Song of the Risen God

by R. A. Salvatore

  Khotai nodded, and so it was settled. The four didn’t wait for dawn to set off. They moved slowly and steadily north, turning east only after they had put Appleby-in Wilderland far, far behind.

  * * *

  Redshanks knew that he was dying, but the old frontiersman was smiling.

  He could hear the distress in the voices of the xoconai around him and so knew that his friends had escaped.

  He groaned and grimaced when the javelins were tugged out of him, and he was still groaning, trying to growl away the pain, when a pair of xoconai hoisted him to his feet, in the middle of the road, to face Xatatl.

  Redshanks managed to recover his smile, and he offered a shrug to the augur. “I’m not apologizing,” he said, his voice strained with the pain.

  “I am not angry with you,” the augur replied. “I salute your courage and cunning.”

  “Well, then, if you wouldn’t mind a bit of healing.”

  “I promised my people a sacrifice in the morning,” Xatatl said, with what seemed like an apologetic shrug. “I cannot let them down.” He motioned to the guards, and they began roughly hauling Redshanks away.

  “As long as it’s not personal then,” the doomed man said.

  “Why should I be angry?”

  “No, ye can’t be fooling me. They’re running free, and ye won’t be catching horses on your short-legged lizards.”

  The augur shrugged. “Fool. Where do you think they can run? The world is ours.”

  Those words silenced Redshanks and stayed with him throughout the night, and they echoed even the next morning, when he was hanging upside down, his lifeblood pouring from wrists expertly cut by xoconai executioners.

  15

  DUSTY SCROLLS

  “What do you know, Brother?” Elysant asked, coming under a low archway, candle in hand, to find Brother Thaddius sitting at a desk covered in parchments. Beside him sat a rolling cart, tall and narrow, with dozens of small cubbies, each holding several scroll tubes.

  “I know why Saint Belfour traveled so far from Vanguard,” Thaddius answered. “I know what he hoped to find.”

  He motioned for Elysant to come near and inspect the scroll he had open before him.

  “Brother Gilbert?” she asked. “Annacuth? What is Annacuth?”

  “A town, I expect, from long ago. These are very old. But look!” He unrolled a second scroll, one identified as the “First Diary of the Tomb of Unknown Ancients in the Ruins of Hertemspah.”

  “Hertemspah?” she asked, and Thaddius shrugged.

  “But read the first line,” he told her.

  “They are not masks,” Elysant read aloud. “We thought them masks. The red, red nose, brilliant red, bloody red, with the brightest blue beside it.” Elysant stepped back, eyes wide.

  “Familiar sounding, yes?”

  The woman leaned in and kept reading, silently for a bit, until she got to the end of the diary. “Once they were mighty, so claim the poems. Once they built the greatest cities in all the lands, greater than the desert cities of Behren. They are lost to the world now. I feel a deep sense of regret. I would have enjoyed their golden temples and unusual ways. They were the Sidhe, who called themselves Xoconai.”

  “Xoconai,” Thaddius echoed. “Not so lost to the world, it would seem.”

  “This diary dates to the earliest days of the Church. Nearly eight centuries.”

  “And this and the other writings of Brother Gilbert—there are seventeen entries—have been rarely examined, as far as I can determine, although the records from the early days are far from complete. Still, I can say with confidence that I am the first to look upon these in more than two centuries, and the last named in the logs was…”

  He paused there for effect, and it worked, for Elysant leaned forward eagerly.

  “Master Percy Fenne,” Thaddius told her.

  Elysant furrowed her brow for just a moment before her eyes grew wide. “Who killed the goblins plenty,” she recited.

  “So, Saint Belfour and his troupe were searching for the sidhe … the xoconai, two hundred years ago, and now we have found them?”

  “They have found us,” Thaddius corrected.

  “Good fortune, then, that we uncovered the tomb in this trying time.”

  “Perhaps, but I have found nothing in these diaries that will aid us in the struggle if these xoconai are indeed intending to invade Honce-the-Bear. The writings are confirmation, perhaps, and with them, I might be better able to persuade Father Abbot Braumin of the impending threat, but there is so much more that we must learn.” He looked around at the looming darkness in all directions in these massive catacombs, a checkerboard of small rooms walled by low arches and filled with graves, scrolls, books, and dust. So much dust.

  “It is a place to start,” Elysant said hopefully.

  Brother Thaddius couldn’t defeat her smile, and so he returned one of his own. Whatever trials might lie ahead—and he knew there would be many—he was glad that Sister Elysant of St. Gwendolyn would be by his side.

  * * *

  Aoleyn was more angry than nervous as the monks escorted her back to the main chapel and the audience chamber of Father Abbot Braumin. His summons had surprised her, after all these days alone in her room, with little human contact. She wasn’t even certain how many days had passed!

  She followed Master Viscenti into the room, and when he moved aside, she was surprised to find Aydrian already in there, standing before the father abbot’s desk. Not quite sure what to make of all this, Aoleyn’s gaze darted all about, scanning the room for clues.

  She noted three familiar alabaster coffers on the table beside Braumin’s desk, and a wheeled cabinet, it seemed, set with many cubbies, all holding scrolls.

  “Ah, good,” Father Abbot Braumin greeted. “I trust that your stay with us has been comfortable.”

  “I don’t like a roof above my head,” Aoleyn answered. “It is a silly way to live.”

  Braumin furrowed his brow and looked to Aydrian, whose responding shrug and expression seemed to agree with Aoleyn.

  “Well, at least many of the ceilings here at Saint-Mere-Abelle are wondrously painted, with scenes divine and inspired,” the father abbot said.

  “And do you think any of them more beautiful than the tapestry painted in the sky above?” Aoleyn countered. She didn’t know why she was bothering to argue over such trivialities when it would be easier, and probably better for them all, if she just let the man have his little victories. But she knew that it felt good to irk him.

  The father abbot laughed. “Brilliant,” he replied. He motioned to the side, and a pair of monks brought two chairs up and set them before his desk.

  “Please, sit with me,” he said. “I would offer food and drink, and will later, but for now, with such treasures as these ancient scrolls before me, I think not.”

  Aoleyn looked to Aydrian and followed him to her own seat when he took his.

  She didn’t like sitting. Aoleyn was much shorter than everyone in the room, and she felt smaller still as she sat there. She wondered if the monks were trying to diminish her. She took a deep breath and calmed herself. Her friends had all told her that this Father Abbot Braumin was not a bad man, and she hadn’t been harmed, after all.

  “What did you call these strange invaders, with their faces of red and blue?” Braumin asked.

  “They call themselves xoconai,” Aoleyn answered.

  “Sidhe, I think, is also a term for them,” Aydrian answered.

  “Not to them. They do not call themselves sidhe, and they hold no affinity for the goblins that the people of my tribe call the sidhe,” Aoleyn said. “It is a word the xoconai would consider more descriptive of us.”

  “Your tribe, from far in the west?”

  “Yes. Usgar. I am Usgar.” Aoleyn paused and considered all that had happened. “I may be the only Usgar still alive.”

  “I had thought that many refugees had come east with you,” said the father abbot.

&nb
sp; “Uamhas,” Aoleyn replied, and Braumin furrowed his brow and looked to Aydrian.

  “The folk who lived in the seven villages about the lake,” Aydrian explained. “The Usgar lived on the mountain. She was the only one of that tribe to make the journey to the east.”

  “The mountain. And this was the mountain where you got these?” Braumin asked, and he held up a handful of jewelry that Aoleyn knew well. Her black eyes sparkled as she looked upon her treasures, and she had to consciously fight the irritation that tingled in her arm and hand, threatening to enact the power of her tattoo and transform her arm into that of a cloud leopard.

  “Yes,” she answered. “In a cave, as I told you before. A cave of crystals—many, huge and full of chips and flecks and stones.”

  “You know that we value these stones,” Braumin replied. “To us, they are the gifts from our god. Only we know how to find them, in a place far away.”

  “None of you have ever been to the cave,” Aoleyn said.

  “We get them from a different place,” the father abbot said. “To the east, across the sea.”

  “Then these are not yours, and not of your god,” Aoleyn said, and the monks around her bristled uncomfortably. “And you are not the only ones who know how to find them. You don’t even know how to find these.”

  “But you do?”

  “I am of the Coven—or I was. We witches command the crystals of Usgar.”

  “Brother Thaddius believes you,” Braumin said.

  “Because I speak the truth.”

  The father abbot nodded. “Aydrian claims that you are very powerful with this magic. More powerful than many of my brethren, even.”

  “Most,” Aydrian whispered under his breath.

  “How would I know?” Aoleyn asked, glancing at Aydrian as she did.

  “Aydrian says that you can access the power of the stones very quickly.”

  Aoleyn was growing quite tired of this leading conversation, so she lifted her right arm and grimaced as her bones cracked and reshaped, then she dropped her paw onto the edge of Father Abbot Braumin’s desk. She let her claws out a bit, just to tap them on the wood.

  The monks around her gasped and fell back, and even the father abbot betrayed his surprise before quickly getting himself back under control.

  “Father Abbot!” Master Viscenti protested, but Braumin held up a hand to quiet the man.

  “I can do the other arm as well,” Aoleyn told him. “And my legs. Perhaps more.”

  “Please do not. And please end that,” he said, motioning to her leopard paw. “It brings many painful memories to us, for there was once one among us who could so transform himself so completely.”

  Never blinking, never unlocking her gaze from that of Father Abbot Braumin, Aoleyn released the magic.

  The father abbot breathed a sigh of relief. “What about these?” he asked, holding up the jewelry. “How fast and fully can you summon the magic within them?”

  “The magic is not within them, it is within me,” Aoleyn corrected, and she wasn’t even sure why she had said that or how she had come to truly understand that. But she didn’t doubt the observation. “I hear the song of Usgar in the stones, and that music allows me to find my way to power.”

  “And how quickly?”

  She shook her head, not understanding.

  “Not two heartbeats passed when she summoned the ice to wreck the pursuing ship,” Aydrian intervened. “She is very fast with the magic, faster than anyone I have ever seen. Faster than I, when I use my armor or the lightning in Tempest.”

  Braumin nodded and seemed satisfied.

  “This is very difficult for me,” he explained. “Particularly given that it is you, that it is Aydrian Boudabras…”

  “Aydrian Boudabras is dead,” Aydrian said. “I killed him.”

  “Yes, so you say, and so I wish to believe. But you understand my hesitation, of course.”

  “Of course. I would probably be less generous to you if our situations were reversed.”

  “Brother Thaddius found these in the mountains south of the Wilderlands,” Braumin explained, motioning to the coffers. “They are every old. And these parchments on my desk are very much older still. Brother Thaddius found these in the deep libraries of Saint-Mere-Abelle. They speak of the xoconai—and even name them as xoconai.”

  Aoleyn and Aydrian turned to each other in surprise, then both leaned forward, looking at the ancient parchments.

  “The brothers of old called them the sidhe—isn’t it interesting that such a misnomer has survived the centuries?”

  “Then you know we are telling the truth,” Aoleyn blurted.

  “Do I? Or do I know that these are old tales that perhaps my friend Aydrian here is using—”

  “You are a fool,” Aoleyn interrupted, and the monks bristled. “Why would I come here? Why would I care? I am not of your people.” She smiled and went on, but in her own language. “I am Usgar. I am the slayer of the demon fossa, who roamed under the blood moon, seeking its food. I am she who killed Tay Aillig, and I would do it again.”

  She kept going, simply telling her tale in deeper and deeper detail, and in the language of Loch Beag, so they could not understand—for the different and wholly unknown language was the whole point, after all.

  Abbot Braumin looked to Aydrian helplessly, holding up his hands in confusion.

  “The tongue of the high lake and the mountain,” Aydrian explained.

  “What is she saying?”

  “She is telling her story, of who she is and what she has done.”

  “But she speaks ours with such fluency? How is this possible?”

  “The same way I learned their tongue,” Aydrian admitted. “With the wedstone—the soul stone. Aoleyn shared the mind and so learned the language.”

  “Possession,” Master Viscenti said with a snarl, from the side of the room.

  “For need and for good,” Aydrian replied. “We have already been down this road, Father Abbot. There was no time for—”

  “Yes, yes,” Braumin agreed. To Aoleyn, he added, “Please stop.”

  The woman went silent, she and Father Abbot Braumin staring at each other long and hard.

  “Well played,” he said.

  “I am Usgar,” Aoleyn stated in their language, perfectly articulated. “I am from the other side of the world. I know not your church or your ways, or your claims over the magic—and I reject those. The jewelry is mine. I made it. I was right to make it. I would have died without it. We, all of the Ayamharas, would have died had I not made the jewelry.”

  “It’s true,” said Aydrian.

  “And so you would not know of the danger that comes your way,” Aoleyn went on, growing angrier with every word.

  “I believe you.”

  “And the xoconai would roll over your cities and your people and leave you all enslaved or dead.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But will you even hear? No!” Aoleyn continued, her anger deafening her to the man’s words. “We could have run, south over the mountains or north into the other mountains, and so we would be free, and so you would all be doomed…”

  She stopped suddenly, staring at Braumin as his words at last registered.

  “I believe you,” he said again, and to Aoleyn’s great surprise—to the great surprise of everyone in the room, she quickly realized—Father Abbot Braumin handed her jewelry, all of it, back to her.

  “Father Abbot!” Master Viscenti gasped, and he was obviously speaking for all the other monks in the room.

  “Please understand my hesitance, my fear,” Braumin said. “That anyone, this man in particular, would come to us with such a tale as you have weaved … it is all so unusual.”

  Aoleyn slipped her ring on, feeling the small sting as the inner band of wedstone wire pierced her finger and filled her with the song of Usgar. Then she began working with the turquoise ear cuff.

  “The belly ring, the earring, the anklet—all of it! You use the
soul stone, that you call wedstone, to pierce your flesh. Why? Does this bring you closer to the magic?”

  “To the song of Usgar, yes.”

  “Where did you learn such a thing? How did you think to turn the sou … the wedstone, into wire?”

  Aoleyn shrugged. “I was … I was in the cave beneath the God Crystal. I do not … No one told me or taught me. I only thought that it might help. I wanted to be closer.”

  “And it worked?”

  Aoleyn nodded.

  “None of the brothers have tried this. None but I have handled your jewelry. Might I now try your ring?”

  Aoleyn looked doubtfully down at the red ruby. “It makes fire,” she said.

  “Oh, I know, and I promise that I’ll not blow up the room,” the father abbot replied with a laugh.

  Aoleyn slipped the ring off and handed it to him, and he placed it on his little finger, wincing as the wire poked into his flesh. He closed his eyes for a moment, his face scrunching in concentration, but then he opened them and shook his head at the onlooking brothers.

  “I feel the power,” he explained to the other monks. “But no more than if I held it in my hand. I would still have to coax the magic to its full glory.” He looked to Aoleyn and held the ring back out to her. “And you could use this quickly if you wanted?”

  “Do you really wish to see?”

  “Oh no, no!” Father Abbot Braumin said, with another laugh.

  “There wouldn’t be much left of your room, or of any of us she didn’t protect with the other stone set in that ring,” Aydrian agreed, and he, too, chuckled.

  But Aoleyn wasn’t smiling. The conversation had thrown her thoughts back to a cave on the side of Fireach Speuer, where she had incinerated some Usgar Tay Aillig had set about to guard her. She could almost smell again their crisped flesh, a most awful stench.

  “Aoleyn?” Aydrian asked, with obvious concern, and she knew that she was wearing her discomfort on her face.

  She responded by touching Aydrian’s arm and holding her other hand out across the desk, and as soon as Father Abbot Braumin touched her, all three of them began to glow brightly within a shroud of white light. Aoleyn dismissed the fire-blocking serpentine shield immediately and held her hands up to show Braumin that he need not fear any fireball, as would usually accompany such a spell.