by Kate Elliott
He had let himself be distracted. He had failed to follow the scent when it was right before his nose.
Where had those damned hounds gone?
At the door, a large party of Rikin brothers hailed him cheerfully. A short, plump woman stood authoritatively in their midst, one hand slack at her side and the other cupped at her waist. It was clear these fierce Eika warriors followed her lead, although they towered over her and might have crushed her with a single blow of an ax.
“My lord prince! I bring a message of utmost importance. I pray you, let me speak.”
The sun dazzled him. He turned aside to stand under the eaves. “Deacon Ursuline!” The world tilted; a cloud covered the sun
as the waters stream around him, but he has to walk against the current because his hands are bound and they are dragging him through the flowing river of blood that burns so brightly that the heat forces tears from his eyes.
The blood is everywhere, drowning the land. Its rushing roar obliterates every noise. No matter how loudly he cries out, how he shouts or sings, he cannot hear himself. He cannot hear anyone, only the river’s furious flood and the rumbling tremor that afflicts the earth beneath him where pebbles slip under the soles of his feet and he slides and slips, dancing to keep upright.
Buildings rise around him and through an open doorway he sees into the interior of a dim chapel. A lord lies there with a steadfast hound curled asleep at, his head and terror at his feet. He fights free of his captors and darts into the church, flinging himself weeping against the lord, but no human flesh embraces him. He is all stone.
Everything is stone or fire.
“Get him out of there! He profanes the holy chapel.”
“Madman,” they cry.
They drag him outside and pour water over him.
Ai, God. It burns.
Coarse brushes scour him until his skin bleeds. Everything is bleeding. The world is bleeding.
There is a man sitting in a chair with a child beside him, a girl, sweet-faced and quite young, but the blood had got into her bones and she turns red. She is burning.
He struggles to reach her, to save her, but they pin him down and beat him.
“It is him,” says the man. “So am I vindicated. Let all the folk who have whispered under their breath see what he has become. He lied about his birth. He tried to cheat my cousin. He has now tried to assault my daughter, who is the rightful count. Put him in a cage. Restrain him, so that he can’t hurt anyone. Let an escort be assembled. I will make the folk who scorn to bend their knee to my daughter see what he truly is.”
“My lord?”
He fell, caught himself, dizzy, and his claws extruded as he slammed a fist into the log wall, thrusting deep. He stuck there a moment, and only after he shook his head did he wrench his claws out of the wood.
“My lord prince?” she asked again.
“The light blinded me,” he said. “I walked too quickly from inside the hall into the open air.”
His head rang with the sound of that roaring, the unceasing stream. I know where he is! It was difficult not to shout aloud with joy and triumph.
“Are you sure you are well, my lord?”
He attacked with questions, to give himself time to recover. The scent of blood had been so strong. The hallucination had almost subsumed him.
“What brings you to Medemelacha, Deacon Ursuline?” he asked. “I am surprised to see you.”
“No less surprised than I am to be here, my lord. I was sent at the command of OldMother.”
This was staggering news, but he knew better than to let his amazement show by any gesture or expression. “What message do you bring, Deacon?”
Yet his heart raced, and he could scarcely quiet his trembling limbs. Alain was at Lavas Holding. Now he could sail to rescue him, and do it quickly before worse harm was done to him. What had sent him mad? Why was he being punished in this way? Or was it punishment at all? There were other plagues abroad; they spread among humankind as maggots in rotting flesh. No man, or woman, was immune. Alain had wandered into places where he might well have taken sick.
All the more reason to save him and take him to the WiseMothers, as they had commanded him to do.
“Yes, my lord,” she said, as if he had spoken out loud. “OldMother wishes you to sail to Alba at once, to the stone crown where Brother Severus has left several adepts to perform the ceremony on the tenth day of Octumbre. There is little time left if you are to reach there by the proper day.”
“What about Alain?” he demanded. His passion startled her; she took a step back, and the Rikin brothers crowded around to listen circled nearer, pressing forward, as if they expected to see blood spilled.
Rivers of blood.
The wind was rising. A cloud covered the sun, blown in off the sea, and out beyond the harbor he saw rain coming in across the water, changing the color of sea and sky.
“OldMother said nothing of a person called Alain,” Ursuline said after a moment’s consideration. “Is that one of Brother Severus’ adepts? I can tell you, I do not care for these noble clerics. They sneer at a woman like myself although my lineage is perfectly respectable. They think themselves above the work of shepherding the common folk from birth to death, although certainly the blessed Daisan spoke of the importance of the ordinary work of living, of choosing what is useful and good instead of what is evil. Every person faces this struggle, not only the high and mighty!”
She was indignant. Her expression gave him pause.
“OldMother made no mention of Alain?” he asked again.
Yet OldMother knew. OldMother herself had told him to find Alain.
“She said this.” Her voice changed pitch, deepened and roughened. “‘Stronghand must go at once to the Alban crown, there to set in motion what is necessary. Now we understand what we need to do.’ I am to go with you.”
“Said she no more than this?”
“Is that not an express command?” she demanded of him. “Yet if that is not enough, then she bade me give you this to remind you of her power.”
She unfolded her right hand to display four ephemeral items: a tiny white flower, a lock of downy infant’s hair, the shards of an eggshell, the delicate wing bone of a bird. These things he had once placed in the hand of the youngest WiseMother as she climbed the path to the fjall to join her grandmothers.
“My lord Stronghand!” Yeshu jogged up, face red, tunic plastered with sweat. “The man’s gone. His boat’s already put to sea, that’s what they said, him and two big black dogs, but he can’t be far yet. The tide’s not with him. He must be moving right up along the coast. Do you want men sent out in pursuit? We’ll catch him soon enough.”
He reached for the precious items cupped in Ursuline’s hand, but she closed her fingers over them and pulled her hand away gently, so as not to seem defiant in front of the others.
He saw now the trap Ursuline had laid.
“No. Let him go. No matter.”
Ursuline was born out of humankind, weak and soft, but like the WiseMothers she bore within her the capacity to gestate life. Therefore, the mothers ruled. They alone could create life, and destroy life before it came into autonomy.
She understood their power, and now she challenged him. The stab in the back he had long expected had come from the most unlikely place. Ursuline lead shifted her alliance. She obeyed him not for himself alone but because he obeyed the wishes of OldMother. She knew who ruled the Eika; he was simply their servant. For some strange reason, caught up in the exhilaration of war and conquest, he had forgotten.
Of course he had no choice. To go against OldMother was beyond him. He bowed his head, knowing he had lost Alain and the hounds. He had failed his brother.
“I am OldMother’s obedient son,” he said. “Tomorrow we sail for Alba.”
3
AS she hit the water hard and went under, the remnants of her wings held her aloft just long enough that the impact did not knock her out. She fought to the
surface, gagging and spitting, and gulped air.
Storm waves crashed against cliff. One of the brothers bobbed up next to the rocks. It was difficult to tell whether he was alive or dead, and she kicked to swim over to him, but the movement sent such a shock up her leg that she almost passed out, floundering. All at once, too suddenly, his body vanished into the waters.
A swell off the storm washed right over her. She swallowed sea water, panicked, and slid under. Nightmare memories of the battle choked her as she struggled.
I am a monster.
A blow slapped into her rump. A large body shoved against her. She spun in the water, thinking it was one of the brothers, but there were other creatures in the water with them. Her eyes were open, and as lightning split the darkness she saw the limp bodies of Gnat and Mosquito, who were not even flailing as two huge men-fish glided gracefully around them.
Was it a dance? Was it curiosity?
Her air was giving out. She clawed for the surface, but not soon enough. Not before lightning flashed again, and she saw what was happening.
Gnat and Mosquito were being eaten, flesh ripped from their bodies. Already their faces had lost shape and the bone of their skulls gleamed in patches where the flesh had been gnawed away. Their eyes were gone.
They hadn’t been dead when they’d leaped into the water.
She came clear into the air gasping and heaving, and a face emerged from the seas just as lightning again illuminated the heavens. It had lidless eyes and horrible writhing hair that was a mass of eels with tiny sharp teeth nipping at her face. The monster loomed so close that the shock of seeing it made her forget to paddle. She sank beneath the waves again. Yet drowning gave her no surfeit from a broken heart.
I led them into a trap.
She thrashed, trying to find the surface, but everything had gone topsy-turvy.
A second body undulated underneath her kicking legs. She burst out of the water and, flailing, found a muscular arm under her hand. A rough hand gripped hers. She tugged, trying to break free, but it yanked her along after it. Spray and waves broke over her. The storm howled and thunder made her ears ring. A squall of rain passed over them, pounding on her head.
Must fight.
That claw closed around her arm and the monster dove, dragging her under.
I have been trapped.
She struggled, but the wound had drained her. She had no reserves left, and they were too far under the water for her to fight back to the surface if she could even figure out which way to swim. Her lungs emptied; her vision faded and sparked into hazy blotches as bubbles rolled past her eyes.
A face loomed. A lidless mouth fastened over hers, and a thick, probing tongue forced her mouth open. Now it would feed on her, consume her from the inside out as she had woken the fire that had consumed from the inside out the logs and the poor, doomed soldiers who had died screaming. Razor sharp teeth pressed against her own in an ungainly kiss. Pinpricks jabbed in her hair as the eel-mouths sought flesh.
Air.
Ai, God. Air filled her lungs, breathed into her by the monster.
The creature unfastened its mouth and dragged her onward, down and down, breathed air into her lungs a second time, and when she thought they could go no farther, it swam into a tunnel opening deep in the rock, far underwater, felt not seen because by now she was blind. They were trapped in a drowned hole in the ground and when her head scraped against rock, the pain washed down her body like knives. She passed out.
Eyes swollen shut, she woke when the ground shivered beneath her. Her tongue was so thick it seemed to fill her entire mouth. Clammy fingers pried her lips open and a foul liquid trickled into her mouth. She spat, and struggled, but she hadn’t the strength to fight. As the potion soured in her stomach, she slid back into darkness.
Speak. To. Us. Bright. One. Speak. To. Us. We. Know. Where. You. Are.
“Dead, is it?”
She swam up from the depths. Her face hurt, and her ears rang from a hallucinatory dream of ancient voices afflicting her. Her body throbbed with pain. The earth beneath her trembled and subsided. She opened her eyes and saw a double image wavering in front of her, but at long last she realized that she saw two distinct creatures who were speaking Jinna for some odd reason.
She hadn’t spoken Jinna since the years she and Da had lived in Aquila among the fire worshipers. Those had been good years. Da had been happy there. That’s where he had got the astrolabe, a gift from his noble patron. There had been chopped dates and melon at that banquet. She recalled it well enough, the feasting and the singing, the poem that had taken five nights to tell about a bold queen and the wicked sorcerer who had opposed her; she had known that poem by heart once, it had amused the court poets to teach her because of her excellent memory, but a veil clouded her sight … the palace of memory lay under a fog. She couldn’t recall the opening line.
In the beginning. No.
This is a tale of battle and of a woman.
No.
Wisdom is better than love.
No!
In the Name of the God who is Fire offer my tale …
“Bright One!”
Gnat and Mosquito, her mind told her hazily. Certainly they pestered her mercilessly enough. One pinched her so hard on the arm that she croaked a protest.
“Not dead,” observed the first.
“Bright One, wake up! You must drink.”
She drank. The water cooled her tongue, and she could talk almost like a person. “It was a trap.”
“A trap, indeed, Bright One. They were waiting when we came through,” said Gnat.
“Maybe so, Brother,” retorted Mosquito, “but we don’t know if they were waiting for us or if they were waiting for anyone!”
“How many sorcerers can weave such a spell, you idiot? Who do you think they expected?”
“Where is Sorgatani?” she asked, managing to get up on her elbows.
The ground she lay on scraped her skin, and it hurt to move at all, but no pain could equal the shock of looking up with her salamander eyes and remembering that Gnat and Mosquito were dead; they had been fed to the fishes. Where their bodies had gone she did not know, but the creatures who stared back at her were not the Jinna brothers at all but mermen, the same beasts she had seen devouring her hapless servants in the stormy waters.
They had the torsos of men but the hindquarters of fish, ending in a massively strong tail. They had arms both lean and powerful, and their scaly hands had webbing between the digits and claws at the tips. Monstrous faces stared at her, with flat eyes, slits for noses, lipless mouths, and hair that moved of its own accord, as if a nest of eels was fastened to their skulls. Yet they spoke Jinna with the inflections of Gnat and Mosquito.
“The Hidden One?” Mosquito shook his head, and looked at his brother, although it was too dark in this pit for any normal man to see, and they were not men to have lips or wrinkles from which to read thoughts and emotions.
Gnat shook his head like an echo. The eels that were his hair woke and hissed, then settled. “We don’t know. Her wagon went through the gap. Then we came back for you.”
“What of Breschius?” she asked, choking on the words.
“Those who were still living ran out through the stockade. We came back to help you.”
“You are dead!”
Again they spoke to each other by looking alone. Water made a sucking sound in a hole nearby, rising and falling. Lichens growing along the walls of this cavern gave off a slight luminescence, and this dim light allowed her to see that the two mermen rested half in and half out of water where it funneled away into a tunnel sunk into the rock, an old flooded passageway. She lay farther up, almost in the center of a cavern no larger than a royal bedchamber. It looked high enough to stand in, and she thought there were three passageways opening into the rock on the far side of the chamber, if she could only get so far. Yet to move seemed an impossible task. Her head felt muzzy and her ears clogged. Her leg hurt so badly that she co
uld barely think.
“Many are dead,” agreed Gnat somberly. “Many more will die. We died for you, Bright One.”
“How can it be you speak to me now?” Her words echoed through the cavern. The ground shivered in response.
“The Earth is waking,” said Mosquito. “The Old Ones speak. We are your servants. What do you wish us to do?”
Ai, God. She wept. She had not feared to risk her own life, but she hadn’t really considered what it meant to allow others to die on her behalf. Gnat and Mosquito were dead, pierced by arrows and then eaten alive, yet some portion of them remained living within the bodies of these creatures.
Was she their prisoner, or their master?
“Where are we?” she said when she could talk through her tears. Her voice shook, or perhaps it was the ground trembling again, the shudder of a chained beast. Fear washed through her, its taste as harsh as sea water. As the quake subsided, a second followed hard on it. Did the shaking never stop?
“Beneath,” said Gnat.
“We are at the heart,” said Mosquito. “Lay your head against the earth, Bright One. Close your eyes. Let the Old Ones speak to you.”
Liath sat up. Pain shot through her injured thigh, but she gritted her teeth and endured it. “Who are the Old Ones?”
They shook their heads and, after another wordless consultation, Mosquito spoke. “We don’t know. They live in the Slow, just as you do, but they live even beyond the Slow for the passage of their life is not like that of flesh, which feeds us.”
Flesh fed them, mind and body. If they consumed her, would they ingest her knowledge and her memory and her way of speaking? Even if they did, how were they, who fed as all creatures must feed, any worse than she was? She had killed men this day in the most horrific fashion imaginable.
Who was the monster?
“Very well,” she said, although she couldn’t bear thinking of closing her eyes again. If she closed her eyes, she might see the blackened bodies of comrade and enemy alike. But what else could she do? She was at the mercy of these creatures who spoke like Gnat and Mosquito and who had not yet devoured her. Who knew how long they would claim to be—or seem to be—the brothers. She would drown if she tried to escape back the way she had come. She might not have the strength to walk, and there might be no way to escape to the surface from this cavern in any case.