The Rose of Sarifal

by Paulina Claiborne

  The torches around them burned up bright. The angel hurried down the slope, which curved to the right. He stopped and turned, his eyes blazing, his sword across his back, the sleeping boy in his arms who cried out as if beset by evil dreams.

  “This is not a flower that is native to Moray,” hissed Argon Bael. “It is an alien species that has come to us from Gwynneth Island, where it crept up from the Feywild, beautiful and deadly. Let me tell you what the lycanthropes have done in Caer Moray, these last ten years. They have turned away from Malar and the hunt. They offer no blood sacrifices. They ignore our cherished festivals, and instead have forged alliances with our enemies. In the winter months they visit Northlander villages in the deep snow and bring food to them if they are starving, smoking meat from their own tables. They claim this is an ancient rite, handed down by Garmos Saernclaws himself—it is a heresy, a perversion. The Feast of Stags, they call it. Always they feed the human part and starve the beasts, so that many of them can no longer run on four legs and stumble if they try. Slaving together under their fey princess, they have rebuilt the old human walls, the human towns and palaces that our ancestors burned, that our ancestors spilled their hot blood to destroy, and now they live in them, sitting in chairs and sleeping in beds and roasting their food in fire. They do all this as if in Malar’s name. And he permits it in his slumber. But when he wakes …”

  In his arms, Kip moaned aloud. The angel smiled, and stroked his brow with a gesture that seemed for a moment like tenderness. Then he turned and hurried down the slope, deeper into the tomb.

  The Savage, crouching in the drizzle up above, in the darkening afternoon, now witnessed a strange thing. He hid behind a broken marble pillar. In front of him the horses, sheep, and goats stood in clumps, tearing at the grass that grew up through the stones, or nibbling at the wet branches of the gorse trees. Among them and around them prowled a wolf, an enormous brute who had established a perimeter for them, squatting to piss along a circuit of fallen stones. Whenever she got close they shied away in terror, but then quickly forgot as soon as she retreated into the wide porch, where, because of a protruding section of the wall, she was invisible to them, but not to the Savage as he watched. Distracted for a moment by a noise behind him, the elf turned his head. But it was nothing, a trick of the wind between two stones, and when he turned back the beast had changed.

  This in itself was no surprise, because the lycanthropes were always changing, moving back and forth between their beast and human forms through a dozen different gradations. Even in the most rapid transformations he could see the shift, as their jaws, hair, and teeth grew or receded, and their joints reformed. Even in their most human state, he could still see the beast inside of them, and even as animals he sensed the human clawing to get out.

  Nor did they wear clothes. The Savage had heard of lycanthropes wearing coats or cloaks and breeches, even boots, when they wanted to hide among humans or come into a town and steal away a human child. But these, far from any need to hide their nature, had run naked ever since they’d fought them on the beach. By contrast, the woman in front of him had no animal in her as far as the Savage could see, no hairy hands or cheeks, and no protruding teeth. Instead, the cloak she wore was made of a brindled wolf’s skin, its fierce, dead face arranged over her head as a type of hood. She carried a totem stick in her left hand. She was staring straight at the Savage, and it was obvious she knew he was there. Her face asked a question, and to answer it the golden elf stood and showed himself, though still keeping his body hidden from the flock of herbivores that anyway, the Savage guessed, would not have shown much interest, so intent were they on finding food.

  The Savage knew what he was seeing. The druid made an impatient gesture with her hand, so he stole softly to the porch.

  “I’ve been watching you all morning,” she said as he came out of the rain. The porch was empty. Flames flickered from the cressets in the tunnel’s mouth.

  “I am—” he began.

  But the druid raised her hand. “No names,” she whispered, drawing close. “I see you are loyal to your friends, which surprises me, because I hate your kind. But I have been watching you these past days. I did not think you understood what loyalty was, or had any honor inside of you. The fey murdered my family at Caer Corwell. Eladrin soldiers hung them from the battlements, the children too. But you have followed us all day when you could have run. I honor that, and so I will pledge my life to save them, the priestess of Chauntea and the shifter, if you help me. I am desperate. They have gone to rouse the beast.”

  She was, the Savage guessed, one of the Ffolk, perhaps a secret emissary of King Derid Kendrick in this most inhospitable of lands. Tall and thin and dark, she peered into the Savage’s face with intense blue eyes. All these druids were a little crazy, the Savage thought, or more than a little. But he was used to people hating the fey.

  “Are you with me?” she asked.

  “There are only two of us.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  All this time the sky outside the porch had darkened as the rain increased. The Savage opened up some of the packs the horses had carried up from the valley, looking for his weapons. He found a long cloth bag, which he unstrapped to find his sword. “I’m not stupid,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.” He drew it from its scabbard and watched the fire play along the blade.

  As if in response, a stroke of lightning struck outside the porch, and the rain redoubled. Thunder exploded over them, and the Savage looked out to see the grazing animals scatter away into the darkness out of sight. The druid raised her totem stick, and the Savage guessed she was controlling the storm at least a little bit, bringing it close, joining in its music.

  It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to the long odds, but he disliked feeling trapped. It was one thing to follow thirty or so lycanthropes into a hole. It was another to feel forced or obliged to do it, because of the manipulations of some human woman—pretty though she was—who made no secret of her contempt for him and all his kind. If she only knew. He also had his reasons to hate the fey.

  Lightning flashed outside, as if playing in the bowl of the ruined town. The rain fell in sheets, and occasionally it would splatter inward, pushed by the wind. The Savage found himself staring at the girl, her chapped lips and sunburned cheeks and bright eyes and thick black hair, her body under her leather clothes. The problem with these humans, he thought, was that their lives were too short to give them patience. Lukas also was like this, the way he threw himself and all of them into a fight without a plan, or at least a plan he would share. Perhaps this was due to the natural inferiority of human beings, which manifested itself sometimes as arrogance. He swung his sword in front of him in a complicated pattern, to limber up his wrist.

  “What are we waiting for?” he asked.

  She smiled, and the weathered skin made creases at the corners of her eyes. “You’re right. We are too few to fight the Beastlord in his den. We need a third.”

  A third? thought the Savage. We need a seventeenth. What was wrong with these people?

  He had found some dry binding cloths among the saddle packs. Putting his sword aside, he used one to wipe his arms and face and hair under the druid’s appraising glance. After a few moments she moved to the stone steps that led down into the storm and stood looking out, to give him some privacy, perhaps. At the same time, she might have been using the lightning to signal to someone down below, someone who now leaped up the steps into the shelter of the porch, a leopard with a piebald, mottled reddish coat who shook himself and then began his transformation into a man dressed in a leopard’s skin.

  “Eleuthra,” he said when he could speak. “Well met!”

  “Einar,” she said—his name, evidently. Another human, this one a Northlander, the Savage guessed from his red beard and red hair. “Einar Stormsson,” she continued, but she did not smile. The Ffolk and Northlanders were ancient enemies, had shed each other’s blood for centuries throughout the Moonshaes,
until the Amnians and the fey and other newcomers had had the bad manners to disturb them—Stormsson turned, and in his flaring nostrils the Savage could detect some of Eleuthra’s disgust.

  “What’s this, a fey?” said the Northlander. “You surprise me. Phew—he stinks.”

  Acutely self-conscious of his dark skin and black clothes, his long yellow hair still glistening and wet, even his golden tattoos and the gold rings on his fingers and ear ridges, the Savage turned to Eleuthra as if seeking confirmation, and was happy to see the clear dislike in her face as she surveyed the other druid. “He has come to help us in this fight.”

  “Phew—you trust him?”

  Perhaps her own bigotry seemed less attractive when she saw it in other people. She glanced at the Savage, and he could see her face soften. She almost smiled, as if to reassure him. Great, thought the elf. Now that it’s established we all hate each other. But paradoxically, he felt strengthened by their low opinion. He picked up his sword and turned his back to them, as if goading them to follow, and strode forward into the tunnel’s mouth, the flat of his blade over his shoulder, whistling a tiny common melody, which he had learned on Alaron.

  Down below, at the bottom of the curling path, Kip and Marikke had reached the tomb, a vast cavern hacked from the living rock, fed with air shafts, because the torches burned bright. High above them the rock ceiling glistened and dripped, and the rough walls held a reddish hue. Underfoot the floor was lined with agate tiles, which looked like the flesh of a flayed animal in the red light. And in the center of the space, perhaps sixty feet from the cavern’s entrance, there stood a high table of a different, lighter stone, carved with runes and ancient petroglyphs, and on it lay the body of the Beastlord.

  The table was about the height of a man’s chin. The lycanthropes had crept around the cavern’s wall until they had surrounded it in a rough circle. Most held back, but the bolder ones had crept forward on their knees. Argon Bael, with Kip in his arms, had made a circuit of the table, igniting as if with his passage the stone lanterns at its head and foot, illuminating the creature that lay huddled on its surface, its spine curled almost in a circle.

  Despite the lantern light it seemed to exude darkness. Steam rose from it, and a rank cat smell. The angel spoke, his voice loud and harsh in the enclosed space. “You understand why the leShay queen sent you to me, and I brought you here. We could have killed you but the Beastlord stayed our hands, because he needed you.”

  He came to stand next to Marikke and spoke more softly, conversationally. “All of us for all these years have wept for him, but it has not been enough. These stones are red from the blood of our sacrifices at the dark of the moon. This time we require an intercession from the Earthmother of Toril, to free the Beastlord from his tomb. Do you understand me?”

  Marikke shook her head. “I cannot.” And then as if to justify herself, to stave off punishment, she blurted out: “All this way we’ve been climbing down, and I have called upon her. We have ways of praying that are constant, of giving and receiving like the rise and fall of our own breath. Or the cycle of blood within our bodies—we can pray without ceasing,” she babbled, overexplaining in her fear. “But she is gone from me, gone from this place.”

  The boy lifted his head from the angel’s breast. His cat eyes shone in the lantern light. “This is not a game,” said Argon Bael. “String her up.”

  And Kip could see that there were niches hollowed in the cavern’s wall, and thirteen altar stones that made the circuit, cubes of carved basalt, brought from the surface long ago. Some of them still had skeletons or the remains of dismembered corpses hanging above them from a net of chains that rose up to the roof. Six lycanthropes seized up Marikke, treating her with cautious roughness as if they expected her to resist, but she did not. Head bowed, her tangled yellow hair over her face, she allowed them to pull her over to an empty altar stone, while at the same time some of the wolf-men, screaming and chattering like apes, had hoisted themselves into the chains above her head and released a pair of greasy iron manacles. One of them, a grotesque brute with orange hair, stretched out his legs to each side and let down a dribble of piss.

  “No,” whispered Kip.

  “Then you can help her,” said the angel. “The queen told me. Lady Ordalf of Karador—she understands these things. She told me you can climb down to the pit where our god is chained—like this, perhaps,” he said, nodding toward Marikke. “I have not seen him. But you have the power.”

  “No,” whispered Kip. “Do not make me.”

  Argon Bael smiled, and the wolf-men heaved on the chains, drawing Marikke up into the vault. She did not protest or say a word as she hung from her wrists. At the same time the angel flung the boy onto the stone table, onto the back of the creature that lay on it. Afraid he might fall, Kip seized onto the rank hair, and let his mind descend.

  He had to force himself, for Marikke’s sake.

  At first, with his eyes closed, his cheek burrowed up against the beast’s foul skin, he imagined he was climbing down a slippery ravine with the small stones sliding all around him. Black night without a moon, without a sound, and no wind. Cold. In his most catlike form, he crept down over the stones, until he stood on the lip of the abyss, and jumped.

  Somewhere above him he heard Marikke cry out. He twisted himself over, because it was as if the direction of his fall had changed, and what was down became not up, but somewhere to the side. He fell down through the cold, through pricks of light that were like stars. And at the bottom, the ground rose up to meet him.

  Because of what the angel said up there in the world of men and beasts, he imagined he might fall into a place just as horrible and full of terror. He imagined he might fall onto an island in a lake of fire, a barren land without a drop of water or a blade of grass. And he imagined that the deities of fury, Talos, Malar, and the rest of the divinities who had been confounded in the Spellplague, would writhe here imprisoned in pits or cages of fire. And so when he fell into the light, he imagined it might scorch his skin. And when he breathed, he imagined that his lungs might fill with poisonous, burning fumes. So he was surprised even more than he was relieved, when he found himself coming to consciousness in the bright, crisp sunshine, lying on his back and opening his eyes in a field of pale wildflowers. And when he rolled onto one elbow he could see the creature he had come to find, a black cat leaping in and out of the tall grass, searching for field mice.

  High above, Marikke hung twisting in her chains, surrounded by grinning wolf-men. She also had made her own kind of interior descent, a way to protect herself from the pain in her shoulders and her wrists. She couldn’t tolerate the sight of the great sleeping creature curled up on the table, or the boy clutching its greasy fur. And so she closed her eyes and imagined herself walking down the steps of a building in Caer Callidyrr, the city in Alaron where she had first met Lukas and the others, the entire crew of the Sphinx. Often, when seeking respite from the cares of the present, she would transport herself back to a place she had known, and not necessarily one where she’d been happy. In this case, she was in a stone three-story guildhall in the middle of a warren of stone streets, far from the upland village where she’d been born in a cottage in a grove of larch trees. But the floor plan of the guildhall was a complicated one, and in her mind she hurried by the empty courtroom where she had first glimpsed the tall ranger and his genasi friend, talking to Aldon Kendrick, applying for some kind of license, and, as she later discovered, negotiating for the Savage’s release. Destitute, she had left Kip in an exorbitant inn and had come here to pursue any chance of honest employment, and maybe some that had not been so honest, a quest that had led her ultimately to Lukas, who needed a healer for his expedition. These locations in her memory were like the corridors and cramped rooms where they had taken place, and finally in her mind she found what she had been looking for, a narrow back passage and a twisting stair, which in reality had led her to the narrow office of the secretary of religious affairs, a
dry young man who had rejected her credentials and had barely allowed her to speak, so contemptuous he was of her country manners and her country clothes.

  Now the room was empty. In her mind she crept across the floor and peered into the inner sanctum, where in real life she’d never penetrated, the lair of the functionary who had ultimately refused her permission to practice her craft inside the city limits. In her mind it was a spare, open place with windows along one side that overlooked a stone courtyard, a fountain, and a tree.

  Her nostrils were full of the stinking cavern, which among other things had been used as a latrine by generations of lycanthropes. And her ears were full their foul music—below her Argon Bael recited his incantations, while the rest of the beasts had broken into a kind of ragged, howling, wailing chorus that nevertheless contained vestiges of rhythm and melody. But in her mind she was immured in a stone room in a stone building in a stone city, surrounded by stone battlements. And it was here, nevertheless, that someone found her, someone she least expected, who scratched at the inner door and then came in, a little girl of perhaps eight or nine, with muddy, bare feet and dirty, broken fingernails, her brown hair a mess, wearing a torn green dress, an urchin from the streets. Marikke knew who she was.

  “Oh, sweet goddess,” she murmured.

  Chauntea smiled. Her lips were thin and chapped. Ghosts of freckles covered her brown cheeks. “You are hard to find,” she said, her voice light and soft.

  “I looked for you. I called you but you didn’t come,” lied Marikke, even though she knew what the goddess would say next.

  “Did you? Then what are you doing in this place? This is not my house. This is not where my servants look for me.”