“Yes, but he tasked me. He even asked me to find his wife.”
“Do you think it is time for you to go?” Bahdlahn didn’t try to hide the incredulity in his voice.
“I cannot. Not now. Our work here is important. We’re saving lives and making great gains—perhaps even enough so that we will be able to retake Palmaris when winter falls heavy on the land. Their numbers here are thin, too thin to hold Palmaris. If we can isolate them from reinforcements, there is hope.”
“There is always hope,” Bahdlahn replied with a smile. He, too, let his thoughts go out, not in search of the missing queen but for his lost friends. He was confident now that he had made the correct choice in turning away from the departing boat, in staying here to carry on the fight.
He hoped that Talmadge, Khotai, and particularly Catriona were well, wherever they might be.
And most of all, Bahdlahn hoped that Aoleyn was well.
* * *
Connebragh came down the mountainside quickly, using a crystal full of green flecks and stones to lighten her step, and another, a cat’s eye agate, to see more clearly in the starlit night. She knew she was being a bit reckless here, moving quite fast and floating more than walking. Fireach Speuer was full of unexpected drops and hidden ravines—if she went over such a drop, would she have enough magical power to lessen the fall enough to avoid serious injury?
Even with those doubts, though, the woman would not slow. She had gone to the crystal caverns and had finally found the entrance, which was hidden by powerful illusions. Full of anticipation and hope, Connebragh had gone into the tunnels, hoping to find many crystals humming the many songs of Usgar. Surely such additional magic would greatly help her and her two companions as they continued to exist on the edge of the great city that had been revealed beneath the waves of Loch Beag.
Indeed, Connebragh had taken several crystals, but from the moment she had entered the caverns, a great unease had come over her, and as she had moved deeper into the darkness beneath the mountain, she had found an unnatural chill, a breeze of whispers and mourning.
The cavern was haunted, full of ghosts, and so she had fled, terrified.
As she had rounded the western spurs of the high mountain, she had heard the song of the Coven, the voices familiar but now singing unfamiliar songs, and it had occurred to her that they were calling to the dead.
Connebragh didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.
Or maybe she didn’t and it was just her terror playing on her sensibilities.
Either way, the woman had no intention of spending a heartbeat more than necessary up here on the high slopes of Fireach Speuer, and she vowed with every passing moment that she would not return.
She finally got down from the slopes to the appointed meeting place in the tall grasses along the southwestern rim of the chasm, in what had been a marsh when that chasm had been Loch Beag.
The camp was there—she found it easily enough—but her friends were not. Some sticks placed on the ground in the shape of an arrowhead pointed the way for her.
She moved carefully, studying the ground in front of her before every step. Many snakes lived in here—some poisonous, some giant constrictors, and some, the deadly, white-furred variety, a bit of both. Giant, aggressive lizards, too, nested in the tall grasses.
Connebragh breathed a bit easier and moved a bit faster when she came to more open ground off to the north. She nodded, for she knew where they had gone now, and she picked up her pace even more, soon coming to a small ridge. Atop that ridge, standing amid the brush and trees, she noted two forms, Asba and Tamilee.
Connebragh moved up beside them but, before she spoke her greeting, the view before her caught her attention. Large fires burned down in the city far below.
“Bonfires,” Tamilee said. “There is some ceremony.”
Before she could respond, Connebragh heard a chorus of voices loud in song, for just a few moments.
“What is going on?” she asked.
“Nothing good,” said Asba.
“The Usgar witches are in a frenzy of song and dance up above,” Connebragh told them.
The song grew louder once more as a line of torches came forth from the huge pyramid that centered the city, and, in the glow, it seemed as if the areas before that great structure teemed with people.
“Can you look down there?” Asba asked.
Connebragh nodded hesitantly, though neither of her friends noted it. She could look down there with a magic crystal, but she didn’t want to.
“Can you?” Asba asked more sharply, turning to regard her.
Connebragh nodded again, more committedly, and began fishing about her bag of crystals until she found the one full of quartz. Slowly, her hand shaking, she lifted it up before her eyes and began to sing softly.
She saw the bonfire reflected in the crystal shaft, tiny and far away, but as her song continued, that fire grew in her vision, larger and larger. She looked through and might as well have been there among the masses for a few fleeting moments—enough time for her to understand what was happening in the conquerors’ city. Enough time for her to see the poor humans, children among them, being struck with those toothy paddles, over and over.
Long enough for her to see the blood. The screams filled the night—Connebragh’s crystal didn’t help her hear that, but she didn’t need it.
“What is happening?” Asba demanded, shaking her.
Connebragh lowered the crystal and reached back to the man to steady herself. “They’re killing the uamhas … the lake folk,” she said, barely able to get the words out for her gasping. “Many. Hundreds…”
Connebragh straightened suddenly and looked up the mountainside, toward the area she knew to contain the sacred lea and the God Crystal.
The witches were calling the spirits of the dead. She knew that. They were directing them even as the bright-faced conquerors killed them, summoning them up the mountain and into … into Craos’a’diad, she realized, into the caverns below the lea, which already teemed with ghosts.
But why?
* * *
In the dusty catacombs beneath St.-Mere-Abelle, Brother Thaddius tempered the exhilaration and self-satisfaction of his expert linguistic puzzle solving with a sobering reflection on the implications he was finding in the ancient texts. These scrolls were not written as they would be contemporaneously—there sometimes were major alterations in the spelling of even familiar words, for example, and often stilted syntax.
But now Thaddius had seen enough, and enough commonality and context, to better decipher. Now he was discovering relevant facts.
This last text he had read named a place, Otontotomi. While Thaddius, of course, wasn’t even sure of how to pronounce that name, he expected it sounded much like the name of the xoconai city in the far west referred to by Aoleyn. And as he read on, he found the place referred to as “the great city of golden light,” a legend of the xoconai, and a place that was “drowned atop the mountains and buried beneath the sky by rains extreme.”
Wouldn’t that describe a city drowned under a mountain lake?
Brother Ferdinand had gone farther than To-gai in his travels below the Belt-and-Buckle. Much farther. He hadn’t walked, hadn’t ridden a mount, hadn’t flown through the air with magical moonstones or on the back of a dragon.
“Heca teotextli,” Thaddius read aloud. How glad he was that Aoleyn had taught him much of the xoconai language.
Brother Ferdinand’s claim was that he had walked across the world on a beam of light.
Thaddius thought of the scene outside of St.-Mere-Abelle, of the pyramids flickering with what seemed like lightning.
Was this how the xoconai so quickly and efficiently moved their armies? They had come across the world with such suddenness and in such numbers, impossibly fast.
The monk went back to his reading, struggling with the smudges, the tears, the flowery font, the strange spelling of even common words. He had to decipher this, and quickly,
because he believed that there was more here of great importance.
For Ferdinand was also speaking about diamonds, and diamonds created light.
Did the xoconai walk on the light of diamonds?
* * *
“The city is … quiet tonight,” Julian said to Cathilda, when he entered her home and found her sitting alone, her children and a few others they did not know off in the side room.
“Strangely,” Bahdlahn added. He and Julian had made their way to Cathilda’s house quite easily—too easily. Something was wrong.
“The soldiers were all along the lane this day,” the woman replied. “They took many people.”
“Took?”
Cathilda shrugged.
“Why are they here?” Julian asked, indicating the other children. “You expected us.”
“I thought their grandmother would have arrived for them by now,” Cathilda replied. “Their mother did not return from her work. We have a deal: if either—”
Julian’s nod told her that she didn’t need to continue.
“Where do you think she is?” Bahdlahn asked quietly. “The mother, I mean?”
Another shrug. “She cooks for the priests. Might that they needed more for visitors. I cannot know. The grandmother will come, and very soon. She probably saw you arrive.”
Julian and Bahdlahn both glanced uneasily at the door.
“She knows,” Cathilda assured them. “She is part of this. More fervently than I.”
“And the mother?” Julian asked, and Cathilda nodded.
Julian and Bahdlahn exchanged a look, both jumping when there came a loud rap on the door, two quick knocks, a pause, and then a third.
“That is her,” Cathilda said, rushing to the door and cracking it open.
An old, small woman pushed her way into the house. Her face showed the wrinkles of a life lived long and fully. Her eyes didn’t sparkle with youth, but neither were they dull with age as they darted about, scanning, taking everything in. She was tiny and hunched, with a long nose hooked by age and thin lips which she licked constantly.
“That them?” she asked.
“Allheart Knights, yes,” Cathilda replied.
“Good that ye’re here,” the old woman said. “There’s something foul afoot, and I’m knowing where to find it.” She looked to Cathilda, who nodded, then motioned for the men to follow her out into the night.
The old woman moved with surprising speed and vigor, moving through alleyways she obviously knew quite well, even climbing a pile of debris blocking a long and narrow channel. Near the top, she crouched suddenly and looked back at her companions. She put one finger over pursed lips while the other hand waved for them to join her.
Bahdlahn peered over the pile, looking down another lane to the wide square before St. Precious. A large crowd had gathered there, both xoconai and human.
“Hold,” Julian ordered Bahdlahn, as the young man started over the top of the pile. “We cannot go out there.”
“Bah, but follow,” said the old woman, and she pressed past the two, moving down the far side of the pile, skittering across the cross street and into the doorway of another building. From that door, she glanced back and waved the two men to join her.
They moved with all caution and found that the place was empty. From the other side of it, the northern wall, they had a better view of the square—and then they knew.
A xoconai augur danced and chanted and then, every so often, stopped and pointed to someone in the crowd. That person was then dragged out, pulled down to his or her knees, yanked forward over a low beam, then dispatched with a blow, or several blows, to the head.
“Is this our doing?” Bahdlahn gasped. “Retribution for our successes?”
“I don’t—” Julian started to reply.
“So what if it is?” the old woman snarled, and both men looked at her with surprise.
“They warned the city of retribution,” Julian reminded. “We have kept our fighting out of Palmaris for fear of—”
“Bah!” she cut him off. “So what if it is? And so be it, stripe-faced devils!”
From outside came another communal gasp as another execution was carried out.
“We should leave this place and the fields beyond, then, perhaps,” said Bahdlahn.
“Bah!” the woman scolded him. “Don’t ye dare. Was ye thinking it all to be easy?”
“Old woman,” Julian scolded, to which she snarled “Bah!” again. Then, to the shock of both, she produced a dagger from her belt and rushed out through a broken window.
Bahdlahn and Julian ran to the window and noted her charging into the square, then pushing through the crowd. They lost sight of her but noted the jostling of her passing. Out the other side she came, running straight for the augur!
A xoconai intercepted—and got stabbed for his effort!
He fell back, dodging the subsequent wild swings from the old woman, while other soldiers rushed up, stabbing with spears.
The old woman laughed at them, even as their weapons pierced her flesh. “Swive them!” she yelled, her dying words. “Swive them all to demon hell!”
Bahdlahn fell back from the window, gasping.
“There is our answer,” Julian said to him, also coming back from the window, then grabbing Bahdlahn’s arm and tugging him back the way they had come.
“Back to Cathilda’s?” Bahdlahn asked, as they went back over the pile and down the narrow channel.
Julian shook his head. “Not tonight. Let us be quick out of the city.”
On they went, building to building, alley to alley, chased by xoconai songs and cheers and the gasps of poor people watching their fellows die.
“What answer?” Bahdlahn demanded, when they had gotten through the wall and back out into the empty night. “Do we go south? North to the Timberlands?”
“Swive them,” Julian said to him, grimly and determinedly. “We fight them. We kill them.”
“And they will kill us,” Bahdlahn said. “Maybe all of us.”
Julian stared at him, hard.
Bahdlahn glanced back at Palmaris. “And maybe all of them.”
“Then they’d do it anyway,” Julian said. “So be it.”
Off he went, into the night.
Bahdlahn paused for a long while, looking back and forth from the receding Julian to Palmaris behind him.
He finally nodded and smiled with admiration for the old woman who had given her life for the chance of stabbing one of these merciless conquerors. Yes, he thought, better that than cowering in the quiet darkness until the macana fell, and he hoped that he would die as bravely.
“So be it.”
21
HIGH PRIESTESS OF TONOLOYA?
Tuolonatl stood on the field outside a newly conquered town, looking up a long hill of grass and wind-flattened rocks to the retreating crowd of people. Atop that hill sat another human temple. St. Gwendolyn, it was called—or, more completely, St. Gwendolyn-by-the-Sea.
By the sea.
The monastery was built atop a cliff, and behind it was a drop of hundreds of feet to the black stones thrumming under the unceasing crash of waves.
The xoconai had crossed the continent. Before them, in this region called the Mantis Arm, lay the easternmost beaches. Far out beyond the waves, the sun would rise on Tonoloya, then it would climb into the sky, cross thousands of miles, and go behind a different sea on Tonoloya’s western beaches.
Greater Tonoloya was right here, before them, ready to be seized.
The woman could feel the stare of angry Pixquicauh behind her—she could hear him chewing his lip behind his xoconai skull condoral. Oh yes, he was mad at her, outraged, because she had held back her mundunugu, who could have ridden their cuetzpali up that hill and caught and slaughtered the fleeing humans.
“Where will they run?” she had told him, to calm his ire. Part of her hesitancy was strategic—hundreds of refugees would put great pressure on the priests within that monastery, and Tuolonatl
knew recent history well enough to realize that any advantage they might gain over these magic-wielding priests was worth pursuing.
She was still watching the retreat, the last of the fleeing humans disappearing into the huge structure, which more resembled a castle than the giant fortress they had encountered in the northwest, when she heard the cries behind her announcing the arrival of Scathmizzane and Kithkukulikhan.
The woman warrior grimaced, thinking Glorious Gold would send her army charging for the isolated temple. She had no doubt that she could defeat this one—it was nowhere near the size of St.-Mere-Abelle, and she had fifty thousand warriors on the field here. But the price would likely be disproportionately high if these priests were anywhere near as adept with magic as those they had left trapped in their walls at that other monastery.
She rubbed her chin, turned to Ataquixt and winked, and then climbed up on Pocheoya. She turned the horse about, pacing slowly to join Pixquicauh and the others on the edge of the area being cleared of warriors so that the dragon might land.
Scathmizzane was dismounting even as the dragon touched down, striding immediately toward his high priest and commander and growing smaller with each step, so that by the time he arrived right before the two, he was barely twice the height of an average xoconai, standing just tall enough to stare the mounted Tuolonatl in the eye.
“Many escaped,” Pixquicauh told Glorious Gold. “We could have caught them on the field, but they ran into the temple.” He half turned, staring hard at Tuolonatl as he did, and lifted his arm out toward the distant St. Gwendolyn.
“They have nowhere to run,” Tuolonatl said. “We can force a full surrender with only a single divine thrower. This temple cannot withstand such a barrage.”
“We have no divine throwers here!” the high priest yelled at her.
“Then bring one,” she replied, sternly and strongly.
Pixquicauh turned to Scathmizzane. “You have demanded deaths,” he said. “Many deaths. A thousand more could now lie dead before us!”
“It is too late,” Scathmizzane said.
Song of the Risen God Page 36