He walked around it on the circular strand, his head hurting. When he was with Eleuthra, near her, he felt better, healed, but now the pain was back. He felt swollen, as if some new growth inside his body were displacing the old, or as if his brain were too big for his skull, as if the loregem, squeezed in his left hand, had given him too much, too fast, too soon.
“In the old days,” he said, “the Kendricks had a way to move between the islands, a charmed circle in each of the Moonshaes, in private shrines and antechambers in the palaces and temples. There was one in Norland and Oman, and in Caer Westphal in Snowdown, and Caer Callidyrr, and Caer Corwell on Gwynneth Island. I believe when I saw the High Lady Ordalf on the terrace of the moon, that she had come from there. Those ways have been blocked for eighty years. But I know a way.”
He spoke loudly, as if to overcome the buzzing in his head. Loudly enough to wake Eleuthra, who sat up to watch him from across the water, scratching herself idly and softly. She wrapped the wolf’s skin around her body. She yawned, sticking out her tongue.
“I know how to open the door,” said the Savage, his head bursting, his heart swollen with the sight of her, the way she moved. “There are signs along this shore—look,” he said, squatting down. He took the knife Marikke had left him, and used it to cut away the leg of an old stump, half submerged in the water. “Look, here.” In a minute he had uncovered what he sought, a buried hunk of volcanic rock, a hexagonal slice of black basalt not native to that place or time, and with the sigil incised in it. He couldn’t read it, but once again he touched it with his fingertips and the meaning came clear:
I regret what you have made me do.
He rose to his feet and staggered drunkenly along the shore until he found the place. He knelt, and in the hard sand and gravel he uncovered it, the hideous face of a demon carved into the black basalt, lips stretched wide, and the sigil cut into his tongue:
I hate the feeling of your hands on me.
And then another and another, each one a sixth of the way around the circle, each one carved into a block of basalt:
I regret the taste of your lips.
It is bitter in my mouth.
You will never have me.
Only my heart is pure.
This had brought him around the entire circle. Now he was on the shore below her where she lay on the grass under the beech trees, watching him, an unreadable expression on her face. She had wrapped the wolf skin around her upper body, but her legs were still uncovered. Ah, he thought, there is a sign or sigil in her body, which I can read with my fingers.
“The way is open,” he said, as the loregem had taught him, “in the mark of the Black Blood. It’s hidden now, but the water will clear. And we’ll see the one in Corwell, see right through to the other side, the circle there.”
She shrugged, scratching at her armpits and the outside of her thighs, sniffing at her fingers. “Sarifal,” she said. “The country of the fey.”
“Come with me,” he said, his voice harsh and pleading even in his own ears. “Malar is hunting us. You saw him.”
“He’s hunting you,” she said. “Not me.” Then she turned her head away from him, staring into the trees, entirely focused on a noise he couldn’t hear, a smell he couldn’t catch, until the bracken parted and another wolf loped into the grove, paused, lifted his leg against an old stump.
He was a heavy brute with reddish fur, and a black mark on his forehead. He drew his lips back from his teeth. The Savage got up from his knees, his knife in his right hand, the loregem in his left. Hating the wolf, he did not see or even predict Eleuthra’s transformation, until the female stepped delicately into his line of vision, hesitant and unsure, he thought, a beautiful brindled creature as if from a different species than the squat and heavy lycanthrope—oh, how his head ached to see them move under the trees, circling around each other nose to tail. Eleuthra squatted to urinate, and the Savage wondered if she had come suddenly into estrus, perhaps that same day, perhaps an hour before as he lay with her on the bank; the stink of it still lingered. And now it was as if the wolves were playing with each other, running under the trees, chasing each other and then doubling back, sinking down onto their forelegs and then bounding up—she was doing this to spite him, hurt him. He gripped the leaf-shaped knife in his right hand. The Black Blood. He needed the Black Blood. The Black Blood would save them. It would open the gate.
Stung with jealousy, he blundered up the bank between the leaping wolves.
Lukas had seen the knot of clouds from miles away, above and ahead of them as they clambered through the Breasal Marsh. It was the last sign the goddess showed them, the last they needed. Coal had run ahead, Lady Amaranth’s lycanthropic brother, and they followed wearily, he, Gaspar-shen, and the eladrin princess. “Some day,” she said, “I would request for you to play more music, when I am home in Karador.”
She meant it kindly, Lukas imagined as they struggled through the oleander bushes, the small branches whipping back. Still, he could not help but picture himself dressed in a servant’s motley, sawing away, perhaps one of a quartet of tame humans in Lady Ordalf’s court, while others, dancers or gymnasts, capered before the grave-faced, beautiful, ageless fey.
“It will be my pleasure,” he murmured, teeth set, meaning the opposite. It was his intention to gather together his small crew, find the gnome, take whatever gold was due to them and then be gone, back to Alaron. There were packet boats, he knew, that left from Borth and Kingsbay, the free-Ffolk ports on the east coast of Gwynneth Island. Then he would build a new boat and sail north or south or east or west, anywhere out of the Moonshaes, where he had not been happy for a long time. He imagined the salt drying his skin as he tacked away from Callidyrr, Marikke at the foremast, Kip in the bilge, miserable, covered in tarpaulins. They were not dead. He could not believe that they were dead. The black cloud was above him now, and he heard Coal yowling and snarling, and the smash of heavy bodies through the bushes. Then they had reached the dry land, and they were underneath the beech trees. They came up the slope above the pool, and when he saw the Savage on the gravel shore, up to his shins in the black water, he knew that it was so, and everything the dead or dying old man had told him was true, and great Chauntea had not lied.
The golden elf was stripped to the waist. What had the goddess called him? Daemonfey? Bishtek Dlardrageth? He stood with a shining, glowing stone in one hand, a knife in the other, while the red wolf jumped at him from the bank, rising up on his hind legs and scratching at his shoulders with his forepaws, biting at his face. The Savage turned to him, and Lukas could see the red slits down the centers of his eyes, see the sharp, predatory teeth as he sank them into the wolf’s throat, the muscles of his back straining, his skin covered with scabs. Lukas could see amid the wreck of scar tissue on his shoulders and down his spine, the fresh growth there, the pinnacles of bone that had broken from the skin. He had a new circlet of gold around his neck.
Lukas saw him drop the glowing jewel into the water. He saw him reach down with his knife and open up the belly of the wolf, while with his other hand he seized hold of the viscera and pulled it out, so that a cascade of blood fell into the pool, and the red wolf staggered and fell. Lady Amaranth cried out, her bow already in her hand, while a tide of blood washed away from the dying wolf, spreading around the shore as if drawn by a strange current. There was a black stone in the gravel at the water’s edge, and when the blood touched it, it began to glow.
Amaranth drew her arrow to her ear. Loyalties split, Lukas hesitated, and her bowstring sang. His face twisted with rage, the Savage ducked his head, and the arrow passed over his shoulder. At the same time, Lukas saw another woman on the shore, kneeling as if out of breath, dressed only in a brindled wolf skin. She rose to her feet, holding a strange, curved sword. Gaspar-shen had drawn his, and the blade glowed with emerald fire. But she paid no attention. She stood on the grass bank, and as another black stone showed its glowing sigil, and then another farther along the c
ircle of the shore, she cried out, “I hate what you have made me do. I hate the feeling of your hands. Your taste is bitter in my mouth.”
As she spoke, the entire surface of the water started to turn in a counterclockwise direction. Touched by the wolf’s blood, the six stones came alight. The Savage stood up to his shins in the little pool. At any moment he expected to see the water clear, the opaque surface open, and the other side of the portal reveal itself, the circle of lamps on a stone floor, perhaps, in a temple of the gods—anywhere but here. He didn’t have the ears of a wolf, but even he could hear the baying of the hounds, the hunt approaching through the marsh. The afternoon light slanted down through the beech trees, and among the silver trunks he could see his friends Lukas and the genasi. He almost didn’t recognize them, not because they’d changed, but because he had. His eyes saw differently, the sound of his voice was foreign to him, and the pain in his shoulders and down his back was hard to tolerate. His chest and hands were greasy with the wolf’s blood. He looked up into the eyes of a pale eladrin maiden with red hair, a bow in her hand, a second arrow pulled back to her ear, a tattooed line of thorns below her jaw—he knew who she was, the Lady Amaranth, the Rose of Sarifal. Lukas had found her, and if he could keep her from shooting him, then together they would bring her back to Caer Corwell as her sister had demanded, and they would unlock the gnome from her cage, and accomplish good, pure, right things to change the world, and perhaps save the lady also, and depose or destroy the leShay queen, who had hurt the mortal realm for far, far, far too long. The Savage’s thought branched into the future like a sudden bolt of lightning, breaking it apart—there were kingdoms to be saved or overturned. There was a treasure to be won. Eleuthra stood above him with his sword in her hands, the king’s sword he had taken from the tomb. With his new eyes he couldn’t read the expression on her face. The world, the light, seemed tinged with blood. With his new ears he couldn’t understand what she was saying. The lycanthropes came running up the slope under the trees, and the eladrin girl had turned her arrow that way, had shot one of the slavering great brutes. Lukas had drawn his sword, and the genasi, also, was hacking at the wolves—why wouldn’t the water clear? The sigils were alight. The circle was made. His friends had turned away from him and only Eleuthra was left, the Ffolk druid, King Kendrick’s spy, who stepped down from the bank into the water, an unreadable expression on her face. No—she was bringing his sword to him. But why had she raised it above her head as if to cut him down? The pain in his head could not be tolerated, the buzzing in his ears. The dogs were barking, and now there were new beasts among the trees, and then Great Malar himself came up the slope in his panther shape, his black shoulders mangy and streaked with scabs. Still joined to his haunches were the dry and withered remnants of the boy Kip, attached like remnants of a skin that a serpent was sloughing off. A boneless hand hung down between his legs. The god rose up on his hind legs, transforming as they watched. Lukas, Amaranth, and Gaspar-shen had stumbled down into the water now, still black as ink—why wouldn’t it clear? The lamps were lit. Eleuthra had come to him, whether to kill him or stand with him, he couldn’t tell. As the god towered above them, losing his panther shape and metamorphosing instead into an enormous bear, the girl came to embrace him, kiss him, while at the last moment he wrested the sword from her, kicked aside the floating body of the dead wolf, and pushed her down into the bloody water. And with the king’s sword in his hand he left the turning circle to do battle, Bishtek Dlardrageth the Savage. He climbed up out of the water to do battle with the god. The loregem was already lost. He wrenched the gold circlet from his neck and threw it into the pool, and his headache was immediately gone.
POKE IS DEAD
SUKA RODE UNCOMFORTABLY ON CAPTAIN Rurik’s saddlebow as they plodded along the highland trail into the mountains. She was making conversation. “Lord Mindarion says he will not fight for causes, none of the eladrin will. But they’ll fight for Lady Amaranth. I wonder what you think about that.”
The grim captain smiled, showing the livid scar that bisected his lips, and the steel teeth under it. “I like you,” he said. “And I don’t think you’re stupid. I don’t think I have to tell you what I think.”
“If I were you,” the gnome continued. “I’m guessing I wouldn’t trade two pounds of dog shit for the lost princess of the leShays.”
Rurik appeared to consider this. “Two pounds of dog shit are worth less than one,” he objected. “But I take your point. Who wants a tyrant to live forever? The Kendricks are bad enough, and they die every fifty years or so. Quicker, if you let them.”
“Or if you make them.”
Rurik scratched his beard. He stared moodily up ahead, at the back of the horse in front of them. “Treacherous fey,” he said. “Why should I tell you anything? But you know what I’m talking about. You left this place and came to live with us, with men and women. Why was that?
“I wanted a change. You can keep your women, though.”
“Exactly.” Rurik gestured with his chin at the back of the eladrin knight in front of them, a beautiful creature, the scales of his armor shining like a fish’s belly. “Nothing changes here. No one builds anything or makes anything or does anything new. You need people for that. The Ffolk on Gwynneth Island, their lives are the same as when Karador rose out of the lake, the same wooden plows, the same boats, the same charcoal stoves, because of the fey. Everything’s preserved in amber for them, because they live so long.
“You need some urgency,” he murmured after a pause. “Break a few skulls. Die, a little bit. Nobody dies in this stupid country. That’s why no one really lives.”
“How philosophical.” In fact, he was full of shit. By being sarcastic, Suka tried to hide the depth of her disagreement, a type of misdirection that came easily to her. Out of a kind of inner perversity, she told herself she didn’t believe in gods. Ah, gods, she thought. Plenty of people die on Gwynneth Island—too many. Not twenty hours before, Borgol the cyclops had died defending his mistress. Then the drow had attacked them in their forest dell, and Rurik had lost six of his Northlanders and three of the eladrin. And Poke the pig had gone down, shattered by the darkwalker’s cold spear, though she was not dead yet. Marabaldia had her on a stretcher, a canvas sling over two cut saplings. She pulled the front of it herself between her enormous purple fists, while pairs of the remaining Northlanders took turns behind her, staggering under the weight.
They had left the dell while it was still dark, fearing attack at any moment, but the drow were gone. Mindarion’s explosion had spread outward, and as they came down the slope into the thicker woods they had seen many fallen trees, struck down by the blast, and the corpses of several of their enemies. Suka had been knocked unconscious, but the rest, cowering together, had escaped the full force of the detonation. Later, climbing gingerly among the tree trunks, before they’d found the trail again, she had looked for the drow captain, hoping to find her dead or dying, but no dice. Once she had even left the others, because she had caught sight of something in the half darkness, a plume of white that could have been the darkwalker’s hair, and she imagined slipping the knife into her throat and turning it—she knew the creature would not beg. What she found was a family of owlbears, slaughtered for no reason—ungainly, irritable, dangerous beasts, but even so, they did not have to die like that, the young cubs cut apart for sport.
Knife in hand, Suka had rejoined the others. She was thinking about Poke the lycanthrope, slowly and with every twist of the crude stretcher losing a small bit of her humanity, or at least her human shape. Dead, no one would know she had not always been a pig. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Intelligent, moral, clean (when given the choice), loyal creatures, pigs were, or so Suka had always heard.
When at dawn they reached the trail that would lead them north into the highlands, she accepted Rurik’s offer to ride with him near the head of their little column. Now, sick of his heartlessness, she asked him to dismount then slipped dow
n from his boot while it was still in the stirrup, and ran back down the line. Marabaldia was there. Marabaldia would understand. Marabaldia knew that life was precious. She had refused all attempts to abandon the lycanthrope in order to save time, or at the very least to leave her to others and ride on ahead.
Suka found her at the back of the company. Steadfastly she blundered up the trail, her iron bar slung behind her back, her massive shoulders hunched—Poke probably weighed close to three hundred pounds, more now than when they started, as she gathered mass out of the air. But the princess wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Little friend,” she said when she saw Suka, “I used to feel such pity for myself during the years when I was in chains. But then bright Selûne, goddess of our sex, granted me a companion in my time of trial, this noble pig to share my loneliness and make it disappear. I, who had lost everything, now found myself rich again, and when you came, rich beyond measure—”
This sentiment, touching in itself, reminded the gnome also of something Lukas, the only other absolute romantic she’d ever met, had once said. Suka burst into tears, partly for memory’s sake.
Marabaldia released the stretcher’s crude legs, still with their leaves and branches, kicked them solid, and laid down her burden so she could embrace the gnome, whose head scarcely reached her waist. She bent down over her, so that Suka had an impression less of receiving a hug than of entering a safe, warm house. She looked up and again encountered the fomorian’s right eye, as if it were a framed picture or a mirror in that house, or else a doorway or (heck, why not?) a porthole into a little tiny upstairs room, where a miniature version of Lukas sat at a table watching her, a smile on his funny-looking face, handsome enough for a human, but please. Did it say something about her that she didn’t know a single member of her own race?
The Rose of Sarifal Page 20
