“Magic,” Aoleyn answered for her, catching on. Elysant started to elaborate, but Aoleyn hardly listened. She certainly didn’t need any sermons on the potential power of the magical gemstones.
She wished that Father Abbot Braumin had sent her out there among his magic-wielding warriors. She thought to go find him and ask for permission to join.
But from far to her left, down the wall to the western side of the massive monastery, there came a call, echoing up across the courtyard.
Monks began rushing all about, out of the buildings and across the courtyards to their assigned posts. Some manned great war engines mounted on the towers. Others began setting out bedding and water and bandages on the open ground.
Elysant again led the way for her two companions, running west along the wall, hoping to catch the first moments of the encounter.
Aoleyn knew from the distant shouting that they wouldn’t get there in time. She called to the gemstones of her belly ring, using the malachite to lighten her, then enacting the power of the moonstone to lift away. She flew past Elysant and Aydrian, climbing higher to see over that still distant western wall.
She heard an explosion, then saw a small ball of flames roll up into the air. Up higher she went, flying faster. She saw the dark forms out on the field, the back ranks of the enemy group.
She noted monks leaping up from holes cut in the grass, pushing aside the sod covering and standing tall, limned in glowing white light. Aoleyn knew that light well, and so she knew what was coming next.
Fireballs engulfed the areas around those monks, flames biting the xoconai and their lizard mounts. The explosions had barely ended, the flames rolling up and dispersing, before the monks lifted away in flight, speeding back toward their waiting brothers on the wall.
Aoleyn called to the song of the moonstone more powerfully, speeding ahead. More fireballs went off, more xoconai died, and those in the back ranks turned and fled.
The monks on the wall cheered.
Aoleyn set down on the parapet not far away, running to join the group greeting the returning heroes. She spotted Thaddius, who had set off one of the early fireballs, and ran to him. Before she arrived, though, she heard different yells from farther along the wall, calls for help for a monk out on the field.
She saw monks desperately trying to summon their gemstone power once again, and when she went to the wall, she understood. One of the brothers was left on the field, pitifully crawling toward the wall, through blackened grass and burned enemies, a javelin sticking from the back of his leg.
Other enemies closed for the kill.
Hardly thinking of her actions, Aoleyn leaped over the wall, flying, diving for the monk. Before she even landed, she called upon the magic in her anklet and summoned a patch of ice over the three charging xoconai riders. One tried to throw her javelin, but her lizard slid sidelong on the ice and the missile flew harmlessly aside. Another tumbled altogether, the lizard scrabbling and spinning.
Aoleyn flew past the monk, right for the enemies. The third lifted a javelin, and Aoleyn changed the song of her moonstone abruptly, adding the song of her ruby ring, using the malachite alone to keep her aloft while she sent forth a great burst of hot wind, as she had done to the witches of the Coven on that fateful day, which seemed like years before.
The javelin flew out and flipped in the air, flying back behind the thrower. That xoconai and the others, and their mounts, slid backwards across the ice patch, cowering against the stinging and biting flames in the wind. Fog rose up as the ice melted fast in the hot breath of Aoleyn’s magic.
She dropped to the ground and ran to the wounded monk. Scooping him in her arms and calling on the moonstone to carry them both, she half flew, half dragged him to the base of the wall.
Down came some monks, Thaddius among them, to hoist their injured brother. The whole group moved swiftly to the side, where a small, secret door in the wall opened and others ushered them inside to safety.
Barely had she entered the courtyard, taking a deep breath to let all of the magic cease, when Brother Thaddius wrapped Aoleyn in a tight hug. “You saved him!” Thaddius whispered repeatedly in her ear, and Aoleyn only then realized that many were cheering—and cheering for her.
Elysant and Aydrian arrived soon after.
“I expect that Father Abbot Braumin will find his decisions vindicated,” Elysant said.
Aoleyn just felt drained, the fury of her magic gone. A great exhaustion, emotional and physical, came over her.
She pulled back from Thaddius and looked around at all the others, some tending the wounded monk with their soul stones, others calling from atop the wall that the enemy was fleeing, still others rushing about to report the incident.
“A score dead, at least!” one called from the wall.
“Twice that number burned and running away!” yelled another.
For the first time, Aoleyn thought that maybe, just maybe, St.-Mere-Abelle might prove strong enough to keep the xoconai at bay.
It was hard for her to take too much solace in that, however, given the images of Ursal and Palmaris that she had seen on her spirit-walk. And worse, the procession of souls she had witnessed marching slavishly to the west, to Fireach Speuer and the God Crystal, to be devoured, their life energy converted into magical power for the great demon god who led the xoconai.
She looked around again, letting Thaddius lead her by the hand across the courtyard toward the father abbot’s audience chapel.
They would celebrate this small victory.
They should celebrate this small victory.
But in the larger scheme of the world, this vast monastery remained a very tiny place indeed.
* * *
Day and night over the next week, the monks kept up their vigilance and defensive preparedness, spirit-walking all about St.-Mere-Abelle, a large perimeter, watching for signs of the enemy.
But the fields remained clear.
Father Abbot Braumin sent some trusted brothers out farther to the south and out into the Gulf of Corona, and there they found some answers. Off in the south, across the inlet and St.-Mere-Abelle’s docks, they found a great procession of enemy warriors, but a staggered one, with long gaps in between the legions, each of those gaps marked by newly constructed stone or wood pyramids. It took them some time to confirm that these were waypoints, places that would magically transport the warriors across great leaps of distance to the next in line. The invaders were filling the southland with these pyramids, these teleportation gates, and so they could bring their forces to bear on any critical battlefield in short order.
Nor had the xoconai fully turned from St.-Mere-Abelle, despite the quiet fields, for the spirit-walking brothers going north and west had found three of those same pyramid structures evenly spaced about the perimeter of the monastery, all heavily guarded. If the enemy turned their eyes to the monastery, they could bring a full army onto the field in very short order, all within an hour’s march of the monastery.
Further north, beyond the towns abandoned by folk who were now mostly huddled within St.-Mere-Abelle, and past the limestone cliffs, where the dark waters of the Gulf of Corona and the flow of the Masur Delaval merged and blended, the spirit-walking brothers saw the ships—many ships and many more small boats—a flotilla of refugees from Ursal, Palmaris, Amvoy, and many smaller towns in between. At the point where the peninsula turned south, the ships and small boats mostly diverged, with the small craft staying on the coast and turning for the inlet to St.-Mere-Abelle but many of the larger ships staying due east, sailing for the open waters.
Running away as far as they could go.
Aydrian, Aoleyn, Thaddius, and Elysant were among the many Father Abbot Braumin sent down to support the docks, to welcome the refugees and guard against enemy infiltrators, and so the foursome were there to inspect the larger ships that came in, including one from Palmaris carrying some familiar faces.
Aoleyn’s heart soared when she spotted Khotai, then Talmadge, and by the time sh
e reached them, Catriona had joined them.
“Where is Bahdlahn?” she asked.
The three knew it was coming, of course, and they exchanged concerned looks.
“We left him very much alive,” Khotai was quick to say.
“You left him?”
“He left us,” Talmadge corrected. “At the docks of Palmaris. He chose not to flee with the ship. There were too many people left helpless, caught in the city as it fell. He wouldn’t leave them.”
“By the time we knew of his decision, we were all aboard and sailing, too far out to get back to him,” Khotai added.
Aoleyn looked to Catriona and saw that the woman was holding back a waterfall of tears. Aoleyn, too, felt a lump in her throat. Was Bahdlahn dead? She closed her eyes and tried not to entertain such dark thoughts. He was a capable warrior, a clever adversary, and he knew how to hide.
She had to trust in him, she tried to tell herself, and she even silently insisted that if Bahdlahn had died, she would have somehow, mystically felt it.
“He’s alive,” she declared, because she, and they, needed to hear it.
“Why aren’t you in To-gai?” Aydrian asked.
“The mountains crawl with sidhe,” said Khotai.
“I found the pass,” Talmadge told Aydrian. “And the elves and their zombies who guard it. They would have none of me or anyone else. They made it clear. And they knew.”
“Knew?”
“Of the invaders—they called them the xoconai. And they insisted that the xoconai would not find them and had no business with them, and that I, that all of us, had no business with them.”
“What does it mean?” Thaddius asked.
Aydrian shook his head, his face scrunched as if he had no answers.
“The news is not good from the west,” Talmadge went on. “Palmaris is lost, and Ursal. The king and the Allheart Knights are, or were, in Palmaris, chased there by our enemies. The invasion is furious, fast, and huge.”
“There is more,” Khotai added. “Things we learned of the fall of Ursal while on the boat coming to this place. The captain meant to keep sailing, as with most of the larger ships, all the way to the east coast, perhaps even south to the kingdom beyond the mountains.”
“Behren,” said Aydrian and Thaddius together.
“I implored him to stop here, that we could tell the monks,” Talmadge added. “I … we … didn’t expect to find you here, but glad we are to see that you have survived.”
The group of seven left the docks soon after, with the tall ship waiting only on the tide to return to the open waters, and the talk among the five friends from the far west centered mostly on whether they would take the captain’s offer and sail far away.
Catriona, with her skull elongated to three times the normal length, garnered many curious stares as they hustled all the way to Father Abbot Braumin’s audience hall.
Braumin, too, stared at Catriona in surprise.
“You are from Aoleyn’s lands?” he asked the young woman, and she nodded somewhat sheepishly in reply.
“Your head,” the father abbot said. “Forgive my forwardness, but your head … it is…”
“It is common among her people,” Aydrian explained. “They wrap the skulls of their children to shape the growth.”
“Some have two humps, others a single stretch,” Aoleyn added.
“But yours is not misshap … altered,” Braumin said.
“She is Usgar,” Catriona said, somewhat sharply.
“My tribe was of the mountain, not the lake. We do not follow such a practice.”
“The tribes of the lake only did it so we would not look like Usgar,” Catriona said. She and Aoleyn exchanged looks and shrugs, a silent agreement that the past was truly behind them.
“It is beautiful,” Father Abbot Braumin told her. “There seems to be so much more of the world than we here know. Much of it is beautiful, and much is dangerous.”
“The xoconai are both,” said Aoleyn.
“This is Talmadge,” Aydrian told Braumin. “An old friend of mine.”
The father abbot arched his eyebrows.
“Not that old,” said Aydrian. “We met a few years ago, far beyond the Barbacan. It was Talmadge who showed me the Ayamharas Plateau and the wondrous Loch Beag and Fireach Speuer. It was Talmadge who introduced me to Khotai of To-gai here, and to Aoleyn and all the rest.”
“Good fortune that he did, it would seem,” said Braumin.
“For us, too,” said Talmadge. “Aydrian showed us where to run, to both our benefit. We learned much of the fall of Ursal on the boat out of Palmaris, and we watched the sack of Palmaris. We were aboard the last ship out of port.”
“We have seen the enemy, just a glimpse, but expect they are formidable,” said Braumin.
“Very,” said Talmadge. “Divine throwers.”
Braumin and the other monks, Aydrian and Aoleyn, all stared at him curiously.
“And they have a dragon,” Talmadge added.
He told his story in full, and, coincidentally, just as he was trying to explain the fall of St. Honce, another group entered the father abbot’s audience chapel, led by Abbot Ohwan of St. Honce and Abbot Havre of St. Precious.
The group remained together throughout the day and long into the night, hearing the stories and discussing countering strategies.
“If they come, we will be ready,” Father Abbot Braumin vowed.
* * *
His words would be put to the test the next day, when the xoconai army appeared on the field east, north, and west of St.-Mere-Abelle.
“Fair winds, my friend,” Aydrian said to Talmadge that morning, down at the docks. “And watch out for powries.”
“Powries?”
“You’ll know them when you see them,” Aydrian replied with a grin. “Though, by then, it might be too late.”
Over to the side, Khotai and Catriona stood with Aoleyn.
“Come with us,” Khotai said, for the tenth time.
“I can’no,” said Aoleyn. “I am needed here.”
“There is a wondrous world out there, I am told,” said Khotai. “Away from the battles and the death.”
“I will find it one day,” Aoleyn promised. “I will find you one day.”
“Find Bahdlahn,” Catriona begged her, and Aoleyn nodded.
“I feel as if I should stay with you,” Catriona said. “I do not run from fights.”
“This isn’t your fight,” Aoleyn replied.
“Isn’t it? They killed my people. They killed … they took me from Bahdlahn.”
Aoleyn shrugged. “Go,” she said, pointing to the ship, which was readying to leave. “Find peace and find wonder. If you stay, you would be another mouth to feed and a sword we here hope that we will not need. If we are to win this war, it will be magic, not steel, that turns the xoconai away. And so I must stay—the monks wish to learn from me and I must try to teach them.” She paused and gave a helpless little shrug before finishing. “Believe me when I tell you that I wish I could just go and find Bahdlahn and fly with him in my arms to find this ship, your ship, that we could all sail together and see the great ocean and all the wonders of the world.”
Khotai gave Aoleyn a long and tight hug, Catriona joining in. When they finally pulled apart, wiping tears, Talmadge nearly tackled the Usgar witch, squeezing her so tightly, so desperately, that for a moment she could hardly breathe.
“I saw you destroy that demon on the mountain,” he said. “I thought you more a girl than a woman, so slight and small, and you went into that place of death and destroyed the fossa. Then you saved so many when the sidhe came, and used your magic to get us across the lake before it drained. And you stopped them again … Aoleyn, we are all so indebted to you.”
“There is no debt among friends,” she replied.
“I hope we will see you again,” Talmadge said, and now his eyes were misty, too. “I hope to sail with you to the city of Jacintha in the kingdom south of the mountains. I
hope to see again your face glowing in the light of daybreak as the sun climbs above the eastern sea. Truly, I am glad to know you, Aoleyn of Fireach Speuer.”
Aoleyn gave him that crooked little smile and hugged him again, then stepped back and motioned.
She stood still, staring, as the three climbed the gangplank, and then she kept standing, arms folded about her in the chill morning breeze off the cold water.
She was glad when Aydrian came up beside her and draped his arm across her shoulders, pulling her close.
She felt like he was the only friend she had left in the world.
PART 3
DEMON WITHOUT, DEMON WITHIN
Tuolonatl is cochcal, the commander of the xoconai army. She was the obvious choice, as she is legend. Whenever a city of Tonoloya was threatened by rival sovereigns or by outside invaders, the first name spoken to lead the defense was Tuolonatl.
And if word came to a threatened city that Tuolonatl was leading the approaching force, the battle would likely be surrendered before it was waged.
That is the strength of reputation.
Tuolonatl was the obvious choice as cochcal, except that this war was decreed by Scathmizzane. This was destiny, a holy war, yet Tuolonatl is not devout. She is no friend to the augurs of Glorious Gold. To any of them, from all that I have learned. She doesn’t speak of them with contempt only because she doesn’t speak of them at all. And neither would she attend their sermons.
She is practical, though, and values the augurs among her ranks, for their healing powers if not their words of comfort and Glorious Gold.
It is curious, then, that Scathmizzane chose her to lead the great march to the east, over the mountains to conquer Tzatzini, then out from the mountains to march across the world, to conquer all who stood before us as the promise of Greater Tonoloya came to fruition, with sunrise and sunset shining on the beaches of the xoconai nation.
Scathmizzane is god. Scathmizzane is Glorious Gold.
Scathmizzane brought us the golden mirrors, that we might step a hundred miles in a single stride.
Song of the Risen God Page 30