Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 9

  Or perhaps the tribe had learned of Aoleyn’s secret relationship with Bahdlahn! He was up there, working on th’Way. Were they going to grab him, too, for this awful journey?

  A million fears assailed the poor young woman, none of them for herself. She accepted her fate—what choice did she have?—and took comfort in the truth of what she had done. She had destroyed the demon that had haunted the mountain for time untold, the demon that had slain her father and had ripped the mind of her mother. The demon that had killed Brayth, and had nearly destroyed Aoleyn—and would have, had not Seonagh interceded, at the cost of her own mind.

  Aoleyn had watched the ceremony when Seonagh had been thrown into the holy chasm, Craos’a’diad.

  She knew what to expect.

  And she knew what was down there, awaiting her in death.

  But so be it.

  She looked at Innevah and grimaced. Her legs went weak beneath her, but the two strong warriors holding the poles bound to her wrists yanked her upright immediately.

  Egard’s whip bit into her back, her own simple shift offering little padding against it.

  Even through the gag, Aoleyn cried out, a muffled whimper, but one that caught the attention of the last two witches, Mairen and Connebragh.

  “Halt and break,” Mairen called, and she turned back to face Aoleyn. She took one of the binding poles and motioned for Connebragh to take the other.

  “Go and piss in the woods,” she told Egard and his charges. “Back down the trail fifty paces. Make sure that we are not being followed.”

  With a nod to Connebragh, Mairen dragged Aoleyn to the side of the trail, and there pushed her up against a stone, that she could sit upon it.

  Mairen seemed nervous, pacing back and forth, scratching at her hair and tossing glances that seemed somewhere between anger and disappointment at her captive.

  “What a foolish girl you be,” she said at last, bending low to put her face very near to Aoleyn’s. “Everything was there for you. The Coven awaited. The Usgar-laoch called you his wife—what woman in the tribe would not wish to share a bed with the great Tay Aillig?”

  I! Aoleyn thought, but did not reply.

  “It was all there for you, right before you,” Mairen continued. “How well you heard the song of Usgar. You could have served me for many years. Perhaps you would have become Usgar-righinn!”

  To Aoleyn’s surprise, Mairen pulled the gag away. “Do you not understand this?”

  “I did nothing wrong,” Aoleyn whispered, lowering her gaze.

  “You killed Ralid,” Connebragh said, coming forward, but Mairen held her back.

  “He was torturing a man,” Aoleyn whispered.

  “Uamhas!” Mairen corrected.

  “I did’no mean…”

  Mairen grabbed her by the chin and yanked her head up to stare into her eyes, those black eyes of Aoleyn, so unusual and striking. At first, Aoleyn thought the woman would hit her, but Mairen’s face softened, and she seemed more sad than angry.

  “I believe you did’no,” the Usgar-righinn said quietly. “But child, there is so much else.”

  “I killed the fossa,” Aoleyn said, or almost said, before Mairen’s hand slapped her hard across the face.

  “You killed Ralid!”

  “And after, I hunted the fossa and found it in its cave,” Aoleyn insisted. “And there, I destroyed it. I can show you the place, and you will know.”

  “Then why did you not return its head, or some evidence?”

  Aoleyn licked her lips, trying to figure out how to explain. “I can show you the cave,” she repeated. “’Tis not far.”

  “I do’no want to see your cave, child. Why did ye no’ bring its head?”

  “When I destroyed it, it changed,” Aoleyn started to explain. “I burned out the darkness, but a cloud leopard was left…”

  Mairen’s sigh told her to stop.

  “’Tis true,” she whispered under her breath, lowering her gaze once more. “And if you went in there, you would know—oh, but you could not not know!”

  “Fool girl,” she heard Connebragh say.

  “Recant,” Mairen said. “All of it.”

  Aoleyn looked up, not understanding.

  “Admit your guilt to cleanse your heart,” Mairen explained.

  “I did,” Aoleyn protested.

  “Not about Ralid,” Mairen snapped. “All of it. Your lies about the demon fossa. Your heresy in breaking sacred crystals.”

  “No, not a lie…” She wanted to continue, but she had clearly pushed Mairen as far as the Usgar-righinn would go, for the older woman shoved the gag back in her mouth and secured it tightly, extra tightly, and with the last yank on the cord done only to inflict pain.

  Mairen grabbed one pole, Connebragh the other, and together they tugged Aoleyn to her feet and dragged her back onto the trail, handing her off to Egard and his guards before taking their places in the line again and taking up the song and dance.

  Up the mountainside they went.

  * * *

  Many of the Usgar watched the procession leave the encampment earlier that day with a combination of surprise and trepidation. Activities were underway for breaking the camp and heading up the mountain, but to have the entire Coven leaving, along with the highest-ranking man in camp and the nephew of the War Leader, was quite unusual and disquieting.

  “Where is the Usgar-laoch?” many asked as the sun set across the lake far below.

  “Why is the girl bound?” others inquired.

  The warrior Aghmor watched it all with torn feelings, for he, unlike any others in the camp, understood what this was about. Mairen had promised that they would return in three days, to accompany the migration to the winter plateau, but Aghmor realized that they would come back with one less Usgar, and likely without the uamhas, too.

  The prospect of that bothered the man more than he expected. He was no friend of Aoleyn, or the uamhas, and Aoleyn had confessed to possessing the bear that had killed Ralid. But he didn’t want to see her executed, for her explanation of why she had done it had been quite accurate. Tay Aillig and his hunting party were torturing the man down the mountainside, and intended to kill him if the demon fossa did not, and, knowing Tay Aillig, not pleasantly.

  The warrior had no idea of what he might do, but he found an excuse and left the camp soon after the procession had departed. He knew the trails well to the winter plateau, and he followed carefully, off to the side of the main paths and far enough back so that if he stepped on a stick or rustled some leaves, he would not be discovered.

  They were easy enough to see, with their torches, and since he suspected where they were going, but not so easy to follow, he realized, for their pace was great. Aghmor believed that the witches were using magic to get them up the mountainside, and his suspicions were confirmed when he watched them float up a fairly sheer cliff face.

  The man grew anxious, fearing he would lose them.

  He grew anxious, too, because he still didn’t know why he was shadowing them!

  That didn’t slow him, though—quite the opposite. Yes, he knew these trails well, and so Aghmor ran through the darkness as fast as he could and caught back up to the procession on the other side of the cliff face.

  He was close enough to watch them when Mairen called for a rest, and crept in close enough to hear most of Mairen and Connebragh’s conversation with Aoleyn.

  Then he knew, beyond doubt, that this procession would not stop at the winter plateau. They were going higher.

  He thought of Aoleyn, and nakedly, removing his anger and frustrations with her from his thoughts and simply viewing her recent actions through the lens she had offered. Perhaps he was being honest with himself for the first time in years, allowing his heart to press him though his fears of breaking tradition or going against Usgar order.

  Perhaps it was more than that, even, now that he allowed himself to view Aoleyn away from her dangerous and frowned-upon eccentricities, to see her with his heart ins
tead of his Usgar traditions.

  Aghmor considered his options—if they caught him out here, the punishment would likely be severe. The Usgar-righinn was not known to be lenient with men who crossed her, and Egard wouldn’t likely protect him.

  Aghmor didn’t trail the procession when it started once more, for he was long gone.

  Now he was leading the way, running with all speed, determined that they wouldn’t catch up to him. He passed by the winter encampment, off to the side, not wanting to be seen by the lone resident. Confident of where Mairen was leading that procession, Aghmor moved on to the east of the camp, to a trail that was now a stair leading higher up the mountainside.

  * * *

  The procession of witches and their escorts and prisoners came onto the winter plateau soon after dawn to find an old man waiting for them, heavily leaning on a walking stick in the middle of the flat, mostly stony ground set before the sacred grove of pines that shielded the physical manifestation of Usgar.

  Old indeed. It seemed to Mairen that the man, Elder Raibert, had aged greatly over the summer months. He had always been lean, but now he looked emaciated and sallow, older than old, as if he had died and was rotting away, propped on a stick.

  Mairen instructed the others to wait at the edge of the clearing, then started toward Raibert, to find Ahn’Namay moving beside her. She looked to the man to scold him, but then caught herself, reminding herself that she had no say over this one, whom the tribe had already decided would replace Raibert as Usgar-forfach when Raibert died.

  Ahn’Namay would be a powerful Usgar in short order, she realized, and one whose voice could have deep implications regarding her own dreams of power.

  “We had heard that you would be descending to the summer encampment,” Mairen said to Raibert as she approached.

  The Elder snorted. “You walk on these feet,” he chided with a wheezing cackle. “Oh fie, but I have grown thorns inside them!”

  The Elder’s laugh had always annoyed Mairen, but thankfully the man had never been particularly mirthful. That had apparently changed, she realized as he continued on, cataloguing every pain and infirmity, as every sentence seemed punctuated by a cackle now.

  Less annoying than his wheezing laugh was the stench coming from the man, which seemed in line with his words as he explained his inability to control his basic bodily functions.

  “I’d be a week trying to get down there,” he said, and laughed, and kept laughing, seemingly uncontrollably, as he added, “You’d have found me dead on the path not halfway down.”

  Mairen and Ahn’Namay exchanged curious looks.

  “What’s taking it so long?” Raibert cried out suddenly.

  “What?” Ahn’Namay asked.

  “Death!”

  Again, the two Usgar glanced sidelong at each other.

  “You have heard?” Mairen asked.

  “Heard?”

  “Of the trouble?”

  “Aye, and the trouble of my feet!” he replied, shaking his head vigorously, and sneering more than laughing. He looked past the pair to the rest of the entourage, and snorted. “The one you’ve brought bound in vines will likely outlive me.”

  “Elder…” Mairen started.

  “Been a long summer,” he said, ignoring her. “Too hot. And now’s too cold. Don’t remember the last time it was a good day. And I know every coming rain days before it falls. In every bone.”

  Mairen tried futilely to interrupt as the Elder rambled on about every happenstance, every pain, that had befallen him since the tribe had moved down the mountainside the previous spring. She wanted Raibert’s blessing before ascending th’Way to Craos’a’diad, but the man seemed incapable of discussing the matter, or any matter that didn’t directly involve him. At one point, she just rolled her eyes and sighed, which was a very rude thing to do to the Usgar-forfach, and very ill-advised.

  Raibert was too immersed in his current tale of woe to notice, however.

  “Will you journey up to Craos’a’diad with us, Elder?” Mairen finally managed to ask.

  Raibert just laughed and shambled past her, leaning heavily on the walking stick. Mairen and Ahn’Namay looked at each other and shrugged as the old man went by, then fell into his wake and followed him to the edge of the winter plateau, looking out to the north, to the huge lake far below and the lines of mountains surrounding it. The day was dawning bright and clear, affording them a long, long view.

  “The land is flat and dry,” Elder Raibert said, shakily lifting one arm and indicating the area to the east, the region known as Fasail Dubh’clach, the Desert of Black Stones. “All the way to the horizon. I have walked it, long ago, in my youth. I would like to see it again.”

  Mairen shrugged. She had also seen the desert—had seen more of it than most Usgar ever would, as she had once spirit-walked as far across the desert as she could manage. Miles and miles, all the way to the horizon. She knew that Raibert was speaking of something more tangible, though. The poems of the tribe’s skalds depicting Raibert in his youth claimed that he had actually gone down there, off the mountain and off the great Ayamharas plateau. Indeed, he was the last known Usgar to do so.

  “Those days are behind us, Elder,” Mairen said.

  “Aye,” Raibert replied. “And ahead of us, fewer days than we’d like. Fewer than we know, both of us.” Again, the man issued that grating cackle.

  “I look only to today,” Mairen insisted. “We have walked through the night and have all the morning ahead of us for our journey up th’Way. I must be off. If you’ll not join, then give us your blessing and we’ll be on our way.”

  “You look much further than today, child,” Raibert said gently. He turned to Mairen and locked her gaze with his own.

  That image took Mairen’s breath away. For the first time in many seasons, she saw a clarity in Elder Raibert’s eyes. He did not seem old to her in that moment, just venerable.

  “You look too far ahead,” Raibert warned. “Our days are not as long as we would like. None of us. The mountain knows. The mountain is carn. The guardian is destroyed.”

  Mairen stared at him blankly, trying to wrap her thoughts around his strange words—words that he was speaking with surety, it seemed. Carn, she mused? An old word, meaning herald. The mountain is herald?

  “But for today, I will join you,” Elder Raibert said with another laugh, a different sort of laugh, one that signaled absurdity and futility. “I will give my blessing for what must be done.”

  Without another word, he snorted and cackled, then turned and walked off, dropping his walking stick to the ground. His stride was long and strong then, so strangely. The other witches fell in line, Mairen no longer leading the procession but bringing up the rear, replaying those last words of Raibert.

  What did he know? And how had he suddenly found such vigor?

  And that clear look in his eyes?

  She tried hard to seem confident and serene regarding the dark business of this day, but inside was turmoil.

  The old man had shaken her deeply, and worse, she didn’t even know why.

  6

  WHEN LIGHT DIED

  Talmadge didn’t really want to do this, but the villagers of Car Seileach, the first tribesmen of the region who had accepted him and opened up this world to him, had asked it of him. And they had given him a throwing axe and a fine sword—one he had traded to them years earlier, in fact.

  “Eirigh’ti,” they had called the one he was seeking. “The sun man.”

  At first, Talmadge had thought the man must be blond-haired, but as he thought about it after he had set out from the village, along the bank to the north, it didn’t make sense. Many of the villagers in the towns around the lake had light brown or yellow hair, and so that didn’t seem like much of a point of differentiation.

  It didn’t really matter, he supposed, as he had been assured that he would understand when he saw the stranger.

  He crossed through an area of short weeping willows, all brig
ht and yellow in the morning sun, their small leaves turning with the season. Tall grasses spread out wide around the area.

  “Great place for an ambush,” Talmadge told himself under his breath. Preferring to be the ambusher, not the victim, the skilled frontiersman went down to his knees and crept through. He held his sword in one hand, the hand axe in the other, using the longer blade to part the tall grass before him. He wasn’t too far from the spot where he had killed a man, Badger, after a vicious fight with one of the large lizards of the lake, the ferocious clo’dearche.

  That memory weighed heavily on Talmadge’s shoulders, suddenly, and each movement came hard to him.

  But he persisted, and moved up a bluff, and when he parted the last line of tall grass before him, he was afforded a wider view, finally, of a meadow beyond.

  “Eirigh’ti,” he whispered breathlessly at the amazing sight that presented itself before him—so amazing, and out of place, that it took him a long while to sort it out, to even realize that it was a human, and one Talmadge knew, outfitted in a breastplate of shining silver and trimmed in gold, shining brilliant in the sunlight. The visitor to Loch Beag was gathering wood, logs for a raft or a shelter, it seemed, chopping branches with a gleaming sword, red gems sparkling when the man turned it in a way that caught the sunlight. So perfectly crafted were the breastplate and short metal greaves that the man, Bryan Marrawee of Dundalis, made no sound as he moved and twisted, and if he was hindered at all by his garments, he didn’t show it.

  Talmadge thought back to that day by the river when he had met this strange character. When he had found the opportunity, he had peeked into Bryan’s large sack and seen this armor, but never had he imagined how brilliant it truly was!

  Bryan brought his sword down on a branch, then again, and a third time, the chopping finally taking it down.