Kalik Read Online Free Page A

there, they struck flesh. Cries. Then light coming up on the lake. Lutha signalling from the platform.
    At the causeway gate – from behind fences either side – we speared the attackers. Turmoil. Bellow. Thrust and thrust. Another wave surged across the causeway, folded beneath a wind of arrows. Kalik gave an order. A party sallied out, stabbing, clubbing. The main attack turned, escaped.
    “Now!” Kalik and I leapt into a canoe below the causeway. Groans, cries somewhere above. A short passage, and we jumped out, the paddlers after us. Through a gap between gardens and vines we ran. Flung ourselves down.
    “Ahhh!” Shrieked horror as we rose out of the ground. Our spears swung and swung again. Kalik and I, hand to hand. Cantering after, hacking, slaying, a howling red blur.
    Kalik tripped. A berserker leapt. My spear knocked him off his feet, grunting face down. Stamp on his shoulder. Wrench out the spear. Chop! The pithing stroke. Kalik scrambled up, his fury a blast of heat down my side.
    I saw him kill and kill again, heard his roar above my own. And then he was bringing us all together. Quieting the warriors who wanted to scour the hills towards the river. Calling, “Canoes!”
    Several followed ours in the growing light. Lamentations, thuds floated across from where Lutha’s warriors surrounded the rafts in a frenzy of killing.
    At the river, we landed on the far bank. The Salt Men who had escaped through the hills and around the bottom of the lake struggled across from the Island of Bones. Some drowned.Others crawled from the water, exhausted. As they scrambled up the bank, we loomed above their screams.
    We harried those already across, slew the wounded. One fired an arrow at Kalik which I struck off course with the broad face of my spear-blade. Luck. “Thanks, Brother!” Kalik slew the bowman before he could fire again. Under the lowering face of Grave Mountain, the rest retreated to their fort up the valley.
    Its stockade fell at our first rush. Between the huts we speared our way. I stopped when only women, children, old men were left. Kalik led his warriors on, killing now for lust.
    The fighting petered out, Kalik getting control of himself and the others. I interfered too late, saw a woman cut down needlessly. Her baby tossed in the air, impaled. Kalik ordered a hutful of women and children led back to the canoes.
    Further up, we ran down a Salt Man, beat about for others. In the saddle at the valley’s head, Kalik and I circled through trees down the other side of the watershed, but found no recent tracks.
    Back to the lake, past the burning remains of the fort. As we went, Kalik ordered the line of corpses down the valley stripped of their gear and weapons. Our dead, like the enemy’s, abandoned.
    In the evening by the lake the prisoners waited. Some had disappeared on the way. The Salt Women lamented, dishevelled, the children in terror, but Kalik ignored their despair. As we paddled between two bodies lolling towards the river’s mouth, he smiled grim.
    “It will be long before they dare attack again.”
    “Yes, but they will return.” I knew something of the persistence of the Salt Men now. I had thought I understood the nature of evil, too, but was beginning to wonder. Did we need to kill the women? Children? Old men? And what about the prisoners?
    “Lutha will celebrate tonight!” Kalik threw back his head and shrieked. A scream of blood and killing. And jaggedthrough the growing darkness, a woman’s shriek replied: delight and death.
    “You’ll see a difference in the Maidens. Lutha will order the wine.”
    “Wine?”
    “Like drinking blood!”
    Torches flamed. Kalik and Lutha, both of them blood-covered , danced towards each other across red sand. The Maidens chanted and swayed as they moved up to the Roundhouse, circling, raising spears and bows. The air reeking of death, rent with screams of triumph. Edged. Hysterical.
    More torches on long poles. Lutha gestured, and the Maidens