We have time! Edme and Faolan both thought. A bit of time was all they needed.
Faolan and Edme could not wait to get back to the Obea tree and tell the others. They needed to rest and to consume the remainder of the food the Prophet had cached in the tree roots. Everything depended on their being strong enough to catch him when he came. The Skaars dancing he had started was killing more wolves in the Beyond than the cold or the famine. It had to be stopped.
When they returned, the Sark was up but Gwynneth was already sound asleep, although the sun had barely risen.
“Back so soon?” the Sark asked.
“We found something,” Edme said. “Nearby.”
“Yes, smells like a mouse — a little fatty. Where is it?”
The two wolves explained.
“Spirit food!” the Sark snorted. “Oh, how nourishing! I feel myself chubbing up already. About to split my pelt! What a racket this prophet has going. What a frinking — to borrow an owl expression — racket!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE PROPHET COMES
THE PROPHET HAD HEARD THE MESsage. Spirit food awaited him. But he had just been leading circles to the south, and it had been a long night. He needed to get back to the Obea tree, to rest, to think about things. The helmet had rubbed a raw spot just beneath his ears where the visor slid down. He needed rest and he needed the lovely stoat that awaited him.
Occasionally he had doubts about eating when he told his followers not to. But, he was leading in the only way he could. He gave his followers not the will to live, but the grace to die beautifully and then be reborn. He had discovered his gift when the herds vanished. The lack of food had cleared his mind, leaving him with the ability to understand the workings of the celestial. On a night when he was so racked with grief that he thought of hurling himself from a cliff, the stars had called out to him. Not in words but with a deep resonant thrumming. He had looked up and seen light falling through the star ladder with Skaarsgard dancing on its rungs. The light began to throb and his own heart beat in harmony with the light above. That was the moment he realized his own significance in the great drama that was about to occur in the Beyond. It was not a famine; it was a deliverance, and he would lead it. He began to lift his feet one at a time, then quickened the steps. “I am the one! I am the one! The Prophet who will help Skaarsgard bring heaven to earth, soul to marrow, and marrow to soul!” He looked down and saw his body truly for the first time. It was but a vessel destined for decay, and a vehicle through which the true spirit is released.
Now when he ate, it was only to keep the vessel whole until the final fracturing, when his work and Skaarsgard’s would be complete.
The Prophet knew himself to be a container for light — all the light that poured from the sky. It suffused him, illuminated his marrow, guided him so he could guide the wolves of the Beyond to their true destiny. He tipped his head back now and felt the helmet shift. The visor slipped back and he scanned the sky. But enormous thick gray clouds had moved in from the west and sealed the sky. He searched for the tiniest rip in the gray, just a crack to show the sun rising in the east. Ah, there it was! He felt a ray strike the visor and he flinched. He tipped his head to lower the visor once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE VISOR’S GLINT
WHEN THE SARK AWOKE, SHE SAW that Gwynneth was still asleep, as were Faolan and Edme. Gwynneth was squashed into what looked to the Sark like a very uncomfortable position. The Masked Owl slept in an upright posture in the V where two sides of the buttress roots met. “Well, to each her own,” the Sark mumbled to herself. She got up and noticed that Faolan and Edme must have gone out hunting earlier, for there were two voles left out. The Sark had to admit that she had acquired a taste for these rodents, as had the other two wolves. They had also become proficient hunters of the little creatures. Although the Sark stopped just short of pronouncing rodents delectable, they certainly could be most satisfactory. Bats were less so. But still, in these times beggars could not afford to be choosers. And the Sark made no mistake that they were all beggars in the Beyond.
The Sark’s mind drifted to the Skaars dancers. They were begging for death. Something had killed their hope as surely as water on a flame.
The Sark wandered over to look out from their root shelter. The shelter faced west, and she saw something that flashed in the distance. It can’t be the sun, she thought. The sun rises in the east. But it could be a reflection! A reflection of the rising sun on metal! The Sark had seen it once before in the Slough: a glint on a helmet, on a visor. Finally! she thought. The Prophet is coming!
“Gwynneth! Faolan! Edme!” the Sark whispered.
The owl’s eyes flew open and the Sark gently but firmly clamped Gwynneth’s beak in her mouth. “Don’t hoot! He’s coming. Don’t make a sound, any of you!” She unclamped Gwynneth’s beak and nodded to the west. The sun was reflecting off of the helmet at such an angle that all they could see was a growing radiance that did not look like an animal at all. Nevertheless they felt his presence. Who is this wolf? Edme thought, and felt a quiver deep in her marrow. Finally, a great evil was about to be revealed.
Faolan felt a tremor pass through him as he also realized they were about to come face-to-face with a creature of great power. A creature who had cast a deadly spell on the poor starving wolves of the Beyond.
The flashes were becoming larger and still the Prophet was a faceless being, a creature from an unknown place. To feel him so strongly was unnerving.
The wolf was close enough now for the Sark to pick up his scent. He looked vaguely familiar to all of them, but only vaguely. If he would just take off his helmet! Just then, he seemed to sense their presence. The fur on his ruff rose in a stiff frosted nimbus gilded by the rising sun, as if Great Lupus himself had fallen to earth. The Prophet looked like a god, not a wolf — a false god, the Sark thought.
“Now!” the Sark said. Gwynneth darted into the air. The three wolves raced out from behind the roots.
The Prophet squeaked and turned to run. Gwynneth folded her wings and spiraled down directly into his face in a kill plunge, but he reared up, batted her aside, and leaped ahead into a dead run with Faolan and Edme at his heels. Although the Prophet was thin, he was fast. Faster than any wolf they had seen in the Beyond for the last two moons. He had energy, a maniacal energy that did not come from meat. His speed showed the zeal, the ardor of a fanatic.
Edme cut behind the Prophet to come up on his flank. It was a turning guard maneuver, but it wasn’t working. Faolan tried to run harder, but a sudden shift in the wind smacked him squarely in the face. The Prophet ran in the lee of a line of drifts that blocked the wind at least temporarily. The gap between them widened, and if the Prophet could stay in the lee of the drifts, he could run even faster.
Urskadamus! Is everything against us? Faolan swore silently. But hadn’t that always been the way, he thought suddenly. Hadn’t he been put out on a tummfraw as a newborn pup? Hadn’t that icy tummfraw broken loose in the flood of a raging river? And yet he had held on with his tiny claws and survived. He would hold on now. He would claw his way through this wind.
He felt his legs stretching out. The splayed paw punched through the windy drafts. He could tell that the wolf felt him bearing down and he saw the Prophet waver, then cut to the side to get closer to the line of drifts. I can read his every move. He has no cunning.
Had this wolf never run a byrrgis? Every time the wolf hesitated, Faolan picked up on it. The wolf’s indecision was Faolan’s advantage and he used it for all it was worth. The fight had come down to not strength or energy, but strategy. Faolan swerved in deeply. He was now in the windless tunnel in the lee of the drifts and he felt his legs stretch out. But the Prophet was still ahead of him and disappeared around a bend. When Faolan charged around the bend, the Prophet had disappeared. Dread flooded through Faolan, and he skidded to a halt. How could it be? How could the Prophet have disappeared?
At just that moment,
there was an explosion of snow from the ledge above Faolan. In the vortex of swirling white, Faolan saw eight legs scrambling, kicking against the empty air.
Suddenly, Faolan realized four of those legs belonged to Edme. Her single green eye glittered like a beacon in the tumult. The Prophet must have sprung onto a snow ledge in one last desperate effort to get to the top of the drifts, and now he and Edme were falling toward the ground. A question flashed through Faolan’s mind. Where did Edme come from? But there was no time to think.
“Flank port!” Edme cried out as she landed and began to chase after the Prophet.
She was packing the gap — as she had with the moose. Faolan once again joined the chase, cutting in on an angle. Edme came in on the opposite side, and they slammed the Prophet’s hips at the same time, throwing him off balance. The Prophet rolled. Faolan was on him in a second, pinning him to the ground. Gwynneth flew straight down at his face, using her talons to flip back his visor.
“Liam MacDuncan!” she screeched. The helmet fell off and began to roll down a short bank.
“My helmet! My helmet!” cried out the chieftain of the MacDuncan clan.
“Your helmet!” Gwynneth screeched again in the blistering cry of Masked Owls. “That’s my father’s helmet. It’s Gwyndor’s!”
The wolf blinked. His green eyes were bright with a kind of moral emptiness, the dark pupils at their center like dead beetles. Gwynneth could not help but think that had this creature been an owl, his gizzard would be kerplonken — dead. The two wolves who had brought him down could see that he was a wolf who had been severed from his marrow.
The Sark, who had fallen behind on the chase, now stepped up to snarl over him. “Try dancing now, you fool!”
The wolf was shaking so hard he could barely speak, “I … I didn’t mean to —”
“Mean to what — steal my father’s helmet?” Gwynneth shrieked. “Disturb the only hero mark ever made for an owl? Trample the grave of a warrior? Is that what you didn’t mean to do?”
“I meant … I meant —” the wolf stammered.
“You meant nothing,” the Sark barked at him. “You misled your clan and others. You are a weak fool.”
“I meant to give hope!” the Prophet protested.
This enraged Faolan. He began pounding Liam’s chest with his powerful splayed paw. “You call hope the ‘spirit food’ the dancers leave for you while they starve?”
The Sark, her eye twirling and pelt twitching, spoke. “Faolan is right. Don’t speak to us of hope. That’s not hope you offered — that’s despair. Are you too stupid to know the difference? You think putting on the armor of a truly valiant hero and begging for death is hope?”
Liam MacDuncan started to say something, but the Sark thumped a paw down over his muzzle.
“I’ll give you death!” she howled. “But you’ll die alone with your despair. Was that it? Was the despair too much for you to contain within your own pathetic mind? You wanted to share it! That was the only way you could become a leader. But you’re no leader, and no chieftain. Great Lupus, your father must be crouching in the Cave of Souls with his tail between his legs and his ears laid back in shame! He must be cringing in our heaven!”
“Don’t!” cried Gwynneth, for she saw the Sark bare her long fangs to rip into Liam’s neck. “Don’t! He’s the only one who knows where my father died. He must take us there.”
“I will, I will,” Liam MacDuncan mewled like a whining pup pulled from his mother’s milk. The sight was so sickening that Gwynneth yarped up a pellet.
The fever of anger seemed to drain out of the Sark. She looked at Faolan, Edme, and Gwynneth, and swallowed. In a small, barely audible voice, she said, “Yes, your death must wait. This goes beyond a single wolf, one crazed wolf. Don’t you see?
“I have always been a lone wolf but within the steady little universe of the Beyond. Yes, I have looked askance at many of the elaborate rituals and codes of the clan wolves, but Liam!” The Sark turned to the quivering wolf. “Liam MacDuncan, you came from the oldest and most venerable clan in the Beyond. It was the clan of the original Fengo, the founder of the Watch at the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes. And now you have come to this. What a perversion you have created. You’ve lured wolves to their deaths with this insane dancing. It must stop now! Do you hear me?” Her voice rose. “It must stop! We are in the worst of times, and you have found none of the courage in yourself that has been in the MacDuncan marrow for over one thousand years. You have helped bring us to the brink of complete and utter ruin.” The Sark paused, and her head dropped. “The stench of ruin is all I smell!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TOO LATE
THE OFFICERS OF THE BLOOD Watch gathered in the gadderheal along with Mhairie and Dearlea. Faolan and Edme flanked Liam MacDuncan, and the Sark stood at his hindquarters. Gwynneth stood apart with her foot on her father’s helmet.
“What is this about?” Tamsen said, staring at Liam. “And why have you brought the helmet and visor of your father, Gwynneth?”
“You recognize them, Tamsen?” Gwynneth said.
“Of course I do. I was but a youngster at the time, but I fought in the War of the Ember. But it was my understanding that because of Gwyndor’s actions in that war, a hero mark had been made for him. And the helmet and visor were never to be moved, on the direct orders of the great Duncan MacDuncan. Your father, Liam.”
“So they were,” Liam answered.
Gwynneth’s black eyes widened. It was true and Liam knew of it!
“So why are they here? What is the meaning?”
“They are here because I have abused the dignity of my office as a chieftain of an ancient and honorable clan. I … I deluded myself in thinking that I could save the Beyond. I tried to call down Skaarsgard and … and … and I believed that I had to become — was meant to become — a god on earth, a prophet.”
A profound silence fell upon the gadderheal. “You are the one?” Tamsen barked. “You are the wolf who began the despicable dances and you used the helmet and visor of Gwyndor for your crimes?”
Liam didn’t utter a sound, but hung his head in shame.
Tamsen whirled around to face the other wolves. “As captain of the Blood Watch, I invoke the privilege of the Sayer and I say this: The wolf Liam MacDuncan, false-marrowed and deceitful, must be taken to as many dancing circles as possible between here and the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes and unmasked. The fraud that he is must be revealed. We shall stop this dancing once and for all!”
For the first time in many moons, Faolan, Edme, the two sisters, and the Whistler raced with real hope to a large dancing circle. There were perhaps a dozen or more wolves gathered on a high plain. The five friends felt their hearts beating wildly in their chests as Liam MacDuncan walked stiff legged toward the Skaars dancers. At least four of the dancers were already falling to their knees.
“Go to the ones still dancing,” Gwynneth hissed. Liam walked forward.
“Regard me,” he croaked in a hoarse voice to a swaying dancer. She stopped in her steps.
“The Prophet!” she sighed in near ecstasy.
“A false prophet!” Liam said this forcefully, and then slowly but with great deliberation tipped his head, so the visor slipped back and revealed his face. The she-wolf cocked her head to one side and stared at him blankly.
Her mate nudged her. “Keep dancing, dear.” He did not even seem to register that his prophet was the wolf Liam MacDuncan, even when he removed the helmet and it rested in the snow beside him.
“It’s as if they both still see the helmet and visor on him. They don’t see his true face!” Edme muttered in disbelief.
A thin little pup rushed up to the ragged pair. “Mum, Da, that’s just a wolf, not a prophet at all. It’s Liam MacDuncan! I saw him once. He’s just a wolf.”
But his parents did not even hear him. They did not even turn to look at their pup. “Mum!” the pup whimpered. He scampered up to his mother and tried pulling her tail. “Mum,
listen!” But she shook him off as she might shake off a burr that had stuck in her ruff.
“The pup is coming with us,” Faolan said abruptly. “I am not leaving him here to die.” He turned and looked at the dancing circle. “This is despicable. This is a living tummfraw!”
The words exploded in the silence of the Beyond.
Faolan dipped down and gently picked the pup up by his ruff in the manner that very young wolves were carried. As they walked away, the little pup looked back, but a fog bank had descended and swallowed up his mum and da. He tried not to whimper. He tried to remember that it was not so long ago that his mum had played with him by the river before it was locked with ice, when the water flowed. She had promised to teach him to swim and to fish when summer came. But summer never arrived and now his mum and da were gone.
The wolves walked on. They would demand no bones of contrition from Liam. They would take him to no more circles. It was too late. The Skaars dancers were beyond rescue, lost in their trance. What had started out as a famine had rotted into a perversion, a disease of submission, an addiction to death. The very spine of the Beyond quivered, as if the marrow were leaking from its bones.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GOOD-BYE TO FRIENDS
THE WHISTLER ACCOMPANIED Faolan, his sisters, Edme, Liam, the pup, and Gwynneth for the first few leagues after the Skaars circle.
“You’d better go back to the Blood Watch now,” Edme said, turning to him. “We’re sorry to leave you, but we have much to report to the Fengo. He knew nothing about the Skaars dancing when we left.” She glanced at Liam. “But with the arrival of the MacNamara wolves, at least we can tell him that the Blood Watch is stronger.”
“And,” Faolan interrupted, “we will tell the Fengo about you, Whistler, and your service to the Blood Watch.”
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