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by A. A. Attanasio

  The torn haunch thuds among the soldiers and

  sends them scurrying over the edge of the tarn and onto the frogskin mud at the water's lip.

  To Kyner's accusatory silence, Ygrane mumbles, "It got through my spell-maze—got through faster than I

  thought—"

  Magic gone, the witch-queen appears a dismayed

  child. She gazes at the dark flecks of horse-blood

  splattered on her white raiment, and a febrile dread grips her.

  Kyner, with Short-Life in his hand and unfettered by

  the queen's enchantment, weighs for an instant his loyalty to this witch-queen against his vow to exterminate enemies of the Church. One glance at the confused fright in her face settles it for him. Though she has called this abhorrence upon them, he knows certainly now that she is not evil.

  What she has done comes from a child's foolishness, not the anti-life of vampyres and lamia. He turns Short-Life outward.

  Directly below the rock shelf, where the fiana stand ready to throw themselves at whatever comes over the

  wooded crest, Falon calls, "Older sister! The troll sees the Eye! It has stopped!"

  Ygrane looks up, startled, and recognizes that the

  magic is not gone from her as she had thought in her

  panic. Her power continues above her, drawn up out of her by the firestorm billowing high over their heads. The confusion she suffers is merely the tidal ebb of a titanic wave of power.

  As if standing some distance from himself, Kyner

  feels strangely removed from the clanging of his heart. All paths of escape have closed. They are trapped on the

  soggy bottom of this ravine, their backs against the tarn.

  His men motion to him to come down from the rock shelf and hide in the quaking mud. But he knows there is no hiding from a troll.

  "Why has it stopped?" he asks, keeping his tight stare on the tree line above them.

  "The Eye has caught on a branch of the Great

  Tree—as Raglaw said it would." Ygrane watches with wide,

  gleaming stare the fiery turmoil above them, so distant it appears a malevolent star. "It has siphoned my magic after it, and the troll's as well."

  A new hope opens in her, and she summons her

  fiana onto the shelf and arranges them in a circle around her. "You, too, Uncle," she directs, positioning him in the ring.

  A pressure of command bulges Kyner's eyes with a

  look of near-alarm at being shoved into place. "What are you about, child?"

  "Raise your swords!" the queen commands. "Point them at the Eye."

  Kyner moves to protest, but the fiana have already extended their swords, and heaven's blue fire runs over their blades. He complies, and the edge of his saber

  sprouts fur, bunched whiskers of brilliant beryl.

  Above, the spikes of the malevolent star whir like

  blades. The Eye of the Furor descends slowly, carrying with it a blazing cumulus hotter than the moon. Kyner's men cry out in terror. The brightening sky silhouettes immense tentacles lashing above the crest of the ravine.

  The troll approaches. Its bellows reverberate so

  loudly the sodden ground trembles underfoot as though the land itself is in pain. Willows atop the slope flail wildly and go down.

  The witch-queen lifts her arms, anticipating the

  torrent of power that falls toward her from the incandescent heights. A wind from below, from out of the rock slab, fills her raiment and lifts her tresses. Every point on her body sparks: her fingertips and nose touched by thorny circles of azure fire that pours over the curves of her ears and sprays from the ends of her uplifted hair.

  The troll's thunderous keening thickens, and its

  enormous head heaves into view, blotting the stars.

  Painted in moonlight and garish swatches of hot color from the incendiary storm, the engorged head reveals clusters of tiny blind eyes warting a snicking mouth-hole. And from a gaping maw of fibrillating tendrils, ordure streams, spurting from the horse it has slaverously devoured.

  The cables of its squid arms rear into the sky,

  reaching beyond its grasp for the boiling thunderheads, and men scream. Ravening angrily, the troll topples

  massively forward and collapses into the ravine,

  shuddering the earth.

  The impact sets boulders rolling and sloshes the

  tarn's black water onto the rock shelf. Kyner and the fiana collapse, swords spinning on the stone in fiery pinwheels.

  Only Ygrane remains standing. A tentacle coils around her legs and torso and squeezes the breath out of her, lifting

  her off her feet.

  She hangs suspended in the spot glare from above,

  so close to the troll's squamous face she steeps in its heatless stink, its cold beyond the frozen miasma of dead things. Breathless, she dangles over scissoring

  mouthparts, sees a spiral of myriad tongues rippling

  inward, digesting the chewed horseflesh and bone-marl of its recent meal.

  Her head and outstretched arms strain toward the

  empty sky. The burning cloud is gone, and the full moon wears a few hard stars in its silver aura.

  Kyner and the fiana stagger upright, weapons in hand. Falon shouts, "To the circle!" The desolate cold pouring from the fallen troll leans like a wind, and the warriors struggle to find their places. The moment they do, electric flames whorl from the points of their upraised swords.

  Focused by these antennae, the magic returns,

  bursting into the tarn in a slender pillar of fire bright as daylight. Ygrane drops softly to the ground, landing on her feet, the tentacle a brown vapor widening away. The troll is gone. Shapeshifting to some smaller form, it vanishes among the trees, a shrunken mud thing in the abrupt

  daylight, lumpy with nodules and cysts.

  Ygrane holds in her extended hands the Eye, big as

  a melon, full of its milky vapors. At her nod, the swordsmen lower their dazzling blades, and she rears back and hurls the Eye toward the moon. It arcs upward as if shot from a sling, streaking an ivory rainbow, and comes down outside the ravine. The boulders and willows on the crest rear starkly in the flash of its impact, and a toll of thunder sounds dimly.

  "Will it come b-back?" Kyner stammers with

  exhaustion, and drops to one knee, leaning on his sword and sucking for breath.

  Ygrane shows her silvered palms to her kneeling

  fiana and opens her arms to the summery thunder smell blowing from the fire-pillar standing on the water. The refulgence draws closer, and the ravine shines with all the colors of noon. Jade hues shimmer in the willows; the tarn reflects its true tannic brown, and the strata of the cliff show red and green marls.

  All fear burns off. A joy from deep past lives seizes her. This is the achievement for which she has risked all, this phosphorescent current that flows upward into the abode of the gods. With pride, she says, "Uncle, the troll will not come back. We hold a branch from the Tree of Heaven!"

  Kyner blinks into the balmy light and finds his men,

  none missing, all kneeling. Some pray to their upright swords, some to the queen. She alone stands, raiment

  flowing, maned in tawny hair, sea fire in her eyes, an uncanny semblance of an older order.

  "Uncle, watch over my body," she orders.

  The battle-lord nods, his viscera still frosted from the living current that flowed through him and the fiana moments ago. He has no will to resist her. His men are safe. They have seen the wrathful behemoth, and yet they live. All he craves now is to return with them to Venta Silurum to tell this tale—with or without the witch-queen.

  Druids be damned!

  He joins the men, who are building a circle around

  her with their swords, laying them on the stone tip to tip, hilt to hilt. He places Short-Life in the circuit and sits cross-legged, with his knees touching the fiana on either side.

  "How long will y
ou be gone, my lady?"

  "I will return at moonset. The branch will bend to earth no longer than that. Guard over my body until then.

  Do not break the circle of swords, or my soul is spent."

  Her voice sounds sourceless to her, drawling from a

  slower place than the swift current of time that tugs from the pillar of fire in the tarn.

  Vaguely, she grows aware that Falon calls to her:

  "Older sister, take me with you!"

  From above, she sees him crawl over his sword into

  the circle and put his arms about her. The image veers away, streaks into the quietude of summer twilight, a soft citrine light, and horizons of trees hazy with sunmotes.

  "Guard me well . . ." Her chin touches her chest.

  The ghostly blaze in the tarn goes out, and darkness

  swarms.

  *

  The Furor stands in steaming grass, smoky thickets

  behind him. Massive kegs loom in the haze like boulders.

  Oblique sunlight runs through the trees on the mountains, carrying mists, pollen fumes, and startled gusts of birds.

  From higher up, from snowfields of purest indigo, a drift of voices and laughter spills into the sunny woods and over the phlox fields.

  The Rovers of the Wild Hunt and the Kith of the

  Shining Face arrive together, a happy troupe of gods this night, when honor goes to the elder gods and the living leave honor aside. For tonight is Ancestor Night, the night that exalts all the dead, when the living cavort with unrestricted abandon.

  Holy law decrees, each god shall drink a full horn of

  the Brewer's mead—the Furor excepted. He shall drink a skull-cup measure of wine fermented from the most rare fruit in the Tree, the dusk apple.

  Through the pitch green trees, the revelers of the

  Abiding North come at a brisk stride, their fur-skin boots silent on the musty floor of the forest and their laughter and giddy shrieks resounding in the smoky blue canopy of the pines. These gaudy merrymakers, bedecked in animal

  pelts and blossoms, come hurtling through the trees, riding on each others' shoulders. They are frolicking gods,

  determined to enjoy themselves. No matter their chief's plea, they will not contribute any energy this night to his cause.

  Boldest among them is the Brewer, dressed in a

  barley crown and a havoc of hop bines. His mirth rings loudest in the woods as he bounds into the smoky thicket where the large casks hold his brew. Directly behind him charges the Poet with the Judge clasped to his back, legs about his waist, one arm swinging wildly, owl-feather cape shedding tufts like milkweed.

  The Brewer raises his hammer, strikes the bung,

  and releases mead into the spiral horns poised below.

  Apart from the revelers, five sullen shadows squat

  above, on an overhanging bluff with a commanding view of the Rainbow Mountains. Behind them, spectral peaks climb like a ladder into the storm branches of the Tree, toward the star-strewn Gulf.

  The five sinister silhouettes backlit by the coronal

  smoke of the setting sun are living elders of the Abiding North. They were the Furor’s first allies millennia ago when he united the clans. The Guardian, Dark Mistress, Brave Warrior, the Silent One, and the Crone sit quietly, waiting to drink deeply of the sacred mead. They are too old and pensive to help him now as once they did, routing the dark scorpion masters and trapping fire eels. He nods to them, for they expect him to join them as usual. But tonight, he strides past and goes directly to Keeper of the Dusk

  Apples.

  A stately, solar-burnished woman with sunset-

  streaked tresses, Keeper has loved the Furor since her childhood, when he saved her parents from the giants

  Freeze and Storm Silver, and for that valor received a dent in his brow above his good eye. In gratitude to the Furor, she took her present name and has since devoted herself to wandering the twilight lands of Dusk searching for that dim country's rare wine apples.

  Proudly, Keeper of the Dusk Apples, regnant in her

  ermine gown, presents with both hands a large, gnarled horn filled with golden wine, all that could be fermented

  from last year's crop.

  Ancestor Night traditionally begins with the Tribal

  Chief quaffing this precious drink in honor of the Elder ghosts, and he hoists the horn expectantly. He passes a hard stare across the happy gathering.

  Then, with a scowl of unflinching defiance, he pours

  the libation into the grass. The wine runs off in a sun-sparkling braid, slapping a liquid sound from the mud that tears groans from the gods.

  "There will be no pleasure for me this night," the Furor decrees. "In trance, I have seen the Apocalypse!"

  The gods moan angrily.

  "No talk of end times on this night, Chief!" the Brewer shouts, and waves his hammer.

  "Yes!" the Furor shouts back. His dragonish eye sockets sweep the crowd, seeking out individual faces—

  the Poet's surly impatience, the Queen's glower, the

  Giver's bewilderment, and Keeper's gingery face wide with surprise and a glint of pride in her gray eyes. "On this night, we must talk of end times," he insists, and throws his horn into the grass. "Now—while there is time yet to act, to save ourselves from fiery doom."

  "What of holy law?" the Judge blusters. "What of the honor we owe the dead?"

  The Furor speaks in cold, measured tones. "The first honor we owe the dead is to stay alive!" He notices his brother, the Liar, sneering at him. The Liar stands among friends—the Wise One, Gentle Nanna, and the Fat Lady—

  lackeys bound to him by cunning and deception.

  "Yes, brother," the Tribal Chief continues in a more strident voice, "we must fight for our lives again! The Tribes of the Radiant South tie fateful knots in the currents of destiny. Their magic is powerful enough to cut the roots out from under us!"

  "Fah!" the Liar laughs. His blond, chiseled caste, his look of precision and clarity, carry conviction. That is why he is the Liar, chosen by the clan to challenge and test the worthiness of every decision. He has learned well over the years how to frustrate his older brother, and he says emphatically, "The Fauni, the greatest clan of the Radiant South, are dead! We have broken them in the rootlands!

  We have seized the Italic peninsula for our own. We even burned their so-called Eternal City. And you're still moaning, brother? You still fear the threat from the South?"

  "I have seen it—"

  "And we have heard it. All of it. Before." He gives a disapproving look. "Not tonight, brother. You've already lured away nine with your doomsday rant. Nine taken from our festival. Nine who are willing to sleep for a hundred

  years so you may use their lives for your magic. That is enough."

  "I need more power—

  "For a magic that may not even work."

  "It will work. Ask the Wise One." The Furor shoots an iron look at the furtive, narrow god, who averts his gaze and tries to appear small beside Gentle Nanna. "Tell them, Wise One. You've been spying on me for my brother. You know this magic will work."

  The Wise One shrugs, his watery eyes two pools of

  alertness in his seamed and frizzy-bearded face. "You would call demons from the House of Fog—that is risky."

  "Only demons are strong enough to challenge the

  Fire Lords," the Furor says.

  The gods look back, annoyed, disgruntled. "We've heard all this before," the Liar grouses. "It's Ancestor Night, brother. Leave us in peace and go work your magic with those of us willing to forfeit their joy. We are here to celebrate!"

  Murmurs of assent sweep through the gods, and the

  Furor silences them with his gruff voice, "Listen to me! With this magic, with the demons from the House of Fog

  working for us, we have a unique chance to flush all the foreign spores out of the rootlands below."

  "A chance." The Liar gives a flippant look. "You see?
Your own words betray you. Why should we sacrifice a hundred years of life for a mere chance?"

  "The magic will work," the Furor insists, "but I need more power, to be certain. The magic from the Radiant South is elusive."

  "I say then nine of us are enough. Use them to call your demons and trust the rest of us to do honor to the ancestors." The Liar turns to the Brewer and smiles broadly, teeth bright as a flashing spear-tip. "The Chief's libation is made. Let the mead flow!"

  With a mighty thwack, the Brewer's hammer strikes

  the bung, and a jet of silver whips the thicket with foam, dousing the shrieking, jubilant crowd.

  The Furor's hectic face clenches with disgust.

  Keeper of the Dusk Apples draws closer to console

  him. "Don't blame them for not seeing past their pleasure.

  It is the way of all life to avoid death. No one looks willingly into that dark prism. You are exceptional."

  "Would that I were," the one-eyed god sighs, and removes his hat to wipe the heat from his wide brow and sweep back a mane gray and turbulent as thunderheads.

  "If I were exceptional, Keeper, would I need the energy of other gods to work my magic?" He shakes his head slowly, remorsefully, and stands, hat in hand, watching the

  celebrants guzzle from their frothing horns.

  They seat their bodies complacently on the mossy

  rocks and root-ledges, laughing, flirting. The Queen, her snowy hair unbraided, wears a foam mustache and a

  bawdy laugh and has eyes only for the Lover. He casts a lingering look of helpless amusement at the Chief across the glade and links arms with the Queen to drink from her horn.

  Keeper of the Dusk Apples distracts the Furor with a

  golden apple she takes out of the ermine satchel at her hip.

  It is a token of the wine apple harvest. "The crop is rich this year, One Eye. You will taste dusk wine next Ancestor Night, after you have tied your own knots in the currents of destiny. You will assure our future, lord. You always have."

  The Furor's gaze only lightly touches the apple, then lifts toward the clear, moteless light above the mountains, the prismatic mountains with their star-sharp peaks. He steps back from the mud puddle made by his spilled wine, and the Healer hurries over, green robes snapping with her rush to collect the enriched mire. He ignores her,