The Ale Boy's Feast (13 page)

The white flare was not in his eyes at all. It was a shape painted on the wall—the very shape that had burned in his vision since Mawrnash. A magnificent snow-white peak. The mountain’s slopes spilled down to empty space, a span of unpainted stone above a jagged line of green treetops that had been painted to represent a forest.

Auralia never finished this picture
, he thought.
But it’s important. Look how the man stares
.

The statue’s face was blank, a question, as he leaned toward the blaze of the mystery, the white mountain, before him.

Looking over his shoulder, Cal-raven could see Auralia reaching forward, flickering in her circle of candles as if sparks had fallen to bless her.
She’s not fleeing from death and darkness. She’s trying to drag the world with her. To the mountain
.

“Cal-raven.” Ryllion’s voice from the darkness behind him bore a note of unease.

Sensing his time might be short, Cal-raven drank in the sight of the painting. Daylight increased, the mountain gleaming as if it were painted with the dust of crushed diamonds.

“This is what I saw from the Mawrnash lookout on top of Tammos Raak’s tower,” he said. “This is what caught the light and marked my vision. This is what Auralia hoped we would find.” He touched the gap between the painted forest and the high mountain. “If only you’d finished the painting,” he whispered. “You didn’t show me how to climb there.” Even on tiptoe he could not reach the lowest stroke of the mountain’s chalk.

Fetch me a ladder. I’ll get there
.

Something momentarily obscured the light. Cal-raven looked up in time to see an array of kites pass over. “Wait!” he cried.

A blast of shattering stone from the cavern behind him shook the ground.

“Cal-raven!” roared Ryllion. “Deathweed! Breaking through!”

He heard a wall crumbling behind him and a flood rushing in.

Ryllion leapt into the chamber. Beyond him, the candles went out around Auralia’s statue as a massive, dark arm wrapped around it. The bone-littered ground rose as if someone were shaking out a blanket. Water poured toward them, carrying a chaotic clamor of debris.

Ryllion sprang to balance shakily on the arm of the unfinished statue, staring toward the ceiling. Reaching down, he seized Cal-raven’s hand and pulled him up onto the other arm.

The wave of sludge broke against the painted scene, surged back to splash against the statue and rise as high as Cal-raven’s knees, battering him with branches and bones.

Ryllion twisted Cal-raven’s hand sharply, and he cried out in alarm. “I’ll play along with your game,” the Bel Amican growled through unnatural teeth. “For now.” Then he bent his knees and jumped straight for the opening, caught the edge and, grappling, pulled himself through.

The Deathweed snaked in, thick as a tree trunk, spiked and smashing at the cluttered tide, searching. As it struck and broke the statue, Cal-raven leapt for the wall, sank his fingers into the stone, and pulled himself up like a spider.

A tree branch came down through the window. At first Cal-raven thought it was another Deathweed tendril. But then he grasped it and heard Ryllion groan. He was raised up through the window and out into the day. Behind him, Deathweed struck the walls of the chamber.

On a grassy hillside, Cal-raven lay shaking at Ryllion’s feet.

“I’m not safe out here.” Ryllion watched the edge of the forest.

“Nobody’s safe anywhere,” said Cal-raven. “Not anymore.”

“What do we do?”

“We go on. Together. Two failures beginning again.”

“It’s not just Bel Amicans who want to kill me.” Ryllion’s eyes narrowed. “Your own people sharpen their arrows when they hear my name. Do you mean what you’ve said? About protecting me?”

“If the word of Abascar’s king is worth anything,” said Cal-raven, “you have it.”

he underground river writhed and turned, an angry snake seeking to shake off its anxious riders. But the ale boy clung to the raft behind his companions, who held to their battered boats as the line of crowded floats descended. Kar-balter shouted from his vantage point at the front, informing them all of what little he could see ahead.

Between them, the awakened Abascar dead murmured as if rousing from a dark dream. When they spoke, such strangeness! They described vivid visions of threads, lights, and boats that had carried them north through the earth. They claimed encounters with Northchildren in luminous veils. And the ale boy was troubled, for it seemed like a beautiful song he’d forgotten.

Striking stone wedges that jutted from the walls, the floats spun and sailed around bend after bend. The passengers were dismayed at how far and how deep the beastmen had burrowed. Steep riverbanks rose to fissured walls where broad-backed toothbeetles clung in clusters, scrabbling and chewing at the earth’s oily seepage, their scalloped purple shells aglow. And in the scavengers’ pale light, a sickening spectacle was revealed—beastmen in a cacophonous travail, desperate to break through the walls, panting like dogs beaten bloody.

We can’t slip past unnoticed
, the boy worried.
Some see in the dark, like gorrels and viscorcats
.

And yet, the beastmen gave only weary glances to the passersby. Spread along the base of the walls, they bashed at the earth with pickaxes and stones, even with
their bare and bloodied claws, single-minded, desperate as men drowning beneath a layer of ice. Their chieftain was dead, and the Keeper had burned his ghastly throne to ashes. The veins through which he had poured Essence for his servants were gone. Cut off from the source of their strength, they dashed their bodies against the rock, seeking to restore their spoiled illusion of power.

They might be helped
, the boy thought.
If only we could lead them to the well …

As if reading the ale boy’s mind, Jordam said, “Bel’s well. Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? We need that water. Look what it can do.”

“rrGone. Stones, scattered. rrRiver, dry.”

“Did Bel Amicans destroy it?”

Jordam shrugged. “No water. Do rivers … move?”

As the raft rocked and spun, Mulla Gee, a Gatherer woman the ale boy had known from their harvest work together outside House Abascar’s walls, struggled to bind a sling around her broken arm with a roll of rag-strips. “I miss the sky,” she said to herself. She seemed bewildered to find herself here and touched the dark patch of dried blood on her temple where an arrow had gone in. “The sky was so near, I think. And the bright ones, the Northchildren … Where have they gone?”

Several of the riders turned, but instead of mirroring the ale boy’s bewilderment, they seemed to share the old woman’s longing.

The floats surged quietly along through the earth, carried like dry leaves through an unmapped world.

If I’m right and this river falls to join the deeper river, it will happen soon. What will we do then? These people are weak, unfed, and hardly capable of rowing north against the current
.

“O-raya’s boy is sad,” said Jordam, watching him warily.

“If I escape with these from Abascar, I doubt I’ll ever make it back to help the Bel Amican prisoners. And I promised I’d see them all to safety. But it’s too far. And I’m too tired.”

Jordam huffed a sigh. “rrMany promises. Too many promises. O-raya’s boy can’t do everything.” He splayed his large right hand across his chest. “Bel says heart has one hand.” He shrugged. “One … not big enough to catch everybody.”

The boy looked over his shoulder at nothing but coursing water and darkness.
Wisps grew into a thicker fog, concealing what lay ahead, and the torches hissed and sparked. When the current slowed and the waters quieted again, the parade glided steadily, and the passengers relaxed their grips, catching their breath. Jordam dipped the torches in the bucket of pitch, letting them flare.

Their relief was short-lived. The torchlight found two beastmen crawling along the nearest bank. The creatures saw the floats just as the passengers saw them.

One was a female, resembling sketches the ale boy had seen of stout, tree-dwelling Fraughtenwood trolls. She struggled along, one arm embracing her red and swollen belly to keep it from touching the ground. The other—a chalk white, hairless male—moved with a wolf’s predatory stride. His face was marred with a toothy grin, joyless and drooling, more a muzzle than a mouth.

The creatures overcame their surprise and sounded shrill appeals for help.

“rrDying,” said Jordam.

The creatures’ anguish was clear; rib bones jutted out through translucent flesh. The female’s belly bulged with the effort of something struggling and unborn. The male’s canine grin groaned a wretched spray. But when his baleful gaze met the boy’s, he turned his head, and a second face, this one more like a man’s, appeared on the side of his head, a visage that seemed to have been melted down by a hot iron. This second mouth spoke, pleading in the Cent Regus’s rough, barking speech.

The ale boy held up the empty water flask. “What can we do?”

Jordam steered the raft closer to the shore. “Won’t hurt us,” he said. “rrCarry them for a while. Find help. Somewhere.”

“We’re bringing them with us?” exclaimed Kar-balter from the front. “Did you drop your sense in the river?”

Jordam turned to the boy as if to ask for a better suggestion.

“They’re still dangerous,” said Kar-balter.

“rrYes,” Jordam agreed, and then he sighed. “Like me.”

The other Abascar riders did not protest as Jordam helped the beastmen climb aboard his raft, but they did crowd onto other vessels to make room, while the ale boy, Nella Bye, and the young man Jaysin, who was quietly singing through Abascar’s
hour songs, bravely stayed. The ale boy could see in the company’s expressions that old fears were returning like a fever.

Jordam barked warnings to the two new riders. They cowered, fretful. But then the male’s ferocious face fixed on the ale boy, and he licked at the crimson stains of his fangs. Jordam growled again, and the monster turned to gaze instead at the ripe flesh of the female’s hairless belly. She whimpered, covering it with her red-fleshed hands. It rippled as if the unborn could sense danger.

“What will we do if …” The boy held back the question. Then he wrapped his arms around his knees, peering anxiously ahead.

Moments later he felt a brush of cold, damp feathers against his face. Strands of luminescent lichen swayed through the fog, trailing across the passengers’ heads. In the quiet the passengers all faced forward, helpless in the river’s swiftening momentum.

The two-faced beastman howled a bloodcurdling lament from his dog face. Jordam snatched the last length of the rag-strips and bound it tightly about the creature’s muzzle, while the expression on the other, more human face seemed almost apologetic.

The ale boy’s gaze shifted to the female, who seemed weaker, almost asleep, while her belly quivered.

She’s dying
.

He put his head in his hands.
This river. It’s endless. What if I’m wrong? What if we have to go all the way back?
As they rounded a curve, he could hear a new sound—the thunder of crashing water.

They raced toward a wall of vapor.

“This is it!” shouted the boy, clutching the side of the raft just as the river, which had widened, plunged them down a rugged stair, threatening to break the bonds that kept their feeble vessels together. He yelled to hold on tight. The passengers needed no such instruction.

Jordam jumped across to the foremost craft and swiped at the fog as if he could pull back its curtains. In his absence the two-faced beastman snarled and
turned his savage face to the boy. The boy clutched the torch with its tremulous blue flame.

The floats jerked, crashed, tipped, spun, and slammed against one another. One split almost in two, and passengers reached for each other.

Boom, boom … boom
.

The beastwoman shrieked. The boy saw her try to leap from the raft as the male seized her by the leg. He dragged her back from the edge so that she fell, his claws digging ruts in her skin. She kicked and roared. His human face, wide-eyed and afraid, looked desperately about as if seeking an escape from its own body’s mad intent.

Boom, boom!

Jordam leapt upon the vicious beastman. The raft dipped sharply, its prow striking stone. Just as the beastwoman struggled to her feet, it spun around and flung her into the water.

With the change in weight, the raft flipped sideways. The boy lost the torch and fell headfirst into the stream. The rush cast him against sharp stones again and again.

Boom, boom … boom
.

Choking on sludge, he struggled to find a foothold. The river rushed over him, roaring in his ears, pummeling him with debris. His left hand was still closed fast around the strap of the water flask. He fought to get his head back above the tide. He heard muffled shouts. He saw nothing. A wave pushed him back under.

A firm hand gripped his wrist. He was lifted up, trailing strands of sludge-weed, and laid across the raft. The beastmen were nowhere to be seen, but he heard screams fading quickly behind them.