The Gathering Storm (66 page)

Because he lay so still, it was easy to admire the handsome lines of his face and the clean lines of his limbs. He had not lost any of his strength or beauty. He did not look as though four years had passed although perhaps there were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the product of worry and strain. Those hands had stroked her once; those lips had kissed her in a most satisfactory manner, and would again, she prayed.

He was only one man. Lives would be lost no matter what happened, but a second cataclysm would affect unimaginable numbers, would wipe out entire villages and towns and, as she had seen, perhaps whole civilizations. In the heart of the burning stone she had witnessed the cataclysm as it had ripped the heart out of uncannily beautiful cities built by creatures not of humankind yet somehow like them in their clever industriousness: the goblins and the merfolk. They existed as legends, stories told about beasts not as dumb as cattle yet animals still. But maybe the stories weren’t true; maybe humankind had forgotten the truth or hidden it so as to hide the shame of what it had done all unwittingly.

“I love him, but his is only one life. I would sacrifice my own life to save his, but I will not sacrifice the world. I will save as much as I can and see justice done. On this, I am determined.”

A sliver of a smile cracked that aged face. It was not an expression of amusement, yet neither did it mock. “You are an arrow loosed, Bright One. I wonder if you can be turned aside.” She ducked her head as a sign of respect, although not of submission. At last she closed the gap between them, and
Liath had consciously to stop herself from taking a step back because of the weird aura of her presence, her very appearance, and because like any horse she loomed larger than one expected. She was big, and could crush a human skull with one good kick.

But she stretched out her hand and offered Liath an arrow from the quiver slung over her own back.

“We are not enemies, Bright One. This arrow I will give you, in addition to my aid in bringing this human to safety. There is a child held for safekeeping in my camp whom he has sired.”

“My daughter?” The bow slipped from slack hands to fall to the ground, the arrow click clacking down on top of it. “Blessing? How came she to you?” All the questions she had kept fettered ever since she had first seen Sanglant broke free. “What was Sanglant doing here, hunting griffins? How did he get here? Is he alone? Exiled? How far are we from Wendar? How fares my daughter? Was she with her father all along? How came she into your care? What grievance had that man who attacked Sanglant? How can we return to the west?”

Li’at’dano chuckled. “You are still young, I see. You spill over like the floodwaters.” She bent, picked up bow and both arrows, and gave them to Liath. “Let us return to the encampment. Once there I shall answer your questions.”

THE odd thing was that the healer who attended him was dressed as a woman but resembled—and smelled like—a man. He was giddy with pain, and therefore, he supposed, unable to make sense of the world properly. The sky had gone a peculiar shade of dirty white that did not resemble clouds, and it had an unfortunate tendency to sag down and billow up. The effect made bile rise into his throat, and the nasty taste of it only intensified the way pain splintered into a thousand pieces and drove deeper into flesh and bone.

Sometimes the mercy of death was preferable to living.

Yet.

Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath. He tried to speak her name but could get no voiced breath past his lips.

“He moves,” said the healer, speaking to someone unseen. “See you his finger, this twitch? Fetch the Bright One.”

A shadow skimmed the curved wall of the sky, distorted by corners and angles, and abruptly he recognized his surroundings: he lay inside a tent. He sensed a smaller body lying asleep near to his, but as the flap of the tent lifted a line of light flashed, waking every point of pain.

He gasped out loud. Agony shattered his thoughts.

“Sanglant.”

Her voice startled him out of the stupor of pain. This time he could speak.

“Liath? Where have you been? You abandoned us.”

She was crying softly. “I was taken away by my kinfolk, but I had no wings to fly with. I could not follow them nor return to you. But now I have walked the spheres, love. Now I’ve come back to you and our child.”

“Ah,” he said.

The light faded. He fell into darkness.

And woke.

He hurt everywhere, but the pain no longer was excruciating; it was only a terrible throbbing ache that radiated throughout his body. Air thrummed against the walls of the tent in a complex melody that rose and fell depending on the strength of the wind and minute shifts of its direction, although in general it seemed to be coming from the southeast.

He heard Liath’s voice.

“I can see nothing. I have little knowledge of healing. I do not understand why she should have fallen into this stupor. What can
I
do to wake her?”

“Look more closely, Bright One.” The shaman’s inhuman voice stirred unexpected feelings in his breast—irritation that she had dismissed him so easily, fear for his lost daughter, determination to hunt down Bulkezu.

Bulkezu was dead.

But not by Sanglant’s hand.

A strange scent tickled his nostrils, a light stinging heat that was both sweet and hot and yet not really a smell at all. It was the taste and touch of sorcery.

Liath caught in her breath in the way a woman might, prodded to ecstasy. “I see it! It’s a pale thread,
there
. She is still linked to the daimone that suckled her, who returned to the sphere of Erekes.”

“Nay, as you see, the thread is broken.”

“So it is, God help us. As long as I walked the spheres, the thread between them remained unbroken. But when I crossed back into the world below … think of a man on the shore and one in a boat on the river who remain in contact by both holding onto a rope. If that rope is cut, the one on the river will be borne away by the current.”

“She has drunk the milk of the aether and it has changed her. She has not grown in the fashion of a child of Earth, not if she was born only four years ago.”

“She’s grown so quickly.”

“In body, but not in mind. Now that thread of unearthly sustenance is cut off. She lies adrift, betwixt and between this world and the one above.”

“What can we do?”

“Ah. You have asked me a question I cannot answer. I have not walked the spheres, nor can any reach the ladder who are mired in Earth.”

“How came my father by such knowledge, then, that he could teach me and that I could use that knowledge to climb?”

The shaman chuckled. Something about the comradely wryness of her response aggravated Sanglant in the same way a constantly buzzing mosquito makes it difficult to sleep. The centaur had not treated
him
with such respect. He was not accustomed to being treated as anything lower than a king’s son, a prince of the realm, and captain of a powerful army. He was not accustomed to being expected to prove himself to another’s satisfaction.

“Liath!” he said, emphatically, and found he could sit up. The movement dizzied him. Pain stabbed in his chest. He clutched the pallet he sat on and waited for the agony to quiet,
as it did. He recalled the process of healing well enough. He had gone through this torment more than once. It would swell and ebb in stages until he was as good as before.

He touched his damaged throat, the voice that had never entirely healed.

Or almost as good as before.

It was still better than being dead.

“Sanglant!” Liath had braided her hair back, and her face was clean. It shone with joy. She grasped his hands.

“A powerful spell,” remarked the shaman, behind her. Her mare’s body filled half the space of the tent, and she loomed ominously over the raised pallet that rested on the ground before her. A slight shape lay curled up on the pallet. It was Blessing, unhurt but utterly slack. Normally Blessing slept with her hands closed into fists, tucked up against her chin; now she lay like a corpse.

“What have you done to my daughter?” he demanded.

Liath recoiled slightly, a movement checked immediately but not so quickly that he didn’t notice that her first instinct had been to pull away from his anger.

“Has she cast a spell on her?”

“Nay, love, she’s done nothing.”

“Then why does she lie there like a body that’s had its soul torn from it?”

“I pray you, Sanglant, do not speak such ill-omened words! Blessing fell into this stupor at about the same time I fell to Earth, or so we believe. She spoke, she said that she heard me and that I was all on fire. Ai, God.” The words were spoken regretfully. “She’s so big. Has it really been four years?”

“Three years! Four years! I’m no cleric to keep track. To me it seemed like an eternity, falling into the pit, but perhaps you suffered less hardship separated from me than I did from you!”

She took a step back, surprised by his anger, as was he. But it just kept boiling up, and boiling up, and he couldn’t stop it.

“How do you know this creature is not our enemy? She refused to help me find Blessing. Now I find Blessing
here
, in her clutches. How can you know that
she
did not injure our daughter?”

“Her people
rescued
Blessing from this man called Bulkezu. Blessing’s own servant Anna told me the story. Anna? Anna!”

“She is gone to fetch water, Bright One,” said the healer. Sanglant had not noticed her, but she sat by the entrance on a cushion, hands folded in her lap.

“Anna could have been bewitched—”

“She seemed a practical enough girl to me. Here now, love.” Liath eased up beside him and set her hands on his shoulders. He knew her expressions intimately; he saw that she was concerned, even apprehensive, and—surely—treating him as if he were a flustered hound that needed to be calmed before it could be settled for the night in its kennel. “You’re not healed yet. You should lie down and rest.”

“Why are you taking their side against me?”

That
offended her, and she stiffened, shoulders going rigid as her chin lifted. “I take no one’s side. I am as much a prisoner, or a guest, of the Horse people as you are. As our daughter is. I have little more than a year to plan a great undertaking. I will ally with whom I must in order to stop Anne from bringing down upon us a cataclysm of such terrible strength and breadth that—God Above, Sanglant! You know what I speak of! You were at Verna. Why are you arguing with me?”

For the instant it takes to draw in a breath, a shimmering aura of flame trembled around her as though she were about to flower with wings of flame.
This
Liath had a terrible power. She was somehow the same woman who had vanished from Verna and yet now something else entirely, a creature not quite human and not quite the beautiful, graceful, scholarly, yet fragile woman he had married. The one he had saved from Hugh, from Henry’s wrath, from life as a fugitive.

The one who had needed him.

This
Liath had killed Bulkezu with a single shot and driven off a pair of griffins with a blazing ring of fire. She spoke with the ancient centaur shaman as with an equal. She stared at him now forthrightly, her gaze a challenge.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

THE country north of Hefenfelthe was rich and sweet, as green as any land Stronghand had ever seen, laced with fordable rivers and manifold streams, and so gentle that it placed few obstacles in the path of his army. Spring brought frequent showers, but although it rained one day out of three, they made good time and met with occasional, if stiff, resistance as they marched north on the trail of the queen. Mostly they found abandoned villages and empty byres.

“The scouts have returned!” called Tenth Son, who marched with the vanguard.

Human outriders called down the line of march and the army creaked to a halt at a stagger as word reached the ranks behind. The van had come to the top of one of those gentle, if long, slopes that allowed Stronghand to survey the line of his army where it snaked back along the ancient Dariyan road. The paved road made their passage swift, although it exposed them to attacks from the surrounding woodland.

The RockChildren marched in even ranks, five abreast, each unit bearing the standard representing their tribe. Rikin’s brothers were given pride of place at the front and the rear, while Hakonin guarded the wagons with their precious siege engines, supplies, extra weapons, treasure and loot, and the ironworks that could be set up as forges in a semipermanent
camp. Like rowing, pulling the wagons strengthened a warrior on those days when there wasn’t any fighting to be had. The other tribes took their places in the order of march according to the honor they had earned in the last battle or skirmish, a shifting dance of bragging rights that kept the soldiers eager. Even the human levies were permitted to compete, and in truth their presence made his own people fight harder. None wished to be an object of ridicule by having killed fewer of the enemy or gathered less loot than the Soft Ones.