by Sylvia Kelso
Despite the wind, the air around us seemed empty too. Every face was turned into it. Away from everyone else. Then Therkon lifted his chin and looked at me.
Two said. “Ruins. And the wind changed. Is that not clear enough?”
* * * *
If Rangar was a shadow of Ve Pool, Hringstenn was Rangar’s skeleton. With every oar-stroke taking us in under the roll of its hill, through a scatter of islets, across its bay’s ample width, the qualms deepened in my belly. Rangar’s port had been half-deserted, but not empty. People had walked, however sparsely, on Rangar’s quay. Smoke had risen, despite the empty houses, above Rangar’s streets. Hringstenn’s harbour held only water. Even rubbish did not litter the quay. And the streets . . .
“Couple o’ gales’ll lift half a roof o’ shingles off,” Segil said quietly, while I stared. “Rain’ll do the rest. Over a couple o’ years.”
And Hringstenn’s roofs had had a couple of years. Wind and time had torn the centers out, opening houses like gutted beasts. Chimneys and solid Isle gable-ends stood pathetically isolate, their stone black with water and old soot, above the bleak mercy of the veiling snow.
“Aye,” I heard Rathi mutter, in answer to some question from Therkon, “likely it’s been fallin’ a couple o’ days.”
Longer, something said inside me: the season has been turning backward, retreating toward winter, ever since we left Eithay. It is mid-winter, dead water, the desolation of the solstice, here.
In deathly silence Anfluga edged up to the wharf. Rowing in had taken most of the night, and just before dawn the wind dropped altogether, as abruptly and capriciously as it had turned for the squall. Or perhaps, something insisted with terrifying logic, it had not been caprice, but intent.
Whatever the source, the bleak grey water now was all but
motionless, a mirror for the deserted shore. No wave-wash to break the silence, any more than any wheel squeaked or fowl cackled, doors banged, feet tramped. No human voice, not even a gull’s voice called.
Gulls would leave, logic told me, when the flesh-refuse failed. But somewhere in this ruin, something was awake; aware and waiting, silent as black water, under the sporadically falling snow.
I shuddered uncontrollably and Segil grunted beside me, hefting the aft warp. I know, that sound answered. It was not only cold, unnaturally cold, but uncanny. Such silence, such stillness, in a place of human habitation, such absolute emptiness.
He tossed the warp with automatic skill around a snow-capped bollard, and Anfluga touched her side to stone.
Ahead of me, Hringstenn lay empty. Behind me, too, nothing moved. The whole crew, the whole ship, was waiting. For whatever waited for us. For a choice on our part, a decision. For me.
Then a step and a presence came beside me and Therkon asked quietly, “Do we go ashore?”
Never was I more grateful for the crown prince, let alone the imperial hatchet man. Because whatever he felt, his voice, like his face, was coolly blank.
Even if he had laid the onus on me. On me, reason insisted above the rising stress that had my fingers tight on wood, that shortened my breath as Two drew near sparking, on me as well as Two. And it’s nothing to do with oracles, less with available facts. If you are what it wants, the decision is yours.
Go looking for the enemy? Or simply, cunningly, cravenly, wait?
If I went ashore, Therkon would go. Even if I asked, I would not be permitted to go alone.
But if we went ashore, all Azo’s hackles rose at once, we would be in the open, vulnerable, isolable, in the deadliest of urban
terrains: empty, hostile, ruined streets.
And searching, therefore open to attack and ambush. Losing the slight initiative of immobility and defense.
If I stayed, the enemy would have to come to us.
To me, and Therkon. With the crew behind us. Eighteen more strong, able men.
Eighteen more lives in jeopardy, if the enemy took the bait.
In a spasm of panic I jerked my eyes across the snow-swathed quay, into the mouth of an empty, ominously twisted street, up again over the broken roofs, and onto the crest of Hringstenn’s hill.
Lower than the hill behind Yinstey, even lower than Haugar cape. Smoother than the rocky perimeter of Ve Pool, swelling treeless and seeming all but rockless under its sheath of snow.
With a crown upon its crest.
Stones, Two said in the hiatus of shock and recognition. Artificially placed, upright, standing stones.
Tall stones, broad stones, snow-thatched or snow-clothed stones, their own color lost against the snow-thick sky, but their variant bulks and heights and angles making an identifiable shape.
“Long Stone,” a burred Isle voice said in my memory. “Sights come all of a piece to me. At the Giants’ Dance.”
Where Nouip had Seen, on another island, so now, here, might I?
I lifted a hand and said, “Up there.”
Chapter XVI
The quay was so quiet I could hear every crunch of snow under our boots. The fall itself had almost stopped: only scattered flakes drifted around us, white moving flecks in the frozen vista of blacks and greys and solid unsullied white. Without other sounds, the town’s emptiness seemed to reach out to us, not merely a
desolate but a deadly, listening hush. As if an ambush were
already laid, and the ambushers crouching, poised to strike.
Rathi had disliked the idea of any sortie almost as much as would Azo. Two eventually overrode his protests with a brusque, “Who gains more from time?” The counter that would have moved Azo, if not for my reason. If she cared nothing for strangers’ lives, she would never begin a waiting match that we, denied the sea, needing food and shelter eventually, could only lose.
The quay was not so very wide. Past a ruined cargo-hoist waited the mouth of the nearest street. Snow, water-stained stone, broken windows. A sudden jink shut all but half a bowshot from view. Therkon broke stride and looked at me.
Rathi said curtly, “Down here.”
Bested over the sortie, he had campaigned hotly for the whole crew to go ashore. When Therkon pointed out why they should ward themselves, protect innocent lives, and most important, guard the ship that might take us all away, he had set his jaw. And after a seething pause, announced flatly, “Blades or no blades, the pair o’ ye’ll be toddlin’ babes in there. I’m comin’ with ye.”
“That,” he jerked his hand now at the closest street, “’ll go east-about. The one ye want’s here.”
Therkon gave him a measuring stare. Azo counseled coldly, For good or ill, let the guide go first. Two ruled that if Rathi knew the town well enough to reach the hill with the least chance of ambush, we would take his word.
The second street was half as narrow again, and twisted as rapidly the opposite way. Too well reminded of Amberlight slums and hair-crispingly swift ambushes, Two and Azo had the first knife almost in my hand. Therkon was treading on my heels.
Before me, Rathi walked swiftly but steadily down the street
center, a hand tucked under his weather-canvas, doubtless on the hilt of his own sword.
The street swung again: another vista of neglected or ruined house-fronts, shutters dangling, doors broken or ajar, site on site for ambush amid the mounded snow. The silence under our footsteps stretched my nerves like softened bowstrings. Two was on the verge of a spark.
Rathi glanced left and right and muttered, “Ye’d look, at least, for rats.”
Therkon answered, coolly as on the Aspis, “Too long for them as well.”
The street opened suddenly into a little space with a low broad snow-shape at its centre. Rathi skirted it with one brief mutter of “T’well.” I thought how it would have looked once, the town’s hub. Market stalls perhaps, people with loaves or vegetables, people fetching water, a cart or two jolting past. The busy racket of voices, of
ongoing human life.
Rathi veered seaward. Down another street we found a cross-road, and a house-width later, the gate.
One wooden leaf still hung, but the other had rotted at the hinges, leaving shards as warning above the deceptive hump of snow. Sidestepping, Rathi heaved at the standing half. Its snow-muffled Sskrrriiirrk over the threshold stones almost scared Two into a spark again.
Open ground appeared, perhaps once a common pasture, now a mere sward of hummocky white under clumps of snow-spatched, leafless trees. A hundred yards away rose the foot of the hill.
Not Skall, I told my thundering heart. Nowhere near so high, and it’s not raining, and no screaming seagulls, and up there is no Angrir.
What might, what must be somewhere here instead almost undid Two. I only got the better of her as we angled after Rathi into the open snow. “There’s a path, somewheres, over here.”
The path started behind the foothill’s bulge, and followed an easy slant up the hill-crease beyond. A well-trodden path, it had been once. Its beaten depth, and the lines of verge-stones, showed even through the snow. Silent, trying to husband our breaths, we toiled up.
Probably the whole slope would once have carried grass, if nothing else. All that remained was irregular bumps in the blanket of pall-pure white. Except at our backs, it lay utterly pristine. No beast had marked it, not a single bird.
Rathi muttered, “Used to be rooks. A hare or two. Curlews, whaupin’ over the tops. Springs, ye’d hear a wren. Or turnstanes, down t’shore, tuck-tuck, tuck-tuck.”
The little echoing bird-call bounced eerily as a turned pebble itself. I was grateful when he fell quiet.
The crease narrowed. A last scramble through a gauntlet of boulders brought us to the crest.
Wholly treeless, it would have drawn wind at all times, if the merest breeze. Now the air hung immobile, pinned under swollen cloud-bellies. Not a breath slanted the noiseless sift of snow.
Rathi hesitated. Therkon glanced swiftly left, right, behind, before. Two’s upset was blurring my vision. I could barely make out the stones.
At close quarters most stood tall and attenuated, though the shapes and angles of side and top were wildly different. The snow had thatched their salients, laying white patches amid the rust or dun blots of moss, but the rock beneath was all a muted cinnabar red.
I did not try to count them. The circle, I managed to guess, was perhaps half a bowshot across. The stones loomed higher than a man, silent, brooding, lost in their own reveries. Where perhaps not even the circle-makers had impinged.
Without knowing it I too had stopped. Therkon was a pace behind my left shoulder: assuming, I had one ironic moment of realization, the place of troublecrew. Rathi waited on my right. They had checked the surroundings, then, and found them empty. Only the circle remained.
The path, my second step showed me, was also the formal
approach. We had come up on a slight northward curve, curling to find the circle’s gate on the inland side. The circle itself would face outward, over the town, over the sea, into the north-east.
The gate was open, or perhaps had never been closed. Two massive stones, broader than they were high, made a porch for jambs set in the circle itself.
I stopped again. Snow lay between the stone quartet, thick untrampled snow, and shadow, it seemed, more than the scanted light would explain, lingered among those crowded blocks. A stillness came out of them that had nothing to do with the desolation of the town beneath.
The porch stones were marked. Carved, or at least grooved, with wide spiraling circles linked across each face. Their patterns crossed under the spatchings of snow and lichen, like ancient ditches in a half-grazed field.
The force of the stones’ presence, the prickle of my neck-hairs warned, sacred. Consecrated. A place, like the lookout over Iskarda, perilous to outrage.
It would not, could not be the place that actually harbored Sthassamaer.
Two’s tension eased, and my vision cleared. Beyond the portal the circle spread to the hill’s brow, with a spar of three outliers running to either side. The hilltop itself fell left and right in long descending spurs, perhaps where the makers had hauled up their stones.
The evenness of the ground within betokened a clear place, even under the snow. Flattened, if not actually paved. Made for procession, dancing, ritual. A single, tallest menhir stood at its heart.
I did not know I had meant to move until the snow crunched again under my boots, but the men came with me, wordless as very stones. Now the portal’s shadow received me willingly,
welcomingly, I wanted to think, as would Iskarda’s qherrique: a creature recognized, if not known. And the men with me, vouched for by me.
The central menhir was uncarved. Nothing about it said, Focal point. I walked past, carefully keeping to its right, sunward side.
The circle’s farther rim opened before me, two tall slender standing stones flanking another enormous recumbent block. Over its back the fall of snow-cased earth, the spatched clutter of town, rimmed an immense shield of winter-grey sea.
In all that prospect, only snow-flecks moved.
The men were still wordless. Rathi, too, had fallen back a step, for he was no longer in the corner of my eye. I looked out into the emptiness and waited for Two to see, to extrapolate, to find and uncover Sthassamaer.
Two did nothing at all.
The men were waiting. They would expect an oracle. Or some insight, at the very least something noticed about the circle, the land beneath. Something to show I had not merely frozen where I stood.
“Well,” I said stupidly, “we’re here.”
The sound seemed to shudder in the air, a blasphemy. Someone behind me gave a quick little sigh.
“So,” Rathi’s voice said, “ye are.”
* * * *
I did not spin round and hurl the wrist-knife. I did not even try to control Two. I could only stand, feeling bone and blood and muscle congeal to the rigidity of the stones.
Not a place to harbour Sthassamaer. And that had been true. This place had not harboured Sthassamaer. I had brought Sthassamaer with me.
How long had this been planned? How long had it been waiting? How long had it traveled with us, seeking the perfect moment? How much had it known?
How much had Rathi known?
I turned then. Slowly as a circle’s heel-stone, revolving on its pivot. Letting my eyes find the men.
Therkon’s face was pallid, frozen as his limbs. He too had understood.
Rathi was looking at me. I actually saw it happen: a heartbeat’s struggle, a flash of bewilderment. And the dark eyes that had shown such concern for me, for us, were gone.
Sthassamaer looked out at me, through eyes whose pupils, irises, retinas were unbroken black.
* * * *
I ought to have been running, screaming like a rabbit, terrified beyond thought. Two ought to have been paralyzed, or sparking out of control. But in that moment all I felt was red, molten rage.
“You took him,” I said.
“Aye.”
The word was right, the voice wrong. Rathi, but speaking as from the bottom of a well.
“You took him. An ordinary man. A good man. And you took him, like a castle piece, a dice-bone, a toy.”
The face moved. A kind of writhe, that might have been meant for a smile.
“You stole him. And you cheated us. All this time. All this way.”
It nodded its head, as if pleased.
“You got us to Skall. You made me kill people. You sank
Aspis—” the air reddened to opacity—“you drowned them.
Deoren, and Verrith, and Azo!”
It bobbed its head again, as at a compliment.
My hand leapt in Verrith’s reflex, the knife whipped from its sheath and Two flamed like the smallest light gun charged by it
s handler’s will as we hurled that white lance of light.
Rathi’s body sprang back. The knife vanished in mid-flight. The black eyes widened, and then black spilled from them over the entire face.
Head, beard, shoulders melted into cascading black. Like
water the flood poured down and out and rose again in an
impossible tide, ankle, knee, waist-high, spreading, reaching out, engulfing me.
My feet clove to the snow-bound stones. Two froze with me, paralyzed as the rest.
And the water rose, rapid, silent, black as bilge-seep, cold on my legs and hips as very ice, waist-high, sucking, pulling me down into blackness that had already eaten Therkon, the stones, the hilltop, nothing was left around me, not Hringstenn, not Kaastria, not the Isles, not the rest of the vanishing world.
My eyes had failed already. The black grip was about my chest. In a moment my lungs would stop, and then my heart. Blackness would have it all.
But my ears still worked. Into them, blackness admitted one heavy swashing thud.
And the water stopped.
Blackness hung icy at the base of my throat, shutting down breath. I struggled by intent alone. But I could still breathe. I could still hear. Across my lungs’ susurrus came another, lighter thump. A brief strangling noise. Then nothing at all.
But the water began to ebb.
My throat came free, my shoulders, my chest. My waist. My arms would move. Blackness thinned about me, sinking away to release the earth as well.
Reverse shadows coalesced first, tall standing darknesses on fading dark, then a variegated shadow-dark paling down to murky grey, and then that faded too, a zone of dusk above paling, purifying white.
Shadows assumed color and edge and shape, a tall single menhir, a further rank of snow-patched, earth-coloured stones. The gulf of the portal, the fall of the hilltop, other hillsides beyond. Earth and air reassembled, cold air blessedly clean, flakes of white falling across it into reaches of white untainted snow.
And at my feet, a great outflung swathe of red.
Brilliant living red, glistening like very water, spreading with the speed of water, but hot water, steaming into the frigid air. Red intense as heart’s blood, and carrying the stench of heart’s blood, brutal as the stink of an abattoir, eating out into the unarmoured snow.