Embarrassed, almost shamefaced, she had revealed her conversation with the goddess. “I’m only telling you part of it. I know you must find your friends,” she said. “I accept that. But we can’t neglect the signs.”
“What signs?” asked Lukas, though he knew. He hated these signs. He had spent years perfecting the art of chasing enemies or game, turning every broken stick into a narrative, a vision of the past. In a muddy puddle he could see, as if reflected in a mirror, an image of the creatures who had stepped that way—or so he told himself.
But these signs were like a joke. They’d found the first more than a mile from the coast, far beyond the wreckage from the wave. It was the body of a lycanthrope, hanging upside down from the bough of a white pine tree, not a mark on him. Rigor mortis had frozen his face into a horrifying rictus, a parody of a human smile. It had extended his right arm perpendicular to his body, had even extended his forefinger, which had pointed uphill.
What kind of a narrative was that? Later on, three twigs had formed an arrow pointing along the ridge, though there wasn’t any sign of the person that had made it, not so much as a bent blade of grass. Half a mile onward, a spider’s web was soaked in dew, the outline of an arrow spun into its fabric.
Irritated, Lukas had kicked it from the stalks of grass that held it. Not that it mattered—for the first day the goddess had led them in the direction he would have chosen anyway, back to Kork Head, where he could pick up Marikke’s trail again. In his mind he held a vision of her and the boy held captive in a wooden cage, surrounded by a pack of howling lycanthropes. Marikke had her arms around the little shifter, protecting him. The Savage could take care of himself, at least in the ranger’s imagination—he was never there, was always somewhere else.
But on the morning of the second day, the goddess had tried to lead them inward, away from the coastal swamp where he and Gaspar-shen had chosen the wrong way their first night on Moray Island. And when he had reminded Amaranth of her promise—that they would look for his friends first of all—she had acquiesced. Still, she found it hard to look at him and spoke instead to the genasi, or to her brother, the wolf. She had allowed him to lead her toward Kork Head, but the goddess would have none of it. A couple of hours after they’d turned their backs on her last blaze of signs—a sequence of aspen trees whose leaves, though it was springtime, had already changed color—they discovered something new.
The wolf’s name was Coal, because of a black mark on his forehead. He ran down a rabbit, tore into its stomach, and there, packed inside the viscera, was a slip of ivory or a spur of bone that was not natural. The rabbit had been slow and sick. And the piece of bone had writing on it, miniature letters written in a bloody ink, a fey script that Amaranth and Lukas could decipher once Coal had brought it to them—the bone tasted awful, he indicated in a series of grunts.
Lukas held the piece of bone up to his eye. Here is what the letters said: “You are stupid. Is your friend a freak? He is not from the real world.”
Impassive, the genasi scratched his arms, running his sharp nails along the lines that ran under his skin like glowing veins. His thin lips closed and opened, but he said nothing.
They continued southeast. In the afternoon Coal caught another animal, an otter on the bank of a small stream. The otter didn’t slip into the water, didn’t run away. His head and body were covered with tumors, and his little eyes, when Coal slit his belly, seemed to be pleading for release. A stink rose from his insides, and a black fluid erupted from his body, as if it had been held under pressure by his skin. Coal jumped back, and the fluid splattered on the dry ground, leaving tiny marks in the same fey script: “Stupid, stupid.”
But they pressed on. As they neared the coast, they discovered a man sitting on a stump. He was ancient, asleep in the sunlight, his long white beard sunk to his chest, his long white hair struggling out from underneath his broad-brimmed hat. He was dressed in rags, and a walking stick lay beside him. At first Lukas imagined he too had expired, and that they were supposed to open him up to find some new insulting signal from the Earthmother. He’d be damned if he did that. But there was no human habitation in fifty miles, and there was no reason for this man to be here, no way for him to get here to this glade in the woods with no path or road to follow.
They gathered around him, and he opened his bleary, ice-blue eyes. If he was frightened of the wolf, he didn’t show it. He spoke in the Common tongue, his voice high and weak, “The goddess be praised. It is as she told me years ago, that at the end I would see a genasi warrior, and a beautiful maiden, and a wild beast, and a stubborn fool. That would be the end of my life’s passage, and the beginning of another journey that would take me far from here, beyond the Astral Sea. I was just a boy when I saw her in my mother’s garden, and since then I have wandered my life away, searching for this moment. Here it is at last. And I was to give you a message … let me see. She made me repeat it over and over. Let me see …”
His voice trailed away. Cursing silently, Lukas bent down over him, close enough to smell his foul breath, his teeth worn to carious stumps. “Let me see,” the old man mumbled. “It was so long ago. I saw here in the garden—she was just a little girl. A girl my own age, but I knew who she was. Since then I have looked for her all over the Sword Coast, and now all through these islands—not for me to follow in my father’s trade. Not for me to marry and have children. But all these years I have been searching for you four—at first I thought it would be a matter of months! A year at most. I did not guess it would consume my life—oh, I am ready to see her again.”
“The message,” suggested Lukas grimly. The old man was pitiable, but he refused to pity him. This was all Chauntea’s trick, an invention of the past few hours.
Amaranth, though, went down on her knees and took his hand. “Younger than you,” he said, “and not as pretty. But I knew who she was. She made me repeat the message in a language I didn’t understand—I hope I can remember it. I made a little song out of it and would repeat it to myself before I went to sleep.”
Amaranth had tears in her eyes. Lukas had an inclination to seize the old man’s hat and pull it down over his eyes, or grab hold of his beard and wag his head from side to side. Lukas looked up at the genasi, who studied him impassively. The wolf sat on his haunches in the grass.
The old man closed his eyes, perhaps to compose himself for death, perhaps from the effort of remembering. When he spoke, it was in the primordial language of the gods: “Idiot. You’re a pig’s ass. Your nose is like a big, fat turd, and your friend is ugly. You’ve taken the girl far afield, and for what? The daemonfey is going toward the same place. The loregem showed him, and you will meet him there. Tarkhaan’s son, Bishtek Dlardrageth, whom you call the Savage. This is my desire and command. As for the other two, you must look no further, unless you search in the Nine Hells. They are dead. The priestess and the boy. Malar killed them.”
Lukas stood up straight. “You’re lying.”
“Am not. If you don’t believe me, wait for a few hours right where you are. You’ll see Malar face to face. No, here,” the old man continued, stretching out his clawlike hand. “I’ll show you.”
But he didn’t. Instead he fell backward off the stump, legs in the air.
Amaranth bent over him. “Oh, dear,” she said.
“Leave him,” Lukas said.
“No. How can you be so heartless?” she said. She had been holding the old man’s hand, but now she pulled away in disgust, because the hand had come apart. She staggered up, and together they watched the old man’s body subside, as if through an instantaneous process of decomposition—his flesh was dry as ash. After a moment Gaspar-shen drew his scimitar. With its hooked end he drew back the brim of the man’s hat, showing the heap of powder that had been his skull, while clumps of his beard and hair drifted away.
“He was a liar,” Lukas said again. “He didn’t show me anything. And … the golden elf has no demon blood, I’d swear to it. You’d be abl
e to see it in his face,” he continued, remembering a morning when he had seen the Savage washing, seen the scars along his back, the sharp bones of his vertebrae almost like spines. “And Marikke and Kip aren’t dead. And … he didn’t show me anything,” he concluded, repeating himself lamely, while at the same time he could not but imagine the Beastlord in his panther’s shape bounding toward them through the forest, surrounded by his pack of wolves.
After a moment’s waiting while Lukas overcame his doubts, they turned back the way they’d come.
But it was the Savage and the wolf that first arrived at the place. They had crossed a river near an abandoned town, the stone streets empty, the roofs caved in. But the bridge to the far bank was intact, an elegant single span, and on the other side a raised cobblestone track that led into the marsh—what had once been, the Savage guessed, irrigated agricultural land, now flooded and overgrown. But then they passed an earthen dike and the road gave out, and then they were in the marsh itself, and the way was difficult. Not for Eleuthra, who slid through the undergrowth and loped tirelessly ahead, but for the Savage, who slapped at the mosquitoes and stumbled through the muck. In places he had to cut himself free with the king’s sword, whose edge was supernaturally sharp. Nevertheless, the prickers caught at his bare skin, and sometimes he had to draw breath, lightheaded, close to tears.
The treasure he had taken from the tomb now weighed him down. But more than that—the gold was changing him in ways both good and bad.
At moments when he bent down in the undergrowth, his ears ringing and his head aching, he thought he would remove the rings from his pockets and his fingers and his hair, remove the circlet from his neck, and drop them one by one into the noisome pools, saving the ruby for last. Or else he would scatter them in different directions, because he imagined that together they held between them a black power. At such moments they seemed too heavy to lift. But then he would remind himself how deeply he’d been hurt the past few days, the wound he’d taken to his chest in his fight with the angel, the dragon bite he’d taken to his forearm. Surely it was not just the effect of Marikke’s healing that had enabled him to survive these things, that had reknit his bones and strengthened his blood and healed his skin. Surely there was some spell or magic in the gold, an effect that he could feel when he passed it over his flesh, a force that drew out his malignancies like a lodestone drawing out an iron needle from the sand. Without that force, he never would have been able to struggle this far. In the night, after Eleuthra had left him, it was the gold that had kept him warm in the chill spring wind without a coat or even a shirt.
And the healing and the warmth were not superficial, but deep inside, a reordering. Something long dispersed, now coming together. No wonder he was weak. He had read of demons in the Nine Hells who, if you ripped or cut away one of their limbs, would regrow it from the stump. But it took time to nurse or heal such a wound, and doubtless the demon would feel weak and nauseated—they did have feelings, didn’t they? Perhaps he would find out.
And if not, perhaps that was just as well, because feelings were killing him, and he was sick of love. How many years had it been since he had felt like this, felt this tingling on his skin, this new sensitivity to every stimulation? Over the decades he had been with many women, too many to count or remember. But now he was like a boy again, and the sensation was both pleasurable and painful, like the feeling of blood returning to a sleeping limb, or of awakening from a long dream. Now this was real. The wolf had disappeared into the marsh.
Up to his shins in the black water, he stood up straight and lifted his sword. The sun shone overhead through the slender trees, the nets of vines. He clenched the demon-eye ruby in his left fist, and for a moment he thought of Marikke and Kip, for whose sake he had entered Malar’s tomb, fought Malar’s angel. Disoriented, head throbbing, he imagined their faces—red-cheeked Marikke, little Kip.
He imagined their faces, but he couldn’t see them. Instead, he saw where he was going, a dry place in the middle of the marsh, a grove of beeches, and a circular pool of water. The jewel showed him. The loregem, Eleuthra had called it. It did not show him scenes from his own memory. It did not show him what was happening elsewhere. It did not prophesize what was to come. Instead, he thought it was like a book of knowledge or of spells, a book that was in sympathy with himself, which was why his palm thrilled with electricity and why his head ached and throbbed. The gem knew what he wanted or what he needed. The gem showed him the way. The gem allowed him to follow the wolf, and in his mind’s eye that morning he had seen her squat and piss on a fallen gatepost in the abandoned town beside the river. When he arrived, the stone was dry, and he could read the inscription with the loregem’s help. The soft flesh of the ruby thrilled under his fingers, and what had been indecipherable was now suddenly plain:
This is not the way forward.
And on the other side of the empty town—it was called Horsa, he realized suddenly—he had found traces of the wolf, a mound of scat. There was the bridge, the single span over the river. The wolf had ripped away the moss from a stone, revealing a column of runes carved in a language he had not known until that instant:
Do not follow me.
And beyond the causeway in the marsh where he was now—Breasal Marsh, he knew its name—he saw the wolf pause half a mile ahead, and cough or vomit up the fragments of bone from some unlucky small animal over a stone tablet just submerged. Inspired now, granted new energy despite his aching arms and head—the mental images, so clear, so sharp, were like an irritant, he thought, like shards of rock or glass inside his brain—he stumbled forward on Eleuthra’s trail, looking also for the broken twigs or wet prints that marked her passage. Again he thought he was reminded for the first time in many years what love felt like, a hidden, urgent communication, a synchronicity in his and the druid’s vision of the world, a shared experience that was painful and disorienting, but also welcoming and addictive. He needed her, and the gem knew it, and knew other things as well, like the location of the black, circular pool in Breasal Marsh, a portal before the Spellplague, when all this country had been full of fey, dead now, annihilated, as Eleuthra had told him, the water and the mud full of old and broken bones.
He splashed his way to the submerged tablet, tried to push the water away. Then he bent down, and with sensitive new fingers read the incised letters like a blind man:
You disgust me, ugly creature.
Do not chase me.
I will break your demon heart.
These words were like food to him, nourishment to keep him going. And so he came to the place in time, as the land rose and dried out in the center of the marsh, and the trees grew straight and big, silver, smooth-barked beeches with their leaves like the blades of little knives, like the knife Marikke had left for him in the king’s barrow below Scourtop, where he had broken his chains. And in the middle of a secret grove among the green, yellow, and copper-colored leaves, he found the pool, and the wolf waiting.
No, not the wolf. He saw Eleuthra in her human shape, the wolf skin and the king’s thighbone cast upon the bank. But she was washing the muck and sweat off her body in the clean water, the clean light of the afternoon, clothed only in the dappled shadows as the leaves turned and stirred above her head. Bent over in pain, leaning on his sword, he watched her from the deeper trees, watched the language of her gestures change as she became aware of his presence. Nor did she try to hide the treasures of her body, but instead displayed them more openly. The water was cold, he could tell by the gooseflesh on her arms, the color in her cheeks. But a woman does not hide herself from the gaze of an animal. And as he watched, he felt more and more distorted and deformed, as if from the inside out. This also the loregem was showing him as he squeezed it and it slipped and throbbed between his fingers: a vision of himself, the barbed tail hanging down between his legs, the high leather wings arching from his back, the row of sharp spines between them—a monster, a daemonfey from House Dlardrageth itself. The lorege
m was showing him, and the king’s gold was healing him, and the love knot with Eleuthra was binding him to her knowledge of what he was, awakening his nature, bringing it out of him, breaking down the walls that hid him from the world, cunningly constructed by his father and himself over many, many years—that’s what love is, isn’t it?
She ran her hands through her wet hair, elbows back. Then she turned around and bent down to examine a cut along the outside of her thigh, a beaded line of blood. “Don’t touch me,” she said as he came close. But he didn’t pay any attention.
“It’s strange,” she said later, turned away from him, lying on her side on the green turf. “I knew this place, but I didn’t know how to find it. I thought I was following you, even though you were behind me.”
He grunted.
“It’s a gate to something,” she continued. “That I know. But the door is closed. You cannot open it. And even if you could, I wouldn’t go inside it. Not with you.”
She turned over onto her back and pointed up at the sky. There were clouds overhead and as the Savage watched they gathered and combined into a knot of darkness overhead, which blocked the sun. And it began to rain, a soft, cleansing shower that drifted down, he suspected, onto themselves alone. The raindrops almost looked like flecks of gold, he thought, as they filtered down through the leaves.
Then she turned toward him. “What is your name?” she asked. “Your real name?”
But he wouldn’t tell her. Later the shower dissipated as she fell asleep, lying naked on her wolf skin, while he looked for the gate. He laid his sword next to the sleeping girl but gathered up his other treasures, which he thought would help him. He held the loregem in his left hand. Without it he felt naked.
The pool was as round as a drain. He knew it wasn’t natural, a plug of water perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, much smaller than he had thought when he had seen it in his mind. At first the slope was gentle, a circle of gray sand then it dropped away until the water was black at the center of the pool.
The Rose of Sarifal Page 19
