Child of a Mad God

by R. A. Salvatore

  So perhaps this Aoleyn would win.

  He laughed at the absurdity of it all, at his own helplessness, at his own smallness, and continued down the mountain, under the sunrise of the brilliant late-summer morning. The girl, the strange flying girl, had saved his life, beyond any doubt. Not simply from the Usgar hunters, but from the giant bear—in his decades on the frontier, Talmadge had never seen a bear behave so strangely! It was almost as if the great predator had come in to protect him from the Usgar. He stopped and pondered: had the girl done that, too?

  The girl who had thrown lightning and fire, who had healed the deep wound of the crystalline knife? Who had shown up at exactly the right moment to save him and get him away from danger?

  Talmadge ran his hand over the wound, flinching, pained by the slightest touch. The dagger had gone in so very deep, he understood, he knew. The strike had been mortal, surely, for even with the heroic healing, his side remained raw and red. He’d have a mighty scar to add to his collection when it fully healed.

  Might an Abellican monk have performed this miracle? Would it have had to be an abbot, even the Father Abbot? Yet here he was, alive. For the first time since the fight, Talmadge truly appreciated how impossible that should have been.

  “Thanks, girl,” he said quietly, his whisper lost to the howling mountain winds.

  He huddled up against that wind, crouched behind a boulder, unarmed and quite exhausted. A part of him wanted to take a nap, but he didn’t dare. He needed to be off the mountain quickly, this very day, if possible, and back to the relative safety of Fasach Crann. The Usgar were still out there, after all, to say nothing of the demonic beast that had attacked him and the girl.

  Talmadge glanced back up the mountainside. “The poor, doomed girl,” he whispered.

  An image of Khotai flashed in his thoughts, the last moment he had seen her before the canoe had upended, throwing them both into the water.

  If Khotai had even hit the water—he couldn’t be sure, for not a sound had he heard other than his own desperate splashing as he swam for all his life for the shore.

  Fleeing, instead of trying to help her.

  He was not going to do that again. He was too old to add to that burden.

  Heaving a great sigh, Talmadge fished in his pocket to pull out the crystalline dagger. Such a tiny and inadequate weapon, it seemed!

  “So be it,” he said, and he turned about, fought away his exhaustion, and started back up Fireach Speuer.

  * * *

  This was death.

  Not just the stench of death.

  Not just the coldness of death.

  No, this was a place of death itself.

  Magic was life and life was magic, but here, Aoleyn wondered if there could exist either.

  “It killed them,” she reminded herself, thinking of her mother and father and all that she had lost. With that in mind, she bravely moved to the low corridor and crept in, and was soon crawling.

  Her diamond light seemed to diminish in there, in this place that was not of magic.

  She came through to an angled floor with a crawl space that seemed too tight for her to inch through. Every sensibility within the young woman told her to turn back, to run away, to be as far from this awful place as possible.

  But she found herself flat on her belly under that too-low ceiling, inching forward with grim determination. For she could feel the coldness beyond.

  The fossa was there, waiting for her.

  The ceiling above her opened a bit, but she stayed low. The floor before her sloped downward, then disappeared into a dark hole, one that reminded Aoleyn of the pit she had encountered in the crystalline caverns, beneath the maw of Craos’a’diad. And like there, she could feel the ghosts in here, the lamenting spirits of the fossa’s many victims.

  Was her mother here?

  She shook the thought out of her head. She couldn’t be distracted, not for an instant. She had to be faster than the fossa!

  It was there, just beyond her, in that pit, she knew, she could feel, she could hear.

  She tapped her foot and brought a field of ice before her on the decline of the stone floor, and some surely falling into the pit beyond. She considered her options, on how she might fight the creature in these quarters, or how she might get out of this compromising position, and focused on the songs of the moonstone and the malachite.

  She heard a roar, and the fossa leaped up before her to the stone, barely a stride away, its claws raking hard on the icy patch.

  Aoleyn cried out and threw forth the power of the moonstone, a blast of wind that slammed the slipping monster and pitched it back over the edge.

  And Aoleyn went right to her turquoise and wedstone, and sent her spirit flying behind it, diving down into the most horrible darkness she had ever known, toward the red eyes that peered up at her, and straight in to the beast.

  Immediately, Aoleyn began again her healing.

  The demon fossa howled, shrieked, caterwauled, and went into a murderous frenzy that flipped it all about the pit and sent bones flying all about.

  Inside the creature’s senses, seeing through the fossa’s eyes, Aoleyn saw the ghosts swirling about, trapped and crying, the spirits of so many men and women, children even, and a thousand animal spirits as well. Somewhere there was her mother and her father, she knew, and she wanted to call to them, to free them!

  All she could do was cast her healing, with all her strength, to burn away the demon side of their eternal tormentor.

  She felt that seething hatred, too, the mind of the monster. Her second wave of assault didn’t surprise it, as had her initial intrusion, and now it moved with purpose, scrambling to the back wall of the pit.

  “No, no, no,” Aoleyn heard her own mouth saying, up above, and she brought forth more magical healing, knowing that time was short.

  The fossa leaped across the pit to the wall, caught on, and leaped back higher the other way.

  “No!” Aoleyn cried, in her mind and body, for she couldn’t defeat it in time, and she was not in her corporeal form to defend!

  Her spirit flew free as the fossa sprang to the front wall again, up higher, murderous claws catching hold on the stone and launching it back higher on the back wall. Forward, it sprang again, but now over the lip, its momentum sliding it up the gradual incline, across the ice, one claw reaching forth to stab and hook Aoleyn’s arm!

  She just got back into her body, just recovered her senses, and she flew forward, caught by the demon, sliding across her own ice, and falling. Instinctively, purely on terror, the witch grabbed at the malachite to resist the fall, but only minimally succeeded, both Aoleyn and the demon crashing down hard into the pile of bones, more than one jagged bit stabbing into her.

  She fled her body again—she had no choice—into the fossa, assaulting it with waves of Usgar’s song, with the healing power of the wedstone.

  She saw through its demonic eyes as it lunged for her form, tasted her own blood as the fossa chewed into her upper belly and lower rib, tearing her diaphragm, biting for her lungs and heart.

  Aoleyn knew pain as never before, knew terror as never before, and so she ran and hid in the only place available.

  In the song of the wedstone, in the magic of Usgar, and there she sent forth healing as never before, into the fossa, into herself, and she could feel the monster’s agony, could smell its flesh burning.

  But it was still biting, and her blood was pouring forth, and in this battle, the monster’s fangs against her healing powers, she could not win.

  She cried out for her mother.

  But there was something else, something she felt from the other gemstone, the turquoise, something within the demon fossa.

  Something that it had been, that hated the demon more than all else.

  Aoleyn went there. Aoleyn healed, trying to keep her body alive, trying to burn away the demon.

  The fossa chewed.

  38

  TALMADGE’S TEARS

  H
ands on hips, at a loss where to begin, Talmadge almost jumped out of his boots when a large and dark form came charging out of the cave, straight at him!

  He cried out, he fell back, waving the crystalline dagger somewhat pathetically, and nearly tripped over his own feet and tumbled to the ground.

  But the charging creature had less interest in fighting him than he had in fighting it, and it skidded to a fast stop and turned sideways to the man, stalking off and never taking its eyes from him.

  Its feline eyes, for this was no monster, but a cloud leopard, graceful and beautiful. A ferocious predator, to be sure, but a shy one that did not seek out difficult fights.

  Talmadge eyed it curiously, and began nodding his head at the big cat’s profile as it loped away, low to the ground, long and sleek.

  Like the monster from the previous night, though with a furry and plump tail and not some strange swordlike sheaf of bone.

  When the cat was at last out of sight, Talmadge looked back to the black maw of the cave. It wasn’t the leopard’s lair, certainly, or the cat would not have run off. But why was it in there? The monster had burrowed through a bear, so what might a leopard do against such power?

  Or was this the monster? Talmadge had heard tales of creatures that transformed in the dark of night, or under the glow of a full moon. Was this legendary demon a were-creature, perhaps?

  It was all too confusing, and interesting, but also quickly dismissed as a musing for another day when the most pressing question weighed in on Talmadge: what had happened to the young woman, to Aoleyn of the Usgar?

  “Oh, by Abelle’s fat ass,” Talmadge cursed, knowing that he had to go in. “Aoleyn?” he called, as loudly as he dared, hoping against hope that she was somewhere about out here.

  He kept calling as he moved about, trying to construct a torch and figure some way to light it. He gave up on that plan quickly, though, with the mountain wind howling.

  So he sighed and went to the opening, bent down, and peered in. He noted a shallow cave, and would have thought it nothing more, except he noted an opening in the back of it, a tunnel leading farther in.

  He had to go there, for the only reason he could even note that passageway was because a light was coming from it, thin but consistent. The light of a magical diamond, Talmadge knew. The young Usgar woman was back there. He looked around for the leopard, but it was not to be seen. Could she possibly still be alive?

  He hopped into the cave and moved to the passageway, which had a lower ceiling. He went in crouching, but gave up on that and crawled. He went around a bend cautiously, the light growing at that corner, and found that the passage opened up for a slanted floor, the uneven top of a gigantic stone, with only a tiny clearance to the rough stone ceiling above.

  The thought of crawling through such a space terrified Talmadge, monster or no monster on the other end, but Aoleyn was back there—or at least, her diamond light was back there.

  “Aoleyn!” he called, for if there was a monster back there, it was going to catch him whether he was silent or not. “Girl! Are you there?”

  He paused and listened, but heard only the wind moaning through the entry cavern behind him.

  He lay on his stomach and squeezed under the ceiling and began inching through. He called to Aoleyn repeatedly, but heard no reply. All he knew was the diamond light, and a stench, growing stronger with every inch, and a sense of cold, deathly cold, that he had never known before.

  But Talmadge kept going. He thought of Khotai, and decided that no, he wasn’t going to leave this lovely young woman who had saved his life.

  “Come on, monster,” he growled under his breath, knife firmly in hand. The young woman was dead, he believed, and so there was no justice in the world, no beneficent god rewarding heroes and punishing demons. That thought chased him through the tight crawl space, burning at him, assaulting him. By the time he came to the wider area just beyond, a dark hole before him, he was too angry to be afraid. Now that terrible smell of death only made him want to fight, and now the sudden and empty cold …

  “Cold?” he whispered in surprise.

  Talmadge put his hand before him to test the stone ahead once more, but pulled it back immediately, for the stone there was much colder, was frozen and slick with ice, and actually hurt to touch!

  “Aoleyn,” he breathed, remembering her actions the previous night. He lifted his head as high as he could go, and noted the pit. The light was coming from in there, he could tell, casting a glow up the back wall.

  That back wall held him transfixed for a long moment, staring at the gouges in the stone, claw marks as profound as a great cat might do to a stand of soft clay.

  He searched about and pulled out the cord he had taken from the tree the night before, finding a jag where the ceiling met the floor where he could tie off one end. Wrapping the other end securely about his hand and arm, Talmadge inched forward, trying to see over the rim and whispering Aoleyn’s name.

  He came to the cold area but kept going, peering intently, and he finally came to where he was able to look over the ledge. There she was, sitting against the wall on a mound of bones.

  Unmoving, the front of her clothing drenched in blood.

  “Aoleyn!” he yelled. “Usgar girl!”

  She didn’t stir.

  Talmadge lowered his head in despair. She was dead—she had to be. She was too still. There was too much blood. He thought he should go and retrieve the body, but he didn’t even know how he might do that, for the cord wasn’t long enough.

  He said a prayer for Aoleyn, for this wonderful and strange young woman who had so bravely saved him, and he started back.

  And he slipped on the ice and slid back the other way, over the lip of the pit. The cord tightened on his forearm painfully as he struggled, and he had nothing to grab onto, nowhere to put his foot even, for the side of the pit, too, was covered in magical ice. So he hung there and he flailed for a bit, grimacing against the pain, and thought himself stupid indeed, for if anyone came here in the future, they would find him hanging here, dead.

  Finally, overcome with frustration, Talmadge brought up the crystal knife and cut the cord. He dropped the final ten feet to the bones, crunching and shifting beneath him.

  “Idiot,” he cursed himself, and he realized that he had to go and search the body to find the gemstone that she used to lift them the previous night and hope that he could bring forth enough magic to get him back up to the ledge. He moved over her tentatively, unsure, not wanting to desecrate her. He moved her shirt aside to inspect the mortal wound, a deep gash at the bottom of her rib cage—no, more than a gash, more like a burrow, and he thought of the bear the previous night.

  “Oh, poor girl,” he whispered.

  He noticed the diamond, too, glowing brilliantly from a strand on an unusual belly ring she wore. Truly Talmadge had never seen anything like it, with its four strands each ended by a different gem, obviously magical—at least the diamond.

  “Girl?” he asked repeatedly, moving very close, trying to make sure that she had expired before he took her gemstones, a task that seemed more difficult now, for that belly ring seemed quite secure and he might have to cut it off her.

  He hugged her close, whispering comforting words to her, though he knew she could not hear. He said another prayer, though he had no god of his own and knew nothing about any Aoleyn might care for.

  He slid his hand down to grab the gray hub of her jewelry, closing his fingers securely to see if he could somehow ease it out.

  And there he found her, found Aoleyn, the thinnest strand of life!

  “Girl? Girl?” he said, grabbing her face with his other hand and shaking it about, trying to stir her, to no avail.

  She seemed quite dead, but he felt her life in his other hand, in that stone! No, he realized, not in the stone, but through the stone.

  Talmadge was not practiced or trained in the use of gemstones. His only experience with magic came from the clairvoyance crystal in his poc
ket. He closed his eyes now, though, and he felt the magic in the gray stone on Aoleyn’s belly, and he knew then that it was what the monks of Abelle called a soul stone, the stone they used in healing.

  And this was the stone Aoleyn had used to heal him, twice.

  “Please, please, please,” Talmadge kept repeating, trying to focus all of his thoughts on that soul stone.

  His whispers died away when he heard the song in the stone, and he went to it and embraced it, and tried to give it, somehow, to the poor woman.

  But he could not. No matter how hard he tried, Talmadge did not know how to cast such a spell. He could hear the magic, could even call back to it and amplify the song, but no more, and he realized that he couldn’t save Aoleyn, that the tiny flicker of life remaining within her was going to snuff out while he held her there in his arms, in that pit of death.

  He began to cry.

  He cried for Khotai. He cried for Aoleyn.

  * * *

  Tay Aillig was barely halfway to Mairen’s tent when Connebragh intercepted him.

  “Are you just returning?” the witch asked.

  He stared at her hard, trying to intimidate her and back her away from those dangerous questions. Normally that would work on the malleable Connebragh, but this time, she held her ground, though her expression was hardly confrontational.

  “Have you seen your wife?” Connebragh asked, and Tay Aillig surrendered his imposing stare for one of surprise.

  “What about her?”

  “I … I assumed that she would be with you.”

  He realized then that Connebragh hadn’t been accusing him of anything with her first question, but that hardly seemed to matter at that moment, anyway. “She is not in her tent?” he asked.

  “She is nowhere that I can find.”

  “And the Usgar-righinn?” the War Leader snapped. He thought back to the previous night in light of this new information.

  “Seeking Aoleyn.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I do not know! I just asked you…”

  “Not Aoleyn!” Tay Aillig snapped. “Where is Mairen?”