“Truth, truth, truth.”
The stone shamans who had battled Imperial forces at Loe had worshipped the old gods; my father (or so he had told us, told me, that brief period after his return and before his suicide) had rescued General Duke Halioren from being sacrificed to raise them to the defence of their remnant worshippers.
I clutched at my handkerchief, though nothing about this was making me feel like sneezing. I wanted to bury my head in my hands. Mr. Dart had bitten his lip bloody when the woman started keening. I slowly brought the handkerchief in front of my face.
“Truth, truth, truth.”
Dong dong dong
“Aiiiiiee—aiaaaiiieee—aiaiaa—”
The noise stopped.
I clapped my hand across my mouth to stop from making a sound. Mr. Dart dropped his head down as if he’d been hit. We both breathed very shallowly.
The—cultists?—were standing utterly still. In their long cloaks they looked akin to the standing stone, faceless, flame-lit, silent. They were rigidly expectant, staring, it seemed, directly at us.
Out of the darkness to our right came a small procession, and I breathed for the first time in what felt like hours, because it had not come swooping out of the thickets above us, or dripping wet out of the Lady’s Pools to the left, where the old monsters were bound by the shrine to the new goddess.
First came a milk-white horned cow, her horns silvered, around her neck a chain of white asters. She walked forward on her own, neither wandering nor pushed. Her eyes were red in the firelight; or at least I hoped it was the firelight. She walked forward, and the suck of her hooves on a muddy spot was the only sound.
She walked up to the standing stone and stood next to it. The air was very still; the wind seemed to have died down while they were chanting. After the cow reached her place, I realized other figures had followed her: an ordinary-sized person in a shining white robe, a second, rather plumper, in solid black, and a third in a robe of shining silver. The third was extraordinarily tall and thin. In the silver robe he looked like a metal statue, like one of the automata the Ghilousettens were trying to build.
“That’s Dominus Alvestone!” Mr. Dart hissed.
I dared not reply for fear of sneezing, but I felt my eyes straining wide, trying to reconcile the tall thin Scholar bending graciously over the Baron with this obscene masquerade.
All three priests—I was not going to call them avatars of the Dark Kings, even in my thoughts—wore masks, featureless ovals made of enamel or lacquer or metal: white, black, and silver polished so finely it caught reflections that were mirror-clear and horribly partial. One moment it caught the cow, and I saw the bovine face looking out from the human form, and I shuddered.
The white priest stepped to stand next to the cow. He was holding a knife made of whitened steel, with an edge I could see catching the light from here. He held it up, and the congregation surged down to their knees and up again, with a moan rising and falling like the wind.
The black priest stepped next to him. He held up a goblet made of smokey black quartz, and the congregation let out a louder moan and this time not only knelt but threw out their hands before them in a deeper obeisance, as I’d been taught as a child to do before the Emperor or the Lady, and did not get up.
The silver priest stood forward.
Dominus Alvestone? A Scholar—surely not—surely not—
He spoke in modern Shaian, his voice a throaty and compelling alto. “Children,” he said, and I noticed that at his word the earth was starting to vibrate again, as if someone was drumming a very large gong very quickly and very low. “Seekers, Guardians, Guides. Why have you come hither?”
“Truth,” moaned the crowd, heads on the ground, “Strength. Power.”
The silver priest spoke again. His hands were in his sleeves, holding who-knew-what. “And what will you pay for these things?”
“Life,” they moaned. “Blood. Power.”
“Tonight,” he said, “is the night of the Moon’s treachery, when she turns her back on the Sun for her mortal lover. Tonight is a night sacred to the old gods, when we enter the house of the dragon
that swallowed the seas. This is the third moon of our seeking, the fifth of our searching, the seventh of our longing. Tonight you shall taste what you desire. Tomorrow you shall see it. The third day you shall claim it.”
The woman cried out in high exultation, like a wolf-howl in the mountains. The crowd drummed their feet.
“Valdo, hear us. Ettin, see us. Nestre, know us,” they moaned. “O Dark Kings, embrace us. O gods of light and terror, renew us. O lords of shade and desire, speak to us. O shadow of the Moon, reform us.”
“Good,” the silver priest said, in an even deeper voice, and the low gonging rose up into a hugely loud thunder. “Begin the sacrifice.”
The black priest made an imperious gesture to the cow. She stepped forward as if drawn on a lead, and at another of his gestures knelt at the white priest’s feet. The silver priest stood between us and the scene, so I didn’t see what he gestured nor could I hear what words he muttered, whether in Old Shaian or new.
The congregation rose to their heels and started to sway, their masks askew from their long obeisance, their voices groaning in the chant. The gong led them, and the woman keened.
The silver priest chanted and gestured. The white priest called out into pauses in the chanting, and the wind started to pick up here and there. It wasn’t a real wind, up valley or down; it was plucking at different garments or leaves around the clearing, as if something invisible was moving about. I did not like that idea. I couldn’t tear my attention from the sacrifice to see what Mr. Dart was thinking. I breathed through my mouth in the hopes I wouldn’t sneeze.
The black priest knelt before the cow with his goblet below her throat. The silver priest cried out four words that pierced so strongly I forgot myself and clapped my hands to my ears—the white priest stabbed the cow with his knife—and all the noise again stopped.
The black priest caught the flow of blood in his goblet. The sound of the liquid hitting the stone was the only sound for a moment, and then the gong started its solemn double heartbeat again, and the congregation arose slowly like the wave of the wind and began to stamp and sway in its rhythm.
When they were all moving in unison the silver priest said, “Prepare yourselves for the fire and the knife and the blood, my children, and come to me. Drink deep, for tonight we enter the next stage of the mystery.”
The black priest stood next to the Ellery Stone. The white priest had blood all the way down his front, and held the wicked long knife—red and white now, and dripping. The silver priest pulled out a handful of something from his robes. When he threw it on the fire it sparked and sputtered black and white and silver, and sent up a billow of blood-scarlet smoke.
The congregation slipped out of their hooded cloaks, and I saw they were naked below their masks.
“Come!” cried the silver priest, and the fire flared up in a gout of silver and black sparks. “Come see your doom!”
He raised his hands to show that he held a glimmering stone, white and silver and black, about the size of his hands and polished as brightly as his mask.
The congregation let out a moan in unison, dropping down into the full obeisance, hands flat and outstretched, while the silver priest cried, “The Heart of the Moon and the treasure of the Dark Kings! Come! Come under the knife and the fire and the blood, and worship.”
One of the naked men cried out in a guttural voice and flung himself into the fire, standing there, letting the flames writhe around him, his mask burning off, his face in a rictus, and when he came out wreathed in smoke his body shone white and silver and black, his face red and unrecognizable. He grovelled before the black priest, who poured blood into his mouth, and then knelt before the white priest, who made three swift shallow cuts across his torso, and then he flung himself down again into the obeisance before the silver priest.
The s
ilver priest dipped the stone into the man’s own blood and used it to draw patterns across his body, muttering all the while, his left hand dribbling bits of some sort of powder as he did so, so the man glittered in the firelight with blood and with reflective glints.
The stone did not seem to be getting bloody, or perhaps it was absorbing the blood as it painted, for when the man’s body was wholly disguised—his face red and his hair plastered bloody—the silver priest let him kiss the stone. I saw the expression on the man’s face, and it was unholy ecstasy.
The congregation howled in triumph, and the silver priest said, “Glorified is he who came first! Come! Children, come to your desire! Come under the knife and the fire and the blood, make your offering, and worship!”
The first man stumbled off back to the congregation, who gave him wide space except for a few who ran up, ululating, bearing flagons, and poured wine across him. He smeared it across himself and howled, his arousal evident, his face ecstatic, those around him clamouring and pressing close to lick and kiss him.
I turned my head to keep from retching and saw Mr. Dart looking as flabbergasted as I felt. He gripped my arm tightly as another man let out an animal cry and leaped into the fire. “I’m sure that’s—” He stopped abruptly.
I swallowed. Blood in my mouth from biting my tongue made me gag. I coughed. “More of a cult than a secret society,” I managed after a moment.
“The, the wind’s turning,” he said.
I turned back at a particularly loud cry to see that the mad cultists were starting to act on their arousal, and also to get a face full of the most appalling stench as a gust of wind hit me.
My whole body seized. I jerked backwards helplessly, brittle stems cracking under my convulsions.
“Jemis, you’re—be quiet.”
I wrapped my arms about myself, half bent, nose and eyes streaming, knee squelching in my own mess, trying not to sob from the sheer disgustingness of it all. My body felt like it had that night in the outhouse after the wireweed, as if my stomach was trying to reject its lining. Except that on that occasion I’d been safe from everything except drug-induced dysphoria, and on this—
The wind had turned, and waves of smoke and blood were washing over us. I knew intellectually it wasn’t real blood, that the wet warmth was my own sweat and snot and vomit, but it didn’t matter, for as I tried to gulp clean air the wind brought smoke and magical incense, and I couldn’t control myself any longer, and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed until my vision dissolved utterly into sparks and I couldn’t hear anything until at last I stopped, and in the ringing silence heard Mr. Dart’s faint and horrified whisper:
“They heard you.”
Chapter Twelve
I was still holding my handkerchief.
This seemed incredibly important. I clutched it tight to my face, body seizing as waves of nausea and sneezing surged through me. My ribs—head—nose—jaw—sides—ringing—hurt. The handkerchief was my only safeguard.
Ages later, I finally felt able to uncurl from about my knees. I fell forward under yet another sneezing fit, and my arms plunged up to my shoulders in frigid water.
Water?
I pushed myself out of the muck and onto rocks, and this time managed to keep my balance. My eyes were watering, and it took a few more minutes of panicked breathing before I could squinny them to look for Mr. Dart. He was sitting next to the pond clutching his arm and gulping.
Pond. Pool. Yes. We’d gone down the hill—away from the cultists—tripped over something—fallen face first off a cliff into the uppermost of the Lady’s Pools. Fallen in. Sat up. Started sneezing again.
I started sneezing again at the mere thought, but it was the merest echo of a wheeze compared to earlier. I dabbed at my nose and pulled out another handkerchief and finally felt as if I could muster enough breath.
“I don’t know that I’m cut out for espionage,” I panted eventually.
Mr. Dart spat out an expostulation, face twisted in a grimace as if he’d bitten something sour as an unripe persimmon. “The Lady! What the hell was that?”
Just as I thought it odd I could see his face so clearly, someone laughed. I lifted my head gingerly.
The Lady’s Pools were a set of spring-fed ponds, each perhaps ten or twelve feet across. We’d come to the top one, which was surrounded by a lip made of black marble. Their water was usually very still apart from the bubbles breaking the surface, and very dark, even in the daytime, even in the summer. At night, on a cloudy no-moon night, they were a limpid black like the pupil of an eye.
In the middle of the pool there was another standing stone, at its base a flat stone that people used for certain holy-day rituals that had everything to do with preventing the sort of thing that was going on up at the Ellery Stone.
I remembered when the whole town turned out for them, and we went in procession around the barony boundaries, shaking rattles, ringing bells, singing hymns, and witnessing the priests and the duchy Grand Magister performing the Schooled magic. That was before the Fall, of course. I don’t know what happened to Fiellan’s Grand Magister in the Interim, but he hadn’t been by since, and Beating the Bounds had turned into a military procession where the local nobles ride their horses and show off their weapons.
That lapse might have something to do with why there was a cult meeting up the hill. It almost certainly explained why there was a woman in the middle of the pond.
Woman was perhaps not the right word. She had a human body and face, dark and luminous and beautiful, her hair a smoky black halo with a netting of tiny diamonds scattered through it. Her eyes were dark as the pools, and gleamed.
I could see her perfectly clearly because she was robed in golden light.
For a brief moment Mr. Dart and I stared in astonishment. She was laughing, merry as a summer afternoon, and the air was full of the scent of honeysuckle. We stared—I lowered my handkerchief slowly—Mr. Dart opened his mouth—and then she made a broad open-palmed gesture and disappeared in a shower of light and perfume.
I was all set for collapsing into a combination of sneezes and worship, but Mr. Dart was made of sterner or at least more pragmatic and less allopathic stuff, and instead of falling down he grabbed my arm, pulled me upright, and propelled me down the path.
We stumbled along cursing, eyes squinting blindly in the dark, the sudden vision as incomprehensible as the cultic activities preceding it. The crashing noises grew louder and started to echo off the rocky sides of the valley. I pushed faster, tripping over roots, brushing up against prickly growth alongside the path.
I hadn’t been this way for years; I couldn’t remember what way the path went below the lowest of the Lady’s Pools, where the Ladybeck split into several streams to go around the Talgarths’ house before flowing into the Rag. Littlegarth was just upriver from the confluence, so we should hit it first, I thought. The Garden Hut was the public house in Littlegarth. They’d be open till midnight—
“Left, damn you,” Mr. Dart hissed. “Not into the Lady’s Pools again.”
The Lady—surely we had just seen the Lady—
I ricocheted off a boulder and went nearly headlong into a thicket. Mr. Dart grabbed my collar and pulled me back upright, then pushed me on again. I tried to hold my breath, but kept having to release it in explosive puffs as we jerked and jagged around obstacles. I had no idea where we were or where Mr. Dart thought we were going, and only hoped he wasn’t leading us blindly in circles.
I twisted my ankle in a little hollow. Careening back the other direction, I launched straight into Mr. Dart, who gripped me until I stopped moving. “Hush.”
I couldn’t hear anything past the sound of my own breathing and blood.
Blood—an honest-to-goodness cult to the Dark Kings—who were certainly neither honest nor good—Mr. Dart whispered in my ear, so close his beard tickled against my jaw, “I’m afraid they’re—”
A voice rose up—not in shouts of triumph but in eerie ululations. Male o
r female I couldn’t tell; but it made all my hair stand up in pure reaction. Mr. Dart flinched.
The sound held us still, him with his hands gripping my arms, me straining to see into the shadows. Metallic and wild, the ululation went sailing across the registers. It was like being trapped inside a bell with a cricket.
Perhaps they’ve gone past us, I was about to say, when I realized that the falling darkness was a rising mist, and that the mist was shrouding figures naked and masked and wearing long grey robes like Violet had been wearing.
O Lady, I moaned inwardly, my breath catching in my throat. If only she would come now—
The figures were not running. They were not howling, except for the one whose keening cut through the air like a knife. They did not even seem to be walking. They were coming nearer.
I felt a sick fascination rising in my stomach. Some part of me was responding against my reason, responding to something in the air, in the wind swirling the mist, in the ululations. My reason said run; my reason said this is wrong; my reason said flee.
My heart said listen.
I listened; I had to. Mr. Dart was gripping my arms. The more I tried to hear something else, the more the wailing filled my mind; the more I tried to penetrate the shadows, the more the mist held my eyes. My reason whimpered, Where is the Lady in all this? My reason said, She showed herself for a purpose. My reason said, This is not right.
My heart said, Yes!
Unfortunately the majority of my time at Morrowlea had been devoted to the heart.
Out of the darkness a gleaming figure took shape, collecting all the light into silver, face blank and robes like fish scales, shimmering like the herring burnished by fire, the whole thing sinuous, shining, deceptively fascinating.
The silver priest floated towards us, glowing now in the mist, face brilliant, almost coming into focus. My heart was thudding high and hard.
I leaned into it, as I’d leaned into running, as I’d leaned into Lark, when she filled my heart and mind and life like the first sunlight of spring, like a long drink of water.
Stargazy Pie: Greenwing & Dart Book One Page 11