She wanted to blame Enkhaelen, but this was not his style.
After a moment, she stepped forward, reluctant to follow the baited path but aware she had no choice. Bait must have a fisherman on its other end, and she had Serindas. She was more than willing to show them the true predator here.
Her boots made no sound on the flagstones. At first she moved slowly, cautiously, but when nothing leered out from the snowy mist, impatience got the better of her and she picked up the pace. How long she walked, she could not say, but all thought of time fled when from the mist there loomed an archway.
It was an old structure, a massive entry made of weather-beaten stone with a lintel decorated in flowing feminine forms. The pillars on each side were women as well: to the left a girl in chainmail, a sword at her side and a shield across her back, and to the right a woman in full plate with a hammer at her feet. Their carven hands held up the roof.
A chill ran down Dasira’s spine. What would a Trifold temple be doing out here in the middle of the Garnet Mountain Territory? she thought. No skinchanger would worship them, and even with the town below, she doubted that humans who made their homes out here would be amenable to the faith.
Inset past the arch was a double door, its lacquered wood and brass handles burnished by wear. Discomfited but unwilling to retreat, Dasira stepped into the shelter of the arch.
Looking back, she saw nothing: no path, no footprints, only whiteness like a wall drawn up to the edge of the structure. She turned again to the door and found it ajar.
Warm light seeped through the gap, throwing a stripe across the floor at her feet. She caught the scent of incense, heard voices raised in a faint, lilting chant.
Gripping Serindas’ hilt with her right hand, she reached out with her left to nudge the door open. It swung easily on well-oiled hinges.
Light spilled free, forcing her to squint against its brilliant wash. As she focused, she saw steps leading down into a grand pillared hall, its grey marble floor reflecting the glow of thousands of candles. Polished wooden pews and padded benches filled the chamber, leaving bare only a central aisle. On the walls to either side, alcoves held votives and myriad statues—of women, of children, of great cats and other beasts.
It made Dasira think of the grand Light temples the Emperor had commissioned, with their pale stained glass and white spires and scintillating idols of crystal and gilt. Those temples and this felt the same to her, merely refurbished. Full of flash yet empty of meaning.
A deep red carpet ran up the center aisle to a dais at the far end, where the altar and three ritual sarcophagi stood, each representing the body of a goddess, each draped in ceremony. Behind them rose the complement to the pillars outside: a full statue of Brigydde, arms upraised, her gown and flesh painstakingly painted and her hair a radiant fall of copper leaf. Her eyes were white spheres, the tears that tracked from them blood-red.
Before the altar knelt a dark, antlered figure. Dasira’s heart lurched in her chest. His head was bowed in an attitude of prayer, his shoulders draped in red and grey; even his hair looked like someone had finally taken a comb to it.
This is a mirage, Dasira told herself. A mind-trick. But that did not stop the surge of panic and fury.
Under their influence, she disregarded the steps and leapt straight to the floor. Her fingers tapped the stone as she landed in a crouch then pushed off like a runner given the signal. The temple was empty but for her and Cob, and if she had her way it would soon be empty in truth.
Two lunging steps, then her foot hit the red carpet and time stopped.
She was still moving—she could feel it—but slow, nightmarishly so. And upon the dais she saw a second figure emerge from the shadow of the statue of Brigydde.
Fiora.
The girl’s dark hair was bound in plaits, and she wore not armor but a simple white gown cinched above and below her swollen belly. Gracefully, reverently, she approached Cob with her burden: a steel mantle dripping with chains.
Conniving bitch, Dasira thought, and tried to free Serindas, but even that motion was like moving through sludge. She put one foot in front of the other but the carpet was endless, the altar distant but all too clear.
At Fiora’s approach, Cob raised his head. The branching antlers were as spectacular as ever. Gore her! Dasira thought viciously, unable to form the words aloud. Guardian!
But Cob made no move, and Fiora halted before him with a beatific smile, raising the mantle. It would never fit, not with the crown of antlers. Dasira could have laughed. Yes, roll in the grass with him, lounge at his side, but you won’t have your way. The Guardian won’t allow it. Your presumptuous ways mean nothing against the—
Cob gripped the base of one antler and wrenched. Half of the great crown tore away with the sound of green, splintering wood.
No! Dasira cried soundlessly. Again he reached, and again he ripped away the only thing keeping him from yielding to the yoke. Even as she struggled forward, even as the great antlers withered to ash on the floor, she admitted bitterly that it was just like him to be oppositional.
Fiora lowered the mantle to his shoulders. The chains hung bright against his dark flesh. As she gestured for him to rise, Dasira pushed forward harder, teeth clenched, desperate to break free. She would tear that thing off him. Beat some sense into him.
Kill that manipulative little bitch.
The girl's hands moved on him as he rose, seeking and connecting those chains. She was small behind his bulk, but Dasira saw the gleam of one dark eye fixed upon her: Fiora watching. Waiting.
And the red carpet was running out. Dasira managed to wrench Serindas from his sheath at last, a bloody glow kindling at the corner of her vision. Three more steps. Two.
One.
Her foot hit the bare floor and time returned—too fast, for there on the stone was a thin red line. She did not have time to turn.
Pain blazed through her threads as she crossed it, and her legs unhinged. She hit the ground on her right side, Serindas biting a groove in the floor as the vengeance of the Trifold broke her control over her stolen body.
Two shadows fell across her. Caught in convulsions, she barely managed to swivel her gaze.
Fiora, smiling placidly, her face nearly glowing with the goddesses’ power.
And Cob. Stern, steel-swathed, with eyes full of fire.
*****
The mist had no scent—not of snow, not of magic, nothing. Neither did the tracks. Arik followed them anyway, fur bristled and claws clicking quietly on the stone.
He felt blind without scent, as if he was drifting in nothingness, padding through nowhere. Even his own scent was muted, though what little he caught was rich with fear’s unpleasant tang. He wanted to howl for the others, or lay down and whine and wait for the whiteness to clear, but it was no sudden snowstorm. It was not even cold.
Realizing this, he shifted. Fur retracted, claws sheathed, tail tucked tight against his backside. He stretched his hands and arms, reminding them how to work like a human’s, and ran his fingers through his thick silver-grey hair. Up here, far from the ground and with a nose that was no match for his wolf-form, he felt more secure, though he knew he was just tricking himself. The lack of scent could no longer unnerve him, but nothing had really changed.
The tracks led on, and he followed. How his companions could have gotten past him, he did not know, but they were all there: five sets of prints that clarified easily where the stone path became dirt. Fallen leaves lay brown and crumbling at the verge of the mist, strange for winter in the Garnet Mountains but reassuringly different from the desolation of the Grey.
Still, there was magic about. Even if he could not see or feel it, he was no fool.
He picked up a leaf in his callused fingers. Sniffed it, crushed it, chewed on a piece. Though it felt real, it had no scent and tasted like nothing. He spat it out disdainfully and rose.
“This is all magic,” he told the mist, and it absorbed his voice as if listening. “The m
agic of one who pays no heed to the natural world, who knows nothing of my folk. Show yourself and I will teach you about wolves.”
No answer came—not in words. The mist, which had lingered an arm’s length away, seemed to retract slightly until a finger of clear air extended ahead of him, showing more of the leaf-strewn path and hints of trees on either side.
Arik squared his shoulders. He had no desire to face a sorcerer, even one naïve about skinchangers, but he might have the advantage here. And though he trusted that the others would catch on to the falsity of their environment, he did not know how long it would take. For the true humans, they might not notice at all.
He had a responsibility to his pack to seek out the sorcerer and destroy it before it could do harm.
He advanced slowly, taking in every detail. The trees around him were a mix of soren and inkwood, not the same as before the mist, and their trunks made alternating streaks of color in the dimness, silvery-grey and brown-black. Leaves littered the ground along with worm-eaten soren nuts. It looked like mid-autumn. Tracks of deer and hares and dogs intersected periodically with his companions’ prints.
Dogs. The detail nagged at him, but he pushed it aside. This path was not familiar. The terrain was canted, slightly stony, with trees overhanging the trail from low root-riddled embankments. Old cart-ruts had been baked into the dirt.
No. He felt no déjà vu. The world was full of cart-paths and soren trees, of dogs and hares. He did not recognize this place.
Yet his hackles went up.
With each step, the sense of familiarity heightened. The mist cleared enough to show the twists of the path. He still smelled nothing, felt only the crunch of brittle leaves beneath the balls of his feet, but his fingers had loosed their claws again without conscious thought.
And then the stone wall rose up from the mist, with its unmistakable gate.
He halted, toes digging into the dirt and calves tensed to spring away. It was a low wall, no more than thigh-high to him now, but he remembered how he had once felt penned by it. The gate was taller but simple, just a few planks with hinges and a latch. Beyond it, the mist had retracted to show hints of a yard, of outbuildings. The raised hutch where he had spent so much time with his face pressed to the wire, his nose twitching at the half-wild hares within. The coop. The smokehouse. The compost garden.
The kennel where he had slept.
Beyond them, just out of sight in the fathomless white, would be the shack.
Arik drifted forward, captivated despite his dread. The prints led here, and for a moment he thought wildly that his comrades would see what he had done. More than a decade gone, but they would still see it and know the monster he had been.
He reached up to touch his face and was reassured to feel the clean scruff of furry stubble.
This is magic. An illusion plucked from my head, and a weak one at that.
The lack of scent let him hold on to that belief. He knew how it should be: feathers and dust, hare-droppings, the companionable scent of the hounds, the odors of the house—rarely caught, as he was not allowed inside. The rich reek of smoke and meat. The huntsmen.
This was merely a scenery painting in which the sorcerer must be hidden. Not real. He had nothing to fear.
Steeling himself, he pulled the gate open and stepped inside.
And, like a fist, the reality of scent and sound and sensation slammed into him. It was all there in an instant, every tang of the yard, the warmth of the autumn sun, the feel of the black earth beneath his toes. The dogs’ markings, the whiff of vegetable rot…
The stink of entrails. Of blood, fresh blood, thick and hot.
He went rigid, senses reeling. Memory struck harder, not in the pallid pastoral images he had conjured but as the visceral horrors he had not experienced in years. The rod splintering on his back, leaving the last of the stinging welts. The reek of filth, of alcohol, the heat and fear of the hounds all crammed into the rear of the kennel. The hoarse shouts that had become screams, the throat-deep growls, the teeth, the blood…
He looked down at his hands and they were clawed, furred, matted with red. His arms bled from the dogs’ tearing jaws. They lay at his feet, gurgling out the last of their loyal lives, throats shredded. He ached all over, muscle and sinew and bone strained from his skinchange, but he realized dimly that he was not small. Not as he should have been.
It’s just a memory, he told himself furiously.
He looked up and all was ruin, just how he had left it. The hutch torn open, the coop a mess of feathers and blood, small bodies littered everywhere.
And larger bodies…
“No,” he whined through a mouthful of fangs, recognizing their shapes.
He padded forward cringingly, desperate for this not to be, but the bodies smelled all too familiar. The one lying by the coop, throated, was Fiora. He saw her empty eyes, the torn hanks of her dark hair, the claw marks that had tattered the flesh of her sides and chest into red rags. The one at the garden, slumped over the edging stones—that was Ilshenrir, face down, grey garments shredded and pale hair glossed with pearlescent wraith-blood. And across the stoop, beneath the shack’s shattered door, Lark lay like a broken doll, left arm and half her face gone.
Arik’s throat hitched. He coughed hard and a piece of bone flew free, still flecked with meat.
The taste of flesh, human flesh, filled his mouth. He refused to remember having done that. He had fled the real shack while still in a frenzy, and when it passed and he crept back in desperate hope that he had imagined it, the scavengers had already come and gone. There had been little to tell him if the taste had been truth or delusion.
He crouched in the yard, shuddering. His jaws had reshaped to beast-form on their own, and his tail swept the dust as it tucked between his shivering legs. The door hung from one hinge, splintered and scored by claws, and he remembered the hollers of fear from behind it. Remembered flinging the dogs from himself with one hand while tearing at the wood with the other.
He dared not go in. From the interior of the shack, the stench of blood and death was too thick, too horrible to bear.
But there was a dark voice inside him, a nasty thing embedded deep in his mind that whispered, Go on. See what you have done.
Cringing, he reached over Lark’s staring corpse and pulled at the broken door. It crashed down beside him.
Inside, all was wrecked, the table overturned, the bunks slashed, crockery smashed, bedding-feathers everywhere. Blood, rotten food, smoke, herbs and excrement mixed in an overpowering stench. Panic hammered in his chest, but he had to know.
The doorway was too small, so he ducked cautiously, ears folded flat to his skull. Last time, he had been just the right size—a cub bulked out to the size of a man by the change, walking on his razored toes, all teeth and tormented fury.
There were no windows. The huntsmen had spent little time in here—sleeping, wintering, not much else. It was all so small now. Feathers ghosted up around his paws, flecked with red. He squinted, trying to see and not imagine. Knowing there were bodies but daring not to think.
Scraps of clothing. White, brown. A glimpse of green and gold on the floor, like a snake’s shed skin.
A pale shape on the far bunk.
He took another step, then froze. There was more than blood-scent here. He clamped a paw over his nose but had already caught it: the reek of exertion, of terror and rapacious lust. In the shadows the white flesh was striped with red lines. Shoulders, thighs. A ragged dark hole at the belly.
The bile surged and Arik wrenched back, skimmed his skull on the door-frame and nearly fell off the steps. Desperately he bent low and let his stomach heave out the evil, trying to blot it from his mind. Trying not to feel the scrape as it came up, or see the shards of bone, the fingers among the unidentifiable slurry.
Can’t be real. Can’t be. I wouldn’t—
I wouldn't kill her.
But he recognized that other urge, and trembled piteously. He had been too
young for such things the first time, his fury spent on the imperative of a predator when the prey is trapped and stinks of fear. Now he smelled her scent on his fur, the venom, the half-healed punctures in his sides, and knew that it was more than possible. She was a predator too—a worthy mate despite her corruption.
But Raun, the raging wolf, would not agree. Would not condone such a mix.
So he had…
A footstep on the path.
His ears swiveled and he raised his head, wiping shakily at his stained maw. What he saw made him want to cry.
Cob stood at the open gate, staring. In his face Arik read horror and disgust. But he was alive, and that lifted the skinchanger’s heart on a fine thread of relief. The rage was gone, making him no longer a threat. Cob would curse him—would kill him, probably—and he would welcome that. He would beg for it, for what he had done.
He tried to speak, but the words came out a snarl. Cob’s face twisted, and he took a step backward.
A whiff of fear reached Arik’s nose. Stag fear.
Delicious.
“No, no,” he tried to say even as his legs tensed automatically. His tail untucked and his ears came up. Human thoughts, human emotions held no sway over this predator’s body.
Another retreating step. Cob wore no antlers, no trace of the Guardian, but still he was rich with the scent of his bloodline, the one that made Arik happy to stick so close and roll in his blankets when he was not looking. The one that all wolves adored. A lifegiver, an elusive lover, the staunchest of fighting prey. The running deer.
Another step, then Cob turned and fled.
Arik could not help it. Eons of instinct triggered instantly and he was on four feet, tearing across the soft soil as he gave chase. It was not rage now, not hunger but joy, a terrible desire, the predator’s passion.
And he was faster, so much faster than a deer that ran on two legs.
His soul sang with it, as did his throat: the howl, the hunting song. His thoughts were wolf thoughts. No right or wrong, no reason, just chase it because it runs.
The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) Page 67
