2
Aleya fled along the snowy road, through the brush that now sprouted between its stones. Gusts rattled the treetops. In her mind lingered the image of the sorcerer untouched by the wind. As solid as he had seemed—far solider than his guards—he must be dead too, or something like it.
Dead and commander of the dead: She had, long ago, read about such things. A sorcerer could sustain his existence for centuries on this side of the Gate of the world, so long as he had souls to feed on. Her lord might have gathered to him all who had died during the siege and downfall of his city.
Aleya shivered: She had escaped not from a tomb but a larder.
Luckily, he did not seem to be able to pass the city gate. She wished she could remember the last hours of the city, when their enemies must have breached its walls and overrun the streets. Among the enemy had been mages who feared her lord’s ambitions, and priests and priestesses from many temples. They had defeated him, obviously, but with all the dead he had gathered up, perhaps their united strength had been sufficient only to confine him.
And now the armies of his enemies, too, seemed to have been swallowed by wilderness.
A city of the dead, through his power dreaming that it was still alive—she wondered if she herself had walked in that dream nightly for all the years since the city had fallen. How seductively real it had seemed for a moment, while the ruins and this snow-blanketed forest felt so utterly unreal—
Except that the forest persisted, mile after endless mile. The smell of cold bark and old leaves was stronger than the stink of the crypt that clung to her, and the ache in her legs was also undeniable. She could dance until dawn night after night, but never in her life had she walked so far on her own two feet.
Somewhere in the shadows, Aleya lost the footprints. She was too afraid to turn back, wanted only to put as much distance as she could between her and the haunted city, so she trudged onward. And at last the cliffs at the southern end of the valley reared up ahead.
The bridge leading south out of the valley lay in tumbled blocks in the depths of the gorge. And winter had not yet frozen the river, so she could not cross on the ice.
Aleya stood there wearily for a long moment. A lesser road did wind up the steep wall of the valley to the eastern border of her lord’s domain. She had ridden it long ago, in springtime when apple orchards had carpeted the road with petals.
The peasant who had made the footprints might know another way out of the valley. But she did not.
She found a trace of the road where she remembered it, along a stream that here joined the river. It climbed steeply through a deeper, darker forest that had swallowed all trace of the orchards. Switchbacks eventually bore her out of the trees, led her up, trudging ever more slowly, toward the barren and wind-blasted ridge top. The city was now just a pale smudge beneath the mountain wall; strange, after all the years shut up in it by the war, to see it at such a distance.
Near the summit, the tip of a boundary stone pointed into the clouds. Spurred by the thought that she would soon leave her lord’s domain, Aleya quickened her pace. Then the road topped a shoulder of the ridge, revealing what lay beyond: nothing but black forested hills and valleys as far as the eye could see.
She stopped in despair, shivering in the frigid wind. What disaster could have emptied the whole country?
A last switchback led up to where the boundary stone loomed at the summit of the ridge, now only a quarter mile away. Suddenly the shadows swimming around its base, the way the stone seemed to beckon, filled her with a cold dread that might even be one of her true forebodings.
Then Aleya spotted a gleam of yellow light down in the forest below her feet.
She cautioned herself that the light might prove to be another haunting. Still, suppose it was just an ordinary peasant’s hut. O gods and goddesses, what she had endured this day already! She would welcome even the simplest food, even the coarsest, commonest face, as long as it belonged to a living man or woman.
She glanced over her shoulder again at the stone, then headed down toward the light, into the next valley, where hopefully her dead lord could not reach.
3
When Aleya at last reached the source of the light, she found a quite solid-looking hut of squared timbers and split shingles, very like the peasant houses she had known. Rays of lamplight escaped the shutters to scatter across the snow.
She approached the door, telling herself she had left sorcery and terror behind. These would be simple folk who, despite the dirt on her, would be overawed by her gold and jewels, her lace and brocade, her exquisite beauty.
When she knocked, an exclamation sounded inside. The door jerked open on broken hinges. For an instant everyone in that room froze, and in a single glance she took in the scene:
A handful of armed men sat drinking at a plank table. One of them had answered her knock. The men wore filthy leather cuirasses and breeches strapped over even fouler woolen undergarments, the style of the whole reminding her of a pair of barbarian slaves a merchant had once sold to the lord of her city. Their longswords, together with the crest of a white eagle’s head sewn upon all their cuirasses, told her that despite appearances they were neither slaves nor brigands but some lord’s men-at-arms. As the overpowering reek of their unwashed flesh reached her, Aleya also remembered that her lord had ordered the filthy western slaves bathed, and their clothes burnt, before he sacrificed them and ate their souls.
The soldiers were not the only people in the hut, however. In a corner huddled a peasant family who had been rousted in their nightclothes. The husband, a bearded, burly man, bled from scalp and mouth, and rage distorted his face. A little girl sobbed against her mother’s knee, but the mother’s gaze was fixed upon her other daughter. That slight child, who could be no more than eleven or twelve, writhed on the lap of one of the soldiers. He grinned as he fumbled under her shift.
In that scene, Aleya read a story: When her people had died or fled this country, the western savages had invaded. These peasants had no lord now, and no recourse.
Well, she would free that girl from her tormentor.
She did not think of the harm the barbarians might do to her. No one, commoner or cavalier, had ever insulted her. As she edged past the soldier who had opened the door, stepping into the light, she expected only the deference that had always been paid to her, the admiration she had always seen in men’s eyes.
Instead, the soldier’s mouth gaped to reveal a pitiful row of decaying stumps. He began to pant with breath that stank like rotten meat. A thought strayed across Aleya’s mind: He had not cleaned his teeth in his entire life.
Then his face contorted, and a curdled scream burst from his lungs as he staggered back. His fellows scrambled away from the door as well, knocking over stools, a crock of beer.
But the soldier molesting the girl threw her aside, jumped to his feet and, shouting in a language she did not know, pulled a bit of hide out of his shirt. When he spit upon it, out flew a small winged creature with many wriggling heads—
Aleya recognized the wriggler even as it sped toward her: not by its shape, but by the greasy sheen surrounding it, the foul taste in her mouth. It had been made from the flesh and soul of a dead man. Her old lord would have dissolved it with a twitch of one finger. She herself had always tried to avoid magic, although as a child she had been taught a charm—she groped in her memory, but not quickly enough. The wriggler struck her in the chest like a stone and flung her backwards out of the house.
She dropped hard onto the ground. The men-at-arms spewed from the house into the night, some of them sobbing with terror.
When she climbed to her feet and turned once more toward the hut, however, she was met not by the peasants’ gratitude, but by first the husband carrying the younger child, then the wife pulling the older daughter by the hand, as full of haste as the soldiers had been. When she stepped in front of the family, the husband also threw magic at her—not another wriggler but a word, a god’s name
, that clamped onto her limbs and rooted her like a tree.
At first Aleya could track the routes of both parties by the racket of their feet in the crusty snow. From the direction the soldiers had fled in came the jingle of harness and the thud of hooves. By the time her paralysis wore off, however, the forest had fallen silent.
She put her hands to her face but felt only her own delicate, winter-chilled features.
She was far too tired to chase the peasants tonight. Aleya stepped into the warm hut and barred the door behind her. First she searched the hut for a mirror to reassure herself, but in vain. Then, ravenous after her long trek, she looked for any food that did not require cooking. The soldiers had left only bread crumbs and spilled beer.
She hated being alone. How she longed to have those peasants back. The girl would have made a pretty servant.
Aleya found a pitcher of water and managed to drink a few swallows before an irresistible wave of weariness poured over her. Without undressing, she crawled into a bed behind the stove, and as soon as she laid down her head, fell asleep.
4
In the morning, the fire in the stove had gone out and the hut was cold. Aleya set her hair and clothes in order as best she could, drank and rinsed her face. Then she wrapped a rough blanket around her and stepped outside.
A chipmunk chit-chit-chittered from high in a fir tree. The forest otherwise appeared empty of both hauntings and living things. The footprints in the snow told her that the barbarians had ridden south, while the peasants had run away eastward.
Aleya set out on aching feet after the peasant family, following their tracks through the forest for miles without encountering another sign of a human being. None of these peasants, she decided, could have made the prints she had seen yesterday. As the day warmed, the snow melted and the ground turned to mud. The tracks joined another old road, this one more or less tended, that cut across the sides of the hills, affording her views of the lower-lying countryside to the south. Then a bend in the road revealed, about twenty miles distant, a stone-crested knob like a captain’s helmet rearing up from the forest.
Remembrance seared her. Behind that knoll lay the site of her father’s manor, burned to the ground the year she had married. Further south, along the river misnamed the Fortunate, loomed the stronghold of her lord’s ally turned savage enemy, whose soldiers had killed her husband, and in the broad valleys beyond rose the fortresses of the ever-warring great lords, who had at last appeared united at the gates of her city—
All gone now. The light of day did reveal scattered bare patches marking villages or isolated farms, but only at the base of the eastern mountains could Aleya spot anything like the cultivated landscape of her childhood. Luckily the road was leading her in that direction.
Or … it was not lucky at all.
The eastern edge of her lord’s domain was bordered in part by the lands of the Temple of the Oracle, a sacred wood that was never cut or hunted in. The temple itself lay as far east and north as one could go before all roads climbed toward heaven. Even her lord, whose name she would surely remember soon, who had destroyed the greatest mages of the Rich Lands, had taken care not to provoke the Oracle, one of the most powerful and secretive of the old orders. Its priestesses had nevertheless raised a wall of magic and prayer between his lands and theirs. They searched out, even kidnapped, women and girls with the sort of foresight that Aleya owned a bit of—but had always kept secret in fear of them. No one else could pass through that wall uninvited, except for orphaned girls, impoverished widows—women with no other recourse. In exchange for shelter, the priestesses would bind them in living servitude to the Oracle, just as her lord bound the dead in order to feed on their soul-stuff.
The boundary stone last night had been the Temple’s. Last night Aleya had possessed the good sense to turn away from it. Today she was stupidly walking east, straight toward the Oracle.
She tried to remind herself that her old world was gone. Even the great Temple of the Oracle might lie in ruins, engulfed by its own forest.
But once awakened, her lifelong dread that the Temple would discover her could not be contained. Those priestesses would chain her in a windowless cell, they would suck away her soul until she was gibbering and incontinent. She might already have crossed into Temple lands; it might already be too late to escape.
As Aleya skidded toward panic, a sharp thud made her glance wildly around. A second thud and a crack! followed.
The source of the noise proved entirely mundane. A farmstead abutted the road ahead, just visible through the trees. There a peasant woman had begun splitting wood. The woman was plain, dumpy, and middle-aged, dressed in the most rustic parti-colored wool, and she swung her axe with the ease of one accustomed to hard labor. Her shoes were the right sort to have made yesterday’s footprints in the city, but her feet were far too big, nearly as large as a man’s. A pair of turkeys pecked the ground beside her, gobbling.
Aleya straightened her stolen blanket-cloak and stepped nearer. Before she reached the gate, the peasant jerked erect, wide-eyed. At least this one did not scream or flee.
Aleya knew she was less than perfectly groomed, but she was still beautiful, and her bearing was always graceful. “A good day, mistress,” she said, in the cool, musical tones she liked to cultivate.
The peasant slowly lowered her axe. As Aleya continued forward, the turkeys flapped their wings in agitation. Then the peasant woman hissed a god’s name, a searing bolt of light that slammed Aleya down into the mud of the path.
How did these peasants know such magic?
Astounded and enraged, Aleya struggled to her feet. The peasant woman was still spitting out words in her rustic accent: “Go back! Go back to Lord Reyzmon, dead creature, and leave the living alone!”
Dead creature?
Reyozem Ahon —this woman knew the sorcerer’s name, though she did not pronounce it correctly.
Go back to your lord, dead creature.
Terror reared up in Aleya again. And then the peasant began droning a prayer. A prayer! As if this ugly commoner were handmaiden to a god!
Perhaps she was one of the Oracle’s snares, though, because that tuneless song sliced through Aleya’s flesh like knives, it choked the air from her lungs. The pain was so intense she nearly fainted from it. O gods and goddesses, the prayer was a supplication to the God of the Gate: Open the Gate of the world, lord, let this lost spirit pass out to heaven … Aleya barely managed to gasp out, “What are you doing? I’m alive! Stop it now!”
The peasant sang on. Aleya did not know how long she could survive. To show that she was alive, and that neither prayer nor pain ruled her, she stepped forward again. But the witch hefted her axe, and Aleya, shocked even in her agony by this crudest of threats, once more stopped in her tracks.
“I am not dead!” she gasped. And then, pushing out the words against the weight that crushed her lungs, “Whatever you think—I don’t mean any harm! I just need—I need …” What did she want? A refuge? Rest? An explanation for her long sleep and terrible awakening?
She was so tired, so alone, as pitiful as a beggar. At last she whispered, “I need your help.”
The other woman’s eyes flicked wide and she abruptly stopped her prayer. Aleya’s agony drained away and, dizzy with relief, she sucked in great lungfuls of air.
After a moment the peasant shook her head and muttered, as if talking to herself, “It’s true you’re solider than most of them. And you even have speech. I suppose you’ve been eating the living to keep your thoughts—”
“I have not!” Aleya cried out in horror.
“—and of course you’ve forgotten what you are already. But you must be full of blood to be walking in daylight and looking at me as if you can even take in my words.” The peasant witch grimaced in perplexity, scratching the back of her neck.
But Aleya moaned, “No, no,” because she didn’t remember well, and she had utterly lost all the years since the city’s downfall. Once more she p
ut her hands to her face and felt only her own smooth cheeks. A landslide of terror and panic was nevertheless roaring down on her. She cast her denials at the peasant, trying to convince herself: “I feel hunger and thirst, and cold and weariness. How could I be dead?”
The witch, or disguised priestess or whatever she was, shrugged. “You hunger for the living, you thirst for their souls, you’re cold from the grave, you’re tired because you’re two hundred years dead, creature, and you should have lain down to rest long ago. You just dress those appetites in the memories of your life.”
“No!” cried Aleya.
But she had longed for living people, and the people at the hut had fled from her in terror.
She had drunk water, and a fire in the stove, a blanket—ordinary things had warmed her. And what about the blue sky just now gleaming through the clouds, what about the smells of cold mud and newly split pine, what about the fluttering turkeys, the crows squawking in the peasant’s apple trees? She felt these things to her bones.
As she had always been able to do with her little bit of magic, Aleya could also taste the glow of the peasant’s soul. Now the thought came unbidden: That would warm her, too … Although the witch was not beautiful and Aleya did not want to touch her, much less eat her life.
“I feel so much,” Aleya whispered. A lump swelled in her throat. She wanted to cry, but no tears would flow. Was that because she was highborn, and no matter what her fear or her suffering, she would not disgrace herself before this muddy, ugly, insolent, blasphemous peasant?
Or was it because the lady Aleya was dead and had no tears?
“You are dead as dead, creature,” said the peasant. “Your soul is just stuck on the wrong side of the Gate, see?” She sighed deeply. “You’ve claimed my help and I seem bound to your claim, though I never knew a person could owe a debt to one of Reyzmon’s slaves. You must be that dead woman who chased the Governor’s soldiers from my brother’s house; I suppose that’s the reason for my obligation to you.”
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 16
