Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  I shook my head. “Where would you have heard that? No. I’ll come with you, but I won’t sing.”

  He relented, offered me an arm and we took a seat beside the fire. Eager to keep away from the topic of singing, I posed a question.

  “You and your mother live in northern Souldern?”

  “Yes, the Ridings.” He settled back onto one palm. “My mother has a way with horses, but the mountains are too rocky for anything more than donkeys. So she, and others like her, congregate on the plains.”

  I looked around for the animals in question. They were enormous, the plains horses I’d seen on my first night in camp, picketed two tents away in the company of several apathetic donkeys.

  “What about you?” I pried. “You talk as though you’re not one of them.”

  Nisien turned his cup in contemplation, then made a sound between a weary exhalation and a laugh. “Maybe I’m not?”

  I gave a small shrug, unsure if I had trespassed on overly personal ground.

  “I spent ten years in the legions, away from my mother, fighting and taxing my own people. After that, I don’t feel that I belong here. But life dragged her to the brink of death while I was gone. I can’t leave her again.”

  My hand stilled on my cup. “You fought with the Arpa?”

  He nodded. “Many of the men around here did at one point or another. They take us as boys.”

  “Not the women?”

  Nisien snorted. “No. The Arpa have no women in their army. Their women would never touch a sword, and their men would never let them.”

  That thought sent me into a pensive silence. The Eangen were pragmatic about gender: whoever could fight, fought; whoever could farm, farmed; whoever could weave, wove. The notion of an entirely male army, and a female population who had never touched a weapon, was foreign to me.

  “Do you have an Arpa wife?” I asked, curious to meet one of these unmilitaristic Arpa women. “Did you bring one home?”

  Nisien, halfway through a drink of wine, choked. “What? No!” Realizing how emphatic he’d sounded, he added, “I don’t intend to marry, so don’t mistake my attention.”

  “Oh, I didn’t,” I assured him, and it was true. But of its own accord my memory turned back to Albor, back to Eidr’s arms, and my smile faltered. I hid my face in my cup. “How did you leave the legions?”

  “I earned my release.” Nisien sat forward now, bracing his arms on his knees and letting his back round out. “There was a minor… power struggle… among the commanders. I chose the right side. But I’m still Soulderni auxiliary. If there’s a real war, I’ll be summoned back.”

  “So the Arpa push into the mountains doesn’t count as real war?” I probed.

  He frowned, then grunted. “Hah. Well, I wouldn’t know. How did they get that far north?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. They didn’t pass through Eangen lands.”

  “Must have come up around the Headwaters then.” Nisien scratched at the side of his face.

  I nodded thoughtfully. The Headwaters was where the Pasidon spawned, a broad expanse of water that bubbled with hidden springs. It looked harmless enough, they said, until you fell into a well and drowned, or were snared by one of a thousand horrors and torn limb from limb. No one lived anywhere near it nor dared to cross it unless it was locked in ice.

  “So you can’t think of any reason why the Arpa would push into Algatt land?” I pressed.

  “Well, it forces the Eangen and the Algatt to annihilate one another, but that’s a rather messy strategy for the Arpa, and they’ve never cared much for anything north of Souldern.” Nisien shook his head. “I truly can’t say.”

  Annihilate. I mulled the word over until it soured my stomach, my thoughts darkened, and I stood in the ashes of Albor once more. Was this man right? Would the Eangen and the Algatt battle each other for control of the Rim until one, or both, were gone?

  Nisien saw my face change but, mercifully, did not comment. Instead, he offered me one word: “Sing.”

  I rolled my eyes heavenward and rapidly blinked over-bright eyes. “Gods, no.”

  “Well, I’m not taking you north if you don’t.” The man gave a playful half-shrug.

  “Perhaps I don’t want you to take me north,” I replied. “You stink of horse.”

  He gave me a glare of mock offense, then added in a gentler tone, “Sing something from home? You must miss it.”

  I made a face at him, but my mind began to turn. There had been no funerals after the raid in Albor, no memorials, no pyres. I couldn’t perform death rites from such a distance. But didn’t my people, my husband and my cousin, deserve at least one song?

  I cleared my throat and shifted onto my knees, letting my chest and stomach open. “All right.”

  If anyone else watched, I didn’t see. I focused inward, recalling Eidr, Yske and Vist. I pulled up the memories of every corpse I had seen and laid it before my mind’s eye, like glass beads on a string.

  I sang an Eangi song, Eidr’s favorite. It was an old one, whose lyrics were wrapped in the obscurity of centuries past; not quite a dirge, though it was by no means joyful. It was a song of passage, of closing, of loss and hope.

  My voice was deep for a woman’s, not sweet, but easy. I felt each note hum through my ribs, softening as it slipped into husky minors and meandering lengths.

  For once, the Soulderni did not openly stare, but their conversations lowered as they listened to the melody. Nisien’s eyes followed me throughout, studying me, drawing the words into himself as if he understood their meaning.

  When the last note faded, there was no applause. The Soulderni sensed that this was not a song to be commended.

  “Are you mourning your village?”

  I glanced up at Uwi and was startled to find her face blurry. “Yes.”

  The girl dropped down to my side and crossed her legs. “Can I sing with you? I don’t know the words, but I can sing along.”

  For a second time that night, I blinked tears from my eyes. “Yes. Yes, you may.”

  Uwi straightened her shoulders in satisfaction and looked to me, her belly already puffing out with deep breaths.

  I parted my lips and began to sing, “The Owl, he watched, his eyes of gold…”

  THIRTEEN

  At sunset the next day, the Soulderni gathered. They wore their finest clothes, resplendent in oranges and reds and creams. Women bound their hair into twin braids, wrapping them round with embroidered strips of cloth. Men wore their hair free while children shrieked and fidgeted with excitement, hauling around dogs and tugging at their parents’ clothing.

  I slipped, alone, to a spot in the back of the crowd as Silgi’s family merged with two long rows of Soulderni, all singing and shuffling their feet. Skirts swung. Men shook out their hair and women sang to the Solstice sunset, but there was more urgency than joy to their actions. They were a people whose land had been invaded, whose god had gone silent, and all their hope of his reappearance depended upon tonight.

  I felt their determination and fear in my bones, pulsing with the beat of escalating drums, tumbling and booming and tapping into a fevered pace. The fervor of the crowd rose alongside, swelling with deep wooden flutes and the sudden blasts of horns.

  Straining up onto my toes, I glimpsed a priestess in a gown of palest yellow. Her braids trailed down before her ears, while the rest of her grey hair was piled into a crown and studded with bracken. She was old – likely the oldest woman I had ever seen – but her back was still straight and her gaze clear.

  She led a bull towards the altar at the foot of the waterfall, just visible above the heads of the crowd on a nearly imperceptible elevation. Despite the chaos of humanity and sound, the animal’s steps were languid, drugged.

  Nisien drew up to my side without greeting and set his stance, arms laced over his chest. He did not sing, but rather watched the proceedings with distant brown eyes.

  “Why don’t you join in?” I asked.

  Nisien gave
a half-shake of his head, still focused on the proceedings. “Oulden hasn’t spoken in weeks. And I’ve never been the most pious of men.”

  I eyed him sidelong, the priestess in me trying to read beneath his words. “You don’t think he’ll come tonight?”

  Nisien shrugged with an air that dissuaded further questioning. After last night I was comfortable with him, but his lack of confidence and the tension in the air made my skin crawl. I brushed at my arms and turned my attention back to the ceremony.

  The pounding of the drums eased, the eye of a storm, and the women filled the lull with a new, lilting verse.

  As if responding to their summons, the waning sun broke up through the valley and struck the foot of the waterfall. There it hung, transforming the mist into clouds of shimmering gold.

  My breath hitched as the priestess raised her knife and the drums picked up again, steadier than before. Besides Nisien and me, she seemed to be the only one not singing. She cast her ancient eyes from the bull to the sunset, blade poised, chest rising and falling in time with the music.

  A horn blasted and the Soulderni priestess struck. The head of the bull bowed, and his broad horns dropped from sight beneath a wall of howling faithful. Though I couldn’t see, I could imagine how the blood gushed onto the altar, overflowing the rocks and into the pool.

  The drums and flutes stopped. The last horn died, and a hush fell over the crowd as the mist continued to dance, iridescent and alive.

  Time stretched on. The Soulderni didn’t move, didn’t speak. The back of my neck prickled and Nisien’s brows contracted inwards, his lips turning in a half-formed frown.

  Slowly, the shaft of light left the pool and began to travel up the waterfall, taking its golden glory with it.

  “Oulden,” the voice of the priestess rose. “We beg your presence.”

  Beside me, Nisien shifted again and I noticed more than one person glance at their feet. The ground here, I saw for the first time, was covered with a fine clover of sorts, laden with buds.

  “They bloom,” Nisien leant down to murmur in my ear, “when Oulden is near.”

  But, judging from the mood of the crowd, the god was late again. Sunlight reached the top of the waterfall and slipped over onto the ridge beyond. Whispers laced through the Soulderni, some low and cautious, others thin and frightened. Nisien crouched, staring at the buds, and I remained poised, every instinct preparing to fight or run.

  Someone cried out. Then another and another. Across the ground flowers began to bloom, buds unravelling with unnatural swiftness. Their color was equally strange, not a color at all but a lack of it, insubstantial and empty. A shadow. The heart of a mountain.

  Nisien recoiled and I lifted my feet, staring at the plants in confusion and a growing, heart-pattering dread.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  There was no time to answer. Cries ruptured into screams and, as the last flower unfurled, the waterfall ran dry.

  People bolted, snatching up children and crying for missing family members. I stayed where I was, drawing up Fire in my chest and winding it through my body like ivy.

  Nisien stepped closer, narrowly avoiding collision with a fleeing girl, and grabbed my arm. “We should go!”

  “No,” I said. Lost in the Fire, my voice was emotionless. While the human side of me would have run in an instant, even abandoned the camp and headed north, it was the Eangi, the priestess, who was in control now.

  The Soulderni thinned around us, leaving the priestess and a pair of acolytes at the side of the pool. I knew that whatever was happening, whatever was coming, I should be with them.

  I pushed Nisien’s hand away and stepped back. “Give me your knife.”

  The horseman put a hand on the long blade at his hip. “Why?”

  “I’m an Eangi,” I said. “A priestess of Eang. Give me your knife, please.”

  To his credit, he pulled the weapon from his belt and handed it over without hesitation. At the same time, he became incredibly calm. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Do not let anyone leave the valley.” Without waiting for confirmation, I turned the knife into a familiar grip and ran towards the pool.

  The old priestess didn’t see me. She was praying, quick and rapid. Two followers hovered a pace behind her, long knives bared, their faces thin masks of composure over wild-eyed fear.

  One of them threw up a hand towards me. “Stop! Run! The other way!”

  “I’m Eangi!” I called back. “Let me help.”

  The priestess lifted her head and looked at me over her bony shoulder. Her lips never stopped moving, but her eyes closed, once, in affirmation.

  My shoes splashed into puddles of blood as I took up position at her side. The purification that the waterfall had wrought over Iosas’s and my sacrifice had stopped. Now the blood of the bull congealed, creeping into the pool in curling tendrils.

  No mist met my face. There was no roar of the waterfall to smother my senses, just the lap of tiny waves while the bull lay nearby, horns angling his head at an unnerving angle towards the sky. It was a sky without texture, a blanket of unearthly dusk and odd, diffused light.

  As the screams of the Soulderni grew more contained and distant, the priestess’s hissing prayers became the loudest sound.

  “Eang,” I breathed, touching my throat where my collar used to be. “Eang, hear me. Goddess of War, Watchful Goddess, speak to me. I know you are displeased with me, but I need you now. Tell me what is happening. Show me what to do.”

  I slit open my bad hand – it still wasn’t strong anyway – and held it down to my waist, letting the blood pool in my palm. I murmured familiar Eangi words, over and over. “Let me see, let me see.”

  Before I could complete the ritual, before I could look for a vision in the blood, someone spoke from behind us. But it wasn’t the old priestess or I they were speaking to.

  “Oulden, where are you?”

  The priestess and I turned as one. A man, a creature – a god – stood between us and the camp. I couldn’t describe him, because there was no way to actually look at him. He was shadow. He was nothing. Like the tainted flowers at our feet, he simply was.

  This had to be the interloping god, the one tormenting Souldern. But how could he be here, at Oulden’s Feet? How could he pass onto the other deity’s sacred ground?

  “You.” The priestess’s voice did not waver. “Why do you trespass at Oulden’s Feet?”

  The being remained motionless, but I sensed him draw closer. His presence billowed out like silent thunder, rushing across my skin.

  It took all my will not to flinch away, but I couldn’t help a fluttering blink. In that brief space between my eyelids closing and opening again, the priestess’s acolytes evaporated. One moment they were there and the next they burst into ash, ash that rippled and blew into my face. I gasped and spluttered and covered my mouth with a sleeve as the rest of the ash fell upon the shadow flowers at our feet. There, the blossoms shuddered and bloomed broader, greying and becoming more… substantial.

  The priestess seized my hand. Her knife, still slick with the blood of the motionless bull, tangled between our fingers. There was no need to communicate; we served different gods, but together we were stronger.

  “I have come to kill your god, old woman,” the being declared. His voice ground through me, making my bones and teeth ache. “Come, Oulden, protect your servant. See how many long and grey years she has given you. See how your people cower!”

  I kept my gaze focused on the stranger, trying to ignore the ash – the remains of two people – caught in my hair and smeared across my tongue.

  I could see now why Iosas had said this god was different than Oulden, or Eang. He was formless and faceless, intangible but powerful. So very powerful. Powerful enough to disintegrate humans in a breath. Powerful enough to trespass on another’s sacred ground.

  That realization sent fear rocking through my chest. What was I doing, standing here with an old wo
man in a land that wasn’t even my own, while an unknown deity stalked towards us?

  When he received no answer the being laughed, a human sound caught in a landslide of divine disgust. “He is hiding from me! Hiding, still! Even in his own temple! They cower, they cower, the New Gods. The young, the weak. Can you not bear the power of the Old World?”

  Before I could process these words, a rope of blackness lashed towards us. I instinctively ducked, pulling the old priestess down with me behind the bloody altar.

  But my movements were too hasty, and the other woman too slow. My foot slipped in blood and I nearly careened into the pool. The priestess stumbled, emitting a crackling, piercing wail.

  Our hands broke apart. The ceremonial knife clanged off the rocks and toppled into the water with a soft plunk and a ripple – both nearly drowned by the other woman’s shrieks.

  I stumbled halfway to my feet, soaked in water and smeared with blood. The old priestess clutched at the altar above me, contorted and shuddering like a speared rabbit.

  I cried out. The woman had been speared, but not by any weapon of this world. The interloper stood on the other side of the altar now, his hand buried in her chest as if he grasped her lungs. Shadow poured into her in a constant flow, solidifying into a humanesque, muscled arm.

  All amusement fled the being’s voice when he spoke again. He bellowed out towards the mountains, “Oulden!”

  I heard the woman whimper. My gaze flicked from her legs, just within my reach, to the strange god. He hadn’t marked me as a threat yet, even with Nisien’s knife still clutched in my good hand. If I was going to run, now was the time.

  But even as my baser instincts urged me to bolt, I reached out one bleeding, Eangi hand. My fingers found the woman’s thin ankle and I dug my nails into her skin.

  My Fire rushed from my body and into hers in a blessing, cleansing burn. The deity’s arm jerked back, and the woman dropped like a sack of grain onto the rocks.