Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  But Allystaire knew he had to draw out the sword, and it was deep. All at once, he thought. All at once, and hold against the tide as it comes. He gritted his teeth and with one strong pull, freed his sword.

  He felt that spark of life extinguish itself, and the man gave a gurgling cry; blood and gore gushed from the wound as Allystaire pulled the weapon free. He pressed his senses, the Goddess’s Gift, further into the man’s body, seeking the trail of the spark. But it was fruitless. He continued to press, looking for any sign of life, any movement of the blood, a twitch of the muscles, the beat of the heart, things he had not known he could sense or feel or see with this Gift, and he tried to will them into working.

  And then an impenetrable blank wall dropped over his extended senses. You cannot—you will not attempt to—reach into Death’s demesne. The Goddess’s words to him, when She had Ordained him and granted him this very Gift, rolled across his mind.

  With a grimly clenched jaw, Allystaire stood and looked for the next wounded man. Even those who had been only lightly hurt seemed no threat, as most had collapsed or swooned. Only one stood, halfway up the slope, staring at his outstretched hands as if seeing them for the first time.

  Allystaire moved among the broken and bleeding bodies scattered across the slope. Most were beyond his help, but the one he had just been struggling with still breathed. His face was battered so that his own mother might not recognize him, and one arm was badly twisted.

  The paladin knelt and poured from the Goddess’s endless compassion, knitted the bone and closed the wounds of the man that had been a chimera that he had just now been trying very hard to kill. And with that compassion flowing through him, Allystaire felt a grief begin to grip him. I know now why your other Gift did not come to my arm, Mother, he thought. These men meant no evil. They were wild, like a sick dog. They knew nothing of what they did.

  When he stood up, the man now whole and healed, he saw Idgen Marte moving among the scattered and broken bodies, placing the back of her hand over mouths, or her fingertips to a neck. “This one lives,” she called out. Nodding, if for no other reason than to clear his head, Allystaire hastened to her and knelt by the man, pressing his bare palm against the man’s neck. He wore, Allystaire saw, the tatters of Delondeur’s green and white. He needed but a bit of the Mother’s grace to close a few of Idgen Marte’s shallower cuts.

  And then this process repeated itself, Idgen Marte moving ahead of him and finding three more men who would live, and Allystaire growing wearier by the moment.

  The man who kept examining himself finally turned to Allystaire and Idgen Marte, his dazed eyes focusing for the first time since he’d shed his beak and feathers. “Who are you? Where…what…” Then his gaze, harried and fearful, settled on Allystaire. “Lord…Lord Coldbourne?” His hand went to his chest, to the faded grey remnants of Oywryn livery. “How?”

  “Settle down, man,” Allystaire said wearily, still seated on the ground nearest the man he’d last healed. “I have no more idea of what happened here than you. And I truly do not care if you are a deserter or how you came here.” To the empty cave mouth, he called out, “Bethe. You can come out now. Danger has passed.”

  The three of them sat in silence for a moment. Bethe did not appear. Idgen Marte opened her mouth, closed it, then slapped her thigh and spoke. “We had to defend ourselves.”

  Allystaire stood up, his movements slow and measured. The former Oyrwyn man had knelt on the slope, watching him with fearful awe.

  “I know,” he replied woodenly. “I find no sin in this, for us or for them.”

  “Then why does it feel like murder?”

  “If there was evil here, it was in whatever made them monsters.”

  “There was no evil in that either.” Gideon’s voice suddenly rang out, young, but clear and confident. They all turned towards him as he emerged from the cave, Torvul leading Bethe. “Only misunderstanding. Perhaps a touch of…” The boy paused, searching for a word. “Of senility.”

  “Senility?” Idgen Marte pulled a rag free from her belt and began to clean her blade. “Best explain quickly, before that one swoons like he’s wont to do,” she said, with a thumb hooked in Allystaire’s direction.

  Allystaire simply snorted and went to collect his sword, the greater part of the blade coated in blood. He sought something to clean it with, but stopped as he saw the men who’d survived focus on Gideon. The Oyrwyn deserter raised a trembling hand at the boy.

  “It’s…I can feel it in you. You’ve brought it out.”

  “Peace,” Gideon said, raising one hand, the palm out. “The god of the cave can no longer reach out to you. I took its power, yes, and that is what you feel. But none of its essence. It has…” The boy paused. “Departed. Not died, precisely.” Then, regretful, lips pursed. “At least I hope not.”

  “The god of the cave? Is that it was called?” The man lowered his hands, but fear was written plainly on his ragged features.

  The boy is standing there speaking of killing a god and taking its power, Allystaire thought, and a fear greater than any he’d felt during the fight with the chimera gripped his stomach like a clenched fist of ice. What have I done? He glanced at Idgen Marte and knew from her widened eyes that she was thinking the same.

  The response to Allystaire’s question made him want to weep, or laugh, or both. The unmistakably bright, pure voice of the Goddess sounded in his head, saying, Precisely what you needed to do, my knight.

  Suddenly made weak-legged by the wave of joy and relief that rippled through him, Allystaire let out a half-laugh and quickly dug the point of his sword into the rocky ground and leaned his weight on the hilt, staring through teary eyes at his feet. In another distant corner of his mind was the dim memory of a master-at-arms yelling at him to never lean on a sword, that this was how points snapped and blades bent. He found that he did not care.

  When he laughed, all eyes turned briefly towards him, he was sure. He could feel the tension, Torvul and Idgen Marte probably wondering if he had snapped, but he didn’t even bother to explain. He just waved a hand and said, “Go on, Gideon. Explain. Take your time.” He lifted his head then, smiling faintly, still leaning on his sword. He glanced at Idgen Marte and could feel the curiosity roiling in her.

  I rather enjoy knowing something she does not, for once, Allystaire thought, a bit smugly, as he turned towards Gideon, who had taken another step from the cave mouth and lifted his hands as if about to begin a discourse to a hall full of students.

  “Long ago, more years than men count, I think, even in the Concordat, long before the first Eldest breathed…” He paused, shook his head, and with pursed lips, continued in a stronger voice. “Before people built with stone, before people had the idea of building, this cave was a refuge. A home. And a god found the men and women who lived here, and it gave them gifts. Wings, and fangs, and claws. The gift of hunting, of prowess equal to the bird of prey, the wolf, the bear. And those people thrived, and made this cave a temple.”

  The boy turned to the dwarf, a few steps behind him, who was listening, but, Allystaire could tell, thinking of something else, his left fist curled tightly around something in its palm. “You saw that, yes, Torvul?” the boy asked.

  The dwarf nodded, and his eyes focused briefly on the boy. “Yes. As you said on our way back…” The dwarf cleared his throat, and gestured to Gideon. “Go on then, boy, it’s your tale t’tell, not mine.”

  Gideon quickly resumed. “This god, the god of the caves, he spoke to men when they were not much more than the animals they hunted, or that hunted them. And surely he made them strong. But something, I do not know what, something severed this god from the world. Some great catastrophe, perhaps. When I touched what was left of its mind, I knew that it had no knowledge of walls, of iron and steel, of wheels. The things we make to master the world were all foreign to it. It had spent uncountable years alone in the p
lace that had been its temple. Tell me,” the boy said, suddenly looking at the Oyrwyn survivor, around whom some of the other newly conscious men had begun to gather, “when did you find this place?”

  “It were summer,” the man replied, nervously glancing at Allystaire. “Early summer, s’sthe last time I remember. I hope it was this summer,” he added, faintly ill.

  “It does not matter, I suppose,” Gideon replied. “What matters is that someone did find it. Several of you, I would think.”

  “Aye,” the man replied. “It were…the Brotherhood. We found the cave and spent some time exploring it and then, then I only remember…” He put a hand to his head and suddenly went to one knee upon the ground.

  Frowning faintly, Gideon said, “It meant you no harm. I hope you can see that. There was simply too much distance between the men it had known and the men it found. It tried to help, yet no longer knew how to teach you, how to tell you what it was doing or how to control its gifts—”

  “Don’t you call it a gift, boy,” the man snarled, springing back to his feet. He took a threatening step towards Gideon, fists clenched in anger. “I’ve lost months to this thing you call a god.”

  Allystaire and Idgen Marte both snapped into motion, stepping between the man and Gideon with several yards still between them. “And you would have lost a good deal more if not for him,” Allystaire said, quietly. The man responded as though Allystaire had shouted, knuckled at his forehead, was halfway to a knee before the paladin caught his elbow and stood him up. “We can deal with all that later. For the next turn, at least, I do not care a whit how or why or when you deserted an Oyrwyn host, aye?”

  The man nodded. Allystaire let him go and turned back to Gideon, waving a hand for him to continue.

  The boy nodded and cleared his throat. “I…I spoke to it. I think I was speaking to it in my head since we came up into this pass. If it is possible for a god to be lonely, it was. It did not understand why its gifts no longer worked, or why its temple was empty. Even to a god, millennia can be a long time,” Gideon said, sadness creeping into his voice, his eyes having dropped to the stones at his feet. “And even a god may dream of firelight and the sound of drums.” He looked up then, at the Oyrwyn man. “If it helps, when I made it understand what it had done, what its gifts had wrought, it grieved, like a father might grieve when a son he loves will not listen to him.”

  The man opened his mouth as if to speak, but looked sidelong at Allystaire and clamped his lips tightly together.

  “Gideon,” Allystaire said, moving away from the man and towards the boy, “when you said you took its power, what did you mean?”

  “It dissipated itself,” the boy replied. “I gathered in what it tried to expel.”

  “How? Is this something the sorcerers taught to you?”

  The boy shook his head. “No. Not at all. In fact…” He smiled, faintly, an almost predatory gleam in his eye. “In fact they would be distressed to learn that I could.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bhimanzir was often frustrated with me. I was taken into their training because the Eldest said he sensed great power in me. Great will, he said. This is what they call their ability,” the boy said. “Will.” He shrugged. “Yet I always struggled to learn all but the most basic of lessons. I think it was because what Gethmasanar sensed in me was not their kind of power, not their ability to tap into the magic.”

  Torvul’s eyes widened and his head snapped up when Gideon said ‘will’. So did Idgen Marte’s.

  Allystaire only smiled and said, “No, lad. No, it was not.” He grasped Gideon’s shoulder. “You did well today, Gideon. Exceptionally well. And I suspect that tonight, when we make camp, there is a conversation you will need to have.”

  “Who with? About what?” The boy’s brow furrowed.

  “You will see,” Allystaire said, then he turned to the men Gideon had saved. “You men, surely you are confused. Frightened, even. Perhaps hungry. Come with us, make a camp. Rest a full night in your own skins, your own minds. Then we can think on what to do in the morning.”

  “What about them?” The Oyrwyn man pointed at the bodies strewn about the slope. “Surely we can put them t’rest, too.”

  Allystaire scrutinized the man, trying to find his face or his voice in his memory. Try as he might, though, there was simply no possibility of having known every man under Oyrwyn arms. “What is your name?”

  “Keegan, m’lord,” the man replied.

  “Keegan, we cannot carry the bodies out, and the soil is thin and hard this high in the mountains. Yet there are enough stones that might do for a cairn.” It’ll be knocked over in the first good wind, and carrion will be at them soon after, but it’s the best we can do, Allystaire thought, and was inwardly shamed.

  “That’ll do, m’lord,” Keegan said.

  He could feel the accusing stares of Idgen Marte and Torvul on his back as he laid down his sword and bent to pick up the first stone. He said nothing.

  By the time he was standing with an armful of rocks, both had laid down their weapons and joined him.

  * * *

  Camp was a subdued affair. They had not been able to get down to the other side of the pass, but everyone involved seemed to want some distance from the caves, so they had traveled right to the very edge of darkness before settling in. Torvul had built up the fire and somehow had come up with fresh bread for everyone, and another huge pot of stew.

  “How, dwarf, do you do this?” Allystaire asked him, as Torvul carried his iron pot down the steps of the wagon and laid it on a metal stand he’d set over their fire. “Riding hard all day, a pitched melee, uncovering ancient secrets, and you produce fresh bread and,” Allystaire sniffed the steam coming off the pot, and ventured a guess, “beef and bean? How?”

  “And barley,” Torvul grumbled. Lacking, for once, a witticism, he simply shrugged and added, “I simply see no reason to neglect supper.”

  The four men who’d come with them out of the pass kept mostly to themselves, and Allystaire left them to it. All were eager for the food though as they began digging into it with the spoons that appeared from Torvul’s wagon. Allystaire noted Keegan picking at it, and once spitting to the side.

  “Something wrong with it?” Torvul asked, rather sharply.

  “No,” the man protested, working his tongue around his lips for a moment. “I just, I find myself with no taste for beef. I mean no insult.”

  The meal resumed and the pot was quickly diminished, the bread mere crumbs around the built-up fire. Allystaire stood, feeling the ache of the day in his legs and shoulders, and gestured to Gideon. The boy stood, and Allystaire placed one hand on his shoulder and led him out of the camp, a few yards away towards where the horses were tethered.

  “Gideon, you told me when we met that you were not convinced that gods and goddesses existed. Has your mind changed?”

  “I think that they are not as powerful as most would believe,” the boy replied, “but yes. Clearly evidence has amassed to force me to modify my position.”

  Allystaire searched the dark ahead of them and caught a faint but promising shimmer, and began steering the boy towards it. “Prepare to modify it further, lad,” he said.

  Only a few yards ahead, and they found the Goddess awaiting them in a clearing carpeted in pine needles, beneath a stand of towering evergreens. Allystaire knelt. Gideon, his jaw agape, remained standing till Allystaire tugged at his leg, and the boy sank awkwardly to both knees.

  She laughed, then, and Allystaire and Gideon could not help but join Her. Suddenly She was standing directly before them, one hand atop each of their heads.

  “My Knight,” She said, and Allystaire’s heart leaped against his chest at the sound of Her voice. The pain in his knees and back was quickly forgotten. “I knew again that I had chosen well when you grieved for the men you killed today.”

/>   Before he could even begin to formulate a response, Her hand had reached down and cupped his chin, tilting his face towards Her. She smiled. Thought was beyond him. Response was impossible. “I grieve for them with you, and I will do what I can for them. Yet you proved again the wisdom of my choice; you kill when you must and you save whom you can. This, My Arm, is precisely why I Called you. Most knights of this world do the opposite.”

  Allystaire felt himself lifted to his feet, and for the second time, felt the kiss of the Goddess he served fall upon his lips. It was overpowering. His senses could not perceive anything beyond the scope of it. If Her hand and Her lips were flesh, he was unsure. They felt, somehow, to be both more and less substantial. Her kiss lasted but a moment, but the impact lay smoldering on his skin with a tangible weight, like a punch. Better than a punch, his mind supplied, dumbly.

  He knew, instinctively, when She let go and stepped away, that it was time to remove himself—all of their Ordinations, starting with his own, had been private, between only the chosen one and the Goddess. He could feel, as he walked away, the presence of Her mind, and the beginnings of Her reaching out towards Gideon, as the boy stood, and was wrapped in an embrace that Allystaire thought was, somehow, touchingly maternal.

  “Oh, my Will, my boy,” She murmured against the crown of the boy’s head as She hugged him to Her. “I feared they would not find you, would not know you as I do.” This was the last Allystaire heard as he drifted, slightly dazed from Her overwhelming presence, back to the camp.