“He didn’t,” Daimhin said. “If by him you mean the White King. I tracked those who did this. They didn’t come from the White King’s camp, and these men hid from the White King’s patrols both coming and going. It was only twenty men, but some of them were drafters, and all were armed with good muskets. The villagers scattered at first, but then they recognized the leader. He’d been raised here among them. But after enough of them came back into town, he seized them, and he demanded those in hiding or at outlying farms come in. Started killing people until they did. Made promises of safe passage. Lies, naturally.”
“You didn’t learn all that from their tracks,” Kip said.
“On their way back to their boats on the coast, these arrachtaigh, these monsters, came across a Blood Robe patrol and had to hide. One of them got separated from the others. Got lost. I found him. We talked.”
Kip didn’t bother to ask if that man was still alive.
“Can you tell me anything else about them?” Kip asked.
“Height and weight for most of them, a few would just be guesses. They call themselves Lightguards, came on some type of boat they called a sea chariot. Second-in-command walks with a crutch.”
“Aram,” Ben-hadad said from behind Kip. “That sonuvabitch.”
“Commander was a young man named Guile,” Daimhin said. “I didn’t ask many more questions. There were kids dying.”
Kip’s stomach sank. “Zymun.”
No one protested that surely he wouldn’t do such a thing.
“Why?” Cruxer asked.
“Zymun was raised here, right? Maybe it was a childhood grudge?” Tisis asked. “But why kill everyone else? He can’t have hated everyone.”
“I think once people saw him for what he was, they may well have all hated him,” Cruxer said. “He’s certainly capable of hating all of them.”
“The massacre was to cover up whatever he came here to accomplish,” Kip said.
“You think he met with the White King?” Tisis asked.
“Definitely possible. Maybe he was seen, and decided—” Kip started.
“No tracks that way,” Daimhin said. “They might have taken their boats, I suppose, but there’s a good road straight to the old city. He would have known about it if he grew up here. I don’t think he came to meet with the wights.”
“And they hid from the Blood Robe patrol,” Ben-hadad said. “I don’t think he was making an alliance with the White King, as convenient as that would be for us to expose.”
Kip said, “Whatever he did here, he killed everyone in this village in such a way that we would think the White King ordered it, if we found out about it at all. By leaving the houses standing, refugees from elsewhere can move right in, and squatters don’t often dig too deeply into why the houses they’ve moved into are empty.”
“Nor do they appreciate when others ask where the original owners are,” Big Leo said. “So they do the covering up for you.”
“That’s why he didn’t let his men steal any jewelry,” Kip said. “He didn’t want them to keep any evidence of their crimes.”
It was all . . . pretty clever, actually. Zymun was stupidly impulsive at times, but he was smart enough to realize he could disappear for three or four days and turn up saying he’d been in brothels, and everyone would believe it. A massacre, this far away? No one would even think to connect him to it. A year or two ago, it would have been impossible. It still would be, except that he had access to skimmers.
“But why not kill the children?” Winsen asked. “Why add the risk of letting them live?”
“Some of the men must’ve balked at it,” Tisis said. “Many men will barter with evil, when they must. ‘We’ll kill the men, sure, but not the women. Fine, the women too, but not the kids. They can’t even speak. They’re no danger to us.’ The Lightguard’s rife with thugs and criminals, but they’re not all . . . Zymun.”
“That’s the Lightguard for ya,” Ben-hadad said, “willing to butcher helpless men, women, and children, but they draw the line at toddlers. Moral fucking paragons.”
“We should kill all of them,” Cruxer said. Fair as Cruxer was, there was nothing soft in him toward evil.
Kip had known Zymun was a snake, but his wanting to kill Kip so he could be assured of his own position had at least seemed understandable, if cruelly calculating and cold. Their grandfather was cruelly calculating and cold, too.
Murdering several hundred people . . . for what? . . . was a different thing entirely.
Kip couldn’t imagine Andross Guile doing that.
“The babies died,” Daimhin said with a voice like a swimmer in the great ocean seeing no land in sight, no ships, breath short, one last confession on his lips.
It brought Kip back to the present.
“Fourteen babies they didn’t kill, but I couldn’t save them. Not one. I couldn’t find milk. No cow nor horse nor pig nor goat in the time I dared to be away. I went in to the camp followers who haven’t yet left Azuria, tried to hire a wet nurse. They’d heard of me, though, from the Blood Robes. They feared me. They raised the hue and cry, said I was there to steal their women, tried to kill me.
“I came back. I could never go far again. I cut up food. The babies couldn’t take it. I chewed up food, gave them little bits. They spat it up. They didn’t even all die in my arms. There were too many dying for me to even give them that. I thought of giving them the black mercy, but I held out hope that someone would come at the last minute. The Third Eye had sent me to stop the massacre, but I’d failed. I hoped maybe she’d sent someone else to save the children.” He took a deep breath. “But maybe I was the last hope. Or maybe the others failed, too.”
His voice rolled across a vast distance, a messenger telling the facts, but tears rolled, blood and water mixing on his cheek.
“I was so happy when the crying stopped. Not relieved, mind you. Happy. I wept with joy. What kind of a horror could be ‘happy’—”
“That’s not joy,” Kip interrupted. “That’s a breakdown.” The words kind of slipped out, but he also let them.
“Bugger off. You don’t know me,” Daimhin said, eyes coming to hard focus.
“Yes I do,” Kip said. “The day you took your first stag, your hands were shaking so hard that when you cleaned it, your knife punctured its intestines. Your father never told anyone. He didn’t want to shame you in front of the village. But you were ashamed, and your secret shame spurred you to become a better hunter. You expect perfection of yourself, and it’s always been your shame that makes you redouble your efforts. It’s brought you to heights unimaginable to other men . . . but it broke you here.”
Kip could feel his Mighty getting tense even before he saw the white-knuckled grip Daimhin had on his obsidian knife.
Shame is a gorgon. Before you grab her serpentine hair to drag her into the light, remember what her hair is.
“Forgive me,” Kip said. “I know you, but you don’t know me. I shouldn’t have spoken so.” Except it had been on purpose, and the truth lay wriggling in the light like a rainbow trout thumping about the bottom of the boat, gasping in the air when it so wanted to breathe safe water. “The cutting. Tell me about it.”