The Rose of Sarifal (forgotten realms:moonshae isles)

by Paulina Claiborne

  The pain in Suka s head redoubled. Startled, she looked down at her own hands, and saw that she had raised her crossbow and had aimed it at the middle of the fomorian s back. Her fingers grasped its levers as if their will was different from her own. Then in a moment she understood: She was to kill Marabaldia. And then the cyclops, enraged, was to tear her apart. There was no reason to risk injury to his beautiful dark elves, whom he was likely to consider as superior beings, more nearly on a level with himself. They were there for Poke, the lycanthrope. These other vermin he would leave to exterminate themselves.

  Oh, her head hurt. She was astonished that the prince had left her thoughts so clear. His contempt was so profound, he hadn t even bothered to confuse them. Or perhaps he took special pleasure in demonstrating that it was useless to understand. She stood with her feet braced against the crossbow s recoil. Behind her, an empty expanse of brick she knew the gate was there. But she couldn t find it. Her hand tightened on the lever.

  Marabaldia, by contrast, was full of feeling. The few thoughts she had were elemental and powerful. She knew Araithe was a twister and a snake, who had betrayed her years ago. If he said her lover was still alive, then maybe her last hope was gone. She stared at the cyclops as if she could bore into his brain through his unprotected eye or reach her hand in through some gratefully surrendered portal and grasp hold of his soul. She saw his lips pull back in terror, revealing his great teeth. She saw his hands fumble for the axe at his belt. She had the iron bar she had taken from her cell, and she d rather die than go back there. For a moment she broke contact with the cyclops. She glanced back at Suka behind her left shoulder. The gnome s pink hair stood up in clumps. Her tongue lolled out and showed her dog tattoo. Her brow creased. She had a puzzled, terrified expression on her face. She swung her crossbow wildly, aiming almost in Marabaldia s face. But she and the gnome had sung their songs together. Marabaldia had nothing to fear from her.

  But for security she captured Suka s eyes with her own, just as the gnome jerked up her hand at the last instant and shot her heavy bolt. Marabaldia felt it slide past her ear. She felt the rush of wind. And one of the drow was down, shot in the mouth between his shining teeth. The bolt had done great damage. The drow was screaming, and Suka was screaming too. She bent over and put her hands to her ears, hiding her face. The rest of the drow were moving, and Marabaldia swung her bar. She hoped to catch the leShay prince. He had no weapons that she could see. Nor did he condescend to move aside, but just stood there with that insolent smile on his face while the ragged end of the bar whistled toward him and stopped as if the air around him had turned to jelly, too thick and slippery to penetrate.

  Frustrated, Marabaldia searched for the cyclops again, reestablished their link, so that she could wield him like a weapon. He had risen from the ground, his axe in his hand. He caught one of the drow as he ran past him. The axe bit into the back of his head. He had not expected the creature to attack him, and he fell. The others separated into two groups, and two of the dark elves moved toward Suka as the air blackened around them. Prince Araithe was taking the light away. Marabaldia pressed the cyclops to attack him while she struck at one of the drow with her iron bar. Scimitars drawn, wary now, they danced away and then came forward, hacking at her hands.

  Suka s fight was over, Poke saw. She knelt with her hands over her ears while the drow stood above her, his sword raised. Confused, maybe, by her helplessness, he didn t bring it down. Now there were three around the giantess, who fought them valiantly with her great bar. And Poke had done nothing yet. She was managing her transformation.

  One hand clutched her crossbow. With the other, she unbuttoned her clothes down the front, so she could slip out of them easily. She felt she was climbing down a ladder, down from the furnished living spaces of a house and into a deep cellar. At each rung on the ladder she paused and looked down, before gathering up her courage to proceed. And the cellar was full of smells and noises that were not different from the ones in the house. But they changed in pitch, intensity, and significance as she descended. Foul smells turned intriguing, and then delicious. Speech sounds, which had such preeminence in the World Above, began to blend in with many other noises she had been ignoring, creaks and grunts and raucous breathing, and the subsiding moans of the wounded drow. Underneath these, down another rung, she could hear the shuffle of footsteps and below that, suddenly significant, the movement of rats in the corners of the room.

  The light changed at the same time. In her human shape, upstairs, she had watched with the others as the room darkened and the leShay prince worked his magic. But her plan was to sink below the level of his illusions, which were designed, she guessed, for the perceptions of more complicated creatures than mere beasts. And so as she descended the ladder her vision improved, and she could see many things that had been hidden from her up above, including the gate to the courtyard and the outside street, an open postern set into the brick on one side of the wall behind them, with worn stone lintels and a stone threshold, and no door at all. Now she could feel, as if for the first time, the soft breath of outside air. It was a warm evening out there in the cobbled streets of the abandoned town.

  And she felt her body change, a sensation that brought with it an intense and aching pain as her joints reformed, her hands stiffened. This pain, bad as it was, was for Poke an outward symptom of a more terrible distortion. Like all the followers of Lady Amaranth, like all the inhabitants of Moray Island who had chosen the way of the climbing rose, she hated this. She hated the feeling of her bestial nature reasserting itself, as she lost by increments the hard-won sense of her own consciousness and sunk instead into a landscape of primal emotions; rage, lust, fear, forsaking all the myriad variations of humankind.

  But it was necessary, if she were to help her friends with a surge of mournful pleasure she called them that, understanding also that in a few seconds she would forget the meaning of the word. A sow could fight where a woman could not. Her shoulders rose as her neck disappeared, as her jaw spread apart. Her head broke apart as she turned it to watch the leShay prince with his gloves still in his hand, the little smile still touching his lips. Enormous and furious, the cyclops was attacking him, and yet he did not move. He didn t have to. In a moment the one-eyed creature was down, was crawling toward Prince Araithe on his hands and knees, laboring to lift his axe. But he was already defeated.

  Just before her hand ceased to function entirely, before her weapon fell out of it and she herself sank to the ground, she tightened one of her two stiffening fingers on the crossbow s lever, and watched the bolt sing away. The drow had his black hand in Suka s hair, had drawn her head back to cut her throat, when the bolt hit him in the chest. He staggered backward just as Poke sank to the floor. Tusks sprouting from the corners of her mouth, she made her run at the leShay prince. The room seemed bright as day, lit with a radiance that had bleached away all but a few colors from the world.

  In her human shape she could see beauty everywhere she looked. But down here there was nothing but chaos. As she moved, she could feel the small tugs of all the mental barriers that Prince Araithe had woven in his own defense. They couldn t hold her down here. She smashed through them like a hand smashing through a curtain of spiderwebs. She scarcely saw or registered or understood the amazed face of her enemy as she seized his right forearm and crushed it between her jaws. She didn t hear his yelp of pain. Instead she turned and dragged him back across the floor, a light, delicate creature with no substance at all in these lower realms. Released from his power, the cyclops staggered to his feet, and with one stroke of his axe he severed the head of one of the three remaining drow that had pressed Marabaldia back against the wall.

  The others fled.

  Suka had also gotten to her feet. And when Poke dragged the leShay prince out through the postern door, the illusion stretched and snapped and vanished not just for her but for the higher creatures also, and they stumbled out behind her into the dark street.

  C
hapter Nine — Cross-breeding

  Theruined city below Scourtop on Moray Island is by far the oldest sign of sentient habitation in the entire Moonshae archipelago, so old that it has no name in the Common tongue or any other language. The glyphs that decorate the stone table at the mountain s root, the walls of the cavern there, and the carved tablets in the ruined public buildings mean nothing to any living creature. Abraded by the rain and wind, they will disappear before they are deciphered, Marikke thought, and the record of an entire civilization will vanish with them.

  But as the exposed stone broke down in the hard weather, there were other places, underground, that stayed intact, preserved by the altitude, and the absence of any insects or rodents in the high valley. The Savage and Eleuthra lay in one of these, a stone barrow set into a grassy hillock, whose circular shape betrayed its artificial nature.

  In the aftermath of the battle around Malar s tomb, the lycanthropes had dragged the corpses up the winding tunnel into the stone porch and had butchered them there; the dead druid and their own fallen comrades. No one had dared to touch the angel s shining flesh, and they left him where he fell, down in the pit. But they had lit bonfires out in the open, and the air still tasted like charred meat.

  Now they lay around, exhausted, in little piles. Marikke picked through them on her way to the entrance of the long barrow. Tongues lolling, the lycanthropes stared at her, not remembering or else not caring that two nights before they had hoisted her in chains above Malar s table. Her shoulders were still sore, and she could not raise her arms above her head.

  But there was worse damage inside. For two days she had not spoken to the snot-nosed little girl. And now today she had ignored all her rituals and had not spoken a single prayer. She had ignored the passage of the hours, the sixteen internal ceremonies, the rhythm of the major and minor supplications. Her heart was like an empty room where the goddess had once lived. What she did now, today, for the first time since her consecration, was in someone else s service. Great Malar had sent her on this errand, had pressed the sacrificial knife into her hands. Or no what she had promised was not even to the god, but to the shifter boy whose form he took. She could deny nothing to the shifter boy.

  She was wounded in her mind, unsure of the way forward. She ducked her head and clambered in the stone passage, not more than thirty feet until it opened to a circular chamber where the dead were buried in stone caskets twice as long as a man. There were two of them, and between them, manacled together, lay the Ffolk woman and the daemonfey, if that was what he truly was, with the brindled wolf s pelt covering them.

  At midday the chamber was lit through airshafts, a dim, uncertain light. The druid lay on her side, the Savage on his back. Marikke had brought them food and water this morning and the day before, but they were very weak. The Savage didn t raise his head.

  She kept the knife behind her, tucked under her belt, and she could feel it goading into her backside. Why did the woman have to die? Kip would not desire her death, if he were able to understand the woman had risked her life for him. But this other, this Savage, who knew what motivated him? She pulled the hairy pelt aside and got to work. She felt no sympathy for him and used no tenderness. He had been wounded by the angel s sword, a white seam across his chest. When he lay dying she had closed its angry lips and staunched the bleeding, though the flesh was swollen and discolored. As always it was easier to heal other people than herself was it the goddess who had allowed her to ease his suffering? Now, in anger and despair she found herself reciting the nine names of Chauntea as she put her forefinger over the wound. Another day, another time, she would have said she was allowing the goddess to flow through her into the Savage s skin and then deeper into his flesh. When she felt the feverish heat of his infected body lessen and subside, and when she saw his skin change its color under her hand, she would have thanked the goddess, who now cooled him and drew out the fluid from his wound, which started to weep hot, honey-colored tears.

  But she had no thanks to give. Great Malar had risen. He had occupied and destroyed the shifter boy, whom Marikke had nurtured and protected all these years. The goddess had allowed it. More than that, she had required it.

  The Savage lay with his eyes closed. Clinical in her interest, with no joy or thanks in her heart, Marikke pushed the yellow hair from his dark cheeks, examining the pattern of the golden tattoos under his left eye, examining his yellow lashes and brows. She had never seen him so unguarded and so near, and she was looking for clues. She studied the pale, bleeding marks on the rim of his ear, and in his nostril, and on his fingers where the lycanthropes had robbed him though they had no use for gold, they enjoyed hoarding it. She studied the scars along his neck, and then, pulling his shoulder so that he squirmed in pain, she turned him toward her so she could see the deeper scars along his back, the pale ridges and craters of abused tissue that ran down his spine into his trousers, the old wounds he had always kept covered underneath his black clothes. Closing her eyes, she pushed her fingers into his flesh, probing him for information he had locked away, feeling the structures of broken bones between his shoulder blades where his leather bat wings had been torn out, and all the damage lower down where, she imagined, the horns of bone protruding from his spine had been shorn off, and his thick, scaly tail had been ripped out from his pelvis by its roots.

  When she opened her eyes again, she saw he was looking at her, and at that moment she was astonished she had ever been deceived by him. No doubt with part of his mind always he had been cultivating the illusion, altering and shrouding himself in the perceptions of his companions had he allowed anyone ever to be close to him? How can you be a friend to someone you don t know? His green eyes were open now, and he was too weak to conceal himself. She saw the slit of demon red in the center of his pupils, and he looked at her with undisguised hatred and contempt, though she had saved his life. It had taken all his power to overcome the angel.

  Hey, she said. How are you feeling?

  Her interest was entirely abstract, she told herself. Next to him the woman stirred, the druid. She also had been damaged in the fight, bitten to the bone in many places on her arms and thighs. She also had lost a lot of blood, and she was still weak as a wolf pup. But healing her had been straightforward, a matter of sealing her wounds, of cleansing her and warding off infection. Marikke had soothed her with a sleeping charm, but she and the Savage were chained together under the wolf s pelt, and she had woken, almost. She groaned.

  With her left hand, Marikke touched her elbow near where the claws had ripped her. She spoke an empty, meaningless prayer and made her sleep again. She was staring in the Savage s eyes, trying to read his story in his face, the source of his deceit.

  So, he whispered. You betrayed us after all. I told Lukas not to trust you.

  Startled, she almost laughed. What did a daemonfey know about betrayal? What greater betrayal could there be in nature than to breed with demons in order to create a master race? But even beyond that, this creature, whose true name she didn t know, had been maimed and punished by his own kind, cast out into the world to live with ordinary mortals as if he were one of them.

  Why have you helped us? he whispered. Why have you drained my wound? His voice was harsher now that he didn t have to pretend.

  She didn t know the answer to his questions. Had he seen the knife in her belt? Did he know why she was here? It was not to cure him he had guessed that much. No, but the Beastlord had a test for her.

  And at that moment, she knew she would fail his test. Irritated, she shrugged one shoulder. You have been summoned to the High Hunt, she lied.

  By whom?

  And when she said nothing he continued, By the kitten boy?

  The red slits in his eyes gleamed and burned. You know that s not what he is, Marikke said. Not anymore.

  This was her great grief, the thought that Kip was lost to her. Worse than lost, because his body was as it had always been, his face, his shy, tentative smile. With that same s
mile he had pressed the knife into her hands. The Beastlord was in him now, and if there was a tiny part of him that still survived, she didn t know where to find it.

  And surely all of them had been deceived from the beginning, from the first night they had set foot on Moray Island. If Argon Bael had made some kind of magical communication with the leShay queen, then already she d have known all she needed to know about her lost sister. If she sent Lukas to destroy the girl, it was only as an afterthought. The real reason was to raise the Beastlord. Once that was accomplished, Caer Moray would fall anyway, and Lady Amaranth would die.

  No, Marikke and Kip had been the important ones, the arrow s point. The others had always been expendable. In which case, why had Argon Bael spared the Savage s life there on the beach, the first night he had taken them prisoner? Perhaps even then he had recognized the devil in him, or else needed him for the High Hunt yes, that was it. He had needed him for the High Hunt.