The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  With the rising sun bright in his eyes, Zacharias saw Bulkezu as iron wings and iron face and gleaming strips of iron armor. The two feathers stuck on either side of his helmet flashed white and brown. The griffin feathers fletched in the curving wooden wings that were fastened to his back shone with a deadly iron gleam. Where the ground leveled off, just beyond the eastern portal, he galloped toward the waiting woman, lowering his spear.

  Zacharias hissed out a breath, but he did not act. He already knew he was a coward and a weakling. He could not stand boldly against the man who had first mocked him, then violated him, and then wielded the knife.

  He could not stand boldly—but he watched, at first numb and then with a surge of fierce longing for the woman who waited without flinching. With an imperceptible movement she opened her fingers. From within her uncurling hand mist swirled into being to engulf the world beyond. Only the air within the stone circle remained untouched, tinted with a vague blue haze. An unearthly fog swallowed the world beyond the stones.

  All sound dissolved into that dampening fog, the whir and hum of spinning feathers, the approach of the horses, the distant skirl of wind through grass.

  With a sudden sharp exclamation, the woman leaped to one side. A horse loomed, became solid as griffin feathers cut a burning path through the mist. In stillness the horse jumped out of the fog and galloped into the ring of stones, hooves clattering on pebbles. Bulkezu had to duck so that his wings did not strike the lintel stone above.

  The other riders could be seen as fleeting figures searching for a portal to enter, yet they were no more substantial than fish swimming beneath the cloudy surface of a pond. They could not leave their fog-enshrouded world. They could not enter the circle.

  The war leader quickly scanned the interior of the stone ring, but the woman had vanished. As he turned his horse in a tight circle the griffin feathers left sparks behind them in the blue haze. Of all things in this place, those feathers alone seemed immune to the witchcraft that had been brought to life.

  “Dog!” he called, seeing Zacharias through the haze. “Crawling one! You have not escaped me!” He nudged his horse forward, tucked his spear between leg and horse’s belly, and drew his sword. Zacharias shrank back, trapped against the stone. He had nowhere to run.

  But the horse had taken no more than three steps when the earth began to shake and the huge stones groaned and creaked and seemed to swing wildly from side to side, although Zacharias felt nothing at his own back except solid, unmoving stone. Bulkezu’s horse stumbled to its knees, neighing in terror, and Bulkezu himself was thrown. Stones swayed as if whatever spell had set them in place was at this moment unweaving itself, and Zacharias shrieked, flinging up his hands to protect himself, although mere flesh could not protect him against stone.

  This was more than witchcraft.

  The woman appeared again in the center of the circle, surefooted and unshaken by the earth’s tremors except for the flashing shimmer and sway of beads dangling among her gold necklaces. Bulkezu struggled up from his hands and knees behind her. Zacharias tried to call a warning, but the breath sucked into his lungs congealed there and he could only gasp and choke and point.

  With a grunt, the woman swung around to bring the flat of the obsidian blade down between the two arched spines of Bulkezu’s wings, onto his head. The blow laid him flat on his stomach, and his helmet canted awkwardly to one side, almost torn off. Blood swelled from the base of his skull to mat his black hair. The shaking subsided, but the haze remained. Outside the circle the other riders flitted by this portal and that, still searching for an entrance.

  The woman stepped closer to Bulkezu—that fast he rolled to one side and jerked himself up and back around in a half turn. The tips of his deadly wings hissed through the air to slice her across the abdomen and through her sheath of necklaces. Beads of jade and turquoise, pellets of gold, rained onto the ground around her. He leaped backward, up to his feet, sword held before him. His helmet he slapped down, and again when it would not settle right around his eyes, and then, with an angry grunt, he wrenched it off and flung it to one side so that, finally, his face was exposed—proud and handsome in the Quman way.

  Ugly red welts bloomed on the woman’s bronze-dark skin. Blood welled from the cuts and snaked down in vermilion beads to lodge in the waistband of her skirt.

  They faced off, each wounded, each warrior now. In this way they measured each the other: the Quman warrior made fearsome by the glint of the griffin feathers bound into the wings at his back—only a man who had killed a griffin could wear such wings; and the foreign woman, not of human breed or birthing, with her bronze cast of skin and hair, her own blood seeping unheeded down her belly. Her gaze on her opponent was as unyielding as the stone behind Zacharias’ back.

  Bulkezu sprang forward, batting at the spear with his sword and closing the distance between them. Zacharias gasped aloud. But her spear circled around Bulkezu’s blow, and as she stepped aside, she caught him with the haft, a strike behind his knee. She was neither frail nor slender; the force of her blow dropped him to his knees, but he sat down hard, locking the haft beneath him, and lashed out with his sword. She leaped back, abandoning the spear. But as he rose to pursue her, the spear moved. Like a serpent come to life, it twined around his legs. He fell, catching himself on his hands, but where his sword struck earth, it sank into the dirt as if hidden claws dragged it down into the depths. No matter how hard he scrabbled, he could not grab it.

  She raised her arms again, chest naked now except for a single strand of gold that curved along the swell of a breast. The shaking resumed, more violent than before. The great lintel stones rocked and teetered and began to slide. Wind battered Zacharias to his knees. With his dagger Bulkezu hacked at the magicked spear wound around his legs, but to no avail. With each cut it merely grew spurs and flourishes, and these spurs sprouted roots that embedded themselves into the ground until its many-limbed net pinned his calves to the dirt and twined up his arms. In frustration he threw his dagger at her. With her arms outstretched and blood trickling down her breasts to pool in the folds of her skirt, she merely stared.

  But the dagger slowed—or was that a trick of the haze and the trembling earth? As the shaking subsided, the dagger froze, suspended in the air.

  Impossible. Zacharias staggered up to his feet, leaning on the stone for strength. What was she?

  “Damn you, witch, what do you want?” cried Bulkezu, but she did not reply; she did not appear to understand him, and neither did she appear to care. In the seething fog beyond the stone circle, riders still quested back and forth and around the ring of stones for some way to get inside.

  Bulkezu struggled on the ground but could not free himself from the rootlike tangle that bound him hand and foot. His sword had vanished into the earth. He looked furious. Brought down by a mere woman, and one armed with the most primitive of weapons! But Bulkezu’s hatred could not be more tangible than Zacharias’ exultation.

  Zacharias actually crowed, the rooster’s call. He had lived to see Bulkezu brought low.

  “Sorcery is a weapon more powerful than a blade,” Zacharias cried in the tongue of the Quman people. “What matter that she is a mere woman and you are a strong warrior? What matter that the tribes sing your praises because you slew a griffin, the first warrior in a generation to do so? You may be adept at war, mighty one, but she is armed with something more dangerous than brute strength. Her sorcery binds you. You can only kill her, never compel her to your will as she does to you now. And the truth is, you can’t kill her either.”

  “Dogs can bark, but it is all noise,” snapped Bulkezu without looking at him. He did not look away from his opponent. “As for you, you who are only a woman, you have made an enemy this day.”

  But the woman only smiled, as if she found his threats so insignificant as to be laughable. At that moment Zacharias fell in love with her—or with what she was, and what she had: She was no coward, and her gods walked with her. What ma
tter that he no longer possessed that portion of a man that some considered to be all the measure of manhood? Hadn’t the blessed Daisan himself said that the peace of true love lasts until the end of days, and has nothing to do with carnal desire? She was everything he was not.

  “I beg you,” he called hoarsely in the Wendish tongue, “let me serve you so that I may teach myself strength.”

  She looked at him, then turned away to catch the horse and hobble it. To one side of the fire lay a basket and a quiver. She unearthed bow and arrows, and with some care she approached the furious warrior and plucked a griffin’s feather from the wooden frame which, like two shepherd’s crooks, arched over his head. Her fingers bled at once, and profusely, but she only licked her fingers and murmured words, like a prayer, under her breath.

  “Nay, I beg you, let me do it.” Zacharias stumbled forward as Bulkezu cursed out loud. “Let me do it. For he has shamed me, and in this way I may return shame upon him threefold.”

  She stepped back to regard him with narrowed eyes. He had never seen eyes of such green before, fathomless, as luminous as polished jade. Measuring him, she came to a decision. Before he could flinch back, she nicked his left ear with her obsidian knife, and when he yelped in surprise, she licked welling blood from his skin—and then handed him the knife and turned her back on him as she would on a trusted servant.

  “Strike now!” cried Bulkezu, “and I will give you an honorable position among my slaves!”

  “There is no honor among slaves. You are no longer my master!”

  “Do you not recognize what she is? Ashioi, the tribe of gold. The ones who vanished from the bones of earth.”

  A chill from the stones seeped into Zacharias’ skin and soaked through to his bones. It all made sense now. She had come from the spirit world. She was one of the Aoi, the Lost Ones.

  Bulkezu grunted, still struggling. Only a man who never ceased striving could stalk and slay a griffin. “I will lay a blood-price on her. My riders will track you, and kill her, and bring you back to grovel at my feet.”

  Zacharias laughed, and at once his fear sloughed off, a trifle compared to the prospect of victory over the man who had humiliated him. “You bargain and then threaten, Bulkezu, mightiest son of the Pechanek clan. But what you took from me is nothing to what I am about to take from you, because the flesh is given by the god to all men but your prowess and reputation can never be returned once they are taken from you. And by a dog, a piece-of-dung who was used as you use slave women!” He reached for a feather.

  “I curse you! You will never be more than a slave, and always a worm! And I will kill you! I swear this on Tarkan’s bones!”

  Like an echo of the threat, the iron-hard feathers sliced Zacharias’ skin with each least touch until his palms and fingers were a mass of seeping cuts. Blood smeared his hands and made them slick while Bulkezu struggled and cursed but could not free himself from his bindings as Zacharias denuded his wings.

  He took everything, all but one, and when he was finished, his hands bled and his heart rejoiced. “Kill him now!” he cried.

  “His blood will slow me down.” She said it without emotion, and by that he understood there was no possible argument. “Nor will you touch him,” she added. “If you will serve me, then you will serve my cause and not your own.”

  She grasped Zacharias’ hands and licked them clean of blood, then let him go and indicated that he should stow most of the feathers in the quiver. She fletched several of her stone-tipped arrows with griffin feathers, afterward hefting them in her hand, testing their weight and balance. When she was satisfied, she went to the eastern portal and began to shoot, one by one, the riders who circled her sanctuary. At once they sprayed a killing rain of arrows back into the stones. She had downed four of them before they truly understood that although neither they nor their arrows could get into the circle, her arrows could come out. At last they retreated out of arrowshot with their wounded. As from a great distance Zacharias saw them examine the arrows and exclaim over them while one rider galloped away eastward.

  “My tribe will come soon with more warriors,” said Bulkezu, even though he knew by now that the woman did not understand his words. He had recovered himself and spoke without malice but with the certainty of a man who has won many battles and knows he will win more. “Then you will be helpless, even with my feathers.”

  “And you will be helpless without them!” cried Zacharias.

  “I can kill another griffin. In your heart, crawling one, you will never be more than a worm.”

  “No,” whispered Zacharias, but in his heart he knew it was true. Once he had been a man in the only way that truly counted: He had held to his vows. But he had forsaken his vows when God had forsaken him.

  Bulkezu glanced toward the woman. He could move his neck and shoulders, wiggle a bit to ease the weight on his knees and hands, but he was otherwise pinned to earth, no matter how he tried to force or twist his way free of her spell. “I will raise an army, and when I have, I will burn every village in my path until I stand with your throat under my heel and her head in my hands.”

  Zacharias shuddered. But he had come too far to let fear destroy him. Against all hope he was a free man again, bound by his own will into the service of another. He might be a worm in his heart, but hearts could change. She had said that all things change.

  “Come, you who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus.” She had stepped back from the edge of the stone circle and hoisted two baskets woven of reeds and slung them from the ends of Bulkezu’s spear, then balanced and bound the spear as a pole over the saddle. To the saddle she tied three pale skin pouches, odd looking things that each had five distended fingers probing out from the bottom as if they had been fashioned from a cow’s misshapen udder or a bloated, boneless hand. She tossed dirt over the fire. She whistled tunelessly and wind rose, blowing the fog outside the sanctuary of the stone circle into tufts of a wicked, cutting gale. The distant riders retreated farther away.

  Bulkezu strained against the spear with its many rootling arms that clasped him to the earth, but he still could not shift at all. The remaining griffin feather hissed and fluttered in the rising wind. While she tested the harness, ignoring him, he tested his shoulders to see how far he could slide his wings out, or if he could wedge himself down far enough to cut at the magicked staff with the iron edge of that last feather. “I will have my revenge!”

  She took no notice of his threat. Instead, when everything was to her liking, she returned to the eastern portal to watch. Fog shrouded the land, and in this fog she—and Zacharias with her—could easily make their escape, concealed from the eyes and ears of the waiting riders. But how long would they have until the Quman riders tracked them down?

  She turned to smile at him as if, like the spotted thrush, she had divined his thoughts. Carefully, she wiped drying blood from her abdomen, then clapped red-streaked hands together and spoke words. A flash of heat blasted Zacharias’ face, and suddenly, as the burning stone winked back into existence in the center of the stone circle, he knew that the Aoi woman would not leave this sanctuary by any earthly road.

  The woman regarded him unblinking, as if testing his courage. Bulkezu said nothing. Zacharias dropped the horse’s reins and untied the bedroll behind the saddle, shook it out to reveal the fine knee-length leather jacket that Quman men wore when they did not wear armor. He offered this to her so that she could cover herself, because not even necklaces covered her upper body now, only the smears and drying tracks of her own blood.

  The stone burned without sound. Wind swirled round them, whistling through the stones.

  Bulkezu threw back his head and howled, the eerie ululation that according to the shamans was the cry of the he-griffin. Zacharias had heard that call once, from far away, when the Pechanek clan had wandered the borderwild of the deep grass—the land beyond human ken into which only heroes and shamans might venture. Ai, God! He had never forgotten it.

&n
bsp; But he would not let it rip his hard-won courage from him now.

  She stepped forward. Zacharias followed, leading the horse.

  The heat of fire burned his face, but just before he could flinch back from the flame, they passed through the gateway. Bulkezu’s call, the high-pitched song of wind through grass and stone, the moist heat of a midsummer day blanketed by fog—all of these vanished as completely as though they had been sliced away by a keen and merciless blade.

  PART ONE

  THE DEAD HAND

  I

  THAT WHICH BINDS

  1

  THE ruins stretched from the river’s bank up along a grassy slope to where the last wall crumbled into the earth at the steep base of a hill. Here, on this broken wall under the light of a waning quarter moon, an owl came to rest. It folded its wings, and with that uncanny and direct gaze common to owls it regarded the ring of stones crowning the hilltop beyond.

  Stars faded as light rose and with it, shrouded in a low-hanging mist, the sun. The moon vanished into the brightening sky. Still the owl waited. A mouse scurried by through the dew-laden grass, yet the owl did not stir to snatch it. Rabbits nosed out of their burrows, and yet it let them pass unregarded. Its gaze did not waver, although it blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

  Perhaps the mist cleared enough for the rising sun to glint on the stones that made up the huge standing circle at the height of the hill. A light flashed, and the owl launched itself into the air, beating hard to gain height. From above the stones it swooped down into the circle, where certain other stones lay on the soil in a pattern unreadable to human eyes. Flame flickered along the ancient grain of a smallish standing stone in the center of the ring. Out of the flame came faint words overheard in the same way that whispers escape through a keyhole, two voices in conflict.

  “It seems to me that you have all been too gentle. A firmer hand would have solved the matter long ago and bent this one you seek to your will.”