Kip, the cat-shifter, came to, trussed-up in the predawn chill, damp soot in his nose. The boy s desire for a bath threatened to overwhelm him, make him move when he knew he shouldn t move.
When light broke, it would be the third morning after the fight on the beach, where he, Marikke, and the Savage had been taken prisoner. Since then the lycanthropes had brought them from the coast, the first day through swamps and forests, the second day through treeless, upland meadows pastureland when men still lived here, when all of Moray was a Northlander redoubt, and where the shaggy, long-haired cattle had been famous. But now finally they were coming onto the spine of the land, the curved ridge of mountains that ran through the middle of the island from Black Giant in the south to Scourtop above them, a line of jagged peaks and glaciers.
They had not been harmed, despite the twenty or so lycanthropes the Savage had killed when they attacked the skiff. Perhaps their own lives had no more value to them than other people s. They had left their dead unburied or else floating in the water, and they had pulled their prisoners into the fen, along a track through the cold mud.
But Marikke couldn t run like that, all night like a wolf. Gasping for breath, she had collapsed on a dry island in the middle of the swamp, where Kip and the elf faked a weariness they didn t feel. Unspoken was the need to delay, to allow Lukas and the genasi to catch up.
But the lycanthropes weren t having any of that. Already half their number had split away north, while the rest had alternately dragged and chased and lashed their prisoners west toward higher ground. Under the full moon they gathered under an oak tree, its bark stripped and cut with claw marks. The ones who still had human faces muttered and complained, while the rest snarled and howled. Scanning them with his bright cat s eyes, the boy could see that there were pigs among the lycanthropes, sows and boars. And there were cats, like him or partly like him. Kip wondered what emergency or cause had brought them together and made them forget their natural antipathy the leader, a wolf lord with a reddish coat, led into the slavering circle a troika of great pigs, who caught the prisoners up in their strong, peculiarly joined arms and flung them up across their backs. Then they could make time.
Naturally fastidious, at first Kip had been happy to be carried, happy to get his feet out of the mud. But the journey had quickly proved uncomfortable. They had tied his wrists and ankles, and flung him up like a sack of grain for the hard, jolting ride. And when they stopped to light a fire or make food, that had been worse the lycanthropes had discovered quickly that his nature was similar to theirs. But because his form and his understanding were so much more refined, so much closer to a human being s, they hated and resented him, mocked him out of jealousy, and called him names. The ripped-up, bloody offal they had given him to eat, he had not been able to touch.
Now was the third morning, and as the stars grew pale, Kip found himself where they had flung him, curled up against the pig-creature s broad, hairy back. The lycanthropes slept in piles, tangled together with their own kind. As always, their animal nature prevailed during slumber. The boy, also, felt the subtle, tiny shift like an electric charge in his mouth, hands, and feet, as his teeth and nails receded. He savored the feeling, as he did every morning upon waking.
But he did not stir. He didn t want to disturb the animals who lay around him. He wanted information, and after he had opened his eyes briefly to examine the heaped-up embers of the fire, he shut them again, and instead allowed his gaze to turn inward, focusing now on his connection with the creature beside him, whom he was touching through his face, arm, and breast. He felt under his cheek the stiff, shiny, mottled bristle, the long muscles underneath, the occasional tremor or twitch. All that was like the skin of water on the surface of a pond, and he was the fisher cat, crouching by the shore, claws outstretched, hating the water yet fascinated also, looking down and down for the small fish, slow and sluggish in the cold depths, because the animal was asleep. A flash of yellow, and he had it on the bank, had slit its cold belly and spread it out, a map of entrails, and in it Kip could see a world of enemies as the pig-man perceived them, the hostile islands of Oman and Norland and Gwynneth and Alaron, where lycanthropes were hunted and despised. Even here on Moray the enemy still held fast, stubborn outposts of men and orcs and infestations of fey, all of whom must be driven out and destroyed, for the sake of the Black Blood.
The boy allowed his thoughts to move and stretch a little bit.
Where are my friends? he asked without asking.
Another fish on the bank, slit open. They are here.
Where are you taking us?
Into Orcskull.
Why?
This one was darker, deeper, an eel slithering away. But he caught it and hauled it up, though it twined around his wrist. Great Malar says it. Great Malar wants it.
No sooner had these words, unspoken, risen to the surface, than he caught a glimpse of something lower down, something at the bottom of the pool, a shadow or a shape that waited there, its red eyes glowing in the dark. Kip shuddered, and he felt the wereboar come awake under his body as without moving he slunk away from the inner water and feigned sleep.
Not far away, Marikke lay on her back, her face unquiet, her long hair tangled and caked with mud. Unlike Kip, who craved physical contact even when he was in danger, who was always brushing up against you or else reaching out to touch your arm, she had dragged herself away from the night fire, humping on her elbows and her knees to be alone. This was not because she had any illusions of escape her wrists and ankles were tied too cruelly for that. It was because she needed space for the goddess to find her and speak to her alone, space to become greater than she was. Now she was dreaming, close to the surface of sleep, because of the pain in her swollen hands. But even so the goddess crept out to her, lightly on the thin edge, and greeted her with the sign of the morning. In Marikke s dream she had taken an unusual form, a cloud of bees buzzing without sound, and yet retaining the shape of a young girl.
Daughter, I am afraid, she said, though she was young enough to be Marikke s daughter. The ice is breaking in the mountains, and Great Malar wakes. An angel comes to prepare the way. Swift is his sword, bright is his hair. But it is your choice, what happens next.
Hurt and cold as she was, Marikke said nothing. You re not listening, said the girl, her mouth drifting and reforming as the bees turned and moved. You re not seeing what I see. Oh, it is because you are suffering, she said, and even in this dreadful bleak morning Marikke almost had to laugh, because now the goddess was around her like a golden cloud, caressing her without touching her, moving the blood through her body and opening her up. It was a cold, clear dawn in the Month of Melting, and there was frost on the rocks. Back to the east the way they d come, the sun was rising over the straits.
Always her heart lifted when she came into the mountains. It was a landscape she knew from the time when she herself was a little girl in her father s stone hut in the Fairheight hills on Alaron, watching the wet clouds chase the rainbows up the valley. The Orcskulls were drier, the chalky ground the color of exposed bones. Still she took comfort in the graceful granite peaks that rose behind her, touched now with dazzling light. Surely the goddess was in all places, and all creatures served her in their own way.
But where was the person who had attacked them on the beach, the mage with the shining sword who had taken the Savage by surprise as he cut the lycanthropes apart?
Where do you think you re going? Harsh and deep, the voice came from behind her. The first day of this journey from the coast, she could scarcely tell the lycanthropes apart, and all their words sounded like grunting and babbling in their distorted mouths. But now she recognized the Common tongue. Now the goddess had blessed her with understanding, which allowed her to twist away from the kick when it came, the clawed foot that caught her in the side and not the head. The creature rose above her now, a rust-colored old wolf-man, the leader of his pack, his beard grizzled and stained. He reached down with his cruel hand, and with his claws he hooked her by the rope between her wrists, and dragged her down toward the encampment where the fire had burned the night before. There he threw her on her face in the dry dirt.
They were in the ruins of some Northlander stable or sheepcote from the old days, a roofless rectangle of laid stones, collapsed on two sides and the fire pit in the middle. Kip was there with a wereboar squatting over him, an albino giant with a broken tusk, who had forced his cloven hand into the shifter s hair and pulled back his head. Where is he?
The Savage had disappeared during the night. Always this was the lycanthropes vulnerability, their long hours of sleepiness after gorged meals and frenzied motion they spent more hours asleep than awake. Only a few of the cleverest were able to maintain their human shapes during slumber. The previous day they had gotten into camp long before sunset, and most of them had immediately collapsed into an unconsciousness that was expansive rather than profound, their claws twitching in their dreams.
The Savage was gone. The golden elf had slit his bonds, doubtless with some secret dagger he had hidden in his clothes. The two young wolves that had been supposed to guard him lay with their throats cut in a smear of dark blood.
But why hadn t he freed her where she lay, away from the others? Marikke had never trusted him how could you trust him? Everybody, everywhere had learned to hate these elves, arrogant creatures from the wilderness beneath the world, or else, if you wanted to think of it that way, from the mossy grottoes and shifting forests inside ourselves. Their outward splendor buried their black hearts. If one of them claimed to have changed his nature, run away from home, what then? Surely he could change back just as easily. Surely also the many traps he d laid for human women, as sticky and repulsive as any web
Where has he gone? snarled the albino pig-lord, forcing back the shifter s head. In his right hand, the creature clutched a knife between his two heavy fingers. Kip whimpered in fear. At these moments of crisis he was at his most human, a thin pale boy with a shock of yellow hair.
Later, with the goddess s help, stripes of red and brown would appear in it, but at this moment it was almost white, because of his terror. Around them and in the gap of the collapsed wall, Marikke looked into the faces of twenty or thirty creatures whose bestial nature was now paramount, and whose voices now drew tight around them like a noose of sound.
Oh, sweet Mother, Marikke prayed. Not my will, but yours. Even so, a little help might be appreciated
One of the wolves, his long back decorated with a ridge of colored mud, lumbered through the gap. His jaws sagged open, and his long tongue protruded into the shifter s face, while at the same time the pig-lord s hand had changed into a boar s cloven foot again and dropped the knife. But he pressed the sharp edge of his foot into the boy s neck, while the rest of the animals screamed and gibbered. Marikke closed her eyes, trying to find a place of inner calm, however provisional and momentary, a foundation from which her prayer could rise. The wolf-man stood above her, his clawed foot in the middle of her back. She sought her place of soft tranquility until she found it at the moment when several of the animals cried out in surprise or grunted in dismay, and she opened her eyes to see a man break into the circle, kicking the beasts aside. He seized the wereboar by its tail and dragged it back, twisting it at the same time until the creature flipped onto its side, struggling to right itself, digging its feet into the chalky ground.
Great Mother, Marikke prayed. And at first this person did seem like the manifestation of a prayer, because the beasts cringed away from him and were suddenly quiet. And because he himself seemed touched by heaven in the light of the rising sun, wearing clothes so bright they seemed to glow. And his sword when he drew it from the scabbard on his back seemed to burn with reflected light, as the beasts pressed down their heads into the dust or else turned to offer their bellies or their throats.
This was the sword-mage that had defeated the Savage on the beach. Then, in the darkness, Marikke hadn t seen him clearly. She didn t much care about the faces of men or women as a rule, and she was suspicious of physical beauty, which she imagined always hid an inner flaw. Yet to her, suddenly, the mage appeared achingly, painfully lovely, with a loveliness that seemed not decorative only, but seemed to mean something, to symbolize something true and just and right and eternal that was at first glance. So she was surprised to hear his voice when he spoke, a voice that held none of those same qualities, but was instead as harsh and jarring as an eagle s scream.
Brutes, he cried, what have I tried to teach you? Patience and discipline. That is what s required to be a man. You howl and complain of failure, yet turn away from every chance at victory at the first scent of blood. Believe me and have faith. Soon you will hunt again.
As he spoke he swung his sword, catching one beast after another with the flat of the blade, so that they yelped and scrambled back. One was too slow, a young boar, and the mage turned his wrist suddenly, so that the sword bit. One stroke, and the fleshy head sagged free, and the arteries spurted blood into a puddle. Take him and prepare his body. Some of you must be hungry after this long run.
Two of the wolves crept forward and dragged the wereboar away. Marikke knelt in the dirt, hands clasped, eyes averted. Now she was able to examine the mage more closely, and saw new details she had missed in the power of his first impression. There were gaps in his mouth where he had lost teeth. And she could see the lines of his veins and arteries, pulsing blue and red under his transparent skin. And there was some discoloration on his neck, some scaly rash that disappeared into his shirt.
He stepped toward her with the point of his bloody sword held low. He drew the blade between her wrists, freeing her of the cruel ropes, then moved behind her and freed her ankles. Then he did the same to Kip where he lay on his side.
Rise, said the mage and then laughed when he could not, his hands and feet as cold and useless as rocks. Terrified, Kip turned onto his back, his hair as white as bleached bone.
The pig-lord, who had recovered some of his human shape and clothes, now shambled forward. We had an elf, he grunted. A golden elf. Yes, a golden elf. He escaped during the night.
The mage shrugged. I know him. I do not fear him. I made him prisoner. Let him starve here in the wilderness. These are enough. These two are what I want. Tonight the Black Blood tribes will gather in the dark of the moon. Tonight, standing in our own flesh, we will see the Beastlord roused from slumber, and he will call us by name. He will not turn away from our sacrifice, or despise it. You will see.
He strode over to Marikke, still on her knees. He bent down beside her, and she could smell his carrion breath. Our sacrifice, he repeated. All of us must give up something. Even me. I recognize a servant of the goddess. My name is Argon Bael. What is yours?
Marikke told him. This close, she could feel the heat that radiated from him, see the brightness of his skin. She closed her eyes. Oh, my lady, she prayed. And as she did so, she recognized the mage. He was the Beastlord s angel of vengeance, as Chauntea had described him. Marikke could see that now.
She felt his lips close to her ear. This is a matter of justice, not revenge, he whispered in his harsh voice.
All the other islands, they will hunt these creatures as they find them, exterminate them all. Here only are they safe. Is it too much to ask, one little island in the bright sea? One little sanctuary for the Beastlord? You know there are orcs in these mountains. And giants. And on the north coast, in Trollclaw, even men. Not all of them are dead. Is that fair, do you think? Is it too much to ask, to be rid of them? To wipe this land clean?
There is room in the world for all creatures, murmured Marikke, sounding stupid even to herself.
Is there? Is there so?
He helped her to her feet. When he touched her hands, the pain in them disappeared, and she could move her fingers. Attend the boy, he said, nodding to the shifter. Stay with him. You know they hate him more than you. Because he is more like them. It is their own nature they can t stand. Do not stray from me. I will protect you. These others
He swung his sword, shaking the blood of the wereboar off the blade. The gesture took in the ruined stable and the nearby ground. At that moment their enemies did not seem intimidating. Many sat or squatted, staring vacantly, while others curled up, already asleep. But after Argon Bael wiped and sheathed his sword, he clapped his hands. And in a moment the circle had reformed. The lycanthropes surrounded them again, and caught them in a net of focused and intense ferocity, following every motion or gesture with their eyes, and giving the impression that it was only Argon Bael that kept them from tearing Marikke and Kip apart.
Come, he said, and strode through the collapsed wall into the bright light of the morning. Above him, Marikke could see his wings, which seemed incorporeal, not part of his body so much as implied, a shimmering trick of light that spread out behind him, where the air seemed unsteady and discolored. He extended them as if for her inspection.
She helped the boy to his feet. Grabbing, chafing his hands, she provided a small version of the comfort the angel and the goddess had given her. Murmuring a prayer, she stroked the blood into Kip s fingers and led him forward, stumbling through the ranks of wolves until they reached the open hillside and the beginning of the rock fall. There a fresh breeze waited for them, and a change in the weather. Clouds passed over the sun, wisps of fog blew over the mountain crests, and it began to rain.
Crouching above them in the rocks, the Savage welcomed the fog, which soon pressed around him like wet feathers. He welcomed anything that hid him. Soon the peaks were lost to sight, but he could still peer downward through the boulders and watch the lycanthropes pick single file through the scree. These were the conditions that submerged the beast in all of them, the small wet rocks unsteady, and slippery, and uncomfortable for claws and cloven feet, for anything but hard boots. And so as they toiled upward, they appeared to him more and more as a line of unhappy men, held in place by obedience or duty, because animals in this weather would crawl away to shelter and stay put.
Moving from boulder to boulder, taking particular care not to kick loose any falling rocks, the Savage shadowed the line, making a path that was parallel to theirs and a hundred feet above it. In time they climbed up through a ravine at whose bottom flowed a quick, gray stream fed by snowmelt. They had left behind the grassy meadows and the drier upland pastures, decorated that morning with buttercups and lavender and mountain columbines. The golden elf in his black clothes, intent as he was on never being discovered, nevertheless with part of his mind was always witnessing and worshiping the beauty of the land, as he climbed up through the gorse bushes and juniper trees, their flat green needles lined with droplets from the fog, and here and there a complete spider s web, hanging as if made of water.
He had no weapon save for the tiny dagger he had hidden in his underclothes, which he had used to free himself the night before. He scanned the line below him for the packhorses. It was peculiar how, even in their most human incarnation, the lycanthropes betrayed their animal nature, not so much in their physical morphology especially at this distance but in the language of their gestures and their social hierarchies. In the front of the lines there were the predators, the panthers and the wolves, swaggering and aggressive. Behind them the pigs, less truculent but more devious, enablers and counselors and minions, prey and herdsmen, too. In their most human shape they herded livestock, a few dozen sheep and goats, and the line of packhorses carrying the baggage. One of those horses, in one of those big packs, would have his sword.
He skirted through a patch of juniper above the scree. Up ahead he could see the angel, glowing in the dim, foggy light. He was the one who had taken the Savage by surprise, that night on the beach. And behind him the boy and the healer, stumbling and unsteady the Savage also, in the night, had struggled with his little knife, his fingers cramped and bloodless. None of them had eaten anything since they were captured. The Savage was lucky to have found himself close to a sleeping pig-girl, a small shoat of perhaps fifty pounds, whose throat he had cut while at the same time locking his cold palms around her snout, while he rolled onto her head and stifled her. With a strange sort of pleasure he had felt the hot blood flow over his hands. Later, he had even drunk some of her blood, which had disgusted him. But it was good to be alive.
The ravine narrowed and grew steep. The stream was now more of a waterfall, and the lycanthropes labored up through the spray. The angel disappeared through a keyhole in the rock. The Savage, clambering above him, could see the land open up. There was an updraft here, and the fog rose like a curtain to reveal a broad bowl below the peak of a high mountain, its summit clad in ice. And he could see among the tumbled stones the ruins of a town, and stone forums and amphitheaters. The angel strode along a double line of collapsed columns, roofless and headless, yet each one carved in a different geometric design. There were no emblems the Savage could see, no statues of men or beasts, no floral patterns or even curved lines, but only zigzags and jagged edges and hard angles, all indicating or leading to a single point, an enormous square opening in the granite flank of the mountain on the other side of the circle of ruins, perhaps a mile away.
This place was far older than the wrecked farmhouses down below. Those were remnants of the Northlanders or Ffolk who had once lived in this section of the island, not long ago. But these structures were grander, evidence of an extinct civilization perhaps not even of men but of some other more perfect, more gigantic creatures, now disappeared.
Moving along the walls of fitted stone, far from the central avenue of columns, the Savage followed the lycanthropes into the porch below the mountain.
Looking up, Marikke tried to imagine the labor that had slaved away this temple from the rock, hundreds of years, perhaps, and thousands of men. They stood in a broad atrium that led into the heart of the mountain, a vacant granite cube sheathed in marble, embellished with a relief that showed a line of carved symbols on either wall, a progression of geometric shapes leading to the tunnel s throat. There a hole had been hacked out of the living rock, rougher and older even than the porch, and black with accumulated soot. Ironwork cressets were fixed on either wall, and as the angel led them forward he touched with his sword the torches hanging there, one on each side. They flared up as he passed.
But at the tunnel s mouth, under the first pair of torches, he turned and made his preparations. Not everyone was worthy to descend into the rock. This was the temple of the Beastlord, and here a distinction had to be made between the hunter and the hunted, the predator and prey. The sheep and goats and horses, brought along as draft animals or food were left in the atrium with a single she-wolf to guard them. Marikke could sense her disappointment when Argon Bael stretched out his shining sword to indicate her, a brindled, powerful creature that along with only a few others had maintained her wolf s shape throughout. Now she gnashed her great teeth as if trying to argue, until the angel raised his hand.
The herbivores bolted out into the drizzle where they stood in dispirited groups while their guardian prowled around them. Over generations, she imagined, they had become used to wolves. But the angel kept behind another one of the wereboars, whom he slaughtered with his shining sword, and Marikke was horrified to see the creature at his most human with his cloven hands outstretched, with his snout upraised, his bulbous face full of understanding. By contrast, the others were at their most bestial as they tore him apart, there on the porch.
Marikke and Kip retreated to the side, where they climbed up onto some tumbled rocks. Marikke put her arm around the boy s shoulder. His clothes were damp, and he shivered with cold. His hair was bone white in the torchlight, and as his head fell forward against her side, Marikke could feel on the surface of her skin a pleasant sort of pain, his mind probing into her for comfort. And so she tried to provide it as she had for all these years, ever since she had found him orphaned on Alaron when he was just a kitten, as you might say, his family s isolated cottage in the high pastures broken into and destroyed by people who despised his kind, or mistook them for lycanthropes out of willful ignorance. All over the Moonshaes they d been hunted down.
But he was more than just a shapeshifter. He had another, more secret gift. Lady Ordalf had sensed it in Caer Corwell. As she watched the beast-men snarl and fight over their uncooked meat, Marikke prayed to Chauntea the Great Mother, whose servant she was. The rock walls impeded her, and her own dark mood. But the goddess was as merciful as always, and soon it was as if a small flower had pushed itself up through a bed of stones, and the boy found her hand and squeezed it.
But the angel of vengeance, also, felt a change in the rock chamber. Putting his sword aside, he clambered up to stand over them. And because he was unarmed, and because of the small measure of peace in her heart, and because the boy had now closed his eyes in sleep, she was able to look up at him without fear. She could see that he also was weary and unquiet, his hair dirty and thin, and a rash over his cheeks.
Tell me, he murmured, is there anything else left there for me?
He reached down and seized her by the hair, hurting her a little bit. Let me tell you why you re here, he said. I want you to know, because when a woman and a child sacrifice their lives, it must be in the spirit of loving kindness, a gift rather than a coercion. Otherwise it is for nothing.
He tightened his grasp of her long hair, pulling her head back so she could look into his eyes, haunted and colorless and ringed with darkness. You must think we are alone here on this island. All the others, boats travel back and forth between the busy harbors. But here also I have ways of getting news, and when I heard from the fey queen in Karador that she was sending a gift to me, a priestess of Chauntea and a shifter boy, I dispatched my servants to the beach to intercept you and bring you here. I saw the signal fires across the strait from Kork Head. A present from Lady Ordalf, who is otherwise a mangy vixen from the pits of the Nine Hells. The others, they don t matter. Do you know why that is?
Marikke had already guessed, but she wanted him to say it:
Tonight it is the dark of the moon, continued the angel. For many years the tribes of the Black Blood have gathered here and prayed to our god s memory, and watched our power dwindle. Northlanders in the Delve, raping our land of its treasures. Terrible creatures in these same mountains. But that s not all, and not the worst. For ten years in the ruins of Caer Moray there has bloomed a flower.
But now suddenly Marikke didn t want to hear what he was talking about. She wanted to know about the Beastlord. Ever since the Spellplague nearly a hundred years before, the grip of Malar had weakened in these lands. No lycanthrope now living, or his father, or his father s father, could have seen him prowl these mountains. For all these generations, Marikke imagined, this one angel had kept the fire of his worship burning in this place with stories, and faith, and empty rituals.
Tonight that would change. As she looked at him, as she listened not to his words but to his tone, Marikke could see and hear in Argon Bael a mixture of urgent hope and desperation. He was like a starving man who has been offered meat, but fears he is too weak to stomach it. Or he was like a man grown used to insubstantial shadows, and both fears and craves the light.
Tonight is the night of prophecy, he said, and the air carried to her, again, a whiff of carrion. Queen Ordalf knew it I saw her face in the surface of the pool when she spoke to me. It is because of our sins that the deities of fury turned away from these lands and left us alone. I have tried to nurture the pure faith, even as I have seen many of my beasts abandon it over these ten years, seduced by heretics in Caer Moray. But tonight we will redeem ourselves, and you will help us.
Wildly and circuitously, he spoke of a prophecy Marikke knew: These small deities, cast down in the Spellplague, could not reassume their actual flesh without the intervention of a greater god, the Great Mother, perhaps. Until then they could exist only in nightmares and visitations, when they could trouble the minds of their worshipers and gnaw on their dreams. They survived best in memory, which was not strong among the savage lycanthropes.
I will not help you, she said.
Ah, but what about the boy? Do you think he could live here without you? Or without my protection my people hate him, because he can survive in the human lands. They will tear him limb from limb.
Marikke tightened her grip on the boy s shoulder, felt his cheek against her side. I will not help you, she said.
But what if I don t need your help? Argon Bael bent over her, his narrow face as intense as any bird of prey s. Queen Ordalf is notorious, but not for her stupidity. She scarcely saw the boy, yet she knew what he was. She touched his fingers and she knew.
I will not help you.
I think you will, he said, and let go her hair.
Come, my boy, he continued, smiling, and Marikke could see his angel nature struggle to the surface, as if he d lit a lamp inside himself, and she could see it glowing through his alabaster skin.
The torchlight around them seemed to diminish, and outside the afternoon was far gone. Argon Bael bent down and gathered up the sleeping boy into his arms, and with a tender gesture brushed his shock of hair from his delicate ear, just faintly tinged with calico fur. Kip seemed to fall into a deeper slumber, and he put his arms around the angel s neck for comfort, and sighed as if reassured. Argon Bael carried him over the wet stones of the porch, stepping lightly over the smeared blood, and into the tunnel s mouth.
Miserable and dispirited, Marikke followed close behind, and as they moved past the torches in their brackets each one flickered to life as if touched by the angel s essence and then bound to mimic it, all the way into the mountain s heart. The tunnel was rough-walled and unshaped, in contrast to the marble porch, a hole that wound down into darkness, its floor covered in gravel. Oh, sweet Mother, Marikke prayed. But it was as if the goddess of the forests and the fruit trees had no purchase here, and could not find her in the dead underground, in the Beastlord s tomb.
The lycanthropes followed, quiet and subdued. Perhaps they also were lacking faith, Marikke thought. Perhaps every month Argon Bael had tried some trick like this to keep their hearts alight. Oh, sweet Mother, she prayed, make me wise when the time comes but there was silence in the part of her mind where the goddess lived. Instead she filled it with worrying and predictions while she ransacked her memory for the words of the prophecy that Argon Bael had mentioned. And there was something else he d said. Tell me about the flower, she asked him. In Caer Moray. Is it a yellow rose, by any chance?
The torches around them burned up bright. The angel hurried down the slope, which curved to the right. He stopped and turned, his eyes blazing, his sword across his back, the sleeping boy in his arms who cried out as if beset by evil dreams.
This is not a flower that is native to Moray, hissed Argon Bael. It is an alien species that has come to us from Gwynneth Island, where it crept up from the Feywild, beautiful and deadly. Let me tell you what the lycanthropes have done in Caer Moray, these last ten years. They have turned away from Malar and the hunt. They offer no blood sacrifices. They ignore our cherished festivals, and instead have forged alliances with our enemies. In the winter months they visit Northlander villages in the deep snow and bring food to them if they are starving, smoking meat from their own tables. They claim this is an ancient rite, handed down by Garmos Saernclaws himself it is a heresy, a perversion. The Feast of Stags, they call it. Always they feed the human part and starve the beasts, so that many of them can no longer run on four legs and stumble if they try. Slaving together under their fey princess, they have rebuilt the old human walls, the human towns and palaces that our ancestors burned, that our ancestors spilled their hot blood to destroy, and now they live in them, sitting in chairs and sleeping in beds and roasting their food in fire. They do all this as if in Malar s name. And he permits it in his slumber. But when he wakes
In his arms, Kip moaned aloud. The angel smiled, and stroked his brow with a gesture that seemed for a moment like tenderness. Then he turned and hurried down the slope, deeper into the tomb.
The Savage, crouching in the drizzle up above, in the darkening afternoon, now witnessed a strange thing. He hid behind a broken marble pillar. In front of him the horses, sheep, and goats stood in clumps, tearing at the grass that grew up through the stones, or nibbling at the wet branches of the gorse trees. Among them and around them prowled a wolf, an enormous brute who had established a perimeter for them, squatting to piss along a circuit of fallen stones. Whenever she got close they shied away in terror, but then quickly forgot as soon as she retreated into the wide porch, where, because of a protruding section of the wall, she was invisible to them, but not to the Savage as he watched. Distracted for a moment by a noise behind him, the elf turned his head. But it was nothing, a trick of the wind between two stones, and when he turned back the beast had changed.
This in itself was no surprise, because the lycanthropes were always changing, moving back and forth between their beast and human forms through a dozen different gradations. Even in the most rapid transformations he could see the shift, as their jaws, hair, and teeth grew or receded, and their joints reformed. Even in their most human state, he could still see the beast inside of them, and even as animals he sensed the human clawing to get out.
Nor did they wear clothes. The Savage had heard of lycanthropes wearing coats or cloaks and breeches, even boots, when they wanted to hide among humans or come into a town and steal away a human child. But these, far from any need to hide their nature, had run naked ever since they d fought them on the beach. By contrast, the woman in front of him had no animal in her as far as the Savage could see, no hairy hands or cheeks, and no protruding teeth. Instead, the cloak she wore was made of a brindled wolf s skin, its fierce, dead face arranged over her head as a type of hood. She carried a totem stick in her left hand. She was staring straight at the Savage, and it was obvious she knew he was there. Her face asked a question, and to answer it the golden elf stood and showed himself, though still keeping his body hidden from the flock of herbivores that anyway, the Savage guessed, would not have shown much interest, so intent were they on finding food.
The Savage knew what he was seeing. The druid made an impatient gesture with her hand, so he stole softly to the porch.
I ve been watching you all morning, she said as he came out of the rain. The porch was empty. Flames flickered from the cressets in the tunnel s mouth.
I am he began.
But the druid raised her hand. No names, she whispered, drawing close. I see you are loyal to your friends, which surprises me, because I hate your kind. But I have been watching you these past days. I did not think you understood what loyalty was, or had any honor inside of you. The fey murdered my family at Caer Corwell. Eladrin soldiers hung them from the battlements, the children too. But you have followed us all day when you could have run. I honor that, and so I will pledge my life to save them, the priestess of Chauntea and the shifter, if you help me. I am desperate. They have gone to rouse the beast.
She was, the Savage guessed, one of the Ffolk, perhaps a secret emissary of King Derid Kendrick in this most inhospitable of lands. Tall and thin and dark, she peered into the Savage s face with intense blue eyes. All these druids were a little crazy, the Savage thought, or more than a little. But he was used to people hating the fey.
Are you with me? she asked.
There are only two of us.
Are you afraid?
All this time the sky outside the porch had darkened as the rain increased. The Savage opened up some of the packs the horses had carried up from the valley, looking for his weapons. He found a long cloth bag, which he unstrapped to find his sword. I m not stupid, he said, if that s what you mean. He drew it from its scabbard and watched the fire play along the blade.
As if in response, a stroke of lightning struck outside the porch, and the rain redoubled. Thunder exploded over them, and the Savage looked out to see the grazing animals scatter away into the darkness out of sight. The druid raised her totem stick, and the Savage guessed she was controlling the storm at least a little bit, bringing it close, joining in its music.
It wasn t that he wasn t used to the long odds, but he disliked feeling trapped. It was one thing to follow thirty or so lycanthropes into a hole. It was another to feel forced or obliged to do it, because of the manipulations of some human woman pretty though she was who made no secret of her contempt for him and all his kind. If she only knew. He also had his reasons to hate the fey.
Lightning flashed outside, as if playing in the bowl of the ruined town. The rain fell in sheets, and occasionally it would splatter inward, pushed by the wind. The Savage found himself staring at the girl, her chapped lips and sunburned cheeks and bright eyes and thick black hair, her body under her leather clothes. The problem with these humans, he thought, was that their lives were too short to give them patience. Lukas also was like this, the way he threw himself and all of them into a fight without a plan, or at least a plan he would share. Perhaps this was due to the natural inferiority of human beings, which manifested itself sometimes as arrogance. He swung his sword in front of him in a complicated pattern, to limber up his wrist.
What are we waiting for? he asked.
She smiled, and the weathered skin made creases at the corners of her eyes. You re right. We are too few to fight the Beastlord in his den. We need a third.
A third? thought the Savage. We need a seventeenth. What was wrong with these people?
He had found some dry binding cloths among the saddle packs. Putting his sword aside, he used one to wipe his arms and face and hair under the druid s appraising glance. After a few moments she moved to the stone steps that led down into the storm and stood looking out, to give him some privacy, perhaps. At the same time, she might have been using the lightning to signal to someone down below, someone who now leaped up the steps into the shelter of the porch, a leopard with a piebald, mottled reddish coat who shook himself and then began his transformation into a man dressed in a leopard s skin.
Eleuthra, he said when he could speak. Well met!
Einar, she said his name, evidently. Another human, this one a Northlander, the Savage guessed from his red beard and red hair. Einar Stormsson, she continued, but she did not smile. The Ffolk and Northlanders were ancient enemies, had shed each other s blood for centuries throughout the Moonshaes, until the Amnians and the fey and other newcomers had had the bad manners to disturb them Stormsson turned, and in his flaring nostrils the Savage could detect some of Eleuthra s disgust.
What s this, a fey? said the Northlander.
You surprise me. Phew he stinks.
Acutely self-conscious of his dark skin and black clothes, his long yellow hair still glistening and wet, even his golden tattoos and the gold rings on his fingers and ear ridges, the Savage turned to Eleuthra as if seeking confirmation, and was happy to see the clear dislike in her face as she surveyed the other druid. He has come to help us in this fight.
Phew you trust him?
Perhaps her own bigotry seemed less attractive when she saw it in other people. She glanced at the Savage, and he could see her face soften. She almost smiled, as if to reassure him. Great, thought the elf. Now that it s established we all hate each other. But paradoxically, he felt strengthened by their low opinion. He picked up his sword and turned his back to them, as if goading them to follow, and strode forward into the tunnel s mouth, the flat of his blade over his shoulder, whistling a tiny common melody, which he had learned on Alaron.
Down below, at the bottom of the curling path, Kip and Marikke had reached the tomb, a vast cavern hacked from the living rock, fed with air shafts, because the torches burned bright. High above them the rock ceiling glistened and dripped, and the rough walls held a reddish hue. Underfoot the floor was lined with agate tiles, which looked like the flesh of a flayed animal in the red light. And in the center of the space, perhaps sixty feet from the cavern s entrance, there stood a high table of a different, lighter stone, carved with runes and ancient petroglyphs, and on it lay the body of the Beastlord.
The table was about the height of a man s chin. The lycanthropes had crept around the cavern s wall until they had surrounded it in a rough circle. Most held back, but the bolder ones had crept forward on their knees. Argon Bael, with Kip in his arms, had made a circuit of the table, igniting as if with his passage the stone lanterns at its head and foot, illuminating the creature that lay huddled on its surface, its spine curled almost in a circle.
Despite the lantern light it seemed to exude darkness. Steam rose from it, and a rank cat smell. The angel spoke, his voice loud and harsh in the enclosed space. You understand why the leShay queen sent you to me, and I brought you here. We could have killed you but the Beastlord stayed our hands, because he needed you.
He came to stand next to Marikke and spoke more softly, conversationally. All of us for all these years have wept for him, but it has not been enough. These stones are red from the blood of our sacrifices at the dark of the moon. This time we require an intercession from the Earthmother of Toril, to free the Beastlord from his tomb. Do you understand me?
Marikke shook her head. I cannot. And then as if to justify herself, to stave off punishment, she blurted out: All this way we ve been climbing down, and I have called upon her. We have ways of praying that are constant, of giving and receiving like the rise and fall of our own breath. Or the cycle of blood within our bodies we can pray without ceasing, she babbled, overexplaining in her fear. But she is gone from me, gone from this place.
The boy lifted his head from the angel s breast. His cat eyes shone in the lantern light. This is not a game, said Argon Bael. String her up.
And Kip could see that there were niches hollowed in the cavern s wall, and thirteen altar stones that made the circuit, cubes of carved basalt, brought from the surface long ago. Some of them still had skeletons or the remains of dismembered corpses hanging above them from a net of chains that rose up to the roof. Six lycanthropes seized up Marikke, treating her with cautious roughness as if they expected her to resist, but she did not. Head bowed, her tangled yellow hair over her face, she allowed them to pull her over to an empty altar stone, while at the same time some of the wolf-men, screaming and chattering like apes, had hoisted themselves into the chains above her head and released a pair of greasy iron manacles. One of them, a grotesque brute with orange hair, stretched out his legs to each side and let down a dribble of piss.
No, whispered Kip.
Then you can help her, said the angel. The queen told me. Lady Ordalf of Karador she understands these things. She told me you can climb down to the pit where our god is chained like this, perhaps, he said, nodding toward Marikke. I have not seen him. But you have the power.
No, whispered Kip. Do not make me.
Argon Bael smiled, and the wolf-men heaved on the chains, drawing Marikke up into the vault. She did not protest or say a word as she hung from her wrists. At the same time the angel flung the boy onto the stone table, onto the back of the creature that lay on it. Afraid he might fall, Kip seized onto the rank hair, and let his mind descend.
He had to force himself, for Marikke s sake.
At first, with his eyes closed, his cheek burrowed up against the beast s foul skin, he imagined he was climbing down a slippery ravine with the small stones sliding all around him. Black night without a moon, without a sound, and no wind. Cold. In his most catlike form, he crept down over the stones, until he stood on the lip of the abyss, and jumped.
Somewhere above him he heard Marikke cry out. He twisted himself over, because it was as if the direction of his fall had changed, and what was down became not up, but somewhere to the side. He fell down through the cold, through pricks of light that were like stars. And at the bottom, the ground rose up to meet him.
Because of what the angel said up there in the world of men and beasts, he imagined he might fall into a place just as horrible and full of terror. He imagined he might fall onto an island in a lake of fire, a barren land without a drop of water or a blade of grass. And he imagined that the deities of fury, Talos, Malar, and the rest of the divinities who had been confounded in the Spellplague, would writhe here imprisoned in pits or cages of fire. And so when he fell into the light, he imagined it might scorch his skin. And when he breathed, he imagined that his lungs might fill with poisonous, burning fumes. So he was surprised even more than he was relieved, when he found himself coming to consciousness in the bright, crisp sunshine, lying on his back and opening his eyes in a field of pale wildflowers. And when he rolled onto one elbow he could see the creature he had come to find, a black cat leaping in and out of the tall grass, searching for field mice.
High above, Marikke hung twisting in her chains, surrounded by grinning wolf-men. She also had made her own kind of interior descent, a way to protect herself from the pain in her shoulders and her wrists. She couldn t tolerate the sight of the great sleeping creature curled up on the table, or the boy clutching its greasy fur. And so she closed her eyes and imagined herself walking down the steps of a building in Caer Callidyrr, the city in Alaron where she had first met Lukas and the others, the entire crew of the Sphinx. Often, when seeking respite from the cares of the present, she would transport herself back to a place she had known, and not necessarily one where she d been happy. In this case, she was in a stone three-story guildhall in the middle of a warren of stone streets, far from the upland village where she d been born in a cottage in a grove of larch trees. But the floor plan of the guildhall was a complicated one, and in her mind she hurried by the empty courtroom where she had first glimpsed the tall ranger and his genasi friend, talking to Aldon Kendrick, applying for some kind of license, and, as she later discovered, negotiating for the Savage s release. Destitute, she had left Kip in an exorbitant inn and had come here to pursue any chance of honest employment, and maybe some that had not been so honest, a quest that had led her ultimately to Lukas, who needed a healer for his expedition. These locations in her memory were like the corridors and cramped rooms where they had taken place, and finally in her mind she found what she had been looking for, a narrow back passage and a twisting stair, which in reality had led her to the narrow office of the secretary of religious affairs, a dry young man who had rejected her credentials and had barely allowed her to speak, so contemptuous he was of her country manners and her country clothes.
Now the room was empty. In her mind she crept across the floor and peered into the inner sanctum, where in real life she d never penetrated, the lair of the functionary who had ultimately refused her permission to practice her craft inside the city limits. In her mind it was a spare, open place with windows along one side that overlooked a stone courtyard, a fountain, and a tree.
Her nostrils were full of the stinking cavern, which among other things had been used as a latrine by generations of lycanthropes. And her ears were full their foul music below her Argon Bael recited his incantations, while the rest of the beasts had broken into a kind of ragged, howling, wailing chorus that nevertheless contained vestiges of rhythm and melody. But in her mind she was immured in a stone room in a stone building in a stone city, surrounded by stone battlements. And it was here, nevertheless, that someone found her, someone she least expected, who scratched at the inner door and then came in, a little girl of perhaps eight or nine, with muddy, bare feet and dirty, broken fingernails, her brown hair a mess, wearing a torn green dress, an urchin from the streets. Marikke knew who she was.
Oh, sweet goddess, she murmured.
Chauntea smiled. Her lips were thin and chapped. Ghosts of freckles covered her brown cheeks. You are hard to find, she said, her voice light and soft.
I looked for you. I called you but you didn t come, lied Marikke, even though she knew what the goddess would say next.
Did you? Then what are you doing in this place? This is not my house. This is not where my servants look for me.
She came forward across the floor toward the windows, and with one hand she pulled and twisted at a lock of her long hair. I think you are hiding. I think you are afraid to ask what you must ask.
Outside in the courtyard, the fountain had overflowed, and water was spilling over the tiles. And the tree, old and stunted, had pushed out some new shoots. Marikke knew what would happen if she stayed. The tree would overflow like the fountain, a chaos of green. Vines and tendrils would force themselves past the shutters and into the room itself. In time, they would pull the stones apart, and the building would collapse.
I ll give you a hint. It is my will, said Chauntea, that the Beastlord should be free.
At these words, far away, past the sweating cave beneath the mountain, down deep in the abyss, in a field of wildflowers Kip the shifter, who understood cats, reached down to stroke the fur of the black hunter in the grass. Marikke couldn t see that far. Wearily, in pain, she opened her eyes, because she heard a new sound that had disturbed the savage music around the table, dispelled it in an eruption of shrieks and screams.
Someone stood between the torches at the entrance to the cave where the tunnel wound down from the surface, a golden elf with a red, flickering sword. An enormous leopard and an enormous wolf had leaped past him into the chamber of the tomb and were ripping into the lycanthropes along the walls, many of them still in the middle of their transformations the leopard had the snout of a yellow boar caught in his claws, while the wolf had closed his teeth behind a panther s neck.