Under Heaven. Guy Gavriel Kay

      “Around the back!” he screamed. “It’s open!”

      But in the same moment he took another chance, hurtling to the door. He flung the heavy wooden bar back. Just in time he dodged again, avoiding a downward slash that bit past him into wood.

      He was sent staggering as the door flew open, hitting him in the back, but something—pride and anger and fear interwoven like threads in silk—made him step towards the man left standing. Tai slashed at him, parried a hard return as the others spilled into the room behind him.

      “They killed the shaman!” he cried over his shoulder. “She’s dead out back! Meshag’s over there! Watch the one on the ground! I only wounded him!”

      The one on the ground was seized by three men and dragged upright, off the ground, held like a child’s doll. He received a bonesplintering blow to the side of his head. They didn’t kill him, however. Tai noticed that. And in the same moment he heard one of the Bogü say, “Leave the last one, too. We will use him.”

      At those words, the man facing Tai abruptly changed his expression. Tai would remember that look, as well. He could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes in years of nights to come.

      The man moved back towards the curtain. He reversed his sword, fumbling for the grip with both hands. He was trying to stab himself, Tai realized. But before that could happen, two carefully placed arrows took him one in each shoulder. The sword fell to the ground.

      The man screamed then. A terrible sound, beyond any possible pain of his wounds, Tai thought.

      A little later he would begin to understand.

      HE’D HAVE SCREAMED like that, he found himself thinking on the ride back south (they had left that same evening, unwilling to remain by the lake, needing as much distance from it as possible).

      He’d have tried to kill himself, too, if he’d had any idea what was to come before he was allowed to die. And the man had clearly known. In some ways, that was the most horrific thing.

      The Kitan cavalry—Tai’s own men—had come rushing down the slope when the shouts and screaming had begun, but it was all over within the cabin before they were near enough to do anything.

      Tai had walked across the grass to join them when he came out. It had been disorienting, to be back in mild sunshine with so little time having passed. The world could change too swiftly.

      The thirty Kitan riders had remained apart, together, to see what the nomads would do. Watching in impassive silence at first, then with increasingly intense, shattering revulsion.

      The Bogü began by claiming the body of the old shaman from out back and burning it on a pyre they built between cabin and lake. They did this respectfully, with chants and prayer. She had been defiled by murder and burial under ground, it seemed. She had to be returned to the sky—left in the open to be devoured by wolves and other animals—or she could be consumed by flame and rise with the smoke.

      They chose fire, because they were beginning a greater burning. They set the outbuildings alight, and then the cabin itself, but not before they brought out Meshag upon his pallet and laid him down in the yard. They dragged out the two men Tai had killed, the guard and the shaman, and finally they brought forth the two who were still alive. They were drinking by then, the Bogü: there had been kumiss in the cabin.

      The shaman’s bells chimed as they pulled his body across the trampled grass. His mirrors glinted, splintering sunlight. Tai had wondered if he’d transgressed in killing this man. It was not so, he understood now. He had done something, in the nomads’ eyes, that marked him as a hero. He was to be honoured, it seemed.

      They invited him to join in what was now to follow, with the two dead men and the two left deliberately alive. He declined. Stayed with his men, his own people, from a civilized place.

      He was physically sick, wrackingly so, when he saw what came next. What he had been invited to share. Many of the Kitan cavalry became violently ill, stumbling or riding away, retching into the grass.

      The empire of Kitai had not been shaped through nine dynasties by a placid, pacifist people. Theirs was a violent, conquering grandeur, built upon slaughter through nearly a thousand years, in their own civil wars, or carrying warfare beyond shifting borders, or defending those borders. Such was their history: fires such as these, or greater burnings by far, blood and blades.

      There were texts and teachings as far back as the First Dynasty about the tactical utility of massacre, killing children, mutilation, rape. The useful fear all these could spread in foes, the overcrowding of besieged cities as terrified refugees fled before advancing armies. These things were a part of what men did in warfare, and warfare was a part of what men did in life.

      But the Kitan did not roast dead enemies over fires and eat their flesh with invocations to the sky. Or cut off slices from men still living, staked out naked upon the ground, and let them watch, screaming, as their own body parts were consumed, cooked or raw.

      There was a great deal of smoke, spilling thickly upwards, hiding the sun. A stench of burning in a once-serene space beside a northern lake. The crackling of several fires, howls (humans, not wolves), ritual chants, and someone’s desperate, slowly fading plea for death replaced the sound of birds and wind in leaves. The ugliness of men erasing solitude and autumnal beauty.

      It went on for some time.

      One of the nomads eventually approached the Kitan where they waited, gentling their nervous horses a distance apart. He was bare-chested, grinning widely, and he was waving the severed forearm of a man. Blood dripped from it, and from his chin.

      Unsteady on his feet, he extended the human flesh towards Tai, as to a hero worthy to partake of this great bounty. Giving the Kitan, the stranger, one more chance.

      He took an arrow in the chest as he stood before them. He died instantly.

      Tai could not, for a moment, believe what had happened. It was entirely wrong, shockingly so. He stood in numbed disbelief. Which was, however brief, too long an interval for a commander of men in a place such as this one had become.

      His soldiers, as if released by that single arrow to their own demons, their frenzied response to the horror they were being made to witness, mounted up suddenly, all of them, with smooth, trained efficiency, as if an order had been given.

      Seizing bows and swords from saddles, they swept forward—avenging spirits, in and of themselves—into the fires and smoke, infused with a clawing fury, with the sense that this hideous savagery could only be expunged, erased, with savagery of their own.

      This understanding of events came to Tai only afterwards. He wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.

      His cavalry knifed into and among the outnumbered, on-foot, drunk-on-kumiss nomads, the stumbling, blood-soaked men they’d come north to aid—and they slaughtered them between the fires.

      And when it was done, when none of the Bogü were left alive amid the black smoke and the red burning, the blurred sun setting west now, the lake a dark, cold blue, the next thing happened.

      Meshag, son of Hurok, stood up.

      He looked around the unholy scene created by men in that place. He had been a graceful man. He wasn’t any more. He had changed, had been changed. He moved awkwardly now, as if oddly jointed, had to shift his whole body to turn his gaze, moving stiffly through a full circle. Black smoke drifted between him and where Tai stood rooted to the ground with a gaping horror. He was seeing this, and refusing to believe what he saw.

      Meshag stared towards the Kitan riders for a long moment. The last men alive here. Then, shifting his shoulders as if trying to throw back his head, he laughed. A low, distorted sound.

      He had not moved or opened his eyes since falling unconscious by another fire to the south weeks before.

      It was not his remembered laughter. The way he stood and moved was appallingly different, this shambling, slack-limbed, unnatural posture. The Kitan soldiers, in an