Everyone fell silent, exhausted by the weeks of struggle and the prospect of more to come. Tahvo drifted away, murmuring something about the spirits. Tamallat and Cabh’a spoke quietly in their own tongue. Nyx clasped the Hammer to her chest, leaving Rhenna and Cian alone again.
“Rhenna…about Yseul…” Cian began.
“You don’t owe me any explanations.”
Cian gathered the rags of his courage. “I should have told you long ago.”
“‘He gave you his seed,’ Ge said. It’s true, then?”
“Yes.” He clenched and unclenched his fingers, wishing for her anger or contempt—anything but this seeming indifference.
“She lied when she said you forced her,” Rhenna said.
“She found me. Baalshillek…I was not in my right mind.” I thought she was you. “I have no excuse.”
“Baalshillek made her out of your people’s substance. How could you resist her?”
“I should have known her for what she was.”
Rhenna shrugged. “Now you know that females of your kind do exist.”
“Perhaps the Alu were once of my people. No longer.” You are my people, Rhenna. You are the last. “There will be no more Ailuri children.”
She looked up with her uneven half smile. “Poor Cian. Perhaps for a while you can finally escape the females who constantly demand your…cooperation.”
“There will always be one female who can command me.”
“And that is something you’d best not forget.” She adjusted her belt to conceal a hole in her shirt, gave Cian a brief nod and went to join the Imaziren.
Cian’s legs nearly gave way. He braced them, sucking in ragged breaths until the dizziness left him.
Rhenna had forgiven him. She was too strong and just to do otherwise. She had learned to accept his weaknesses as she could not abide her own, insignificant as hers seemed to him.
But even her pardon could not undo this day’s work, or bridge the chasms that cruel necessity had opened up between them. He had not lost Rhenna today, or even when he’d taken Yseul in the dark streets of Karchedon. She had never truly been his.
He found a quiet place well away from Ge’s nursery and changed to panther shape, scouting the forest in search of Yseul or the Alu. Their scents were already fading, buried beneath the competing odors of birth, growth and decay. When he returned, Tahvo, Nyx and Rhenna were deep in conversation.
“No sign of the Alu,” he said, leaving Yseul’s name unspoken.
“We have good news,” Nyx said. “Tahvo has reached the little people.”
“So far from their own country?”
“They are close to the spirits,” Tahvo said. “They were afraid of Ge but regretted leaving us. They will guide us back to Nyx’s village.”
“If we can trust them,” Rhenna said.
“Tahvo says that their òrìshà have brought them word of Cian’s victory,” Nyx said. “I would not be surprised if they consider him an òrìshà himself. They may agree to take us across their territory, as far as the eastern boundary of the great forest.”
“Whatever these little people may do,” Rhenna said, “Cabh’a and Tamallat have decided to return to their people. They’ve sacrificed enough.”
Cian bowed his head. “I should have come alone.”
“Regret is pointless. We must move ahead.” Rhenna tilted her face toward the sky. “I have no desire to stay here for the night. We’ll make camp elsewhere.”
She went to speak to the Imaziren while Nyx and Cian gathered the meager supplies the Alu had permitted their prisoners to keep, including a few small animal skins that served as scanty garments. The band covered a league’s distance before nightfall. The next morning they passed by the place where Mezwar and Abidemi had died. The deadly, brilliant flowers hung in tatters, bereft of the scent that had tempted the Ará Odò hunter.
Nothing was left of Abidemi himself, not even his bones, but the scavengers had hardly touched Mezwar. Rhenna, Nyx and Cian dug a grave for him and covered it with stones, while Tamallat wept and Cabh’a chanted Amazi death-rites over his final resting place.
Two days later they reached the hedge wall, or what remained of it. Only severed, skeletal branches stood where Nyx, Rhenna and Tahvo had worked so hard to breach it. The forest that had fought them now eased their passage, and when they came to the high cliff that bordered Ge’s valley, the little people threw down vine-woven ladders.
The walk to the Ará Odò village was an easy stroll compared to what had come before. They never met with Enitan, but Nyx was confident that they would find him at the village, unharmed. No one contradicted her. They had all had their fill of death. Hope, however fragile, bound them as surely as the bitter chains of tragedy.
Every day Nyx brought Cian the Hammer. Every day he refused it. But he knew the time would come when it would demand his fealty, and on that day every previous loss would seem as nothing.
On that day, Cian knew, he would die.
“You have failed once too often,” Farkas snarled. “And all of us will suffer because of it.”
Yseul cast him a contemptuous glance from her perch in the tree above, observing Urho out of the corner of her eye. She had felt no joy in returning to her allies and reporting her lack of success with the Alu and the Hammer. Farkas’s response had been easy enough to predict. Urho remained an enigma, and that made him all the more dangerous.
Farkas, however, was the immediate threat, and so Yseul stayed out of his reach for the first few hours and endured his railing without argument. He had finally subsided into familiar, tedious repetition.
“We must attack,” he said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “You said they still do not know about me and Urho. We have surprise on our side—”
“And they have the Hammer.” Yseul yawned, snapping her teeth, and jumped down from the tree.
“Which according to your observations, the Ailu fears to hold, let alone use,” Urho said, sharpening his knife on a stone with an air of boredom. “Your attempt at direct attack miscarried even before he obtained the Weapon.”
Farkas deepened the furrow his ceaseless pacing had plowed around the cold campfire. “Before,” he said. “Before you and I gained control of our powers.”
“True.” Urho tested the blade against his thumb and drew a thin red line across his flesh. “We have not spent these days of waiting in idleness. But Yseul, too, has become more powerful, and it was not enough.”
“She is female,” Farkas spat. “Are you a man, Urho? Will you ever use that weapon you spend so much time sharpening, or are you an enaree who prefers to don the clothes and manner of women?”
Urho’s fist tightened on the hilt of his knife, then slowly relaxed. “I have no need to prove myself to you, Skudat.” His cold, pale eyes met Yseul’s. “Our master shaped Farkas and me to be the equals of the Bearers, but you were made before their threat was known. Perhaps you are flawed and should no longer lead—”
“And who shall take my place?” she purred. She circled Farkas, looking him up and down, and stopped before Urho. “Which of you mighty males is strongest? Farkas, with his brawn and his courage? Or Urho, who has wisdom and the patience to use it?”
The two males regarded each other like bristling boars. Farkas flexed his muscles and raised clenched fists. To Yseul’s eyes, it seemed that the air about him changed, growing solid like water turned to ice. She had only a moment to note the effect before the very breath in her chest congealed. She gasped, helpless as a fish thrown up on shore to die. Eleven Children of the Stone, stationed on the perimeter of the camp, stiffened to attention. Through darkening vision, Yseul glimpsed Urho, blue in the face and raking at the earth with rigid fingers.
Then suddenly the air was free again. Yseul sucked it in until she could hold no more and broke into a spasm of coughing. Urho fell onto his back, arms splayed. The Children staggered and sank down wherever they stood.
Farkas laughed. “No man can live without
air,” he said. “I can kill them all—”
“And your allies with them!” Urho snapped, scrambling to his feet. He turned his face skyward and began to chant, his foreign words raising the hairs on the back of Yseul’s neck. Perpetually moist air went dry. Thunder boomed. The leaves in the canopy overhead rattled like miniature drums. Needles of ice sluiced through the branches and slapped Yseul’s skin, chilling her to the bone. Her breath turned to a wreath of mist around her face. Lush foliage blackened and curled under the onslaught of bitter cold.
Farkas yelled and hopped from foot to foot. The Children shuddered in the scraps of armor they had not discarded in the relentless Southern heat. Just as Yseul was about to risk striking Urho, his chanting ceased. Ice turned to water and then vanished altogether. Sun broke through the clouds, sending gouts of steam spiraling into the humid air.
Farkas took a step toward Urho, his dripping face twisted in rage. Yseul prepared to put herself between them, but one of the Children interrupted her with a hoarse cry of warning.
A handsome, dark-skinned man strolled past the guards, evading their spears as if he himself were made of nothing but air. He grinned with a flash of white teeth and bowed to Urho.
“Most impressive,” he said.
Farkas drew his knife. “Who are you?”
“His name was Enitan,” Yseul said, suspicion giving way to certainty. “Is he dead, Eshu, or have you merely borrowed his body?”
“Eshu,” Farkas said with a scowl. “The trickster who bargained to help us find the Hammer and then betrayed us.”
“Betrayed you?” Eshu raised a brow and sat cross-legged beside the fire circle. “I did as I promised. I led this female to the land of the Alu and the òrìshà who guarded the Hammer.”
“And then abandoned us,” Urho said. “We have not seen you since you left us among the shapeshifters.”
“I did not agree to obtain the Hammer for you,” the god said. He glanced at Yseul. “I gave you fair warning. I said the Alu might not kill you if you proved your worth. You are still alive.”
“And lacking the Hammer,” Farkas said. He sheathed his knife as if even he thought twice about threatening a god. “Without it, we cannot beg the Stone God’s leniency for you and your kind.”
Eshu grimaced and scratched behind his ear. “You are impatient, little man. I am not yet finished.”
“You would still help us?” Yseul demanded. “Why should we trust you to do more than talk?”
Eshu’s lids dropped over his eyes. “Your comrades are considering an attack on your enemies,” he said. “You know that such an effort will end only in your deaths. The godborn have too many friends in the forest now that Ge is no more.”
“And you are our friend,” Urho said, his voice tinged with scorn. “What more do we require?”
“You do not know?” Eshu leaped up, seized one of the Children’s spears and broke it over his knee. None of the soldiers moved. “What are you, creatures of the Stone? No more than made things like these men of metal, spawned to serve your maker as slaves, with not even a single soul amongst you. When you die, you will have no other existence. Olorun will not intervene on your behalf. Your ashes will scatter on the wind, to be lost forever.”
“You lie,” Farkas said. “I am a prince of the Skudat.”
Urho opened his mouth and closed it again, casting a troubled glance at Yseul. She stared at Eshu, wanting only to laugh at his words and drive him away. She could do neither. She rubbed the scar on her forehead and remembered the day of her birth, remembered the confusion and helplessness as the blood of dead Ailuri cooled in her veins and Baalshillek spoke the words that gave her life.
“Are you the one who can give us what we lack?” she asked Eshu, despising the words even as they left her lips.
“Not I. But if you take the Hammer and the other Weapons for yourselves, you may yet become whole.”
“You would have us betray our master,” Urho said, “and bring the Stone’s wrath down upon us.”
Eshu ignored him. “You know I speak truth,” he said to Yseul. “Your Baalshillek cannot reach you here. He cares nothing for your survival once you have stopped his enemies. You will die even if you obtain the Weapons and deliver them to your master.” He grinned. “Take them for yourselves and see what transpires.”
Yseul turned so that Urho and Farkas couldn’t see her face. She knew full well that Baalshillek was no god, whatever he had come to believe. He had lost his spy among the Children. He could not know of her failure to obtain the Hammer, and the slight control he had wielded through the crystals had also been denied him.
“What will you gain by this?” she asked Eshu. “What good are we to you if we can no longer intercede with the Stone priests on your behalf?”
“An excellent question,” Farkas said. “What is your game, godling?”
Eshu shrugged. “Perhaps Olorun has opened my eyes to new possibilities.” He leaned closer to Yseul. “It is not too late to defeat the godborn,” he whispered. “But first you must know their plans. They will be seeking the remaining Weapons. I will bring to you a tribe of the little people of the deep forest, kin to those who aided the Bearers. If you do not behave like utter fools, they will fear you as òrìshà and agree to serve you. Send them to the Ará Odò village to listen and learn. Then contrive to move before your enemies, and lay your traps with cunning.”
“These little people will take us wherever we wish to go?” Urho asked, still frowning over Eshu’s blasphemous suggestions.
“If your power is sufficient to intimidate them.”
“That will not be a difficulty,” Farkas growled. “And what of you, Eshu?”
“I?” Eshu scurried up the trunk of a tree as nimbly as a cat. “I will watch for your victory, servants of the Stone!”
Part III
Harvest
Chapter Twenty-One
R henna sat on a convenient rock and removed her torn leather boot, shaking a sharp stone from its toe. Nyx, Cian and Tahvo stood together, gazing with various expressions of amazement, despair and resignation at the endless swamp that stretched to the smudged green horizon.
Seven hundred leagues of forest lay behind them—week upon week of laboring through pelting rain, across swollen rivers, up and down the sides of mountains so thick with brush that every footstep risked a painful tumble. Only the combined elemental gifts of the travelers—and the expert guidance of the little people—had made the excursion bearable.
Even so, most of the garments Rhenna and the others had started out with had disintegrated to rags, and they now wore a disreputable patchwork of skins, furs and salvaged cloth. Had they seen any villagers on their way to the East, such folk might well have mistaken them for brigands.
But the forest had been nearly empty of human inhabitants. The little people, invisible since the beginning of the crossing, had made their farewells to Tahvo several days ago and vanished into the trees. Forest had given way to a drier, more open plain like the one that lay between the Great Desert and the lands of the Ará Odò. It was a country laced by many rivers and streams, all flowing north and east; herds of antelope, massive àjànànkú and black-striped horses cropped the grass and foliage on their banks.
Here, Nyx had said, they could expect to find villagers and herders of cattle, men whom her father had met on his journey west two decades ago. Nyx had also mentioned her father’s report of a vast swamp, deeply flooded in the rainy season.
Nyx’s brief description had not done justice to the immensity of the barrier that stood between them and her fabled holy city. Every river they had crossed or passed poured into the mass of floating vegetation and turgid water. The swamp had an appearance of solidity, with islands of green, feathery stalks rising above dark channels inhabited by ònì, akáko, numerous birds and the usual contingent of biting, stinging insects. Nyx assured her companions that the semblance of stability was illusion. If Rhenna had not grown used to Southern heat, she might have found the
stench and humidity unendurable.
She pulled on her boot, tested it with a stamp on the soft ground, and went to join the others. Tahvo turned toward her with a faint smile, as if to reassure her friend that things were not as grim as they appeared. Nyx, who still bore the Hammer across her back, continued to stare unblinking at the swamp.
Cian stood a little apart from the women, keeping a marked distance from Nyx. He greeted Rhenna with a raised brow. “At least we’ve seen no sign of Yseul in all these weeks,” he said.
Or the Alu, Rhenna thought. Or any other miserable devas bent on our destruction. It was faint comfort. Rhenna was certain that Tahvo suspected the presence of enemies who hadn’t yet shown their faces, though the healer refused to put her concerns into words. If such enemies followed, however, even the combined senses of an Ailu, the little people, two competent trackers and a shaman who spoke to gods had not detected them.
“Rafts,” Nyx said suddenly. “I remember my father spoke of building a raft to cross the swamp.” Her tense shoulders relaxed. “That is what we must do.”
“There seems enough dry wood on the hills,” Rhenna said. “Do any of you know how to go about it?”
No one did. They discussed various possibilities and theories at some length, and as the day’s heat reached its zenith, they retreated to a stand of trees set well back from the edge of the swamp. Nyx used her gift with growing things to select the best branches and binding materials, collecting every piece of rope and braided vines that the travelers had made, preserved or salvaged in the forest. Her skills also provided Rhenna and Cian with straight, sharpened sticks to serve as spears, with which they went hunting for the evening meal.
The dark coloring of Cian’s fur, so useful in the forest, was too conspicuous on the open plain. He used his Ailu senses but kept human shape, tracking a small herd of antelope while Rhenna worked her way around the beasts from downwind. Their collaboration won them a plump doe. Once they returned to camp, Rhenna set about skinning and cleaning the carcass, and Cian gathered firewood and kindling.
Hammer of the Earth Page 32
