Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  I couldn’t speak, so I walked away.

  * * *

  I rode north. The night was clear, the moon illuminated my path and placid Cadic was resigned to my inadequacies as a rider. But my eyes burned with unshed tears and my heart ached more fiercely than I wanted to admit.

  Sixnit. Uwi, Iosas. Nisien and Euweth, even Silgi. They had only been temporary reliefs from the reality that I was alone in my task.

  The thought of East Meade lent me some small comfort. My vision had been inconclusive about its condition, and that left room for optimism. But the village was at least five days’ detour off my path north, and something more than pessimism warned me that I could not expect aid there. Even if their Eangi survived, they would not help an outcast. I couldn’t go to them until my task was finished, and Eang’s favor restored.

  Wind rushed through the grass and the horse plodded on. No hoot rippled out through the night. No white-grey shadow came to me on the wing. The head of Nisien’s hatchet dug into my side and my Soulderni sword bumped against my thigh. I let my hand fall to the latter’s hilt and ran my fingers over it, taking comfort in its smooth leather and cold pommel.

  “Eang?” I began, intending to pray, but no more words followed. Why bother, when she likely couldn’t hear me? Or might choose to ignore me?

  Soon, all I could think of was the fear Eang had felt at the sight of Ashaklon. I battled to reconcile that emotion – so raw and human – with the supposed indomitability of the goddess in whose shadow I’d been raised. But I found no resolution, and, deep in my soul, a seed of doubt burrowed down with Omaskat’s assertions that Eang was not worthy of worship.

  Doubt, however, would do nothing to help me. It did not matter how I felt about Eang’s fear; I belonged to her. I was still an Eangi, and I had only one way to redeem myself.

  I had to press on.

  * * *

  I saw other riders on the horizon three times over the next two days: a pair meandering east, a train heading south and four drivers bringing their herd to water. Each time I avoided them, heading for lower ground or waiting in a stand of trees until they passed.

  Sometimes as I rode, I sang. When we were girls, Yske and I would sing together constantly; a trait she had learned from her father and kept in his memory. Now I kept it in hers.

  The songs secured me and reminded me of my place in the world, my obligations as an Eangi. I sang through all the deeds of the daughters of Risix – ancestor of all those with red hair, including my lost Eidr. My heart ached as I sang of how one daughter discovered the herbs that healed the eternally wounded bear Aegr, how another had bartered her voice for a flask of the High Halls’ pure water, in the hopes of healing her wounded lover. Both she and her love had perished in retribution, for no living human was permitted to drink from the High Halls. And I sang of Ogam, mischievous son of Eang by a winter storm, and his travels from the western inlets to the Headwaters.

  The tales of Eang herself stuck on my tongue – accounts of her leading her people into battle against the former Algatt kings, of her slaughtering a thousand Arpa at the Pasidon, and how she stole one of her sisters’ breath and transformed it into her owl messengers.

  On my second night away from Nisien and Euweth, I made camp in a hollow. The ground was becoming rocky again and I guessed that I would reach the Arpa-Eangen border sometime around noon the day after. I saw to Cadic, divided the last of my food into two paltry portions, and filled my belly with hot water.

  When I heard the flutter of wings, my heart leapt. I stood up, turning full circle in search of their owner. Uneven rock faces rose on every side, ledges laden with ferns and moss and the occasional stunted tree.

  Cadic watched me for a blithe moment, then turned her attention back to grazing.

  “I’m listening,” I called.

  “For me? How kind.”

  A man stepped out of one of the many passages into my campsite, his knotted white hair brushing against overhanging ferns. Despite the color of his hair his face was youthful, with large blue eyes and perfect, nearly feminine bowed lips within his braided beard. He wore a calf-length grey kaftan, latticed with silver and red embroidery, and the unmistakable, overpowering aura of the unveiled divine. A god might choose to hide that aura when they were physically in a human’s presence, but this one let his fill the air like an oncoming storm, unmistakable and bold.

  I jerked the hatchet from my belt – my sword was with my bedroll nearby – and demanded, “Who are you?”

  He smiled slyly and adjusted a rope hanging over one shoulder. “You’ve sung to me so sweetly these last few days.”

  I took a step towards Cadic, still unable to name the stranger.

  The man gave me a bemused frown. “I thought you’d be quicker than this.”

  “Ogam?” I rested a hand on the horse’s neck. Could this be Eang’s son? He looked the part, from his snowy eyelashes to his broad shoulders and crooked smile. But no one had seen Ogam, son of Eang by Winter, in centuries.

  The newcomer nodded. “Yes. Rather foolish of your teachers, Eangi, not to warn a young woman against singing my name so often. It gives me ideas.”

  My muscles stiffened, ready to leap for the horse. “Did your mother send you?”

  “My mother?” Ogam barked a laugh. “No, I just told you, you called me. Though perhaps I should not tell untruths, not so close to your hearth. In a way, she did send me, and your song helped me find you a little sooner. I’m looking for her.”

  I forced my fingers to loosen on the haft of the hatchet. I doubted Eang’s son would do me permanent harm, but I knew the tales about him well enough not to risk it. “She’s not here.”

  Ogam began a sauntering circle of my fire, closing on me. I retreated into Cadic’s flank.

  The Son of Winter raised his nose in my direction and inhaled deeply. “I smell her on you. But you’re the only vestige of her I can find.”

  “You can’t find Eang? Why? What’s happening?”

  Ogam stopped two paces from me. “I don’t know. I’ve been away.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Will you keep Hearth Law?”

  Ogam took a moment to think, then pressed an open hand over his heart. “I swear it.”

  I relaxed, though not entirely. I returned to the fireside and refilled my small iron pot from a waterskin, then set it on the stones beside the fire. “All I can offer you is information.”

  “A god expects to provide.” He swung the rope from around his shoulder and held up a fat skinned hare. His clothing, however, revealed no blood, no sweat or other signs of a hunt.

  Hunger ignited in my belly, but I made myself hesitate. “That’s very generous.”

  “I know.” Ogam inclined his head. “Give me a moment to find a suitable branch, and I’ll have it spitted.”

  Reluctant as I was to let him leave my sight, I hung back as he vanished into the shadows.

  “Eang,” I murmured. “Your son is here.”

  “She can’t hear you,” Ogam called through the clefts.

  I pinched my lips shut. In the songs, Ogam was a hero, if an unpredictable one. He wasn’t truly a god, despite his claim, but we had no other title to give him. He was singular within creation – the son of a goddess and the elemental Winter. His feats were as prolific as his illegitimate offspring, though I hadn’t heard of any woman bearing a son of Ogam within living memory. As he said, he had been away.

  “Where were you?” I asked the empty air.

  “In a land of vast herds, magic drums, winters without day and summers without night,” Ogam replied. He re-entered the firelight with two crooked sticks and a long spit. He sunk each stick into the earth with efficient jabs, speared the hare, and laid it over the flames. “And women with hips as round as the moon.”

  I snorted at the last. “Then why did you come back?”

  Ogam dropped into a crouch across from me. “An owl came to fetch me. But when I called to my mother, she didn’t reply.”

  I took th
is information with a slow nod and rested the hatchet on one thigh. “Then I have a lot to tell you.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Ogam stayed in his crouch. “Go on.”

  I gave him a brief account of my failure to kill Omaskat, his buying me as a slave, the binding of Ashaklon and his mother’s last visit to my dreams.

  “That was the last I heard of her,” I finished. “One of her owls followed me for a few days, but then it vanished, too. Three nights ago.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “We spent the night with a detachment of legionaries.”

  Ogam’s eyes drifted to the horse. “Did these legionaries… oh, I don’t know. Set up an altar, offer more than a handful of prayers – something that would have sent the owl away?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Were they all human? Was there a god or hidden creature among them, perhaps?”

  “What?” I looked at him sharply. “They were just men.”

  “Well then. That’s strange. Now, let me see…” Ogam rotated the spit. Fat hissed and popped in the flames. “You disobeyed a direct charge from my mother to kill an ‘Algatt’ wanderer. You devoted yourself to someone else’s baby, which upset my mother and sent her off on an apparently dangerous quest. Ashaklon, a God of the Old World who’s supposed to be bound, attacked Oulden and is now a tree. And last, there is unrest in the High Hall of the Gods, likely connected to Ashaklon’s rise. Yes – I’ve heard rumors.”

  “And the Arpa,” I added. “They’ve pushed the Algatt south, but they claim they’re not involved. Wait – if you came south, didn’t you pass through the northern mountains?”

  “Not precisely.” He squinted at the hare and craned to see its crisping belly. “I passed over them.”

  “From where? The Hinterlands?”

  Ogam’s gaze levelled. “Yes.”

  Interest warred with the dozen practical questions I should have been asking. “What’s it like?”

  “Empty,” he said. “And thus, I have spent little time there. There are no humans to save or fight or seduce.”

  At his last word, my fingers brushed the hatchet.

  Ogam noticed and smirked. “The gods may have their moral failings, Hessa, but honestly, lying with a servant of my mother’s is a touch too unwholesome – as interesting as you are. Freckles. A peculiar Eangen feature. And so thick…”

  I forced myself to relax.

  He added slyly, “Unless she doesn’t know…”

  “Hearth Law,” I reminded him coldly.

  Ogam shifted his stance, coming onto one knee and one palm. He peered into my face like a curious fox. “That only holds if you’re unwilling.”

  “The hare is burning.”

  Ogam jerked our dinner away from the flames and blew it out with one frigid, curling breath. He grumbled, “Human females. You’re beautiful for such a short span of time. A fruit plucked in its season is so much more satisfying than one that is eternally ripe.”

  “And now the hare’s cold,” I noted.

  Ogam scowled at our supper’s sudden skin of ice and laid it back over the fire. After a moment, it began to drip again.

  “Ogam,” I said, trying to pull him back on course. “Your mother’s people are being slaughtered. My people.”

  His frost-colored brows knit together. “Yes.”

  “So? Are you going to do something about it? You’re Eang’s son.”

  “Don’t talk to me of duty, woman, it will not sway me.” Ogam rocked forward into his toes. “That being said… I’d go to the High Hall, but I have a feeling that’s what my mother did and now… well. No one can find her. What of Oulden? What did he say?”

  I shook my head. “He wouldn’t speak to me.”

  Ogam gave me a reprimanding look. “Oulden’s an unsocialized goatherd. You need to be more direct. Did you even try?”

  I gaped. “I wasn’t about to demand counsel from the Soulderni’s god; that’s disrespectful. Besides, your mother will tell me what I need to know.”

  At my first sentence he started to roll his eyes, but at the second, his expression sobered into something close to pity. “I… see. What about the rest of the Eangi? Or this High Priestess, Svala? My mother said she could not be found?”

  I hesitated. “She didn’t say that exactly, she just said she was none of my concern. If… if she is dead, Eang would know, right? Frir would tell her?”

  Eang and Frir were close, and not only because they were sisters. The Goddess of War and the Goddess of Death naturally labored hand-in-hand.

  “Yes,” Ogam affirmed.

  “Then how…” I shifted into a kneeling position. “How could the Algatt hide her?”

  “The Algatt have Svala?” He asked the question like a teacher, suggesting there was an answer I hadn’t thought of yet.

  I paused. “I don’t know. She wasn’t with the other captives, and I think I saw them looking for her in the forest. Could Gadr have taken her to set a trap for your mother?” That would be entirely in character for the Algatt’s skulking mountain god.

  “If I find him, I’ll ask.” Ogam reached up and unbound his hair, mussing it out with crooked fingers. “Braid this for me. The hare will be thawed soon. Oh, don’t be so full of pride, Eangi, it’s not befitting a human. Come, come.”

  Deciding it was better to curry favor with Ogam than irritate him, I slipped the hatchet pointedly through my belt and came around the fire.

  His hair was as soft as rabbit’s fur but as thick as a horse’s mane, and cool as the first snow of winter. I braided it up from one side of his face, then the other.

  “How will you find Gadr?” I wanted to know.

  He made a contemplative sound. “If I can find one of his priests, I might be able to locate him through them. But there’s never been many of them. Gadr likes to keep his power to himself. And tracking one down is something my mother will have already done.”

  I took up the locks over his forehead and twisted them together with the braids, in a long tail. “Do you have a leather?”

  He held up a leather thong in a manner that reminded me of Sixnit, who asked for her hair to be braided at least twice a day. I swallowed and wrapped the length of his hair in the cord before tying it off between his shoulder blades.

  “Then what?” I inquired, coming back around so I could see his face. “After you track down Gadr?”

  “That will depend on what he has to say.” He leant forward and eased the hare off the fire to blow, ever so gently, over the meat. “What of this Omaskat? Did my mother tell you why she’s so bent on his destruction?”

  I shook my head and reached to pluck a piece of meat. It was perfect, despite having been frozen.

  “It’s strange,” Ogam mulled. “When you failed, she should have struck the both of you down and been done with it.”

  My stomach fluttered. “I saw him in the mountains, in my vision. Maybe he’s connected to all this. I just can’t imagine how.”

  “Is he human?”

  I hesitated, greasy fingers reaching out to pluck more meat from the thinning hare. “Yes. I sensed nothing unnatural about him, except… I can’t use my Fire around him. I think your mother is withholding it.”

  “‘Unnatural’.” Ogam’s mouth twisted into a grin. “We gods created you. You are the ones that did not naturally arise. That is odd though, about your Fire. My mother is petty at times, but not quite so.”

  I remembered Omaskat’s heresy about the gods being created by divinities even more powerful than they, but I refused to get sidetracked. “As far as I could tell, Omaskat is as human as the next Algatt.”

  “And Vistic? This baby?” Ogam pressed. “Is he human?”

  I let my hand drop. “Why do you keep asking if people are human?”

  “It is a question no one asks enough. Do you know how many gods are posing as humans at any given time, meddling and mating and spying? No. Of course you do not. You’ve never been taught to ask, and oh, how the gods
love to masquerade, how good they are at it. Learn to ask the right questions, Eangi, and you will go far.”

  “Vistic is just a baby,” I protested. “I attended his birth. His mother is my friend and I’ve known his father since I was a child.”

  “That means very little. Who is he, really? What will he be?” Ogam asked the air as much as me. “You’re likely correct… but whatever happened to him caused my mother a great deal of stress, so it cannot be a simple child-snatching or hungry lynx.”

  All those suggestions made me ill. “He was the last thing she mentioned.”

  “Well,” Ogam tore off one of the hare’s haunches and bit at it, revealing immaculate teeth. He chewed and swallowed before continuing, “I’ll visit this Sixnit, then, and find the baby’s trail. And if I find a priest of Gadr along the way to interrogate, I will.”

  “Be kind to Sixnit,” I begged. “Help her, please, if you can. She has suffered so much.”

  A flash of genuine reproach passed through his icy blue eyes. “Have I been gone so long? You petty creatures. All you care to recall are blood and sex. I am not a compassionless beast.”

  I sank back. “Forgive me.”

  “You say that,” he waved a finger at me, “but you don’t mean it, Eangi. Ack. There’s more than one reason why the other gods don’t give pieces of themselves to their worshipers. It chokes them with pride, not to mention her Fire burns you out like candles. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll question my mother as much as I wish. I, unlike her, am truly immortal – an unforeseen side effect of my father’s blood, or lack thereof. She cannot slay a winter storm, let alone one from her own womb. Believe me, she has tried.”

  I stared at him, unable to think of a single thing to say. Besides, the thought of Eang trying to kill her own son was concerning. Not for the first time, I swallowed my unease at the goddess’s choices.

  I forced my shoulders down. “Can you advise me? What should I do next?”

  That seemed to appease him somewhat, though his gaze remained cold. “Kill Omaskat. There is a reason my mother unleashed you on him. It must be important.”

  “But in my vision, he was in the high mountains,” I pointed out. “I… That’s three weeks’ travel, alone. And by the time I get there, summer will be waning. What if I don’t find him right away? I can’t winter in the mountains.”