Hammer of the Earth

by Susan Krinard

  Emotion assaulted her so violently that at first she thought a dozen Alu spears had impaled her. She caught her breath, feeling her belly and breast. They were whole. Sensation tore through her, pain and ecstasy combined in a delirious dance. Vision returned, and she saw Cian slumped in Rhenna’s arms before the power of Ge’s passion swept her away.

  Joy. Exaltation. She felt the blood of the Watcher seep into the earth, rich and sweet, trickling between the particles of soil until it reached the sensitive fibrils of her roots. Eagerly she accepted the nourishment, trembled at the new strength it sent coursing through her veins. The pain she had never acknowledged drained from her body.

  But she knew that Cian’s blood would not halt her dying, even if he spilled it all at her feet. He was not to be her murderer or her savior. Yet she no longer feared him or the fate he brought from his world of prophecy and mortal desire. She would not end when the Hammer was taken from her. Her children would live on.

  She spoke to the Alu, ordering them to pursue and hold the treacherous female who had commanded the attack on the Watcher. He lay on the ground, eyes glazed with pain, while Nyx sought to stanch the bleeding of his wounds with scraps of cloth torn from her own garments. Rhenna knelt beside him, fists clenched, as if she could fell a goddess with a single blow.

  Ge looked upon the mortals as she had once regarded her ancient worshipers, without anger or regret. The time for such indulgence was past.

  “What will you give for the Hammer?” she asked Cian gently.

  He raised himself on his arm and met her gaze. “My life, if you will let the others go.”

  Rhenna objected, but he seemed not to hear. He, too, understood. He saw how the kiss of his blood had reminded Ge, for so sweet a moment, of what she had been before she had learned to hate.

  “Yours is the true blood of Earth,” she said, “but I would not take it from you. You cannot restore what is lost.”

  “Then what is your price?”

  “Immortality.” She smiled, and one of the Alu began to weep. “You will give me life that will continue when mine is done.”

  “How?” he asked. But even as he spoke, the knowledge came to him through the soil upon which he lay, and his skin grew pale as a serpent’s belly.

  “I am no god,” he croaked.

  “What is it, Cian?” Rhenna demanded. “What does she want?” She rose and faced Ge, her plain mortal features taut with brave, foolish defiance. “We share his fate,” she said. “Whatever it may be.”

  Cian caught her hand. “You can’t be a part of this, Rhenna,” he said. Leaning heavily on her arm, he climbed to his feet and took a step away from her, the blood already clotted in his healing wounds. “You will surrender the Hammer?” he said to Ge.

  She inclined her head. He glanced from Nyx to Tamallat and Cabh’a, his eyes unseeing.

  “Curse all devas,” Rhenna said. “What does she want?”

  He looked through her. “She wants children, Rhenna. Children of her body. And only I can give them to her.”

  Chapter Twenty

  T ahvo broke free of Ge’s influence, her stomach knotting in horror. She remembered. Everything that had been in the spirit’s thoughts had become her own. She could see how Rhenna stared at Cian, bewildered and not yet ready to understand.

  There was no more Tahvo could do for him. Rhenna needed her now.

  “Tahvo?” Rhenna said, her voice pleading like that of a child who longed to be told a comforting lie. “What is happening?”

  “I was with the goddess.” Tahvo swallowed. “I…”

  Rhenna touched her brow. “You can see.”

  “For a little while.” She closed her eyes, wishing herself blind again. “Rhenna, Cian has agreed to the bargain.”

  “Bargain?” She laughed. “Cian is to sire offspring on this…this—”

  “It is possible.”

  Rhenna’s moss-and-honey eyes smoldered with fury and pain. “How?”

  “The spirit must choose a mortal body that will accept her soul for the time it takes to…” She couldn’t finish the sentence, but Rhenna already knew. She turned on Ge.

  “Use me,” she said.

  Narrow, sharp-ended vines sprang from Ge’s sides and curled about Rhenna’s arms and face. The warrior held rigidly still as the probing points drew tiny beads of blood from her skin. Cian threw off his stupor and stepped forward, poised to interfere.

  Abruptly Ge thrust Rhenna away. “No,” she said. Her gaze came to rest on Tahvo.

  Tahvo’s mouth went dry. Who better to bear this burden than a noaiddit who already shared Ge’s essence so completely? She spread her hands across her belly, recalling the dream on the Northern steppes—how she had become large with child and given birth to a babe with black hair and green-gold eyes….

  It must not be. Such a union would injure Rhenna beyond all healing. Tahvo could no more mate with Cian than with her own brother.

  As she waited, sick with dread, Ge’s eyes looked past her to the Imaziren women, quickly dismissing them. But Tahvo felt no relief, for the goddess moved on to the Alu and their pale-skinned prisoner.

  “He gave you his seed,” she said to Yseul, “but it died inside you. Your evil killed it.”

  Yseul shrank from the goddess’s anger. “I had no choice. I—”

  Ge snapped a command, and the Alu beat Yseul to the ground with the shafts of their spears. Tahvo glanced at Rhenna. The warrior’s visage was as cool and white as a mask carved of seabeast tusks.

  Oh, my sister…

  “Nyx,” Ge said. “Come to me.”

  Nyx obeyed with obvious reluctance, her face averted as if somehow she might escape Ge’s inevitable scrutiny. The goddess’s needle vines drifted over Nyx’s skin, pricking, tasting.

  “Blood of the Alu,” Ge said. “You are worthy.”

  Nyx looked from Rhenna to Cian, who had closed his eyes against what he did not wish to see. “Great òrìshà…” she began.

  Ge’s eyes glowed like the forest in the depths of night. “Will you give your body?”

  “You will not be hurt,” Tahvo whispered to Nyx. She felt for Rhenna’s hand and held it tightly. “There is no other way.”

  Nyx lifted her head. “Then I agree.”

  Not so much as the rustle of a leaf broke the absolute quiet. Ge’s vines reached for Nyx again, but this time they sprouted countless tendrils no broader than the width of a single hair. The tendrils pierced Nyx’s clothing, shredding it from her limbs, and wriggled like corpse worms under her flesh.

  Nyx moaned. Tahvo gripped Rhenna’s arm. Something wonderful and terrible was happening, for as Ge’s tendrils invaded Nyx’s body and enclosed her in a web of vegetation, Ge herself began to shrink until the female form she had made was no more than a twisting cable of stems. Then even that last remnant disappeared, dissolving into Nyx as ice melts under the sun of spring.

  Pupilless green eyes glittered in Nyx’s brown face. The Ará Odò woman still inhabited her own body, but it was no longer hers to control. She would feel everything that happened, but Ge would move her limbs and speak with her voice.

  Nyx held out her hand to Cian. He stared at it, frozen, and then lifted his eyes to Rhenna. She looked away. He gave Tahvo a bitter, helpless glance and took Nyx/Ge’s hand. Together they walked to the foot of the tree, and Nyx raised her arms. Thick vines, woven in the shape of a ladder, dropped from the canopy. Nyx began to climb. Cian followed like a man going to an inexorable, gruesome death.

  Rhenna turned her back on the tree, arms folded across her chest. The Imaziren women sat locked in close embrace, bound in their grief for the companions they had lost. Tahvo whispered a calming chant, striving desperately not to feel what passed between Cian and the goddess in their bed among the leaves. No one was watching Yseul when she plunged feet-first into the ground.

  One of the Alu shouted an alarm, and the others converged on the place where Yseul had stood. Only a slight mounding of the soil betrayed her passage.<
br />
  Tahvo crouched and stroked the earth with her fingertips. Her senses were still distantly tied to Ge’s, so she knew almost at once where Yseul had gone and what she intended.

  “The roots,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “She is attacking the roots of the tree.”

  Stone-faced, Rhenna gazed into the forest. “Why?”

  “To distract Ge. To prevent what must happen.” Tahvo rushed to the Alu, hands raised palm up in supplication. “Yseul wields her magic to harm your goddess,” she said in the Alu tongue. “Help me to stop her.”

  The leader called Keela gripped her spear in both hands, her eyes wild with fear. “What must we do?”

  “You have the Ailu magic. Reach into the earth. Bring her to the surface again.”

  Keela looked at her women and licked her lips. “We have never—”

  “Try.” Tahvo sank to her knees, drawing the shapeshifter with her. “Feel your enemy. Drive her as you drive the beasts in the hunt.”

  The Alu knelt in a circle about their leader. They began to sing, a tune both haunting and ferocious, drumming with the butts of their spears and tossing their heads to the quickening beat. Tahvo matched their chants with her own. The ground bulged between two massive, wedge-shaped roots, and the top of a black-haired head emerged.

  Rhenna rushed the Alu and seized one of their spears, spinning lightly on one foot as she took aim. Yseul’s head and shoulders popped free of the soil, her skin pocked with blisters. She cried out in rage as the earth rejected her. Rhenna threw her spear. It grazed Yseul’s arm and lodged in bark.

  A deafening bellow boomed through the forest. The tree tossed and rolled as if it would pull its roots from the ground and stride away. Yseul, her arm streaked with blood, stumbled behind the broad, quivering trunk.

  The overwhelming clamor ceased. Leaves shaken loose from the tree’s lowest branches drifted to the earth and lay still. Rhenna tugged the spear loose and set off in pursuit of Yseul.

  She returned a few moments later. “She’s fled,” she said.

  “You can’t let her escape,” Cabh’a said.

  “I have no intention of doing so…once I know that Cian is safe.”

  “Yseul will not be easily found,” Tahvo said.

  Keela helped Tahvo to rise and signaled to her women. “Only we can track her in our own land,” she said in the Alu tongue. “When the mating is finished…” She looked up into the great tree. Tahvo followed her gaze.

  Cian was climbing down the trunk, arms wrapped about the vine ladder as his bare feet clung to rough bark. He reached the ground, scrubbed his hand across his face, and stared about him as if the world had grown too strange for mortal understanding. The wounds and bruises on his skin had completely healed. Rhenna took a step toward him and stopped.

  Tahvo approached him with great care. Her vision was beginning to dim again, and she knew it would soon be gone. As Ge would soon be gone.

  Cian focused on her slowly, despair dulling his golden eyes to weathered bronze. “We must go.”

  Tahvo looked up again. Nyx had not yet reappeared. Even as she searched, the trunk gave a snap and groan of splintering wood. A dark premonition filled Tahvo’s head, and she saw herself as an insect scuttling out of the path of a toppling twig.

  “Away!” she gasped. “The tree…”

  The Alu already understood. They bounded off, some taking the shapes of panthers for greater speed. Rhenna pushed Tahvo into a run, Cian beside her and the Imaziren at his heels. When they paused to catch their breaths and look behind, they saw nothing but a whirlwind of scudding dirt, leaves and branches.

  The tree was not falling. It was flying apart, shattering from within. Chunks of wood as big as several horses shot into the sky. A cloud of debris choked the air, arching over the forest for a league in every direction, yet none of the tree’s fragments fell on the mortals who watched its undoing.

  Rhenna tugged on Tahvo’s arm, but she shook her head. “Wait.”

  The others huddled closer, speechless with astonishment. The ferocity of the divine storm lasted but a few hundred heartbeats. When the dust began to clear, Tahvo searched the center of the eruption, hoping to see one last thing before the gift of sight deserted her.

  Nyx stood where the tree had been, cupped within the low walls of an earthen crater. Her naked skin gleamed, unmarred by the fury of Ge’s final moments of life. She threw out her arms, and from them fell as many seeds as there were stars in the sky. Where each seed struck the earth the soil rose to cover it like the arms of a mother cradling her child.

  Nyx squatted and spread her hands on the ground between her feet. Her fingers dipped and lifted again, wrapped around the handle of a weapon half as tall as she…a thing made of wood and reddish-black stone engraved with symbols, arcane and strange, simple of form but radiating such power that Tahvo began to truly comprehend what the spirits would demand of Cian.

  Nyx stood, raising the Hammer in triumph. Her eyes flashed brilliant green one last time and then darkened to a mortal woman’s deep brown.

  Cian started toward her, his steps halting and ungraceful. Rhenna made no move to follow.

  “Is Ge dead?” she asked Tahvo.

  Tahvo wiped the wetness from her eyes. “She is gone.”

  “You weep for such a monster?” Rhenna asked.

  “For one so ancient, for one who once loved the race of men… Perhaps even the spirits require forgiveness.”

  “I curse such gods of death,” Tamallat said, tears running down her cheeks. “Let the evil ones destroy them.”

  Tahvo had no comfort to offer. She could see little now, but through the veil falling over her eyes she watched tiny seedlings spring up in verdant glory, warmed by the rays of a sun no longer obstructed by the great tree’s vast canopy.

  Ge had found her immortality.

  Cian stared at the Hammer. He was afraid to look higher, afraid to meet Nyx’s eyes and share the memory of what had passed between them.

  He remembered everything…every touch, every sensation: Nyx’s hands stroking his chest, the feel of her lips on his skin, the murmur of leaves singing their joy at Ge’s triumph. Shame had not kept his body from fulfilling its part of the bargain. And though he knew Nyx had no control over what had happened, he could not forget that she had experienced their joining as surely as he.

  “Cian.”

  He raised his eyes to Nyx’s. He could read nothing in their brown depths. Her regal bearing seemed to reject any taint of shame or regret.

  “The Hammer is yours,” she said, offering it with both hands. “Take it.”

  Sunlight glinted off the unfamiliar glyphs etched in its head. The metal was marbled black and red, perfectly shaped save for a tiny piece chipped off one edge. Cian reached for the smooth wooden handle, fingers shaking. A keening wail rose from the forest, voices of the Alu mingling in mourning for their lost mother.

  “They are no threat,” Tahvo said from behind him. “They will hold to Ge’s agreement.”

  Cian let his hand fall, the Hammer untouched. He looked down at the seedlings rising so swiftly from the fertile soil, unable to fathom how they could contain any part of him.

  “How is Rhenna?” he asked Tahvo.

  “She understands.”

  “Does she?” He wrapped his arms around his chest. “I wanted no part of this, Tahvo.”

  “I know.”

  “It isn’t over, is it? When I take the Hammer…it will change me.”

  Tahvo didn’t answer. Her silver eyes held visions she could not share.

  “You must take it, Cian,” Nyx said.

  “I’m sorry, Nyx,” he said. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Then I will keep it for a time. But be warned…I can hold it only because I shared Ge’s power. Anyone else who touches it may suffer grievous harm.”

  “I understand. I am grateful.” He drew a painful breath. “Nyx, I—”

  She met his gaze. “We do what we must,” she said. Abruptly she wa
lked away, stepping carefully over the seedlings.

  Cian forced his legs to obey his will, turning back toward Rhenna. She stood with the Imaziren women, as tranquil and composed as a well-fed lioness. Cian was not deceived.

  She smiled as he approached, her lips twisted up on one side in a way he knew all too well. “You seem to be all right,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is the Hammer?”

  “Nyx is…carrying it for me.”

  Rhenna’s eyes flickered with emotion, quickly concealed. “It doesn’t seem so terrible. Why are you afraid of it, Cian?”

  “I don’t know.” Heat scalded his cheeks. “Everything will change—”

  “Everything has.”

  His fingers ached with the need to touch her. “No, Rhenna.”

  She stared at some point over his shoulder. “What now, Tahvo?”

  “Ge no longer rules the forest,” the healer said. “Yseul has no allies. We can travel freely where we choose.”

  “Not where we choose,” Rhenna said wearily. “We have only one Weapon. There are three more to find.”

  “I know where to seek them.” Nyx joined them, carrying a long bundle wrapped in large leaves and bound with vines. “The prophecies lie in my father’s homeland. All we need to learn will be there.”

  Rhenna glanced at Nyx, jaw tight. “East,” she said. “A hundred leagues? A thousand?”

  “It is far, but my father made the journey alone.”

  “Tahvo?”

  “East,” the healer agreed.

  Rhenna sighed. “We are in no shape to go anywhere as we are now. We’ll return to Nyx’s village to rest and gather supplies. Can you find the way back?” she asked Nyx.

  “The spirits will aid us,” Tahvo said.

  “Can they protect us from Yseul? If the Alu don’t catch her…”

  “Cian said there may be more such creatures on our trail.”

  Tahvo nodded. “I fear Yseul was not alone.”

  “Then we must be doubly cautious,” Nyx said. “The location of my father’s city and the true prophecies remain hidden from the Stone priests and their minions. We must be certain not to lead Baalshillek’s servants to them.”