by H. M. Long
“They’re currying favor. It will be a smart move if we survive.” Nisien threw the pair a discreet look. “The Rim is a good place to make your name and those two – they’re rich men’s sons. Estavius’s father is High Priest of Aliastros and Castor’s is a senator.” When I gave him a confused glance, he clarified, “A powerful man, a politician and a spokesman for the people.”
“Ah,” I said. “That explains his… attitude.”
Nisien gave the ghost of a grin. “Well, the commanders on the Rim are harder on men with a comfortable background. But now Athiliu knows their faces personally, as does Polinus, and if the mission is successful the story will go right to the Ascended Emperor Himself.”
“Then there must have been a lot of men vying to come.”
Nisien understood my meaning. “Yes. But as you may have noticed, they’re all pure Arpa. They’re legionaries. Not auxiliaries. My… fluency in Northman is why Athiliu insisted I join – that and my reputation. I was surprised, honestly.”
“What do you mean by reputation?”
The Soulderni fingered the dense bread and dried meat in his hands. “I made a name for myself in the far south, like those two are doing now. I was a scout, sometimes a messenger, sometimes a spy.”
I eyed him. “A spy?”
Nisien grinned. “The southerners are dark, like Soulderni. I drew less attention.”
I let my head tilt to one side and examined his face. By now, the seed of nostalgia I had seen in him back in Souldern had blossomed into something near hunger. There was still a shadow behind his eyes, like any sane man recalling a season of violence, but he missed it, too.
I thought of Euweth’s expression when she sent me away – a mask of anger and determination that had covered her terror of losing her son, and her own loneliness. She had been right to fear, even if she had brought that fear to fruition.
The sight of Quentis striding past tugged my thoughts away from the Soulderni. Polinus had instructed us to collaborate during the rest, but from the way Quentis kept his eyes focused ahead of him, he had no intention of doing so. I didn’t, either.
“Tell me about the south and the Empire,” I invited Nisien.
Nisien settled his shoulders back into the tree’s trunk. “Only if you tell me about being an Eangi.”
I leant back beside him, leaving a gap between our shoulders. “You first.”
“Well…” The horseman gathered his words together. “The Empire is vast. Far more than I ever imagined. Going there as a child, straight from the Ridings to the capital, it was terrifying. So many people, people from all over the Empire, all packed into high houses and narrow streets.”
I considered this before I asked, “Did you try to run away?”
Nisien stared into the distance. “No. There was no opportunity – I was just so far from home. But I wasn’t alone. I was with dozens of other boys in the same situation. We became brothers. I never stopped missing my mother, or vowing to return to her, but I didn’t hate the legions. I was welcomed. Respected. I belonged.”
I watched unspoken memories flicker through his eyes. “If it wasn’t for your mother, would you ever have left?”
His focus remained on that distant point. “Circumstances are never that simple.”
I glanced around the village, at the legionaries sitting or standing all around us. The thought of Nisien willingly living among these people, belonging to them, chilled me.
“In the Empire…” I asked, “did they let you worship Oulden?”
Nisien shook his head. “No.”
“So you…” I sat straighter. “You didn’t worship Oulden for ten years?”
“Everyone in the Empire bows to Lathian and the Emperor, who is his… well, the Emperor to Lathian is like an Eangi to Eang, a vessel.” The horseman picked at his nails. They were torn to the pink, I noticed. “That’s the way it is. You don’t worship gods outside the Arpa Pantheon. One of my commanders enforced that. Some don’t. But he did.”
“Who was he?”
Nisien’s face clouded. “He’s called Telios. One of Lathian’s zealots.”
I recalled the name from Nisien’s conversation with Castor, that night in the cave in Souldern. This, combined with the tightness around my companion’s eyes, told me I was inching towards something important. “Lathian’s zealots?”
The young man’s expression darkened. Telios, it seemed, was not someone Nisien wanted to remember. “Soldiers absolutely devoted to Lathian. Zealots, like the name suggests.”
His words, said and unsaid, hung in the air between us. I searched his clean-shaven face for clues, both about Telios and the state of Nisien’s soul. Had Oulden really accepted him back after ten years of worshiping foreign gods?
“Now,” Nisien said abruptly, “your turn. Tell me about the Eangi.”
* * *
That evening I stood by as Quentis worked his Arpa witchcraft. Mixing drops of his own blood with powders and herbs from a bag, he took a reed and proceeded to flick it onto the trees around the camp. Occasionally, he used the paste to draw a symbol and muttered over it.
“What is this supposed to do?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Do you put Fire in the runes?”
He frowned at me in disgust and scooped out the last of the mixture with his fingers. He used it to mark the forehead of each horse. They shuffled and danced around him, unnerved by the smell of blood.
“They’re not runes. And no, I don’t put fire in them. They have power in themselves, sourced from Lathian.”
I bristled and fingered the hatchet at my belt – the only weapon the Arpa let me carry. Everything about this priest, from his measured strides to the smooth rumble of his voice, made my skin crawl and my hair stand on end. He was in my home, the land of my goddess, but he did not seem the least bit cowed.
“It will deter anything unholy from coming upon us.” Quentis neatly avoided a falling hoof and cast me a second, more lingering glance. “And if you do not stop watching me, I’ll ward you, too.”
“Eang’s blood is in this land,” I returned. “You can’t ‘ward’ me.”
He gave me a tired look and circled around, making for the tents. There were eight of them, simple structures arranged in a neat, inward-facing circle around several cookfires. For all their faults, the Arpa were industrious; a whole night’s worth of wood was already stacked, and several men had begun to cook the evening meal.
Abruptly, Quentis turned. “Eangi.”
“What?”
“Why are you going north?”
I let the silence hang between us for a while before I said, “I serve my goddess. As you serve your god.”
He took a step back towards me, his bowl in hand, fingers stained with paste and blood. “How do you serve her?”
It was my turn to step closer to him. “That doesn’t matter to you.”
“To me? Yes, it does. Perhaps not to Polinus, but we are different men, with different… sensitivities.” He was a pace away from me now, bloody fingers poised as if he might reach out and touch me. “Why would Eang send one of her priestesses into the mountains, alone, in such dangerous times?”
“Why would I tell you?”
His lips pinched into a sour, thoughtful expression. Without another word, he turned and strode away.
I waited until Quentis was gone from sight before I rolled the tension out of my shoulders. The priest had left me unnerved, but I had no time to dwell on him.
A voice came to me upon a twisting strand of wind. “Hessa.”
I turned around and scanned the trees suspiciously. “Ogam?”
“Come.”
The cold wind tugged me forward by a lock of loose hair. I ignored the disconcerted stare of a legionary and followed it outside the camp. A few minutes on, the lock of hair fell back against my cheek and I halted in a small clearing of jutting rocks, knotted roots and bursts of hip-high ferns. In a forest of waning summer sunlight, this place alone was cool, smelling of snow and lo
ng, dark nights.
“Where are you?” I asked, not bothering to hide the accusation in my voice.
“Far away. You called to me?”
“Two days ago.” My throat thickened at the memory of that night – hunted by Shanich and near madness. I turned slowly, scanning the clearing in the mottled evening light. “I nearly died. Didn’t you hear me?”
“I was occupied. Tell me what happened.”
“A creature called Shanich attacked me.”
“Shanich… Shanach…” Ogam tasted the name, turning it on his tongue and trying to find a sound that registered in his memory. “Shanalch?”
“Shanich. She tried to…” I felt my face paling. “She wanted to… drink me.”
“Your blood, spirit or tears?” he inquired.
I gaped at a disembodied patch of orange sunlight, galled. “Blood, spirit or— Gods above and below, Ogam, you do realize I can die? Only once?”
“Yes. So which was it?”
“She didn’t say,” I retorted.
“Hmm…” Ferns rustled in a circle around me, moving contrary to the rest of the forest in Ogam’s icy breeze. “Likely your blood, for its life-magic. If so, I’ve heard of her, but only just.”
“What is she? A demon?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Of a sort – she is something that never should have been. A child of one of the Gods of the Old World, but that god perished long before her kin were bound by my mother and the other New Gods. They say that before her death, terrified of her mortality, that goddess tried to secure her children eternal life. It went… awry. And the first generation of demons came to be. And they bred.”
I waited for him to go on, angling my good ear in the direction of his voice. When he didn’t, I ventured, “Shanich mentioned a group of gods I’ve never heard of. Well… she seemed to think only they were gods, actually. She called herself and Eang Miri and the ‘gods’ the Four? Pillars, I think? A Weaver and Thvynder, and two others?”
Ogam was silent for another second. Then he made a derisive sound. “She’s slept for a long time, Hessa. Her memory has likely skewed. Don’t let her madness trouble you. But…” he added thoughtfully, “if she is from as far back as it seems, she’s not with Ashaklon. My mother must have rebound her at some point, and now that her power is fading, Shanich walks again. Still, she may not be able to leave the area you found her in. Yet.”
The thought of Eang’s waning power stole any consolation from his words, or lingering interest in the Four. “I found a broken binding tree, too. And a cairn and shattered standing stones.”
“Unsurprising.”
“And there was a creature. A bear, maybe? Bigger. It’s what scared Shanich off.”
“Really?” Ogam sniffed. “I heard Aegr escaped the High Halls… but so many have. What a time we live in. Demons breaking ancient bonds, Gods of the Old World causing a ruckus, legendary beasts clawing back into the Waking World!”
Aegr. I’d sung of the great bear in the Ridings, hadn’t I? Cursed with an eternal wound, the ornery bear had been healed by a daughter of red-haired Risix. Since that healing, he’d become a gentler figure of Eangen lore, but he was supposed to dwell in the High Halls.
Ogam sounded nonchalant as he mentioned the bear, and the creature had saved me. Still, the thought of anything escaping the High Halls was discomfiting.
“Then I might encounter more things like Shanich and Aegr?” I summarized.
The wind hovered for a pensive moment. “It is possible, though Aegr’s a paternal fellow – maudlin, too – so he’s hardly a concern to you. If my mother came back to Eangen she could likely do something about them but… well.”
“She’s not in Eangen?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer. “At all? You’re sure?”
“Not sure, but reasonably convinced.” Ogam’s voice lowered and the wind pooled in front of me. “You’re still all I can sense of her. She’s either far away or hiding very well.”
Eang, hiding? I remembered how Eang’s fear had felt, as we faced down Ashaklon. Perhaps Ogam was right, and Eang was hiding just like Oulden had.
Disconcerted and more than a little indignant, I protested, “She can’t do that. We’re her people. Her duty is to protect us.”
“She can do whatever she pleases. Haven’t you learned that by now?”
I pushed down another rush of ire. Ranting about Eang’s actions to Ogam was not only dangerously heretical but would not get me any closer to the High Halls. And I still had questions to be answered. “Fine. Then what should I do if we meet something like Shanich again?”
“We?”
I paused. “I’ve joined up with the Arpa. After Shanich… I had no choice. Traveling alone was too dangerous.”
Ogam’s laugh made the leaves tinkle in a full circle over my head. “See? I did make the right choice. Trust the immortal Son of Winter, Eangi.”
“But you didn’t come.” I tried not to sound like a petulant child and failed. I reined myself in. “You said you would hear me. You promised.”
“I was occupied,” he said again. “I’ve found the trail of the child, Vistic.”
I hadn’t expected that. “You have? Is he all right? Did you see Sixnit?”
“She’s with me now,” Ogam replied, and relief washed over me like the warm evening sunlight shafting through the canopy. Before I could respond, he carried on, “As to the child, he was taken.”
“I know that,” I strove to be patient. “By what? Or who?”
“As near as I can figure, Gadr.”
I gaped at the forest. What did the Algatt god want with an infant? “Gadr? Himself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Ogam’s tone turned irritated. “Do you realize how many questions you’ve asked in the last minute of conversation? If I was a riverman I would have stuffed you in a muskrat den by now.”
I stilled myself. “I’m sorry.”
The wind tugged at my hair again. “Gods below. Stop using words you don’t mean.”
“My questions are justified,” I pointed out. “I need to know.”
“All you need to know is your own task. I’m being generous by even speaking with you,” he replied. “If you encounter another creature like Shanich, try to soothe them, keep them calm. Sing. They’ll be groggy and may be convinced to go back to sleep. Other than that, just be cautious and stay away from binding trees. And graves.”
The air pressure dropped as if something had vacated the space around me. “Ogam?” I called, and realized it sounded like yet another question. “Ogam.”
“‘Thank you’,” his disembodied voice prompted from somewhere far away.
“Thank you,” I relented.
His presence faded and the cool wind retreated, letting the warmth of the fading sun slip back into my little corner of forest. Slowly, I let out a breath and closed my eyes, sorting out what I had learned. Eang, absent from Eangen? Vistic taken by Gadr? But why?
Ogam’s voice, a memory this time, rang through my head.
Are you sure he’s human?
I thought about the tiny infant Vistic, curled into Sixnit’s chest in the ravaged Hall. The thin breath in his lungs, the limpness of his head; could he be anything other than human? But he had survived, the son of an Eangi, the only living creature in the Hall of Smoke besides his mother. Maybe there really was more to him.
I took a few more moments to collect myself, then rubbed the back of one hand over my eyes. I couldn’t work this through alone. It was, I realized, high time I brought Nisien into my confidence. Maybe the Soulderni would have fresh insight.
It was then that I heard footsteps. They were distant and many, so soft and cautious that I could barely distinguish them from the usual rustle of the leaves. I dropped into a crouch in the ferns, cocking my good ear towards the sounds and keeping my breaths quiet, measured and deep.
The footsteps continued at a steady distance, passing me and heading in the direction of the Arpa camp
. I crept forward, sheltering behind a root-draped rock, and peered through the forest with a hand on my hatchet.
Shapes crept through the trees. They moved low, traversing the rough terrain through shafts of nearly horizontal sunlight and swaths of shadow. Round shields preceded them, their bosses smeared with charcoal to keep them from reflecting the sunlight, as were the heads of their axes and their swords. Their cheeks, pale in the waning light, were painted with telltale blue and yellow.
The Algatt had come.
TWENTY-THREE
I watched the Algatt progress, two halves of myself awakening and vying for dominance. One was a memory, an Eangi girl with forty shields locked with hers and the dauntless, unquestionable leadership of the war chief Ardam ringing in her ears. That Eangi had faced a force like this many times. She had little fear, surrounded and guided by her people. One of many. Part of a whole.
But the other half of myself, the louder one, knew she was alone. All she could remember were the remnants of the Hall of Smoke where every one of those companions lay.
Those two halves collided into a flush of fear and rage. My breaths shortened and Fire clawed up my throat, livid and scorching. My eyes flicked over the shapes in the woods, counting a dozen, two dozen, three. More came on; I heard them all around. In moments, I would be surrounded.
I hunkered lower, allowing myself one more second to think. Hurling myself at this many Algatt raiders was certain suicide. But as the seconds slipped by, my rage coiled tighter and the odds mattered less and less.
The camp had to be warned. If the Arpa watchmen hadn’t sounded the alarm by now, perhaps they’d already been silenced. An Eangi war cry might carry the distance, but I’d be killing myself in the process. I needed to get closer. Fast.
An Algatt stepped into my clearing. He didn’t see me immediately, narrowing his eyes against the last of the evening light and stalking his way through the ferns. He was red-haired and bearded, like Eidr had been before Algatt, like this one, had murdered him.
I made no conscious decision to move. My limbs simply unfurled and I rose halfway, hatchet in hand and Fire falling from my lips like hot coals from a brazier.