by NS Dolkart
“Narky is the high priest of Ravennis now,” Phaedra corrected her. “The Dragon Touched have captured him. He’s afraid the king of Ardis will take Criton’s death as an omen and resume the war.”
“Oh God,” Vella said.
“If the king of Ardis sends his army against them again,” Phaedra said, “the war won’t end until one side or the other has been completely annihilated. Criton was the only one insisting that the Dragon Touched make peace with their enemies – the only one with enough authority, anyway.”
Bandu and Vella looked meaningfully at each other. “This won’t end well for my people,” Vella said. “This won’t end well for anyone. Bandu, we should have gone. We should have gone while there was something we could have done about it.”
Bandu nodded, and she looked down at Goodweather with tears in her eyes. Goodweather had gone back to raking at the ground with her claws and bringing handfuls of turf to her mouth.
“There still is,” Phaedra said. “That’s why I’m here.”
She told them about her studies with Psander, and of the research she had conducted on Bandu’s behalf. The girl looked back at her and shook her head. “Criton is not my mate now,” she said. “I don’t want him. I want Vella.”
Phaedra and Vella both winced. “Bandu,” Vella said, “you didn’t have to…”
“If Ardis is destroyed,” Phaedra said, “Narky’s wife will be killed, as likely will Narky, and thousands of others besides. If Ardis triumphs, their army will come here too. You won’t be safe.”
Bandu nodded and wiped her eyes. “You want me to bring back Criton. He is not my mate and I don’t want him, but you want me to bring him back.”
“You don’t have to go,” Vella said. “Bandu, you don’t have to go.”
Bandu turned to her. “In your dream,” she said, “your grandmother is sick. Even if your kind win, is still not good. This war is bad for them, is bad for Goodweather. In your dream I go to find Criton.”
“And leave me with Goodweather!” Vella cried. “You never came back in my dream, Bandu!”
Bandu nodded, contemplating the situation in silence. “Tell me about the dream,” Phaedra said.
When they had done so, Vella repeated, “You never came back.”
“But she wasn’t lost yet,” Phaedra said. “You didn’t say she felt lost, only that you couldn’t tell Goodweather for sure one way or another.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Vella said curtly. “Or you could say that she won’t come back, and I wasn’t able to tell our daughter a lie.”
Our daughter. Phaedra looked to Bandu, but Bandu said nothing.
“Bandu,” Vella said, “Don’t go.”
“So many lives will be lost,” Phaedra countered. “So many people will die.”
Goodweather began coughing, and Vella lifted her and scooped the grass and dirt out of her hands and mouth. Bandu looked at them, and then back to Phaedra. She sighed.
“How do I go?” she asked.
Phaedra explained what she knew, while Vella wept and intermittently pleaded with Bandu not to leave her for this foolish mission. “We can leave this place and go into the mountains,” she said, “or up into the far north where no Ardisman will find us.”
“Then your parents die?” Bandu asked her. “And your grandmother, and Dessa and Iona? If your kind make peace with Ardis, Goodweather has family and many places to go and nobody hates her. She can find mates who love her and not be like Criton’s mother, always hiding. Vella, if I bring back Criton, I don’t stay with him. He goes back to your people and has other women and I come back to you.”
Vella passed Goodweather over to her and buried her head in her claws. Bandu took the baby and turned back to Phaedra. “There are animals you say that want to eat me when I go to find him. What else?”
“Well, for one thing,” Phaedra said, “we’ll have to find a way to get you down there at all. I have a suspicion that the Yarek could help if it chose to. Its branches breached the sky-mesh when it bore Silent Hall off into the fairies’ world; it seems likely to me that its roots pierced the barrier into the underworld. If we could somehow convince the Yarek to help…”
“It helps me,” Bandu said with confidence. “It already says so before.”
Phaedra nodded and handed her the bag that contained Narky’s bolt and Criton’s bucket. “In that case,” she said, “the rest is up to you.”
47
Bandu
The Yarek was there when she reached for it. Come to me where my trunk rises, it said, and I will let you into the depths where you wish to go. When Bandu told Vella and Phaedra of that condition, Phaedra looked worried.
“That journey will take you weeks! Let’s hope the war isn’t over by the time you get back.”
“If you get back,” Vella corrected her. “Are you sure you want to do this, Bandu?”
“I am sure,” Bandu told her. “Phaedra, you stay here with Vella until I am home. Help with Goodweather.”
“I can’t,” Phaedra said. “I need to find and seal the fairy gates as quickly as I can. We may have decades or we may only have weeks, but I can’t afford to–”
“Then I don’t go,” Bandu interrupted.
Phaedra sighed. “All right. But if you’re not back in two months, I’ll have to assume you’re gone. And if Ardis wins and their army marches north, we’re leaving and heading for Atuna.”
Bandu left then, taking only the satchel that held Phaedra’s relics and the food in her belly. In Dragon Touched lands she could rely on the northern plainsmen to feed her, and in the southern plains she could tell people that she was a friend of Narky’s. Everyone had heard of Narky the Black Priest, and when people asked her where she was headed, she told them she was going to meet Narky’s God and nobody questioned her.
The hardest part of the journey wasn’t the travel or the wet weather, but the lack of Goodweather. Bandu’s breasts grew hard and swollen after two days without nursing her daughter, and she had to painfully squeeze out some of her milk just to keep them from hurting all day long. She worried about how Goodweather was faring without her. At least she was old enough that she had started eating soft person-food.
It had been years since Bandu had been truly alone, at least for more than a few hours. It was freeing, but it was not pleasant. She missed Vella and Goodweather, she missed Criton, she missed Phaedra and Hunter and Narky. Most of all, she missed Four-foot. The wolf had been her companion since the time she was a little girl afraid in the woods, and it was wrong to travel without him or even the poor substitute of her own kind.
Would she see Four-foot in the world below? She hoped so, if only so that she could apologize. His death had been her fault, even if only indirectly. She wondered if Narky’s God would let her bring Four-foot back with her too. It hurt that she had to prioritize Criton over him.
As the days went by and Bandu came ever closer, the trunk and branches of the great tree took up more and more of the horizon. It had grown markedly since the last time Bandu had been this close – how long before it stretched over the entire world? Its parent-self Goodweather had been her friend and ally, but she had no illusions that the Yarek’s presence in this world was benign. The plant-beast was a weed that would worm its way into the foundations of this world and someday destroy it – at least, unless God Most High uprooted it again. It was strange how ambivalent she felt about the matter.
At last she neared the Yarek’s base and stood among the burnt trees and burnt bodies where Salemis had routed two armies. The Yarek’s trunk was wider now than Psander’s fortress had ever been, towering before her like the affront to the Gods that its presence truly was. She felt its power, even here among the scorched and skeletal lesser trees, bursting like strong new shoots out of the ground all around her. The Yarek’s magical presence was even vaster than its physical one.
When she reached its trunk, she found that the ground in contact with it had fallen away entirely, revealing a mas
sive stairway of tangled roots that spiraled all the way around the trunk and sank deep into the earth.
Bandu took a deep breath and picked her way to the trunk across the uneven walkway that remained. She touched the live wood with her fingertips and said to it, I am here. Will you help me?
Of course I will, the Yarek responded. Have I not told you that I mean to repay you for your efforts to bring me here, to your fertile new world?
Then bring me to the land of the dead, she said, and after that, bring me and whoever is with me back again.
The great tree breathed its assent, a waft of sweet air falling upon her out of the branches above. Descend, the tree said. You are safe with me.
Down and down she climbed, round and around the tree until the sunlight disappeared and she lost track of the number of times she had circled the trunk. She lit no fire to disturb the mother of all plants, but kept her hand always on the bark, feeling her way down in the dark. After a time, she became aware of a sound beside her own, the creaking of massive roots growing further and further into the depths of the earth. And then another sound, a dissonant scratching as something large and multi-clawed scrabbled up the root stair toward her.
Show me what I can’t see, Bandu asked of the Yarek, and she reached forward with her mind until it showed her what her eyes could not: an eight-legged badger the size of a bear, moving up the staircase toward her with horrifying speed. Bandu thought back to the guardians Phaedra had described for her, but none of them were anything like this beast. When it reached her it reared up on its hind-claws and said in the language of magical thought: You are not permitted here. Go back or I will devour you.
The creature had a steel collar around its neck. Ravennis tames you, Bandu said. You don’t stop me. I have His highest servant’s blessing.
A servant is still a servant, the badger said, licking its lips. Speak my name and tame me too, or go back, else you will be eaten.
Bandu stood her ground. I give myself two names, she said, and they are both better than the name my father gives me. I don’t need to know your old name – my name for you is stronger and truer: you are Eight-Claw the Coward, the First Who Runs. You do not stand in my way.
The badger shrank away from her in fright. That is not my real name.
Go back where you come from, Bandu said, or I call your real name Dust.
Eight-Claw shuddered and obeyed, retreating until he had disappeared from her mind’s vision. Soon he had disappeared from her imagination as well, shifting and fading in memory as if he had been only a dream. Maybe he was a dream, but on this endless stairway, such distinctions were essentially meaningless. Down here, a dream could kill just as easily as flesh could.
Now she heard voices from behind, calling to her from the world of the living. The first voice was Phaedra’s. “Bandu!” it cried. “I forgot to tell you the most important part of what I learned! Come back – you’re not ready for what’s down there!”
Bandu ignored it. It was not plausible. Phaedra did not simply forget to give Bandu information. If anything, she sometimes forgot to stop.
“Come back!” Phaedra’s voice called again. “It’s new information really, I only just put it together from something Narky told me. Please, if you don’t come back you won’t know how to get past the final gate, and your soul will be trapped forever! At least wait for me to catch up!”
Bandu didn’t even slow her pace. Did this new monster think she was that weak, that doubtful of herself? It would learn otherwise.
Voice after voice called down after her, begging her to turn around, and Bandu ignored them all. When even Criton’s voice cried that she had overshot her goal and that he was trapped on the level above her, she laughed scornfully at the second guardian’s cowardly tactics and willed it to appear before her, which it promptly did.
It was a small creature, half Bandu’s size and fragile like a doll made of reeds, which is what it might have been. Its figure solidified as she identified it, taking the form she had named: a wispy little reed-doll carrying a wicked inwardly-curved knife.
Why won’t you turn? it squeaked. I have slain more men than that badger ever did.
Bandu laughed at its indignation. Go away, she said, but the reed-doll did not obey. Instead it lunged at her.
She stopped it with a kick that bent its upper half backward so far that it nearly folded in two. When it sprang upright again, she caught its knife and tried to wrench it away, but the weightless creature only rose along with the blade, clinging to it. You cannot destroy me, it hissed.
I don’t care, Bandu told it. Go away. She wound her arm back and hurled the blade and the creature into the darkness. She never heard it fall.
She shook her head and kept walking, though at this point her descent was less physical than spiritual. Her callused feet no longer felt the roots beneath her so much as she knew that she was still descending. The physical world was receding behind her, a sign that she was nearing her goal.
Then, from her right, she heard a bark of greeting. It was Four-foot’s voice, she recognised it in an instant. Going to meet him would take her away from the trunk, though – dare she lose contact with the Yarek? It was best to wait for Four-foot to come to her, if he could.
He could not – as the barks of greeting came closer, so did the sound of a chain being dragged. She felt the moment when he came to the end of his chain more than she heard it – it may as well have been her neck jerked backward by the unforgiving steel. Four-foot yelped, then growled, then whined. He could not reach her, and now she even saw him dimly, held by a chain that seemed to stretch back into eternity. There was a lock on his collar that kept it clasped around his neck. There was a key in it already, but without hands like hers, Four-foot could not turn it by himself.
Could she go to him? If it hadn’t been for that key, if there had been nothing she could obviously do for her friend except comfort him, she would have done it without a second thought. But that key, it was wrong. It was a detail designed to tempt her, to trick her into thinking that she could free him without a fight. It was a lie.
But Four-foot was no lie, she was sure of that. She’d have known if he were a demon in disguise. She knew the wolf’s voice, his essence too well to be fooled by some demon who had taken his form. He was really here, and he was really trapped, and he was really whining for her to come to him.
But if she stepped away from the Yarek now, her quest would be over. Maybe she would free Four-foot and maybe she wouldn’t, but there was no doubt that the underworld would have won. It might swallow her as it had swallowed so many others. And even if it didn’t, even if she survived, it would have managed to keep her away from Criton forever. The key proved it.
The trouble was that she did not want Criton, not like she wanted Four-foot. Rescuing him would not bring her the pure joy she would have felt with Four-foot alive once more. He was no longer her mate, no longer her companion; seeing Criton again could only complicate her feelings about him, and about Vella too. For Vella was right: Criton may have spoken of taking other women, but it was Bandu who had actually done so. If she rescued him from this dark place, she would have to face him again.
Four-foot barked again, to get her attention. She shut her eyes tight, so tight that it squeezed tears from the corners. It made no difference – she could see him just as easily through closed eyes as through open ones. She wanted to go to him, wanted it desperately. How many months had she spent among the Dragon Touched, wishing she could have Four-foot beside her instead of Criton and his kin? This might be her only chance to make that happen.
But she couldn’t go to him. She could not afford to save Four-foot and give up on Criton. The wolf could end no wars. He might have protected her against the dangers of Tarphae’s woods, and even saved her friends from bandits once, but he could never protect Goodweather and Vella the way that peace would.
She opened her eyes again, for all that it didn’t matter. I come back for you, she told Four-foot,
but what if she was lying? She stumbled away down the stairway, weeping as Four-foot howled and whined behind her. His voice echoed in the darkness, on and on, no matter how far she went.
And then at last she came to the end, her path blocked by a wall of solid rock. There was a door in it, and in the door was a face. It could have been a man’s face or a woman’s, or then again, it might have been a dog’s or a jackal’s. The dream was growing less and less definite.
Whatever it was, it was looking at her through eyes of stone, waiting for her to say something. She could tell somehow that her first words would be very important, but she didn’t know what they ought to be, so instead she waited, hoping that the door would speak first. It didn’t.
Let me in, she said at last.
The jackal-person grinned at her. I don’t open for the living, unless they give me blood. Put your hand in my mouth and I will open for you.
No.
Then I will not open. Turn back, girl-whose-pulse-beats-on. Go home.
Bandu stood, staring at the door while it stared back at her. Then she reached into the satchel at her side and pulled out the two halves of Narky’s bolt. If you don’t open for me, she said, open for your God. His priest blesses my journey.
The door licked its lips with a great scraping sound. That relic carries memories of a heart pierced and a life taken. Feed me the arrow and its memory, and I will let you pass.
Bandu put both halves in the jackal’s mouth, and gasped as the memory they held sprang to life in her mind. She got a sudden image of Narky releasing the catch on his crossbow, and of a big Tarphaean boy reeling and falling with the bolt lodged deep in his chest. She felt the wound as if the bolt had struck her chest too, and she collapsed to her knees, gasping for breath. Then the vision dissipated, leaving her to wonder about the circumstances that had led to Narky killing that boy.
Delicious, the door said, and swung backwards to let her through. Both halves of the bolt had vanished. Bandu took a deep breath, and stepped past the doorway into the underworld.
