Hunt (North Book 3) by Alexandria Warwick

Author:Alexandria Warwick [Warwick, Alexandria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YAF019020, YAF019030
Publisher: Andromeda Press
Published: 2021-08-11T22:00:00+00:00

28

Apaay screamed, lunging for Kirimat as her neck peeled apart and her eyes dulled. Numiak roared through his gag, his back bowed, arms and legs straining against the rope binding his hands. Kirimat’s body thumped onto the floorboards. Tossed aside like it was nothing.

Apaay sagged in the commander’s grip, too shocked by Kirimat’s death to realize that chaos had erupted in the hall. In the short time she had come to know this woman, Apaay realized they had become friends.

The doors burst open. Men in white furs poured forth. It was a wave, a frenzy, a stampede. The Herd took to their caribou forms, long legs adapted for fleeing fast over flat terrain, and heavy, solid hooves. The men came: ten, fifty, four hundred, more. Their dense, stocky builds shoved aside the slender Caribou Nomads. They wore the pelts of their brethren atop their shoulders, massive paws resting against their barrel chests. Apaay watched, horrorstruck, as one swung its sword, eyes black beneath the open-jawed hood of its uniform, and severed a caribou’s head clean off its shoulders.

Nanuq’s men, the kirn of the Empire, were here.

The screams deafened, animal and man alike. Blood splashed the trampled grass. Water heaved onto the riverbanks from the Herd’s struggle to escape, and the vines, they slithered like tongues from the overhanging canopy, the fat white blossoms bulging from the ends, expelling a cloying sweetness. Apaay was frozen. Numb. It was one death after another, by nigana, by sword, by hidden daggers plunged into hearts. She watched the slow topple of caribou into the river, watched as they thrashed and did not resurface, dragged down by the impossible weight of their antlers. Nanuq’s men cut a seamless path through the chaos, planting themselves in a protective circle around the commander, who stood calmly on the dais, looking out.

The lack of emotion, the dead pits of his eyes, chilled Apaay to the bone. The commander didn’t care about his people. He likely never had. He cared only for power, and to bolster that power with a heavy, rolling fear. Apaay had done little to stop him. She’d done not one thing. Blood, then suffering, and now infiltration, the oozing of Nanuq’s influence, deep into the sacred waters of Nigun.

It was too late.

Apaay lunged for the commander, clawing at his sickeningly detached expression. “You’re mad!” she screamed.

He laughed, clamping rough hands on her upper arms, his mouth a sneering curve. Apaay struggled to free herself. “That is the way of the world, dear girl. When will you see that under Nanuq’s guiding hand, our lives will be infinitely greater? Join him,” he said, “and you will want for nothing.”

It hit her then. If Nanuq’s kirn were present, where was Nanuq? She scanned the disorder despite having no idea what the man looked like.

“He’s not here,” the commander said. “Don’t fret, my dear.”

The man was completely delusional. Supercilious beyond words. “Now that Nanuq has a foothold in Nigun, he will dispose of you.”

The sneer returned, a baring of blunted, uniform teeth.

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