Oh, they knew!
They knew of the cave, and of the slave.
They knew of Aoleyn’s uamhas lover.
They knew and she was damned. By Usgar, she was damned.
Better you had died in the Mouth! rang Connebragh’s voice in her thoughts. Shame!
Shame! another echoed.
Shame!
Shame! Shame!
Over and over, from every direction, a dozen voices, disparate yet united against her.
She couldn’t think straight, she couldn’t see straight. She wondered where she was more than once, and which direction was which, and how she could fly away. But no, she couldn’t fly away, because if she did, she’d lead them straight to Bahdlahn.
I will have him, rang the loudest voice in her head, the voice of Mairen, who had been listening to Aoleyn’s thoughts through the cacophony of the shrieking Coven, who had heard her reference to Bahdlahn.
Tay Aillig will have him, Mairen taunted.
We know the cave, Connebragh’s spirit imparted. He will have your head from your shoulders. Oh, but you’ve failed us, Aoleyn!
Aoleyn’s spirit managed to look out, then, to see torches moving along the trail to the east, toward the cave, where her physical form sat helpless, where Bahdlahn could not hope to protect her, but would surely die trying.
Tay Aillig would eat him, Aoleyn knew.
She thought of that, she focused on that. She pictured Bahdlahn beneath her as she swayed on the rocky spur. She heard his moans of pleasure and turned them into groans of pain. In her thoughts, she brought forth her memories of the fossa’s cave, that pit of murder and despair. She let them all see it, and smell it, and feel the pervasive, evil coldness.
And while the witches of the Coven faltered beneath that weight of despair, Aoleyn stayed with Bahdlahn in her imagination. She thought of him now screaming in agony under the torture of Tay Aillig, and she grew angry, and her spirit began to brighten with the heat of that anger.
No longer a shadow, but a light, she burned with rage and glowed like the most powerful diamond. The wisps of witches reaching out at her dissipated under the brilliance of that angry light, unable to penetrate the cocoon Aoleyn had woven for herself, a shell of burning, denying rage.
It wouldn’t be enough. She had to break the circles, had to escape.
She found the weakest link in their dancing chain and leaped for it, attacking now with all her fury.
Moragh.
It was Moragh, barely a woman. Aoleyn caught her and grabbed her. She found the link between this mere child and Moragh’s physical body, a thin line of sensibility, a lifeline cord.
She could have snapped it, unbinding the woman, letting Moragh’s disembodied spirit wander helplessly, unlikely to ever find her way back.
It would be so easy. The novice was no match for the power of Aoleyn!
She couldn’t bring herself to do it, couldn’t do to this poor girl what the fossa had done to Elara and to Seonagh.
She invaded Moragh with all her consciousness instead, and yelled into every corner of the witch’s consciousness, I am not what you believe!
And Aoleyn was gone, passing through Moragh, flying fast across the encampment, chasing the torches.
She passed over them, over Tay Aillig and Egard and Aghmor—oh, Aghmor!—and a handful of other warriors, running fast and true for the secret cave.
Mairen’s whispers nipped at her spirit, Connebragh beside her, others coming.
Aoleyn shot for the cave. She didn’t go for the opening, to weave in through the foyer and the narrow passageway. No, she went right through the wall, finding cracks she could not have seen with her physical eyes in the brightest daylight.
She came into her body so forcefully that she tumbled over amidst the pile of rugs.
“Aoleyn!” Bahdlahn cried.
Her eyes snapped open and she stopped his approach with a striking stare.
“Run,” she implored him. “Run!”
“Aoleyn,” he said, hesitating, then stubbornly coming forward.
Aoleyn fell into her gemstone, into her moonstone, and created a burst of wind that sent the strong young man tumbling backward, into and down the narrow channel.
“They are coming!” she yelled.
I am here! Mairen said in her mind.
“Tay Aillig knows!” Aoleyn shouted. “Run! Flee!”
She felt them, then, in her mind, attacking her relentlessly. She tried to stand, but Sorcha took control of one leg and twisted it under her, pitching her face down to the side.
Aoleyn grabbed at the only thing she could find: the pendant on her hip. Hardly even considering the movement, she brought forth its power and lashed out at the natural hallway, turning stones to lava and dropping them to block the way before stubborn Bahdlahn could come back after her.
“Run!” she yelled with all her strength. “They’re almost here! Just run!”
The witches swarmed her, then, her jaw clenching uncontrollably, so tightly that her teeth hurt. Her arms flailed, her vision failed, and she was there, but she was not, caught inside herself too deeply, as if in a sealed black room, a chamber of emptiness.
Rage, she told herself. Rage!
21
EXPLOSIONS
The heat was too intense, the falling stones glowing angrily under the strange enchantment Aoleyn had put upon them. Bahdlahn tried to get through, once, then again, yelling loudly to block out the terribly true words Aoleyn was shouting at him.
She convulsed. She told him to run. “They’re almost here!”
She began to shake mightily, flopping about on the floor, and Bahdlahn couldn’t get to her—and what might he do if he did get to her?
He wanted to die beside her, but he could not get through. He wanted to hold her and shield her and fight off their persecutors, but she was being persecuted in her mind, he understood, by spirits he could not punch. The damned Usgar witches had come for her and grabbed her, and now the warriors were coming, too.
For him.
He owed it to her to get away. She was imploring him, as he would implore her were the situation reversed. She would not want him to die in trying futilely to save her, as he would never want Aoleyn, his lovely, wonderful Aoleyn, to remain beside him at the price of her own life out of misguided loyalty.
Bahdlahn tried to get through one more time anyway, and was repelled.
He stumbled out of the cave and he ran. Bahdlahn ran. Tears in his eyes, sobs choking him, he ran.
He ran from the deamhans.
He ran for a home he had never known.
* * *
Aghmor slowed as he neared the area of the cave, even pretending to be unsure of the area, but right behind him, Tay Aillig shoved him and told him to move along.
What had he done? He wanted to rewind the last moments of his life!
But in the consideration of regret, Aghmor saw her again, straddling Bahdlahn, under the starlight, moaning with pleasure.
He charged away, past the spot where he had fallen and Bahdlahn had saved him. This was their fault, not his. He jabbed his finger ahead, pointing, when they came in sight of the cave, and started to lead the way in, spear in hand.
Tay Aillig grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back, rushing ahead. Into the alcove he went, easily discovering the narrow channel behind the half wall at the back of the shallow foyer. He went around, out of sight, fast, and came right back even faster, stumbling, rubbing at his eyes and face.
When Aghmor and Egard came in close behind, they understood, for behind that half wall, the heat shimmered in the air, the stones glowing angrily.
“She is powerful,” Egard remarked. “Even now.”
Tay Aillig and Aghmor moved to the entryway of the short natural passageway, squinting against the heat, which was only gradually diminishing. Peering through the smoking and steaming, they could see Aoleyn, squirming and thrashing on the ground, gurgling strange sounds, her arms and legs moving in a not at all c
oordinated manner.
“Mairen has her,” Tay Aillig said, nodding and smiling.
“Bahdlahn is gone,” Aghmor said, and it wasn’t until both Tay Aillig and Egard regarded him curiously that he understood his mistake. “Thump,” he explained. “Aoleyn calls him Bahdlahn.”
“You seem to know much,” said Egard.
“He kept me alive. They kept me alive. Throughout the winter, the slave served me.”
“You would call for mercy?”
Aghmor stared hard at Egard. “I will throw him into Craos’a’diad myself, if Usgar-triath allows.” He looked past the two men to those standing just outside the cave. “Gather snow,” he ordered. “Bring it quickly.”
They did, and threw it on the stones, Aoleyn’s dying magic hissing and steaming in protest.
“When it cools enough, enter and hold her,” Tay Aillig told three of them. “Bind her hands and feet and gag her, but nothing more.”
He paused and looked to each of them intently, telling them with his eyes that they had better not fail him in this. “Nothing more,” he restated.
He motioned for Aghmor, Egard, and the remaining two to follow, and started away.
Bahdlahn’s trail was not hard to find in the muddy and sometimes snowy ground, a wide and deep path that showed him to be stumbling and slipping with every desperate step.
“She is more dangerous,” Egard dared remind them as the five started out.
“Mairen has her,” Tay Aillig replied. “And twelve others have her. I only hope there will be enough of the heretic’s consciousness remaining that she will realize the pain I will inflict on her.”
“When she goes into Craos’a’diad?” Egard asked.
“By the time she goes into the chasm, she will be begging for her death. If she makes it that far.”
Aghmor swallowed hard and kept his eyes turned away. He understood what Tay Aillig was talking about. He remembered the uamhas women captured in the raids, taken halfway up the mountain and horribly abused before they were released and sent stumbling, blind with sorrow and terror and humiliation.
He knew what Aoleyn would soon face.
“Her fault,” he whispered under his breath, because he had to, because to think anything else made him want to scream and leap into Craos’a’diad himself.
The five set off at a swift pace. Behind them, they heard one of the three left behind laughing, and Aghmor knew that they had breached the melted corridor, and were likely descended upon Aoleyn even then.
* * *
They came at her from every angle, with every thought, anticipating her moves and countering them before she could begin.
They had caught her by surprise, all thirteen. She should have known better than to fly so near the Usgar encampment. She should have gone up higher, to look back on them all, on the sacred lea and the Crystal God, where the witches danced.
Now they had her, and even her great rage couldn’t expel them, for there were too many and they were too ever-present in her every thought as it formulated.
Aoleyn went away from plotting and away from rage, and went instead to a memory, distant. She saw a young mother with an elongated skull, a lakewoman, cradling her baby in her arms and telling him “You are stupid” over and over again.
There, Aoleyn remained, watching that scene, allowing her feelings to become a wall, a cocoon against the invading witches. They couldn’t relate to her in that moment, couldn’t begin to comprehend, even, what they were seeing as they chased Aoleyn’s focused meditation.
She replayed the scene over and over again, basking in it, becoming wholly within that moment of her distant life, one of her earliest memories.
She didn’t feel the warriors grabbing her and pulling her arms behind her back. No, she was not there, but was into her memory fully, in the cave with the uamhas, watching the mother.
“You are stupid.”
Within the echoes of that simple sentence, Aoleyn began to reconstruct her feelings. As she had come to understand the implications, the truth of the uamhas and their inevitable fates, Aoleyn allowed her anger to grow, and her shame for her tribe, using those powerful emotions as further insulation in her cocoon. Inside, she curled, a speck of freedom within her spirit, hidden fully from Mairen and the others, who were out there, in the rest of her being, possessing her.
Even Aoleyn’s anger came from a place of deep calm and acceptance then, and from, mostly, a sense of truth and simple right and wrong. She let it build and gather momentum—she pushed away any thoughts of urgency.
Her physical limbs began to twitch, to press against the bindings, though she felt nothing. Her eyelids fluttered, though she was seeing nothing.
She was just there, in her cocoon of a memory from long ago, in a spot of privacy and meditation, and letting that meditation lead to a singular truth, building, building.
Then exploding.
The spirit of Aoleyn came forth then with new heights of denial and anger. She couldn’t speak aloud, for she hadn’t control of her physical being yet (and had been gagged, anyway, though she didn’t know it). But within her spirit and her mind, she came forth, roaring, pushing, rejecting the intrusions.
The minor witches flew away, easily and forcefully expelled.
She found the consciousness of Sorcha and hit the old woman with a wall of shame, one she knew Sorcha, who had been friend to Seonagh, could not deny.
Then there were but two, and Connebragh fast wilted under the weight of Aoleyn’s truth—as Aoleyn had believed, Connebragh was one of a good heart, and having that memory bared to her, a tale of a mother so desperate to save her child that she told him he was stupid, that he had to be stupid or the Usgar would murder him horribly, was more than Connebragh could so nakedly face.
That left Mairen, just Mairen, who knew no shame with regards to the uamhas. Mairen alone within the mind of Aoleyn, vying with Aoleyn for control.
In the earlier fight, bolstered by her sisters, catching Aoleyn by surprise, Mairen had held the upper hand, but now they were evenly faced, these two women, and in the body of Aoleyn.
Get out! Aoleyn’s every thought demanded.
Traitor! Heretic! Mairen’s spirit countered, hitting Aoleyn with waves of accusations she believed would bring shame and defense.
What she didn’t realize, however, is that her insults rang as compliments to Aoleyn, who knew the truth of Usgar, the god and the tribe, and knew that truth to be awful and wicked.
Mairen had no support here, and by the time she realized she had taken the wrong angle of attack, it was too late.
Aoleyn expelled her.
And Aoleyn took back her thoughts and her body fully, spasming and jolting about as she began to realize the physical world about her.
“Hold the witch!” she heard a warrior say, and a boot slammed down on her back, pressing her hard to the floor.
She was caught. She was tied. She was surrounded.
That realization came with the awful understanding that she could not use half-measures here, not if she had any hopes of surviving, or of protecting Bahdlahn, who was surely being pursued.
“Here now, why’s the witch glowing white?” she heard an Usgar warrior ask.
* * *
Her spirit coming back into her body so unexpectedly and forcefully, Mairen stumbled away from the Crystal God, where she had been leaning, and fell to the grass of the sacred lea. She looked around at her twelve sisters, all shaking their heads, a couple in whispered conversations.
“That was powerful,” Connebragh said, rushing over to offer the Usgar-righinn a hand back to her feet. “How did she come forth so…”
Before she finished the question, the whole of Fireach Speuer seemed to groan and shiver, and off to the west there came a flash, then a blast of flames, a tremendous fireball, rising up into the air and curling over like a gigantic flaming mushroom before flickering away.
“Aoleyn,” Connebragh breathed as the others gasped.
“The U
sgar-triath!” Sorcha cried, and others began to whisper and wail.
Mairen held up her hand to quiet them. “Hold faith,” she ordered, and to Connebragh, she quietly added, “Go back out in spirit and see what you can learn.”
The younger woman blanched, looking from Mairen to the east and back again repeatedly, clearly not thrilled about going anywhere near the dangerous Aoleyn, in body or in spirit.
As she turned back to the east again, though, Mairen grabbed her by the chin and yanked her head back, then fixed her with a stare to show her that Aoleyn was the least of the dangers before her.
Connebragh nodded and clutched the gray-flecked crystal to her breast, then closed her eyes and began to sing, falling into the magic, using the wedstone flecks to begin the journey of freeing her spirit from her corporeal form.
* * *
It all seemed so terribly familiar to Aghmor when Tay Aillig led the way onto an exposed ledge, looking down the northwestern slopes of Fireach Speuer to the lower trails and ridges where they expected the running uamhas to be.
“Your dagger,” Tay Aillig said, and then again when Aghmor didn’t register that the Usgar-triath was addressing him, calling for his crystal dagger, thickly flecked with flickering quartz. Aghmor peered through the translucent blade, trying to use the magic to grant him distant sight.
“I see … I don’t…” he stammered.
Tay Aillig pulled the dagger from his hand. “You two,” he said to Aghmor and Egard, and he motioned down to the right, where a ridgeline formed a trail down the mountainside. “Down to the pines,” he explained, pointing to a large line of tall pines some few hundred strides below, “with all speed, and curl back in to the west. He had to go through there.”
As those two started, Tay Aillig motioned to the other two to run down along a trail to the left, to the pines and then curling back to the east to meet up with Aghmor and Egard.
Off they ran and Tay Aillig brought the dagger up to his eyes and looked through the magical blade. “Mairen,” he whispered, calling to his wife and hoping that she still held the spiritual connection to him. Even though the witches had blessed their weapons this morning as soon as Aghmor had alerted them of the traitor and the escaped slave, Tay Aillig knew that his power with the far-sight would be greatly enhanced if he could bring Mairen back into his thoughts.
Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 35