Elysant looked at the robe skeptically.
“He wasn’t much taller than you,” Thaddius teased.
“It should be put under glass,” she argued. “We cannot let it rot!”
“If that was truly the robe of Saint Belfour, it has been down here for more than two centuries,” Thaddius reminded. “Do you doubt the magic of it, given everything else we have found, given the saint’s insistence that we take everything? Put it on, my friend.” He looked at the sarcophagus in the middle of the room, drawing Elysant’s gaze with his own. “If I understood it correctly, the ghost of a saint bade you to wear it.”
Elysant’s hands trembled the entire time she was changing. She was putting on the very robes worn by the legendary St. Belfour of Vanguard.
“Well?” Thaddius asked when she had the robe tied about her. The fit was loose, but not terribly so.
Elysant smiled and took up the stone staff. She started to speak but then just kept smiling, wider and wider, and shaking her head as if in disbelief.
Thaddius understood. She could feel the power, the magical energy, the holy glory.
“Let us be far from this place,” Thaddius said.
“What of the thieves who fled?”
Brother Thaddius shook his head. They didn’t matter, he knew. They didn’t matter at all.
PART 1
THE WESTERN WINDS BLOW
There is a beauty to this mountain—Tzatzini to the xoconai, Fireach Speuer to the humans—that goes beyond its physical features, and one that remains constant whether looking below to the vast lake called Loch Beag, or now, the golden city of Otontotomi. For the real beauty of the mountain lies below its rocky spurs and lines of evergreen trees in caves filled with crystals and crystals filled with sparkling stones which carry within them magical energy beyond the strength of a warrior, beyond the power of an army.
The xoconai claim this place as holy, as their own, the rightful domain and magic of Glorious Gold, their god Scathmizzane.
The humans who lived here for centuries untold claim this place as holy, as their own, the rightful domain and magic of their god, Usgar.
To the xoconai, the humans confuse their fake god with the demon Cizinfozza, which they called the fossa.
I wonder, then, was this god, Usgar, truly the same as Cizinfozza? And so, a god or a demon?
Or are they the same thing, god and demon?
As I grow familiar with the similarities between the humans and the xoconai—the social and family structures, they way they go about their days in their respective villages and cities—I find that question coming to mind more often, and it is one that troubles me greatly. I was raised to favor a god, and to hate those who favored a different god. Or to pity those misguided others, at least, and to recognize that if we conquered them and showed them our god and our ways, they would be better off and would come to gratitude.
Perhaps that is the case, perhaps not, or perhaps it fluctuates back and forth as the respective societies change and evolve.
But none of that really has anything to do with the gods, or demons, or whatever they are.
The humans of this conquered land surely do not appreciate the coming of the xoconai at this time. Hundreds were killed, thousands taken as prisoner, to now work hard under the merciless eyes of the xoconai augurs. What love can any parent, xoconai or human, hold towards an invading army that stole a child and destroyed a home? Even if the xoconai show this conquered people a better way of life, that sting is profound and lasting.
Will the eventual outcome dull the desire for vengeance? How many generations will need to pass, I wonder, before there can be any true mending of the relationship?
Or will that not matter to the xoconai? Perhaps the augurs will demand that the humans be wholly eradicated, worked to death in slavery or sacrificed to Glorious Gold. Perhaps in the end, Tonoloya, the nation of the xoconai, will stretch from sea to sea as Scathmizzane demands, and within that vast nation, humans will be erased, first chased to the edges of civilization, then hunted down and murdered.
Then will Tonoloya know peace from the humans.
But I see these humans, their ways, their familial love, their hopes, and know they are akin to the xoconai in all of these things, person to person. And in that truth, how is Cizinfozza an evil and monstrous demon, but Scathmizzane a wonderful god, Glorious Gold?
I have come to see, to my hope and my sadness, that if the distinction is merely that this god or that god is my god, and that I am little different from my enemy who serves a different god, and if our gods demand that we two peoples do war, then perhaps we are both better served with no god.
To everything I learned in my youth, this is blasphemy. And were I to speak it aloud, my end would be certain and painful and the memory of me would be erased except in whispers among those few who might agree.
To deny it in my private ruminations, however, is to kill the truth of myself, of who I am and what I believe and hold dear, and that truth is more important to me than the body that holds it.
I sign this your student, forever in your debt,
—Ag’ardu An’grian
Sunrise Face
1
THESE SONGS OF MAGIC
Aoleyn looked back from the windswept bluff to the small group winding down the rocky decline.
So small. A hundred, perhaps, no more.
The tears in her eyes were from the wind, the woman told herself. Yes, the previous night had brought amazing and dramatic changes, a wall of mountains melting, a huge and deep lake pouring forth across the flatland low desert.
Yes, her world had so suddenly turned upside down. Not for the first time—or the last, she knew, wiping some moisture from her cheek.
It was just the wind, she told herself, trying desperately and futilely to put aside the reality that, for every one of that band of refugees moving down from the Ayamharas Plateau, thirty other men, women, and children had been slaughtered in the course of a single day.
Yesterday.
Aoleyn hadn’t many friends in the world—no close ones beyond Bahdlahn, who was now among the refugee group fleeing the conquered plateau—but that didn’t lessen the pain, however she tried to hide it. The sheer scale and suddenness of the destruction overwhelmed her.
The woman pushed a long strand of her black hair out from in front of her face, blinked her dark eyes determinedly to push the sadness and the tears away, and then put a hand on her bare belly, feeling the chain she had fastened there and the multiple gemstones set upon it. Her finger brushed the smoothness of one, a moonstone, and there her hand lingered, connecting her more intimately to the magical energy within that small stone.
She coaxed the power, bit by bit, until her fingers trembled with the magical vibrations, until the song of the gem filled her thoughts.
She called upon the magic, she leaped away, and she began to fly, like a bird on the wing. Around the side of the great chasm, which had only yesterday been a mountain lake, she went, staying low, not daring to go over the rim and expose herself to the conquerors, who were already as thick as ants along the southern rim of the bowl.
Not daring to expose herself to the giant among them, a huge and beautiful and terrible creature she had seen riding a monster, a snakelike dragon that seemed to swim through the air.
Sometimes no more than her own height above the ground, sometimes weaving about clusters of trees, she sped along the new canyon’s western rim, avoiding any signs of movement, giving wide berth the one village on this side, a place that had been sacked even as she and the others had made their desperate escape across the deep and dark waters. In a very short while, she had traversed the length of the canyon and come to the thicker trees and sheltering rocks of the foothills of the great mountain looming above the southeastern rim. Fireach Speuer, it was called, thick and tall and casting long shadows each morning across the waters of the lake that had been. The huge and hulking mountain that had been her home. One area of flat ground,
more than halfway up those slopes, had served as the summer camp for her people, the Usgar, and a stony plateau at the mountain’s high peak had been their winter home, the seat of their power, the source of their magic, of the Coven’s magic, of Aoleyn’s magic.
Aoleyn had to set down in those foothills, to pause and consider her luck—or was it, perhaps, fate? For only because she had been fleeing her people, running away from the Usgar and all that they believed, had she escaped the tide of strange-looking conquerors that had crested every mountain pass and ridge like a great wave of death breaking over Fireach Speuer itself.
She wasn’t even sure how she felt about the obvious conquest and destruction of the Usgar. Had these invaders done her a favor, done the world a favor, in ridding everyone of the foul barbarian tribe and their murderous ways?
No, Aoleyn found that she couldn’t bring herself to think like that. She had not hated all of the Usgar, after all, and had considered many, particularly the tribe’s subjugated women, to be victims beaten into acquiescence. She had wanted to save them all from the ways of Usgar, not from these strange invaders, who, after all, she hadn’t known existed until she had flown over them as they destroyed the lake village known as Fasach Crann. Only when Aoleyn had come to understand that she could not save the Usgar from themselves had she fled.
Aoleyn grimaced, which looked much like her crooked little smile, when she thought of Tay Aillig, the leader of the Usgar, her tormentor, whom she had brought down from on high in an avalanche of stone in the midst of her escape. She looked down at her hand, now the small and delicate hand of a young woman, tattooed with the pad markings of a cloud leopard’s large paw.
She felt the vibrations of that tattoo, of the bits of gems she had implanted to make the image, and the magic they contained, a power that had transformed that hand and arm into the limb of a cloud leopard. She imagined those long claws now, and saw again the last look of horror on Tay Aillig’s face as he lay there, trapped among the fallen stones. She had shown him no mercy.
She grimaced again as she remembered the killing move—her sweeping claw taking the man’s throat so easily, so fluidly; the blood, so much blood, gushing down the front of Tay Aillig; the shocked expression of a confused man who had thought himself a god—frozen forever in the mind of Aoleyn.
So be it.
A deep breath blew the memory aside for the moment and brought Aoleyn back into the present, where she quickly realized that she was not as alone as she had hoped. She ducked fast amid a tumble of boulders.
She heard them. Their voices, melodic, a bit higher-pitched, undeniably beautiful, sounded not so far away.
Aoleyn crouched lower in the shadows of the boulders. She called upon the magic of the diamond set in her belly ring to absorb the nearby light and deepen the shadows about her.
Many enemies were nearby, she quickly realized. Her thumb rolled across the band set on her ring finger, feeling the ruby and the serpentine set there.
Serpentine to protect her from flames, ruby to create fire.
Aoleyn winced yet again, remembering the smell of the charred corpses she had left in a cave. Men, Usgar men, guarding her and taunting her.
Then melting before her.
I did what I had to do, she stubbornly told herself, and though it was true, the image haunted her still.
And then she forgot it, in the blink of a surprised eye, when she saw him, a tall, golden-skinned man whose nose was as red as the blood that had gushed from Tay Aillig’s neck, and that patch lined by blue streaks as brilliant as the waters of the lost Loch Beag under an autumn sun. He wore a shirt of armor, rows of golden bars, it seemed, and shot with lines of brilliant silver. So, too, was his helm of gold. How could it be anything else, for what mundane metal might have been worthy of this beautiful golden-skinned man?
Aoleyn’s trance broke when she scanned to his lifted arm, for he held a spear above his shoulder—no, it was at the end of a Y-shaped throwing stick!—and was aiming it right at her.
Aoleyn had not yet coaxed to a crescendo the magical song of any of her gemstones.
Aoleyn had no fire or lightning to throw.
Aoleyn had nowhere to run.
* * *
His wounds would not kill him. He knew that now. He looked down at the golden cast that had been poured over his hip and side.
Poured! Liquid gold!
It should have killed him, of course, and surely it had hurt, bursts of agony the Usgar warrior had never imagined possible. But whatever the wrap was that these strange, tall, painted-faced humans had placed on him before pouring had kept him from melting under the molten metal.
Now he was feeling better, too much better to deny. His strength was returning, though one of his legs obviously had been broken in his fall. They were going to pour gold on that injury, too, he believed, judging from the way the shaman or priest or whatever he might be had been indicating the course to his helpers. He couldn’t feel any pain down there, couldn’t feel anything at all, and he desperately hoped that their medicine would fix that, as well.
He propped himself up on his elbows as one woman passed him.
“Do you know who I am?” he declared imperiously. “Tay Ail—”
She punched him across the face, then put her foot on his throat and slammed him back down to the ground, her weapon, a flat wooden paddle with the teeth of some animal lining both its edges, hovering threateningly just above his face.
Tay Aillig is my uncle, Egard finished in his thoughts, but he wisely said no more.
He closed his eyes and tried to fall far, far away.
The woman’s return, with another of these strange-looking people, surprised him. They grabbed him by the shoulders and hoisted him up to a sitting position.
“What—” he started, but then he shrieked as the woman drove something sharp into the back of his shoulder. He turned fast to look at her, then shrieked again as the man did the same to the other shoulder.
They each stabbed him again in a different location—no, not stabbed, he realized when the woman got him in the back of the arm. They weren’t simply stabbing him; they were hooking him!
A third stranger, or perhaps more than one, pulled on ropes behind him. Up went his arms, above his head, then up went Egard, hoisted by eight separate hooks driven into his flesh. He was standing then, though his legs remained numb and were not supporting him, and then he was off the ground, hanging there helplessly, shocking bolts of pain, blisters of agony, shooting through him.
Barely, through the pain, he felt pieces of that same healing cloth being set about the hooks, and he watched, mesmerized and horrified, as these handlers poured more liquid gold, sealing and supporting the hooked areas, stopping his flesh from simply tearing and thus dropping him to the ground.
He screamed and writhed, twisting furiously, which only made the pain even more intense.
They brought before him a long piece of metal, shining golden, polished so that he could see himself.
A full-length mirror?
It made no sense. None of this made any sense!
Another came up behind him and, from over his shoulder, peered at him in the mirror.
Egard recoiled at the sight, the shock of it overcoming his agony for just a heartbeat. For this one’s face was hidden behind a mask, if it was a mask, of a human skull, as if that skull had been pressed right through the flesh of his face.
Egard tried to turn his head to get a better look, but the stranger cupped him about the ears and forced him to stare into the mirror.
And in that reflection, Egard’s eyes met those of the stranger, locked gazes drawing him deeper into the image, deeper into this monstrous man.
He felt the intimate invasion, the stranger boring in, as keenly as if fingers were pushing through his eye sockets. He writhed and cried out and closed his eyes, but too late.
For the skull-faced augur was in there, in his thoughts, probing.
* * *
Aoleyn threw her
hands out in front of her defensively, desperately, and turned her head so fast in terror that she didn’t even notice her arms transforming.
She leaped, instinctively, straight up, and she was high above the ground before she even realized the transformation. Suddenly she loomed twenty feet above her attacker, who stared up at her in shock. Down she dropped, and she braced herself against the fall.
She landed lightly and pounced immediately, burying the golden man beneath. She slapped him on the ground repeatedly, hitting him several times before she even realized that her arms, like her legs, were those of a leopard and not a woman.
Aoleyn pulled her head back and looked down at the mauled stranger, trembling, gasping, covered in the blood pouring from deep, raking wounds.
What had happened? How had it happened?
Her tattoo, she realized. The leopard paw–like gemstone that she had used to mark her body had somehow taken over, or her terror had called to it on a level below her consciousness. Pure survival had demanded the swift change, and so it had come to her without her even consciously willing it!
Aoleyn, too, trembled, her thoughts spinning as she tried to sort through this shocking transformation.
Her tattoo? Was the connection truly so powerful and intimate? It had taken over in that moment of desperation, as if she had become something else, something animal, something monstrous.
Like the fossa.
She looked at the torn man before her, expiring, certainly, as his blood continued to flow.
“No!” Aoleyn growled, and she forced her own limbs back to those of a young woman. She called upon the wedstone immediately, demanding of it the healing magic that would allow her to save this stranger.
She knew she should be away—other enemies were about her and had likely heard the commotion. But she stayed, and she demanded the magic. He was an enemy. He had tried to kill her. She was justified in killing him, she knew.
Song of the Risen God Page 3