His blue skin nearly black by night despite the full moon shining overhead, Eovath tramped up and extended his hand.
She shook her head. "I can't. I left my boots on the ziggurat, and I'm not used to hiking without them."
"That didn't happen yet," her brother said, "unless you insist that it did. This can be last year. In fact, it is." He waved his hand at the revelers, the tents, the mammoths, and the vague, flat grayness of the tundra extending for mile after mile beyond. "Because you want it to be."
She realized he was right. This was exactly what she wanted, and her feet didn't hurt a bit. She took his hand, he helped her up, and they walked toward the music.
The dancers capered in a circle, which reversed direction whenever one of the drummers decided to call out the command. Folk who didn't react fast enough ended up jostled or even knocked to the ground. Blacklions particularly inspired by the music sprang from the ring to the space inside it, where they turned cartwheels, flipped, and threw one another into the air.
Knowing Eovath needed a fair-sized patch of ground to execute the steps, other dancers opened a gap in the ring for him and Kagur. Jorn and Taresk smiled at them.
Kagur and Eovath spun and kicked to the beat. "This is better, isn't it?" he said.
"Yes," she answered. "It's everything a sane person could want. That's how I know you're mad. Only a madman would poison it and chop it to pieces."
He sighed. "I thought that by now, you might understand. It's all a dance, everything that's happening. Maybe it started when your father killed mine, or when the Rough Beast first whispered to me. Anyway, the music carries us along."
The drumming and piping were still whirling all the Blacklion dancers along, but though the tempo was becoming ragged, and the flutes were starting to screech and squeal.
"Would you have stopped dancing if you could?" Kagur asked.
"Would you forgive me if you could?"
"No."
"There's your answer."
She frowned. "It's not an answer I understand."
The night darkened. No matter which way she and Eovath turned, the moon no longer shined over the giant's shoulder.
"When you give yourself over to a purpose," he said, "and decide nothing else matters, it sets you free by making everything simple. In its way, it makes you drunk as Tian brandy. I know you've felt the exhilaration, too."
"All I feel is hate."
"That's what I mean." Somehow gleaming even with the moon extinguished, his golden eyes peered down at her. "But I see it was only true for a while. Now you're reverting. It's sad that I wasn't able to give you the gift of purity, either."
The music had slowed to a dragging atonal whining with seemingly random drumbeats underneath. It was only Kagur's memory of how the tune was supposed to sound that kept her kicking and pivoting in time.
"The only thing I want from you," she said, "is your life."
"Then why haven't you taken it? No, never mind, that isn't really fair. Neither of us could kill the other. We haven't reached that part of the dance. We're coming to it, though. This is the last time you'll dream about me. Your last chance to understand."
Mere shadows in the gloom, dancers shuffled, stumbled, and lurched. The smell of rot tinged the air.
"Understand what?" she asked.
"Anything you want. If you like, I'll even tell you how to kill me."
"Why?"
He grinned. "Maybe I'm choking on guilt and regret. Or maybe I decided I hate you after all, and I want you to die knowing you had the answer but not the strength to use it."
"Tell me, then."
On the other side of the circle, dancers toppled to the ground.
"Fight the coming battle to kill me and for no other purpose," Eovath said. "Hammer me with every warrior and weapon you have."
"You do have to die," Kagur said, "but we need to throw back the xulgaths and their beasts as well."
"If you try to win everything, you'll lose everything. Fight the battle close to the red pit. Kill me and then abandon the cave dwellers to die. Go home to the tundra where you belong."
"If I did that," she said, "it would truly be the end of the Blacklions. I'd stop being one if I threw away everything our father taught us."
"The Blacklions are already ended, sister. Look around."
All the dancers were collapsing, sometimes falling to pieces in the process. Despite the darkness, Kagur spotted her father just in time to see the head tumble from his shoulders.
For a moment, she felt dismay and a numbing bewilderment. Then a surge of rage snapped her thoughts into focus.
She snatched for her knife, but Eovath grabbed her arm and squeezed with a frost giant's strength. The bones in her wrist ground together, and she gasped.
"I told you," he said, "we have to finish the dance. It ends like this." He threw her to the ground amid the fragments of reeking carrion that were all that remained of her kin.
Something squeezed her shoulder, and she cried out knowing it could only be a dead man's hand. But then her eyes popped open, and the starlight filtering through the canopy revealed Nesteruk crouching over her.
He whispered to her. At the moment, she didn't have Holg's magic to enhance her understanding, so she only caught a few words. But she assumed the orc boy was telling her he'd heard her muttering or shifting restlessly, realized she was having a nightmare, and climbed down from his branch to hers to wake her.
Fortunately, she'd learned enough of his people's language to thank him. He nodded, reached up for a bough, and climbed back to the fork where he was spending the night.
Since Kagur couldn't fall back asleep, she was glad when the sun flared back to life not long thereafter. But she would have been gladder if she weren't expecting a sorrowful day.
When she and her companions had fled the pyramid, they'd simply tried to get off the lake as quickly as possible. They might not have survived if they'd worried about anything else. Fortunately, the effort still landed them on the same side of the lake as the Dragonfly and Skulltaker villages, and after several days of pushing hard, she and the other raiders were nearly home.
She, Holg, and their fellow humans returned to their territory while the orcs went home to theirs. Upon her arrival at the painted caves, she set about the task of confirming to the kin of those who hadn't returned that yes, just as they feared, their loved ones were dead.
Vom and Dalk made the rounds with her to embrace those who wept and praise the valor of the fallen, and she sensed they would have performed the whole task had she asked it of them. But she'd led the war party, and it was her responsibility.
Insofar as it was possible, though, she put off explaining everything that had happened and all that was about to. She deemed it better to wait until she could talk to Dragonflies and Skulltakers together.
The opportunity came the following day, when dozens of folk from each village met by Old Scar's remains as they had before. By now, scavengers had mostly picked the longstrider's bones clean, and they no longer stank. Around their gleaming whiteness, the Black Jungle was truly black, with dusky flowers shrouding the greenery and perfuming the humid air with a pungent sweetness.
Kagur surveyed the crowd. The last time she'd spoken here, she'd only been talking to warriors, but that wasn't the case now. Somehow sensing that the tribes were in imminent peril, old folk, nursing and expectant mothers, and children had descended from the crags to listen, too.
"All right," Kagur said. "You all know some of us journeyed to the pyramid to kill the blue giant. I'll tell you what happened when we got there." Omitting irrelevancies like how it actually felt to experience twisted space and all the tricks it could play, she sketched the events as clearly as she could.
The Dragonflies and Skulltakers were as alarmed as she'd expected by Eovath's threat to annihilate them. But they were less heartened than she'd hoped by her effort to recruit allies for the struggle to come.
Leaning on the spear that also served him
as a walking staff, Denda asked, "Will anyone really come?"
Vom answered, "I think some of them may."
"But even if they do," asked an orc, "will they get here in time? You say the xulgaths are already bringing their warriors together."
"From all around the lake," Kagur said. "That will take time, too. It's a race, but our allies may win it."
"You don't lack for gall," Yunal sneered.
"What do you mean?" Kagur replied.
"You lured Skulltakers away on a crazy venture with our sworn enemies. Naturally, it failed, and we lost some of our bravest, Ikolch included."
"My mother wanted to go," Nesteruk said. "And she always told me that anytime a warrior—"
"Be quiet!" Yunal snapped. "A shaman is talking. This stranger, this human, got Skulltakers killed, and now the giant and the reptiles are coming to slaughter the rest of us." She glared at Kagur. "Your fault! Yet you still want to tell us what to do. That's what I mean by gall!"
"The xulgaths," Kagur said, "were coming in time, no matter—"
"You claim that, but how do we know?"
Kagur wanted to punch Yunal. She took a breath instead. "A warrior of the Blacklions is talking. You be quiet. Maybe the raid was a bad gamble, but it's too late to rethink it now. We can only decide what to do next. If you don't like my plan, what's yours?"
"I don't care what humans do, but my folk will scatter and stay alive!"
Passamax scowled. "Skulltakers don't run away."
"I know, warrior," Yunal said, "and it angers me to give such counsel. But the stranger there forced this on us, and no one can call us cowards for doing what the spirits say we should."
"How are they saying it?" asked Holg, leaning on his staff with all of his left foot but the ball and toes off the ground. The shoeless trek from the lakeshore had been hard on Kagur's soles but harder still on his, just as the fast pace had taxed his endurance.
Seemingly caught by surprise, Yunal hesitated. "What?"
"I asked how you learned the will of the spirits," the old man said. He shifted his weight to lift the blistered heel of his right foot off the ground. "Kagur just now explained the current crisis and the new plan. You haven't prayed in the moments since. How can you know what you claim to know?"
Yunal waved his hand at the forest around them. "Are you so blind you don't see how the darkness of death chokes the green of life? This is our future if we stay and face the doom rushing to claim us."
Orcs muttered to one another, and even Passamax abruptly seemed less full of fighting spirit. But Holg smiled the way Jorn Blacklion had when he was practicing swordplay and an opponent fell into a trap.
"Funny," the old man drawled. "I thought it was just nature being nature." He shifted his clouded gaze to the crowd. "Haven't you watched the black flowers bloom over and over again for as long as anyone can remember? What makes this time special?"
Yunal shivered like a warrior on the brink of going berserk. "A blind, feeble old human is calling me a liar."
"What I'm saying," Holg replied, "is that it's easy for seers to slip into bad habits. We want people to heed our counsel, and they often will if we're relaying messages from the spirits.
"Unfortunately," the old man continued, shifting his weight again, "we can't go around casting divinations all the time, the results can be puzzling when we do, and it's rare for the powers to speak of their own accord. But I suspect we all realize early on that if we simply claim to hear their whispers in the wind or read their warnings in the way a spearbeak circles in the sky, people will give excessive weight to what are actually just our own opinions."
"You are calling me a liar!" Yunal snarled.
Holg shrugged. "If you insist on putting it that way, maybe. Back in my homeland, the spirits really did speak to me. They told me to help Kagur and stop the blue giant. And if I say they want us to fight and you say they want us to run, well, we can't both be right, can we?"
"We can prove which of us the spirits favor." Yunal looked to the crowd. "Clear a space!"
"It always comes down to this," Holg murmured, "at least when you're arguing with orcs."
"You're limping," Kagur replied, "and you have trouble seeing in sunlight. Are you sure about this? We could take some of the orcs to hear what Ghethi has to say." The Dragonfly healer had stayed behind in her cave to tend two children weak and dizzy with fever.
"They wouldn't go," said Holg. "If I don't fight, they'll take it to mean Yunal is brave and right, I'm cowardly and wrong, and that will be the end of it." He smiled. "Don't worry. After all the foes and beasts we've faced already, surely you trust me to knock some sense into this fellow."
Unless his magic is stronger than yours, Kagur thought. She had no idea of the extent of Yunal's powers, and she didn't see how Holg could know, either.
But she did trust the old man, and he'd also convinced her he was right: this was the only way. She squeezed his bony shoulder, and he closed his eyes and hobbled forward to meet his adversary.
For a few moments, each shaman simply stood and seemingly took the measure of the other. Then they both started reciting incantations at once. Yunal snarled his prayers and swung a large, intricately carved bone like he was smashing heads. Holg spoke softly and shifted his staff through tighter, subtler passes.
The old man finished first, but nothing overt happened as a result. An instant later, Yunal completed his prayer by lashing the bone down to point at his opponent.
A pillar of yellow flame roared up from the grass around Holg's feet to engulf him completely. Kagur caught her breath. Bolta, whose wits the old man had untangled on the trek back from the lakeshore, said, "No!"
Then the fire subsided except for a few small flames crackling in the blackened grass, and Holg stood unscathed in the middle of the scorched spot. He waved his hand at Yunal palm up as if to ask, "Is that the best you can do?"
The orc's jaw muscles bunched, and then he and his adversary launched into new incantations. But this time, Kagur discerned that they weren't quite starting simultaneously. Holg waited to hear the first word and observe the starting gesture of Yunal's prayer before beginning his own. Like a swordsman fighting defensively, he was sacrificing a bit of speed in order to gain knowledge of his opponent's intentions. It wasn't Kagur's preferred method, but she could only hope the strategy would serve him well.
A hornet as long as her arm shimmered into existence between Yunal and Holg, then, wings droning, shot toward the human shaman. Holg spoke the final word of his prayer and flicked his staff at the onrushing creature in a casual-looking way, like he was shooing away an insect of normal size. The hornet vanished.
Yunal roared and lashed the bone in an arc. A second bone, shiny and translucent like it was made of ice, flew out of the first and hurtled at Holg.
Somehow the orc had produced the flying bone considerably faster than he had the burst of flame or the huge hornet, without needing to speak a prayer, and the abrupt acceleration in the tempo of the fight appeared to catch Holg by surprise. He tried to dodge the weapon's strike, but it clipped the top of his bald head anyway, and he stumbled.
Blood streaming from his gashed scalp, he raised his staff and parried the next blow, and the one after, but seemed capable of nothing more. Meanwhile, Yunal advanced, and Kagur assumed that when he closed the distance, Holg would have two hammering cudgels to dodge instead of one.
She wanted to dash forward and intervene. Scowling, she held the urge in check. From the expressions on the faces of Vom, Dalk, and other members of the raiding party, and the white-knuckled way they gripped their spears, javelins, and hatchets, they were having to hold themselves back as well.
Then, however, Kagur noticed something that eased her fears at least a little. She tilted her head sideways to whisper to Rho: "Holg's lips are moving. He's blocking and whispering a prayer at the same time."
The boy grinned. "He's drawing the orc into a trap."
But it was a trap that would only work if Holg a
rticulated the prayer properly, and with blood streaming down from his split scalp and the flying bone clacking relentlessly against his staff, that couldn't be easy. He blocked another strike, and although he thus averted a second blow to the head, the conjured bludgeon smashed down on the knuckles of his left hand. Kagur winced, but the shaman's mouth kept working, maybe without a stumble if his nameless patrons were looking out for him.
Yunal stepped closer and nearly into striking distance. Holg retreated a space, and thick gray fog swirled into existence around him, concealing him from view.
Yunal hesitated at the edge of the cloud, peering in. The conjured bone flew back to him and floated above him. Then the butt of Holg's staff leaped out and thumped him in the forehead.
The orc reeled backward. Holg lunged out of the mist and landed a second cracking blow to Yunal's forearm. The other shaman fumbled his grip on his weapon but clutched it before it could flip out of his fingers.
Holg landed, or half-landed, one more attack, a glancing blow to the shoulder. Then Yunal struck back, and for the next few moments, they swung, jabbed, blocked, and evaded like ordinary combatants.
Kagur frowned. It was good that at least Yunal hadn't yet commanded the flying bone to resume attacking, but she suspected the orc didn't really need the help. He was younger and brawnier than his opponent, and in a purely physical confrontation, he had the edge.
Apparently recognizing the same thing, Holg retreated toward the cloud, which still held its shape like a bubble instead of spreading and thinning as it should. Whipping the bone in his hand back and forth, Yunal shouted words of power.
Holg waited until Yunal was several words into the incantation—deep enough, perhaps, that it was difficult to stop short of the ending, deep enough that the music carried him along. Then the old man started another prayer of his own.
The orc swept his weapon over his head and pointed. The cloud shredded into nothingness.
As the last wisps of mist dissolved, Holg finished his prayer and stabbed with his staff. The resulting flash was both difficult to see in sunlight and the first offensive magic the old man had attempted. Maybe it caught Yunal by surprise, and that was why he didn't even try to dodge. The beam of light caught him in the torso, and he doubled over.
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