Marked In Flesh

CHAPTER 38

Watersday, Juin 23

All the weapons and machines that had been built and tested in secret, and all the men who had been conscripted from all the nations that made up the Cel-Romano Alliance, headed for the borders that separated human land from the wild country.

When the airplanes flew overhead, carrying the weapons that would make this a swift war, the men who came from the big cities cheered at the metal promise of more land, more food, more space. But the men who had been conscripted from the villages that touched the wild country looked at the airplanes and whispered to their comrades, “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

Bombs dropped from the airplanes destroyed the terra indigene settlements, those simple dwellings that provided a gathering place for the Others who watched the borders. The men and machines flowing up the roads in the wake of the bombs’ destruction killed the wounded and the weak and the young. And they killed the terra indigene who turned and tried to fight to protect their wounded and weak and young.

It quickly became clear that the humans now had weapons that the shifters couldn’t fight. So the gards fled in advance of this enemy.

For a full day, men and machines moved up the roads, killing and conquering. Then they stopped because there were no roads, and the machines could not move forward on the narrow game trails.

The leaders looked at the conquered land and declared the human race victorious.

That night, no one but the men who came from small villages on the border noticed the odd, and terrible, silence.

In all the Cel-Romano nations, old men and women slipped away from their villages and followed trails into the wild country that had been made by generations of humans. Or they slipped away to isolated places where the land met the Mediterran Sea. There they set out traditional foods that were given to families during a time of mourning.

“They were our friends,” voices whispered to the night. “We share your grief. They were our friends.”

Nothing answered them. Nothing stepped out from among the trees, or rose from the sea, to accept their mourning gifts. So they returned to their villages, and their neighbors asked the question: “Do you think it will make a difference?”

And they answered: “We will know soon enough.”

They watched the two-legged predators. And they listened, not to the upstart species but to the world itself.

The humans had broken the boundary between the land Namid had given to them and the wild country that belonged to the terra indigene.

No boundary now. Not in this part of the world. And when there was no boundary, Namid’s teeth and claws knew what they had to do.

Anger sharpened the wind as Elementals called Air raged through Cel-Romano, uprooting trees to form barriers across the roads. Anger quietly rumbled along the skin of Elementals called Earth, who tested the ground beneath the places that had built the flying weapons. Anger rained along the coastline and fell into the Mediterran Sea, drawing the attention of ancient Tethys, the Elemental who watched over the sea.

Then the wind and rumbling and rain were gone as if they had never been—and the humans in Cel-Romano began to believe this was all the terra indigene could do, began to believe they had conquered the Others and would hold all of this new land.

Began to relax.

Flowing around her home in the Fingerbone Islands, Alantea listened to the stories in the surf—stories that came through the seaway from the Five Sisters, who knew much about Thaisia. She listened to the cries of anger coming from Cel-Romano’s western shores and the strait that connected her domain to Tethys’s home.

There was a malignant current running between Cel-Romano and Thaisia, a current that didn’t touch the other parts of the world. At least, not yet.

A question had come from Thaisia not long ago, and she and the gards living in her domain had helped find the answer. Might she not ask a question in return?

And when she had the answer, she would decide what to do.