Reckoning of Fallen Gods

by R. A. Salvatore

“A prisoner of the Usgar-righinn,” another added.

  Egard nodded, then looked to his men and motioned for them to stay quiet. He wasn’t sure how to proceed here, but he really didn’t like the idea of showing his evidence against Aoleyn to the Usgar-righinn without Tay Aillig present. The Crystal Maven didn’t particularly like him, he believed—but then again, as far as he could tell, Mairen didn’t particularly like any man.

  “We will wait,” he decided, and he squatted down right there, in front of Tay Aillig’s tent, laying Ralid on the ground. He motioned to some women to come and gather the fallen warrior, to prepare him for a proper farewell.

  * * *

  The Mouth of God, Craos’a’diad … high on the mountain, near the peak, looking down on the Usgar winter encampment.

  Tents there. Tents? Surely, there could be no tents, with the wind and the cold …

  Mairen’s spirit fell back inside her own thoughts for a moment to sort it out. This was a mental construct, a structure of comfort. An odd choice for Aoleyn, she thought, truly so, given that this place was a sacrificial pit more than anything else. A place where heretics were thrown. She understood why Aoleyn might be imagining that place at this time, but as a source of comfort? A place with shelter?

  No, not literal tents, of course, Mairen suddenly realized. These were containers, for memories, thoughts, emotions. The Usgar-righinn charged back into her victim, rushed for the tents, tore open a figurative flap.

  A needle, dark gray, pressed against the belly of a young woman … blood, but healing immediately …

  “How did you get the wedstone from the crystal?” Mairen asked aloud when she realized the composition of the needle itself.

  Her verbal prod had her victim looking down at a crystal in her hands, in her memories.

  But the tent flap swept shut, and Mairen growled in anger.

  Another tent loomed before her … an owl flew silently over the Usgar encampment … a woman rushed out of a tent … uamhas …

  A tent … an actual Usgar tent … a tent Mairen knew!

  The owl again, watching … a witch, a friend, stumbling from the tent … a serpent … cries of pain … death!

  “Caia!” Mairen cried aloud. “You knew!”

  The enraged spirit of the Usgar-righinn no longer probed, nay, but attacked, tearing at the tent flaps, ripping and scrambling the pieces. She didn’t want information now, she simply wanted to destroy, to kill.

  Her victim fought back, terrifically, but it would not be enough, and Mairen was glad that they had exhausted and weakened this powerful young woman.

  This young woman she would now utterly destroy.

  Mairen flashed back into her own body, suddenly and violently, and so shockingly that her form went tumbling, losing its grip on Aoleyn and falling to the floor. At first, she thought her victim dead, then, when Aoleyn groaned, considered that the young woman had found the strength to expel her.

  No, she realized, when she looked across the way to see Connebragh holding the gray-flecked crystal, the source of Mairen’s spirit-walking and possession.

  “You dare?” the Usgar-righinn roared.

  Connebragh shrank back, but shook her head in defiance. “Look at her,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “You are killing her.”

  “I will kill her!” Mairen shouted.

  “No, not like this,” Connebragh argued, her tone uncharacteristically harsh and defiant. She shook her head vigorously and spun to the side, clutching the crystal defensively against her torso as Mairen slowly rose and began to approach. “This is not the will of Usgar. This is not our tradition. The tribe will not accept it. Aoleyn’s husband, the Usgar-laoch, will never accept it.”

  That last sentence stopped Mairen in her tracks, for indeed, it rang with truth. Tay Aillig would never forgive her for destroying Aoleyn without his agreement, and privately, which was simply unprecedented and against Usgar tradition. They had a way to execute heretics, after all, and it was one that fed Usgar and so blessed the tribe.

  She turned instead to Aoleyn and slapped her across the face, just once, releasing all of her anger with that single blow. Then she bent low and stared into the glazed eyes of the disoriented young woman.

  “I know what you did,” she said into Aoleyn’s face. “And I know what the uamhas did to Caia, because you know, and knew, and said nothing.”

  Aoleyn seemed to focus on Mairen’s face then, but whether she fully understood or not, the Usgar-righinn could not tell.

  “Connebragh, gather the guards,” Mairen ordered.

  Mairen continued to stare, even when the two men entered a few moments later.

  “Aoleyn’s clothes?” one of the men asked, holding forth a dirty shift.

  “None. Let her show herself in all her shame,” Mairen replied. “But you and your partner can go ahead of us, and speckle the way from the trees to the center of the camp with splinters and sharp stones.”

  “Usgar-righinn?” the surprised man asked.

  But Mairen was talking to Aoleyn then, and focused to the point where she didn’t even hear the question. “You will crawl, dear,” she promised. “All the way to the middle of the camp, naked for all to see. Nowhere to hide, girl. Nowhere to hide. Filthy and bloody, and they will spit on you, every bit of the way, and laugh at your tears of pain and shame. And I’ll tell them to throw small stones, and throw shit, if they so please. Oh, but I will! You deserve every humiliation, and I’ll see you get it.”

  To the side, Connebragh gasped at the severity of Mairen’s judgment.

  * * *

  She had sent Connebragh ahead, Aoleyn knew, because she wanted the pleasure of this painful humiliation firsthand.

  Mairen untied Aoleyn and pushed her to the ground. Hungry, weak, and beaten, both physically and mentally, the young woman offered no resistance. How could she?

  “Crawl,” the Usgar-righinn ordered.

  Aoleyn turned her head to look up over her shoulder at the older woman, whose features seemed sharp in the low and harsh light from the diamond-flecked magical crystal. Aoleyn considered that for just a heartbeat—and got a kick in the ribs for her hesitance.

  So, she crawled, with Mairen guiding her, prodding her. She pressed through the low-hanging pine branches and out into the open. Night had fallen, but the moon was still nearly full, though silver now and not covered by the bloody face of Iseabal.

  A large bonfire roared in the encampment not far away to the west—Connebragh’s doing, Aoleyn knew. Mairen had called for bright light in the camp, because Mairen wanted everyone to witness this.

  Aoleyn crawled, now upon the path the sentries had made of sharp stones and splinters. They bit at her knees like angry little bugs, and her hand got especially pinched on one movement, and began to bleed.

  But though she grunted a few times, the young woman refused to cry out in pain, and though she knew that all manner of ugliness would befall her, likely even an execution, she was determined that she would not cry, and stifled her sniffles and blinked back her tears.

  As she drew closer, she realized that the whole of the tribe was out and about that bonfire, all taunting and cursing at her, and many holding objects. She crossed into the encampment and the rain of missiles began. Most were smelly and disgusting, like rotted mushrooms and wet bulbous weeds, designed to humiliate her. But some threw stones, and not all of those were pebbles.

  Aoleyn kept crawling and shielded her face as much as she could, but not with her arms. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing her afraid.

  A pair of legs appeared before her. The bare legs of a woman.

  “Stop!” she heard Mairen command, and she was surprised that the Usgar-righinn had moved around her without her even knowing it.

  She was right beside the blazing bonfire, the heat of it growing uncomfortable very quickly.

  Aoleyn heard another voice that she thought she recognized. She started to look up, and did enough to see that it was Tay Aillig’s awful nep
hew Egard speaking with Mairen. She only got a brief glance, though, as Mairen was quick to smack her in the face for daring to lift her gaze from the ground.

  The two were whispering, and Aoleyn probably could have made out their words were it not for the continuing curses shouted around her, and the fact that she really wasn’t sure she cared enough to listen.

  It was over. All of it. Every hope, every dream. She had never known love, even physical love, for the one time she had been with a man, she had been raped. She would never know what it was to hold a child of her own, or to see the world beyond this one mountain, which the tribe thought huge, but which she found suffocating and small.

  None of that would she know. It was over. Every dream. She took some comfort in that she had stayed true to herself, but in the end, she had lost to the traditions of Usgar.

  Strangely, she didn’t feel foolish, though her actions had condemned her, for she believed that she had done right in discerning a newer and better way to utilize the blessed crystals. Usgar could not be mad at her for that, she believed, if he was truly the source of such magic, for he had given it to her, after all.

  How, then, could their god tolerate this?

  But Mairen was the voice of Usgar in the tribe.

  Some beads fell to the ground before Aoleyn. She looked at them curiously for a moment, then realized they were hers, though she hadn’t worn them in a long time. They had been in her tent …

  “We found these near the body of Ralid,” Egard claimed, and gasps arose all around. “They’re your own, Aoleyn, are they not? I’ve seen you with them.”

  “I do’no … I have not…” she stuttered, trying to sort out this puzzle. They were near Ralid? But how could that be?

  “The bear,” Mairen said then, and she laughed as if it had all come clear to her.

  Aoleyn looked up, and Mairen did not stop her this time, as if she wanted the young woman to look into her eyes then.

  “The bear,” she said again, nodding. “You saw through the eyes of a bear. You possessed the bear.”

  “A bear attacked us … Ralid!” Egard cried, and Aoleyn caught the slip up, but if anyone else did, they didn’t respond or show it. “You did it,” he accused her, seeming as if he would leap upon her and throttle her then and there. “You murdered an Usgar warrior, who was my friend!”

  The gasps arose again, and the shouts, and calls for Aoleyn to be killed. She had no allies here, she knew, although Connebragh, to the side, seemed more than a little uneasy with all of this.

  “Admit it, child,” Mairen demanded. “I was in your thoughts. I saw. You can’no lie here. Speak truly and so make this easier upon all of us.”

  Others called out at her, a hundred voices assailing her thoughts, jumbling them as she tried to find a place of calm and sort out some direction here.

  The verbal goading continued unrelentingly, and finally, in sheer frustration, Aoleyn shouted out, “I did it!”

  The tribe went silent around her, the only sound the hiss and crackle of the fire.

  “You admit…” Mairen started.

  “Aye,” said Aoleyn. “They were torturing a man—all of them. Ralid, Egard…”

  Egard kicked her in the side, blasting out her breath.

  “Uamhas,” he told the gathering. “We captured an uamhas. We…”

  Mairen put her hand on his arm to silence him. “It does not matter,” the Usgar-righinn told them all, her voice solemn and serious. “Aoleyn has admitted her crime, and it is not the only sin from this one. The Usgar-laoch will return soon and the Usgar-forfach is on his way to us. We know what must be done.”

  As she finished, she stared straight at Aoleyn, and the young woman noted the edges of Mairen’s lips curling up in a perfectly wicked smile of grim satisfaction.

  5

  THE ELDER’S CLEAR EYES

  Carrying his gory trophy, Tay Aillig climbed the trails of Fireach Speuer. At one point, he noted a snake skin off the side of the path, and thought to perhaps find the white-furred viper that had shed it.

  If he could kill the snake and take its head, more specifically its fangs and poison sacs, perhaps he could plant them within his misshapen bear head, giving the trophy a more sinister, less typical appearance. A second set of fangs within the mouth, dripping with poison?

  He dismissed the thought almost as soon as he had it. It was ridiculous to expect that he could get away with such a ruse, and if, or when, caught, his entire declaration would be shown as a fraud, and not as some simple misidentification of the creature he had slain.

  He nodded as he considered again that he was carrying a mighty trophy all its own, even if no one believed that it was the fossa—and that was a claim that Tay Aillig would not openly make. No, he would let Mairen lead here, and meant to only describe his kill as something he had at first thought a bear, but then, after encountering it up close, became far less certain.

  Let them draw their conclusions and voice their suspicions, he thought. That way, there would be no stench of a lie upon him.

  Even if, in the end, it was decided that it was a mountain bear, that was no small trophy among the Usgar. Had any warrior in memory slain an adult bear single-handedly?

  He came upon a rocky rise, still some miles below the camp, and he climbed to the top to gain a better vantage point.

  His people were breaking camp, he believed, though it was hard to tell the specifics from this great distance, and the suspicion surprised him and made him more than a bit indignant. He was the Usgar-laoch, the War Leader! How dare they make such a decision without him, and while not even knowing where he was?

  As he considered it, however, his surprise began to ebb. This was Mairen’s doing, of course, and she knew where he was, and that he would soon be returning, or, now, that he would soon enough catch up to the migration. Given all of the strange events of the last few days, Tay Aillig soon enough found himself nodding in agreement with the witch’s choice. There would be no more raids on the uamhas, they had long ago decided, and all the hunts had been completed, the stores ready for the long winter respite. Better to climb to the winter plateau early, for though the recent days had been warm enough, the weather this high up could change very quickly.

  One year, Tay Aillig remembered, he had gone to bed, not even bothering to wear a shirt, for the air was so warm, only to wake up to a bedding of snow across the upper reaches of the mountain that reached almost to his hip.

  That year’s journey to the winter plateau had been a horrible ordeal. They had lost an uamhas, and nearly her tender, in an icy slide down a steep ravine.

  He climbed back down the rocky outcropping and started again up the mountainside, at first swiftly, that he might get to the encampment before they had set out.

  His pace slowed soon after, though, as he considered things.

  He had no desire to help with breaking down the tents and packing the supplies, and more importantly, if he was not there when they left, many Usgar would be staring out at the lower reaches of Fireach Speuer, seeking some sign of their Usgar-laoch, fearing that perhaps he had been wounded or killed out on the dangerous mountain.

  His heroic return would be more dramatic.

  “Aye,” he said with a nod. He rolled in the soft and moist dirt at the side of the trail, then, and even cut himself in a few places. He wanted them to see him entering the camp, dirty and battered, but carrying such a trophy as this.

  He found some blueberry bushes then, and an apple tree, so settled in for some dinner, then curled up under a shady tree and took an afternoon nap.

  The sun was almost down when he awakened, dusk had fallen, but that meant little to Tay Aillig. The moon would not be full this night, and it would not be red, in any case. There were creatures on the mountain that could kill him, of course—bears and great cats, packs of wolves and coyotes, even the giant condors called rocs, and deadly mountain vipers. But Tay Aillig knew them, as he knew this place, and so he knew how to avoid them.

 
; Not far from the rocky outcropping, he backtracked and began to climb once more. He grew curious as he neared the top, coming around the side of the stone hill enough to catch a glimpse up the mountain, and to see the glow of a bonfire in the area where he knew the encampment to be.

  They hadn’t yet broken camp, he realized, a bit disappointed.

  That turned to curiosity a heartbeat later, though, when the Usgar-laoch noted a line of small fires, torches, higher up on the mountain.

  “What are you about, Mairen?” he whispered, suspecting, rightly, that this was her game.

  * * *

  The twelve current members of the witch’s Coven of Usgar sang softly as they made their way slowly up the mountainside, each carrying a torch, each wearing nothing but a simple smock to mid-thigh, each dancing with every step, often turning about, arms high and wide, to draw circles of fire in the air with their torches. Three warriors accompanied the procession, including Egard, nephew of the Usgar-laoch, and one older man, Ahn’Namay, considered the highest-ranking man among the elders and the likely successor to Usgar-forfach Raibert when Raibert at last crossed from this life.

  At the back of the line, the three warriors formed a triangle around Aoleyn, who was tied and gagged, her wrists each bound to a pole held by one of the warriors, while Egard stood behind her with a nasty scourge, ready—nay, eager—to punish her if she moved in any way not prescribed by her captors.

  Between the warriors and the witches went Ahn’Namay, supported by an uamhas woman who had been tasked with helping him along the difficult hike. Not just any uamhas, but Innevah, the mother of Bahdlahn.

  Aoleyn squeezed back tears watching the woman marching before her. Aoleyn was certain of her own fate, but she didn’t think the choice of Innevah to accompany them this night a coincidence. When Mairen had been inside her thoughts, she had seen the memories, the images of Aoleyn’s time flying in the body of a bird, and seeing through the eyes of that owl, when she had witnessed Innevah sneaking out of the tent belonging to the witch, Caia. She couldn’t be sure that Mairen had seen or deduced what Aoleyn had come to believe about that incident, but she was very afraid. For Aoleyn was fairly certain that the white snake that had killed Caia had not entered her tent by accident.