As he spoke he swung his sword, catching one beast after another with the flat of the blade, so that they yelped and scrambled back. One was too slow, a young boar, and the mage turned his wrist suddenly, so that the sword bit. One stroke, and the fleshy head sagged free, and the arteries spurted blood into a puddle. “Take him and prepare his body. Some of you must be hungry after this long run.”
Two of the wolves crept forward and dragged the wereboar away. Marikke knelt in the dirt, hands clasped, eyes averted. Now she was able to examine the mage more closely, and saw new details she had missed in the power of his first impression. There were gaps in his mouth where he had lost teeth. And she could see the lines of his veins and arteries, pulsing blue and red under his transparent skin. And there was some discoloration on his neck, some scaly rash that disappeared into his shirt.
He stepped toward her with the point of his bloody sword held low. He drew the blade between her wrists, freeing her of the cruel ropes, then moved behind her and freed her ankles. Then he did the same to Kip where he lay on his side.
“Rise,” said the mage and then laughed when he could not, his hands and feet as cold and useless as rocks. Terrified, Kip turned onto his back, his hair as white as bleached bone.
The pig-lord, who had recovered some of his human shape and clothes, now shambled forward. “We had an elf,” he grunted. “A golden elf. Yes, a golden elf. He escaped during the night.”
The mage shrugged. “I know him. I do not fear him. I made him prisoner. Let him starve here in the wilderness. These are enough. These two are what I want. Tonight the Black Blood tribes will gather in the dark of the moon. Tonight, standing in our own flesh, we will see the Beastlord roused from slumber, and he will call us by name. He will not turn away from our sacrifice, or despise it. You will see.”
He strode over to Marikke, still on her knees. He bent down beside her, and she could smell his carrion breath. “Our sacrifice,” he repeated. “All of us must give up something. Even me. I recognize a servant of the goddess. My name is Argon Bael. What is yours?”
Marikke told him. This close, she could feel the heat that radiated from him, see the brightness of his skin. She closed her eyes. “Oh, my lady,” she prayed. And as she did so, she recognized the mage. He was the Beastlord’s angel of vengeance, as Chauntea had described him. Marikke could see that now.
She felt his lips close to her ear. “This is a matter of justice, not revenge,” he whispered in his harsh voice. “All the other islands, they will hunt these creatures as they find them, exterminate them all. Here only are they safe. Is it too much to ask, one little island in the bright sea? One little sanctuary for the Beastlord? You know there are orcs in these mountains. And giants. And on the north coast, in Trollclaw, even men. Not all of them are dead. Is that fair, do you think? Is it too much to ask, to be rid of them? To wipe this land clean?”
“There is room in the world for all creatures,” murmured Marikke, sounding stupid even to herself.
“Is there? Is there so?”
He helped her to her feet. When he touched her hands, the pain in them disappeared, and she could move her fingers. “Attend the boy,” he said, nodding to the shifter. “Stay with him. You know they hate him more than you. Because he is more like them. It is their own nature they can’t stand. Do not stray from me. I will protect you. These others …”
He swung his sword, shaking the blood of the wereboar off the blade. The gesture took in the ruined stable and the nearby ground. At that moment their enemies did not seem intimidating. Many sat or squatted, staring vacantly, while others curled up, already asleep. But after Argon Bael wiped and sheathed his sword, he clapped his hands. And in a moment the circle had reformed. The lycanthropes surrounded them again, and caught them in a net of focused and intense ferocity, following every motion or gesture with their eyes, and giving the impression that it was only Argon Bael that kept them from tearing Marikke and Kip apart.
“Come,” he said, and strode through the collapsed wall into the bright light of the morning. Above him, Marikke could see his wings, which seemed incorporeal, not part of his body so much as implied, a shimmering trick of light that spread out behind him, where the air seemed unsteady and discolored. He extended them as if for her inspection.
She helped the boy to his feet. Grabbing, chafing his hands, she provided a small version of the comfort the angel and the goddess had given her. Murmuring a prayer, she stroked the blood into Kip’s fingers and led him forward, stumbling through the ranks of wolves until they reached the open hillside and the beginning of the rock fall. There a fresh breeze waited for them, and a change in the weather. Clouds passed over the sun, wisps of fog blew over the mountain crests, and it began to rain.
Crouching above them in the rocks, the Savage welcomed the fog, which soon pressed around him like wet feathers. He welcomed anything that hid him. Soon the peaks were lost to sight, but he could still peer downward through the boulders and watch the lycanthropes pick single file through the scree. These were the conditions that submerged the beast in all of them, the small wet rocks unsteady, and slippery, and uncomfortable for claws and cloven feet, for anything but hard boots. And so as they toiled upward, they appeared to him more and more as a line of unhappy men, held in place by obedience or duty, because animals in this weather would crawl away to shelter and stay put.
Moving from boulder to boulder, taking particular care not to kick loose any falling rocks, the Savage shadowed the line, making a path that was parallel to theirs and a hundred feet above it. In time they climbed up through a ravine at whose bottom flowed a quick, gray stream fed by snowmelt. They had left behind the grassy meadows and the drier upland pastures, decorated that morning with buttercups and lavender and mountain columbines. The golden elf in his black clothes, intent as he was on never being discovered, nevertheless with part of his mind was always witnessing and worshiping the beauty of the land, as he climbed up through the gorse bushes and juniper trees, their flat green needles lined with droplets from the fog, and here and there a complete spider’s web, hanging as if made of water.
He had no weapon save for the tiny dagger he had hidden in his underclothes, which he had used to free himself the night before. He scanned the line below him for the packhorses. It was peculiar how, even in their most human incarnation, the lycanthropes betrayed their animal nature, not so much in their physical morphology—especially at this distance—but in the language of their gestures and their social hierarchies. In the front of the lines there were the predators, the panthers and the wolves, swaggering and aggressive. Behind them the pigs, less truculent but more devious, enablers and counselors and minions, prey and herdsmen, too. In their most human shape they herded livestock, a few dozen sheep and goats, and the line of packhorses carrying the baggage. One of those horses, in one of those big packs, would have his sword.
He skirted through a patch of juniper above the scree. Up ahead he could see the angel, glowing in the dim, foggy light. He was the one who had taken the Savage by surprise, that night on the beach. And behind him the boy and the healer, stumbling and unsteady—the Savage also, in the night, had struggled with his little knife, his fingers cramped and bloodless. None of them had eaten anything since they were captured. The Savage was lucky to have found himself close to a sleeping pig-girl, a small shoat of perhaps fifty pounds, whose throat he had cut while at the same time locking his cold palms around her snout, while he rolled onto her head and stifled her. With a strange sort of pleasure he had felt the hot blood flow over his hands. Later, he had even drunk some of her blood, which had disgusted him. But it was good to be alive.
The ravine narrowed and grew steep. The stream was now more of a waterfall, and the lycanthropes labored up through the spray. The angel disappeared through a keyhole in the rock. The Savage, clambering above him, could see the land open up. There was an updraft here, and the fog rose like a curtain to reveal a broad bowl below the peak of a high mountain, its summit cl
ad in ice. And he could see among the tumbled stones the ruins of a town, and stone forums and amphitheaters. The angel strode along a double line of collapsed columns, roofless and headless, yet each one carved in a different geometric design. There were no emblems the Savage could see, no statues of men or beasts, no floral patterns or even curved lines, but only zigzags and jagged edges and hard angles, all indicating or leading to a single point, an enormous square opening in the granite flank of the mountain on the other side of the circle of ruins, perhaps a mile away.
This place was far older than the wrecked farmhouses down below. Those were remnants of the Northlanders or Ffolk who had once lived in this section of the island, not long ago. But these structures were grander, evidence of an extinct civilization perhaps not even of men but of some other more perfect, more gigantic creatures, now disappeared.
Moving along the walls of fitted stone, far from the central avenue of columns, the Savage followed the lycanthropes into the porch below the mountain.
Looking up, Marikke tried to imagine the labor that had slaved away this temple from the rock, hundreds of years, perhaps, and thousands of men. They stood in a broad atrium that led into the heart of the mountain, a vacant granite cube sheathed in marble, embellished with a relief that showed a line of carved symbols on either wall, a progression of geometric shapes leading to the tunnel’s throat. There a hole had been hacked out of the living rock, rougher and older even than the porch, and black with accumulated soot. Ironwork cressets were fixed on either wall, and as the angel led them forward he touched with his sword the torches hanging there, one on each side. They flared up as he passed.
But at the tunnel’s mouth, under the first pair of torches, he turned and made his preparations. Not everyone was worthy to descend into the rock. This was the temple of the Beastlord, and here a distinction had to be made between the hunter and the hunted, the predator and prey. The sheep and goats and horses, brought along as draft animals or food—were left in the atrium with a single she-wolf to guard them. Marikke could sense her disappointment when Argon Bael stretched out his shining sword to indicate her, a brindled, powerful creature that along with only a few others had maintained her wolf’s shape throughout. Now she gnashed her great teeth as if trying to argue, until the angel raised his hand.
The herbivores bolted out into the drizzle where they stood in dispirited groups while their guardian prowled around them. Over generations, she imagined, they had become used to wolves. But the angel kept behind another one of the wereboars, whom he slaughtered with his shining sword, and Marikke was horrified to see the creature at his most human with his cloven hands outstretched, with his snout upraised, his bulbous face full of understanding. By contrast, the others were at their most bestial as they tore him apart, there on the porch.
Marikke and Kip retreated to the side, where they climbed up onto some tumbled rocks. Marikke put her arm around the boy’s shoulder. His clothes were damp, and he shivered with cold. His hair was bone white in the torchlight, and as his head fell forward against her side, Marikke could feel on the surface of her skin a pleasant sort of pain, his mind probing into her for comfort. And so she tried to provide it as she had for all these years, ever since she had found him orphaned on Alaron when he was just a kitten, as you might say, his family’s isolated cottage in the high pastures broken into and destroyed by people who despised his kind, or mistook them for lycanthropes out of willful ignorance. All over the Moonshaes they’d been hunted down.
But he was more than just a shapeshifter. He had another, more secret gift. Lady Ordalf had sensed it in Caer Corwell. As she watched the beast-men snarl and fight over their uncooked meat, Marikke prayed to Chauntea the Great Mother, whose servant she was. The rock walls impeded her, and her own dark mood. But the goddess was as merciful as always, and soon it was as if a small flower had pushed itself up through a bed of stones, and the boy found her hand and squeezed it.
But the angel of vengeance, also, felt a change in the rock chamber. Putting his sword aside, he clambered up to stand over them. And because he was unarmed, and because of the small measure of peace in her heart, and because the boy had now closed his eyes in sleep, she was able to look up at him without fear. She could see that he also was weary and unquiet, his hair dirty and thin, and a rash over his cheeks.
“Tell me,” he murmured, “is there anything else left there for me?”
He reached down and seized her by the hair, hurting her a little bit. “Let me tell you why you’re here,” he said. “I want you to know, because when a woman and a child sacrifice their lives, it must be in the spirit of loving kindness, a gift rather than a coercion. Otherwise it is for nothing.”
He tightened his grasp of her long hair, pulling her head back so she could look into his eyes, haunted and colorless and ringed with darkness. “You must think we are alone here on this island. All the others, boats travel back and forth between the busy harbors. But here also I have ways of getting news, and when I heard from the fey queen in Karador that she was sending a gift to me, a priestess of Chauntea and a shifter boy, I dispatched my servants to the beach to intercept you and bring you here. I saw the signal fires across the strait from Kork Head. A present from Lady Ordalf, who is otherwise a mangy vixen from the pits of the Nine Hells. The others, they don’t matter. Do you know why that is?”
Marikke had already guessed, but she wanted him to say it: “Tonight it is the dark of the moon,” continued the angel. “For many years the tribes of the Black Blood have gathered here and prayed to our god’s memory, and watched our power dwindle. Northlanders in the Delve, raping our land of its treasures. Terrible creatures in these same mountains. But that’s not all, and not the worst. For ten years in the ruins of Caer Moray there has bloomed a flower.”
But now suddenly Marikke didn’t want to hear what he was talking about. She wanted to know about the Beastlord. Ever since the Spellplague nearly a hundred years before, the grip of Malar had weakened in these lands. No lycanthrope now living, or his father, or his father’s father, could have seen him prowl these mountains. For all these generations, Marikke imagined, this one angel had kept the fire of his worship burning in this place with stories, and faith, and empty rituals.
Tonight that would change. As she looked at him, as she listened not to his words but to his tone, Marikke could see and hear in Argon Bael a mixture of urgent hope and desperation. He was like a starving man who has been offered meat, but fears he is too weak to stomach it. Or he was like a man grown used to insubstantial shadows, and both fears and craves the light.
“Tonight is the night of prophecy,” he said, and the air carried to her, again, a whiff of carrion. “Queen Ordalf knew it—I saw her face in the surface of the pool when she spoke to me. It is because of our sins that the deities of fury turned away from these lands and left us alone. I have tried to nurture the pure faith, even as I have seen many of my beasts abandon it over these ten years, seduced by heretics in Caer Moray. But tonight we will redeem ourselves, and you will help us.”
Wildly and circuitously, he spoke of a prophecy Marikke knew: These small deities, cast down in the Spellplague, could not reassume their actual flesh without the intervention of a greater god, the Great Mother, perhaps. Until then they could exist only in nightmares and visitations, when they could trouble the minds of their worshipers and gnaw on their dreams. They survived best in memory, which was not strong among the savage lycanthropes.
“I will not help you,” she said.
“Ah, but what about the boy? Do you think he could live here without you? Or without my protection—my people hate him, because he can survive in the human lands. They will tear him limb from limb.”
Marikke tightened her grip on the boy’s shoulder, felt his cheek against her side. “I will not help you,” she said.
“But what if I don’t need your help?” Argon Bael bent over her, his narrow face as intense as any bird of prey’s. “Queen Ordalf is notorious, but not f
or her stupidity. She scarcely saw the boy, yet she knew what he was. She touched his fingers and she knew.”
“I will not help you.”
“I think you will,” he said, and let go her hair. “Come, my boy,” he continued, smiling, and Marikke could see his angel nature struggle to the surface, as if he’d lit a lamp inside himself, and she could see it glowing through his alabaster skin.
The torchlight around them seemed to diminish, and outside the afternoon was far gone. Argon Bael bent down and gathered up the sleeping boy into his arms, and with a tender gesture brushed his shock of hair from his delicate ear, just faintly tinged with calico fur. Kip seemed to fall into a deeper slumber, and he put his arms around the angel’s neck for comfort, and sighed as if reassured. Argon Bael carried him over the wet stones of the porch, stepping lightly over the smeared blood, and into the tunnel’s mouth.
Miserable and dispirited, Marikke followed close behind, and as they moved past the torches in their brackets each one flickered to life as if touched by the angel’s essence and then bound to mimic it, all the way into the mountain’s heart. The tunnel was rough-walled and unshaped, in contrast to the marble porch, a hole that wound down into darkness, its floor covered in gravel. “Oh, sweet Mother,” Marikke prayed. But it was as if the goddess of the forests and the fruit trees had no purchase here, and could not find her in the dead underground, in the Beastlord’s tomb.
The lycanthropes followed, quiet and subdued. Perhaps they also were lacking faith, Marikke thought. Perhaps every month Argon Bael had tried some trick like this to keep their hearts alight. “Oh, sweet Mother,” she prayed, “make me wise when the time comes—” but there was silence in the part of her mind where the goddess lived. Instead she filled it with worrying and predictions while she ransacked her memory for the words of the prophecy that Argon Bael had mentioned. And there was something else he’d said. “Tell me about the flower,” she asked him. “In Caer Moray. Is it a … yellow rose, by any chance?”
The Rose of Sarifal Page 6
