Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  “In Urgi,” the man replied. “As slaves. Or fled west.”

  “West?” I repeated, steeling myself against my memories.

  “To the sea.” The other archer, a woman, advanced two paces. “So they say.”

  I tossed the sword to the ground, concealing the depth of my relief behind a hard mask. So, Sixnit and the survivors of Albor hadn’t been alone in their goal to flee west. I’d half expected the Algatt to execute a full Eangen genocide, but if enough people had managed to flee, perhaps there was hope.

  Still, the distant bulk of Mount Thyr loomed. My emotion was genuine when I asked, “What of their Eangi?”

  “Dead,” the woman replied. “Of course.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “The axe,” the male archer reminded me. “If you’ve got questions, ask your own people. You’ll be with them soon enough.”

  With that, temptation rushed over me. It would be easy, so easy, to let these hunters drag me down into Urgi. I could search for Sixnit, ask when and where Omaskat had gone – perhaps I could even find relatives among the captives. I could try to recruit people to accompany me north, instigate a rebellion among the slaves, save my people from servitude within their own homes…

  But the risk was too great. I hadn’t managed to escape the first time – why would the second be any different? Besides, Eang had instructed me to do none of those things, valiant as they were. My task was Omaskat alone. Once he was dead, once I regained Eang’s favor and secured my place in the High Halls, then I could move on to other tasks.

  “The man called Omaskat, when did he leave your camp?” I asked, pulling my hatchet free and dangling it, unthreateningly, by two hooked fingers under the head.

  The woman raised her bow and drew three-quarters. “The axe, now. And get on your knees.”

  No more conversation, then.

  I flicked the hatchet up, snatched it by the haft and hurled it in one movement. It slammed into the man’s thigh at the same time as I willed Fire into the woman’s eyes, boiling them instantly. Her bow sprung, arrow lodged into the dirt and the two other hunters dropped the doe. In a spurt of inglorious self-preservation, they fled.

  I launched forward, throwing an Eangi battle cry after their scrambling forms for good measure. The sound echoed through the trees, as alone as it had been when I faced the raider in the Hall of Smoke.

  I snatched up my sword and jerked my hatchet from the archer’s thigh with a squelching crack. The man screamed but the woman was too stunned to make a sound, convulsing and covering her bleeding face with both hands.

  “Omaskat,” I repeated, sheathing my sword. My pulse thrummed in my ears; it would likely be a few minutes before anyone else arrived, but I needed to be long gone by then. “Blue tunic, mismatched eyes. Hunting dog. Threw his slave in the river last month. Whoever tells me first will live.”

  “The traveler went north,” the man croaked immediately. “Weeks ago.”

  “Where was he headed?”

  “That’s all I know! Let me live, I beg you, please—”

  A flick of Fire turned his begging to a choke, then a burble as his ribs collapsed in upon themselves. The woman I left alive, but not before stripping her of her bow and arrows and casting one last look at the far-off rise of Mount Thyr.

  I jogged off north with a new bow and a belly full of conflict as Algatt horns bellowed from Urgi. But by the time they reached the body and the wounded woman, I had vanished into the forest.

  * * *

  On the fourth day after I left Ogam, I crossed a tongue of the Pasidon and diverted east, avoiding open farm fields and scattered hamlets. Most of the settlements were occupied by Algatt, so I kept to the forest and lit no fire when I camped. Alone in the night, I watched the mountain people’s lights glisten through the windows of Eangen houses.

  By all appearances, the Algatt were settling in for the season. They inhabited Eangen farms and could be seen in the fields, tending crops and flocks. They hadn’t just taken our goods or our lives; they’d taken our homes.

  The knowledge of that, the weight of it, ached in my stomach. It was the same feeling I had when I thought of Sixnit or my family in East Meade and the leaderless, priestless refugees heading west towards the sea – that I was turning my back on my people. I was abandoning them all for the charge of a goddess who hid fear in her heart, and who had vanished from the face of her own land. A goddess whose bindings were breaking. A goddess whom I had disobeyed, and who, it seemed, had little time for her people.

  I kept trudging north for Eang, but everything in me screamed to turn back. I prayed and sacrificed, sending droplets of blood into the few fires I dared to light. I encountered more signs of unnatural unrest in the land – broken standing stones and a collapsed cairn – but Eang still did not respond to my inquiries.

  Once, while washing, naked and knee-deep in a creek, I even contemplated making yifr – the drink which the Eangi High Priesthood used to leave their bodies and visit the gods and the dead. The sickly-sweet scent of yellow widow’s soap flower, growing on the bank nearby, reminded me of Svala. I saw her again, eyes red-rimmed and cheeks painted with runes, spouting visions of the High Halls. The drink, and visiting the High Halls, were forbidden to common Eangi – but what if I made it anyway? I would be careful not to attract attention, and so long as I broke no laws, like eating or drinking or lingering too long, I might avoid reprisal. I would simply search for Eang and get answers to my questions. It was what Svala would have done.

  No. I splashed cold water on my face and scrubbed the impulse away. Svala was a High Priestess – honored, faithful, and wise enough to tread the realms of the Gods.

  I was none of those things.

  * * *

  On the fifth night, a vixen came into my camp. I smelled her before I saw her, musky and dank and circling the coals of the fire.

  I sat up slowly and reached for my sword. I didn’t expect a fox to pose a real threat, but animals were not always what they seemed to be.

  “I have no food for you,” I told the creature.

  She kept pacing, her eyes pools of captured, low firelight. Behind her, I heard the rush of a creek and the mournful lilt of a night bird.

  “I said, I have nothing for you. What do you want?”

  Another rustle sounded in the undergrowth, so faint that I almost missed it.

  I came fully awake and stood, sword in hand. “What do you want?” I demanded again of the fox.

  Her lips peeled back in an unnerving grin. She yipped, once.

  A second fox peeled from the shadows, then a third and fourth. I recoiled, narrowly missing the tail of a fifth as it darted past my legs. A sixth’s eyes glinted from beneath a fall of ferns. A seventh strode the length of a branch ten feet above the ground, displaying elongated claws.

  I raised my sword, forcing my breaths to stay steady and deep. “Who do you serve?”

  The first fox stalked around the fire in my direction, tail drifting out straight behind her.

  A whisper separated from the darkness at my back. I whirled, but there was no one there. A breath touched my cheek, on the side of my mangled ear, and I spun again, terrified of the sensation and my own diminished hearing. But there was still no one.

  Then a tongue stroked the back of my neck; broad, humanesque, and leaving a trail of moisture that stung like nettles.

  I stifled a shriek and leapt towards the fire, levelling my sword at the shadows. More light, I needed more light. I snatched up dry branches from my shelter with my free hand and threw them onto the coals. Burning lines crept up the leaves, but all they did was curl and smoke.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, urging my limbs into a more defensive stance. “I am a servant of Eang.”

  “Eang?” The voice, far from menacing, sounded melancholy to my ears. It had a female lightness, sweet and drifting, and though she was not speaking Northman, I understood her words. “Eang, Eang… Is this her blood in the land? Why has she not come to me?
”

  I was not about to tell this creature, whatever it was, that my patron goddess was missing. I’d been devoted to her as a baby, just as I’d dedicated Vistic – her name should be enough to protect me.

  The stranger, however, had sounded more curious than daunted.

  “Please,” I said, “tell me who you are so I can pay you proper respect.”

  “Shanich,” she said her name like a question. “I’ve… been asleep.”

  “Greetings, Shanich.” I turned, trying to find her in the shadows and keeping my good ear towards her. All around me the foxes paced, tails mingling, but staying out of sword’s reach. “Did I wake you? If so, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “I am awake,” she stated. “Where is Eang? Call her for me.”

  My throat tightened. “She will be angry if I call her now.”

  “Why?” the unseen creature asked innocently.

  One of the foxes let its tongue loll between glistening white teeth.

  “She has business with Gadr,” I said. “But her son, Ogam, is nearby.”

  That was a stretch to the truth, but Ogam was more likely to respond in force than Eang.

  “Ogam.” The name dripped off her tongue like honey. “Who is this Ogam? Is he the one who marked your cheek?”

  I took a few steadying breaths. If Shanich had not heard of Eang’s son, she had been asleep for a long time indeed. Ogam’s mark, like Eang’s name, might not deter her if she meant me harm.

  “The most handsome of the gods,” I enticed her. “The immortal son of a winter storm.”

  “Oh,” her voice quavered. “I remember Winter. I remember when the Four gave him life.”

  The Four? That was a term I had never heard.

  “Who?” I asked before I could think better of it.

  “The gods, the Four, the ones who came before,” Shanich tittered at her own rhyme. “The Four Pillars of Creation, those who made all life, in the beginning. In the black. Thvynder and Eiohe, Imilidese and the Weaver. But Ogam, him I do not know. Is he a Miri? Perhaps I will have you summon him… but not now. You.” I felt her attention sharpen. “You. What are you? Who are you?”

  I’d never heard of the gods she mentioned or the Miri, but the way she stared at me left no room to ask more. “I am human,” I said, withdrawing further and struggling to keep my extended sword from wavering. A fox brushed past my heel.

  “A human?” The word clearly meant nothing to her. “What is that? Whose daughter are you? Not Eang’s… You do not smell as Miri do. There is power in you, but you are not like us… A dangerous mixture, I think.”

  “Miri?” I repeated the unfamiliar word this time, turning over legends and songs in my mind. “Are you saying you’re a Miri? And Eang is too?”

  “She is, I am,” Shanich trailed after my retreating steps, “but what are you?”

  I pushed the new word aside as a remnant of a forgotten age and searched for another word for human, one equally as ancient. “Clay? My kind was formed of clay, clay and birth-blood of the New Gods.”

  “There are no such creatures.”

  I paused, stunned and at a loss. “We serve the gods. We are mortal. We… only bear children through coupling… Our lives are short and we age with years.”

  “You serve the Four Pillars?”

  I hesitated. All of a sudden, Omaskat’s talk of powerful gods who begot the Gods of the Old World rushed back to me. Were these Four Pillars what he meant? Were they gods that had existed before the Old World, and this woman who called herself a Miri remembered them?

  “I serve the gods like Eang,” I repeated, cautiously. “Shanich… are you a god?”

  She burst out into laughter, a delighted, crackling descent of notes. It filled the air around me, directionless and disembodied. “Oh, oh! No, I am no god! A flame to a forest fire – that is what I am to the Four. But oh, little slave, I remember your kind. How you have grown. How strong you are, and yet still so blind.”

  Slave? Her choice of words chilled me. But this was no time for debating history, theology, or the possibly skewed memories of an ancient being.

  If I understood, Shanich was a creature from a time before the Gods of the New World had bound the Old. Whatever she was – miscreation, monster, abomination – she had been asleep long before the Eangen had landed on these shores or the Arpa came from the south. Perhaps she had slept in something like the broken binding tree, or the collapsed cairn I had seen on the road north.

  “May I ask,” I ventured, “how you awoke?”

  “I do not know.” Her voice drifted again, as though she circled me. The foxes continued to glare, unwavering. “But I am very thirsty.”

  A hand ran up my spine, and it was not figurative. Shanich was behind me.

  I fought down a wave of panic. “Ogam—”

  An arm clamped over my mouth, thin and grey and strong as iron. I screamed and bucked. My feet struck the fire and sparks burst up into the night, illuminating the foxes and a thin shoulder at the side of my vision.

  I bit down. The flesh did not bleed, but I heard a shriek and the arm released. In its place, the foxes flew at me in a chaos of yips and snarls and flashing eyes.

  I ran, abandoning fire and pack and bow. There was nothing else I could do. I leapt through the forest with the thoughtless panic of a fleeing rabbit, ignoring the claws and teeth and the nettle-like hands that scrabbled after me.

  The foxes followed. They streaked across the ground and through the trees, leaping and chattering in an unearthly chorus.

  “Ogam!” I screamed at the wind. “Ogam, please!”

  A fox leapt at me from the side and sunk its tiny teeth into my neck. I snatched at its tail, ripping it away and slamming it into a tree as I passed. It yelped and crumpled.

  Fire burst through my veins, loosening my limbs, strengthening my muscles and sharpening my mind. I pounded across the earth, leaping obstacles and ducking branches. I plowed through a meadow in choking clouds of dandelion fluff and lazy fireflies, then dove back into the shadows.

  “Hush,” a voice hissed in my face.

  I skidded, lost my balance and landed hard on my back.

  Shanich crouched over me. I could barely see the lines of her; thin and emaciated, feline in her poise.

  “Oh, little slave, hush…”

  I threw Fire up into her bones, trying to shatter them, but she barely flinched. So I hacked with my sword instead.

  It bit into her side. She screeched and leapt away in the shambling, curling clamber of a wounded spider. Again, the foxes took her place. I swatted and fought my way to my feet, yelling and crying and raging all at once. Two crumpled, their skulls ruptured by my Fire, but the rest kept coming.

  I found my feet and ran, stumbling, falling, and losing my sword. I pelted over the earth until the ground dropped off before me. An arm of the Pasidon looped some twenty paces below, placid and swift under the moonlight.

  Foxes burst from the forest, blocking off any escape to the left or right but keeping their distance. Trapped, I turned, tugged my hatchet from my belt and braced for Shanich’s final attack.

  But it never came. Back in the trembling shadows of the trees, I heard a roar – the great, gut-watering rumble of some fell beast. The foxes scattered with yips and cries and I stood frozen on the cliff, petrified eyes wide, wondering what could waylay a being like Shanich.

  I could never be sure, but I thought that something too large for a bear passed between the nearest trees. All I truly saw, aside from a great shadow and a broad rustle of branches, was an ursine face. Intelligent eyes gazed out at me around a maw smeared with blood and grey fox fur, recalling a night spent in the very river that flowed past my back, the night I’d been swept down to Soulderni in the arms of a riverman. Had I not seen a creature just like this, among the trees?

  Whatever it was and whatever had caused our paths to cross a second time, that beast should not have been in the Waking World – but nor should Shanich.

&nbs
p; Still, that was no reason not to show proper respect to my savior. Slowly, tremblingly, I bowed to the forest. I heard a deep, whuffling grunt that might have sounded satisfied, then heavy footfalls moved away down the tree line.

  Before the beast could change its mind, I turned on my heel and fled for the river.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Water stung my open wounds as I crossed the Pasidon. I fought against the current, gasping and shaking in a way that I hadn’t since my first skirmish. Raiders, I could face. Wild beasts, I could manage. But a demon with a thirst for humanity and a beast that could frighten her off were more than my nerves could bear.

  And I’d faced them alone. Always, always alone.

  I climbed out onto the opposite bank and collapsed. My body shook, but no tears ran down my face. I was too shocked, and too drained by the Fire.

  I remember little of the rest of that night. Eventually, the sky blushed with the approach of dawn. I realized I was walking – stumbling – south. The wrong way. Next, I was waist-deep in a slow-moving section of the Pasidon and submerged myself.

  The current dragged locks of hair across my face and pulled it out behind me, turning my braid into a tangled mat. But slowly, like grains of sand melting into glass, my wits began to return.

  I waited until my lungs cried out for air before I rose and dragged in a deep, shuddering breath. I wiped the hair from my eyes and stroked my forehead and my cheeks. I found cuts and bites that made my heart pound – my Fire had not managed to heal them all before it burned out – but the feeling of my own skin, warm with life and cool with river water, anchored me.

  I was alive. But nothing could describe the depth of my despair. Neither Eang nor Ogam had helped me. I had lost everything except the clothes on my back, the shoes on my feet and the hatchet in my belt. I had no food. No cloak. No tinderbox. No one to stand at my shoulder.

  “Eang,” I croaked. “Eang, if you can hear me, I need you.”

  My goddess did not reply. I ground my teeth to suppress another wracking sob and slit the end of each of my fingers. I held my hand out in front of my face and watched the blood drip down into the water, languid and bright.