PROLOGUE (68 page)

"Why have you come back?" roared Bloodheart in the human tongue, confronting the slender Eika who stood, proud and unflinching, before him.

"I bring eight ships," said the son, gesturing to certain Eika who stood behind him, representative, perhaps, of soldiers who remained outside. There were by now in Gent too many Eika to all crowd into the cathedral. He could smell them; their metallic scent permeated the air. "These two, from Hakonin, these two, from Skanin, and this one, from Valdarnin. Three more sailed with me from Rikin. These will swell the number of your army."

"Why should I take you in, when it was my voice and my command which sent you home without honor?"

Sanglant measured the distance between himself and the priest, then patted the rags draped over him that had once been clothing. He slid a hand under cloth and pulled out the brass Eagle's badge. With a flick of the wrist, he tossed it at one of his dogs, to his left. The sudden growling movement of two dogs leaping to growl over the badge startled the priest enough that he jumped sideways.

With that jump, the priest came for an instant within reach of Sanglant.

He sprang. As his hand closed on the Eika priest's bony arm, he jerked the knife out from under his tunic. Yanking the priest around hard, he dropped his grip on the creature's arm and snatched the little wooden chest out of the crook of its elbow.

Then he leaped back into the protection of his dogs
— barking and raging wildly now—as a roar of fury broke from Bloodheart's throat and all the Eika in the hall began shrieking and howling at once, their dogs echoing them until Sanglant was deafened. He had only moments to act before he would be overwhelmed.

There was no time for finesse, but then, there rarely was in a pitched fight.

He hacked violently at the hasp of the chest. The knife, little used, still bore a good edge. The hasp snapped and wood splintered as he struck down and again, with all his strength, then wrenched the lid open and dumped the contents out on the floor.

He didn't know what an Eika heart would look like. But where else would Bloodheart keep his heart if not close by him? Why else would the priest carry a chest night and day, never letting it leave his side?

But all that spilled onto the floor was a bundle of down feathers and a white hairless creature smaller than his hand. With rudimentary ears and eyes, a nub of a tail, and four limbs, it looked like the premature spawn of an unholy mother, a ghastly colorless thing without defined features and with no recognizable parentage. It fell with a sickening plop onto the flagstone floor and lay there, limp, unmoving.

Dead.

Never trust the appearance of death.

He raised his knife.

A spear haft hit him broadside and then, as he spun, he felt a second spear pierce him in the back, just below the ribs. He jerked forward, brought the knife down as his dogs swarmed forward to attack his attackers. But his vision had gone awry; the world spun and staggered before him.

A shift of sunlight spilled over the stone floor, its golden touch illuminating the tiny corpse. With a shudder, the embryonic creature stirred, curled.

Came alive.

It darted away just as the point of his knife stabbed and skidded on the stone floor where it had lain.

Bloodheart screamed in rage.

The spear point was yanked out of his flesh and he staggered forward to keep himself upright; his neck snapped back when, at the limit of his chains, the iron slave collar brought him up short. The priest yipped wildly, scurrying after the slender dead-white creature now scrambling away between the feet of the Eika soldiers who had dashed forward to mob him.

Bloodheart, still roaring, his own dogs at his heels, slapped his howling soldiers aside as he shoved his way through. Blood streamed down Sanglant's back, coursing over his buttocks and down his thighs. He faltered and fell to his knees, knife raised before him.

"Dog! Son of dogs! The heart you seek with that blow lies far away from here, hidden among the stones of Rikin fjall. For
this
sacrilege you will pay the price in blood."

Bloodheart struck, but Sanglant was faster. He jumped up and sank the knife into the Eika chieftain's shoulder and hung there as two packs of dogs swarmed forward. At once he and Bloodheart were surrounded by a maelstrom, all teeth and tails and claws.

In this whirlpool Bloodheart grabbed Sanglant by the iron collar at his neck and hoisted him into the air. With his other hand, he took Sanglant's wrist, where he still held the knife, and twisted it hard.

The snap of bone and the wash of hot pain almost made him pass out. But he did not let go of the knife, not until Bloodheart ripped it out of his own shoulder and shook it free of Sanglant's grip. He tossed Sanglant back, flipped the knife to hold it, jeweled hilt in his huge scaled hand, and struck furiously to either side at the ravening dogs, then leaped in among them.

Sanglant groped, found the brass Eagle's badge, and hauled himself to his feet. This tiny shield he held before him, like a talisman, but it was useless. Bloodheart's fury had passed the point of thought. The Eika stabbed the knife again and again into Sanglant's chest.

Sometimes the remains of his chain mail turned the point, but at the ragged ends it could not protect him. The knife pierced him repeatedly, tearing him inside, shattering him, until his dogs leaped howling and biting and Bloodheart was forced to defend himself against them. He let go of Sanglant, who could not stand, could not even kneel, could only fall to the floor as his dogs drove back the mob that had come howling to watch him die. He could only watch as spears and axes fell on his dogs and the other dogs indiscriminately, splitting them open, spattering viscera and green-tinted blood and the wet matter of brain over him, over the floor, over everything. He could only feel the press of bodies and the sting of their whipcord tails as the last of his dogs pressed in around him, defending him even until the bitter end
—as had his Dragons.

He would have wept at their loyalty, but he had no tears.

Bloodheart was still howling in rage, shouting at his priest, calling the Eika to silence, to stillness, so that they could hunt for the hideous creature that had escaped from the shattered chest. The mob stilled, broke, and parted.

In this way, abandoned for more important prey, Sanglant was left alone. Pain washed like water over him, the flood tide swelling to its height as black hazed his vision and he struggled to remain conscious, then ebbing to reveal every point of scalding pain in his body.

He heard the breath of the dogs, those panting out their last breaths and those few which still remained upright. The last six stood around him in a protective circle to face their common enemy. Surrounded by this fortification of dogs, he lay there breathing shallowly and waited for the blinding pain to end.

HE could not quite manage to open his eyes. But he knew he was surrounded by bodies strewn about him like so much refuse. Some few of the dogs were still alive, and they growled when any movement sifted near him. It was so hard to wake up and perhaps better not to. Perhaps it was better to slide unresisting into oblivion.

Ai, Lady. Would he be admitted to the Chamber of Light? Or was he, because of his mother's blood, condemned to wander the world forever as a bodiless shade?

In the distance or in a dream, he heard the flutelike voices of the Eika speaking in Wendish, two voices accompanied by the mocking, harsh counterpoint of Eika calling and crying out in their own rough tongue. Some few of the words he now knew. In his dream he recognized more than he ever had before, but that was the nature of dreams, was it not?

"I have seen this army in my dreams." This in fluent Wendish.

"No better than dog, why dare you speak so before the great one?" This in the Eika speech.

"My dreams are more honest than your boasting, brother! Do not toss aside the gifts the WiseMothers give you just because they are not made of iron or gold."

"How can I believe your dreams are true dreams, weak one?" This from Bloodheart.

"I am stronger than I look, and my dreams are not just true dreams, they are the waking life of one of the humankind. He marches with this army, and as he marches, I march with him, seeing through his eyes."

One of the dogs nudged him, testing for life, and he gasped so loud the echo of it split his skull with pain, but no sound came out of his mouth. Blackness fell. For an endless time he drowned in a black haze of unrelenting pain that spun and sparkled like the knife which had been driven countless times into his body. Finally the darkness lightened to an early morning gray. Glints of light burst here and there in the limitless mist.

The veil parted.

The woman appears young and is certainly beautiful. She wears a fringed skirt sewn of leather so thin and supple that it moves around her with her movements like a second skin. A double stripe of red paint runs from the back of her left hand up around the curve of her elbow, all the way to her shoulder. Her hair has a pale cast, though her complexion is as bronze-dark as his own; drawn back from her face, it is bound behind her head with painted leather strips nested with beads, trailing a long elegant green plume. A wreath of gold and turquoise and jade bead necklaces drapes down her chest almost to her waist. She wears no shirt or cloak, only the necklaces, concealing and revealing her breasts as she shifts.

But for all her beauty and fine grace, she works patiently toward a brutal goal: with a curved bone tool, she is shaving stout lengths of wood into spear hafts. Obsidian points lie on a reed mat nearby with rope heaped beside them.

Does he make a noise? She looks up as if she has heard him and in that instant as a sudden lance of sun cuts down through trees to pierce across her shoulders, flashing on her necklaces, she sees him.

"Sharatanga protect me!" she exclaims. "The child!" She flinches away from the sight, drops wood haft and bone tool, and gropes for the stone points lying on the mat.

"It is not yet time for him to die," she mutters to herself, although he can hear every word clearly in a language he ought not to know yet understands perfectly. Grabbing one of the thin blades, she lifts it and raises it high above her and cries in a clear, strong voice. "Take this offering, She-Who-Will-Not-Have-A-Husband. Give life back into his limbs."

She drags the blade across her palm. Blood wells, dripping down the length of the cut to spill into the air and she shakes the hand out, blood spitting toward him. Behind her, a voice calls a sudden frantic question. A touch of moisture spatters his lips, dissolving there, and as the harsh taste spreads to the back of his throat, the veil closes in a swirling pattern of grays and sparkling stars.

"I know you," he whispers.

But his voice was lost in the snuffling of dogs, and the touch of familiarity drifted away on the last tendril of mist.

Stillness hung like the weight of stone in the vast nave of the cathedral.

Terror hit with sudden force. Had he died? Had he seen, beyond the veil of the living, one of his own kinfolk or only a soulless shade caught forever in the memory of life?

He had always thought his mother's curse protected him from death. Ai, Lord, it wasn't true. It had never been true. He had only been lucky.

If this could be called luck.

He strained, listening, but heard nothing except the dogs. Had everyone gone away? Had they deserted the city, leaving to raid downriver into the heart of Wendar? How long had he lain here, dying and living again?

The footsteps that neared him came as soft as a breeze sliding through dead leaves scattered on the forest floor.

Never let it be said that he did not fight until his last breath.

He twitched but could not move his hands. His dogs growled, menacing their visitor. The smell of rancid meat hit him hard, gagging him, and he swallowed convulsively. He heard the damp slap of meat thrown to the floor and suddenly all the dogs skittered off, nails scraping the floor, and they fought over the remains. The footsteps eased closer. He lay there, paralyzed and unprotected, working his throat as if the movement would spread to his numb hands and allow him to defend himself.

He managed to open his eyes just as the slender Eika princeling who wore the wooden Circle crouched beside him. The Eika's movements had the easy arrogance of a creature who has the confidence of perfect health.

"Are you going to kill me now?" asked Sanglant. He was surprised to hear his voice, faint and hoarse. He struggled to lift a hand, to shift his shoulders beneath him, and felt the merest tick in his neck. One hand flicked up, the one with the unbroken wrist.