by Kate Elliott
Still, Empress Adelheid’s grandfather had refurbished the domed hall, and one of her great-aunts had built stables where once the emperor had housed his guests. The stone ladies glowered at them, faces half obscured, but they were only stone and could not therefore impede their progress.
“Look!” said Pietro, and coughed. Coughed again. “A light!”
Focas looked at Pietro. Together, without exchanging words, they nodded. “I’ll go ahead, Your Excellency. In case it’s bandits.”
Her chest hurt. She was too tired to complain. She just wanted to rest her feet. Focas strode ahead. Truly, it was remarkable how well he had held up. He was as strong as a bull, and far more tractable than his companion. His form faded into the haze, although by now they could see the curved facade of the grand court that greeted visitors. They paused where the paved road gave way to the broad forecourt. Turning, Antonia looked into the haze over the plain, but it was impossible to see anything. On clear days, one could see Darre away in the distance, surrounded by fields.
She choked, coughing. The mule wheezed.
“Hsst!” whispered Pietro. “Do you hear?”
“Where did the light go?” she asked, scanning the wide court and the semicircle of columns, but no lantern or torch burned now.
“Hsst! Look!”
Ghosts advanced out of the fog, wreathed in trailing haze, formless and faceless although about the height of men.
She was ready. She had always been ready, knowing how little surety there was in traveling with such a small party. She unsheathed her small knife and grabbed at the mule, pressing the point to one of the veins in the side of its neck. A trickle of blood flowed over her fingers as she spoke the words that would raise a galla. The air hummed. Where blood beaded on the mule’s hide the haze coalesced as though forming a rope out of darkness. The tang of the iron forge drifted up from the earth.
“Your Excellency! See what I have found!” Focas strode into view, easy among the ghosts. “We have found what we sought! They have been sheltering here in the catacombs. This good captain says the princesses are alive and in his care.”
Too late! The spell had gone too far and must be released or else rebound upon her. The stink of the forge gusted on the breeze. A shadow spilled into the ground beside the pooling blood. The mule brayed and jerked away from the knife, then collapsed as its blood pumped onto the ground.
“What—?” cried Focas, as the men behind him drew their weapons.
It was a small galla, appetite whetted by the taste of blood, but it would demand more before it could be dispatched. It would turn on her, or on anyone. Its substance thrummed in the air as it materialized into this plane. Its muttering words—pain pain pain—ghosted in the air like the sound of tolling bells. The air of this world burned it. It was angry, and trapped, and panicked. She had to act quickly.
She sealed the spell with a name.
“Pietro of Darre!” she whispered without hesitation.
“Your Excellency!” cried Focas, hanging back as the others cried out loud in fear. “What foul creature plagues us?”
“A traitor among us! One who does not serve the empress has brought a demon into our midst to murder the princesses!” She flung up her hands; her sleeves slid down her arms as she cried out. “St. Thecla save us! Matthias, Mark, Johanna, Lucia! Marian and Peter! Deliver us from evil! Seek the one whose spirit has fallen to the Enemy! Seek the one who would destroy us! Take him! Take him! Drive his soul into the Pit! And then begone!”
The shaft of darkness that formed the body of the galla in this world writhed like a chained soul seeking release. The stink choked her, but she kept her arms raised; she did not falter. The galla had the gift, or curse, of sight. They could see into the souls of every man and woman. The darkness lurched, spinning sideways.
Its bell voice rang dully. “Pietro.”
Pietro screamed. He, and the darkness, vanished, and only his bones remained.
The galla had escaped back to its own sphere. That whiff of iron dissipated, subsumed in dust.
Men shouted and wept but gathered most pleasingly around her as sheep flock to the shepherd when they fear the assault of the wolf. Focas fell to his knees, sobbing. The mule struggled to its feet, but collapsed again.
“Your Excellency! I am Captain Falco.”
“I know you, Captain Falco. You are the empress’ most faithful captain.”
He nodded, acknowledging what was to him not compliment or flattery but the breath that allowed him to exist. He appeared unshaken by Pietro’s death, but it was difficult to judge.
“You have done well to guard the princesses. Where are they?”
“Safely in the catacombs, Your Excellency. What news of the empress?”
Always the empress! Yet there would be time to mold these soldiers to her will, and those who refused her could be disposed of, as God desired. The disobedient, after all, were doomed to the Pit.
“Alas, I do not know what has become of the empress. She sent me ahead but remained herself on the coast, in the town of Estriana. She had set an ambush for the northern prince, the rebel, the one who sought to kill his own father, the Emperor Henry.”
“Patricide!” Falco was a stolid, competent soldier of medium height, with the broad shoulders of a man who has swung a sword and carried a shield since he was a lad. “I had heard the Wendish were barbarians. Now I know it to be true!”
In Antonia’s opinion, the Wendish were simple, honorable folk in their own crude way, without more than a finger’s weight of the capacity for greed, backstabbing, and treachery that thrived among the sophisticated Aostans. The southerners plundered and robbed each other, cut each other’s throats, and whored with their own sons and daughters. Still, it was best not to mention that to Captain Falco, who might take offense even though it was only the truth. God would overwhelm the wicked and reward the righteous, and Antonia would see justice done while she was waiting for Them to act on Earth.
Focas crept forward and poked at the scatter of bones with the butt of his spear. “Can it be?” he croaked. “Can Pietro have been harboring a foul demon in his soul this entire time? I did not see it! I did not see it!”
“Hardship blinds us,” she said kindly.
“It is well you are here to protect us,” said Falco, but his tone was bland and his gaze without passion.
“Indeed,” she agreed. “We must go swiftly. The land here is poisoned by the Enemy. It is best we move north in haste.”
Still, he hesitated. “What if the empress comes seeking her daughters, Your Excellency? They are her treasure. She will not abandon them.”
She nodded. “We must leave a few men behind. You pick them, Captain.”
“It is likely that the men I leave behind will die.”
“We will all die in time. That is God’s will. They will only ascend sooner to the Chamber of Light, where the righteous find peace.”
He frowned. In the silence, as he considered, some of his men coughed. The claws of the Enemy sank deep. So many had been infected with the taint that had gripped Pietro, and that she struggled against with every breath.
“Darre is lost, Captain. Best we move quickly before we are overtaken by the Enemy as that one was.” She gestured toward the bones.
His frown deepened, and he stiffened, clenching his hands. “Very well, Your Excellency. It is past time we carry the princesses away. Both suffer from a grippe. I will leave Terence and Petrus, and this man of yours, Focas.”
He was testing her, but she was equal to the challenge. “Very well. See that it is done, and that the rest make ready.”
“Where do we go?”
“This question, indeed, I have pondered on my long journey. We met refugees who say the coast is awash and many towns destroyed. West, as we see, is all on fire. We must go north.”
“Where?”
“There is one whose loyalty we can count on, who will shelter us. We must march north past Vennaci and take the road to Novomo.
”
VII
ON THE ROAD
1
A griffin’s cough woke him. He sat up, instantly alert, but only with his second breath did he recall where he was and what he was missing.
“Liath!” he said sharply.
She was gone.
He jumped up, wrestled on his tunic, and pushed out past the tent flap.
“Your Majesty!”
“Where is—? Ah. Be at ease, Benedict. Sibold.”
“Your Majesty.” The soldiers nodded as Sanglant walked past them toward the campfire set beyond the ring of tents. He heard them whisper to each other.
“I win! Told you he wouldn’t stay sleeping.”
“You did not win! We didn’t wager whether, but when.”
Liath sat cross-legged beside the fire, hands open and relaxed on her thighs as she stared into the flame. Hathui paced behind her. The Eagle glanced up as Sanglant walked up and nodded, acknowledging him. He halted behind Liath to wait.
The last few nights had been really cold, the first hard winter chill since the warm nights and overcast days after the great storm. That chill made him uneasy in a way he could not explain. It hurt in his bones the way a coming change in the weather might make a man’s joints ache, warning him of rain. The ground was cold and dry beneath his bare feet. It was, as always now, too cloudy to see stars or moon, but the heavens still bled an unnatural light, almost as bright as if there were a full but bloody moon.
“How long have you been out here?” he asked Hathui in a low voice.
“Too long, Your Majesty.”
“Still nothing?”
“Nothing. If Liath cannot see within the flames, then I think no one can.”
He and Hathui waited in companionable silence. Liath had a remarkable capacity to focus; she did not once shift, not even to brush the hair away from her cheek as the wind stirred it, which surely must distract her. He twitched, wanting to smooth back her hair, wanting to touch her. She seemed blind and deaf to their presence, although they stood just behind her. He could never be so close to her and ignore her so thoroughly. She was a roaring fire to him, a force impossible to shut out. The heat of her smote him, although he doubted anyone else noticed it. He was the one who burned.
“Isn’t she cold?” he asked, but Hathui only shrugged, and because he couldn’t stand not doing something he went back to the tent and fetched a cloak, which he draped over Liath’s shoulders. She did not thank him; if she noticed the thick cloak at all, she gave no sign.
He paced. Twice Hathui added wood to the fire. Neither time did Liath alter her intent stare, as if the Eagle’s movement and the hot lick of fresh flame did not register. After some time the darkness lightened, heralding dawn, and as a wind rose off the Alfar Mountains now south of them, she finally sighed and sat back, rubbing her eyes.
“Ai, God. No matter how deeply I search—” She looked up, then, and smiled, seeing him. “Aren’t you cold?” she demanded. “You’re practically naked!” She shuddered, drawing the cloak more tightly around her shoulders. “I’m freezing.” She laughed. “Where did this come from?”
He shook his head, a little disgusted, if truth be known. Resigned. Amused. She was not the woman he had believed he married.
“What news?” he asked instead, offering her a hand.
She took it and let him pull her up, dusted off her tunic and leggings, and blew on her hands to warm them. Her fingers were red from cold. “It matters not how deeply I search. It’s as if my Eagle’s Sight has vanished. There are twenty Eagles with this army, yet none of us can see through the flames. We are blind.”
“I am no blinder than I was before.”
“True enough, my love, but I am blind, and I don’t like it because I don’t know what it means.”
“What it means to be blind? Like those of us who are not as gifted as you?”
She looked sharply at him, hearing the pinch in his words. “That isn’t what I meant at all! Eagle’s Sight gives us an advantage, nothing more. It gives a sense of surety that perhaps makes one overconfident. It’s as if a curtain has fallen across our vision, and we can catch only fragments and glimpses through a rip in the cloth. Was it the cataclysm that blinded us? Is it the haze and the clouds? Is it magic, woven by the Ashioi to cripple us? Was the Eagle’s Sight woven into the great crown in ancient days, and is it clouded because the crowns are fallen? I don’t know, and what I don’t know I can’t solve.”
“Are the crowns fallen?”
She rubbed her eyes, yawned, and he caught her under the arm. She leaned against him, eyes shut.
“Anne is dead. That’s all I know. Anne and everyone with her are gone.” Her sigh shuddered through her body. “I felt those who wove the other crowns until the moment Anne died and the crown she wove was destroyed. I cannot say if the others survived the fire and the storm. They may have, or they may be dead, too.”
“You don’t think every person at the other crowns died, too?” asked Hathui. “You said that you … that you destroyed everything—all life—within a league of the crown where Anne was.”
Liath pushed away from Sanglant, and when he reached for her, she shook her head, needing to stand alone. “I don’t know if the fire reached through the weaving to touch the others. Without Eagle’s Sight, I may never know. I am sorry for the sake of Meriam. I liked her.”
“She treated me with respect,” muttered Sanglant, “unlike the rest of them.”
Her gaze flashed to him, and a smile lifted her lips. “It is true, my love, that they did not treat you as you deserved. Yet consider that they are likely dead now, while we have survived.”
“I cannot regret their deaths, considering all we have suffered.”
“Nay, that’s not what I meant. Only that I never thought about what would happen afterward. Aren’t we blind in that way, all of us? We march toward the gate, but it’s the gate we see, not the land lying beyond. We can’t see that landscape until the gate is opened and we’ve stepped through. Then it’s too late to go back.”
Around them, folk stirred as they rose and made ready to march. They had crossed the Brinne Pass in fifteen days. The northern air had invigorated the sullen and the exhausted, who could see how much closer they were to home. Certainly, less dust plagued them. In the early days it had filtered down constantly to coat hands and faces with a film of grit that they hadn’t the leisure or water to wash off.
Soldiers rolled up blankets. Sentries called out a challenge to men trudging into camp with full buckets drawn from a nearby stream, while grooms led the horses to water in groups of twenty. As ragged and weary as his men looked, he knew the horses managed worst of all. The army was almost out of grain, a meager ration to begin with, and the grazing was poor. At least, here on the northern slopes of the mountains, the water was clear, unclouded by particles and ash. Yet it still hadn’t rained, despite the clouds, and both villages they had passed as they came down out of the mountains had been deserted, houses and huts blown down by the great storm.
“I can’t stop seeing them,” she whispered. “The way they burned. I can’t stop hearing them scream.”
He knew better than to touch her when she was in this mood. “They were your enemies.” He’d said the same thing a hundred times in the last fifteen days. “They would have killed you.”
“I know. But I still feel unclean, as though I’m stained with the Enemy’s handiwork.”
He waited. As the light rose, the world came into view: hills, forest, wilting trees. Drought and lack of sun, unseasonable heat followed by this sudden cold winter blast, had taken their toll on the vegetation. To the north the land was too hilly to see far. The road twisted away past a ridgeline, lost to sight. To the south, on a clear day, they would have been able to see the mountain peaks, but there was yet a haze dusting the air, ever present. Even at midday the light lacked strength. It was uncanny. Indeed, it scared him more than anything else. He was no farmer, but he knew what farmers needed: rain, sun, an
d seasonable weather. After years of civil strife, invasion, drought, famine, and plague, he could not imagine that any Wendish noble or biscop held plentiful stores in reserve. They had already suffered hard times. How long would these clouds linger?
“Death in battle is not the worst we may see,” he said at last. “Those deaths may be the most merciful ones, in the end.”
She had shed a few tears, but she wiped them away. She examined him as she might study a manuscript, that look that devoured, so rarely turned on him! He did not understand her yet. He wasn’t even sure what she thought of him. That she was willing to love him passionately he knew. Of the rest, of what lay beyond lust, he had to unfold piece by piece.
“I’ll keep trying,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize she meant that she would keep trying to find her Eagle’s Sight. “The crowns, too. If they’re all fallen, then we have no advantage over our enemies. But no disadvantage either as they have nothing we do not also possess. Unless there are those still who can see with Eagle’s Sight while denying it to us.”
“Do you think there might be?”
She looked at Hathui. Hathui shrugged, without expression. The two women trusted each other in a way that, annoyingly, excluded him.
“I don’t think it likely any other person born of humankind has survived who can see if I cannot.” Liath said the words without vanity or arrogance. “Eagle’s Sight ran through the world on the river of aether. That element is bound into my being, so I should be more sensitive to its ebb and flow than most of my father’s kinfolk. Yet it also seems likely to me that a sorcerer whose skills are honed to the finest pitch might be able to discern things I cannot. And I know nothing of those ancient ones who spoke to me, or the Ashioi, or the Horse people. They may still possess the sight, while we’ve gone blind. And anyway, I am so young, so ignorant, compared to someone like Li’at’dano—”