“His name is Axerian,” Sarine said. “I worked with him to oppose Reyne d’Agarre, during the battle. He’s a kaas-mage. I need to find him, before Zi—”
“Hold,” Erris said, taking a seat opposite the desk. “How can you be certain of his identity? And what is a … kaas-mage?”
Voren furnished a sheet of paper, handing it to her across the desk. She glanced and found a perfect likeness of her attacker, rendered in black lines. The hook nose, the tired intensity of his eyes, the blend of Sardian and Thellan blood in his face.
“Sarine offered this drawing without description,” Voren said. “Unless you gave her the description yourself, I’m sure you will agree it proves her claim.”
“It’s him,” Sarine said. “I’m certain of it. And a kaas-mage is …” The girl trailed off, seeming to listen to a voice before she paused, and started over. “It’s what Reyne d’Agarre was. The tribesfolk had one among their number.” She swallowed. “And I have the gift as well.”
Without further warning a four-legged serpent materialized from nothing, coiled on the edge of Voren’s desk.
Body snapped into place before Erris could think, battle instincts propelling her to her feet, a hand placed on the hilt of her saber, ready to draw. Voren leaned forward, intent on the creature, as though Erris hadn’t reacted at all.
“Fascinating,” Voren said.
“Don’t worry,” Sarine said. “Zi is harmless, and he’s sick. I need to find Axerian, before he gets any worse.”
“What is this creature?” Erris asked, keeping hold of her saber’s hilt as she met its eyes. Twin rubies, flickering like fire.
“This is Zi,” Sarine said. “He’s a kaas. We form a bond that gives us their gifts, but he isn’t dangerous.”
Erris listened as Sarine explained, though she wasn’t about to relax her guard. Certainly the descriptions of strength and speed, the white shield conjured when her saber had struck the assassin’s shoulder, all matched with her experience and the terror inspired by what the girl referred to as “Yellow.” But how to countenance the claim that such magic had existed alongside the leylines, separate and secret, kept hidden for hundreds—thousands—of years? Even though she had seen it firsthand, it begged an explanation within the frame of what she knew: leylines, Skovan hedge magic, Bhakal herblore, or even the terrible beasts native to the New World. Yet the girl claimed it was something else.
“I trust you share my assessment,” Voren said when she was done. “With Sarine, we’ve found a weapon that can counter this assassin.”
“That was the purpose behind my visit,” Erris said. “I’d been weighing options with Marquand. With another d’Agarre to threaten us, we’d considered postponing … our plans.”
“Sarine changes the situation,” Voren said. “With her aid, we can find this Axerian, and keep your armies marching south.”
Erris eyed the girl—Sarine—with a dubious suspicion. Voren had as good as entrusted her with secrets the Gandsmen would sacrifice a dozen spies to hear, and with no effort to show proof of trust.
“Are you willing to help us?” she asked the girl.
“Yes,” Sarine said. “I have to find him, for Zi’s sake. And whatever he’s planning, if it involves assassinations, he has to be stopped.”
“You see, High Commander?” Voren said. “A stroke of luck, for once. With your permission, we can deploy Sarine with your binders here in the city and continue the invasion, both at once.”
She nodded as Voren finished. Too much to consider it luck, but it was at least an opportunity. With Need waning, she could ill afford to let it pass; however, trusting unknown magic turned her stomach. Her enemy was using an assassin armed with one of these serpents—one of these kaas. Just as well to have one on her side again, to counter it.
“I’ll assign you to the gendarme corps, then,” she said to Sarine. “As for the rest, I intend to ride south with the army. If you can prevent anything the assassin might try here in the city, our binders can counter an attempt to strike at us in the field.”
“Is it necessary to ride to the front in person, given the resources here at high command?” Voren asked.
This time she let silence stand as an answer to Voren’s unspoken question. Her Need had grown no stronger. And it was good to see there were limits to his trust, even with would-be saviors.
“I leave in the morning,” she said, earning a solemn nod from both. A dubious thing, to place so much on the head of an unknown girl. But then, she’d done it before, and been proved right. Gods send it would be enough again.
7
ARAK’JUR
Wilderness
Uktani Land
The forests had given way to plains of long grass some days before, marking the boundary between what had been Ranasi land and the land claimed by the Uktani, their northern neighbors. He’d come this way before, with Corenna at his side, on their first journey to reach the Nanerat, the tribe that called themselves the earth’s most peaceful children. They’d been full of hope then. Now every step on Ranasi land was a step on cursed ground, all the joy of her people snuffed out by the treachery of his.
He’d tried to argue against Corenna’s coming before they departed the village. A daughter grew in her belly, or a son. His child. Too soon for it to show, but the visions of things-to-come did not err on such things. He might as well have shouted at the tide. Their people were in danger, and she would be at his side to face it, and that was the end of their argument as sure as it had been the beginning. He loved her for it, even as he pleaded for the sake of their unborn child. Yet here she was, walking ahead of him, weighing their surroundings and planning for what might come when they arrived.
“It was here, near this field,” she said, making it a question and a statement, both. “I saw it in the smoke, though I can’t say how I know.”
“It was,” Arak’Jur replied. “We’re getting close now. Such are the ways of the shamans’ visions.”
She showed him a smile, at once a token of humility at her lack of knowledge and a prod to ask for more.
He returned it. “We’re left with an impression, after a shaman tells us where the spirits wish for us to go,” he said. “An imprint in our memories as though we had traveled to the place too often to need remember the way. When we draw near, we know.”
She nodded, savoring the knowledge in her expression as she might have done a sweet fruit. Spirits, but she was strong. He knew the carrying of a child was a delicate thing, but even knowing the seed grew in her belly, he could never see her as fragile. She had faced the horrors that haunted his worst imaginings—her people broken, dead, scattered to the wind—and pressed forward with a resolve he wouldn’t have found in her place.
“I wonder how much we’ve missed,” Corenna said. “How much our separate ways have cost us, dividing knowledge between men and women. Can we be certain the spirits intended it? We tread on ground that unnerves me, even now, but—”
She came to a halt a step too late, giving him a questioning look.
The wind had changed.
A tingle on his skin. A scent beneath discerning in his conscious mind.
Corenna’s eyes frosted over, her feet set before he could speak a warning. Too slow. The space around her shimmered, and Arak’Jur howled, charging forward as a mighty stag stepped through a shadow ripped in the fabric of the air. Blood ran from the sockets where its eyes should have been, rivulets staining the sides of its elongated face, pooling over teeth too sharp for any plant eater.
Astahg.
The beast lowered its head, thrusting with a rack of antlers half as tall as a man, twice as sharp as any spear. A cracking sound rang out, ice shattering where Corenna had put a wall between them, and he crashed into the beast’s hindquarters, drawing on una’re’s strength to lift the creature and throw it away from Corenna’s shield.
Corenna turned on the beast as he rushed after it, icicle spears sailing through the air from another angle as he ran.
Neither strike landed. Shadows gathered around the creature, swallowing it before it crashed to the ground, leaving them standing alone on the plain, as though the beast had never been there at all.
“It will come again,” he said, his breath coming hard from the sudden exertion. “Be ready for—”
He dropped prone by instinct as antlers gored the space where he had been. Tendrils of shadow licked the air as astahg appeared, and he rolled into it, grabbing hold of one of its forelegs as the rest threatened to trample him on the ground. A flurry of hoof and grass surrounded him. The creature reared, thrusting downward with its antlers as it convulsed to shake him free, and pain shot through him where one pierced his skin, ripping a gash down his back like dried husk. Still he kept his hold, drawing on una’re to send shocks up its joints. If he could keep it pinned long enough, Corenna could finish the beast.
Shadows replaced the sinew and bone in his hands, and the creature vanished.
“I wounded it,” Corenna called to him. “Are you hurt?”
Before he could call back, a howl sounded nearby. Not the astahg. Men.
He sprang to his feet, feeling loose skin and blood hanging on his back. A searing pain, drowned to a dull throb as he found his footing and saw a group of hunters running toward them across the plain.
“I am,” he said, “but I can fight.” It sufficed to keep Corenna’s attention on the men, and on the astahg’s next reappearance.
He squinted toward the hunters, trying to discern their tribe while keeping a watchful eye in all directions.
“Down!”
Corenna shouted it, and too late he saw that the hunters had stopped, dropping to a knee to level their muskets, three hundred paces away.
Belching fire roared over the plain. Corenna conjured a shield of earth, broad enough to shelter them both from the hunters’ shots, but he drew on lakiri’in’s speed and ipek’a’s power, leaping toward where shadows had appeared behind her.
Stone chipped as the shots impacted her shield, and he sailed through the air, ipek’a’s scything claws connecting with the antlers, hard enough to scrape bone on bone. Astahg gored with his antlers; Arak’Jur sliced through, catching an eye socket with a bloodied hand. He yanked, twisting the creature’s neck as its jaws snapped, and he ducked under its rack, striking the beast in the chest hard enough to shatter its ribs, piercing it through the heart.
YOU KILLED HIM.
No, Arak’Jur thought back to the spirit. No, Corenna is in danger. I must return. The hunters, the men, they approach, and mean us harm.
YOU ARE CHOSEN, THOUGH NOT BY US. WE BOW BEFORE YOUR STRENGTH. WE BOW BEFORE THE MOUNTAIN, WHO HAS CLAIM ON YOUR ASCENSION.
Great Spirit, Arak’Jur thought. I honor you, and the scion of your form. But—
YES. HE WAS A MIGHTY STAG.
He had no body, here, communing with the spirits, surrounded by formless void. Yet he felt the sensation of a pounding heart all the same. The hunters had fired on them; that much was clear, even if he had no notion of why. The Uktani had been reserved, cold, and distant on their last journey north. If they had turned hostile, while he was trapped within the spirits’ realm, it would leave Corenna to face them alone. Hunters she could handle, but if a guardian were among them, or a spirit-touched woman …
Great Spirit, he thought. I must refuse your gift. Please allow me to return to my place.
THAT WOULD BE UNWISE. THE TIME OF ASCENSION IS CLOSE AT HAND. WE CAN FEEL IT NOW. YOU MUST GATHER OUR GIFTS, ENOUGH TO STAND BY THE GODDESS WHEN THE DAY ARRIVES.
No, he pleaded. My woman is in danger, and my unborn child.
A POWERFUL THING.
Silence fell between them, enough to kindle warmth in the empty space surrounding his senses. He felt as though a dozen eyes watched him, whispers sounding at the edge of his hearing. Faint voices. No, and Let him go. The Wild, and then, stronger: She comes. The Goddess is waking. He must bring her to us.
IT IS DECIDED. A WOMAN AND CHILD DO NOT OUTWEIGH THE COMING SHADOW. YOU HAVE EARNED OUR BLESSING, AND YOU WILL HAVE IT.
No.
He put all his will into the thought, and found instead a shining light, faded through glass. A woman’s face. A song echoed in his mind, of sadness and loss. She was dying. Then the light flared around him, and his senses bled away.
He sprang across the grasslands, feeling the bounding rhythm of the plain. The cool water of a stream, the joy of pausing to drink, a splay-legged fawn at his side. He was accepted among the plant eaters, a mighty rack of antlers promising strength, wisdom, protection from the predators that stalked them all. He basked in their tranquility, rightly proud of the place he was given in the eyes of the elk, the beaver, the squirrel, and the hare. Yet he was of two worlds, a prince of predator and prey, and the shadows set between them. He stepped through one world and emerged in the other, donning the mask of the hunter, devouring the creatures of peace. He was astahg, prince of plain and forest, and he alone was master of the space between his worlds.
REMEMBER HIM, the spirit’s voice intoned.
A bitter wind seemed to blow across his face, and Arak’Jur thought of Corenna as the blackness twisted away, returning him to his skin.
He expelled a breath, still surrounded by darkness.
The smell of blood pierced his nose, the tang of raw iron and flesh. Still dark, but the void was gone. A soft moon hung in the sky above, and a sheet of stars. Astahg’s corpse lay beside him, eyeless sockets empty and lifeless, though he remembered what it was to wear that form. Corenna. He snapped to his feet, legs aching from the strain of kneeling.
“Arak’Jur, thank the spirits.”
Corenna’s voice, warm and desperate. He turned, met by the force of her arms wrapped around him, and relief melted the knots in his chest.
“Corenna,” he said. “I pleaded for the spirits to release me. I left you alone. If you had been hurt, or—”
She shushed him, holding tighter. They hadn’t moved from the place where astahg had set upon them, clear enough from the presence of the creature’s corpse, but also from the outline of dead men in the grass, bodies twisted to face the sky, holding muskets, arrayed as though they’d tried to charge Corenna, and failed.
“What happened?” he began, and she shushed him again.
“More are coming,” Corenna whispered, finally relenting her embrace. “I tried to warn the first of them, but it took killing to drive them off. The rest ran, cursing me, cursing us, swearing they would return. Uktani warriors, struck by madness.”
She gestured northward across the plain, and he saw what he should have noticed first: lights, winding through the grass. Torches, or lanterns, though they were still a great distance away. Strange, for hunters to announce their presence. Yet they were not hunters now. If they had embraced the mad spirits, the Uktani men would be Venari, warriors, carrying spears and muskets, and bound for war.
He signaled for Corenna to follow, and spared a last look at the body of the astahg. Ilek’Inari’s vision in the smoke surfaced in his memory; the stag tied to men, with more and deadlier beasts to come. Had the spirits sent the beast to attack, ignorant of the Uktani warriors, or was there a deeper link? He couldn’t forget Arak’Atan, the Jintani guardian, who fought with ipek’a at his side atop the peaks of Nanek’Hai’Tyat. A frightening thing. The beasts had only ever been unknowable, terrible forces of death and destruction. If they were more, now, instruments of the mad spirits, weapons to be used against his people … Chills ran through his blood, imagining horrors that could too easily become real.
He and Corenna tracked through the grass, heading west across the plain. He set a cautious pace, careful to stay low. No time to hide their trail. But so long as they kept below the horizon line, men blinded by lanterns would see nothing of their passage until morning.
“How long was I speaking with the spirits?” he asked when they’d covered enough ground to satisfy caution.
“The better part of a day,” she said.
He gritted his teeth, torn between reverence and anger.
“I am well,” Corenna said. “It was only men; my gifts are strong enough to deal with them.”
“And if it had been more? Another beast, a guardian, a woman with gifts to equal yours?”
She fell quiet, keeping pace behind him. He hoped she would have left him behind, entrusted him to the spirits, for the sake of the people of their alliance. In his heart he knew it was the right thing, just as he knew he would never have left her, were their places switched.
“They’re moving,” Corenna said. “The lights.”
She was right; the warriors had changed course, heading farther west. Toward where they would be, in an hour’s time.
“East, then,” he said, leading back the way they’d come. Corenna followed in silence. He might have asked for more, pushed her on the decision to stand and fight while he communed with astahg. But she would not bend; he knew it by now. She would listen, acknowledge wisdom where she heard it, give him the respect he was due, as guardian, lover, and companion. But she wouldn’t abandon him, and he loved her for it, even as he thought it weakness, and recognized that he shared the flaw.
“Arak’Jur …” Corenna said, pointing, and this time he saw it when she did. The lights had moved again, changing course as they pivoted across the plain. “How can they hunt us? We are too far to sight, without light to give us away. They have no trail to follow, and the wind favors us, does it not?”
He nodded, staring toward the lights. No hunter in any tribe could have marked them so swiftly, not until morning, after intercepting their trail in the last place they’d been known to be. No hunter, but in light of astahg’s attack he couldn’t rule out something worse, something more.
“Munat’ap could do it,” he said, his voice solemn as he guided them to a halt, crouching in place.
“Munat’ap?” Corenna said. “Another great beast. Working with the Uktani.”
“The Great Timber Wolf. He runs with a pack of ordinary wolves, hunting the scent of his prey across rivers, forests, lakes, and mountains. If he stalks us, he won’t be deterred by darkness, distance, or terrain. It might explain the lanterns; the Uktani wouldn’t need to sight us to give chase, only to stay in step with the Great Wolf.”
Blood of the Gods Page 6