The Pagan Night

by Tim Akers

  She took a knife from her belt. Bloodwrought and wicked, with a blade thin and barbed at the end. She carried it to the hunt, in case her spears failed and the gheists got too close. Her last resort. She held it out over the cairn, her hand shaking.

  “Will they find you? Yes. Will I defend you? Until my last breath, with the last scrap of my soul.” With her other hand, Gwen began to remove a stone from the cairn. “I’m the last warden, and I can’t let them take you.”

  A small avalanche of pebbles clattered into the room behind her. She whirled around with a stifled cry. The entrance—a stone column as smooth and featureless as a stagnant pond—was crumbling into scree. A hand clawed free, then a shoulder, and finally Sir LaFey tumbled into the room. She fell to the chamber floor and vomited a pile of gravel. She knelt there coughing dust for a moment before looking up at Gwen.

  “Tunnels should have doors,” she croaked.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Gwen said.

  “The rocks appear to agree,” Elsa said. She slowly got to her feet, her hands on her knees as she gathered herself. “Gods, but that was unpleasant.”

  “I’m serious,” Gwen said, an edge of panic to her voice. “I don’t know what your presence will do to this place. You’re a damned knight of the winter vow! This is a sanctum, it’s holy. You could upset the whole balance of—”

  “Enough,” Elsa said, finally standing to her full height. “You’ve been to the Celestial dome, you’ve knelt at the throne and said your prayers in Cinderfell. That didn’t kill you, nor did it bring the Celestial church tumbling to the ground. Have some faith.”

  “You shouldn’t be here!” Gwen said again. She took Elsa by the arm and pulled. It was like trying to shift a statue.

  Elsa laughed, though her voice was rough and quiet.

  “You keep saying that, but what’s the worst that could happen?” Elsa said. “I could get killed. So let’s get to it, before those priests find their way in here.” She turned to face the cairn. “This is the god?”

  “This is its tomb,” Gwen said, “and its prison.”

  “So you mean to free it?” Elsa asked, turning a curious eye to Gwen, then looking down at the knife in her hand. “Or something else?”

  “I… I hadn’t decided… haven’t decided. I’m the last of the wardens. After me there’s nothing. No last defense, no other help coming, and what Allaister did to the river guardian… I can’t let that happen here. Whatever happens, I have to do it. And I’m not sure how much more I can do.”

  “Well, I’m here,” Elsa said, arching an eyebrow. “Lucas is here—I can’t believe that bastard has killed him—and there are more, out there. Last I heard, Blakley was fighting a war to keep your family safe.”

  “For all the good it has done,” Gwen sighed.

  “Maybe, maybe not, but you’re not alone. We may be in a bad spot.” Elsa shrugged. “Worse than most, in fact, but you can’t give up now.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Gwen said sharply, and she held up the blade. “But this might be the only way forward. Those priests will find their way in, and if they have the same powers as Frair Allaister, they might be able to bend this god to their will.”

  “Maybe they intend to kill it. So if you go there first, you’ll be doing their job for them.”

  “If that was their intention, why didn’t they bring vow knights? Frair Lucas travels with you. The inquisition doesn’t act alone against the gheists. Why would they be they acting alone now?”

  “Who’s to say? Maybe Allaister thought he could handle it on his own. One thing’s for certain, though.” Elsa reached down and twisted the knife from Gwen’s hand, as gently as her strength would allow. “If you kill it now, there’s no going back. Sacrifice this god, and so much will fall.”

  “Odd words coming from a knight of the winter vow,” Gwen noted.

  “Frair Lucas has shown me things. Taught me things—and so have you. There’s a connection between these gods and our land. Suhdra is struggling through terrible times. I can’t blame my gods, Gwen, so I must blame yours.”

  “Or the lack of them,” Gwen added. “It’s not like Tener is overrun by the pagan faithful.”

  “The inquisition has seen to that, but there are remnants. People like you, and others, hidden in the forests of the north. Enough to keep the world going, it would appear.”

  “If this is how you feel, how can you keep hunting them? You were at Gardengerry. You hunted that gheist into the Fen, and helped me kill it.”

  “They come back. Even at our best, we can’t destroy them. The individual manifestations are corrupted by madness, but their essences flow back into the everealm, only to bubble up again somewhere else.” Elsa shrugged. “Then I’m forced to hunt down and kill that manifestation, before it destroys too many farms. It’s a cycle.”

  “Like the seasons,” Gwen said, nodding. “But why shouldn’t I plunge my blade into this one? If they come back, as you say, wouldn’t that be a way to free it from its prison, and let it manifest somewhere else?”

  “Perhaps. But remember what you said yourself: we are too close to the everealm, and gheists who die here die forever. If this truly is the god of autumn, then where does it go? It’s not merely a manifestation of the everealm, it is the everealm. There’s a reason your ancestors hid this god away.”

  “To protect it from the inquisition, and the vow,” Gwen said, snatching the knife from Elsa’s hand and spinning it around. “To protect it from you.”

  Elsa held her hands up and backed away.

  “If you say… but think carefully on what you’re doing. You may free it, but what happens then? If it comes back just as mad as the gheists I am sworn to hunt, who will protect the farms? The villages? Hell, everyone and everywhere will be at risk.”

  “But what if I don’t?” Gwen protested, despair in her words. “If those priests make their way in here, and do whatever they intend, who will protect it from them?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?” Elsa asked.

  They were silent for a moment, staring at one another, Gwen clenching her god-killing knife and scowling, Elsa as silent and tired as the dead. Finally, Gwen tossed the knife to the ground and kicked the stones of the cairn.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what to do! I’m supposed to protect this fucking thing, but I’ve failed, and you’ve failed, and we’re all completely fucked! My father would know, or his father, or even Frair Lucas, but all I’ve got is me, a vow knight without her sword, and a knife that might not be enough to do more than piss off a gheist.

  “How am I supposed to know what to do?”

  “You aren’t,” Elsa said calmly. “None of us do, at the important moments. We just do what we can, and hope that it’s enough.”

  “That’s terrible advice,” Gwen said, her voice weak and scratchy, tears gathering in her eyes. “I can see why you became a knight and not a frair.”

  “I haven’t got the best death-bed manners, I know,” Elsa said with a weak smile, “but I washed out of seminary well before that.” She walked to the cairn, found the stone that Gwen had disturbed, then pried the next one off and tossed it aside. “At least I know how to move stones quickly. Come on.”

  “What are you doing?” Gwen asked.

  “Only thing I can. Whatever you decide, you’re going to have to move these stones. We might as well do it together.”

  Gwen watched her for a few heartbeats, then plucked the knife from the floor, slipped it into her belt, and bent her back to help. In moments they had a small pile of stones, more than a few scrapes on their knuckles, and sweat in their eyes. Slowly they made a dent in the tomb.

  “This isn’t so bad, is it?” Elsa offered. “Losing yourself in the work?”

  “Doesn’t make the decision any easier.”

  “No, but it delays it a bit. Why, if we stop to eat, we might not have to make up our minds for most of the day…”

  Abruptly there was a rattling of stones, and a pool
of pebbles grew at the base of the entrance pillar—slowly at first, then faster. They both froze, staring at the rapidly expanding avalanche.

  A hand came through the entrance, ashy dust lining the palm. It clawed at the air, and then a shoulder appeared, and a face.

  “We’re done,” Elsa snapped. She hammered her shoulder into the cairn, shoving a huge pile of rock onto the floor. Something glimmered in the quartz light, a long, stone figure carved to look like a face, and hands, and the barest impression of wings formed of leaves folded over the chest. It wore a half-mask of dry wicker, laid over its face and somehow undamaged by the stones of the cairn. An icon of the old religion—or perhaps the old religion itself. The vow knight grabbed the knife from Gwen’s belt and slapped it into her outstretched hand.

  “Raise a god, or kill it,” she snapped. “It’s up to you!”

  Gwen stared helplessly at the blade, then the priest who was slowly entering the sanctum.

  She glanced at Elsa’s worried face.

  Then she leapt on top of the cairn, raising the knife. She plunged the blade into the icon. The tip, forged in her blood and the temple of Strife, struck the stone figure just above the clasped hands, driving sparks into the air.

  The blade bit down.

  The stone parted.

  Autumn filled the air.

  53

  THE SKY WAS breaking in strands of black and green—war weather, the promise of violence thick in the air. The sun and moon hung on opposite horizons, occasionally visible between the scudding clouds and flashing lightning.

  The trees that lined the river stood like broken spears, their bark splintered, their trunks as raw and jagged as a giant’s teeth. Frair Lucas stumbled into the forest and ran toward the clearing where the dead wardens lay buried. His robes were torn and bloody. An aura of naetheric energy crackled around him, trace remnants dissipating with the wind. Despite his haggard appearance, however, the frair moved with firm intent.

  “There must have been one,” he muttered as he entered the circle of dead bodies. “All these good pagans, one of them must have…” Lucas trailed off as he knelt beside the closest cairn, pulling stones from the pile and tossing them aside.

  “Would it be the children? Or the men? Surely the wives wouldn’t have carried such a thing.” The body slowly appeared, revealed stone by stone. Showing more strength than his years should allow, Lucas grabbed the dead flesh of an arm and pulled the body free. Stones shuffled off, sparking as they struck together, piling up at the frair’s feet.

  This one was a child, her lips curled back from her teeth, the first desiccation of the grave showing around her hollow eyes. Lucas dropped her unceremoniously to the ground and began to search her clothes. Thunder, close to the ground and ominously loud, sounded from the direction of the river. Lucas glanced up long enough to wince, then redoubled his efforts.

  “Not here,” he said, moving to the next cairn. This one was larger. A strange moss was already forming on the stones, as if the earth were anxious to swallow it. Lucas’s fingers slipped on the stones as he started pulling them away. “The women, then. What was I thinking… of course the women.”

  He had the next body in hand when the trees behind him shivered and split, like a curtain thrown aside. Frair Allaister walked into the clearing, the slithering water of his bound god flickering with shadows as sharp and fast as lightning. The priest no longer hovered in the belly of the gheist. He had reclaimed some semblance of motivation, stalking forward with the river spirit wrapped around him like a cloak—a cloak made of water and shadow made solid, twisting and dancing and crashing around him like a storm tide.

  Lucas bent over the corpse of the witching wife.

  “You’re as quick as a rabbit, old man,” Allaister boomed. The gravel in his voice had grown. Even in this diminished form, the gheist that possessed him cast an aura of sheer power. “But the time has come for the hound to hunt, the hunter to sup, and the prey to stop running.”

  “I’m not running,” Lucas muttered. He turned the limp and rancid body of the warden, running fingers over her knobby backbone, pinching her hair aside. His hand paused at a cord of iron and brass, looped around her neck and leading under her arm. He laughed. “And I’m not a rabbit, either.”

  “You fought well, brother,” Allaister said. The clearing distorted, the air growing close, the trees crowding together under the turbulent sky. He gestured, and the gheist that hung around his shoulders swung in a series of short arcs, striking the ground and causing it to shake. “I didn’t think you could diminish me so. There is more to you than the inquisitor’s way should allow.”

  “I have my tricks,” Lucas said, “as do you. You haven’t exactly followed the true path of the inquisition.” He clutched the cord in his fist and pulled. A small triangle of iron, three bars joined at the corners, came free from the corpse and flew into his hand. He whirled around, and the body fell tangle-limbed among the rocks. “You’ve strayed farther from Cinder’s pure light than any pagan I’ve ever judged.”

  “The god of winter will weigh my soul,” Allaister responded. “The path I walk is illuminated by his pale face. His highest servant has blessed my knowledge, and begged for understanding.”

  “So Sacombre knows of this heresy,” Lucas said. “Of course he does, and I’m sure you both believe in your own purity. Zealots and heretics are cut from the same cloth, with the same knife, and to the same pattern.”

  “Revelation demands zeal.” Allaister loomed forward, carried by the tide of living water under his feet. “It brooks no weakness. I am sorry to be the one to judge you, Frair Lucas—you had potential. After all the time you spent in the north, Sacombre thought you could be bent. But now you must be broken instead.”

  “Test me, heretic,” Lucas said. “See that I am the rock you will not be able to break.” He backed away from the god-bound priest. “I will carry your death to the high inquisitor, and lay your apostasy at his feet.”

  “Do you know what lies beneath these hills, Frair Lucas? Has cruel reason given you that insight?” Allaister glanced down at the dead girl. “Even in death you defile them. Why are you surprised when they rise up against you?”

  “I will apologize to her spirit the next time I’m in the quiet house,” Lucas said. “As for what’s beneath this earth, well, I would rather not know. I think it’s better that way.”

  “You’ll learn soon enough,” Allaister said. “I can feel the girl—the huntress. She is reaching out to her roots, finding the heart of what was buried so long ago. It’s like that last taste of summer, inquisitor.” He breathed in deeply, closing his eyes in pleasure. “Like the earth shuffling into the grave.”

  “I can’t wait,” Lucas muttered. He hid the pendant behind his back, turning it over and over in his palm. “Though I think we have some business to conclude first.”

  The Allaister-gheist chuckled and stalked forward, spreading his hands, palms up. The angry tide of the bound god crashed around him.

  “Why do you fight me, frair? The high inquisitor formed me, the god of winter guided me, and ancient truths opened my eyes. I am the scion of your faith. I am the revelation, and the light.”

  “Only the mad can believe that—and I have a history of killing those who are mad.”

  “Alas, I’m afraid that I am the end of your history,” Allaister said. He spread his arms, wrapped in twisting cords of shadow-tainted water. “Look at my glory, man of the reasonable god, and know fear…”

  “That isn’t my way,” Lucas spat. He brought the pendant around, quickly coiling its cord around his staff, clasping it and the staff in both hands before him. “I can do nothing for you, frair, but perhaps I can save your captive god.”

  “You will need to save yourself first,” Allaister bellowed. He rushed forward, a tide of madness and white water cloaking his form.

  Lucas stepped aside, focusing a very tight dissolution around his staff. The body of the gheist evaporated in the face of the binding, a
llowing the staff to pass untouched through the tidal cloak and strike Allaister directly. Lucas slashed the iron triangle across Allaister’s forehead like a short dagger. It left a minor scratch, but blood welled up, drawn toward the pendant like a crimson lace snagged on its rough iron.

  Lucas stepped back, pulling the blood with him.

  “This is your mistake, Allaister: you depend on gods you barely understand.”

  “You know nothing of my theos, priest,” Allaister spat. “You did well in reducing me to this body, but there are no tricks in the court of winter that can end me.”

  “That is why I employ other methods,” Lucas answered. He held the pendant up, letting it dangle at the end of its cord. The blood glittered darkly on its iron. “The wardens of this place understood what you were becoming. That’s why they died to keep you away.”

  “For all the good it did them,” Allaister growled. He charged again and Lucas swung his staff, battering his opponent back but not penetrating the shell of solidified liquid. Allaister swung a fist, striking rock with a blow that echoed off the trees. They grappled, neither gaining an advantage, and when they fell apart, Lucas was diminished, his frail arms shaking, though he held the pendant high.

  The gheist laughed.

  “You have your precious jewelry, priest. Would you like me to bury you with it? Or should I give it to that bitch huntress?”

  “You shouldn’t speak like that of your betters,” Lucas gasped. He was winded, the battle wearing through his thin reserves. Most of his energy had been spent by the river’s edge, tearing the gheist from Allaister’s body scrap by nightmare scrap, until only the core remained. It would swell again, fed by the everealm, drawing the essence of the hallow into Allaister’s body. If that happened, Lucas wasn’t sure Elsa and Gwen could stop it.