In the unnamed city below Scourtop, an incarnation of the Beastlord, standing with his weak legs spread on the stone tabletop, directed and administered the sacrifice. Only when the priestess s body was successfully dismembered and its smoking parts distributed among the temple s altar stones did he pause to remember the High Hunt. By that time the Savage and Eleuthra had several hours lead.
But Kip the cat-shifter was not the only embodiment of Malar on Moray Island. That night, a hundred miles north, among the human settlements along the coast, sleeping next to their exhausted husbands, the Northlander women struggled and cried out, disturbed by the same nightmare: A great panther, its heavy jaws befouled with blood, crouched over their marriage beds, polluting the sheets with the stink of his hot breath. Shivering in the cold dawn, they shook their men awake, begging them not to go out that day in their frail boats to catch the spring herring and the langoustines, or climb up into their potato fields not that day.
In the hills and forests above the towns, the Beastlord marshaled his troops. The great panther, his shoulders striped with mange, moved between the cedars in the dark woods, his tail weaving like a serpent. Down below, the Northlander farmers cursed and whipped their animals when the wooden plows stuck in the marl, until the crazed oxen and draft horses turned and trampled them. Out at sea, the fishermen were lucky with their catch, returning with their bulging nets to empty towns, their women and their children gone.
In the afternoon the animals had rebelled against them, the simple beasts, maddened by instincts they didn t understand, and the lycanthropes who hid among them, who had crept in through the palisades among the rats and dogs. They stole children from their cribs, and dragged women, screaming, from their household tasks. Chattering and cursing, the wolf-men lit fires and threw open the gates.
Toward evening the first refugees arrived beneath the walls of Caer Moray on the bay, and were welcomed inside. Lady Amaranth was sitting in an upstairs room with Captain Lukas. Gaspar-shen, feeling better, was taking a bath, his head and body entirely submerged in the iron bathtub, his slitted eyes staring up through the cold seawater as he lay blowing bubbles from the bottom. He d been in there for hours.
Lukas was playing the violoncello, its long neck over his shoulder, its squat body between his knees. Lady Amaranth sat entranced. Many females of her closest court had come into the room and pressed against the walls, as many as could fit, while even outside in the halls and corridors the lycanthropes huddled to listen. In the courtyards work had stopped.
During the course of renovations, the day before, a pig-woman had discovered an old storeroom, its door choked with fallen timbers. Left over from human times, unlooted by orcs, the room contained a number of old treasures, including some musical instruments wrapped in velvet, with waxed pouches for the strings.
Lukas had not had much opportunity to play in recent years. So for him the dances and sonatas that he managed to conjure from the delicate old spruce wood felt like an emanation from the past, a rediscovery of his childhood in the big house in Loudwater, where his father s third wife had taught him music. Small things the smell of the rosin, the squeak of his fingers on the strings brought big memories, and in the middle of one sequence of arpeggios he caught a sudden glimpse of his stepmother as if she had been with him in the room, her bright eyes and pale lips outlined in kohl. She d been scarcely older than himself, younger than he was now. And then other sensations also, the fragrance of her dark skin, the pressure of her hands as she corrected some mistake. Oh, he had studied diligently under her care and learned much skill. But his father had not forgiven him.
Who can step into a river twice? For the water is different and we ourselves are different. At these moments when we are borne into the past, our unhappiness can become a kind of pleasure. Music makes it so. Lukas in a single trembling note recaptured an image of his stepmother as she paused at the threshold to rearrange the bodice of her dress, to compose herself before she reentered the public spaces of the house to reassume her duties there. She looked back at him, smiling crookedly as if she almost blamed him for taking something from her no, his father had not forgiven him, and he had had to flee the house. No doubt his younger brother had inherited everything.
Lukas s eyes were closed, and he told himself that he must open them or else risk embarrassment. When he did, he found himself in a room full of lycanthropes who, through their listening, had been transformed beyond the ordinary upper limit of their humanness. He found himself in the center of a circle of women whose faces and features were only slightly out of true, and whose rapt eyes followed every motion of his fingers. And Lady Amaranth was weeping, without any groaning or moaning or distortion of her beautiful features. But tears dropped from her lashes onto her cheeks. She, too, he guessed, had sunk back down into the past. To follow her he slipped into a minor key, one of the few gifts to humankind that the eladrin had brought up from the Feywild, and the foundation of all their music. He played her a love song from Karador, and wondered as he watched her face if this was the first music she had heard since she left home, and whether she recognized the tune, and what it meant to her. He wondered what she remembered of her first nine years, the richness of her life then, its poverty now. There being no connection between morality and art, he imagined Lady Ordalf s court was full of music.
But Gaspar-shen, when he rose to the surface, couldn t understand what he was hearing, a low, bellowing sound like the moaning of a calf, and then a scraping, squeaking noise. The iron tub was in what had once been a stable. Clothed in just his eel-skin trousers, carrying a towel, he walked through the gallery of wrecked stone stalls so that he could stand in the shadows at the edge of the courtyard and look up at the candlelight in one of the peaked windows of the keep. The sound came from there. Ah, yes, he had heard it before: The sound of his friend rubbing horse hair against catgut strung over an ornate wooden frame.
But there were other noises, too, closer to hand. He stood wiping his head with his towel, gingerly blotting the lips of the wound behind his ear, where the orc had hit him with a cleaver. With his spread fingers he combed back the cilia that looked almost like a ridge of hair down his spine and between his shoulder blades, while lines of energy formed blue-green patterns underneath his skin, always moving, mixing and reforming. But now a thread of scarlet moved over his belly, and he turned away from the music that was what Lukas called it toward another source of noise, more urgent and meaningful, and because of that more beautiful to him: someone hammering at the gate.
Caer Moray occupied the top of a low hill. It was a simple structure, a curtain wall between five round towers. Along the north side, built on a pinnacle of raw stone above the rocky beach, emerged the keep, mostly ruined now, as were the galleries and guardhouses that lined the outer walls. The courtyard was full of old stone cisterns, and a well that cut diagonally through the rock, down to a sea cave underneath the pinnacle. The gates were wooden, fifteen feet high, and Gaspar-shen could see immediately they were the weakest part of the fortifications, battered flat during the orc wars and now hastily rebuilt out of the original timbers. The gate was flanked by smaller towers, in the base of which was the postern, which now stood open. Lady Amaranth s guard of wolf-women had opened it to guide in the survivors from the ports.
With his towel around his neck, Gaspar-shen retrieved his weapons, then climbed the spiral stair up to the battlements so he could watch them come in. Peering through the embrasure, he could see the deep ditch that lined the curtain wall. The postern led into it, below the raised causeway that strethed across the ditch into the gate. Formerly, he guessed, there d been a drawbridge, which Lady Amaranth had lacked the skill to rebuild. Instead she had filled the gap with rubble. The women, leading or carrying their children, had followed the road from the northwest as it wound down through the hills. Gaspar-shen counted several scores of the Northlanders, barefoot, dressed in their long embroidered skirts, their yellow hair braided or cut short, their faces pale and exhausted. Behind them, driving them, he could see the wolves coming down out of the woods, the vanguard of the lycanthrope army. They did not attack the women, but held them to their road, chivvying them onward, though Gaspar-shen guessed that if any of the women had stumbled or fallen back, they would have made a quick task of them; now they spread away from the road over the open meadows that led down to the bay east of the castle. They ran back and forth down there in figure eight patterns as if playing a game, as they waited for the rest of the troops to come down through the spruce and cedar trees. The sun was setting behind the ridge.
The women were inside now, the postern locked and barred. Lady Amaranth was below him in the courtyard. Lukas was with her. They were greeting the new arrivals. The genasi watched them for a moment and then turned back to see the lycanthropes, reinforced now, spread out on either side of the causeway and the road, enclosing the walls in a long, ragged, disorganized semicircle from the high ground of the pinnacle to the beach. More and more were slinking down through the trees, and they carried torches. Some dragged loads of fallen wood out of the forest, which they built up in intermittent piles.
Lukas had come up the spiral stair. It s the walls, he said, as he took his place beside him. They don t have much in the way of weapons.
Nor do we. Gaspar-shen paused, hawking up moisture and dribbling it off the edge of the embrasure in a long line. Regenerated by his saltwater bath, by nature he was able to produce a great deal of saliva. He watched it fall out of sight into the ditch, a sequence of tiny glowing spheres. They could have taken those women, he said. Why did they not?
Lukas strung his bow. It s the hunt, he said. The quarry s run to ground.
The lycanthropes, as the sky grew dark, lit bonfires at the forest s edge. They built scaffolds, tying the timbers together with vines. Then they brought out some of the men captured in the towns and stripped off their clothes, while Lukas and the genasi watched from the walls. Lady Amaranth was with them. She had sequestered the women in the old banquet hall, below them where there were no windows. She didn t want them to see her servants and followers as they slipped out of their clothes and began their transformations, a pack of wolves now, massed around the postern and inside the gate.
A few retained their human shape. They lit torches along the circuit of the walls and took their positions in the guard towers. Some joined Gaspar-shen and Lukas above the gate pointing their long, hairy fingers toward the row of bonfires and the men that hung above them now. Above the barking and snarling, gibbering and caterwauling outside the walls, Gaspar-shen could hear the sound of screaming. Lukas drew back his bowstring. The genasi raised his hand. Too far, he said Lukas s worst of many faults was his sentimentality. Why would he waste arrows in this empty way, to shorten the suffering of men already dead?
Lukas said nothing, only lowered his bow a matter of ten degrees, and shot.
Stupid, Gaspar-shen observed, but now he saw, three hundred yards beyond the gate, an open space amid a circle of wolves, and a great beast in the middle of it, a panther, he thought, until the creature rose up on his hind legs like a gorilla, and raised his paws into the air. So, no ordinary animal, and the arrow never reached him, though the shot was true. It exploded, burst into fire like a shooting star, while the beast sank to the ground again.
Lady Amaranth had rejoined them. She had changed into her leather armor, and tied her hair up under her leather cap. She had her own bow, and a wolf-woman behind her carried sheaves of arrows from the storehouse, which she laid out on the battlement. And so Lukas began to shoot in earnest, the great bow humming as he drove the stragglers back beyond range. Some of the wolf-women carried their own bows. The genasi guessed they might be terrible shots.
Five animals were dead in the open meadow, a boar, three wolves, and something Gaspar-shen couldn t name. Bellowing, a yoked red bull tumbled from the causeway, and as if the sound were some kind of signal, all the other beasts quieted down. The great panther prowled beyond bowshot. He screamed, and the lycanthropes came forward at a run. Some carried the lopped trunks of spruce trees they had cut in the forest, thirty feet long, borne on the backs of a dozen animals. These were the siege ladders, and the lycanthropes set their trunks into the ditch and set them up against the walls. With superhuman agility they scrambled up them. Once on the rough stones of the upper wall, they scampered up through the embrasures to struggle with the women there. Lady Amaranth was their commander, and she shouted, lit one of her arrows in the torch above her head, and leaned over the battlement to shoot directly down into the ditch.
When he was spitting, Gaspar-shen had seen, lit from the glow of his saliva, a narrow stream in the bottom of the ditch, which he had assumed was sewage from the castle, though he had not caught the scent. But as the flaming arrow fell he guessed it might be something else, a flow of naphthalene from some ancient cistern. With his scimitar in one hand, his short sword in the other, he had jumped onto the parapet and hacked at a trio of wolf-men on the narrow stones as the ditch erupted into fire. Impregnated with naphthalene, the bases of the trees also burst into flame, which climbed up the pitchy bark. Screaming, many of the lycanthropes dropped down into the smoky fire, while the ones that remained above were quickly overwhelmed.
Gaspar-shen could hear the hum of Lukas s bow. Lady Amaranth was with him. They were shooting onto the causeway where the enemy pressed at the gate. Borne on a flood of outstretched arms, more tree trunks moved slowly from the forest s edge. Gaspar-shen guessed they would be more careful this time, and perch them from the ditch s outside lip. The lycanthropes had their own source of fire. They piled brush and timber against the gate. Two wolf-men labored over the rubble of the old bridge, one carrying a torch, the other a leaking skin of oil. Lukas shot them both, but someone else snatched up the flame.
Sortie, Lukas shouted, but Gaspar-shen was already halfway down the stairs to where the wolf guard massed in the courtyard. The edge of his scimitar gleamed with an electric blue. With one hand he unbarred the postern below the gate. Everything outside was red fire and black smoke, except for a line of stone steps that led up to the causeway.
And Lukas was behind him, sword in hand. They hacked their way up to the gate, and when their enemies turned to flee, the wolf-women chased them down. Lukas spilled the skin of oil into the rubble of the causeway, and then pulled away the brush and threw it down into the ditch, where it caught fire. Lady Amaranth gave them cover from above. Then they retreated.
Variations of this same sequence returned during the night. The lycanthropes had hewn new trees and brought them to the wall, to the ditch s outer lip. Shorter, set at a different angle, these new siege ladders couldn t reach even the deepest embrasure, so that the wolf-men were vulnerable as they scrambled up the last stones, clinging to the rough masonry. Many died. And in the hours after midnight it began to rain, a steady downpour that extinguished the bonfires and made the rocks slippery.
A hard wind blew off the sea. The waves of lycanthropes, as they dashed themselves against the walls, established a slower rhythm. Finally, toward dawn, Malar himself came to the gate.
But the defenders had suffered too. The ditch now ran with water, and the naphthalene wouldn t ignite. The last sortie from the postern had ended in disaster. Now the door was locked and barred, but the enemy controlled the causeway and had brought up battering rams. Lady Amaranth watched them from above. Captain Lukas s strange companion with the glowing skin kept the small door, with what remained of the wolf-women.
The captain was with her. All the arrows from the storeroom had been spent. The weather had made marksmanship difficult, but even so the ditch was full of bodies, the causeway paved with them. Lukas had led the counterattacks along the battlements and had supervised a new tactic. With iron bars they had broken apart some of the crenellations, laboriously built over the past year, and pushed the heavy stones onto the heads of their attackers. Each success tore a new gap in the wall.
But they had not touched the rock over the gate itself, fearing for the integrity of the entire structure. Now, as the enemy regrouped, Lady Amaranth and the captain stood side by side, sometimes looking out, sometimes at each other.
She had lost her cap, and her long wet hair had tumbled down. Her face was smeared with mud, and she was bleeding from a wound in her shoulder, where one of the wolf-men had stabbed her. She felt close to tears, not just because the small community that she had built was failing, and would fail. Not just because many of the lycanthropes that she had raised up from pups or shoats were wounded or dead. Not just because she now saw she had been crazy to think that she could maintain a citadel of female authority here in this wilderness where had all the young ones come from, she now asked herself, that she and Esmerella the midwife had birthed in the nursery? Of course the lycanthropes had been going out into the forests and the fields of their own will to mate with the creatures who were now battering down their doors, surrendering to them one by one in degradation and pain, forced by nature she herself had not forbidden it. They were not her prisoners.
No, that was the larger truth, too big to think about. But there was a smaller truth also, which had to do with her own citadel. Captain Lukas turned toward her. He also was not looking his best, bleeding from a cut over his eye, one arm hanging awkwardly. His lips were split, his clothes badged with blood. He d laid his sword along the top of the parapet, and he was smiling at her, a man she scarcely knew, the first man she had ever seen, a man who had put down his life in her defense. Their enemies were endless, surging like the sea below the walls, and doubtless in an hour or two hours they would break through the main gate and overwhelm them. But she had kept a smaller gate inside herself, and this man stood outside it, his blue eyes and dark hair.
Are you hurt? he said.
It s nothing.
But she was lying, because she was hurt. It was quiet down below, the noise stifled by the rain, and the preparations for the final attack. And no one was around them on the walls. The lycanthropes tended the wounded. Amaranth crossed the broad, wet stones until she stood facing Lukas, just a few feet away, and then one foot, and then a few inches, and then nothing. Careful not to touch his scarcely healed ribs, she put her hand out.
Lady, you re crying, he said, which was not true. She reached up to touch the tears on his own cheek. How could anyone tell in this rainstorm? She knew because she could feel the shudder in his breath.
It s all right, he said how could it be all right? How could anything be all right? He bent to kiss her, and she turned her head to avoid him. But then she turned back, fiercely and furiously pressing her lips against his, and then opening her mouth so he could feel her teeth. He was the one who was here, and that was just as well. Better him than another. Look at the damage he had taken for her. Think of the damage he would take. Besides, he had played so sweetly in the afternoon, songs from her childhood in High Karador.
She felt his hands on her back. There came a shout from down below, and another shout. In time they turned away from each other and leaned over the parapet to watch Great Malar come down the causeway toward them, moving in the middle of a phalanx of enormous wolves. He lumbered forward on squat, bandy legs, swinging his hunched body forward on his massive knuckles. But then they saw him rise up, straighten his back, raise his head, step forward almost like a man as his legs lengthened and reformed, his arms dwindled. Then he was down on all fours again, his long black tail lashing the air, his claws and teeth like sabers. Then his rough black pelt took on a scaly sheen, and he sank down lower, a black alligator wagging his enormous jaws. As he moved forward, his body transformed through a spectrum of predatory beasts, until he reached the gate itself and stood up on his hind legs.
Lady, I must go, said Lukas.
He ran his fingers through her hair. Then he lifted his sword off of the stones and ran down the spiral steps into the courtyard to take command of the gate. She watched him, and then looked past him to the broken cistern midway to the keep, the mouth of the tunnel to the sea. There was fighting there too, wolf-men who had climbed up from the water. Lycanthropes were inside the walls. So that was that. From down below she could hear the sound of the battering ram, a hollow pounding on the old, uncertain timbers.
The rain fell. Amaranth wiped the water from her eyes, then looked up at the sky. All of her women had run down to join the fight at the gate. She was alone on the battlements, so she was surprised to see movement along the wall to her left. A small figure walked along the outside edge of the parapet, balancing precariously over the abyss, her little arms spread wide. She raised her head, and when she saw Amaranth she smiled, clapped her hands, and made a mincing, dancing series of steps until she stood above her, a little girl in a green dress, her long hair tangled, her lips cracked and chapped, and she was missing some teeth.
Hey, you, the little girl said. She was completely dry. Now she turned an ungainly pirouette and peered over the edge, where Malar and his beasts smashed at the gate. She wrinkled her snotty nose. I don t like him. I only had one priestess on this entire stupid island, and he killed her. The only one in generations, and he chopped her up into little pieces. She turned back to look at Amaranth and closed one eye. Shall I chase him away?
Please.
I don t like him, repeated the goddess.
He makes a big mess. She squinted, then picked a ball of snot out of her nose, examined it briefly, and flicked it over the parapet. You know, she said, as if conversationally, your walls are coming down.
Amaranth said nothing.
It is not my will, continued the goddess, that they should stand.
There was screaming from the courtyard. The postern was broken open, and there were wolf-men in the courtyard. They had found the doors to the hall where the Northlander women had taken refuge. From where she stood, Amaranth could see neither the genasi nor Captain Lukas, though there was still resistance down below, she knew. There would always be resistance.
There was a hollow booming underneath her feet where the gate was giving way. The stones shuddered from the impact of the ram. But then Amaranth could feel a different kind of rhythm deeper and lower down, as if the crashing of the timbers formed the surface echo of something more profound, another gate deep under the earth.
Look, Chauntea said, and pointed her dirty little nail-chewed finger. To the east, beyond the beast-strewn meadow that led down to the shore, Amaranth could see a black line on the horizon under the milky dawn light, as if somehow she could see the bluffs of Oman Island fifty miles away across the strait, and they were moving toward her, a wall of water, she saw now. At the same time she could feel the cause of the great wave, a low trembling inside the earth, and as she watched, she saw the topmost tower of the wrecked keep, high on its stone pinnacle, crack and collapse.
It s time for you to go home, suggested the goddess. There s no place for you here, you and the Northlanders. This is the land of the Black Blood.
I ve tried to go home, murmured Amaranth.
Try again. East of Karador, by the water, there s a sacred grove of trees where the women pray to the Earthmother. In the evenings they pray to me, hoping you come back. When the light of the setting sun touches the water, they catch it in their bowls and pour it out again. It s a libation, silly! They have a good reason to pray. Your sister is a tyrant. Your nephew is a monster. That s the sad truth.
I ve wanted to. But I can t find a way.
You ll find it, consoled the goddess.
Not land, not sea, not air. Find your boy and go. Follow the signs to the gateway in the Breasal Swamp. It will bring you home. Bring the boy with you. Tell you the truth, she said, and hope to die. He s cute.
He s not
But the little girl laughed and stuck her tongue out, as if to say, I saw you.
Amaranth turned back toward the sea. The battering ram had stopped its noise. Everything was quiet on the battlements, partly because she and the goddess stood as if in the silent epicenter of chaos, and partly because for a moment the lycanthropes had ceased their fighting, and all of them drew breath and looked around. The world itself was drawing breath. Amaranth watched the great wave suck the sea away from the beach, revealing weedy boulders and sunken wrecks there had been a battle here in the old days, between the fleets of the Northlanders and the Ffolk.
Then the wave broke, and lost its height, and surged ashore over the low bluffs, across the meadows, over the causeway and beyond, until it flowed into the ditch itself, and broke against the walls of Caer Moray. When it pulled back, Amaranth could see Malar the Great in the shape of a black alligator, tumbling over the fields toward the shore.
Goodbye, Chauntea said. Turning on the parapet, stretching out her arms, she danced back the way she had come, sometimes hopping on one foot. Whether it was from the force of her steps, or from the water churning underneath her, just behind her the wall cracked and slid down into the ditch Amaranth wasn t watching. The chaos closed around her now. She picked her sword up from her feet and ran down the steps into the courtyard where the fighting was over, the armies were dispersing, whatever remnants could pull themselves away.