The Rose of Sarifal (forgotten realms:moonshae isles)

by Paulina Claiborne

  Eleuthra, he said when he could speak. Well met!

  Einar, she said his name, evidently. Another human, this one a Northlander, the Savage guessed from his red beard and red hair. Einar Stormsson, she continued, but she did not smile. The Ffolk and Northlanders were ancient enemies, had shed each other s blood for centuries throughout the Moonshaes, until the Amnians and the fey and other newcomers had had the bad manners to disturb them Stormsson turned, and in his flaring nostrils the Savage could detect some of Eleuthra s disgust.

  What s this, a fey? said the Northlander.

  You surprise me. Phew he stinks.

  Acutely self-conscious of his dark skin and black clothes, his long yellow hair still glistening and wet, even his golden tattoos and the gold rings on his fingers and ear ridges, the Savage turned to Eleuthra as if seeking confirmation, and was happy to see the clear dislike in her face as she surveyed the other druid. He has come to help us in this fight.

  Phew you trust him?

  Perhaps her own bigotry seemed less attractive when she saw it in other people. She glanced at the Savage, and he could see her face soften. She almost smiled, as if to reassure him. Great, thought the elf. Now that it s established we all hate each other. But paradoxically, he felt strengthened by their low opinion. He picked up his sword and turned his back to them, as if goading them to follow, and strode forward into the tunnel s mouth, the flat of his blade over his shoulder, whistling a tiny common melody, which he had learned on Alaron.

  Down below, at the bottom of the curling path, Kip and Marikke had reached the tomb, a vast cavern hacked from the living rock, fed with air shafts, because the torches burned bright. High above them the rock ceiling glistened and dripped, and the rough walls held a reddish hue. Underfoot the floor was lined with agate tiles, which looked like the flesh of a flayed animal in the red light. And in the center of the space, perhaps sixty feet from the cavern s entrance, there stood a high table of a different, lighter stone, carved with runes and ancient petroglyphs, and on it lay the body of the Beastlord.

  The table was about the height of a man s chin. The lycanthropes had crept around the cavern s wall until they had surrounded it in a rough circle. Most held back, but the bolder ones had crept forward on their knees. Argon Bael, with Kip in his arms, had made a circuit of the table, igniting as if with his passage the stone lanterns at its head and foot, illuminating the creature that lay huddled on its surface, its spine curled almost in a circle.

  Despite the lantern light it seemed to exude darkness. Steam rose from it, and a rank cat smell. The angel spoke, his voice loud and harsh in the enclosed space. You understand why the leShay queen sent you to me, and I brought you here. We could have killed you but the Beastlord stayed our hands, because he needed you.

  He came to stand next to Marikke and spoke more softly, conversationally. All of us for all these years have wept for him, but it has not been enough. These stones are red from the blood of our sacrifices at the dark of the moon. This time we require an intercession from the Earthmother of Toril, to free the Beastlord from his tomb. Do you understand me?

  Marikke shook her head. I cannot. And then as if to justify herself, to stave off punishment, she blurted out: All this way we ve been climbing down, and I have called upon her. We have ways of praying that are constant, of giving and receiving like the rise and fall of our own breath. Or the cycle of blood within our bodies we can pray without ceasing, she babbled, overexplaining in her fear. But she is gone from me, gone from this place.

  The boy lifted his head from the angel s breast. His cat eyes shone in the lantern light. This is not a game, said Argon Bael. String her up.

  And Kip could see that there were niches hollowed in the cavern s wall, and thirteen altar stones that made the circuit, cubes of carved basalt, brought from the surface long ago. Some of them still had skeletons or the remains of dismembered corpses hanging above them from a net of chains that rose up to the roof. Six lycanthropes seized up Marikke, treating her with cautious roughness as if they expected her to resist, but she did not. Head bowed, her tangled yellow hair over her face, she allowed them to pull her over to an empty altar stone, while at the same time some of the wolf-men, screaming and chattering like apes, had hoisted themselves into the chains above her head and released a pair of greasy iron manacles. One of them, a grotesque brute with orange hair, stretched out his legs to each side and let down a dribble of piss.

  No, whispered Kip.

  Then you can help her, said the angel. The queen told me. Lady Ordalf of Karador she understands these things. She told me you can climb down to the pit where our god is chained like this, perhaps, he said, nodding toward Marikke. I have not seen him. But you have the power.

  No, whispered Kip. Do not make me.

  Argon Bael smiled, and the wolf-men heaved on the chains, drawing Marikke up into the vault. She did not protest or say a word as she hung from her wrists. At the same time the angel flung the boy onto the stone table, onto the back of the creature that lay on it. Afraid he might fall, Kip seized onto the rank hair, and let his mind descend.

  He had to force himself, for Marikke s sake.

  At first, with his eyes closed, his cheek burrowed up against the beast s foul skin, he imagined he was climbing down a slippery ravine with the small stones sliding all around him. Black night without a moon, without a sound, and no wind. Cold. In his most catlike form, he crept down over the stones, until he stood on the lip of the abyss, and jumped.

  Somewhere above him he heard Marikke cry out. He twisted himself over, because it was as if the direction of his fall had changed, and what was down became not up, but somewhere to the side. He fell down through the cold, through pricks of light that were like stars. And at the bottom, the ground rose up to meet him.

  Because of what the angel said up there in the world of men and beasts, he imagined he might fall into a place just as horrible and full of terror. He imagined he might fall onto an island in a lake of fire, a barren land without a drop of water or a blade of grass. And he imagined that the deities of fury, Talos, Malar, and the rest of the divinities who had been confounded in the Spellplague, would writhe here imprisoned in pits or cages of fire. And so when he fell into the light, he imagined it might scorch his skin. And when he breathed, he imagined that his lungs might fill with poisonous, burning fumes. So he was surprised even more than he was relieved, when he found himself coming to consciousness in the bright, crisp sunshine, lying on his back and opening his eyes in a field of pale wildflowers. And when he rolled onto one elbow he could see the creature he had come to find, a black cat leaping in and out of the tall grass, searching for field mice.

  High above, Marikke hung twisting in her chains, surrounded by grinning wolf-men. She also had made her own kind of interior descent, a way to protect herself from the pain in her shoulders and her wrists. She couldn t tolerate the sight of the great sleeping creature curled up on the table, or the boy clutching its greasy fur. And so she closed her eyes and imagined herself walking down the steps of a building in Caer Callidyrr, the city in Alaron where she had first met Lukas and the others, the entire crew of the Sphinx. Often, when seeking respite from the cares of the present, she would transport herself back to a place she had known, and not necessarily one where she d been happy. In this case, she was in a stone three-story guildhall in the middle of a warren of stone streets, far from the upland village where she d been born in a cottage in a grove of larch trees. But the floor plan of the guildhall was a complicated one, and in her mind she hurried by the empty courtroom where she had first glimpsed the tall ranger and his genasi friend, talking to Aldon Kendrick, applying for some kind of license, and, as she later discovered, negotiating for the Savage s release. Destitute, she had left Kip in an exorbitant inn and had come here to pursue any chance of honest employment, and maybe some that had not been so honest, a quest that had led her ultimately to Lukas, who needed a healer for his expedition. These locations in her memory were like
the corridors and cramped rooms where they had taken place, and finally in her mind she found what she had been looking for, a narrow back passage and a twisting stair, which in reality had led her to the narrow office of the secretary of religious affairs, a dry young man who had rejected her credentials and had barely allowed her to speak, so contemptuous he was of her country manners and her country clothes.

  Now the room was empty. In her mind she crept across the floor and peered into the inner sanctum, where in real life she d never penetrated, the lair of the functionary who had ultimately refused her permission to practice her craft inside the city limits. In her mind it was a spare, open place with windows along one side that overlooked a stone courtyard, a fountain, and a tree.

  Her nostrils were full of the stinking cavern, which among other things had been used as a latrine by generations of lycanthropes. And her ears were full their foul music below her Argon Bael recited his incantations, while the rest of the beasts had broken into a kind of ragged, howling, wailing chorus that nevertheless contained vestiges of rhythm and melody. But in her mind she was immured in a stone room in a stone building in a stone city, surrounded by stone battlements. And it was here, nevertheless, that someone found her, someone she least expected, who scratched at the inner door and then came in, a little girl of perhaps eight or nine, with muddy, bare feet and dirty, broken fingernails, her brown hair a mess, wearing a torn green dress, an urchin from the streets. Marikke knew who she was.

  Oh, sweet goddess, she murmured.

  Chauntea smiled. Her lips were thin and chapped. Ghosts of freckles covered her brown cheeks. You are hard to find, she said, her voice light and soft.

  I looked for you. I called you but you didn t come, lied Marikke, even though she knew what the goddess would say next.

  Did you? Then what are you doing in this place? This is not my house. This is not where my servants look for me.

  She came forward across the floor toward the windows, and with one hand she pulled and twisted at a lock of her long hair. I think you are hiding. I think you are afraid to ask what you must ask.

  Outside in the courtyard, the fountain had overflowed, and water was spilling over the tiles. And the tree, old and stunted, had pushed out some new shoots. Marikke knew what would happen if she stayed. The tree would overflow like the fountain, a chaos of green. Vines and tendrils would force themselves past the shutters and into the room itself. In time, they would pull the stones apart, and the building would collapse.

  I ll give you a hint. It is my will, said Chauntea, that the Beastlord should be free.

  At these words, far away, past the sweating cave beneath the mountain, down deep in the abyss, in a field of wildflowers Kip the shifter, who understood cats, reached down to stroke the fur of the black hunter in the grass. Marikke couldn t see that far. Wearily, in pain, she opened her eyes, because she heard a new sound that had disturbed the savage music around the table, dispelled it in an eruption of shrieks and screams.

  Someone stood between the torches at the entrance to the cave where the tunnel wound down from the surface, a golden elf with a red, flickering sword. An enormous leopard and an enormous wolf had leaped past him into the chamber of the tomb and were ripping into the lycanthropes along the walls, many of them still in the middle of their transformations the leopard had the snout of a yellow boar caught in his claws, while the wolf had closed his teeth behind a panther s neck.

  Chapter Four — Suka in Prison

  That same afternoon Ffolk slaves had come into the prison at Caer Corwell and had removed two of the interior bars in Suka s cage, according to the instructions that Lady Ordalf had left as an incentive. In fact all of the bars were bolted rather than welded to the iron ceiling and the iron floor, which convinced the gnome that the leShay queen had used this ploy before. Perhaps during her long lifetime she had discovered that coercion was simpler and more dependable than either loyalty or trust.

  One flabby soldier had worked inside the cage while four others kept watch. They had taken one bar of the twenty on either side that separated her from the fomorian and the lycanthrope, whom the jailer had cut to quarter rations in preparation for the feast. The good news was that in her human shape, the lycanthrope would break through a tenday earlier than the bloated giantess not that Suka was particularly concerned about the danger from that side. Although the pig-woman was more than twice her size, she seemed passive and disconsolate rather than fierce. Besides, the gnome was still armed. She surrendered her most obvious weapons when she was imprisoned, but had retained several others secreted around her body, protected from discovery by a layer of misdirection.

  Lately, also, in the darkness, when the lanterns had burned low, Suka had taken the habit of singing to the lycanthrope in her hoarse alto voice to keep her own spirits up and to make some kind of contact, under the general supposition that two females of any race or species would have to have something in common, as long as both wore tattoos.

  She sang ballads from the highlands above Myrloch Vale where she d been born. She sang the songs her father had composed for her, altering the words to popular melodies in order to fit some specific occasion, a naming day, or a broken tooth. Her father had been a drinker, probably still was if he was still alive she d left him after her brother died, sick of the tyranny of the leShay. She d shipped out to Alaron, where eventually she d met Lukas and the others. Now she was back.

  On the fifth night of her captivity the lycanthrope had surprised her by speaking in the Common tongue: Sing that other one, the one about the girl who died young.

  She was referring to Oh, Father Dear, the only sad song in Suka s repertoire, a story so melancholy it was almost a joke, or at least her own father had thought so. The girl had died of consumption pretty much at the exact moment when her lover, a bold sea captain whose leg had been blown off in some episode of Northlander skullduggery, arrived at her door.

  Suka s father, in between grimaces and smiles, had always managed to squeeze out tears over this piece of sentimentality displaced tears, for he was never able to weep at the mess he had made of his own life. And perhaps the lycanthrope, also, could respond to it this way Suka sang it for her twice in a row, and the second time she found herself inventing, as her father had, new and more preposterous details the lover, subsequently, had his other leg blown off after he had agreed to marry the girl s younger sister, who had died of heartstop upon hearing the news, and so on, and so on, and by the end Suka herself was crying also, as her own situation at that moment didn t seem so good. Lukas was on a fool s errand on the island of Moray, which presumably was full of lycanthropes less soft hearted than this one.

  Oh, father dear, don t curse and sigh when I am dead and gone, / I m going to a better place that I will call my own.

  Hmm maybe not. Her father s sense of the ridiculous was almost his only good quality. But this would have been too much even for him, unless he was really drunk.

  Tears in her eyes, she laid her cheek against the bars of the lycanthrope s cage. She missed her friends, missed Lukas especially, though in many ways he was the most harebrained captain who ever lived, willing to risk all of their lives, endlessly, for trifles. Or else not trifles, exactly, but for his own exaggerated sense of loyalty; to redeem the golden elf out of prison, he had agreed to follow the stupidest mortal in the history of humanity into an obvious trap. And now, for her own sake, Suka had no doubt, he had embarked on a half-baked and utterly unplanned assault on the most star-cursed island in the Moonshaes, in the service of an evil queen who would not hesitate to double-cross him and probably had already. Even so, Suka knew, he would return for her or else die trying. He was an old-fashioned fellow, with a sense of honor and all that. And he had given his word.

  Only in a universe where the gods did not exist, he d once remarked, would mere cleverness or ruthlessness ever find their own reward. Real gods, he imagined, would reward transparency above all things, transparent motives, a transparent heart. And of cours
e so far they had rewarded him, he claimed, if not with riches, then at least with friends.

  Remembering him, missing him, the little gnome rubbed her pink hair against the bars. Without even listening to herself she had come to the end of her song. But now she hesitated, first frightened and then amazed, as the lycanthrope s hand slipped through the gap left by the missing bar, and touched her cheek where the tears had fallen, the sharp edge of her cloven fingers scraping them away.

  Do not be sad, said the lycanthrope in her low, grunting, distorted voice. You have nothing to fear from me.

  And then wonder of wonders from the other side of the gnome s cell, where the fomorian giantess was sprawled against the bars, came another voice, also speaking in the Common tongue. You have nothing to fear. We saw you lay down your life for your friends. Her voice was soft and even, beautiful, almost. Now they are starving us for your sake. What are we going to do about that?

  Suka couldn t think of anything, at least not right away. She thought it was a good idea to change the subject. Misdirection was her skill, and soon the giantess was telling her story, which, as it turned out, was every bit as melancholy as Oh, Father Dear. Her name was Marabaldia, and although Suka mightn t necessarily have guessed by looking, she was the most beautiful fomorian in the entire Underdark, and certainly on Gwynneth Island. A girl from a powerful family, renowned for her artistic and musical talents, she had convinced her mother to allow her to marry her deserving sweetheart, a boy from a different tribe. The date had been set, and Marabaldia was the happiest girl in her cave or tunnel or whatever Suka, listening, had to keep reminding herself that everything was happening by torchlight, underground when fate intervened. Her own father dear, who had abandoned her when she was small or at least smaller, Suka thought, not willing to believe she had ever been the size of, say, a gnome now reappeared with a new bridegroom, who was as rich as he was old and ugly though, again, Suka wondered how anyone could tell, especially in the dark.