* * *
They say and it’s been told that Cizinfozza burst his own body, to destroy Otontotomi, and we Xoconai cried, for this was the greatest temple of Scathmizzane, the heart of Tonoloya. The skies did weep, the fires of Tonalli hidden behind the smoke of Cizinfozza’s burst form, and so was Otontotomi buried in a cold and airless tomb, and there, too, was the living Kithkukulikahn interred. Cizinfozza’s spirit then did wickedly turn the xelquiza against his own children, to drive the goblins away, and in their hatred did the half-bloods come to see the love we Xoconai held for the goblin mict to be an evil thing, and so they hated, too, the Xoconai, and so they fought us, the children of Scathmizzane.
* * *
They say and it’s been told that in that onset of the greatest war, in that darkest moment, Scathmizzane accepted the truth of the world between the seas.
Then from the vast plain did he raise, and we Xoconai did cross, Teotl Tenamitl, and the great mountains did then end the war. And here in Tonoloya did we Xoconai multiply and grow stronger, while in Mictlan, the east lands of Zalanatl, the humans did battle the mict of Cizinfozza, and in the divide among the mountains did the xelquiza half-bloods roam, godless, hopeless.
In the east, the humans won, and did multiply and grow stronger, and their kingdoms crawled to Ayuskixmal, the eastern slopes of Teotl Tenamitl, scattering the few xelquiza, claiming the land.
And we Xoconai did wait, and we were promised that Cizinfozza would meet his end, and in that moment would Kithkukulikahn rise and eat Tonalli, and vomit Tonalli, to tell we Xoconai of the light renewed.
In that glorious moment would begin the march.
* * *
They say and it’s been told that in this moment Tonoloya will stretch to the eastern sea once more.
Necu Tonoloya, it will be called, and all of Zalanatl will be Scathmizzane’s, ruled by the Xoconai, between the seas. In the east, we will watch Tonalli ignite her fires as she rises from the great sea. In the west, we will watch Tonalli quiet her flames as she goes to sleep beneath the waters.
Zalanatl will know light.
—The Last Augur of Darkness
12
SALVO
“It will snow today,” Talmadge told Aydrian, the pair moving up the mountain southwest of Carrachan Shoal.
“Are you sure that’s not just your mood speaking?” Aydrian replied, giving Talmadge pause. The frontiersman stopped and regarded his companion.
“She was not pleased to see you?” Aydrian asked.
“She hates me and I do’no blame her,” Talmadge replied. He closed his eyes, both reliving the memory of his shocking encounter with Khotai and trying to excise it from his mind all at once.
“Do you believe her less surprised than yourself? Given your description of the encounter with the lake monster, she thought you dead, of course.”
“I left her.”
“You found her leg! How could you…”
“It matters not. I should have looked. I should have summoned the courage to find her.”
“In the belly of a dragon?”
“But she was not, was she?”
Aydrian sighed audibly. “How could you know?”
“I left her. It is what I do. It is what I did in my home. It is what I did to Khotai. It is what I do.” He looked up the mountain and thought of that unusual and powerful Usgar woman, Aoleyn.
Aydrian’s laugh surprised him.
“You mock me?”
“Or myself,” Aydrian replied. “It would seem that I am able to forgive myself much more easily than is Talmadge.”
“Who did you abandon?”
Aydrian laughed again. “I waged war on the world. Against my own mother. I should have been hanged, or drawn and quartered, after the defeat of my army, and am alive only through the sufferance of those I wronged.”
“And you can so easily dismiss your guilt? What does that say about Aydrian, I wonder?”
“Dismiss it? No, my friend Talmadge, I do no such thing. I bear it as my weight and as my reminder. I wish I could go back and undo all that … it does not matter, because I cannot. What I can do is be better, make what amends I might. You, though, wear a frown of judgment for an action that was not evil, nor cowardly, nor even a slight bit unreasonable. You found her severed leg, Talmadge. Who could have expected that she would survive such a wound?”
“She hates me.”
Aydrian shrugged. “Her surprise…”
“I know, but after the surprise, last night when we were alone … I could feel it. She wanted me to leave. She told me to leave. I tried to argue…” He closed his eyes. He could see Khotai’s face, still beautiful, but twisted into a profound scowl as she yelled at him to leave her alone, to be gone from Carrachan Shoal, her new home forevermore. “I tried to argue.”
“Thus, you led me up here this morning. To find something, you said, but was it really to run away once more?”
Talmadge gave a dismissive snort and spun away. “These trees all look the same,” he said with no small anger.
“They are trees, after all,” Aydrian answered, and Talmadge turned back to see the man smiling. “Likely they feel the same way about men.”
Talmadge stared at him blankly.
“You learn these things when you are among the Touel’alfar,” Aydrian explained. “Are you actually searching for something?”
“There is a place, somewhere about here,” Talmadge replied, glancing all about. “But it was dark—the forest looks much different at night.” He didn’t add that everything also looked different when one was being dragged around by a gang of Usgar warriors.
“I was not alone,” he did say. “And there was a bear. Even though some days have passed, there should be tracks.”
“It has snowed and rained, and the snow melted,” Aydrian reminded him. “The ground was near frozen a few days ago, so no tracks would have been deep.”
Talmadge couldn’t deny that. He had thought it would be easier to find the spot where he had been tied and tortured. He should have come right back when he first realized his loss, but so much had transpired in between.
“We won’t find it,” he said, his voice thick with resignation.
“You still haven’t told me what you seek,” Aydrian reminded him.
Talmadge hesitated, but what did it matter? “I am looking for something I dropped,” he said. “A lens.”
Aydrian cocked his head. “What sort of lens?”
“The sort that lets me see far.”
“A spyglass?”
Talmadge shook his head. “Smaller.” He held up a hand to indicate the size.
“And it lets you see over distances?”
Talmadge nodded.
“Great distances?”
He nodded again.
“Magically?”
Talmadge didn’t answer, but his expression told Aydrian all he needed to know.
Aydrian laughed again. “You should have said so!” He reached into his pack and pulled out a small red stone, polished and round. He focused his eyes on the stone for a moment, then looked up. “I am no stranger to magical items, my friend Talmadge. The Abellican Church in the east, for all of their claims that the gemstones were gifts from God and so sacred and to be in the hands of the monks alone, would often sell stones to noblemen and wealthy merchants, who could not use them as the monks might, but who could have them crafted into items usable by any, like my own sword and armor.”
Aydrian clenched the red stone in his fist, which began to glow slightly as the magical power of the gem grew. Then he held it up to his eye.
The smile disappeared from Aydrian’s face. He blinked a few times, looking around.
“What is it?” Talmadge asked.
“It’s … your lost lens is this way,” Aydrian answered and started off.
Talmadge paused, staring at the man, suspecting that Aydrian was not telling him everything. He said nothing, and followed, and in a short while, they came to a clearing Ta
lmadge recognized.
He saw the tree to which he had been tied, and off to the side, followed Aydrian’s movements to a pile of leaves, and the glint of crystal.
Aydrian picked it up and held it aloft, studying it. “It is a fine piece.”
“More trouble than it’s worth,” Talmadge said, taking it back.
“You came to find it,” Aydrian reminded him.
“I need it now, but that does’no mean I trust it.”
Aydrian seemed confused by that.
“I am not always sure of what I am seeing. I do’no think the lens always shows me true.”
Aydrian held out his hand and motioned for it back, then inspected it again, more closely, before tossing it to Talmadge. “Perhaps the problem is with the user, not the item. It seems a fine piece to me. Perhaps I can offer you some training to better understand what it shows you.”
“Be quick, please.”
“You need it,” Aydrian said.
“There’s a woman…” Talmadge began, nodding.
“In Carrachan Shoal.”
“No, not Khotai. Another,” Talmadge explained and looked up the mountain.
“You are full of stories, my friend.”
“My book grows thick,” Talmadge agreed, for that was the way Khotai had always described a full and adventurous life. He thought back to those days with that wonderful woman, and it was some time before he looked back at Aydrian, who seemed not to understand the reference.
Before he could explain, though, they heard a noise, distant and sharp, a scream.
“Carrachan Shoal?” Aydrian asked, spinning about.
Talmadge could only shrug. He ran past his companion, moving for a high spur nearer the lake that would let them see.
* * *
The brothers, Asba and Asef, and their friend Tamilee had learned how to make even their sentry duty enjoyable, this day, playing a game of “sixes.” They took turns rolling cubed dice into a tin, six to start. Whenever a six came up, but only once in a turn, that die was removed, and the next roller had to roll five. Then four, if that next roll showed a six as well, and so that die was removed, and all the way down to a single die, if needed.
The first player who rolled without getting a six lost the round. They gambled for baubles, for stones, for food treats, for extra watch duty through the night, even for clothes when they were really bored. But it was just for fun, and just to pass the time.
The three always took their actual purpose seriously, though, and even when playing, rotated the watch, ever vigilant.
That sense of duty saved their lives this day, when Asba, at the window of the small treehouse they had built on the perimeter, noted movement up in the foothills. At first, he thought it the strangers, Talmadge the trader and the man with the shining armor and deamhan-like magic, but before he even said that to his companions, he noted more movement.
Much more movement.
“Sidhe,” he whispered. “Lots of sidhe.”
The others scrambled to their feet, Tamilee rushing to the window while Asef, who hadn’t found much luck in rolling this day, quickly pulled on his shirt and shoes.
Tamilee didn’t have to wait long for confirmation of Asba’s observations, for the foothills ahead of them suddenly swarmed with the thick-bodied mountain goblins.
“We can’no fight that,” Tamilee whispered.
“Run,” Asba told her and his brother. “Just run. Out the back and run!”
He paused, crossing the floor, to usher Tamilee by him, and helped the struggling Asef get up after finally getting his shoes on. Out the back of the treehouse they went, dropping down to the ground and sprinting away.
Behind them, a sidhe screeched, and others joined in from nearby slopes, and the chase was on.
“The lake! To the boats!” all three screamed as they neared the town. Some villagers stopped and stared, while others, veterans of Usgar raids in past years, just dropped whatever they were holding and ran to the southeast, to the cove that held the village watercraft.
As the trio moved to the village proper, many of the sturdiest folk had gathered, men and women with weapons in hand. The three skidded up to them.
“Usgar?” one of the older veterans asked.
“Sidhe,” said Tamilee. “Many!”
“Too many,” Asef added. He could see the doubts on the faces of the gathered. The folk of Carrachan Shoal fled the Usgar, as was the custom in all the villages. But the Usgar were great warriors, and carried magic that the lakemen could not withstand. The sidhe were not so powerful.
But neither were the sidhe often seen in such numbers as were now approaching Carrachan Shoal, Asef knew.
“Too many,” he said again, shaking his head, imploring the leaders to order a full retreat.
“Form! All defenders!” the village leader shouted. “To the boats, all the rest!” His expression changed and the blood visibly drained from his face then as the sidhe horde crashed into the southernmost houses of Carrachan Shoal, more sidhe than any of those gathered had ever seen before.
Screaming and scrambling, most of the town ran for the boats, but the warriors, Asef, Asba, and Tamilee among them, stood their ground and lifted their spears and clubs.
“Give me a weapon!” came a voice from behind the forming line, and Asef turned to see Khotai on her roller board, holding her hand.
“Woman, run … err, crawl!” he shouted at her.
“A spear!” she shouted back. “A club. Anything! I’d rather die in a fight than flee a stinking goblin.”
“Get her out of here,” the village leader told Asef. “Go, to the boats.”
Asef paused, not wanting to leave his brother and dear friend, and not wanting to do anything to save this wretched woman. He didn’t even want to touch her.
But another did, a large man, breaking from the ranks, scooping the surprised Khotai from her board and hoisting her high as he sprinted for the cove—with Khotai cursing him and punching him every step of the way.
Asef nodded and turned about, then nearly jumped out of his shoes as the first wave of mountain goblins came charging in. For a brief moment, the line held, with coordinated spear thrusts and support among the villagers. But they weren’t used to this many sidhe, or the sidhe demeanor, for they charged in fearlessly, fanatically even, and the second wave broke through and sent more than one man or woman spinning down to the ground, to be covered by clawing, biting, stomping goblins.
Then it was chaos, purely so, as Asef and Asba and Tamilee and many others had never before seen, had never even imagined. The three friends tried to stay together in mutual support, but the goblins got between them, between all of them, pushing relentlessly forward.
Asef turned aside a crude spear at the last moment, got scraped hard across the side by a second one, but managed to backhand punch that sidhe hard enough to drive it back and buy him enough time to retreat from the first attacker. He called for Asba and Tamilee, but they had their own problems at that moment, each engaged with a capable foe.
The first goblin pursued with abandon, and Asef managed to keep his composure enough to properly defend, and even managed to cleverly set the butt of his spear against the side of a house right before his nearest opponent leaped at him, impaling itself.
Asef’s thrill of victory proved short-lived, though, for the stabbed sidhe went into a frenzy, spinning all about and tearing the spear shaft from Asef’s hands. The monster went rolling away, but the other one came charging in at the now unarmed man.
* * *
“Khotai,” Talmadge breathed, looking down at Carrachan Shoal from on high. A fire had started in the town, where the activity was still high, a battle clearly raging. Shouts and cries of pain carried up to the high ridge. They could barely make out the combatants, but enough to see that the villagers were fighting a retreating action, and seemed as if they would be overrun at any moment.
Many boats were already out on the lake, at least, pulling away from the town.
/> “We’ve got to get to them,” Talmadge said, glancing all about. The two men stood on a rocky bluff and the path before them was far from promising. “Back around,” he said, turning in the direction they had come.
But there, he froze.
“What?” asked Aydrian, who glanced over at his companion, to see him standing there, blood draining from his face. He spun about to see what Talmadge was looking at, and he understood.
Not far from them, mountain goblins streamed down the trails, but not toward Carrachan Shoal, not east of the ridge upon which Aydrian and Talmadge now stood. They were moving down the mountain in the west, straight for Fasach Crann.
Aydrian leaped over and pulled Talmadge down low. “What is this?” he asked. “You said nothing…”
“In all the years I’ve come here, I’ve seen few of these monsters,” Talmadge replied. “Nothing like this.”
“We have to get to your friends.”
“Khotai.”
“No. We can beat this group to the other town,” Aydrian explained. “A warning may save many lives.” As he spoke, he pulled that bow with its feathered end off his back, and in one easy movement bent and strung it.
Talmadge glanced back the other way. “My Khotai,” he said, but he nodded to Aydrian.
Aydrian took the lead, hopping agilely down the back side of the ridge, which was not nearly as treacherous as going the other way. On the lower ground, he sprinted ahead down to a copse of trees, trying to discern how far ahead the leading goblins might be.
It looked to him like he and Talmadge could get ahead of the invaders, but they were going to have to cross open ground to do so, and once spotted, they’d be chased all the way, no doubt.
“We’re going to run down that way, and they’ll see us,” Aydrian decided. “You’re going to keep running, all the way to the town.”
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure you get there well ahead of the invaders.”
Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 18