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by A. A. Attanasio

  continuing to step backward, head lifted, gauging the best track up into the auroral heights. "I had hoped to win a few more to our cause," he mutters, mostly to himself.

  He wonders if he has enough power to work magic.

  "Are the others ready?"

  "They wait for us on the Raven Branch." Keeper kneels and raises the golden apple. "Will you not accept your harvest of dreams?"

  He pulls his gaze down from the layered horizons

  and notices her at his feet, kneeling. "Not this year, Keeper," he says morosely, taking her arm and gently urging her upright. He pushes the apple away, his gaze still as the stars. "I swear on the Gulf itself, I will not accept the dusk apples, I will not drink the wine of dreams again—not until I have purged our enemies from all the roots beneath the branches of our tree."

  Her tawny eyes search the sharp angles and severe

  planes of his face, looking for a chink in his stubbornness.

  There is none. The Furor is so obdurate about this, he verges on trance. Purity—it is his obsession. The rootlands pure, cleansed of all foreigners.

  This close to him, she believes she sees

  clairvoyance in his features. An expression of abstracted concern tightens his stare, a look with which he would remove grit from her eye or a thorn from her hand, gazing now into a wounded future.

  She gently reminds him, "You have won control of all the rootlands in the north that the Fauni held. Only the West Isles remain."

  "Old Elk-Head lives there," he answers and starts walking across the auburn field. "His tribe of Celts holds the West Isles. We will have to conquer them. They are tainted with the magic of the Radiant South."

  "The Fauni conquered them centuries ago. They will offer little resistance. Soon, all the rootlands beneath us will be ruled by you."

  Up the forested slope of running sunlight, the Furor

  leads the Keeper, not once glancing back at the gods

  crowded about the mead casks. "Old Elk-Head's people are older than the Fauni," he whispers, reaching deeper into himself to find the trance strength he will need to work magic. "Old as we are," he says, hushed, "they will not be easy to break."

  "They are children of Mother and Freeze, just as we.

  Kin of the Abiding North." Keeper takes the Furor's giant arm, glad for his massive strength now that they are

  climbing above the swelter of the lower branches. Up here, in the thinner atmosphere, his powerful stride is sufficient to carry them both, and she flies beside him like a wind-raveling scarf.

  The five living elders watch from over the brims of

  their drinking horns as the Furor and Keeper of the Dusk Apples pass before them. The Guardian and Brave

  Warrior, in their antique bone armor with spike-plate helmets and slit visors, have no faces at all. Dark Mistress and the Crone stare silently, their wrinkled, androgynous faces impassive, offering nothing. Only the Silent One salutes the Chief, raising a bulb-jointed arm with a gauping, toothless smile.

  The younger gods do not understand, the Furor thinks. They do not understand the times yet to come.

  Such times have little interest or even meaning to

  the gods, for whom the winking spectra of each moment brim the cups of their skulls with dreams. Time that replete needs no future. Such provenance among the north gods belongs to the Furor, whose trances see across time to a doomful climax. Apocalypse.

  The vista widens as the electrical beings climb

  higher. Flagrant stars yellow as topaz peer down from eternal darkness. Earth floats below, a huge blue crescent at the margin of day and night. The chromatic terrain of the mid-branches falls away and disappears among frost mist.

  Out of that icy haze appears a sere expanse of nacreous dunes and slag rocks patched with snow—the Raven

  Branch.

  The gods who have chosen to sacrifice a piece of

  their lives for their chief wait for him on a promontory of sharp black glass, at the atmosphere's brittle edge. Each is

  wrapped in plush red bear hide that will keep them warm during their century-long sleep. They lie together under the protective hood of a raw-hewn cavern.

  The Furor climbs onto the blighted ridge of the

  Raven Branch and lowers Keeper of the Dusk Apples

  beside him. He is tired from the steep ascent, yet he dare not show his weariness to these good clanfolk who have entrusted their lives to him. They are already half-asleep, drugged by the hypnotic brew that has loosened their

  body-lights, readying them for the Furor's magic.

  The goblet from which they have drunk sits on a

  lump of rime-rock. Keeper drinks the last of the sweet liqueur, the dregs, barely enough to put her to sleep. She will not slumber as long as the others, for she has work to do in Dusk, gathering the golden apples. Nonetheless, she desires to show her love for the Furor by tasting the sleeping brew. She wraps herself in red bearskin, and lies down beside the others. The Furor removes his hat, stands over her, and, in her drowsy gaze, his harrowed face

  appears swollen as the moon.

  "Keeper of the Dusk Apples," he recites her name, and sleep claims her as her strength flies out of her body and into his.

  Slowly, the Furor advances, pausing before each of

  the gods to call their name and draw forth their life energies for his own. The wife of the Brewer, Sister Mint, who concocted the sleeping potion is next, and with the passage of her energy, he feels himself grow stronger.

  Then, Blue, the Furor's oldest friend, gives his life-force, and the gray hues of the Raven Branch deepen in the

  god's one eye.

  From the Ravager, the storm-rider, who is a

  sorceress, he receives a wink and a knowing smile. She understands this magic, having helped him design it. Her power sharpens his clarity, and the words of their shared dread find voice inside him, in telepathic silence: "Call down the Dwellers from the House of Fog. Call down the Dark Dwellers. They will stop the hordes, the smothering flow of invaders. Cleanse the northern forests of all migrants. Purify the forests for the Wild Hunt. Summon the Dark Dwellers to crush the invaders!"

  The rush of words pauses in him when he comes

  before Beauty. Her white eyelashes flutter slightly as he breathes her name, and her lovely features relax into a deeper loveliness, of composed calm so like the immortal sleep of death it twists his heart. She is his daughter. For her, more than for all the gods or his own sanity, he will stop the Fire Lords.

  Beauty's best friend, Silver Heart, lies beside her,

  broad oval face and narrow-slitted eyes aglow with fright.

  She has no notion what is really going on. She is here because Beauty is here. When the Furor whispers her

  name, she feels her inward parts move with joy, all fear gone. And then, she sleeps, and her strength belongs to the Furor.

  With his augmented power, the Furor can hear the

  thoughts of the god lying beside Silver Heart. The Dragon Witch, priestess of the planetary beast, has the laconic expression of one used to trance, and she speaks from inside his head: "The Fire Lords want to tame our Dragon.

  Look what they did to your friend, Bright Sky."

  Chief of the Fauni clan, the famous Bright Sky called himself Lord of Heaven. Zeus to the Greeks. Jove to the Romans. He was an arrogant and lascivious god, yet he and the Furor had been friends for a short while, early on, in their youth. That is how the Furor had witnessed

  indirectly the deviltry of the Fire Lords. Over time, he saw what they did to Bright Sky. They literally bled him to death, draining the power out of his electromagnetic body to the Earth's surface, where it was parsed among people and pooled into human collectives, warbands, village-fortresses, city-states.

  "They built an empire out of Bright Sky's body," the Dragon Witch says. "And they ravaged the north. They stole our rootlands and planted strange peoples beneath us. And what became of your friend?"

  The F
uror silences her by saying her name and

  drawing her strength into himself. The increase of vitality enlarges his memory of Bright Sky, with his remarkable laugh and ready joke. By the end, the Furor had been

  forced to fall back before his old friend. Bright Sky had become a zombie, the madness of Rome.

  Thunder Red Hair gazes up intently at the Furor, his

  father. No words are necessary between them. They are bound to the beginning and the end by their common will.

  The lad even resembles the father as the Furor had once looked, many years ago, before the brutalities of leadership cost him his eye and his innocence. He smiles assuredly at the square-jawed, freckle-faced youth and speaks his

  name proudly, "Thunder Red Hair."

  Earlier spells by the Furor, evoking the Dark

  Dwellers from the House of Fog, once stalled the advance of the southern tribes. For a while, the plague of cities slowed. He swells again with the same power he used then for his magic—and now, this time, there is one more god who will give him strength. "Wonder Smith," he says, and the ruddy-cheeked arms-maker closes his gray eyes. His dimple-chin sags, and his might flows into the Furor.

  The one-eyed god wants more power, but he is alone now on the Raven Branch. The oblate sun burns

  dark red far down the sky, at the rim of the world. He lifts his arms to the multiplying stars, and magic seeps from him like incense. Wafts of it disappear into the Gulf, vanishing among the starshine and fluorescent veils

  between the stars.

  And though it is invisible now, the Furor senses the

  magic working. He feels the Dwellers from the House of Fog circling closer out of the void, like sharks drawn to spilled blood. They stream closer, hungry for the vitality he laces into the cold. He hears their sickly shrieks falling out of the Gulf. And then they appear, not from above but from below—windblown sparks, rising in a hot spray of dizzy turbulence.

  These are the same Dark Dwellers he has called to

  him before, eager again to do his bidding—so long as it is destructive. Destruction is their only utility, and he has ample use for that now.

  He releases all the evocative magic he has

  accumulated, and the whirling sparks frenzy eagerly and with such competitive urgency that one of the looping sparks collides among the others. It spins off in an acute ricochet that sends it hurtling back to earth.

  By reflex, the Furor reaches for it, but it is already gone, vanishing into the planet's dark side. The one-eyed god bites back a curse. He needs every Dark Dweller he can snare.

  There is no time to ponder the fate of the fallen one.

  He returns his attention to the handful of fire-points that have fixed themselves in the net of his magic. With these, he will defeat Apocalypse and build a new future.

  *

  The huge, pocked face of the moon floats in a

  lavender sky among starry pinwheels and misty shreds of neon vapors. Falon, wearing only his golden torque, stands chilled in his nakedness on the lee of a grassy bluff. His pale eyes widen in awe. Purple mountains and blue tree-roughs descend toward emerald meadows and labyrinthine valleys studded with lakes of golden stillness.

  At first, he does not feel the boreal wind blowing

  down from the high silence. The depths and swells of this primal landscape woven in gem-light transfix him. At hand, grassheads toss with the wind in iridescent waves, each individual blade seemingly made of tufted prisms.

  The cold finally pierces his astonishment, and he

  gawks at himself naked. His very flesh shines, bright and

  clear, almost transparent. He swings a startled look left and right, searching for his queen.

  "Falon!" She waves from farther down the bluff, her locks of honey hair and loose robes adrift in the swirling wind. "You should be with the others," she scolds when he runs up to her.

  "I could not let you go unguarded." He peers at her, amazed to see her luminous and tinged with tiny

  starpoints. "I am sworn to protect you."

  Her reproving look sharpens. "You cannot protect me here, Falon. I needed you below to watch over my

  earthly life. Kyner may well take it upon himself to rid Christendom of another witch."

  Falon flinches yet replies with certitude: "The fiana will die first."

  A roving shadow blots the hillside, and Ygrane

  seizes Falon's arm and pulls him after her, breaking into a run. "Quickly! To the trees!"

  Falon flies after her, astonished to find himself

  sailing through the grass, each bounding step hurtling him footless toward the dark apertures of the forest. He dares an upward glance and nearly collapses. A giant raptor glides overhead, its black wingspan a ragged wound of darkness in the luminous sky.

  Ygrane steadies him under the predator's thundery

  cry, and they dash crouched through draperies of wisteria into a forest cavernous as a grotto. Luminescent mosses splotch the giant trees and glowing liana loop from gloomy galleries. When the queen stops short, the chill air fills with sparkles of forest chaff and a minty aroma of leaf mulch.

  "That raptor—" Falon says, his voice vibrant with echoes. He parts the wisteria veils and watches

  incredulously the giant bird dwindling down the lanes of stars. "It is big as twelve men!"

  "A roc," she observes, scanning the high bluffs and their green flares of cedar. "Something has disturbed it." A vortex of bats skirls from a stand of orchid trees on the prismatic cliffs above the bluffs, and she knows then she has found her way to the right place. The one she seeks is coming. She regards Falon skeptically. "Cover yourself, man."

  Falon's stunned expression fractures, as if just

  realizing that he is naked, and he looks about mutely, his hands groping like a blind man's. "Older sister, what is this place?" he asks, though he knows because she has told him and the other fiana that she intended to climb into the sky, yet he must hear it again.

  "It is the Storm Tree, Falon. You have ascended

  with me into the homeland of the gods."

  He yanks at gray shawl-moss from a near bough, shreds it, and starts fashioning a loin wrap.

  "You should be with the others, Falon," she repeats in a dire tone. "I've come to make a new meaning of my life. I must do it alone."

  "I'm here to protect you. I am not going back without you."

  "We cannot go back till moonset."

  "Till moonset, then." He ties off his loin wrap with a lash of vine. "You've been here before, I think."

  "Not in this life."

  "Your robes came up with you—"

  "Yes, they are woven with silver thread." She spies a gleam of eyes in the fretful shadows, many retinal

  sparks, blinking like fireflies. Falon notices them a moment later and moves to guard her. "Pixies," she says, stopping him with an upraised hand. "They're harmless. Just curious. They don't see the body-lights of people up here often."

  Falon observes then that there are many tiny human

  forms scuttling through the phosphorus dark. "Why are we here?"

  "You know."

  "To work magic for our people." He apprehensively searches the cold heights of the canopy. Slants of frosty light illuminate a tumult of vines and gnarled boughs. "What magic is that?"

  "The magic of sacrifice, Falon." She sidles through the curtain of hanging flowers, back into the mauve dusk, and stands staring upward at the saw-toothed mountains.

  "Sacrifice?" That word tightens Falon's mouth, and the fierce orange whiskers of his mustache bristle. "That is why you've come alone? To sacrifice yourself?" A fluster of red butterflies crisscross after him through the rent draperies as he follows his queen into the open. "You are going to sacrifice your life?"

  "Yes." She begins marching back up the bluff, still attentive to the purple sierras, where stars glitter like spume. "I have never seen you here in my sight, Falon.

  That means you should not be here. I do
not want you to interfere, do you understand?"

  "I am sworn to protect your life, older sister."

  Guardedly, he searches side to side, spotting rat-swift motions in the dense grass, where the ground steams

  wispily as if still cooling from the primordial day. He is not sure if the cold that bites deeper into his flesh is the wind or his dread. "No matter what magic you might win for our people, I cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself to death."

  She stops and looks at him softly. Each hair in her

  eyebrows, each amber eyelash, glints in the strange shine of the Storm Tree. "Falon, not death. I mean to sacrifice my life to him."

  She lifts her young face upward, toward a giant man

  skidding down from the mountains. His blue cape flows translucent and furled as starsmoke in the sky above, dragging all the heavens behind him. He is bigger than the roc, his stride encompassing whole slopes of spilled

  boulders. The slant brim of his hat flaps with his vigorous gait.

  At a glance, Falon recognizes the roisterous, soot-

  streaked beard and eagle-hooked visage of the one-eyed god. "The chief of the north gods!"

  "Wait for me in the woods, Falon." She shoves into the jeweled grass and waves her arms with ritual slowness.

  Falon shadows her, bent with fear. "Does he know we used his eye to climb up here?"

  Ygrane pauses and points a commanding finger at

  her guard. "You will not breathe that again. Not again. You are not supposed to be here. Go back to the woods."

  "Surely, he has already seen us—"

  "Go anyway." She continues up the grassy slope, and winged sprites big as dragonflies burst into the shining air around her. She waves them aside, toppling one into Falon's path. It tangles in his red hair, the transparency of its wings visible briefly as it struggles free, a finger-long person with large, irenic eyes. In a flutter, the naked thing is gone.

  "Older sister, wait!" He rushes to her side. This is a dream, he tells himself, remembering Ygrane in the circle of swords, asleep. The precise prismatic graininess of sight and the bite of the alpine wind slay that hope. With genuine fear, he croaks, "He is the god of our enemies!"