The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) (6 page)

“On the morrow’s
Av’set
shall be the time of the
Salaka
. Until that
time all will sit in contemplation of what has passed this turn. Peace and
light upon you all.”

He dropped his arms and stepped back. Drums began to
beat, low, drumming out rhythms like the sea and the surf. And in the
background the special
tuku rhythm
reminded them of their silence.

Soku took her cue. As the last of the Western Queens of her
Yakan’tsu
to arrive she was the first to leave. Her
warru
assisted her to her feet. She spread her arms to the High Queen and bowed her
head formally, hiding her sadness at the proceedings behind a careful mask of
introspection. She did not begin singing the
ak’bala
,
the song of farewell. The pronouncement of contemplation and the delay of the
Feast honoring the Ancestors meant that all would sit in silence and fast,
accepting only one small meal of fruit and wine and water until the next
evening.

Soku was troubled by the way things had ended.
Tokia’s brash words had changed the whole tone of the
Bolorn
,
causing the withdrawal of the High Queen and incurring the displeasure of the
Av’rujo
,
and perhaps even the Deities. Even the formal word
Bolorn’toyo
had been a rebuke. It told them that the High Queen’s word was absolute in this
gathering and was not to be questioned; that the answering of their arguments
had been a courtesy only, and one they had abused.

Soku let her
warru
lead her to her litter, but she did not mount it; contemplation also meant that
one was shorn of all comforts, including riding litters or
av’tunning
,
or service of any type, besides the most menial, so that all might be on the
same level and share contemplation equally.

Soku began her consideration of
the turn’s events as she passed through the large doors. The words of Itil came
back to her, disturbing in light of Tokia’s display. Deep in thought, Soku
followed her servants, on foot, the long way through the Palace to
the
av’turun
that would take her to her
Lan’mba
.

morn was long ended; the light was
turning well into the afterzen...

The unnamed one returned
to the outer chamber to resume his interrupted sweeping, troubled as he always
was when coming from his patient. A distant jangling in the back of his mind
made him forget about the floor.

Speaking of trouble…
With a sigh he
picked up the broom and set it off in a corner, and
moved quickly to a small room just to the left of the main entrance of his home
and lit the crude lamps hanging from the walls.

Something had breached the second circle of wards
that he had around his home. Something big.

Must have missed the first circle breach in dealing
with her
,
he thought. Whatever it was, it was not friendly - the wards would not sound
for a harmless creature. He began collecting the things he would need as he
waited for an image of the intruder to form in his mind from the rites bound in
the wards. It came, and he scowled.
Lor’ugawu
. A whole pack of them. The
third pack in a ten’turn. They seemed to be following a trail, perhaps the same
trail of blood-scent that the other two had been following.

The girl’s blood scent. Deity!
He thought he
had wiped it out completely after the second pack. It was almost as if someone
had set them on the girl’s trail.

He worked faster, filling two quivers, one with
cloth-yard arrows for his long bow, the other with short quarrels for his
tri-bow. He strapped on his fighting harness and the thin plates of
Cribeau
-skin
armor that fitted to it. He quickly donned the chest and back armor plates, a
half-cover for his equine back, vambraces and gauntlets. The scale-plates were
still hard as steel, even after two hundred cycles, yet thin and supple, like a
second skin. To the harness he also added a sheath and short sword, the two
quivers, and the long and short bows, all placed with crisp, practiced motions.
Last he tied back the front of his hair and took up a short spear with a hooked
end. The whole process took less than twenty
grans
.

Nineteen grans too long
, he thought
grimly, as the third circle warning went off. He trotted from his home and
moved into a canter along the side path to the Norae and Este to intercept the
pack. He made the quick gesture that put up the last set of protections
directly around his home. It would not stop them, but it would cost them dear
to cross.

He was troubled. Not just because there had been
three incursions made into his territory by inimical beasts since he had
brought the girl to his abode. No, she herself bothered him. As the effects of
the poison slowly wore off, and the closer she came to full consciousness, the
more and more apprehensive he became, in fact.

Why...?

He swung more to the Este, gripping the spear
tightly, quickening his pace. He had to get to them while they were still in
the pack, before they separated and started circling. Once that happened, he
might not catch them all before they breached the last circle of wards.

Why did her presence bother him more than the pack
of blood-suckers that he trailed? She was an intruder of a different magnitude.
She was a shattering spear of reality in the dream of his solitary life, a rude
interloper reminding him that a larger world existed outside his tiny sphere of
subsistence.

And
how I don’t want to remember...

He caught a whiff of rancid blood and veered
instinctively, just in time. The first
lor’ugawu
landed
where his equine back had been, its red-tipped poison claws leaving great
furrows in the ground. It turned to attack him immediately, springing with a
swiftness that always surprised him.

The thing looked like a cross between a leech and a
badly injured wuman. It was a sickly yellow-gray; it crawled on all-fours, and
it had extra joints in fore-and back-legs. It had a loose spine like a cat,
and long digits that ended in wickedly curved claws. But most terrible was the
face, with straight, bristling hair, almost normal-shaped brow - but eyes with
blood red scleras and no nose except for two long, jagged slits, and a round
hole for a mouth that was lined with barbs. The tongue consisted of four
tentacles with hollow teeth at the ends, that it used to drain its victims of
blood.

It was fast - but so was he. He deflected the attack
with the spear, blocking the claws with the shaft and sliding them away from
him. Then he turned, sidestepping and whipping out with the hooked end. He
caught the thing’s shoulder from behind and tumbled it away, into the nearest
tree. He rushed in and aimed a savage kick to its head with his back hooves.
The skull caved with a sickening crunch. It fell with bony gracelessness. He
stepped on its neck and slit its throat before he left the vicinity.

Lor’ugawu
were only
dangerous in packs, when one had no warning. Not like the girl. She represented
a different sort of a danger, a wild unknown in his life of routine
complacency. Not like the other wuman hunters that stalked him from time to
time. They were faceless to him, nameless, mindless things, dim blurs with no
more higher-thought than most predators. But not she. No, she was in an
entirely different class of danger than they altogether.

Scuffing his hooves in the loam he resumed his
search for the rest of the pack. Adrenaline made his skin prick and sharpened
his senses. The trees parted before him, hiding smaller plants in the folds of
their buttress roots. He went cautiously - the blunt blades of the roots were
big enough to hide the entire pack. The canopy only filtered in the most
sporadic patches of light, and it played tricks with shadow and distance.

She was the most potent kind of danger to his turns
of light - the unfamiliar.

He came upon them suddenly - six of them. They were
gathered around the carcass of a rainforest deer that was still twitching. In
the split instant that they paused in feeding to take in his appearance in
their midst he harnessed the spear and unslung his tri-bow, notching three
quarrels in as many heartbeats. The biggest of the beasts gave a blood-curdling
shriek and attacked. He sighted and let fly as it leapt at his face. The impact
of the three thick bolts seemed to completely cancel its momentum, and it
dropped like a stone, its cry dying with it.

“That girl you hunt is more of a threat than you,”
he said, the silver of his voice harsh and raw with the blood-song that began
to rush through his veins. Battle
heat rose in his brain, temporarily drowning out the raw, broiling confusion
that gnawed at the core of his being caused by the girl. He pulled and aimed
three more darts, and two more of the blood-suckers died as they sprang to
drink his life, two arrows in the neck of one, and one arrow through the eye of
the other. “Couldn’t wait for the prime kill, could you, you gluts. She is one
and she is the more deadly peril to me than the lot of you.”

His taunts brought one more to its screaming end,
the three quarrels thudding sweetly into the chest it exposed with its enraged
leap for his throat. It fell and twitched beside the dead deer in lewd
imitation.

Yes, the threat she represented went beyond the
graceless spear-casts of inane blunderers using long-spears, weapons totally
unsuited to the wilds of the rainforests, and beyond the brainless blood-hunt
of these creatures.

The last two scattered for cover, going in different
directions. He abandoned the bow in favor of the short sword and spear. He
focused his mind, watching for telltales of motion, listening for faint rustles
in the dead leaves. Their coloring somehow made them able to fade into the
background, undetectable until they moved.

Motion - he threw the spear, not really aiming, and
turned to meet the beast rushing in from the other side. Two working together
under cover were worse than six in the open. The lor’ugawu hit the armor on his
second back and he curvetted and bucked to throw it clear. But it was ready for
that and bounced away while the other dove in for the kill from the curve of a
buttress root. He dropped and stabbed, skewering it through the throat. The
claws scrabbled at his armored forearms and its dark blood spurted, catching
him on the side of his face. He shook his head and yanked the sword clear,
turned to see the last coming in fast along the ground. He only managed to stab
it through the shoulder, catching the opposite clawed hand-like paw that
reached to rake his exposed face and upper arm. The
lor’ugawu
strained to get to him, pushing with its back legs, its sucking mouth inching
forward as it twisted in the grip of sword and hand. The barbs around its mouth
and the hollow teeth both could deliver a paralyzing venom. He twisted the
sword, driving it deeper, but the monster seemed determined to take his life
even as its own leaked, hot and fetid, down his gauntleted fist. The fanged
tongue whipped out, missing his eye by less than a digit. Daring greatly,
trusting that the wounded arm was useless, he let go of the sword and grabbed
the disgusting appendage that extended from its mouth and stuffed it, fist,
gauntlet, tongue and all, down its throat. The barbs closed on the armor and
found no purchace as the thing began to strangle. Now it fought to get away,
but he held tight to the wrist he had captured, pulling it closer, even. The
injured arm flopped and jerked, but he had severed the tendons with his wild
thrust and it could not raise it. He watched the back feet as the thing writhed
and died in his grip. Its eyes rolled up into its head and slime seeped from
its mouth, and its foul stench clogged his nostrils, gagging him, but still he
held on grimly, his teeth set, till it moved no more. Then he pushed away and
chambered to his feet, fighting the urge to empty his stomachs on the forest
floor. He looked about at the carnage and let out a breath, spat, moved to make
sure of each one. He stepped on each neck and pressed till it snapped, then
slit each throat. The creatures were amazingly resilient, and he had once made
the mistake of turning his back on one that he could have sworn was dead.

He made absolute sure of these. Then he bent slowly
to retrieve his bow, spear and sword, and to pull the quarrels carefully from
the dead creatures.

He piled the bodies in a cleared area that he
scuffed with his hooves, lined the ghastly pile with stones, and set them
afire, murmuring a short rite to contain it. Still, he watched it carefully.
Fire was an uncertain thing, not easily contained. Once he was sure that the
flames would not spread beyond the stone circle, he retrieved the carcass of
the first and added it to the charring heap. Then he went to find a stream to
wash in as Av sank low in the western sky, holding the spear in hand in case he
met more trouble. His mind slowly cleared and he was able to ponder once more
as the battle-fever left him.

Have these packs been sent after the girl?
Three in ten
turns was too much of a coincidence. She was a knot of puzzles. He had some
ideas about where she came from and why she was here, but he needed real
answers. For if she was who and what he thought she was, then his clandestine
survival was in jeopardy. Serious jeopardy.

For she was a person without a past or present. A
magisterial mystery.

He knew this from her. He had learned during her
delirium that the poison had an interesting side-effect - it made one tell the
truth, uninhibited, undiluted. By using this he had found out quite a lot about
her; he could ask her almost anything and she would answer in great depth and
detail, though sometimes her sickness interfered with her ability to talk
clearly. But any questions about her past or present circumstances, any thing
that would reveal her identity or her purpose for being in the wild, or even
her station in life, and she would babble nonsense, or stop speaking altogether
if he became insistent. Her life was effectively hidden, even when he nudged
her mind with his thoughts. Whoever she was, she had been conditioned not to
betray her origin under any circumstances.

His hands gripped the spear shaft hard; he was
unaware that he was no longer walking.

That she would not reveal her past, in itself, spoke
volumes about her. It unequivocally marked her as someone important with
important information to hide - or why bother?