Although she’d met the golden before, she’d been glad to avoid them in the past, and never been around them for long. When they passed through Kelun holdings at all, they always seemed to be rushing toward the warmer lowlands.
Oji spoke in lilting, rapid-fire sentences that were accented but fluent. Sometimes he chose strange phrases; often his hands moved in intricate patterns to accompany his words. She had heard that osipi used sign language to double the information content of their speech. How much of what he’d said on the trail today had she missed?
He wore a knee-length kurta of thick felt, belted at the waist, with sturdy trousers tucked into his boots. The quality of the clothing matched or exceeded what she herself often wore. He carried himself with confidence, and there was no questioning his prowess as a fighter. Yet Toril had reported finding him destitute.
Her parents—especially her mother—had disliked the osipi. And now she owed her life to one of them.
She had noticed several smiles pass between the man and her husband. They seemed to trust one another—like one another, even. He seemed to believe he’d joined their journey as a friend and equal. He’d be lying within a few steps of her blanket every night; could she stand it?
Shivi slumped onto a log and patted the broad rock beside it. “I don’t think Hika’s story will lighten your mood all that much,” she said.
Malena sat. The sound of water cascading over the rocks had a lulling effect; she reviewed the many interruptions to her sleep the previous night and found herself envying Oji’s effortless slumber. Stifling a yawn, she leaned forward and raised her eyebrows.
Shivi sighed. “After the last wolf took off, and we’d checked on you and Paka, Toril ran to see about the dog. She’s quite a scrapper, I guess; she was bloody as can be, but it didn’t take long to get her on her feet. We all thought she’d come through okay.
“Then she started to convulse. It happened fast. One moment she was shivering a bit. She was whining, too, like she was in pain, and the sound just got higher and hoarser until it faded off into a scary sort of silence. Then she hopped a couple times, threw herself to the ground, and started flailing every which way, while she snapped her jaws and arched her back. Her eyes rolled back in her head.
“I thought maybe the dog had a concussion or something. But then she got back on her feet and went tearing down to the river like demons were on her tail. By the time Toril and Oji got to the water, she’d drowned herself.”
Malena waited for more, but Shivi seemed to be done with her story. She stoppered one water skin, added it to the pair stretched at her feet, and reached for another.
“Well, she’s not drowned now...” Malena prodded.
“No. We found a heartbeat, and after a while she vomited some water and came to her senses. Naturally, we were relieved. But Oji said something that’s been giving me the willies ever since. He asked if her eyes were bloody.”
Malena considered this non sequitur blankly.
“You didn’t look at the wolves before we left, did you?”
Malena shuddered. “I got a close enough look when they were still alive.”
Shivi nodded and sucked in her breath in a half-articulated whisper of agreement. “Well, all of their eyes were bloody. They were wolforen.”
Once again Malena looked nonplussed.
“Did you notice how the wolves split up, Malena? Pack hunters don’t pick multiple targets like that. And did you notice that they came after you and me, not the men?”
“They attacked Toril,” Malena pointed out.
“Yes, but only because he kept defending you. Same with Paka stepping in front of me.”
“Going after the weakest person?”
Shivi shook her head. “They were after a woman, but I think at first they didn’t know which. Once they got a clear look at my gray hair, and you whacked one with a branch, they knew who they wanted.”
The nausea that had nestled in Malena’s stomach all morning now reasserted itself with a vengeance.
“They knew who they wanted. They wanted the woman that the blood magic couldn’t kill.”
Malena felt her lips and hand begin to tremble. “Why me?” she whispered.
“Remember about Gorumim’s need for a symbol?”
It was Oji’s voice, and Malena started when she heard it. The golden man stood a few paces away, having materialized with ghostlike quiet. She felt her heart gallop wildly. Her face paled.
“I’m sorry,” Oji said immediately, his voice contrite. “I came to fetch the water skins so Shivril wouldn’t have to carry them. I did not want to startle you.”
“Well, you did!” It came out as a snarl.
“Pardon, please.”
Malena felt Shivi’s hand on her shoulder. Air slowly began to flow into her lungs. She stared at her feet, swallowed the queasiness and panic, breathed some more.
“You matter enough to Gorumim,” Oji said, after a pause, “that when the bandits failed to kill you, he tried a reaper curse—and then, when that failed, he sent darker servants to finish. If the name ‘wolforen’ means nothing to you, how about Oreni, their master?”
Malena put a hand over her belly and looked away.
“Be glad that the lore has faded,” said Shivi. She took a deep breath. “Oreni was a raja who wanted to fly. The idea obsessed him. For years he tried every magic; he consulted the wise; he sent letters of embassy to every nation. He built kites. He offered rewards.
“One day a crone sought audience. Her hair was matted and filthy, crawling with lice. She had no teeth. Scars covered her body, and her clothes were rotted.
“‘I can teach you to fly,’ she cackled. ‘But it will cost you dearly.’
“Oreni swore a terrible oath then, that he would pay any price if what she said was true, or have her head for lying. The crone summoned an owl. It flew into the palace in broad daylight and perched on her head. Its eyes were bloody.
“‘To fly properly,’ said the crone, ‘you need a bird’s body. I will teach you how to take one.’”
Oji interrupted Shivi’s narrative with a grimace. “The union of body and spirit is the deepest privacy, at the core of a self. To take another being’s body by force is an awful crime.”
Suddenly Malena was trembling—violently. The dog’s panicked suicide made perfect sense. The raja trying to possess a body, the vile sensation of otherness that had assaulted her with the first wolf death, and the nightmare in the stable all blended into a single ghastly picture. She’d been possessed in one way, and then in another. She wanted to shriek at Oji, to clap her hands over her ears and run away sobbing.
She’d been pounding a drumbeat in her brain: Rescue the children! Rescue the children! Now the rhythm faltered, overwhelmed by a pain and terror as vast as the whole world. Her body—her very soul—had been violated! And it had happened again this morning, for an instant. The dying wolf had tried, anyway. With her. With Hika.
Only the agony of total emotional nakedness kept her from hysterics. Over Shivi’s shoulder she could see Toril approaching, and her shivering paralyzed. Not him not him not him not him not him him him. He can’t see me like this. Not the osipi, either. He doesn’t know what happened. He will never know. Somehow she fought back the bile, clenched her teeth against the scream demanding expression, willed the abject terror from her features.
Toril seemed to sense Malena’s mood. He hesitated, looked at Shivi and Oji.
“She wanted to know about Hika,” Shivi offered.
An expression of what—pity? irritation? worry?—flicked across his features.
“Finish the story,” Malena heard herself say, as if from a great distance.
“Let’s leave it alone,” Toril countered.
“Oreni possessed an owl. Some followers of Oreni possessed our wolves, I assume. Finish the story.”
Shivi searched Malena’s face, seemed to reach a decision. “The crone taught Oreni a secret,” she said. “A secret that nobody should know ho
w to use. Such possession is a crime against the taker as well as the victim, and requires a special kind of malice. A spirit has an affinity for the body it belongs to. To break that bond, you must mortify the body until the spirit no longer claims it.”
“Torture,” Oji supplemented. “You must torture yourself if you want to leave the body behind.”
Shivi nodded. “The crone’s scars were not an accident. But it goes beyond simple pain. A spirit can endure agony and become truer to its form. If you really want this power, you must convince the spirit to see the body as filth, garbage. You must misuse, humiliate, make a mockery. You do unspeakable things to your body until the spirit is numb. And if you can, you choose a regular host and break its soul bond, too. Maybe you use repeated near-drowning. Maybe starvation. Maybe a dozen other forms of misery. You dedicate yourself, body and soul, to that cruelty, for years. That is the kind of depravity that drives the wolves who attacked us.”
“What happened to Oreni?” Malena asked.
Shivi sighed and pursed her lips, accentuating the deep creases along her cheeks. “He flew. I guess he had a talent for it; it took little time and torture to break free of the body he hated. He began possessing the owl almost every night, and spent the daylight hours recuperating in isolation. When the crone grew jealous, he killed her.
“Then his ambition broadened. Why limit himself to flying, when he could also swim or run or slither? He built a menagerie and hired hunters and keepers to help him in his experiments. He learned which species made the best hosts: wolves, bears, buffalo. He became expert in inflicting excruciating pain without damaging their bodies. He trained others in his black art and sent them out on errands of butchery and spying. He began a breeding program to enhance the qualities that were most useful to him, and he slaughtered anything useless. They say the caterwauling and the stench of blood from his castle walls was enough to make hardened warriors weep.
“When the novelty of his animal forms wore off, he turned to human hosts, and at last the people rebelled. Led by a courtier with stolen keys, they chose an opportune night to enter the castle. They were unsure which form he inhabited, so they slew everything that moved inside the walls, every bird that overflew the ramparts, every mouse that scurried away from their torches. Oreni’s underlings died as well. But when they got to the raja’s bedchambers, they found only a mildewing corpse.”
Silence prevailed as Shivi’s tale wound down.
“Remember, Toril, when I told you that Gorumim was evil?” Malena eventually asked. Her voice was steady now; she felt cold inside.
Oji cleared his throat. “My people speak of Oreni as myth; rumors of blood eyes have been laugh-dismissed for a thousand years. But the moment I found those wolves, I smelled their wrongness. Their stares at the children chilled my blood. They took instructions like a human. I knew the children needed help, but I feared to leave until the wolves left, too. Then, when I followed them, my fear grew. I saw how they never howled, never left their course, never stopped running. And I understood in my heart that Oreni’s shadow had touched the land again.”
The boxy silhouette of a wagon broke the hilltop as Malena rounded a bend in the trail and squinted at the orange glow on the horizon.
Toril and Oji were already off their horse.
She spurred her pony, heart pounding.
Even as her feet vaulted onto the heath, she saw bodies, sprawled in indiscriminate grotesqueness. One draped over a wheel; another curled fetus-fashion in a splash of red, at the end of a trail of bent and bloody weeds.
Five of them.
She held her breath until she’d surveyed them all.
They were not children. And none were her parents.
She sank to her knees, awash with relief. The pounding in her ears receded.
A faint, high-pitched whine intruded on her consciousness. It flirted at the limits of her hearing, fading in and out, and it seemed to be coming from a rocky knoll fifty or sixty paces away. Toril showed no awareness, but she saw Oji scanning the knoll with a puzzled look.
Could it be the keening of a child?
Unable to help herself, Malena found her feet walking, then running through goldenrod and clover. She was sick with terror, but visions of her sister crowded out all reason.
Toril called for her to stop. She heard footsteps.
She kept accelerating.
Tupa!
Oji skidded to a stop beside her as she crested the rise and jerked out of motion.
A wolf lay in the hollow beyond the rocks. Its forepaws reached in one direction, while its hind legs stretched backward in full extension, in a mockery of the canine laze that she’d often seen when dogs woke from a nap.
Its back had been broken. She watched it scrabble with its front legs as the rear half of its body remained motionless.
Its belly was slashed; a wet mass of intestine and membrane dragged behind it on the shale.
It continued to whine. Its eyes were half-open, filled with a combination of misery and defiance. Its snout quivered.
In a swift, fluid motion, Oji drew his shortsword and severed the creature’s spinal cord just behind the skull. It slumped. The whine faded.
Malena reeled sideways a few steps, stumbled over another human corpse, and staggered wildly. Once she regained her balance, she froze, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched.
Breathe. Control.
Gradually, she realized that the breeze was masked by the hum of flies. Above the morbid background noise, she heard Toril approach, followed by hooves. An odor—part rot, part mold, part sweat, part feces—assaulted her nostrils.
“These were the possessors of the wolves,” Shivi said, her voice thin from atop the horse that she and Paka had been sharing.
Malena forced herself to look. The corpse she’d almost stepped on was a man—but perhaps the most inhuman, twisted face she’d ever seen. The cheeks were scarred, the lips covered with sores. A matted beard, long and ragged, ran down his throat and seemed to merge with abundant hair on his chest. Irregular gray lumps protruded from his gums where teeth should have been. His eyes were open, the irises bleached and bleary; they’d rolled up and back, exposing mostly cornea with caked blood along the lids.
He was naked, except for a soiled loincloth and a collar around his neck.
A wave of revulsion made her jaw spasm. She swayed blindly away and tripped on a rock.
Toril caught her as she fell. The sensation of his hands on her ribs and hips triggered a wholly different sort of panic, and without thinking, she cried out and swung her fists.
His grip seemed to tighten with the blows. “It’s all right,” she heard him murmur.
“Let go of me!” she shrilled, gasping. “Let go!” She wrenched away.
Silence fell as her sobbing breaths petered out.
Toril wiped at a trickle of blood on his neck. She realized she’d scratched him in her hysteria. His eyes were fastened on his boots.
Malena turned to the sunset.
“After we killed the hosts, I guess Gorumim had no use for these oreni,” Oji murmured. “The men wouldn’t die, but it would take years to make new hosts.”
“Why drag a wagon of useless slaves across the wilderness?” Shivi agreed. “They would just slow him down and drain his supplies.”
Malena imagined Tupa in the company of these perverted husks of humanity—and the ruthless men who’d butchered them. Her skin crawled.
22
an end to secrets ~ Malena
“Wind’s picking up. Stand a little closer.”
Malena shuffled forward, draping a corner of her cloak around Toril’s back to block the slanting mizzle.
Her husband was long since soaked; Malena’s assignment was not to shelter him, but rather the tinder box over which he knelt. He’d been scratching and muttering and striking for perhaps a quarter of an hour, unable to overcome the damp that had penetrated his charcloth by the time they stopped.
She shivered. When raindrops had be
gun falling, around sunset, she hadn’t raised the hood on her cloak soon enough; now trickles escaped her braid from time to time, to slide coldly between shoulder blades to the small of her back. Autumnal equinox was still weeks away, but already the clouds at this altitude hinted of frigid weather to come.
Oji crouched beneath a fir tree, shivering violently. Like all of his kind, he had little tolerance for low temperatures. Toril had donated the jacket that he’d claimed from among Paka’s scrounged gear, and didn’t seem much affected by the loss—but even through two layers of leather and wool, the warrior looked miserable and drained.
Was Tupa huddled out there in this same rain?
The inexplicable feelings that came to her at times, when she thought about certain people, were always reliable. At the outset of their journey she’d been positive that her sister lay ahead. But what about her parents? About them, she felt confusion. Oji had reported no adult captives. Was she hoping in vain?
How much distance separated them now? Since yesterday evening, when they’d found death on the hilltop, they’d pushed hard, trying to close the gap. Normally, a small mounted party like theirs should have made up distance on a larger group with wagons, but Gorumim seemed to be driving his group relentlessly; no matter how fast they moved, the imprint of hooves and an occasional wheel ran on ahead of them.
They were now flanking the Kestrel Mountains in an arc that Toril speculated would intersect with the river town of Two Forks in another couple days. It made no sense. Gorumim didn’t really think he could walk into a populated area with dozens of captive children and an illegal osipi escort, and nobody would notice—did he? If the priest had done even a part of his job in Sotalio, news of the kidnapping would be transmitted by Voice long before he arrived...
Did they want to confront Gorumim in the wilderness? The pace had worn everyone thin. With five riders and three saddles, they’d often ridden double since Oji’s arrival; despite stretches on foot to give the horses a rest, even the animals were weary. If they only napped and caught their breath, and then pushed hard through the night, it was conceivable that they’d overtake their quarry sometime tomorrow. But would they be in any condition to fight, or even to snoop effectively?
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