The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “Two gold nomias,” murmured the Captain, greed melting his voice until it wasn’t a man’s voice at all but that of the Enemy. “I’ll throw him in myself. Here, let me have them.”

  “One now, one later when the deed is done. I’ll go down with you and see you’re given a second when you and I have come safely to the surface.”

  “Fair enough! Fair enough!”

  When they had pushed him and prodded him down the ladders past the turning wheels and their rumbling tumbling roar, they drove him to the edge of the Abyss where a cold wind blasted up from the depths and a smell of decay and sulfur swirled around his body. He did not fight them. He was too stunned because it had been a lie that she was pregnant; she had renounced the married state for all time and chosen to wed herself to God’s service, hadn’t she? God did not make bellies swell with pregnancy. Only men did that. What she withheld from him she had given to another man, and she had betrayed him to his death twice over, though he had loved her honestly and well.

  With a thrust from the butt of a pick hard into his back, they shoved him over the edge, and he fell.

  XXVI

  AMONG THE DEAD

  1

  SILENCE did not come easily to Zacharias. Words screamed in his head every waking moment, but he had only vowels left him, a babble of ooo ah ee eh, all those strong glorious sounds shaped twixt tongue and lip cut clean off. He was a mute beast who could only moan and groan. It would have been better to be dead.

  It would have been better to be dead than to have betrayed his sister.

  Yet he did not die. Like a whipped dog he staggered at his master’s heels cringing and slavering, communicating with gestures and a grotesque vocal mush that Lord Hugh sometimes deigned to interpret, for after all whatever Lord Hugh wished him to be saying surely was what he meant to say, wasn’t it? He was a shadow, kept close by the iron chain that was Hugh’s will and by fear. What if Hugh choked him again with the daimone?

  At the end of a miserable summer they left Darre and journeyed north to the town of Novomo, where Novomo’s mistress, Lady Lavinia, entertained Presbyter Hugh and his entourage lavishly and showered Hugh with attention and praise for his role in saving her daughter from an unnamed but obviously gruesome fate. Here they lingered only one day, however, because the heavens remained clear, and in the afternoon of the second day his retinue loaded pack mules and a pair of wagons with a king’s ransom in provisions and traveling gear. With their escort of forty of Adelheid’s crack Aostan cavalry they rode to a hillside outside Novomo where an old stone crown stood above slopes turned to white-gold after summer’s searing heat.

  The dozen servants, forty soldiers, and half a dozen clerics who made up Hugh’s retinue waited in marching order as the sun sank toward the rugged western hills. Hugh led Zacharias forward to a patch of sandy ground—the only part of the hill not covered with brittle grass—and placed Zacharias directly in front of him, back to chest, placing into Zacharias’ hand the arm’s-length wooden staff used to weave threads of starlight into stone.

  This mathematical weaving Hugh had been teaching him for months now, and tonight his learning, and his memory, would be put to the test. His knees trembled, his palms were damp, and his lips were cracked. Was it worth the price of his tongue to have the secrets he had so long wished to uncover revealed at last?

  His tongue, perhaps. But not Hathui.

  “There,” said Hugh. “Do you see it? The first star. We must seek east and north to weave our path. We will hook the Guivre’s Eye, rising to the northeast, and weave a net around the Eagle rising to the east.”

  They would snare the Eagle, who had already been betrayed by her own brother. The staff quivered in his hand as rage shivered through him, but Hugh guided his arm. The staff rose as Hugh chanted words Zacharias would never be able to speak, although he now knew them by heart.

  “Matthias guide me, Mark protect me, Johanna free me, Lucia aid me, Marian purify me, Peter heal me, Thecla be my witness always, that the Lady shall be my shield and the Lord shall be my sword.”

  With Hugh’s hand directing him as the first stars shuddered into visibility in the purpling sky, he caught the threads of the stars with the staff and wove a pathway into the stones. The stars strained against this tether as the heavens churned inexorably onward, turning and turning with the wheel of night, and the entourage hurried nervously through the gleaming archway to vanish as if into thin air.

  The threads pulled taut against the stones, stretching, thinning, and unraveling, before Hugh clapped him hard between the shoulders and shoved him forward after the final pair of riders in the rear guard. Zacharias stumbled through the gateway with the music of the heavens ringing in his ears and his legs as weak as an invalid’s and his forehead and neck running with sweat. A steady throbbing buzzed up through his soles and all at once

  he sees a girl asleep within a circle of attendants, a motley crew, certainly, for one of them is Anna to his utter surprise, and just as the vision flashes into darkness he realizes that it is Blessing, grown so large, trembling at the edge of womanhood

  Sanglant rides at the head of an impressive army, Wendishmen and marchlanders and the ungodly banners, a dozen or more, of Quman tribes, a host of them to strike fear so deep that he wets himself. The prince does not ride in chains as their prisoner. He leads them, and yet he wears no griffin feather wings because he leads a pair of living griffins as easily as he might bring along a prized stallion and mare, their iron feathers gleaming so brightly that Zacharias is blinded

  his head hurts

  night drowns him as stunted shapes scuttle along rock and through tunnels, voices chattering and clacking as they converge on a pale corpse lying at the base of the shaft beside bronze-bound buckets half filled with nuggets of silver. They are so hungry that it gnaws his belly and he weeps with the pain of this constant starvation so many of them and all trapped here where they must labor in return for the merest dregs of foul nourishment without which they will all die and not merely the many who have already succumbed. They swarm, ready to descend on the corpse, but a sorcerous light bleeds from the arm of the dead man for he isn’t dead at all and that precious totem they recognize as a sign passed down through their generations. They back away, their whispers echoing through the stone halls within which they are trapped

  others walk in the labyrinth

  he glimpses, briefly, the Eagle whom Prince Sanglant rescued from Bulkezu’s horde, her hair gleaming like pewter as she turns to glance around in surprise, as though she has seen him. She vanishes down a side path, pushing a white-haired woman along before her, but he does not see the older woman’s face before

  a wagon rolls far away, a tiny cottage on wheels with beaded curtains rattling and smoke spinning upward from a hole in the top, and beside it on a sturdy gelding rides a woman who shines gloriously as the blue light pulses around her and all at once refulgent wings blossom from her shoulders

  Zacharias fell hard up to his wrists in muck and pungent manure, gasping and panting, chest tight.

  “Liath!” said Hugh in a voice rough with passion, or anger.

  “My lord presbyter! Your Excellency! We have been waiting for hours, Your Excellency! We despaired—!”

  “God help us! He looks ready to faint. Grasp hold of my arm, Your Excellency. Vindicadus, run down to the camp and make sure my lord’s chair is ready. Warm broth! This way, Your Excellency.”

  No one helped Zacharias up. Their voices faded as they moved away from him, and it took some time before he had the strength to lift his head and rise. Clouds chased across the heavens. Below his feet the ground tumbled away into massive, broken earthworks and farther down these leveled out to become grassland and woodland and, to the north, a dense forest of oak and pine. A river curved away until it was lost among the trees. A piece of metal glinted far below on bare earth, but when he shifted his weight onto his other foot, he lost sight of it. His shadow fell before him, drawn long by sun at his back. He turne
d, gasped in fright, and lifted a hand to shade his eyes, but the looming figures that advanced on him were nothing more than giant stones set into the earth—the crown out of which he had staggered. Pinks, blue gentian, and yellow stars bloomed on the grassy sward within the stones although whole stretches of ground consisted of dirt tamped down by a great weight now removed. Here and there cinquefoil speckled with yellow flowers crept through and around bleached bones lying scattered through the grass.

  “Brother Zacharias!”

  Two soldiers waited, arms crossed as they frowned at him. He stumbled after Hugh who, surrounded by his retainers, descended through the maze of earthworks.

  A crude hamlet consisting of a dozen huts and several pit houses lay at the base of the hill, just within an eroded earthen gateway that closed off the labyrinthine earthworks from the open land beyond. There was such a dearth of refuse, with fresh pits dug close by for a necessarium and heaps of earth still crawling with worms and bugs, that Zacharias realized the tiny village was itself newly erected, not more than a year old and inhabited by two dozen or so dark-haired, pale-skinned folk. These natives cowered at the doors to their houses and, when Hugh appeared in his splendid garb, flung themselves prostrate to the ground.

  Hugh studied them before speaking in an encouraging tone. His voice was no longer ragged with emotion, although he still looked pale.

  “Brother Marcus said there was one among you who could interpret for the others—who would that be? Let that one come forward without fear. I am pleased with all I see and all that you have accomplished here. Fear no anger on my part.”

  After a pause, a man raised up and by means of gestures indicated that someone was coming from outside the earthworks. One of Hugh’s soldiers, by name of Gerbert, scrambled to the top of the nearest embankment.

  “There’s a small church half built out there, my lord,” he called down, “and some men coming. They’ve a deacon with them.”

  The gateway had once boasted a deep ditch crossing its opening as a form of defense, but the pit was now mostly filled in with debris although on one side recent scars showed where someone had started to dig it out again. Boards thrown over this sinkhole made a bridge. The procession that approached was led by a young deacon in stained and mended robes, who supported herself with a staff since she walked with a pronounced limp. She had a merry face and a cheerful smile that made her look extremely youthful, since her two front teeth were missing, and her bright, open expression sustained the shock of Hugh’s presence without much more than a widening of her eyes and a trembling of her hands.

  “My lord!” She knelt before Hugh. He offered her a clean, white hand, and she took it in a hand chapped and dirty from hard labor and kissed his fingers, but after this he squeezed his fingers over hers and indicated that she should rise.

  “I am Presbyter Hugh, come from the skopos’ palace in Darre with these retainers.”

  “My lord.” She gazed at him with tears in her eyes, perhaps blinded by his beauty or overcome by the scent of rose water that clung to him. “I am Deacon Adalwif, who watches over this flock on behalf of God, our Lord and Lady.”

  “You are Wendish,” he said with surprise.

  “So I am, my lord. My own people have their lands near Kassel, but after I came into orders, I walked east to preach among the Salavii heathens. Here you find me.” She nodded toward their audience, who watched in respectful silence. “They are good folk, if rather simple, but their piety and hard work have proved them godly. You see that we have accomplished all of that task which Presbyter Marcus of Darre set before us two years ago. The stones are raised. Now we are engaged in erecting a church in order to hallow this ground and to keep the old heathen spirits away.”

  “You have done well.”

  “We do our best to serve God, my lord.” She hesitated as if to ask a question, but did not. “Now you have come.”

  “Here I will stay for the time being. I pray you, Deacon Adalwif, what day is it?”

  She nodded. “Brother Marcus told me that within the holy crowns the days might pass in different wise to that on the profane Earth. I have kept a careful track of days so that my flock may celebrate the feast days, as is fitting, and so that children may be named in honor of the glorious and holy saints. It is the feast day of St. Branwen the Warrior.”

  He smiled, although a certain tension squeezed the curve of his lips. “A glad day for arrivals! We departed Aosta most propitiously on the feast day of St. Marcus the Apostle.”

  “St. Marcus!”

  “It has taken far longer than I had hoped to come here.”

  “Fully five months.”

  “Almost six.”

  “All these passed through in a single night?”

  “In a single night,” he agreed, glancing up the hill, but the massive earthworks and the curve of the hill hid the crown from view. “Yet,” he mused, “what matter if six months pass in one night? We must wait here until Octumbre in any case, preparing for what is to come. I have a strong company to attend me, Deacon, as you have seen. We shall finish building your church. Then we will erect a palisade since this place was the scene of a fearsome battle not many years past.”

  “True enough.” She nodded gravely. “We remember those days well, my lord. Prince Bayan and Princess Sapientia brought a strong force here, but the Quman overset them and drove them northwest. In the end, so they say, Prince Sanglant saved us. All the Quman are driven out and will never return.”

  A shift in the wind made Hugh grimace, chaff blowing into his eye, but he smiled quickly and gestured toward the neat camp his servants had already begun to set up. “So we must pray, Deacon. If we are patient, and strong, all our enemies will be laid to rest.”

  2

  HE drowned under the bones of the world. A whisper teased his ears, and he opened his eyes into a darkness relieved only by a gleam of pale gold light that emanated from his left arm. Amazed, he waited for his vision to come and go in flashes, to fail again, but the gleam remained steady as he looked around.

  He lay in a low chamber carved out of the rock by intelligent hands or shaped by more persistent forces. The floor had been swept clean of rubble. To his left the slope of the chamber created a series of benchlike ledges along the wall. Creatures crouched there, curled up with bony knees pressed to chests and spindly arms wrapped tight up against their shoulders. Many wore bits and pieces of ornaments slung around thick necks, odd scraps they might have scavenged out of a jackdaw’s nest, most of which glittered with sharp edges and polished corners. The creatures had faces humanlike in arrangement, yet where eyes should stare at him, milky bulges clouded and cleared. He could not tell if they watched him or were blind.

  With a grunt, he sat up. The movement made his head throb, and he had to shut his eyes to concentrate on not vomiting. At last his throat eased and his stomach settled, although the pounding ache in his temples pulsed on and on. The air was comfortable, not truly warm or cold; the air hung so still that he could taste each mote of dust on his tongue.

  One of the creatures moved, arms elaborating precise patterns as it rubbed fingers one against the others, against its arms, and against the rock itself, clicking and tapping. The voice was not precisely voice but something more like the grinding together of pebbles.

  “What are you?” it said.

  “I am,” he said. “I am …” It was like flailing in deep water as the riptide drags you inexorably out to sea: “I have lost my name. It is all gone.”

  “You wear a talisman from the ancient days,” said the creature patiently.

  He saw now a dozen of the creatures seated like boulders around the chamber, sessile except for slight gestures whose subtle configurations and variations in sound began to make sense to him, flowing together and apart in the same way that seams of metal work their way through rock.

  “The ancient days are only a false story! We must set aside comfort and dig for truth!”

  “Despair is not truth. The anc
ient days are no false story, but a record carved in air to tell us the truth of the ancient days and the city whose walls speak.”

  “You are a fool! A dreamer!”

  “You are trapped by falls of rock that exist only in the mind you carry!”

  They spoke by means of touch and sound, reaching out each to the others, passing speech down from one to the next and back again, punctuated by the scritch of fingers on dust and the rap of knuckles against rock or skin, by the push and pull of air stirred by their movements and the intake and exhalation of breath. The words they spoke were as much constructs he made through his own understanding of language as uttered syllables.

  “The talisman bears witness to the truth! This creature bears the talisman! This catacomb traps us because in the watch-that-came-before we walk here seeking luiadh. To find luiadh we follow the veins of silapu. One element leads us to the next. This creature leads us to this talisman, or this talisman to the creature. Do not pretend one comes without the other. Listen!”

  They quieted.

  The one whose skin gleamed like pewter, the one who had spoken first, shifted and addressed him. “What are you? The others of your kind, who descend from the Blinding, are empty when they reach us. You are not.”

  “I am alive,” he agreed, before recalling the fate of the poor criminals cast into the pit. He shuddered. That shudder passed through the assembly like a venomous wind.

  “It fears us!”

  “It wishes to poison us!”

  “It seeks silapu! Thief! Concealer!”

  “Listen!” Pewter-skin stamped a three-clawed foot, and the others shifted restlessly before subsiding. When they crouched, motionless, they really did begin to blend into the rock so that he wondered if he still dreamed. They were only rocks, and he was hallucinating. But they kept speaking, and he kept hearing their words. “Let it speak. What are you? Why are you not empty? Why are you cast down like the empty ones? Why do you wear the talisman?”