The Gathering of the Lost

by Helen Lowe

It’s a portal, she thought, another pathway beyond the Gate of Dreams. The medallion beneath her shirt glowed, answering the moon and creating a golden nimbus with Malian at its center. The border realm between moonglow and dark water flickered, and her breath quickened as visions spun into being around her.

  The first images were easily recognizable: a unicorn with flaming eyes materialized out of half night and mist to bell out grief and rage over the body of a black-haired youth; a slender youth in the garb of a River scholar stared into darkness on a Normarch mountainside; the same youth lay concealed in brush, listening to the clip of horses’ hooves, approaching through the Long Pass.

  Water rippled and the images reformed into children, playing across sunlit courts: seven small boys and a girl with fair hair who had been bound together from their cradles. The children grew a little taller, and now their games were weapons practice, and sleight of eye and hand and mind. They practiced the powers of Imuln, too: healing and scrying through water and fire, as well as prophecy and foreseeing. Always, when it came to seeing, it was one of the seven, a boy with chestnut hair, who excelled—when lore and instruction taught that it should have been the girl who held those gifts. Already the eight knew enough to conceal this truth, for any reversals of the Goddess-ordained order were called abominations in Jhaine, and fire, hot irons, and the headsman’s axe were how the hierarchy dealt with such offenses to Imuln.

  Malian’s vision sped on and the children became young adults. The boy’s gift grew stronger and he began to foresee through dreams as well as in smoke, fire, and water. The fair girl walked with him in the world of dreams, shielding him from those who might have found him out, and seeing, through the link between them, much of what he foresaw. His visions revealed a great darkness poised to overthrow their world—and the face of one who might have the power to turn that tide, if they played their part in events unfolding beyond the closed boundaries of Jhaine.

  The fair-haired girl, who had been consecrated at birth as Zhehaamor, both priestess and queen, spoke mind-to-mind with her fellow sovereigns in their temple strongholds, sharing the dark threat and arguing that Jhaine must play its part against it. But the other priestess-queens ranged themselves against her like an iron wall. The ways of Jhaine, they said, were the will of the Goddess made manifest, and what had saved them from the Cataclysm when the rest of the world was riven. The realm of the Goddess must remain inviolate—and a priestess-queen whose visions undermined that sacred duty should be examined for unholy influence and, if necessary, exorcised by the unified hierarchy.

  Water and moonlight swirled around Malian . . . and Zhehaamor and her Seven fled for Jhaine’s border with southern Aralorn, the pursuit hard on their heels. The flight became a series of skirmishes and ambuscades, and one by one her Seven fell. Only three remained when a patrol threatened to cut them off, just hours from the border. One of the three turned to delay the pursuit while the others fled on—but Zhehaamor’s horse went lame and the vanguard of those following, the Seven of another queen, caught them on the Jhainarian bank of the border river. The vision disintegrated into a whirl of swords on the shingle flats and blood staining the shallow water. When it was done, the First with the chestnut hair stood with his head bowed, blood dripping from his swallowtail swords, and all of the vanguard Seven were dead.

  The second of Zhehaamor’s remaining Seven also lay on the shingle, more bleeding wounds than sound body. Somehow, his companions got him onto a horse and limped across the river, heading for the nearby woodland as the main body of their pursuers thundered toward the Jhainarian bank. The pursuers’ horses milled around the bodies of the fallen Seven in a cloud of dust and curses—and the call went up, closed realm or not, to cross the river and finish the last of the Forsworn. The first riders began to move that way, until a line of cloaked and hooded figures emerged from the trees and fanned out along the Aralorn bank. The newcomers bore no obvious arms and stood unmoving, but the advance toward the river stopped. After a long silent wait on both sides, the Jhainarian pursuers turned their horses back.

  Again the pool swirled, the vision shifting to the gates of the Guild House in Terebanth and the two who waited outside, their clothes and boots worn thin. They stood side by side, their young faces somber but resolute: priestess-queen and First, enduring friends and sometime lovers, comrades-in-arms, soon to become heralds of the Guild with their secret faces turned to the world. The gates of the Guild house closed behind them and did not open again—or not for Malian’s seeing.

  The medallion on her breast blazed brighter, and she began to hear the song of Emer through Tarathan’s chant. The tune, like the chant, was a weft and warp of threads: the light-edged lilt of Maraval wood danced through and around the creep of tree roots along the old northern road; the path that had called to Maister Carick above the Rindle sang its siren song again, bright notes of bracken and fern beneath the scolding chitter of a squirrel. As the tug of the water grew stronger, Malian heard deeper notes: the drum of hooves across Emer and Jhaine; the sonorous, swift-moving River currents; and the slow relentless grinding of rocks within earth that was Jaransor.

  Alive, Malian thought, her heart answering the strong, sure beat of the song. I was right, it’s not just Jaransor: the whole of Haarth is aware.

  Water funneled and rolled, pressing in on her eyes, nostrils, mouth. A roaring in her ears drowned out Tarathan’s chant, and the light from the moon disc flickered, then strengthened again. Through it, Malian saw the entire world of Haarth—as though she were looking down on the tabletop map in the Keep of Winds, except that what she saw was real, and riven by earthquake and fire. The strong, sure song was lost as rivers changed course, drowning towns and farmland, and the ocean swept inland behind huge waves, smashing everything in its path. In Jaransor, the towers that had stood beyond time and memory shook—and fell.

  The nine temple sanctuaries of Jhaine survived, but the land around them was torn apart by quake after enormous quake, its cities and strongholds thrown down. In desperation, the high priestesses joined together as one and the voice of the Goddess answered, speaking like stone out of earth and darkness. Nine men of Jhaine stepped forward, as the temples began to crumble around them, and the high priestesses, their faces painted black for the moon’s darkness, raised bare arms in invocation. The sun set in fire and the moon rose in blood as the nine performed the oldest and darkest of all Imuln’s rites—and blood flowed, down into earth, binding the world into stillness again.

  Blood sacrifice, Malian thought, understanding at last: the oldest, darkest union of earth and moon—and made willingly, the vision around her sang that, too, in order to generate the level of power needed to bind a disintegrating realm back into wholeness again. She shook her head, tasting blood where she had bitten her lip, as famine and disease followed the widespread devastation—the Cataclysm that had been wrought by the Derai’s arrival on Haarth.

  Sacrifice offered willingly, sang the voice of stone and moon and water—but what happens when the earth lies quiet and yet the blood is spilled again every Great Year, by force rather than being offered freely? What then?

  “Desecration,” Malian whispered. And wondered: does the Duke know this, that the Great Marriage in its oldest form requires blood for the binding to work?

  The moon vanished, the pool becoming a lightless well through which she dived until she felt made of darkness. “You must learn to eat the dark lest it eat you.” Malian recognized Nhenir’s voice, cool across another memory, and knew, then, when she had made this dark, unending dive before. Until now, though, she would have said that this vision was not of Haarth and should have lain outside the ritual’s path of earth and moon. The darkness splintered into crystal, a cavern ringed with blazing torches and filled with endless rows of stone biers—but the sleepers were gone.

  The guardian was gone, too, or had hidden itself from her Midsummer vision. The sleepers had been waiting, the guardian had told her, for an hour and time appointed—although
Malian was not the one who would wake them. So who had? she wondered. And where had they gone?

  For the first time in five years, she felt Yorindesarinen’s armring burn on her forearm. “I seek out the hidden, the lost I find.” Malian murmured to herself. Is that why I have been shown this now? Are the sleepers more lost that I must find?

  Her brows drew together, her vision shifting to the three great standards at the heart of the cavern. They were blank, both the fiery colors and insignia from her previous visit here erased. All three biers below them were empty now, too—but she remembered the face of the commander, his stern expression full of weariness and grief. The sword upon his breast had been unadorned, but she recalled the way it had called to her, a blade asking to be taken up and used.

  Yet now the sword, too, was gone.

  “Beware!” The whisper seared the air, although Malian was not sure who had spoken, whether Yorindesarinen through the armring, or the power that had haunted this place last time she was here. “They come.”

  “Accursed!” The interwoven voice was a serpent’s hiss, but the shapes that unfolded from the cavern floor were those of seven women, veiled in black. A dark moon rose behind them, a tide of old blood rippling across its face, and the discs upon their breasts were blood-washed black as well. “Forsworn!”

  The voice reminded Malian of heralds, with the distinct strands twisting together to make one voice. Seven, she noted, not eight—and was surprised she cared that Zhineve-An was not part of this; that the young queen had either never been part of it, or Jehane Mor’s shield had been effective in walling her out. But why not these others, then? Malian wondered.

  “They have used blood to bind themselves to the ritual itself.” She felt the flare of Tarathan’s fire as his mind touched hers. “As soon as the rite began, the bond would have pulled them in.”

  And there are seven of them, Malian thought, seven high priestesses of the Goddess, each one drawing on the power of her own sanctuary. And seven, although considerably less than nine, was still a number of power in Jhaine. She knew that she should have been afraid, but instead she laughed.

  “Forsworn!” The serpent voice spat out the word. “Did you think you were the only one in the sanctuaries of Jhaine who could part the mists of time and see? We knew you would come here in the Great Year—that your unholy visions would require your interference in our great ritual. So we bound ourselves to wait and now you will die: death by strangulation as prescribed for the Abjured, since we cannot cleanse either the queenship or Jhaine of your pollution by burning you alive.”

  The dark moon fragmented in a torrent of black water that swept the empty cavern away, roiling the veiled queens into a serpent’s form that whipped itself around Malian, drawing the coils closed. Death by strangulation: she could feel the dry slither of the serpent’s scales, even though she knew its essence was water, as she darted upward like a fish. The serpent’s teeth sank into her ankle, dragging her back down. Each tooth was a red-hot dagger, sinking in—and then retracting with a hiss as the serpent’s head drew back, regarding her sidelong.

  A net of power spun out to engulf her, but Tarathan, still linked to her mind, showed her how the Jhainarian magic could be severed. The serpent’s head reared up, spitting out a curse like cobra’s poison, but she channeled fire and turned it aside.

  The serpent twisted, and for the first time Malian heard the rustle of separate strands within the interwoven voice. “He is here with her, the doubly accursed, the slayer . . . defilement . . . all these years she concealed . . . perversion of the sacred order . . . the abomination . . .”

  “Slayer!” The conjoined voice clanged, harsh as iron, and Malian smelled the acrid whiff of blood, saw the whirl of swords again and the Seven dead on the shingle. “Abjured!” She sensed Tarathan through the ritual’s link, his fire banked down—waiting for them to act, she realized. Even through her, he would not strike the first blow. Power thrummed, deep within her, not just her own strength and his, but the fire of Yorindesarinen’s armring and the song of Haarth.

  “Even Imuln’s moon,” she told them, her voice shadow and stone, “changes its face. Water flows deep underground and wells up again wearing a different form. Do you presume to dictate the path Imuln’s power will take in the world, which face it will wear? Fire, torture, blood: you are the serpent that is strangling Jhaine in its coils.”

  The serpent hissed, its head whipping around to regard Malian again from a pupil-less eye. “You are not her—not the Forsworn. You are other: a greater abomination. Yet she has given you the sacred insignia. Not just to meddle, then . . .” The sibilant voice sank to a whisper, then explored into a roar: “ . . . but destroy! She has sent you to undo all that we are!” And the serpent’s mouth gaped wide, rushing forward to devour.

  Churned-up water buffeted Malian, sweeping her this way and that as the giant maw drew closer. The disc around her neck became a rock, pulling her down, but instead of fighting, she went with it and the serpent overshot. Her foot touched the ropewalk path again and she raised her arms as Jehane Mor once had, in Jaransor, funneling the water of the pool between her open palms.

  The serpent whipped back toward her, but Malian set the funnel spinning along its length. Any sense of pool or moon or cavern disappeared: now there was only the water funnel and the serpent being engulfed within it. Voices cried out, and Malian guessed that the power that bound the priestess-queens together was fraying apart within the sanctuaries of Jhaine. The ropewalk swayed as she spun the whirlpool tighter, intent on banishing the conjoined queens from the Gate of Dreams.

  Tighter still the waters spun, and the serpent thrashed, but kept slipping deeper into the vortex until the mouth of the funnel finally began to close. Malian raised her hands to shut it—and the serpent’s tail flicked up, striking her legs and pitching her head first into the maelstrom: “The price of the path you walk is always blood.” The serpent voice hissed at her as she fell. “Are you willing to pay it, interloper? Or will you condemn another to pay in your stead?”

  Malian turned the pitch into a dive, but the darkness around her was absolute: she could not see or hear anything. Water pressed into her nose and mouth as she tried to work out which way was down, which up, pushing outward with her hands—and another’s hands reached down and grasped hers, hauling her upward.

  This, too, had happened before—except then she had been caught in fire and not water. Malian drew deep on the core of her strength and a spar of light answered, distant through the blackness. She tightened her grip and kicked toward it. The light brightened, growing stronger as the maelstrom fell away and she rose through impenetrable white mist. Unexpectedly, she smelled jasmine, as dizzyingly sweet as when she first stepped into the temple grounds. The mist thinned and trees appeared, their trunks a smooth dappling of light and shade. Somewhere in the distance, a nightingale was singing its moonlit song.

  The nightingale, Malian knew, was one of the enduring motifs of Emerian springtime love. She wanted to smile, but already her bare feet were touching grass and the mist had grown fine as a veil, with only a single drift, like smoke, crossing the crescent of the blue moon overhead. A second moon, three-quarters full and green as winter twilight, shone lower toward the horizon. Twin moons: Malian knew she had heard a tale of that, too, somewhere in her years on the River, although she could not recall what it signified.

  “The Goddess’s isle of the blessed,” Tarathan said. “J’mair of Ishnapur used the motif often in his poetry. You have brought us both here in our physical bodies, something I could not have done on my own.”

  He was still holding her hands, and Malian did not withdraw them. The moonfire sang in her veins, and this, she knew now, lay at the heart of the true rite—the priestess-queen for Imuln, and the hero or king for the land, coming together in the Great Marriage that was Midsummer. And the First of a Seven was the closest thing to a king that there was in Jhaine.

  Tarathan lifted her hands to his lips and kiss
ed them, the touch of his lips warm against her skin. And then his arms were around her, drawing her close. She could feel his heart beating: sure and strong, she thought, listening to its rhythm, strong and sure. Beautiful, the moonfire sang, and dangerous, Raven’s word from the hill fort—but she was remembering how Tarathan had kept the fire of his power banked, unwilling to attack the seven queens in their serpent form.

  “I am still of Jhaine,” he said. She nodded, understanding that, and leaned back a little, so she could study the stark planes of his face and the dark, fierce eyes. He smiled, austerity softening into something warmer as one hand loosened the queue at her nape, his fingers threading through the fan of her hair. “I have wanted to see what you would look like, without the illusions of Maister Carick to cloud the face of the moon.”

  Malian shivered, half from the moonfire and the touch of his fingers, half with the fear that Yorindesarinen’s dream rebuke had raised: that hers might be the moon’s dark face—like the seven queens, their black moon stained with blood. Ruthless, she thought, even while Tarathan’s fingers traced a line of fire along her collarbone and throat: a dancer of Kan.

  “Darkness is one of the moon’s faces,” he said. Both hands slid beneath her hair, and when she leaned her head back against them she could see the blue moon, hanging above them like a pendant jewel. “But it is never the only one turned to the world. And it was light that drew me here—the light that is the heart of what you are.”

  “They said there must always be blood,” she whispered. “At the end, just before the vortex closed. They asked if I was willing to pay that price—and if I were not, who I would condemn to pay in my stead.”

  Tarathan shook his head, and she snared one of his many braids between her fingers, slipping the binding free. His eyes, dark and steady, held hers. “Blood freely given,” he said, and turned his forearm so she could see the red line where a dagger point had parted the skin. “I have already paid, Malian of Night. Blood has been shed; the earth’s hunger has been fed. ”