Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  I was a pace from the door by the time I realized it was slightly ajar. My heart, already fluttering, began to pound.

  “May I enter?” I asked, unconsciously taking on Svala’s welled, rounded tones.

  Silence met my inquiry.

  “Eang,” I murmured in instinctive prayer, then pushed against the ancient wood.

  The scent struck me first. It smelled of wood smoke and iron, ancient oak and beeswax. Sound came next, barking and scrabbling as two huge hounds thrust past me out the door. The dogs, combined with the steady crackling of a fire, were the only sounds in the High Hall of the Gods.

  The light was muted. At first glance, I noted pillars of carved wood, a high ceiling with exposed, smoke-darkened beams, and a long central hearth. But on second glance, the hearth was gone, and a long table stood in its place. It was bare except for row upon row of herbs: yarrow, sumac, motherwort, mint, willow bark and widow’s soap.

  “Aita,” I called the name of the Great Healer. My voice did not echo in the warm, now herb-scented air, but remained trapped in the space around me.

  I peered left and right. Where I expected to see walls, I found endless rows of pillars, each decorated with carvings, cedar boughs and garlands of holly. The Hall appeared to be far bigger inside than it was outside.

  Disoriented, I cleared my throat. “Aita?”

  When there was still no response, I left the security of the doors and moved past the table. The crackling of a fire rose up again and the pillars broadened, leading me towards a central space where a dozen thrones surrounded a hearth of blackened fieldstone.

  At first, the thrones looked to be empty. The fire burned low, sending more smoke than flame up into a pillar of light from the chimney. But when I looked again, two were occupied by limp, lifeless forms. One was instantly recognizable by her looping braids, mossy gown and black-lined eyes, which gaped at the pillar of smoke: Riok, governor goddess of the central Eangen Rioki. The name of the second corpse appeared in my mind a moment later: Dur, god of the Amdur, another central Eangen people. He sat motionless, his thick chest pinned to his throne by three raven-fletched, bone-white arrows.

  Both were Eang’s subordinates, members of her court for all of Eangen history. Their deaths would irreparably alter my world. But it was the third body that filled me with the greatest dread.

  A male god lay on the ground beside the fire, the backs of both knees hacked apart, an oak shield shattered, and his wild hair and fine tunic caked with blood.

  Oulden, the god of the Soulderni. Dead.

  I ran a few steps closer before a force struck me. It hit my chest like a warding hand, stopping me in my tracks and sapping my knees of their strength. I tottered into a pillar and clutched at my ribs.

  This pain was terrific, but my new magic – my magic – responded in kind. It surged through my body, chased by wisps of dormant Eangi Fire, and the pain abated. My senses cleared and expanded, and I sagged into the pillar.

  I heard footsteps, low breathing and the light tap of fingernails against wood.

  A female figure stalked around the circle of thrones, ornate white bow in hand, but the tapping had not come from her. A lean, pale man stood three paces away from me, his face defined by an out-thrust chin and eyes smeared with black. He rested one hand against a pillar, his long, canine nails tapping out a distracted rhythm.

  As our eyes met, his lips parted to reveal red-rimmed teeth. Then he tucked his tongue up and let out a strange, hissing whistle.

  My gaze flicked back towards the doors. The dogs that had shouldered past me not a minute before returned, ears pricked, snouts raised. At some unspoken command, they began to pace across the doorway with their heads low. Barring me in.

  “The taint of iron and the stink of sweat,” a female voice noted. This was the figure with the bow, her beautiful face lit with interest over the collar of her weathered huntsman’s clothes. “Rioux, we’ve found another Eangi.”

  I stood my ground, though everything inside me howled to run. Another Eangi? They’d encountered my kind before?

  “I’m almost disappointed! Hunting down your brethren has made such excellent sport.” The lean man, Rioux, began to approach. He took each step with lanky indifference. “Oh? Did you not know?”

  I stared, turning the trembling of my lips into something like a snarl. Ogam had said he’d found murdered Eangi on the coast, pierced by arrows of white bone – just like the ones that pinned Dur to his throne and clustered in the archeress’s quiver.

  “You killed them?” I demanded, fear and caution lost in a rush of fury and grief.

  “Well, those that the Algatt didn’t kill for us,” the archeress replied, scrutinizing me from head to toe. “Are you the one from the Fall of Ashaklon?”

  I didn’t reply. Rioux made a contemplative sound and the archeress drew her bow, turning her approach into a broad circle to flank me. I watched the overdeveloped muscles of her arms flex, holding the white bow – no, not just white, a skeletal bow, the weapon impossibly formed of ornately carved bone – taut in a way no human could.

  “It must have been you,” she concluded. Her accent was light and high in the mouth. “How many of your kind are left, priestess? There cannot be many, not between us and Eang clawing her way out of the grave so often. Once we kill you too, she might finally stay dead.”

  Rioux’s laugh echoed around her last sentence. “Look at her face! Oh, Eangi, we’ve killed your goddess before. Didn’t you know that? I opened her belly like a fish just two moons ago.”

  Their words rattled in my ears. Eang, killed? Two months ago? That would have been right before Omaskat came to Albor, during the quiet normality of early summer. The High Priestess had mentioned nothing at the time, and I’d seen Eang since. How could she have died?

  A horrible suspicion crept up the back of my neck, even as my eyes remained fixed on the interlopers. Ried. Vestiges. Ogam had said his mother learned how to make Eangi from the gods she had displaced, gods like Ried. Ried, who had ensured they could come back to life through Vestiges.

  What was it Ogam had said, when he first came across me?

  “You’re the only vestige of her I can find.”

  “I’ll do it again when I have the chance,” the lean god added. His voice took on a mocking tone, but with each word, it clouded with a new level of hatred. “The ranks of the Gods of the New World thin, Eangi. They grow weak, while we, the Old, regain our strength. So call your goddess. ‘Eang, Eang, the brave, the vengeful’ – the cowardly, the deceitful, the traitor!”

  We, the Old. Gods of the Old World. I was face to face with not one but two Gods of the Old World. Gods who had just butchered Oulden, Riok, and Dur, and who claimed they had slain my goddess at least once before.

  The goddess’s eyes slitted, thin and harsh as the head of the arrow she trained upon me. “Rioux, what do you see on her face?”

  “Fear,” her tall companion quipped. “Desperation. Confusion. Courage so thin I—”

  “The Son of Winter marked her,” the Archeress realized, holding my gaze, and a trickle of relief passed over me. Was there a chance that Ogam’s name would finally protect me, even if Eang’s did not? “He wouldn’t do that without good reason. Why?”

  Without warning, Rioux’s arm shot towards me. He was still out of reach, but I felt his nails dig into my gut, jerking and pulling and twisting until I couldn’t help but cry out. My knees buckled and I grabbed onto the nearest pillar.

  Rioux crept closer, chin thrust out and eyes glinting. “Are you carrying his spawn?”

  I could barely breathe. I locked an arm over my stomach, wondering through gritted teeth if harm I suffered in the High Hall would transfer to real life. It seemed stupid to find out, particularly if I was one of Eang’s last anchors in the living world. No wonder Quentis was so curious about Eang’s condition and the nature of my Eangi Fire.

  Eangi Fire. My fingers twitched against my tunic, yearning to throw Eang’s power into Rioux’s l
eering eyes and burn them away. But the barrier of Quentis’s magic remained, clenched as tightly as the pain beneath my flesh.

  The magic of the High Halls, however, was free. It swelled without conscious prompting, sweet and clean and liberating. The pain in my stomach retreated, the gallop of my heartbeat slowed, and I straightened slowly, stunned but determined.

  Rioux, still gloating over my suffering, retreated a step. His expression snapped from sneering to wary and his outstretched hand flexed, trying and failing to overpower me again. I felt no more than a brush of fingers against my skin – impotent and harmless.

  One arm still pressed over my stomach, I set my shoulders and looked from him to the Archeress through a haze of amber, honeyed magic. My heart drummed steadily against my ribs and my thoughts ran rapid, but I understood one thing.

  My new magic had shielded me from Rioux’s power – the power of a god.

  The Archeress’s bow creaked as she raised it an inch higher and said to Rioux, “Best back away from the Eangi, brother. She’s clearly been taking what doesn’t belong to her. But an arrow will still put her down.”

  Rioux stepped aside and I was left facing the Archeress and her bow of bone.

  My eyes flicked to Dur again, the man with three arrows buried in his chest, and a rush of fear clawed up my throat.

  With it came instinct. I snatched at my new magic and threw it out in a lash.

  Liquid amber light burst between the gods and me. I screamed in surprise and ducked, throwing up my arms to protect my head – from my own magic and the thrum of the Archeress’s bow.

  I didn’t see the effect of my lash, but I heard Rioux bellow in rage. An arrow blurred through the corner of my eye, so close that I felt it whisk past my forearm and snatch at my hair. It buried itself halfway through one of the hall’s great carved pillars with a crack.

  “Our master is coming, Eangi!” A hand seized my wrist and jerked my arm down. I’d barely time to register Rioux’s face, smeared with scarlet-amber blood – ichor, I realized in a flash, the blood of the gods – before he drove a knife down at my chest. “And even the Goddess of War cannot stop them.”

  A gale tore through the Hall. It stole the air from my lungs and staggered Rioux, just enough for me to sidestep, grab his wrist and jerk the knife away. He howled in renewed fury and I dashed for cover, sprinting past three rows of pillars before darkness crashed around me.

  I dropped into a crouch and tried to see through the raging black. I sensed, more than saw, Rioux bolt away, one layer of darkness blurring with another. The Archeress was too far away to be seen, but I heard shouting, a scream, and the squealing of one of the dogs as it died.

  My mind sputtered and blanked, unable to follow what was happening, but I had to escape. There was a new power in this Hall, and I wasn’t about to wait to find out who it was.

  Eangi instinct took over and, almost without thought, I slit open one of my palms. As the wind buffeted me and the darkness tripled, I drew a clumsy rune in my own blood on the slate floor of the hall. Freedom.

  I slammed my open palm down into the middle of the symbol and let my magic roar through. The wind muted, the sensations of the Hall – stone, wind, slick blood – retreated, and I had the bizarre sensation of sinking down into nothing at all.

  Only as the last shadows of the High Hall faded did I notice that the blood rune around my hand glistened with amber magic, just like Esach’s had in the cave, and Rioux’s not a minute before.

  My blood glistened like the blood of the gods.

  * * *

  I cracked open sticky eyes. Quentis crouched over me, backed by the Waking World’s uniform, if stormy, sky. Clouds billowed and boiled over one another in masses of grey and black, and the wind was sharp with coming rain.

  “Hessa?” Strong arms pulled my shoulders back into someone’s chest. Nisien. “Hessa, are you awake?”

  “I’m all right,” I croaked – my throat was still bruised from Ried’s attack, of all things. Without thinking, I pushed myself away from him and sat up on my own, though I still clutched his fingers in my good, right hand – anchoring myself in this moment and this world.

  Rioux’s knife was gone, but the gash I’d made in my left palm remained. Scarlet blood oozed between my fingers, still glistening with amber. But as I watched, the secondary color retreated, replaced by a familiar, invisible heat. Quentis’s curse was broken, and my Eangi Fire surged back to life.

  At the same time, I sensed the magic of the High Halls sinking, retreating and stowing itself away in the marrow of my bones, bowing to an older, angrier force. I tried to stop it, tried to snatch at it, but my Fire only surged in response.

  Resigned, I curled the fingers of my injured hand in, hoping Quentis hadn’t seen the fading amber gleam and wouldn’t think the cut significant. He hovered closer, wind from the oncoming storm tearing at his hair and robes. I realized now that I could see the Algatt Mountains behind him, so close and so high I’d mistaken them for more clouds. They were a day away, at most.

  “What is happening?” Quentis demanded. “Why are you awake? This storm is not natural, woman. Tell me what’s going on. Who is doing this?”

  “Esach, Goddess of Storms,” I replied simply, hoping he would take that as explanation for my waking too, and turned to Nisien. I took the Soulderni’s hand with renewed urgency. “Nisien, Oulden—”

  He cut me off, his voice low and sober. “I felt it.”

  Distantly, irrelevantly, Estavius appeared in the corner of my vision, his helmetless hair windblown and unkempt.

  Quentis reached to grab my tunic, but the look I cut him made him pause. He dropped his outstretched hand, fingers still poised and a new wariness about his eyes. “What… what are you saying?”

  It took a second to breathe, piecing my memories of the High Hall back together. They were a cacophony of revelation, unanswered questions and violence, but I understood one thing clearly. Three gods, allies or servants of Eang, had died in the High Hall.

  I looked at Nisien. I barely registered his Arpa armor or his clean-shaven cheeks. All I saw then was a kinsman, a man of the north, devoted at birth to the god of his forebears. It did not matter that Nisien had turned from him for so many years. Oulden was the heart of the Soulderni people, and it was he who kept Nisien’s body and soul – both through the evils of this life, and into the ease of the next. Without him, Nisien’s afterlife was as unattainable as my own.

  Oulden was dead. Nisien was devoted to no god.

  THIRTY

  I stared up at the mountains through slitted eyes while the Arpa made camp. I sat beneath a birch tree nearby, half-sheltered from the fine, misty rain with my hands bound in my lap – left one bandaged, right one clasped on my opposite forearm. A new dose of Quentis’s poison made my mouth taste sour and my stomach ache, but my reaction was purely physical. It no longer sent me spiraling back into the High Halls.

  The magic of that world, however, remained quiet. I still tasted honey on my lips, and I felt it within me, protecting me and granting me a new, heightened sense, but it was inaccessible – a sleeping limb or a forgotten name. Eang’s Fire burned under my skin instead, clean and hot and familiar as the sun. Its presence was a relief, but I could not help but feel that I was being denied something important; something outside of Eang’s control. Something that, even if it was stolen, was now mine.

  The Arpa, of course, knew neither of these things. Since I awoke that morning, I’d maintained a bleary façade, pretending to doze and slip out of my own mind while we plodded north and I plotted my escape. But between the presence of the legionaries, Quentis’s near constant watch, and a lack of opportunity to speak to Nisien, I’d yet to make a play for freedom.

  Now the repetitive pinging of tent pegs jarred into my skull. I closed my eyes and leant back against the smooth, raspy bark of the tree, trying to force my muscles and mind to calm. But most of my thoughts were as unwelcome as the world around me, harsh and repetitive and wearin
g me thin.

  I remembered the dead gods around the thrones. I recalled the Archeress and Rioux, the bow and the knife and the runes. I thought of Vestiges and saw Svala’s face, the night Eang had possessed the Eangi girl in the Hall of Smoke. I recalled her fear and grief as she watched the child crumple.

  She had understood, before anyone else, that the girl was dead. But had she known more? Were they matters for a High Priestess alone?

  “You’re the only Vestige of her I can find.”

  “Oh, Eangi, we’ve killed your goddess before. Didn’t you know that?”

  “The Eangi make her nearly immortal… bad habits from old gods.”

  And, as reluctant as I was to do so, I began to understand. The ache in my stomach compounded and I drew my knees in more tightly.

  The Eangi were Vestiges of Eang. Rioux had said they’d killed Eang many times before, most recently two months ago – right around the time Omaskat came to Albor. The goddess must have used an Eangi in some far corner of the land to claw her way out of the grave, just as she’d once done with that young girl in the Hall of Smoke. Otherwise, I would have heard of their death.

  Now only Svala and I were left, it seemed. If Eang perished again, which of our lives would she extinguish to keep herself alive?

  I suspected the answer, at least once Omaskat was dead, and it made my emotions roil. I knew that if I’d brought this matter to Svala, she would have insisted dying for Eang was a privilege, in any context. But I could not believe that, not with my goddess so distant and my circumstances so grim.

  I had to escape. For all her faults and deceptions, Eang was still ruler of the Eangen and I was her Eangi. I needed her to ensure I had a place in the High Halls. Then, and only then, could I reconcile my questions of Vestiges and faith.

  So my purpose remained, as simple and inexplicable as it had always been – find and kill Omaskat.