by J L Forrest
She slept that night far from camp, sheltered below an apple tree heavy with sweet fruit. At daybreak, Kwlko nuzzled her awake. Nyahri worked a trade-ivory comb through her hair, saddled the stallion, and crested a hillside to await Suhto’s departure. A few of the tribe followed, close enough to witness her leave, but she acknowledged no one.
A thousand strides ahead, Suhto waited on a hilltop for his younger brothers, Uhlo and Ehteh, to mount a sleek gray mare and a black bay. Even from such a distance, white mud showed on Suhto’s face and hands—the color of death—and he’d smeared his dark stallion’s flanks with it. Together the three brothers set heel, riding toward the foothills with sunrise at their backs. Nyahri gave a slow thousand-count before following.
◆◆◆
By evening she entered the woodland. The Bhar River flowed beside her, leading into the hills. Nyahri tensed, alert to the stallion’s every sound. His ears pricked and his nostrils flared, seeing and scenting what she could not.
Moist air touched her skin, the season’s first frost kissing the forest’s yellow-tinged leaves. On the plains the sun had scorched the land but, only a few hundred paces uphill, Nyahri shivered.
Squirrels chattered and unfamiliar birds sang. Twice during her climb, Nyahri startled day-bedded deer which darted into the underbrush, their white tails flickering. She followed the hoof prints left by the brothers’ horses, who made straight for Abswyn.
It has not been so long, she thought, since my dear brother’s funeral procession. Ill luck to follow so impatiently on the path of the dead.
Nyahri rode until last light, then tethered the stallion to a sapling, unsaddled him, and brushed him. She unpacked a blanket and lay on the ground, trusting the cold to keep her sleep shallow. She drowsed, waking now and then to some sound—passing porcupines or skunks or deer.
◆◆◆
The stallion snorted and sidestepped. Nyahri opened her eyes, her fingers around her knife hilt. Leaves rustled.
As she moved, a man yelled. He leapt at her but she rolled, kicking his groin, swinging him to the ground. Her blade angled for his throat even as his sinewy hand gripped her wrist, and he kneed her gut, pinning her to the earth.
“How could you?” he pleaded, his voice breaking. “Witch!”
“Uhlo!” she said.
“Go to Suhto, tell him to stop!”
“I cannot.”
“Witch!”
“I will not!”
Uhlo’s tears wetted his cheeks.“Why?”
“He can back down.”
“And be dishonored?” Uhlo spit on her.
Nyahri’s wrist tingled and pain shot through her stomach. Then his knee drew away—
She smashed her palm into his nose. As he swung back, longknife in hand, she brought her foot against his knee. It popped and he collapsed, groaning in the dust.
“You dare?” Nyahri said. She spit on him, snorted phlegm, and spit again. “Hobble back to your brothers, tell them whatever story comes to mind! What will you say to Suhto? A woman beat you?” She circled him. “Will you lie? Weave some fable, how Oudwn woodsmen sported with you?”
As he held his knee, sobs racked him. Blood smeared his cheek, glistening in the new moons’ spider-webbed light.
“A man,” he said, “should not die in Abswyn, not there. You can stop this, Nyahri.”
She sighed, her heart aching, already sorry to have kicked Uhlo so hard. Nyahri picked up his knife, slid it into her belt, then sheathed her own.
“Your knee is broken,” she said, “likely as not, but I am not coming anywhere close to you till you promise to behave.”
“Do you not love my brother?”
“Keenly. I care for you too, idiot—I might have killed you.”
“Why refuse him?”
“My mind is on our ancestors, on the ride and the hunt, not on motherhood and babies. My mind is on the Atreianii, and I know their lore as well as any elder.”
“Still—”
“I am a huntress. One day I will be a priestess—”
“Your mother was a priestess, still wed, still your mother.”
“Her rite may have been motherhood, but mine will be the kill. I am a better archer than you, Uhlo, and by horseback too. I am no tent wife.”
“Suhto never wanted a tent wife—he wants a huntress.”
“Sooner or later I would become a tent wife.” She re-saddled the horse and tightened his girth. As she lowered the stirrups, guessing the length of Uhlo’s legs, she closed her eyes against her doubts. “Let us try to put you ahorse, get you to your gray, and your little brother can ride back with you. Leave Suhto to his fate.”
“Let me go with him.” He laid his hand on his knee. “You have a healer’s skill—”
“I never finished my training,” she said.
“You mother was the best healer in memory!”
“Stop talking about my mother.” She scowled. “My mother is dead.”
“Please let Ehteh and I accompany our brother to Abswyn.”
“You will be on a stretcher for a fortnight or longer, and with a splint for two months. I can only send you back to other women and their better medicines.”
Nyahri helped him up. Uhlo grimaced, balancing on his good leg, and he drowned a scream. Kwlko shied from him.
“Now,” she said, “up.”
Uhlo swung to the saddle, straining the unbending leg over it, catching his breath.
“Take us to Suhto’s camp,” she said.
Uhlo nodded. Nyahri tapped the stallion’s rump, following on foot.
They headed west under the sliver moons. Nyahri minded Uhlo but kept an eye and ear to the woods, holding her breath to listen, to be certain no one followed. She preferred wide-open spaces where a horse could stretch its legs.
If Oudwnii set upon us here, she thought, their bows will outmatch mine. What an awful risk we take, coming here.
{04}
Suhto fretted over Uhlo, who’d snuck away without a word. Any search would need to wait until morning. Ehteh, their youngest brother, a boy of thirteen, slept in a bedroll obscured by undergrowth. Suhto smiled at him, his heart aching for both his brothers, for the thought he might not see them again. Resting on his heels, Suhto strained his ears hour after hour, his spear clenched in his pale-knuckled fists.
A hollow of horse hooves approached on the moist earth—
One moons-lit rider.
Suhto glanced to the horses and to Ehteh, praying for his younger brother to stay asleep, for the horses to remain still. He feared an ambush, Oudwnii in numbers, or worse.
The rider whispered, “Suhto? Ehteh?”
“Uhlo?” Suhto clicked his tongue, easing forward with his spear raised, alarmed by his brother’s bloodied face. Then he recognized Nyahri’s red stallion.
She emerged from the shadows, laying her hand on Kwlko’s flank. “Your brother’s pride is broken,” she said, “as is his nose. Mayhap his knee too.”
Uhlo lowered his eyes. Suhto shot his brother a reproachful glance, then nodded to Nyahri.
“Best if your brothers head back at dawn,” she said. “The knee will need care.”
Suhto took his wounded sibling by the waist and Uhlo dismounted, trembling into his brother’s arms. “Please, Nyahri, he grows cold.”
“Shock,” she said.
“You must have something?”
She dug through her bags and tossed a pouch at their feet. “The brew must be hot, but cover your fire well out here and keep it small. Only a pinch of herb. Keep him covered and warm.”
“Will you not camp with us?”
“Nay, Suhto.”
“Where then?”
“Abswyn.”
“You go before morning?”
“I do not feel like sleeping.” She frowned at him. “I will watch for you.”
“Too dangerous.” He stood tall, the shadows seeming to carve him, his dark hair swept behind his ears. His eyebrows lowered over his glistening eyes. “You sh
ould stay here with us.”
“Oudwn bowmen,” she said, “will have a hard time shooting me by starlight, nay?”
Nyahri jumped into the saddle and tossed Uhlo’s knife to the ground. Suhto watched her disappear westward through the trees.
Uhlo hissed through his teeth at a swell of pain. “Why devote yourself to her?” he asked his brother.
Suhto gave him a wistful look, then returned his attention to the trees. “Last time the winter wapiti came onto the western plains, she dropped a bull from fifty paces. A week later she slew another from five—it never knew she was there. During the southern raids, two summers ago, we fought back the Whitehands. You remember? She never flinched, even while E’cwn hunters, older than she, pissed their breeches. When she is fierce, she is fierce. When kind, kind. You question why I love her?”
“Eh, brother,” Uhlo said softly.
“Do not ask again.”
{05}
Nyahri rode many thousand strides without hurry. Crickets kept her company, unalarmed by Kwlko’s pace. Moist air filled Nyahri’s lungs and softened her face.
Strange to ride here, she thought, strange to come alone.
The last time she traveled that path, she rode in full daylight with her entire family. They had carried her brother’s corpse at the fore.
Before dawn she chose a game trail, parting from the main route. It veered uphill, tangled by fallen trees and washouts. Kwlko complained, hesitating until Nyahri dismounted, leading him by the reins.
The hill crested over a valley framed by two sandstone monoliths. Known as the Gate, they stood hundreds of hands high, coppery and coarse. Past the Gate, at the valley’s heart, arose a straight and unnatural pillar, the hell-spire. At its dizzying pinnacle, a luminescent beacon burst into being, then died, then lit again over and over as it had for Nyahri’s entire memory, as during the memories of her father and her father’s father. Between and beyond the stones, encircling the hell-spire, stood thousands of carven ponderosa frames, the palanquins of the dead. For generations, they had hoisted the bones of Nyahri’s tribe.
The wind blew against her face, and Nyahri gripped her spear, studying the rhythmic ghost-fire of the devils’ pillar. Tears blurred her vision, but before she descended to the burial grounds, she dried her eyes.
I come to Abswyn, she thought, a House of Hell, where many tears have fallen. Nyahri harbored no wish to add to them.
◆◆◆
Nyahri waited for Suhto at her brother’s hatchet-hewn palanquin. The season had bleached his bones, and his funeral clothes fluttered in the breeze. The base of the Abswyn hell-spire stood an arrow-shot away, its glassy metal flat and gray in the daylight, its pinnacle a thousand hands above.
Nearer stood the Feather Stone, a slab of golden granite like no other in the mountains or on the plains. Long ago, the gods had carved this stone themselves. They chiseled a circle into it and, in the circle, inset a doublet of feathers in black granite, highlighted with white quartz.
Night-falcon feathers, Nyahri reminded herself, the emblem of the goddess Sultah yw Sabi.
The goddess once worshipped by Nyahri’s mother, whose own grave stood not far beyond the Stone. Nyahri prayed then to the night-falcon goddess for some good fortune that day.
Before noon, Suhto arrived. He dismounted and sat with Nyahri on the cracked red clay. The cousins ate bread and drank cold tea, surrounded by their tribesmen’s remains. Wandering a short distance, the horses grazed on dry grasses, unbothered by that place’s ghosts.
“I miss your brother too,” Suhto said.
Nyahri nodded. “How is Uhlo?”
“His knee, only dislocated. His nose will never be right.”
“He deserved it.”
“Probably.” Suhto tore another piece of bread and chewed it. “We do not have to do this. We can go back.”
“You withdraw your proposal?”
“Nay.”
“To bed me might make you Ahtros after my father dies.”
“That is not why I want you.”
“You would make a good Ahtros.” Nyahri tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“And you an excellent Ahtras, as is your right.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
He grunted, nodded.
“Can you not love me without making me yours?” she asked. “I have loved you since we were children, but I do not need to bed you.”
“I want you in my tent.”
She stood and kicked the ground. Stones clattered and Suhto closed his eyes against the dust.
“Forget having me,” she said.
“You made your challenge, according to the old laws.” He attempted a smile. “If I enter the House of Hell, you said, and tell you of the Atreianii, bring back some bauble of proof, you will be my wife.”
“Into your embrace, to accept babies and whatever else would come, but this is madness, Suhto! Do you not understand? I set this challenge because no sane man would take it.”
“Did you not know me better than that, Nyahri?”
She folded her arms. “You will not turn back, seek some other woman? If you want none of ours, there are good women among the Inwnii. Consider?”
“Nay. You will not be mine?”
“Nay.”
He sighed, looking into the wind. Shying from something, the horses stamped. A coyote fled across the distant brush.
“I confess,” Suhto said, “I do not remember where the entrance lies.”
“On the west side. I will show you.”
They circumvented the burial grounds, their strides echoing between the red cliffs. Where the soil wore thin, a gray metal showed through, unmarred by seams or edges—the roof of Abswyn, the house of devils beneath the earth. The horses’ hooves rang deeply on it as if on an unfathomable glass bell. Nyahri flinched, unhappy to drum on the devils’ home. Yet she remembered Suhto believed nothing of living Atreianii, and she felt foolish, turning her face from him.
What if he is right? What if the House of Hell is empty, filled with nothing but the corpses of gods?
She led Suhto beyond the pillar, the beacon now dizzyingly above them. A round portal existed at the its base, half buried in sand, but no one had ever learned how to open it, so she passed it by.
Farther west, a sandstone wash exposed more gray structure. Beside it, the cousins tethered the horses on a tangle of mesquite, and on foot the two E’cwnii climbed downward. On one side stood only the vitreous metal, now rising vertically. Nyahri’s heart pounded. Sweat gathered on Suhto’s brow, his lips drawn tightly.
“Here it is,” she said.
A smooth gray door of metallic glass—or glassy metal—sat within a thick frame. The gray deepened into a translucent black along a single rectangular slit, a window no spear or rock or hatchet could break. Nyahri knew men had tried, for generations, using all their strength and their finest weapons. None had left so much as a scratch.
Yet something had once scored it, a scribble of graffiti, an ancient text of the Atreianii. Nyahri understood a few of its words, taught to her by her mother: Atreianii and Sultah yw Sabi and Absolution.
In this place Nyahri’s senses both focused and widened, a mortal fear’s yawning and pitching, and she could take not one more step.
“I do not believe in the Atreianii,” Suhto said, “but if you cast feathers and offer them something to let me pass, I will be grateful.”
“I will.”
His voice quavered. “Wait till sunset tomorrow, agreed?”
“Atop the hill, hidden inside the tree line. I will stay, a day or ten, however long it takes.”
He stepped toward the door. “How do I open it?”
“Look into the black, give it some time, and the door opens itself. The old priestesses sometimes left offerings in the fore-chamber, though nothing ever claimed them. You will walk beyond this chamber to the second door.”
“It too will open?”
“Yea, but no one has ever walked
beyond it, not since the time of our great grandfathers.”
He gripped his spear with both hands, bent his knees, and gazed into the dust-smeared glazing. The slab clanged, the door rolling aside. For a moment, shadow lay within, then an undiluted ghost-light filled a narrow hall. Stale air wafted from the enclosure, Suhto wrinkled his nose, and he turned back once more.
“I love you,” he said.
She mustered her will. “Yea, I love you too.”
Suhto entered Abswyn and the door sealed behind him. Nyahri waited outside in the cliff shade. The sun reached its zenith, and the House of Hell offered her only silence. She climbed back to the mesquite and rode to the hilltop, leading Suhto’s stallion to a grassy clearing. Nyahri removed the horses’ saddles and blankets. She ate a cord of smoked antelope and, by the gloam of the sunset, she watched the ghost-fires glow as they always had.
{Interim: Graffiti}
Men polluted the earth and turned the sky to poison. They raped life and vomited forth their genetic follies. As they teetered, men assumed in hubris to have ended the world.
Humankind lost the right to rule.
The Magisters wrought their progenesis, and then they created us. Together we Atreianii perfected ourselves, wresting control of the Earth. We countered human recklessness, making pets of mankind, chaining Nature as our handmaiden, we mistresses and masters of molecules and chromosomes, aided in time by the Hive. We trained the sun and said, ‘Let there be light,’ certain such limitlessness could never fade.
Yet Nature would not remain a whore. She turned Her dark eye against us, blackened the heavens, and refused us the light. Sultah yw Sabi was right—the Gallatin eruption marked our defeat. All life withered as we descended into the Citadels to wait through the catastrophe, until the world might live again. We bequeathed desolation to men. For that we must recreate God to give us a true Absolution.
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