure distress. “Why is it back?”
Behind Salo, Tuksaad reins in his abada. Concern puts wrinkles on his forehead; his strange eyes are tinged rich brown like a dusky sky. “What about the other one? Can you tell where it is?”
“Still on its way to the Plains,” Salo tells him. “But the other one . . . oh no.”
Salo’s leopard bounds up the path unexpectedly, and Ingacha almost bolts away with Ilapara, but she manages to rein him in. She strokes his neck and coos into his ear, glaring at Salo’s retreating back.
“Where are you going?” Tuksaad says, spurring his abada to follow. “We can’t afford to stop.”
At the fork Salo branches up toward the boneyards, heedless of what lies ahead. Tuksaad follows him, and reluctantly, Ilapara coaxes Ingacha into motion and follows them, too, because she’s with them now; this is the choice she’s made.
Lining the winding path up to the boneyards on either side are the severed heads of those who most recently angered the rulers of Seresa for one reason or another. They’re all affixed to pikes so that they stand at eye level and face anyone walking up the path, like a horrid caricature of a welcoming party.
The stench is devilish. It worsens at the summit, where the path flares into an open space overlooking the town of Seresa—open save for the fetid, headless corpses littering the place among black clouds of buzzing flies. A feral cur with a mangy coat growls as it retreats behind a bush at the edge of the clearing, a partially masticated arm caught between its jaws.
Ilapara grimaces. She’s no stranger to death, so the horror doesn’t quite pierce through the mental barriers she’s learned to erect around herself, but when she sees the maggot-infested head of a young Faraswa woman grinning at her from across the open space, it’s a little too much.
She covers her face with her head scarf, leaving only her eyes open to the world because she doesn’t trust what her face will reveal.
Salo and Tuksaad have stopped by the east-facing ledge of the boneyards, where the mountain falls away and spreads into the town below. She brings her nervous buck to a halt next to them, thankful to turn away from the sights around her, though she thinks she can feel the gazes of the dead crawling up her back.
In the distance, the World’s Artery is a wide gravel snake cutting the shantytown in half, stretching from south to north for as far as the eye can see. An ugly thing, this place. She’s always known this to some extent, and maybe she’s deliberately ignored it, but seeing the view from up here, the ugliness is hard to escape. It’s alive. A real, tangible thing she can reach out and touch. Something she can smell.
As she tracks the column of smoke rising from the center of town, she begins to realize why Salo and Tuksaad are both still as death next to her. She can just about see it; there, on the World’s Artery, just a stone’s throw from the general dealer’s, a wagon stands caught in a storm of raging moonfire. Among the figures standing around the wagon is a man in a horned helmet.