The Iron Hound

by Tim Akers

“This would be easier with horses,” Martin said.

  “Everything could be easier,” Lucas answered. “What is a test worth, if it’s easy. Come on. We’ll rest atop that hill,” he said, pointing. “It should offer a good vantage.”

  * * *

  As they reached the top of the third hill, higher than the previous two, there still was no sight of LaGaere and his men. Martin was beginning to wonder if they had gone wrong when Fianna drew in a sharp breath.

  “There is water near here,” she said.

  “That will be a relief,” Martin said. “My waterskin is as dry as ground wheat.” He squinted as he looked around. “I see nothing.”

  “Some things don’t need to be seen,” Fianna said. She knelt in the dirt, brushing grass aside until the hard cracked earth was revealed. “Some things must be drawn out. Like so.”

  Drawing a deep breath, she squatted beside the patch of earth and tipped her head up to the sky. Something surged through her body, as though her pulse became an aura of light and energy. Frair Lucas stepped back. The earth turned dark. A trickle of water seeped out of the dry cracks, little more than a bead of damp silver. It ran uphill, south and east. Fianna opened her eyes and pointed.

  “That way,” she said. “A river, and old. I have never known the southern waters, but it is eager to share its name.”

  “So we will have water,” Martin said, “and perhaps fish. That’s better than starving to death in the Gallowmoors.”

  “Water and fish and more,” Fianna said. “If your priest has crossed this river’s path, the spirit will know of it. We will have his trail again.”

  “Ah,” Frair Lucas said. “Well, maybe we won’t need the armies of Heartsbridge after all.” He squinted across the moors, in the direction the water was flowing. “Maybe all we need is a witch.”

  36

  THE CORRIDOR BEYOND the mural cut through soft, loamy earth, tangled with the snow-white veins of exposed roots, dripping with condensation. The air smelled like a spring downpour. Flower petals of every color were crushed beneath their feet. Gwen hung back, watching Cahl’s slow progress and Noel’s ecstatic reverence. Several times Folam stopped to urge her forward.

  “Why do you hesitate?” he said. “We have come all this way, come to the heart of our enemy’s house, and yet you tarry by the door? What is holding you back?”

  “I don’t belong here,” Gwen said. “Go on without me. I’ll guard the chamber, and make sure you’re not disturbed. Go on.”

  “What foolishness is this?” he asked. “If anyone belongs here, it is you. Huntress of the Iron Hand, last of the tribe of Adair. The only girl to touch one of the greater spirits, and she stands trembling at the threshold of another? We are the ones who do not belong in this place.”

  “I don’t know,” Gwen said. “I really don’t feel as if this place is for me.” She wasn’t lying. Something emanating from the chamber ahead pressed against her spirit, as though a harsh wind had snagged her skeleton and was trying to pull it free of her body. Folam was watching her closely, as though he could sense her discomfort. “I would rather stay by the mosaic,” she added. “In case the child wakes up, or if someone finds him and gets curious.”

  “And what would you do if that happened?” Folam asked. “Would you kill him? I saw you grab Noel when she tried to stop me, but letting someone else murder a child is very different from pushing the blade in yourself. Could you do that?” Folam took her by the shoulders, holding her away from him, studying her closely. “He is of an age with your brother, isn’t he?”

  “I would do what was necessary,” Gwen said, looking down. “I always have.”

  There was a long moment of silence between them. Noel and Cahl had continued forward, disappearing around a bend. Their voices disappeared into the muddy walls of the tunnel. Finally, Folam nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you have, and you must again. Stay with me, Gwen Adair. Stay close. We have to stick together, you and I. Tribes of one. We must stand side by side.” The air prickled with the same void energy that Gwen had felt while Folam shielded them from Cahl’s earthquake. “You need to guard me against them. In case Cahl tries something again.”

  Voices echoed up from the tunnel. Cahl at first, and then Noel. Calling out in rapture.

  “They seem to have found our broken god,” Folam said. He clapped her on the shoulder, trying to smile through withered lips. Then he turned and hurried down the corridor. His feet sank into the soft mud, squelching.

  Gwen suppressed a shudder, but there was some warmth in her heart. It was the first time anyone of the pagan tribes had expressed trust in her, rather than suspicion or outright hatred. And he was right—if anyone should be present at the shrine of the vernal god, it was Gwendolyn Adair. Last of the tribe of iron.

  * * *

  The shrine was nothing like Gwen expected. The ceiling was close and fetid. A tapestry of roots hung from the broken earth, tangling in her hair as she passed. Rivulets of murky water flowed underfoot. Black rocks stuck out of the mud, once part of a henge but now broken into splinters.

  The whole room was hardly larger than a modest cottage. Only Gwen could stand up straight, and then only at the center. Their boots sank into the mud, and foul gasses escaped each time they took a step. Their light came from a bare flame, flickering in Noel’s palm.

  Gwen looked around the miserable space and sighed.

  “This hardly looks like a place of the gods,” she said.

  “Everywhere is of the gods,” Noel answered quietly. “It depends on the god, and their madness.”

  “The vernal spirit has fallen far, pushed away by its followers and broken by its own violence,” Folam said. He knelt at the center of the room, running pale hands reverently over the smooth, black stones. “It has laid here undisturbed for generations. Gods bless that we got here before the inquisition’s agents.”

  “I can’t believe they would have ever found this place,” Gwen said. “No matter who was leading them.”

  “We found it,” Cahl answered. “At the hands of a child.”

  “The hands of a child and your holy sight, shaman,” Folam said. “Noel, I will need more light than that if I’m to do the work of the gods.”

  “And I will need something to burn,” Noel answered. “There’s little enough of the god of fire in this place.”

  Gwen gathered the bindings Folam and Cahl had used to hide their faces, then wound them around a length of root that was sticking out of the center of the space. “It’s not a torch, but without pitch or alcohol, it’s the best I can do.”

  Noel took the makeshift torch and cupped her hands around it. Her palms muffled the light, plunging the room temporarily back into darkness. For a handful of heartbeats, Gwen stood in the thick, black air and breathed in the stink. She swore she could feel something moving in the mud, as well as a wind that reached out from the earth and plucked at her ribcage like an instrument. She pressed her eyes closed, but that only made it worse. She was about to bolt for the door when Noel moved her hands and a pyre of bright light came to life in the center of the room.

  Gwen breathed a sigh of relief.

  Folam laughed.

  “A flame of summer, to light the way for spring,” he said. “How appropriate.”

  “It won’t last long,” Noel said. “Be about your business quickly. The sooner we’re out of here, the better.”

  “Indeed,” Folam said. He swung a satchel onto the ground and opened it, drawing out various objects and setting them in a circle around him. “Cahl, take the anchors and place them around the chamber. Noel, keep that fire going.”

  “What can I do?” Gwen asked. Folam glanced up at her, chewing on his response.

  “Watch closely,” he said finally, “and stay closer.”

  Cahl moved around the room, dropping icons of cold iron on the perimeter. Steam hissed from the mud wherever he left an anchor. A troubling sharpness entered the air. Noel’s fire snapped in an invisible gale
.

  “The spirits stir,” Folam said absentmindedly. Gwen could feel it, as well. She crouched closer to the voidfather. He glanced at her, then offered her a silvered knife. “There is something troubling you, yes? An uneasiness of soul? The damage done you by Fomharra might be contributing to that. This will ground you.”

  She reached for the knife, but instead of handing it to her, Folam slashed lightly across her palm, drawing blood. Gwen jerked back with a stifled cry, nearly toppling into the mud. Folam smiled.

  “Blood to ground, to trace the spirit, to bind the soul,” he said. The voidfather placed the knife on the earth at his feet, arranging it beside a number of other icons. Pressing her palm with the other hand, Gwen strained to see what they were, but the old man shifted his robes, blocking them from her sight.

  “I’m sorry for the cut,” he said. “As sacrifices go, it’s a small thing.” He looked away from her, busying himself with the instruments on the ground. “Rub some mud on it.”

  “Hardly reassuring,” Gwen muttered to herself. She palmed a clump of mud and pressed it into the wound, staunching the flow of blood and cooling the pain to a manageable throb. When she looked up, Cahl was watching her closely. He shrugged and went back to laying out the anchors. “What is this ritual supposed to do, anyway?”

  “Seal the wound,” Folam said. “This shrine has been a seething pit of everic energy since the god was broken. Well-hidden, yes, and well-managed, but still it bleeds. If Sacombre’s agents were able to track Fomharra’s tomb, there’s little doubt they could find this place one day, as well.”

  “And if they do? Will this ritual somehow stop them from using it?”

  “Perhaps. At the very least, it will make accessing the shrine very difficult.” Folam lifted the knife to his forehead, pressing mud and blood into the tattooed runes of his skin, muttering something under his breath. The air changed. Whatever comfort Gwen was supposed to have gotten from the cut to her palm, it wasn’t working. Her skin seethed with tension.

  “It is the best we can do, for now,” he said.

  “And why wasn’t this done before?” Gwen asked. “When the vernal god was broken by its followers? When the tribe of flowers threw down their host, and broke him?” Folam ignored her, so she looked at the other two. Noel was absorbed in keeping her torch lit, the flame flickering madly around, sometimes swirling up, sometimes dying down almost to embers. Gwen turned to Cahl. “What makes this possible now, when it wasn’t before?”

  “The tribe of the void had not been formed, yet,” Cahl said. The big shaman placed the last anchor with care, crouching beside the earthen wall, wiping his hands clean of spattered mud. When he looked up, his eyes were twin pinpricks of light, the reflected fire of Noel’s torch. “The emptiness was alone. We did not worship it, nor call its name.”

  “There was no… no voidfather?” Gwen asked. “I thought the old religion never changed. I thought it’s remained the same since the Spirit War.”

  “Much has changed. Your crusades have seen to that,” Cahl said. “We found a need to hide. A need to pour emptiness into our hearts, and into our gods. And so…” He gestured to Folam. “…a new tribe, and a god we had never worshiped.”

  “Never should have worshiped,” Noel said briskly.

  “Never mind how my kith came to be,” Folam said, ignoring Noel and her sudden anger. “At the time of the vernal god’s breaking, no one thought it would need to be hidden. It was forbidden, and that was good enough for the elders of that age. But this is a different age, and a different enemy. I am here to serve a blessing of the old gods.”

  “A blessing,” Cahl said stiffly. “One we have paid to achieve.”

  “We are done,” Folam said, cutting off all further discussion. “Now we will start.”

  “Whatever you have woven into the air, it is making this light almost impossible to maintain,” Noel said. “I can’t promise anything.”

  “Never mind that. I have my own tools to hand,” Folam said. He raised an arm, breathing a chant. The anchors scattered about the room began to glow. Sparks shot off of them, as though they were under a great deal of pressure, or friction. The pain in Gwen’s chest swelled.

  “Gods almighty,” she hissed, wincing and leaning forward, hand to her chest. “What is that?”

  “The vernal god is the manifestation of change. The return of life to a realm of death,” Folam said. He stood, his gray head scraping the ceiling as he extended his arms, palms up. “He is a god of wind. He is a god of storms.”

  As he spoke the wind rose to a howl. A torrent formed in the corners of the buried shrine, turning the dangling roots into streamers. Noel and Cahl, already standing near the entrance to the room, flinched away. At the center of the room, though, there was peace. Peace and the voidfather.

  “You better get a handle on this, Folam!” Cahl yelled. “If that god starts to manifest…”

  “Have faith in me, Cahl of stones,” Folam answered. “All spirits bend to the void.”

  The eight anchors sparked more and more, as though a giant whetstone ground against them. The mud on which they rested turned hard with the heat. Bright embers flew through the wind, spinning through the room. The wind increased until it shrieked. The ghost-light flickered like lightning, and thunder rolled through the earth.

  Noel tested herself against the wind. She wrapped her head in the mud-splattered hood of her robe and pushed into the storm. The wind met her, pressed her, defeated her. She fell backward, rolling until she rested against the wall.

  “You’re losing control!” Cahl shouted. The storm stole his voice. In the narrow confines of the buried shrine, there was nothing but the mud, the storm, the eerie light of Folam’s ritual. Cahl knelt beside the fallen witch, while Gwen cowered at Folam’s side, in the tight center of the storm, the pocket of silence at its heart.

  “Voidfather!” Cahl looked up, shielding his face with one massive arm. “Break the squall! If you can’t harness the spirit, we must end it!”

  “We must do nothing, friend,” Folam muttered. Only Gwen was close enough to hear him. She turned to him curiously. The voidfather ignored her.

  He was consumed by his ritual, but he certainly didn’t look like he’d lost control. He stood stiff as a column, hands splayed in supplication, face tilted slightly toward the sky. The wind only barely touched his robes. The tools at his feet hummed with frenetic power. Gwen’s eyes were drawn to them.

  She knew little of the pagan rites. Her role as huntress allowed only certain weapons of ancient power—the bloodwrought spear, the joined crystals of everic power known as tears of the earth, created to battle those blessed of the celestial church, and little else. Her house had been cut off from pagan knowledge, the better for them to hide among the celestials. So the tools at Folam’s feet meant little to her.

  Still, they caused her concern.

  There was the knife he had used to draw her blood, still smeared with crimson and black. There was a sickle of pewter, its half-moon blade touching the tip of the silver knife. Nestled between the two, a doll of elderwood, simple and crude. The doll was wrapped in hair. Black and crimson, glossy with anointed oil.

  It was Gwen’s hair, shorn for her disguise.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she hissed. The voidfather spared her a glance, but not a word. She pressed closer. “What are you doing, Folam! Why do you have my hair? What is the meaning of this ritual?”

  “I am closing an old wound,” he said. His voice grated through clenched jaws. “An infected wound that must be burned shut before the infection spreads.”

  Gwen reached for the doll, but Folam kicked her hand away, shoving her back into the gale. The change in the air was sudden, her breath stolen, her body thrown around like a rag. She stumbled, leaned closer to the ground, then started to crawl forward. Cahl was yelling behind her, but his words were lost in the storm. Tongues of fire flashed around the shrine, snatched from the air and spun by the broken god’s wind until they
snapped out.

  Slowly, painfully, fighting the fury of an angry spirit with each foot, Gwen dragged herself back into the still circle that surrounded Folam.

  Too late.

  There was a flash of sulfurous light and the storm broke. At the heart of the shrine, caked mud cracked open, and the shrine gave birth. What had begun as a storm came to life, horrible and bright, shrouded in the burning petals of flowers and hail.

  The emptiness in Gwen, the strange wound that was stitched into her bones—the place where Fomharra had bound herself to the young huntress—that void opened itself. It welcomed the storm.

  The storm rushed in to fill it.

  37

  IAN WATCHED AS a pillar of wind and ice twisted out of the sky to crush Elsa beneath its weight. The shaman stood at the edge of the storm, hands raised to the sky as the corkscrewing column ground through the remnants of the stables, flicking slate tiles and wooden beams through the air like dust.

  Light blossomed in the middle of the pillar, a spear of sunlight at the center of a tornado. Slowly, the storm peeled open, tumbled apart like a colonnade collapsing in an earthquake. Pillars of twisting snow crashed into the courtyard and dissipated. On the ground at the center of the storm, with the snow scoured away, Sir Elsa LaFey lay motionless. The sunlight flashing from her breast flickered out. The storm closed in again.

  “Her sword,” Ian muttered. He had last seen it by the doma. Without it, she’d never win this fight. He glanced back at the shaman. Still wrapped in the faltering gheist, the man stalked toward Elsa’s limp form.

  Slowly the vow knight stood.

  Their combat started again.

  The humble grounds of Harthal continued coming apart at the seams. The stables had collapsed, the tower where he and Elsa were housed had been stripped of its shutters, and the roof was coming loose one heavy tile at a time. The main keep was hidden behind a squall of sleet. The gate banged open and closed, the beams of iron-bound wood slowly working apart with each booming strike.

  Only the doma appeared undamaged. Ian ducked back, and began making his way around the courtyard toward it.