“The night is cold, our fire is warm, and friends are made as easy as foes,” said Grandfather, and, just as in a fable, their guest responded to the ancient greeting in the true tongue:
“The night is cold, your fire is warm, and I would have friends before me than foes behind.” The big man was white as a bone bleached by the sun, white as moonlight on polished ivory, white as treachery, but still Sullen felt strangely undisturbed by his grinning, withered visage. He’d killed a living man he had known all his life, so what harm could a foreign corpse do him, even one that walked and spoke? That was, until the ancient guest continued, “You pups are far from your pack, and these lands are haunted by that which even the Horned Wolf might fear.”
Sullen wanted to shout this stranger down, to impress his grandfather, to impress himself, and most of all to impress upon this fucker that they feared neither witch nor devil… but nothing clever came to his tongue, and his grandfather had impressed upon him that when you have nothing to say, it is best to say nothing. Grandfather, though, always kept his cleverness close to his tongue.
“All I see by the light of my fire is a weary pilgrim, one with even more harvests than I under his back. One who would do well not to raise the ire of his hosts, lest they bash in his sly mouth so that they might again enjoy the more honest crackling of the fire.” Grandfather looked pretty smug about this pronouncement, as well he should. It was solid, and Sullen felt a shiver in his marrow at discovering himself in the midst of a song in the making.
“Horned wolves,” said the stranger, shrugging off a wicker-framed pack of such impressive size that the rucksack reached to his chest even when he set it on the grass at his feet. Considering how tall he was, that was some pack. “Do they still stalk the Savannahs, pray tell, or have they been hunted to ruin, all so that you might have a cloak less warm than that of the same-horned ram?”
“I wear no skins save that of the sheep,” said Grandfather. It was true; Sullen remembered how he had been made to watch as Grandfather burned the hides of all the horned wolves he had killed on the day the council voted to accept the Fallen Mother and reject the Old Watchers. “You can sit down and act the role of guest at a fire you took no hand in kindling, or you can keep talking that weakness and see what happens.”
The beedi had burned down to Sullen’s thick fingers, scalding him, and he quickly popped the end of it in his mouth, puffing it back to hotness, the skunkiness of the bud mixing with the acrid yet earthy tubāq wrapper. Passing the smoke to his grandfather, he saw that his hand was shaking. The old giant had not sat, but he wasn’t talking any more shit, either, instead watching them with that unwholesome smile on his shriveled apple of a face. Grandfather still didn’t seem particularly concerned, though, so Sullen tried not to be, either. If great deeds needed doing, they’d announce themselves.
“Is it both of you, or just the boy?” said the old man. “Maroto’s blood?”
Sullen’s head swayed from the weight of trying to hold up this nonsense for a proper inspection. What in the name of the first fires was a Maroto? He glanced to Grandfather, who reclined against a rock with his legs folded beneath him in such a way as to give the illusion that he was just sitting down, could stand on his own anytime he wanted. Grandfather coughed on the hit he’d just taken, ground out the beedi in the dirt, and sat up straighter, his eyes narrowed.
“You’ve got a nose on you, to smell us out,” he said.
“My nose is keen, yes, but not as sharp as that boy’s eyes,” said the stranger. “As I approached I saw them flashing in the firelight, and they gave me quite the fright—why, I thought a snow lion had wandered all the way down to the Empire! Now that I see you both up close I know I have nothing to fear, do I?”
“Sullen, if you have to kill this creature be sure to cut off the head,” Grandfather growled. “Burn the lot of it. When the snakes and spiders try to flee the blaze, push them back in.”
That dumped some water on a fellow’s hearth, to be sure, and as soon as the words sunk in, Sullen found his feet already planted beneath him, his body in a tight crouch, ready to leap across the campfire at the stranger. In one of the Deeds of Boldstrut, an assassin sent by the Shaman King of Hellmouth had bewitched her around just such a campfire, and Sullen had no intention of allowing such a fate to befall him and Grandfather.
“Peace, peace, oh Horned Wolves,” said the colossal man, raising a tattooed palm. “Maroto and I are friends, old friends, and I do not seek to quarrel with his family. There is a mistake, nothing more—I sought my ally, but found you instead. These things are known to happen. I assure you my nose is as plain as yours, if not plainer, and while I have been called worse things than ‘creature,’ I am simply a man, the same as either of you.”
“You a witch, then?” demanded Grandfather. “Or do you expect us to trust that out of all the fires burning across the Star this night you just happened on ours and saw the familial resemblance?”
“There was a time in my memory, and surely yours, when those who walked both worlds were not always so cursed,” said the stranger, sounding a touch nostalgic. “Now the Horned Wolves lie down with the Crimson lambs, turning their backs on the world their ancestors built for one promised after death. Such have things changed that I recently heard a traveler refer to burning a wildborn as a ‘barbarian exorcism.’ To think I should live to see such decline… Maroto always nodded to me, and I’d hoped his blood might, too. More’s the pity.”
Sullen would have lunged at the man, Grandfather having already warned this witch about talking more noise, but an epiphany breezed through his skull-smog at that very moment: this “Maroto” must be what Uncle Craven took to calling himself after he left the village. Grandfather had told Sullen there were so many Cravens in the Empire that their relation might earn himself a new name to stand out from the crowd, and they would just have to ask around for a rangy, russet-skinned wanderer with the tattoo of the Horned Wolf on his biceps. There had to be fewer of those in the Empire than there were Cravens. Still, again, what in all the songs sung by bard and beast was a Maroto, and how had Uncle Craven come into such a weird name?
Grandfather spoke again, reminding Sullen that he’d meant to attack the witch before it bestowed curses upon them. From what Grandfather was saying, though, it was all right that he had lost the moment in a saam trance. “Blunt my teeth, but it’s true the respect your kind ought to command is in short supply these days. Like you say, things change, but when has change ever been good? It’s just another word for rot and ruin… But there was never a time when I’d welcome some pasty Outlander to my fire without having him offer a name for himself, and never a time I’d balk at burning a shaman if he sought me harm.”
“Hoartrap the Touch,” said the stranger, with a bow that brought his embossed leather robes closer to the firelight so that Sullen could see that they glittered with embedded jewels and charms, an alien constellation of symbols and sigils. “And whose fire do I share this night, may I ask? Kin of Maroto’s, yes, but father or uncle, son or cousin? What shall I call you?”
“You can call us both ‘sir,’ ” said Grandfather. “I look green enough to give my name to one of your kind, whether we call you shaman or witch, mudwife or warlock?”
Hoartrap’s smile began to appear strained, and Sullen’s neck nodded of its own accord at Grandfather’s wisdom. If anything happened to the old man, Sullen didn’t imagine he’d last one day in this fallen Star, where nothing was as it should be. From the first step he’d taken outside of their ancestral lands, everything had gone to chaos; clanfolk trying to kill him, and now a witch trying to undo them with words… if that was even what was happening. He really wasn’t sure what in the hells was going on here, other than his mouth was parched and he was squatting in front of a too-hot fire, not sure if he was blundering into an epic saga or an overlong joke.
“If you’re not even willing to share your names with me, however are we going to get along on the road we must share?”
That didn’t sound like it boded well. “I told you I sought Maroto, and that he was a friend, and both of these are truths. You two likewise track him, and so it would seem best that we seek him out together… yet now I wonder if such a course is wise.”
“Well, you might,” said Grandfather warily. “Don’t know if the boy and I really need to be sharing a trail with any shaman what calls himself ‘the Touch.’ I’ll tell you straight, that’s far too peculiar a handle for my liking—not one for getting touched myself, as a rule.”
“So you do seek him,” said Hoartrap, nodding. “You must have been between myself and Maroto, and what with your blood, our shared target, and your closer proximity, it must have thought this a suitable substitute. It’s young and stupid. I’ll just have to ask another.”
Again, Sullen wondered if he had dozed on his feet, or if the beedi had been stronger than he’d thought—the words this witch spoke made less sense than the lowing of cattle. Before he could glance at Grandfather for clarification, though, a piece of the night tore itself loose from just behind his ear, drifting past him and over the fire to land on the witch’s outstretched hand.
It was a large, hook-winged owlbat, its ebon fur and dark feathers shimmering like freshly shed blood in starlight, and Sullen fell flat on his arse, rocked to his bones by wonder so pure and profound it seemed to sober him up and make him reeling drunk all at the same time. Never before had he seen a true devil, not this close anyway, and though it mostly looked like a mundane creature, Sullen knew he was right, for beside him he heard Grandfather give an oath at the sight of the being. Sullen was not the sort of boy who divided the world into poles of beauty and ugliness, ideal and flawed, but in that instant he realized he had never before encountered something so sublimely perfect.
More than that: the songs and sagas weren’t just made-up stories, the way Grandfather sometimes implied. There was more to life than dirt and blood, love and grief. Devils were real, so what else might be possible? Anything and everything, was the obvious answer.
And more than that, still: if Sullen was looking at a true devil, which seemed certain, that meant he had achieved something no Horned Wolf had in a generation. Here, without even seeking it out, he had passed that final test of the council. He gazed upon a devil made flesh, saw the creature in the shadow and knew it was more than just an animal, and that meant something. Watching the devil crawl over the old witch’s knuckles, Sullen felt a knot in his throat, wishing his mother could be here to see that her son was more than just a misfit, that he deserved to be a member of the clan. Sullen wasn’t a kid anymore… and yet just beholding the devil filled him with childlike wonder and delight. His first devil…
Then, before he could even sort out his feelings on the matter, Hoartrap the Touch clutched the devil in a wide fist and shoved its head into his mouth, biting down with a sickening crunch. The devil convulsed in his hand, trapped wings straining against their bonds, dark blood jetting out to hiss on the fire and spit up rainbow-colored smoke, and the witch’s jaw dropped wide like a pit viper’s to accommodate the rest of its meal in one go. Even Grandfather was dumbstruck by the appalling sight, and so there was no sound in the night save the brittle chewing of a living creature, and then a series of thick gulps. When next Hoartrap smiled at them, his teeth were as black as his dripping chin.
“They always have their uses, even when they don’t do as you tell them,” said the witch, smacking his lips.
“The first devil I’ve seen in twenty thaws, and you…” Grandfather’s voice had the dangerously low tone Sullen had only heard a few times, and he worried the old man might crawl on his belly across the coals to get at this monster.
“If you find your kinsman, you’ll see plenty more,” said Hoartrap with a leer. “Do not fret, though, even if you don’t live long enough to meet the man your Maroto has become, I can still show you what you seek. They grow dimmer to the likes of you, old wolf, but I’m sure your cat-eyed whelp can attest they are as plentiful as ever, lurking around us, feeding off your every movement, fattening on your faintest sensation. If all you wish is an audience, I would be happy to light the candles for you to see beyond the shroud of—”
“Kill him!” Grandfather barked, his voice cracking, and the desperation there chilled Sullen more than anything else he had beheld that night. “Kill him now!”
Sullen tried, but he was too slow. Perhaps it was the saam they had chiefed, perhaps it was some inner weakness, or perhaps it was just the will of the Old Watchers, but by the time Sullen had scrambled to his feet and gone for Hoartrap, it was too late. Like Boldstrut before him, he had tarried too long in the company of a witch, and his song was sung before he could contribute a verse.
The witch wiped the devil’s ichors from his face and intoned an incomprehensible, earache-inducing phrase as he snapped his bloodied fingers, and the tip of every blade of prairie grass for fifty meters burst into flame. A wildfire would not have frozen Sullen in his tracks, even one incited by such witchery—fires are made to be tramped out. No, it was what the Horned Wolf saw illuminated in the sudden brilliance that pinned him in place so suddenly he toppled over, all the strength he had drawn to propel himself at Hoartrap banished mid-lunge. There he lay for the rest of the night, only chance sparing him from landing in the fire, too scared to even close his eyes.
They wheeled above and around and even through him, some with forms close to that of animals, others strange beyond the imagination of saga singers, and in the depths of his paralyzing dread Sullen vaguely recognized that the devils that had always haunted his dreams and played at the edge of his vision were but hatchlings to the great and terrible entities that exist beyond this world, ever waiting, ever watching. Ever feeding.
Everything Grandfather had told him about such things was wrong, he saw that now, or if not wrong, then incomplete. Naïve.
Grandfather and Hoartrap were far gone, even the grassy earth pressed against his cheek faded, and the longer he watched the more he saw, the devils dipping down through the sky and up out of the ground to bury their beaks, jaws, and proboscises in his sacrificial flesh. Yet he felt nothing at all from their bites, nothing but devastating horror that this was how his song ended, the Saga of Sullen nothing more than a cautionary tale against straying from the pack lest you spend eternity gnawed by monsters…
Until the first rays of dawn snuffed out the burning tips of the grass, and then they were gone, leaving him cramped and sore and half mad. At first he didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it—the devils had fled, and he was still alive. Or close enough; his ragged body dripped translucent gore from a hundred numb wounds that opened and closed as he watched, winking at him… so he stopped looking at them. They weren’t real, or at least not real in a way that would slow him down.
“New plan,” Grandfather croaked when they had both recovered enough to look up and blink at one another, crumbs of blood crusted in the corners of their eyes. “We’ll still find your uncle, but first we hunt down that witch and give him one of them barbarian exorcisms.”
Yet when the late spring sun slouched high enough for them to follow the witch’s barefooted tracks, the traces only went a short distance out into the singed prairie before terminating in a wide circle of stinking grey tar. The grass and earth were covered in the foul residue, and just looking at the stuff made Sullen’s neck sweat and eyes pulse.
Grandfather swore to impress the ancestors, and not just the usual bunch of heroes and hunters but even the especially pernicious ones. Sullen, to his shame, was relieved that the trail could not be followed. It was hardly a valiant sentiment worthy of the songs, but he wished he were back home in the Savannahs, where he knew at a glance who meant him harm, and where the devils kept their distance.
CHAPTER
18
The ax felt lighter on Maroto’s shoulder than it had in a long time as the cluster of well-armed individuals at the stopped wagon turned to face him. A pale, scrub-bearded youth led the five new a
rrivals, all of whom wore sand-colored cloaks on their backs and blades on their belts. From the nervous glance this scrub shot Captain Gilleland, Maroto kenned the score in nothing flat. Rather than getting nervous at the betrayal, it put him at ease—with Gilleland having set this up, they’d be cocky, maybe even cocky enough to have all their number down here where he could reach them, instead of camped in the rocks above with bows and harquebuses. At a minimum, it meant he could finally stave in Captain Gilleland’s skull before these bandits sent him screaming into whatever hell the devils had reserved just for him.
“Ho, barbarian!” said Captain Gilleland. Unlike the bandits, who were green enough to think they weren’t rumbled yet, the mercenary and his two toughs drew their swords. Gilleland jovially gestured with his cavalry saber. “Just the man I was hoping to see. I must say, that chain can’t be comfortable in this heat!”
It wasn’t, the armor a fair bit snugger than Maroto had remembered, especially in the belly, but he said, “Don’t worry on my account, I won’t be wearing it long. Got some sort of problem here?”
“Nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure. These pilgrims think they may have broken an axle; might you be good enough to crawl under and have a look?”
“Oh, sure,” said Maroto, counting the steps between him and Gilleland, minding the loose flap of the wagon’s cover where an archer or three surely watched him. Every step he took reduced his chances of being shot before he could do some good. “Always happy to help a pilgrim get where he’s going. Let me see if I’ve got the measure of this—those guards you said got carried off by cannibals the first night, you just necked ’em and rolled ’em into a ravine?”
A Crown for Cold Silver Page 18
