Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  The strange god’s head snapped towards me, recoiling his smoke-and-shadow arm. “What? Spawn of Eang, here? Oh, I shall catch your mistress too. Oulden and Eang, fallen at the feet of Ashaklon. The bindings fray!”

  Finally, he had a name. Ashaklon. But it meant nothing to me. Was this one of the Arpa gods or… No. A God of the Old World, he’d called himself. One of the divinities Eang had bound, long ago?

  Then, as my mind raced, my knees dug into bloody rock and the old priestess struggled for breath, Oulden appeared.

  The god of the Soulderni was a middle-aged man with wild hair, his body clothed in a tunic of the finest weave and his muscular thighs bare. He wore a pelt over his shoulders and bore a herder’s staff. Everywhere his feet fell, the flowers transformed to brilliant Soulderni red, shedding Ashaklon’s darkness in a fine mist.

  At the same time, a great crash of water sent me reeling into the altar. Deafened and half-drowned in spray, I had just enough time to realize that the waterfall had reawakened before my senses were overridden by Ashaklon’s delighted, gut-melting laughter.

  The Soulderni priestess, huddled behind the altar beside me, reached up to clutch my arm. Her voice gurgled with blood and grey rimmed her eyes. “Where is Eang?”

  The question rung in my ears, more meaningful than the priestess knew. Where was Eang? Where was she when Albor fell, when the Algatt poured out of the mountains, and when I knelt here on the ground of a foreign land?

  I had no answer, except that my goddess was too far away right now, and I was an exile. But I bowed my head onto the stone slab all the same, still slick with blood and spray, and prayed to the darkening sky.

  The waterfall continued to roar, Oulden and the formless god raged, and the old priestess choked, but my prayers met nothing but silence. Eang would not or could not hear, even on Oulden’s holy ground, where the High Halls bled into the Waking World.

  But Eang had to hear me, here as I faced down an unknown deity – it was her duty, her role as my goddess and as an ally of Oulden. And I’d spent enough time in Svala’s shadow to know what the High Priestess would do now.

  My fear faded into a grim, blinding brand of indignation, and there in the warm blood on the altar, I began to draw runes. Eight symbols, at eight points; symbols of opening and tearing, of the human world and the divine, and of Eang. Brave. Watchful. Vengeful. Swift.

  I did not know what to expect. But as my finger left the blood of the final rune, languid and nearly black in the waning light, Eang rushed into my lungs like the flurry of wings. There was no time to be afraid, no time to remember the Eangi girl I had once seen possessed and die in the Hall of Smoke.

  My self, my thoughts, all that I considered my own, stepped back through a veil. And then… there was Eang.

  She tasted like iron on my lips. She was the coldest hour of a winter night and the brazen heat of the summer sun. She overwhelmed me, roaring through muscle and veins, marrow and bone, until that fire, that presence, was all I knew.

  My vision sparked with a golden-amber haze, and I stood. My cuts and scrapes closed over and I watched Ashaklon tear the earth from under Oulden with a drop of his chin. Oulden leapt, his staff transforming into a spear as he charged. One slash. The haft shattered. Three of the tall standing stones around us exploded in plumes of dust and shrilling fragments.

  In the debris, Oulden hurled himself into Ashaklon’s chest. The two went down, humanesque god entwining his spectral fellow in arms of corded muscle. Beneath them, the flowers turned from grey to red in a path of divine rancor.

  I – Eang – left Nisien’s knife on the altar and began a slow approach. With every step she sunk deeper into my limbs and I into her mind, her thoughts and instincts laid out like the valley before my eyes. There was will, hard and unyielding. Anger and frustration.

  And fear. True, fluttering fear.

  The feeling was there and gone, hidden away from me, but not before I’d sensed its direction. It wasn’t fear of Ashaklon, but fear of something greater, something vaguer – something he heralded.

  Still, Eang strode forward. Amid the stones Oulden and Ashaklon struck one another, the shadow deity’s darkness slipping seamlessly between anthropomorphic blows and spectral retreats. Oulden came back at him with earth and stone, the very ground itself moaning and bowing, bending and cracking at his whim. More standing stones, sacred and riddled with magic as they were, burst. The grass, dirt and rock beneath my strides shuddered, the air in my lungs thinned and the water of the pool behind me trembled, every element reacting to the clash of gods.

  I stopped to pick up the remnants of Oulden’s staff. The wood felt as solid as rock, but the break was total; a hundred splintered ends gaped at me, refusing to meet again.

  I took one end in each hand and crept after the thundering gods. My wrist protested, tendons straining, barely healed bones grinding. But this was Eang working, not me, and the goddess did not blink at suffering.

  Ashaklon backed away from Oulden, his hidden muscles roiling, building for a ferocious charge. I circled to the side, my eyes lingering on his exposed back.

  “Oulden,” I called with the voice of Eang, and my throat burned.

  Oulden looked up, the flowers beneath his feet shuddering black, then bursting into a brilliant, violent red. I hurled him half of the staff and bolted, rounding Ashaklon just as the being lashed out at me.

  I drove my half into his spine. At the same instant, Oulden sprung, his half of the staff meeting mine in Ashaklon’s stomach.

  Ashaklon shrieked. Eang’s presence or no, my flesh was still human; the sound blasted me backwards in a blur of sight and sound. I struck a standing stone and my world fractured into blackness.

  The next thing I knew, I was coughing. Dust rained around me, choking and obscuring. Beneath my bruised ribs, Eang’s Fire had gone out. The goddess had left me. Dizzying, cloying exhaustion came in her place and I trembled as I pushed myself upright.

  Through a veil of dust, I saw Oulden heft Ashaklon like a skewered rabbit and plunge one end of the staff down into the earth. The crook had grown significantly, thickening and extending, wrapping snaking roots around Ashaklon’s writhing form and creeping into the earth like the roots of a tree. At last, the God of the Old World folded from sight, and stilled.

  Relief gushed through me. The threat was gone, Eang was gone, and I was still drawing ragged breaths into my lungs.

  But something of the goddess remained, curling in the back of my mind. It was that fear I’d sensed, that vague and fleeting dread that Eang had tried – and failed – to keep from me. It was so genuine, so human, that it left me disarmed. I knew, in that moment, that I’d learned something of my goddess that I was never intended to know.

  The Goddess of War was afraid.

  Distantly, I heard the Soulderni erupt in a wave of lamenting, tremulous cheers. “Oulden! Our god! Oulden!”

  I let my head droop onto the mossy earth and closed my eyes.

  FOURTEEN

  Eang came to me as I slept. She met me in a vision of the Hall of Smoke as it once was, in a quiet corner where I stood alone, kneading dough at a long table.

  “You did well,” she told me. She was not angry today. Rather, she seemed reserved and thoughtful, clad not in her warrior’s garb but in a simple gown, black as the heart of the poppies in her meadow.

  Her praise filled me with warmth, but my memory of her fear came hot on its heels. I kept working with my head down, concealing my own thoughts from her. “Thank you for hearing me.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her run a distracted hand over the stomach of her gown. The gesture was reflexive, self-calming, though her expression was a veil of impassivity. “Did Svala teach you how to use those runes? To reach me at such a distance?”

  I shook my head, face still lowered. “Not directly. But it seemed the right thing to do.”

  I felt Eang’s eyes linger on me, cloistered and calculating, but she said no more on the topic. “I have f
ound your charge.”

  My head shot up. “Vistic?”

  “Yes.” Eang glanced across the Hall. Faceless Eangen and Eangi, little more than memories now, went about their business, oblivious to us. “There… there is more to the situation than I knew. Why did you pledge yourself to the child?”

  My hands paused at their work. “He’s Sixnit’s son. His father was gone, so I stood in.”

  Eang didn’t look at me, her face inscrutable.

  “Why?” I pressed. “Is he all right?”

  Asking any question was a risk, but she did not snap at me. She simply returned my gaze, unspeaking.

  I tried another route. “Is there trouble in the High Halls?”

  She nodded. “Yes. But the appearance of Ashaklon revealed much.”

  I remembered her fear again. “Who… was he?”

  “A God of the Old World,” Eang replied. “Whom I, Oulden and Gadr bound long before your people came to these shores.”

  “Then how did he escape?”

  “That is my concern, not yours. Besides, he was a lesser god – a mere servant. And now he is bound again.”

  A mere servant? All at once, her fear made sense. Ashaklon had been strong enough to trespass on Oulden’s holy ground, challenge him, and required the intervention of two gods to subdue. If entities like him had been servants among the Old Gods, how powerful had their masters been?

  Powerful enough to make the Goddess of War afraid.

  Eang let silence hang between us before she spoke again. “You were right to call to me, but you are not forgiven. You must return to your original task. It is crucial, Hessa. I do not write fate, but I have interpreted her words, and you are destined to kill Omaskat.”

  “Why?” As soon as the question fell out of my lips, I knew I’d gone too far. I froze, hands covered with sticky dough and coarse flour, and raised my gaze to hers.

  Eang’s chin drifted to one side, eyeing me like a crow might a corpse. When she spoke it was with deadly, forced calm. “Because I told you to.”

  I braced, but there was no violent reprisal, no more harsh words. Eang, it seemed, was trying to control herself.

  Finally, the goddess shook her head. “I should leave you to suffer, but it’s impractical. You must get north as quickly as you can. I will call in a favor with Aita and send her to see to the worst of your injuries while you sleep. Also, there are those among the Soulderni who have decided you are, in fact, me. Do be clear that you are otherwise. Now, wake.”

  * * *

  I awoke to the light of high noon, alone in Silgi’s tent. I squinted up at the tight bonds between the roof hides, sealed with resin and studded with their red zig-zag stitches.

  The camp was much quieter than it had been before the attack, but there was a peacefulness about it. Oulden was still here; I could sense him. I sensed others, too. There was a heaviness upon the wind that was Ashaklon, imprisoned within the tree grown from Oulden’s staff; now a fully established binding tree, as I’d seen with Svala on the night I learned I was to kill Omaskat. Then there was iron, clinging to my skin and the air around me: a remnant of Eang. And lastly, I caught a whiff of balsam and lavender – the tell-tale impression of Aita, Healer of the Gods.

  Given the extent of the divine presences around me, I felt no surprise when I saw Eang’s owl perched high on the central pillar, her talons wrapped around a carved branch which normally held clothing. I watched her and, in response, she closed the golden coins of her eyes in an unhurried blink.

  I eased upright. I was still clad in my ash-streaked tunic and trousers, with my braid in tatters and tufts of hair sticking out from my head.

  I flexed the fingers of both my hands without pain. My wrist was completely healed. I turned it, expecting to find some new limitation in movement, but it never came, and my skin smelled strongly of Aita. The cuts on my palms were thin white scars. The tightness in my thigh from the dog bite was gone, and the tender puncture wound was little more than a tiny, gnarled knot.

  A spark of hope sent those scarred fingers up to my ear. It was clean and free of scabs. But it was still mangled – an intentional sigil, it seemed to me, of my failure.

  I swallowed my disappointment and, smoothing my expression, turned my attention back to the owl.

  “So,” I asked dispassionately, “why are you still here?”

  The animal only blinked in response.

  * * *

  The Soulderni held the year’s weddings that night, a great mass of couples holding hands between the remaining standing stones. The waterfall crashed down behind them, sending billows of mist to surround the stark blackness of the newly planted binding tree. I saw the owl there among the branches, a puff of grey feathers amid a lattice of ebony.

  Though I could not see them from this distance, I knew that the tree was scrawled with runes. The Soulderni’s high priestess, her restored body also scented with lavender and balsam, had carved them with me mere hours ago. They were runes of silence and subduing, of Eang – jagged, simple and overlapping – and Oulden – circular and tangling.

  Beneath the tree and across the valley, Soulderni-red flowers blossomed. No place where my feet trod was free of them, yet no matter how many times their cool petals bent, they remained undamaged.

  “Under sky and over earth, I bind your souls.” Oulden didn’t raise his voice over the heads of the crowd, but every ear heard. “I charge you to serve one another, all your days; the husband to the wife, the wife to the husband; flesh to flesh, blood to blood.”

  With that, the couples were bonded to one another and Oulden presided over a dusk feast of unnatural proportion. The wine was red and strange, the meat never grew cold and the bread was studded with fruit and nuts.

  More than once, I caught the god’s eye. I expected him to call me over, to explain his hiding and sudden appearance – at the very least, to express an interest in my presence. But beyond those glances, he did not interact with me, and when I held his gaze a moment too long, he looked away.

  I drew up to Nisien as torches flickered to life. “Your god will not speak to me.”

  He tore his gaze off Oulden, whom he had also been scrutinizing. “Perhaps he’s embarrassed.”

  I started to shake my head, then stopped and surveyed the Soulderni’s god again. He had leant back down towards a clutch of children, hands waving in the manner of a grandfather spinning yarns.

  “Saved by Eang, on his own sacred ground?” Nisien gave a stunted, half laugh. “He’ll endure enough ridicule in the High Halls over that, without being shamed before his people.”

  “Perhaps.” I hefted the bulk of my hair off one shoulder and let it fall down the center of my back. The dress Silgi had gifted to me – for she refused anything less – was a tempered red like the flowers at our feet, grounded in gold and laced at the sides. “Will you and your mother still take me up through the Ridings?”

  “You think we would do otherwise? After last night?”

  “I thought you might be reluctant to travel with an Eangi,” I admitted.

  “You helped slay a god.” Nisien didn’t look at me as he spoke. He was watching Oulden again, but it was not with worship. “I’ll take the aid of Eang any day.”

  “We didn’t slay Ashaklon – we rebound him. That’s a binding tree. As to the aid of Eang, that’s not quite how it works,” I cautioned. “I’m no more than a warrior with Eangi Fire. Eang herself must intervene for me to do something like last night.”

  His eyes drifted to my mended wrist. “Does she always intervene?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Well, the gods are gods; they are powerful and fickle and flawed.” Nisien rubbed at his jaw, glanced at Oulden one last time, and faced me fully. “In any case, we’ll still take you north. Can you be ready to leave after breakfast tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  * * *

  Goodbyes were simple. I bowed low to Silgi and Ceydr, grasped Iosas’s wrist, and, lastly, laid a fe
w light fingers on Uwi’s shoulder in thanks. Then, with saddlebags laden with gifts and supplies and a new Soulderni-style sword – shorter than I was accustomed to, curved, without a cross-guard and suspended horizontal across the hip – I rode out with Nisien and his mother.

  For the first two days, we journeyed with others from the Ridings; a dozen families, their horses hung about with bows and children. I watched a woman ride past me, a baby strapped to her back and a toddler between her thighs. His pudgy hands sunk into the horse’s braided mane, unafraid.

  That toddler, it turned out, was a better rider than I. By noon my legs screamed with the effort of holding myself upright and my horse, displeased with my lack of skill, tossed his head and broke into a spontaneous trot.

  “I can see riding is not considered a necessary Eangi skill.” Euweth drew up beside me and snatched at my mount’s bridle. Her hips rolled easily, her body acclimatized to the horse’s movements. “I’m going to have to lift you off tonight.”

  “Our horses are smaller,” I protested. My hips, spread far too wide for comfort, agreed heartily. “And we don’t ride. Not like this. Our forests are too thick and the Algatt steal all the good horses, anyway.”

  “Or,” Euweth suggested, “you just can’t ride.”

  She was right. I couldn’t even mount and dismount on my own. I managed to get myself down at our noon break, but by dusk my muscles were so torn I could barely stand. Nisien took one arm and Euweth the other as I toppled from my horse’s back. The blanket and leather pad that served as a saddle came with me in a fluttering clump.

  Nisien laughed and hauled me upright with the amused practicality of a father. “All right, little Eangi, slayer of gods. One foot down, then the other. Take a walk.”

  I set myself hobbling around the camp, earning smirks and good-hearted insults from the neighbours. I relieved myself at the designated area without collapsing, which I considered a great victory, then stretched as best I could in the shelter of the scrub. My hips popped like honeycomb while the grey owl watched from the bushes, wide-eyed and emotionless.