Song of the Risen God Page 7

  Khotai twitched her leg, and she floated along, settling right beside the woman.

  “Hurry, Bahdlahn!” Aoleyn called after the young man, who was already off into the crowd.

  Aoleyn led the way for a bit, Khotai easily pacing her, then she bade Khotai to lead, and the woman did.

  “If this doesn’t work as you’re promising, I’ll have your head,” the fierce To-gai-ru woman warned, but confident Aoleyn only smiled in return.

  * * *

  Aydrian and Talmadge noted the commotion when they came in sight of the refugee camp. They exchanged a concerned look and picked up their pace, side by side, jogging the rest of the way up the last slope to the gathering. Both grew more alarmed, their expressions tightening, when they heard the word witch being thrown about.

  “What did you bring to us, Talmadge, you fool?” one man called. He even started for Talmadge, quite threateningly, but a strong woman grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back as she stepped up before him.

  “It’s good that you’re back,” Catriona of Fasach Crann greeted him.

  “What is the trouble?”

  “Your Usgar friend, Aoleyn, has returned,” Catriona explained, glancing back. “She displays her magic.”

  “It is the same as my own,” Aydrian answered, his command of the regional language growing quite strong now. “The magic which healed so many of your people. The magic that allowed me to walk out to the capsized boat, to—”

  “You are not Usgar,” Catriona curtly interrupted. She turned her attention right back to Talmadge. “Come and see.”

  She led the two through the clusters of people, around the strewn boulders of the small plateau, then within a ring of onlookers, who stood shoulder to shoulder.

  There sat Aoleyn and Khotai, with Khotai fastening the last ties of a makeshift skirt and Aoleyn weaving a line of some thin material through a pair of leather straps, fastening them together into a double-thick strap.

  “Khotai?” Talmadge asked.

  The woman looked up at him, offered an unusually sheepish smile, and held up her hand to keep him back.

  “Now?” she asked Aoleyn.

  Aoleyn ran the tie, a wire of wedstone like those she had used to fashion her own jewelry, back through the two leather straps, then up and over to tightly bind them together. After a quick look at the completed belt, she leaned forward to help fasten it about Khotai’s waist.

  “I’m no witch,” the woman whispered into Aoleyn’s ear when they came very close together.

  “You do’no have to be,” Aoleyn quietly replied. “You’ll feel the magic and hear the song. Just tell it what you want it to do.”

  Aoleyn leaned back and fastened the belt in front. “This will hurt a bit,” she warned, lifting Khotai’s shirt to reveal her belly button.

  That was the place, Aoleyn knew from her own experience. Of all the jewelry fastened to her flesh through wedstone wires, that one was the most omnipresent, as it was attached to her very life energy. She pierced Khotai’s navel, enacting a bit of healing within the wedstone wire to heal the wound about it as she stitched Khotai to her belt.

  Khotai’s expression changed. Aoleyn understood that she was indeed hearing the magic song.

  “Close your eyes,” Aoleyn said, and she shifted back, then stood up and stepped back. “Just tell it what you would have it do.”

  “Aoleyn, what—” Talmadge started to ask, but Aoleyn hushed him.

  He said nothing more, but gasped indeed, his eyes going wide, his mouth hanging open, as Khotai lifted from the ground, floating up to stand on her one twisted leg. She rocked back and forth for a moment and Talmadge made a move toward her, but Aoleyn held him back with an outstretched arm.

  Khotai steadied and stared at Aoleyn, her face beaming.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Until you’re tired,” Aoleyn replied. “If you even grow tired.” Aoleyn stepped forward and put her hands on Khotai’s shoulders, staring the woman right in the eye. “Your days on the ground are over, my friend.”

  Khotai’s smile broke then, as she tried to respond. No words came forth, though, just tears, and she fell into Aoleyn’s arms.

  “It will work forever,” Aoleyn whispered to her, promising her.

  The gathering didn’t know how to react. Villagers turned to each other and shrugged, stared, some laughing, some crying, some shaking their heads, though whether in disbelief, denial, anger, or some combination of all of those emotions, none seemed to know.

  Bahdlahn began a cheer for Aoleyn, which was met with a tepid response. Talmadge rushed to Khotai, the woman he loved.

  “You seem unsurprised,” Catriona said to Aydrian, who was outwardly reacting the least of anyone to the remarkable events.

  “You cannot begin to understand the magic of the eastern lands,” he told the woman. “Both in spell and in item. The magic of my sword or breastplate, the gems that allowed me to walk across the water. I am surprised that one such as this Usgar woman, who is not of the Abellican Church or not of the elves, has found such affinity to the gemstones, but not surprised at all at what those magical stones have accomplished here. The magic is powerful, Catriona of Fasach Crann.”

  “Powerful enough to stop them?” the woman asked, glancing up toward the mountains beside them, to the conquered Ayamharas Plateau.

  “We shall see,” Aydrian replied. “I fear that we shall have to see.”

  * * *

  The refugee band set off soon after, moving along the northern bank of the new lake. Aydrian used Talmadge’s quartz crystal to scan behind to the continuing waterfall, running much thinner now, as it fed the new and vast lake. He scanned ahead to the eastern shores and discovered a small river running away from the lake, running east.

  “The crossing will be easier along the lakeshore,” he told Catriona and the others. “We’ve water and food to get us across the desert to lands Talmadge and Khotai know well, and from there we’ll be long away from the invaders.”

  “If they do’no catch us,” the woman replied.

  Aydrian had no answer for that.

  “They won’t catch us,” Aoleyn replied from a few ranks back in the procession. “And if they try, they’ll be sorry for the choice.”

  Even the lake folk who didn’t trust her, who harbored hatred for her because she was Usgar, nodded at her declaration.

  Aydrian was glad of that. He looked to Khotai, who was already moving smoothly, effortlessly pacing the others, and who could easily outrun them now with that curious step-and-glide motion offered by the magical belt Aoleyn had fashioned. Even with her singular twisted and damaged limb, the one-legged woman was able to plant that foot and push away enough to cover twenty strides in her nearly weightless hop.

  Between that, Aoleyn’s continuing work with the healing stone, and Khotai’s determined declaration, Aoleyn was breaking down the hatred, certainly.

  That gave Aydrian hope.

  Not hope for Aoleyn, for he was confident that the woman would find her way through this turbulent uprooting, but for himself. Aydrian knew what he had to do, and he could easily enough guess what resistance he would face in Ursal from King Midalis, and even more from the Abellican Church.

  It occurred to him quite often that he would be walking to his death by going back there. His exile had offered no leeway in its conditions: He was never to return to Honce-the-Bear, under penalty of death.

  Even though he was bearing the tidings of such potential danger in the west, Aydrian feared that those terms would not be ignored.

  So be it.

  They set camp along the lakeshore, not far from the plateau’s foothills, for they could not safely continue in the dark. Catriona allowed no torches, no lights at all, though Aoleyn was able to use her ruby ring to warm up stones for the camp and keep the folk comfortable against the nighttime desert chill.

  Also, as she had promised, Aoleyn’s work with Khotai was not yet finished. She used her healing powers on the woman’s
damaged right hand, but the left proved more problematic, for the years of crawling had twisted her ligaments and reshaped her fingers.

  “I can fix it,” she told Khotai. “But it will hurt, perhaps as much pain as you’ve ever known.”

  “Oh, don’t you doubt that I’ve known lots of pain, friend,” Khotai replied, throwing a wink to Talmadge as she spoke. “Got one leg bitten off and the other shattered by a lake monster that now seems to be a dragon.”

  Aoleyn laughed and nodded.

  “When?” Khotai asked.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Aoleyn replied.

  “Now,” the woman answered, without hesitation and without a single tremor in her voice.

  Aoleyn motioned to Talmadge and Aydrian. “Give her something to bite on, and hold her tight.”

  “Are you sure?” Bahdlahn whispered to Aoleyn, for she had told him his role.

  “Have you stopped trusting me already?” she replied, drawing a nod and a smile from the young man.

  “As soon as he strikes, use whatever healing you can summon,” Aoleyn reminded Aydrian, who was wearing his gem-studded breastplate for just this occasion, and he, too, replied with a nod.

  The two men held Khotai tightly, her ruined left hand out to the side. Talmadge grasped her forearm tightly to keep it over a flat stone that Aoleyn had chosen for this event.

  Bahdlahn carefully set a second flat stone atop the hand.

  Aoleyn put her hand on her hip, over her largest and strongest wedstone, and fell into the song. When the notes rang true and strong, she looked up and motioned to Bahdlahn, and the young man, who had spent the last months working the stones of a stairway far up the side of Fireach Speuer, a man whose muscles had been honed by endless days of chopping and shaping and carrying stone, brought a hammer up over his head and snapped it down with frightening power and accuracy atop the stone that lay atop Khotai’s hand.

  The woman bit and growled and howled, her bones shattering.

  Aydrian sent her healing magic from the soul stones in his breastplate.

  Aoleyn attacked her pain with a powerful wave of warmth and healing, using the same type of stone, a hematite, which she knew as a wedstone.

  It went on for many heartbeats before Khotai had calmed enough to spit out the leather bit they had given her to chomp.

  Talmadge and Aydrian let her go.

  “Aye, that hurt,” she admitted to Aoleyn. “Oh, but that hurt.”

  “And now?” Aoleyn asked.

  Khotai smiled easily.

  “Do’no move,” Aoleyn bade her, and she motioned for the three men to leave them, then continued the healing for a long, long while. When she had finished, she carefully wrapped the hand tight with cloth, using sticks to keep the fingers straight.

  “Do’no try to use it,” she bade Khotai.

  “How long?”

  “Soon,” Aoleyn promised.

  To Khotai’s surprise, Aoleyn then reached down and unfastened the magical belt, freeing it.

  “You’ll see,” she promised and moved away. “Just rest—try to sleep. You’ll be getting it back in the morning.”

  “A problem?” There was no missing the concern in Khotai’s voice. She had been given back her mobility only that same day, and it was clear that any hint that she might be losing it again terrified her.

  “No, but I’ve an idea. You’ll see,” Aoleyn promised, her voice upbeat.

  * * *

  When Khotai awoke the next morning, Aoleyn gave her back the belt. It felt much the same, and she rose easily and in balance.

  “I will heal the hand again as we move,” Aoleyn told her.

  “What about the belt?”

  “It is the same for walking,” Aoleyn said, a mischievous grin spreading wide. “But now you can walk across the water, if you choose.”

  Khotai giggled nervously. “Across the water? Atop the water?”

  Aoleyn nodded, grinning widely.

  “I owe you my life, Aoleyn of Usgar.”

  “And I owe Talmadge mine, and Talmadge owes his to Khotai,” Aoleyn replied. “I would say that we’re all the better for our debts.”

  Not far away, Aydrian overheard the conversation, and he found himself agreeing with the sentiment. All the world was better off with such debts, he mused.

  He thought of his own history, of his time with Marcalo De’Unnero and the evil road he had walked, the demon dactyl strong within him.

  He was free now of that vile presence, an entity that had been injected into his spirit when he was not yet even born, a demonic influence that had been exploited by bad men to horrific ends.

  Alas, though, Aydrian could not forgive himself his history.

  He had to hope that King Midalis and Father Abbot Braumin Herde could forgive him, though, at least enough to heed his warnings, for he simply did not believe that these bright-faced invaders meant to stop at the mountain plateau. They had come from the west, and their road of conquest was almost certainly east.

  East lay Honce-the-Bear and a million innocents.

  4

  FLIGHT AND FIGHT

  He was alone. Hanging, swaying, with only his reflection in the mirror to keep him company, other than the occasional guard who came in to replace the torches.

  They wouldn’t give Egard darkness. They wouldn’t even afford him that dignity. They wanted him to see himself in that golden mirror, hanging there helplessly. They wanted him to witness his every attempt to bend his arm enough to try, futilely, to grab at one of the hooks stabbed into his upper arm. They wanted him to see the grimace of agony on his face every time frustration overcame him and made him thrash about, trying, again futilely and pitifully, to tear himself enough on those hooks that he would simply fall.

  Their lack of any recognition of him, as if he mattered not at all, might have been the worst of all for the captured Usgar warrior. When the last guard entered with new torches, Egard had screamed and pleaded, threatened and twisted almost all the way around, before the pain drove him back to face the mirror, to hang limply with agonized exhaustion.

  That guard hadn’t even turned his red and blue face up to glance at Egard, hadn’t even started in the slightest at the bellows of the tortured man.

  They didn’t even care.

  Except for one occasional visitor. Except for the priest whose face was half skull, who leered at him over his shoulder and then tortured and violated him more profoundly than any physical implement could ever hope to achieve.

  Whenever that skull appeared in the mirror, Egard knew what was coming. The creature stared through the eyeholes of its skull mask, locked its reflected gaze with Egard’s, and invaded his very soul through those eyes.

  The violation was beyond Egard’s darkest fears, a complete stripping of his soul and his thoughts, his very identity, everything that made him Egard, laid bare for the pickings of this monstrous creature. And in those moments of forced and brutal intimacy, the priest tickled him with terror, gave back to Egard images horrible and horrifying.

  The demon priest took pleasure in taking from him his secrets, his fears, his failings, and then took greater pleasure in turning all of that personal knowledge back against him.

  When the interrogations—no, more than interrogations; these were mental, emotional, and spiritual scourings—were finished, when the priest had extracted as much as he could garner, he would leave Egard alone to hang painfully for a few more hours. But only after promising to use the information Egard had provided against everything that Egard held dear.

  “Kill me,” Egard whispered after this most recent invasion of his soul.

  For once, surprisingly, the priest responded. “No,” he said, in Egard’s own language, a language he had stolen from the Usgar prisoner. “You are not empty yet. Once you are hollowed out, then you may die.”

  And he walked away, uncaring. And Egard hung his head and hoped to die.

  * * *

  “Beyond your pleasure, what purpose do you see in this?”
Tuolonatl asked High Priest Pixquicauh when the old augur exited the prison. Unlike the man she addressed, Tuolonatl carried no formal title, though many called her cochcal, a rank recognizing her as the general of the xoconai forces. She didn’t need it. The middle-aged woman was known to every living xoconai the length and breadth of the combined xoconai nation of Tonoloya. She led the elite mundunugu cavalry, the highest warrior caste of the bright-faced people, deadly warriors astride their collared cuetzpali mounts. As the God King Scathmizzane had chosen the old augur to serve as the high priest, his mortal voice among the people, so too had he chosen Tuolonatl to lead this glorious march of the xoconai nation to its promised restoration, a Greater Tonoloya in which the sun would rise over one sea and set over the other. They would march east until the land itself ended.

  There could have been no other reasonable choice to lead the armies. While the xoconai had many heroes, none shone as brightly as Tuolonatl.

  However, the old augur, now called High Priest Pixquicauh, wished his Glorious Gold had picked someone else. He found Tuolonatl insufferable and irreligious.

  “You do not think it important that we gather as much knowledge of our enemies as we can?” he asked the woman.

  “There are better ways to interrogate. Ingratiate, make of them friends, earn of them their trust. Then they will tell you so much more.”

  Pixquicauh snorted and thought her terribly naive. He wondered how someone so soft could have risen to such a lofty perch among the fierce mundunugu.

  “It is tried and true,” she answered.

  “I speak their language,” the old augur boasted. “Do you?”

  He saw that he had put her back on her heels with that revelation, and that made him glad. He wasn’t lying. Scathmizzane’s golden mirror had allowed him deep into the thoughts of the captured man, and those thoughts were translated as they were discovered and scoured, giving the old augur the man’s language as fully as if he had been speaking it his entire life.

  Another miracle of Glorious Gold!