He kicked. But the tendril had him now, twisted around his ankle. In the blue-green light that rose up from the sandy bottom, he could see it, thin and whiplike, lined with tentacles. Even in the best and most watertight plans, you had to be prepared for unseen dangers. And these particular plans were nowhere near the best—set a new standard, actually, for stupidity and porousness—oh, well, he thought, kicking as he fumbled for the dagger at his belt. With the hooked blade in his hand he reached back and thought, I hope I don’t cut off my foot.
It took a moment for his brain, starved for oxygen, to realize what happened next, when he found himself moving inside a nimbus of blue-green light. Gaspar-shen was there. He hadn’t gone ahead to guide the skiff. Or if he had, he’d come back. The patterns on his skin glowed with a cold, wet fire. Water-soul, water-breather, he swept out his own knife and ran the blade along the tentacled leg that curled up from below, then caught Lukas’s arm in his slippery hand and pulled him toward the surface and toward the beach, where the rollers deposited them gently on the dark sand.
“Where are the others?” gasped Lukas, when he could speak.
The genasi shook his head. They crouched together on a spit of sand that stretched out from the coast. On the other side, across a shallow bay, a bonfire burned, inland on the wider beach. “That’s where we were going to meet,” said Lukas. “Who is that?”
He knew. Black figures struggled on the shore, silhouettes against the fire. The Savage was fighting there, and Lukas watched the silent flicker of his sword, the branches of red lightning. The Savage was a good swordsman.
Behind them, flame still flickered on the wreck of the Sphinx. Lukas turned his head and watched as it slid softly underwater. To the east, over the black mountains of Gwynneth, the full moon was rising, a bright smear on the horizon. There were no nagas to be seen, and whatever foul creature had held him by the ankle, it had pulled back into its hole or cave to nurse its wound. Everything was peaceful, for the moment. Shivering on the cold sand, Lukas looked up at the sky. Malar’s Eye, the red star he’d used to set his course, looked down at him.
“I’m hungry,” said Gaspar-shen. His voice was thin and high. His breath whistled through inhuman nasal cavities. The lines on his bald head glowed dimly in the quarter light.
“You’re always hungry.”
“I would like some … custard pastry.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
For a moment more they watched the play of the Savage’s silent lightning. Then suddenly there was another flash of light in another color, a white cyclone of flame. It wasn’t just the lycanthropes down there. “Let’s go,” Lukas said. He staggered to his feet, and together they took off at a run, down toward the base of the sand spit and the bonfire there. All was silent as they ran half a mile along the packed sand toward the larger beach. Even with the east wind, Lukas could smell the swamp as they approached.
They would be too late, he predicted. The storm of red lightning had blown over. In the bonfire’s glare, as he stood out of breath on the long strand, Lukas could see the damage it had caused. Two dozen shapes littered the water’s edge, lycanthropes caught in the act of changing, or else in their pure wolf’s shape, their bellies burned and slit, their guts black and smoking on the sand around the skiff, which they’d pulled up and then staved in. More corpses bobbed in the water, or else drifted inshore, all beasts and half-beasts, Lukas saw with relief. Kip’s oilskin hat floated on the surface. For whatever reason, they had taken his crew alive.
He examined some of the corpses for the rose tattoo, but found nothing. All were wolves except for one, a red boar killed in the act of changing, tusks sprouting from his mouth. Everyone had heard of the lycanthropes of Moray Island, but this creature was a surprise to him, until he remembered the shape-shifting pig he had seen in Caer Corwell, in her cell.
They had ransacked the skiff but left much of value, or at least of use—clothes, mostly. Lukas found a wool shirt and pulled it on. He found a pair of boots. Then he unfastened the hidden compartment and drew out his weapons, his long sword, his spare bow and quiver. Queen Ordalf’s gold he left behind. But they dragged the ruined skiff into the dunes and flipped it over.
“Custard,” repeated the genasi in his high, soft voice. “With … white chocolate.”
“Maybe tomorrow.” Lukas wondered if Gaspar-shen was joking, or half joking—sometimes it was hard to tell. The genasi had lived most of his life within the Elemental Chaos where, Lukas supposed, custard was in short supply, let alone white chocolate. Right now, he would be satisfied if they could avoid death for a few hours. That would be like icing on a cake.
Lukas was a tracker, but the trail they followed from the beach required none of his skill, even in the dark. Behind the beach, in the wet, soggy ground, he saw paw prints and cloven footprints only just filling with water—the lycanthropes had scarcely ten minutes’ start. But even so, Lukas knew they’d never catch them. They would run like wolves.
BLACK BLOOD
KIP, THE CAT-SHIFTER, CAME TO, TRUSSED-UP IN THE predawn chill, damp soot in his nose. The boy’s desire for a bath threatened to overwhelm him, make him move when he knew he shouldn’t move.
When light broke, it would be the third morning after the fight on the beach, where he, Marikke, and the Savage had been taken prisoner. Since then the lycanthropes had brought them from the coast, the first day through swamps and forests, the second day through treeless, upland meadows—pastureland when men still lived here, when all of Moray was a Northlander redoubt, and where the shaggy, long-haired cattle had been famous. But now finally they were coming onto the spine of the land, the curved ridge of mountains that ran through the middle of the island from Black Giant in the south to Scourtop above them, a line of jagged peaks and glaciers.
They had not been harmed, despite the twenty or so lycanthropes the Savage had killed when they attacked the skiff. Perhaps their own lives had no more value to them than other people’s. They had left their dead unburied or else floating in the water, and they had pulled their prisoners into the fen, along a track through the cold mud.
But Marikke couldn’t run like that, all night like a wolf. Gasping for breath, she had collapsed on a dry island in the middle of the swamp, where Kip and the elf faked a weariness they didn’t feel. Unspoken was the need to delay, to allow Lukas and the genasi to catch up.
But the lycanthropes weren’t having any of that. Already half their number had split away north, while the rest had alternately dragged and chased and lashed their prisoners west toward higher ground. Under the full moon they gathered under an oak tree, its bark stripped and cut with claw marks. The ones who still had human faces muttered and complained, while the rest snarled and howled. Scanning them with his bright cat’s eyes, the boy could see that there were pigs among the lycanthropes, sows and boars. And there were cats, like him or partly like him. Kip wondered what emergency or cause had brought them together and made them forget their natural antipathy—the leader, a wolf lord with a reddish coat, led into the slavering circle a troika of great pigs, who caught the prisoners up in their strong, peculiarly joined arms and flung them up across their backs. Then they could make time.
Naturally fastidious, at first Kip had been happy to be carried, happy to get his feet out of the mud. But the journey had quickly proved uncomfortable. They had tied his wrists and ankles, and flung him up like a sack of grain for the hard, jolting ride. And when they stopped to light a fire or make food, that had been worse—the lycanthropes had discovered quickly that his nature was similar to theirs. But because his form and his understanding were so much more refined, so much closer to a human being’s, they hated and resented him, mocked him out of jealousy, and called him names. The ripped-up, bloody offal they had given him to eat, he had not been able to touch.
Now was the third morning, and as the stars grew pale, Kip found himself where they had flung him, curled up against the pig-creature’s broad, hairy back. The lycanthrop
es slept in piles, tangled together with their own kind. As always, their animal nature prevailed during slumber. The boy, also, felt the subtle, tiny shift like an electric charge in his mouth, hands, and feet, as his teeth and nails receded. He savored the feeling, as he did every morning upon waking.
But he did not stir. He didn’t want to disturb the animals who lay around him. He wanted information, and after he had opened his eyes briefly to examine the heaped-up embers of the fire, he shut them again, and instead allowed his gaze to turn inward, focusing now on his connection with the creature beside him, whom he was touching through his face, arm, and breast. He felt under his cheek the stiff, shiny, mottled bristle, the long muscles underneath, the occasional tremor or twitch. All that was like the skin of water on the surface of a pond, and he was the fisher cat, crouching by the shore, claws outstretched, hating the water yet fascinated also, looking down and down for the small fish, slow and sluggish in the cold depths, because the animal was asleep. A flash of yellow, and he had it on the bank, had slit its cold belly and spread it out, a map of entrails, and in it Kip could see a world of enemies as the pig-man perceived them, the hostile islands of Oman and Norland and Gwynneth and Alaron, where lycanthropes were hunted and despised. Even here on Moray the enemy still held fast, stubborn outposts of men and orcs and infestations of fey, all of whom must be driven out and destroyed, for the sake of the Black Blood.
The boy allowed his thoughts to move and stretch a little bit. “Where are my friends?” he asked without asking.
Another fish on the bank, slit open. “They are here.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“Into Orcskull.”
“Why?”
This one was darker, deeper, an eel slithering away. But he caught it and hauled it up, though it twined around his wrist. “Great Malar says it. Great Malar wants it.”
No sooner had these words, unspoken, risen to the surface, than he caught a glimpse of something lower down, something at the bottom of the pool, a shadow or a shape that waited there, its red eyes glowing in the dark. Kip shuddered, and he felt the wereboar come awake under his body as without moving he slunk away from the inner water and feigned sleep.
Not far away, Marikke lay on her back, her face unquiet, her long hair tangled and caked with mud. Unlike Kip, who craved physical contact even when he was in danger, who was always brushing up against you or else reaching out to touch your arm, she had dragged herself away from the night fire, humping on her elbows and her knees to be alone. This was not because she had any illusions of escape—her wrists and ankles were tied too cruelly for that. It was because she needed space for the goddess to find her and speak to her alone, space to become greater than she was. Now she was dreaming, close to the surface of sleep, because of the pain in her swollen hands. But even so the goddess crept out to her, lightly on the thin edge, and greeted her with the sign of the morning. In Marikke’s dream she had taken an unusual form, a cloud of bees buzzing without sound, and yet retaining the shape of a young girl.
“Daughter, I am afraid,” she said, though she was young enough to be Marikke’s daughter. “The ice is breaking in the mountains, and Great Malar wakes. An angel comes to prepare the way. Swift is his sword, bright is his hair. But it is your choice, what happens next.”
Hurt and cold as she was, Marikke said nothing. “You’re not listening,” said the girl, her mouth drifting and reforming as the bees turned and moved. “You’re not seeing what I see. Oh, it is because you are suffering,” she said, and even in this dreadful bleak morning Marikke almost had to laugh, because now the goddess was around her like a golden cloud, caressing her without touching her, moving the blood through her body and opening her up. It was a cold, clear dawn in the Month of Melting, and there was frost on the rocks. Back to the east the way they’d come, the sun was rising over the straits.
Always her heart lifted when she came into the mountains. It was a landscape she knew from the time when she herself was a little girl in her father’s stone hut in the Fairheight hills on Alaron, watching the wet clouds chase the rainbows up the valley. The Orcskulls were drier, the chalky ground the color of exposed bones. Still she took comfort in the graceful granite peaks that rose behind her, touched now with dazzling light. Surely the goddess was in all places, and all creatures served her in their own way.
But where was the person who had attacked them on the beach, the mage with the shining sword who had taken the Savage by surprise as he cut the lycanthropes apart?
“Where do you think you’re going?” Harsh and deep, the voice came from behind her. The first day of this journey from the coast, she could scarcely tell the lycanthropes apart, and all their words sounded like grunting and babbling in their distorted mouths. But now she recognized the Common tongue. Now the goddess had blessed her with understanding, which allowed her to twist away from the kick when it came, the clawed foot that caught her in the side and not the head. The creature rose above her now, a rust-colored old wolf-man, the leader of his pack, his beard grizzled and stained. He reached down with his cruel hand, and with his claws he hooked her by the rope between her wrists, and dragged her down toward the encampment where the fire had burned the night before. There he threw her on her face in the dry dirt.
They were in the ruins of some Northlander stable or sheepcote from the old days, a roofless rectangle of laid stones, collapsed on two sides and the fire pit in the middle. Kip was there with a wereboar squatting over him, an albino giant with a broken tusk, who had forced his cloven hand into the shifter’s hair and pulled back his head. “Where is he?”
The Savage had disappeared during the night. Always this was the lycanthropes’ vulnerability, their long hours of sleepiness after gorged meals and frenzied motion—they spent more hours asleep than awake. Only a few of the cleverest were able to maintain their human shapes during slumber. The previous day they had gotten into camp long before sunset, and most of them had immediately collapsed into an unconsciousness that was expansive rather than profound, their claws twitching in their dreams.
The Savage was gone. The golden elf had slit his bonds, doubtless with some secret dagger he had hidden in his clothes. The two young wolves that had been supposed to guard him lay with their throats cut in a smear of dark blood.
But why hadn’t he freed her where she lay, away from the others? Marikke had never trusted him—how could you trust him? Everybody, everywhere had learned to hate these elves, arrogant creatures from the wilderness beneath the world, or else, if you wanted to think of it that way, from the mossy grottoes and shifting forests inside ourselves. Their outward splendor buried their black hearts. If one of them claimed to have changed his nature, run away from home, what then? Surely he could change back just as easily. Surely also the many traps he’d laid for human women, as sticky and repulsive as any web …
“Where has he gone?” snarled the albino pig-lord, forcing back the shifter’s head. In his right hand, the creature clutched a knife between his two heavy fingers. Kip whimpered in fear. At these moments of crisis he was at his most human, a thin pale boy with a shock of yellow hair.
Later, with the goddess’s help, stripes of red and brown would appear in it, but at this moment it was almost white, because of his terror. Around them and in the gap of the collapsed wall, Marikke looked into the faces of twenty or thirty creatures whose bestial nature was now paramount, and whose voices now drew tight around them like a noose of sound.
“Oh, sweet Mother,” Marikke prayed. “Not my will, but yours. Even so, a little help might be appreciated …”
One of the wolves, his long back decorated with a ridge of colored mud, lumbered through the gap. His jaws sagged open, and his long tongue protruded into the shifter’s face, while at the same time the pig-lord’s hand had changed into a boar’s cloven foot again and dropped the knife. But he pressed the sharp edge of his foot into the boy’s neck, while the rest of the animals screamed and gibbered. Marikke closed her eyes, t
rying to find a place of inner calm, however provisional and momentary, a foundation from which her prayer could rise. The wolf-man stood above her, his clawed foot in the middle of her back. She sought her place of soft tranquility until she found it at the moment when several of the animals cried out in surprise or grunted in dismay, and she opened her eyes to see a man break into the circle, kicking the beasts aside. He seized the wereboar by its tail and dragged it back, twisting it at the same time until the creature flipped onto its side, struggling to right itself, digging its feet into the chalky ground.
“Great Mother,” Marikke prayed. And at first this person did seem like the manifestation of a prayer, because the beasts cringed away from him and were suddenly quiet. And because he himself seemed touched by heaven in the light of the rising sun, wearing clothes so bright they seemed to glow. And his sword when he drew it from the scabbard on his back seemed to burn with reflected light, as the beasts pressed down their heads into the dust or else turned to offer their bellies or their throats.
This was the sword-mage that had defeated the Savage on the beach. Then, in the darkness, Marikke hadn’t seen him clearly. She didn’t much care about the faces of men or women as a rule, and she was suspicious of physical beauty, which she imagined always hid an inner flaw. Yet to her, suddenly, the mage appeared achingly, painfully lovely, with a loveliness that seemed not decorative only, but seemed to mean something, to symbolize something true and just and right and eternal—that was at first glance. So she was surprised to hear his voice when he spoke, a voice that held none of those same qualities, but was instead as harsh and jarring as an eagle’s scream.
“Brutes,” he cried, “what have I tried to teach you? Patience and discipline. That is what’s required to be a man. You howl and complain of failure, yet turn away from every chance at victory at the first scent of blood. Believe me and have faith. Soon you will hunt again.”
The Rose of Sarifal Page 5
