The Rose of Sarifal (20 page)

As for the druid, why hadn’t she said something about this? Maybe the wolf wanted something the woman didn’t want, was afraid even to ask for. Now she dipped her paw into the gap and hooked up a wad of cobwebbed filth while the Savage peered in, looking for movement.

There was none. The light shifted, and he found himself staring down into a nest of bones. The casket had no bottom, was just a stone frame laid over the uneven ground. And he suspected immediately that he was looking down into the lair of some strange animal or worm, and that the webs Eleuthra had broken through did not belong to anything so ordinary as a spider. But in the chalky, churned-up earth he could see a dark hole leading down, a burrow or a sett with entrances and exits in some other place. The hole was lined with filth, and the air was foul and rank. When he bent over the casket he could taste it in his mouth. Lukas could recognize any animal by just its smell, but the Savage had never been a hunter. He had a high stomach and was easily disgusted. The servants who had raised him in Baldur’s Gate had kept bees. He had often seen them slide the lids away, and now this casket seemed
to him a nightmare version of a beehive. He wondered why the druid was so insistent, why even now she was yelping and whining, still up on her hind legs, and why he himself was fascinated, as if, like an augur, he was trying to decipher the meaning of the bleached, gnawed rubble of bones that filled up the majority of the stone casket, the bones of many animals mixed together.

But there was something else. The light shifted again. The Savage, now that he was not bothering to alter, for appearance’s sake, the pupils of his eyes, was able to see better even in murky darkness. He caught a glimpse of something shining there in the litter of bones at the hole’s mouth. He loved gold, not just for the sake of the luxuries you could buy with it, but for its own soft, heavy, lustrous sake. He had always had gold. His father had left him gold, but now the lycanthropes had stolen it—not just the bag of thalers under his armpit, but his personal trinkets also. Why would Eleuthra change her mind about him if he could only stand before her bare-chested and unadorned, like a beggar or a slave? No wonder she hated him. Perhaps she understood this, which was why she whimpered with her ears pulled back, and scratched at the stones.

He expanded the demon centers to his eyes, opened the red slits. Knowing the risk to be unacceptable, yet goaded by his own cupidity and the whimpering expectations of the wolf, he leaned over the casket and plunged his arm over the side, while at the same time the dry bones under his hand erupted into movement and the dragon flew up—a creature the size of a
house cat, who fixed his jaws into the Savage’s wrist. Another one ascended into the low dome, flapping its scaly wings around his head as he pulled back, before it found the long, low entrance to the barrow and disappeared.

But the Savage had grabbed hold of the treasure and wouldn’t let it go, a circlet of gold, and more gold glinted underneath. Lips curled in disgust, he held up his wrist with the creature suspended from it, wings momentarily still. The wolf ripped and snapped at it until it also fluttered up into the dome. Hissing, spitting venom, it dived at the Savage’s eyes and ripped at his naked shoulders when he ducked his head. Then it also was gone out of the tunnel’s mouth.

“Happy now?” the Savage snarled.

The Moonshaes were full of stunted, miniature versions of fell species from the mainland. These dragons had ripped the skin loose from his forearm. He leaned into the casket again and pulled out a shred of silken winding cloth, rainbow patterned, faded, yet curiously intact. The reptiles had built their nest in an old tomb, and though they had added to the pile of bones over the years, the Savage could distinguish the remains of the original occupant. Cursing, he bound his forearm in the winding cloth, wondering where Marikke had gone to. The bitch had betrayed him, but maybe he needed her now, her healing arts.

“Satisfied?” he spat out, even though it was obvious the wolf was no such thing. She was still on her hind legs, scratching at the casket’s stone lid, until he reached
down and brought up the other objects in the trove, a mixture, he thought, of a king’s funeral regalia and whatever treasure the dragons had been able to amass—gold coins, rings, and jewels. And a long steel sword, wrapped in rotting cloth. He snatched the circlet from the bone temples of the king’s enormous and distorted skull. When he raised it up over his own head, it dropped down immediately around his neck.

There was a small part of his heart that was overjoyed with the sight of these treasures, whatever the cost or consequences, whatever his predicament. He had felt naked these past hours since the lycanthropes had stripped his gold away, more naked than the loss of his shirt had made him feel. A ring, made for the littlest of the king’s eight fingers, a vestigial spur of unjointed bone, fitted on his thumb. Another ring, ornamented with geometric patterns, he could use to gather his yellow hair behind the nape of his neck.

He filled the pockets of his trousers. There were jewels, too, some cut and faceted, some not. One of them, a smooth sphere, gleamed like a demon’s eye.

He looked at the druid, who cocked her head. “What?” he said, “this is what you want, isn’t it?”

But she was still anxious and unhappy, until he reached down for the king’s thighbone. She had lost her own totem stick, and perhaps this would help her, he thought. And as soon as she had it in her jaws, she dropped to her four paws and ran out through the burrow’s entrance in the light of the setting sun.

Marikke watched her from the door of a ruined building. She had seen the dragons fly up into the amber light a few minutes before. Now she watched the wolf stop and lower her muzzle to the ground, the bone in her jaws, a raised ridge of hair between her shoulder blades as she picked through the piles of lycanthropes in their most bestial shapes, asleep or else regarding her blearily, having forgotten what they were there for, or what it meant to be a prisoner. The Beastlord, after all, had given them no commands, and Marikke’s had been ambiguous. She watched the wolf lope down one of the streets of the ruined town.

After a few more minutes she watched the Savage staggering after, the king’s sword awkwardly perched under his arm. He held his bandaged arm. His shoulders, too, were scratched and bleeding.

She watched them disappear among the rocks. Then, raising her head high, combing her hair back from her face between her fingers, she walked back to the stone porch below the mountain. Once there, she turned again into the sunset, sniffing the air, admiring the light. The torches flared behind her in the tunnel’s entrance, and all the twisting way down to the Beastlord’s lair. She made her prayers as she descended, murmuring the names of the Earthmother not in supplication but in farewell. Since her last encounter with the goddess, she had decided to put her faith in the hearts of mortal creatures. Because how was it possible to know the truth?
Perhaps we fool ourselves by worshiping Chauntea and despising Malar, and Talos, and Bane, and Asmodeus, the entire pantheon of blood and evil fury. Chauntea is generous and loving, we might tell ourselves, the source of all good things. But if there was only one god with many aspects, and if her purposes could not be understood by mortal creatures, any more than a dog could hope to understand Marikke, then it was best to trust in people after all. Why would Chauntea permit Malar to roam free?

No, she would put her trust in Kip, the shifter boy who loved her, because she had saved him from starvation and death, and given him a home in the world. Surely there was enough of him left inside his own body and his own heart for him to remember her, perhaps to pardon her. She would not run with the others. Knowing her as he did, the Beastlord would find her in an hour. There would be no High Hunt for her.

Now she was in the slimy, agate-floored cavern once again. The torches burned up bright. Kip sat on the surface of his table, and he turned his calico head and smiled as she approached. Her heart rose up to see him smile.

“Did you do what I asked?” he said, his voice light and musical, just as she remembered. Surely there was something of him left.

He had the black kitten on his lap, and he played with it. “Oh, Kip,” she said at once. “Forgive me. I was preparing for the hunt. I had them all locked up in one of those old crypts on the mountain. But the chains
were all rusted and they broke free. We’ll have to go quick. But the trail is clear.”

A pucker appeared between the boy’s clear brows. “Hunt? There’s no hunt. That’s not what I asked.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t understand …”

“I wanted them dead. I told you. They killed a dozen of my people, and my angel, too—my angel, who kept me nourished all these years.” He paused. “What crypt? There’s one on the ridge that Argon Bael used to guard for me. Not there. You did not put them there.”

She bowed her head. “Forgive me,” she said. Already she knew it was useless, that the god had spoken. “Do you remember,” she pleaded, “my father’s house in Alaron, on the heights? Do you remember the pear tree in the field, when it blossomed in the spring? Do you remember when you—”

“I gave you the knife to cut their throats, to water with their blood my holy ground. I gave you the knife. Do you have the knife?”

She brought her hands up to her face in supplication. “I don’t have it.”

“This was the knife for Malar’s sacrifices and the Black Blood on Malar’s altar,” interrupted Kip with his soft, childlike voice. “Do you have it?”

As he spoke, he rose to his feet on the tabletop. And the lycanthropes who had been resting, curled up against the cavern’s walls, got to their feet. Some of them stretched and showed their claws. Summoned by their master’s voice, they gathered in a circle. Marikke spoke. “Kip, do you remember that first evening we came to
Caer Callidyrr, and you were so frightened I had to lead you by the hand while you closed your eyes? We came in through the gate, and when they rang the bell you put your hands over your ears …”

This was probably not the best thing to remember, but it was all that came to mind. Marikke watched the circle close around her, a pack of wolf-men taking charge. She would have preferred someone else, for her last wish. Briefly she examined the interior spaces—the glade, the lakeside, and the snowy field—where Chauntea had so often visited her, but they were empty, barren, not a footprint there.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
C
AER
M
ORAY

I
N THE UNNAMED CITY BELOW
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COURTOP, AN INCARNATION
of the Beastlord, standing with his weak legs spread on the stone tabletop, directed and administered the sacrifice. Only when the priestess’s body was successfully dismembered and its smoking parts distributed among the temple’s altar stones did he pause to remember the High Hunt. By that time the Savage and Eleuthra had several hours’ lead.

But Kip the cat-shifter was not the only embodiment of Malar on Moray Island. That night, a hundred miles north, among the human settlements along the coast, sleeping next to their exhausted husbands, the Northlander women struggled and cried out, disturbed by the same nightmare: A great panther, its heavy jaws befouled with blood, crouched over their marriage beds, polluting the sheets with the stink of his hot breath. Shivering in the cold dawn, they shook their men awake, begging them not to go out that day in their frail boats to catch the spring herring and the langoustines, or climb up into their potato fields—not that day.

In the hills and forests above the towns, the Beastlord marshaled his troops. The great panther, his shoulders striped with mange, moved between the cedars in the dark woods, his tail weaving like a serpent. Down below, the Northlander farmers cursed and whipped their animals when the wooden plows stuck in the marl, until the crazed oxen and draft horses turned and trampled them. Out at sea, the fishermen were lucky with their catch, returning with their bulging nets to empty towns, their women and their children gone.