Reckoning of Fallen Gods

by R. A. Salvatore

  She didn’t answer his call.

  But it didn’t matter a moment later, and the Usgar-triath grinned, for he spotted the uamhas stumbling along an open expanse of slippery rock straight down from his perch. Just as he had expected, and he knew that his hunters, their feet lightened by the magic of the green flecks in their spear tips, would get to the pines before him.

  Tay Aillig would have the slave, surely, but that thought did not excite him. Before, he had wanted to torment this uamhas mostly because of the obvious pain it caused to Aoleyn. But now he had Aoleyn, too, and that was the most delicious thing of all. She would die, and then who might challenge him?

  Aoleyn would be forgotten before the snow had fully melted. Tay Aillig, Mairen beside him, would hold the Usgar in his grasp.

  His smile became a mask of confusion then as the ground beneath him trembled, as Fireach Speuer itself, it seemed, roared. He looked back to see a massive fireball rolling up into the morning sky.

  Mairen had done that, he told himself.

  He hoped.

  * * *

  Egard led the way, eagerly running along the trail, his knuckles whitening with anticipation as he clutched his spear.

  For Aghmor, it was quite the opposite. What had he done? His outrage had carried him from his cave to the Usgar encampment. Jealousy had driven him to betray Aoleyn and Bahdlahn—Aoleyn, whom he desperately desired, and Bahdlahn, who had kept him alive through the winter, selflessly. The slave could have killed him at any time, or could have simply refused to bring Aghmor any food and let him starve to death.

  Now Bahdlahn was doomed, by Aghmor’s witness. Horribly doomed, with Aoleyn condemned beside him.

  “He deserved it,” Aghmor muttered under his breath, and he conjured that horrible image yet again, that he might hide behind his shock and anger.

  But he didn’t believe his words. He would be long dead now except for the efforts of Bahdlahn.

  “Keep up!” Egard said to him, circling back.

  “My leg,” Aghmor answered, and it wasn’t completely a lie. Going downhill was much tougher on his injured leg than crossing the side of the mountain, or even climbing.

  “I can’no kill him without incurring the wrath of Tay Aillig,” Egard said. “You’re to help in catching him.”

  Aghmor just waved him along.

  “He’s going to let you kill the uamhas,” Egard said. “You have my envy.”

  “Who is?” Aghmor asked, genuinely caught off guard.

  “Tay Aillig will let you murder the uamhas,” Egard explained. “Might even let you be the first to torture Aoleyn before he finishes the witch. Might let us all have a turn with her.”

  Egard turned and started away again, and Aghmor, stunned, somehow paced him. He didn’t doubt Egard’s claims. Tay Aillig was the cruelest man Aghmor had ever known—he would let—nay, he would force—Aghmor to kill Bahdlahn precisely because he knew that doing so would bring great pain to Aghmor.

  The warrior thought of the time his friend Brayth lay helpless after a fall, when Tay Aillig had ordered Aghmor to finish him. Aghmor had started to strike, but had been stopped, and mocked, by Tay Aillig, in front of all the others of the raiding party.

  This time, Tay Aillig would make him push the spear tip through Bahdlahn’s chest, surely.

  And Aoleyn. Could he doubt Egard’s claims? Tay Aillig would likely have all the Usgar men take turns humiliating and raping her, as he, as they did when catching uamhas women on their raids.

  The image burned in Aghmor’s mind.

  He tried to cover it with the image of Aoleyn straddling Bahdlahn, but he could not.

  He told himself that Bahdlahn deserved it, that Aoleyn deserved it, but he knew he was lying.

  What had he done?

  Aghmor’s pace increased. He followed Egard around a shelf of boulders.

  He called for Egard to wait, and when the young warrior paused and turned to regard him, Aghmor drove his spear into Egard’s side.

  The victim gasped and pulled away, the back edges of the crystalline spear tip tearing more of his flesh. He stumbled and Aghmor struck again, stabbing hard into Egard’s hip, then retracted and slashed the spear across for the lurching Egard’s face.

  Egard somehow ducked the attack and even tried to counter, but his torn hip would not comply and he pitched forward, instinctively rolling to try to put some ground between him and his attacker.

  Aghmor, caught in confusion by his own impulsive actions, didn’t pursue, but he didn’t have to, for Egard’s roll put him right to the edge of the other side of the trail, where the rocky shelf dropped away. He tried to catch himself, but again, his leg gave out under him, and over he tumbled.

  Aghmor ran to the ledge and saw the warrior crashing through the branches of some pines. He winced with the sound of every snapping branch, and fought hard to breathe when Egard came out the bottom of the trees, falling in a broken lump to the hard ground below.

  Aghmor looked down the mountain trail, toward the pines where he was supposed to set the trap for Bahdlahn. He looked back up the other way, though Tay Aillig was not in sight.

  What was he to do now?

  Tay Aillig would still catch Bahdlahn, he knew without doubt, and Aoleyn was already caught up the hill in the cave …

  Fireach Speuer trembled and Aghmor’s eyes went wide as a massive fireball rose into the sky higher up on the mountain, up by the secret cave, he knew.

  What was he to do now?

  He moved back up the trail, ducking when he came in view of the rocky spur, Tay Aillig standing atop it and looking back up the mountain. He thought of going to Aoleyn. He thought of going to try to help Bahdlahn run free.

  He thought of too much, and so, overwhelmed, Aghmor limped off to the southeast, trying to run from all of them.

  22

  HORROR

  Clever woman.

  When she had enacted her serpentine shield before her tremendous fireball, Aoleyn had managed to keep it under her wrist bindings, and so the fireball had incinerated them and Aoleyn freed her arms with an angry tug.

  Before the flames had fully died within the cave, Aoleyn was already rolling to her back, sitting up and going for the bindings around her ankles. But there she froze, for right beside her was the Usgar warrior who had clamped his foot down on her back, lying there on the floor, burning, flames coming out of his eye sockets.

  The young woman couldn’t draw breath, and not for the acrid stench and smoke.

  Three men were down about her, charred beyond recognition. Her fireball had melted their skin and boiled their blood, killing them before they hit the ground.

  Aoleyn had killed three men, three men with families, with friends, with lives. Three men who were acting in the way of the tribe, in the way it had always been. Now they were dead, by Aoleyn’s hand, by her magic.

  She hadn’t killed Mairen up at the sacred lea. She could have, after her initial burst of fiery wind it would have been no big feat for her to strike again with a blast of lightning and finish the Usgar-righinn. Certainly, if anyone was deserving of Aoleyn’s wrath, it was Mairen, who had murdered Innevah and tried to murder Aoleyn.

  But she hadn’t done it, hadn’t even thought of doing it.

  Aoleyn didn’t want to kill anyone—didn’t even want to kill animals, except for the necessity of food. And even then, she hesitated.

  Now here she sat, in a cave, with three mutilated, unrecognizable men dead around her, by her hand, by her magic.

  She wanted to curl up and cry, but one thought had her moving, had her gathering the crystals she had collected from the witches and stumbling about the blasted cave: Bahdlahn.

  He was out there, running for his life, with horrible Tay Aillig and the others in pursuit. He had no chance of getting off the mountain, not against the trained Usgar and their magic weapons, which would show them the way and lighten their feet that they could catch up to the fleeing slave.

  The makeshift satchel Aoleyn had
used for the crystals was gone, so she gathered what was left of the rug on which she had been laying and tied up her treasure, then stumbled out of the cave—and was there amazed to see that her fireball had extended beyond the rocky confines and melted the snow many strides from the cave entrance, and had burned the branches of the small trees up above the cave, as well. One tree was still burning.

  She had barely gone two running steps before her legs became those of the leopard, propelling her along with tremendous leaps, her falls mitigated by the green gemstone in her belly ring.

  She was a long way from the cave before she even took the moment to realize that Tay Aillig might be expecting her, for surely her blast had been seen all about this side of Fireach Speuer. Mairen almost certainly knew that Aoleyn had survived her magical blast, and Mairen was Tay Aillig’s wife, joined with him spiritually. Even without that, even if Mairen had not been able to regain contact after her expulsion from Aoleyn’s mind, Tay Aillig had certainly seen the fireball—how could he not?

  She knew she should take care here, but she could not bring herself to slow her pace, not with Bahdlahn in such danger. She was not surprised, then, on one high leap from a ridgeline, to see movement below—a man, angling for the area near where she would land.

  Aoleyn called upon her malachite and her moonstone, slowing her descent and turning it into a flight, moving to the side and easing herself down into a small copse of trees. As she landed, she saw that it was indeed Tay Aillig coming out from another tree line across the way.

  The images of the three charred bodies flashed in her mind, but she fought them away, for even that horror could not dissuade Aoleyn from this fight. Not against this one, a man most deserving of her wrath.

  He caught sight of her, roared, and charged.

  Aoleyn called to the graphite of her anklet, stomped her foot powerfully, and loosed a mighty stroke of lightning, blinding in its flash. When her vision returned, she saw that she had stopped Tay Aillig—he stood in the clearing between the two groups of trees—but he didn’t appear hurt at all.

  Her bolt should have scorched him, should have, at least, taken control of his muscles and dropped him writhing to the ground.

  But he just stood there, grinning at her.

  Aoleyn stomped her foot again, sending a second, weaker, lightning stroke, and this time, not blinded, Aoleyn saw it reach for the man, then simply stop before it got to him, dissipating into a flash of nothingness.

  How could that be?

  Tay Aillig lifted his spear to throw, and Aoleyn felt something then, the slightest tug on her belly ring. She didn’t know what that might mean, but it occurred to her suddenly that the spear and the belly ring had formed an attachment, calling to each other.

  She ran to the side as Tay Aillig threw, and instinctively called upon her moonstone to put up a burst of wind against the missile to turn it aside.

  But that spear then veered again, following her movement and flying for her belly!

  Slowed only slightly by the burst of wind, the spear came on, and only Aoleyn’s leopard legs saved her, a single twitch throwing her high in the air at the very last instant. Even so, the spear tried to turn again and come up at her, but the magic in that crystalline weapon was not strong enough and the energy of the throw had expired.

  Dagger drawn, Tay Aillig charged in behind the throw and Aoleyn, descending from her leap, created a second burst of wind, this one full of flames, as she had done to Mairen. But the magic went past him on either side and did not touch him and did not slow him.

  The desperate witch landed with an emphatic stomp of her foot, calling to the blue stone of her anklet, and the ground before her flash-froze into a field of ice, and this time, finally, Tay Aillig could not avoid the enchantment, his eyes going wide with surprise as he ran upon it. Skidding and sliding, he tumbled down hard, and Aoleyn sprang over him as he slid beneath her in a wide-limbed sprawl.

  She looked down as he passed under, and noted that his hand went to something at his waist. Flying away, Aoleyn didn’t understand, but she felt a sharp pain then in her legs, the cracking of bone, and the unexpected reversion to her full human form. She grabbed at the malachite to slow her descent, but so suddenly could not hear the song!

  She crashed down and stumbled ahead on legs caught halfway between human and leopard. Her thoughts swirled, for she did not understand. Something was protecting this warrior from her spells, something he could throw at her to steal the song of Usgar.

  She thought it must be Mairen and the Coven in a spiritual joining with Tay Aillig, for she could not know about the powerful sunstone he carried, a gem that could defeat magic.

  Now she knew that she was in trouble, for she had no answers. She fell to the ground in the open area, and forced herself back to her feet as her legs finally completed the transformation. She glanced back over her shoulder to see Tay Aillig going for his spear—the spear that could somehow hone in on her belly ring.

  Aoleyn was out of answers. Horrified, she just ran, trying to collect her wits and her breath.

  With every step, she replayed the fight—what had worked, what had not.

  With every step, she knew that she was running out of time.

  * * *

  Talmadge groggily opened his eyes, noting the morning light peeking in through the seams of the tent they had given him and his two friends. It wasn’t the morning light that had awakened him, though, he knew immediately, for outside the village of Fasach Crann was stirring.

  He sat up and shook the sleep from his mind, then glanced around to see Khotai fast asleep and Aydrian missing. Not disturbing his beloved, he slipped out of his bedroll, quietly grabbed his shirt, and put it on as he exited.

  Half the town was out there, all milling about the central clearing and all looking up to the south, to the imposing mountain.

  “I think you may wish to see this,” Aydrian said as he approached.

  Talmadge shielded his eyes from the glare of the rising sun limning the top snowy peaks of Fireach Speuer.

  “A great fireball lifted into the morning sky,” Aydrian explained. “Something is going on up there.”

  “Sidhe?” Talmadge asked. “Have they returned?”

  He had barely finished the question when a bright white lightning bolt flashed, not much more than halfway up the mountainside.

  “Usgar?” more than one of the villagers asked, for if it was indeed the magic-using Usgar, they were far down from their mountain perch.

  A second bolt of lightning flashed. Talmadge winced, but instinctually understood. A flash of lightning, powerful and bright, without a cloud in the sky.

  “It’s her,” he whispered.

  “Perhaps,” Aydrian replied with a shrug, and he held out his hand, palm up.

  Talmadge fished in his pockets, then dashed back into the tent and fell to the floor to shuffle through his bag.

  “What is wrong?” Khotai asked, waking. “Have the sidhe come?”

  “No, no,” Talmadge answered, holding up his crystal lens. “I just needed…”

  He rushed out of the tent without another word. He could use the lens himself, and was sorely tempted to do so, but Aydrian was more proficient. And besides, if he was right, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what Aoleyn was doing, or why she might be throwing lightning about the mountainside.

  He waited impatiently, tapping his foot and shifting constantly, as the ranger put the lens up to his eye.

  * * *

  Aoleyn stumbled, her fears putting her too far out ahead of her scrambling feet. She collected herself and dropped another patch of ice right behind her, hoping to slow the dangerous man.

  With every step, she expected his spear to catch up to her and skewer her.

  She crashed through some trees, grabbing the last of them to help her cut a fast turn to the side, then moved around one rock and down a narrow and bending trail between two others. She realized her mistake as soon as she rounded that bend, though, to find the
trail spilling out to the top of a high rocky spur.

  She had to collect herself and find the song of Usgar, to find the malachite or the moonstone to get her off that jutting ledge! She ran to the end, hoping to see a way to climb down it.

  But no. It was a high prow of piled rocks, like so many others across Fireach Speuer, like the one where she had made love to Bahdlahn. A peninsula in the air, it ended at, and was flanked on both sides by, a sheer drop.

  “Find yourself,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Find your heart.”

  Aoleyn blinked open her dark eyes to see Tay Aillig rounding the bend back at the narrow trail. But now she heard the song. She could leap away.

  “Or I can kill him and end this,” she said, and instead of reaching for the malachite, she called upon two songs, those of the moonstone and the graphite.

  Aoleyn wove their notes together and waved her hands in circles above her head, and in moments, the sky above the spur darkened suddenly under a dark and swirling cloud, one flickering with energy.

  Tay Aillig skidded to a stop at the edge of the spur, looking up at her creation and grinning.

  “Clever girl,” he said.

  Aoleyn brought down a bolt of lightning at him from the cloud above, and at the same time, stomped her foot and covered the front half of the spur with ice.

  The lightning got right to Tay Aillig, and then stopped, just stopped, the thunder of it echoing all about.

  Tay Aillig moved as if to throw his spear, but the cloud above was swirling, and it was obvious that no missile would get through that maelstrom.

  “Nowhere to run, foul witch,” he said, easing forward.

  Aoleyn brought another lightning bolt down, and again, it was defeated before it reached him. A third stroke came down to strike the ground right before him, and that trick nearly worked, as the retort shook the spur and jolted Tay Aillig, who stumbled on the ice-slickened surface.