A Dark Sacrifice

by Madeline Howard

  When she asked her question a series of emotions crossed his face inside his hood of coarse black cloth. A thought or a memory seemed to be simmering just below the surface. For a moment she thought she was about to receive an honest answer. But the moment passed. All she could see in his face, in his eyes, was the same closed, secretive expression she knew so well. “If you are afraid, or if you believe anyone has insulted you, you should speak with Camhóinhann.”

  Bitterly disappointed, she turned away without even thanking him for his advice. She had not yet grown so desperate as to seek Camhóinhann’s protection. Untutored in magic she might be, but she knew enough to understand: when it came to someone as powerful as Ouriána’s High Priest, one did not go asking favors. A favor asked, a favor granted, no matter how trivial, was a dangerous proposition. Let him once place her under the least obligation and there was no reckoning the consequences.

  How many days they rode Winloki did not know, for she had stopped counting. With nothing to hope for at the end of her journey, days and distances hardly mattered. But after perhaps a week, the trees started thinning out, until most of the country was farm or grazing land. They no longer had the road to themselves: they passed farmers in carts piled high with fruit or grain; herdsmen driving their flocks to market; peddlers riding on donkeys, or on foot dragging their wares on sledges behind them. She and the guards had fallen into an easy way of things in the wilderness, but now the men turned watchful again, surrounding her in a close circle whenever they approached a village or came near other travellers. Then she was doubly bound to silence, knowing that a reckless word from her would endanger innocent strangers, knowing also that it would certainly result in heavy punishment falling on one or more of her guards.

  So I become my own gaoler, Winloki thought ruefully. There was, perhaps, a fine line between wisdom and cowardice, between complicity and common sense, and how to tell the difference she did not know, but she had seen enough bloodshed in Skyrra.

  And it was a strange sort of captivity, after all, with her mind opening up to so many new experiences. On clear nights, she thought she could hear the stars humming, a thin, tuneless drone. She could sense the pulse of the tide as it rushed in and out all across the world, and envision subterranean rivers and streams spreading out beneath the lands like a net of shining silver. The beauty of these things would sometimes tear at her heart, bring quick tears to her eyes. She could not know that young wizards on Leal, and at the few remaining schools of magic elsewhere, learned to control these perceptions at an early age, to summon them or banish them at will, lest they lose touch with the human world altogether.

  She could spend a timeless time in dreamlike communion with nature, then come suddenly back to herself, her ears filled with the jingle of harnesses, the dull beat of horses’ hooves on a packed-earth road. In her dream, the trees had been straight and shapely, clothed in leaves like living jewels; they drank in the sunlight like wine. Here the air was cold, the trees gnarled and bent under a weight of years, clad in faded rags of autumn; sad drifts of leaves covered the ground. All the voices that sang in her mind so recently were stilled. How long had she been so absorbed? It felt like half the day—though in truth, by the position of the sun it had been practically no time at all.

  And with these glimpses came a hunger for more knowledge, more understanding. She feared that she never would know, never would understand. It was Camhóinhann’s spell on the boat that had expanded her senses so wonderfully, and she knew that he might, if he chose, open her mind to even greater mysteries. But then she would remember to what uses he had turned his own powers—and Ouriána, whose name had become a byword for atrocities! Oh, there were times when she could have wept for all she had missed over the years, for all that she might yet have in years to come, and would not—must not.

  There was, too, another danger beyond the lure of power. It was growing harder and harder to view the men she travelled with as an alien, incomprehensible breed, the embodiment of wickedness. It had begun, of course, with the guards, those earnest young men in their shining, dark armor, but by now even the acolytes, only superficially identical in their drab black garments, their silence and pallid looks, had emerged as distinct personalities.

  How easy it was to hate an abstraction. The Eisenlonders, whom she knew only by their terrible deeds, who had never come close enough to look in the face…But with these men she had looked too closely and too long.

  Rivanon, Morquant, and Lasaire, the three eldest, could work small magics, lighting fires, calming nervous horses; perhaps they could do more than that but refrained out of humility. Adfhail, Uinséan, Féhlim—though scarcely older than she was herself they had travelled far; they had seen so much that their worldliness put her ignorance to shame, yet for all that, they were not proud. And all of them practiced a passionate celibacy, an unremitting discipline of mind and body. “Every sacrifice we make is a sacrament,” Adfhail told her. “As surely as anything done in the Temple.”

  As for the three priests, she could not help seeing that Dyonas was as far above Goezenou as Camhóinhann was above him. Where Goezenou’s personality was distilled from many small cruelties and petty hatreds, Dyonas was as lacking in malice as he was in pity. All his passion was for his goddess and his religion. When he performed the rites, when he sang hymns of praise in his beautiful voice, it was impossible for Winloki not to see, with that new vision of hers, how Dyonas burned with a bright inner flame, impossible not to accept that he, at least, had an unshakable belief in Ouriána’s promise of a world transformed.

  More than once she had glimpsed under his robes of velvet and silk brocade a garment of coarser stuff, likely to chafe, and she had been surprised to discover that he wore bracelets similar to her own—although his were made of iron, with tiny barbs inside that scored his flesh. Skyrran religion did not demand, would not have approved, these excesses of devotion, yet she could not help feeling a grudging admiration for the terrible certainty that informed his faith. He was, she reminded herself, just the sort of man who drew other men into evil and misguided causes. He could turn right and wrong upside down, he could make black into white and white into a muddled grey.

  Yet even so, he presented no danger to her compared to Camhóinhann.

  Too often, her eyes were drawn to the tall, charismatic figure of the High Priest, to his face, white as bleached bone, gaunt, yet alive with power. He was a constant threat to her peace of mind, for it was impossible to recognize what he had become without being reminded of what he must once have been. Marred by whatever terrific experiences had transformed him, he remained the embodiment of sufficient tragic grandeur to stir her blood.

  She knew—she had always known—that he had the ability to bind her to him. Such was the force of his personality that he might have willed her to love, obedience, adoration—to anything. That he did not do so argued an admirable restraint—yet there was a subtle seduction in that very restraint. An uneasy suspicion would sometimes intrude, stifle it as she might, that Camhóinhann was, even in his ruin, some kind of vindication for Ouriána’s new religion.

  Yet with that thought came another, equally confusing: What kind of woman, what kind of goddess, could Ouriána possibly be, if she could command—and accept—the devotion of men so utterly different as Camhóinhann and Goezenou?

  At last Winloki saw hills and highlands rising up in the distance. There was something troubling and forbidding in their very outlines massed against the sky. She could not have explained it even to herself, but she dreaded approaching them.

  Several days passed, days of watching those hills grow taller and craggier, before she finally recognized them for mountains and was able to make out the real hills, bare, brown, and unmistakably desolate, huddled at their feet. By that time, she and her Pharaxion captors had the road to themselves again. Whether it was the fading year, with its threat of bitter weather in the high passes, or simply the nature of the mountains themselves, something up ahead dis
couraged ordinary travellers.

  She was in the hills before she quite knew it, the land rising so slowly that only when she looked back and saw the fields lying faint and misty below did she realize that the road had been climbing all that day. Fragments of stone wall began to appear at intervals on either side of the track. There were weird outcrops of rock, and ledges that had been honed by the wind until they looked sharp as daggers.

  Her dreams that night were disturbed. More than once she started awake, convinced that someone had been leaning over her as she slept: a face as seamed and folded as the hills themselves, staring down into hers with dry, lidless eyes. Sometime before dawn she woke, trembling, ghost ridden, and clammy with sweat, to hear a patter of rain on the roof of her tent.

  By the time everyone had breakfasted and mounted up, it was still raining: a sad, slow, continuous drizzle. The road, which until now had had few windings, divided into many crooked paths, continually running back on themselves until it became difficult to tell whether they were making any progress. When a track took them to the summit of a hill higher than any of the rest, Winloki saw that all the countryside around was scarred with ruins.

  Between the stones grew a coarse, dry grass. Burned brown by the summer just past, it was disintegrating in the rain. Animals there were none, and she sensed no birds but hawks and carrion crows. Yet men had lived in those hills, as the ruins bore witness. There was something there, ancient and malign; it went so deep that it permeated the very earth, the very stones. She had a dim perception that perhaps it was of the earth itself.

  Twilight came early under that heavy grey sky, and the Furiádhin lit spinning globes of werelight to illuminate the way; in their unearthly glow, the faces of all the men became corpselike and terrible. Meanwhile, the rain never let up, and the wind blew colder and colder. Her teeth chattering, Winloki locked her arms across her chest under the brocade cloak and allowed the mare to set her own pace.

  That night, lying under canvas sagging with the weight of water, she feared to sleep, but for all her resistance slumber came in on dark, smothering waves and swept her away. Then her dreams were far more terrifying than the night before. She heard the music of flutes and tabors as processions of maidens went to be wed and buried in the same day. Men she saw with the eyes of beasts, and beasts with the souls of women. It seemed to her on waking that an entire history of the race that once inhabited that country had played out in her tired brain.

  These ruins spread out across the hills were remnants of their cities. All their buildings they made low to the ground; even their mansions and palaces sprawled with rooms and corridors added on at random, for the people had worshipped the earth in its darker aspects and their eyes were always turned down. Refusing to look to the sky for portents, they made bonfires of bones and read omens in the flames, listened to the feverish mutterings of dying men, read auspices in the entrails of slaughtered beasts; so the stars were nothing to them, and the rites of death and the tomb came to be everything. In time, they made a cult and a fetish of death itself.

  Even by day, she could not entirely erase the frightening images from her mind: ritual suicides and poisoned cups, wolf-headed priestesses in bloody garments, jewel-skinned vipers worn as living ornaments. Lost souls shrieked and gibbered on the wind; they fluttered around her like bats, or birds with broken wings; they swarmed like flies and stinging insects. Then, indeed, she wished for less magic instead of more, wished she might move among those ancient things as an ordinary girl, ignorant and untroubled.

  But on the third night, her dreams changed abruptly from foul to fair, and she slept through until daybreak without waking even once. When she left her tent and went out in the damp blue dawn, the first thing she saw was a line of faint, silvery figures etched on the ground outside.

  “Your guards told me they heard you cry out in your sleep,” said Camhóinhann, appearing beside her as she stood, clammy-haired and shivering, scowling down at the marks in the dirt. “And this land is known to breed nightmares. Therefore, I put a ward around your tent to keep them out. You need not frown—the symbols are quite harmless. They are Wizards’ Runes, the same ones your mother learned as a young healer on Leal.”

  Intrigued but still suspicious, she studied the figures more carefully. The runes, if that was what they truly were, did seem benign. Even so, it would be foolish to make too much of this, she admonished herself. With all the power at his command, that he should know one innocent charm among so many spells that are wicked and destructive, it means very little.

  An hour later, when the tents were folded and the horses saddled, when everyone mounted up and continued on, a vague and formless oppression settled over her—a depression perhaps born as much of physical discomfort as the psychic attack on her senses. The wind blew back the hood of her cloak and threw gusts of rain in her face. Her fingers on the reins were turning blue. Sodden, chilled, dejected, fearful, despite her earlier resolve she found herself looking more and more to the High Priest, finding something in his tall, broadshouldered figure that offered reassurance in a world that seemed shrunken and cold.

  The voice that warned her against doing so was growing very faint.

  There came a time when all the sky was filled with mountains, jagged peaks crowned with grey vapors. The clouds had thinned, but the air remained heavy with water. The road began to climb at a steep angle, and a sharp blast of wind came skirling down from the heights.

  With hooves slipping in the mud, the horses struggled up the slope. Winloki saw Goezenou dig in his spurs, though his sturdy bay was doing the best that it could. “We are almost there,” she heard Rivanon say to another acolyte, and she wondered what he could possibly mean. But for a scattering of beeches and pines, a few hardy shrubs rooted in the scree, the mountain was as barren as the hills below. She found it difficult to imagine any destination this empty country might offer. By nightfall the road had narrowed to a trail.

  Late the next morning, they were riding through a region of rocky pinnacles and giddy precipices when a sudden turn in the trail brought them to a narrow defile littered with tumbled boulders. A little black rill trickled down on one side of the gorge and disappeared into a crack in the earth. They had not ridden far when the trail ended abruptly at a sheer rock wall.

  Craning her neck, Winloki tried to see what was happening. What place this was she did not know, but the urge to turn the mare around and ride away as swiftly as possible was all at once so strong, she would certainly have done so had there not been so many horses and riders blocking her way.

  From his seat in the saddle, the High Priest began to sketch signs on the air. They were not like the runes of the warding spell and were none so wholesome. Mazelike, convoluted, they suggested the writhings of serpents or the movements of scorpions.

  For a moment it seemed to Winloki that the bones of the mountain were shifting, that the face of the cliff would crumble, that all its great weight must come tumbling down and bury them—until the rock wall wavered like a reflection on water, and the illusion concealing a pair of immense doors at the base of the cliff dissolved.

  The doors were like nothing she had ever seen before: tremendous in scale, of a hard, crystalline substance cut but not polished, with scrollwork hinges of sun-bright metal. Instinct told her the doors were immeasurably more ancient than the ruined cities, yet unlike the cities they had defied the ages.

  “Where do they lead?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “Into a catacomb,” said Rivanon. “Behind these doors of adamant and gold are the tombs of ancient kings—the fathers of the fathers of the people who lived in the hills. But just as they were hidden by a spell, the doors are likewise sealed.”

  She felt caught in a backwash of time, sucked back through the centuries. The world was far older than she had ever imagined, and its history more terrible.

  “Then how will we enter—or are we to enter?” Her heart lifted at the thought that it might be impossible, then sank with his r
eply.

  “The doors will open for Camhóinhann. He and Dyonas passed this way once before, eleven years ago, and learned the secret. Morquant and I were with them.”

  But instead of beginning to work the necessary spells, the High Priest ordered two of the men to dismount and unload one of the packhorses. Halfway guessing what he intended, Winloki felt a cold sensation of horror creep over her skin.

  “What is he waiting for? Why does he delay?”

  “No king went into these tombs alone,” said Morquant. “Wives and concubines went with them—whether the women met death here, or previously, I do not know. But slaves were sacrificed outside these doors. It takes a death to open them from the outside.”

  The lost souls that had haunted her all through the foothills seemed to press in on her, darkening the air. The mare, sensing her distress, took several skittish sideways steps. Winloki made a low sound in her throat when the dun gelding, stripped of its gear, was led before the iron doors, where Camhóinhann waited with his long knife already drawn.

  “It seems cruel,” she said, just above a whisper, “when the poor beast has come all this way, carrying our supplies—trusting our kindness.”

  “Do not grieve yourself. It will be swift and painless. It would be different,” Rivanon added under his breath, “if Goezenou had the slaying of the unfortunate beast.”

  She gritted her teeth and forced herself to watch. This magic of blood and death was the very reminder she needed of who these men were and of what they were capable. She was hating them all now, hating herself for not hating them enough these last weeks. Had she really forgotten how many of her countrymen they had slain? Let the lesson not be wasted. Let me remember this moment to the last drop of blood.

  By a great effort of will she neither flinched nor turned away, determined not to show them any weakness. And yet, as promised, the death was humane. Camhóinhann put a hand over the gelding’s eyes, whispered a few words in one nervous ear. Then the front legs collapsed and the horse fell over on one side, lying so still Winloki was half convinced it was already dead. In one movement, so swift she scarcely saw it, the priest bent down and cut its throat. Blood bubbled out in a crimson stream, smoking on the cold air.