The Gathering Storm (138 page)

And this was only the beginning. This was not even the worst of it. As you sow, so shall you reap. Humankind and their Bwr allies had sown two thousand seven hundred and four years ago and now their descendants faced a bitter harvest.

The storm was coming.

Now.

She bound her wings tightly around her as the impact reverberated
through the earth. Shock waves coursed deep through the ground. Out of the ruptured sea rose a vast wave that radiated outward in all directions and which crashed against the cliffs of the erupting coastline in a blast of hissing vapor which at once cooled and heated and poured yet more impetus into the towering plume rising above the land. In a short time, or in hours, the wave would reach the other shorelines. There was nothing Liath could do to warn the thousands who would drown.

The displaced air from the impact swept outward in a vast ring that rolled over land and sea on all sides, uprooting trees, burning grass, and what close by resounded in an eerie silence was heard as a roar of bangs and knocks and booms far away and even in so distant a place as Darre itself. Folk stopped in the streets in terror and fear only to see a worse horror as the earth began to shake and the volcano long smoking and rumbling to their west erupted with a slurry of ash and mud. Down the western coast of Aosta other sleeping volcanoes shuddered into life. There was nothing Liath could do to warn those living too close to this rim of fire, now woken.

I had no choice.

No doubt Anne had spoken such words, too, as she convinced herself to take on the task that had led to her destruction, although she had believed herself all along to be the righteous one. To stop Anne, Liath had made herself into Anne.

No matter.

The deed was done.

She cast herself onto a streaming river of fire and let it carry her to the surface, just in time, because already the flow abated as the WiseMothers withdrew the press of their minds. Already the salt water cooled and stiffened the outer layer of the flowing lava. Already the flood of aether out of the heavens diminished, and the strength of her wings weakened; they began to shred and fall apart as the Earth reasserted its pull.

She found herself, naked, clutching only her bow, on a stairway formed out of the crust of a lava flow, all swirls and coils in the hardening skin. Everything else had burned off her, even the Quman quiver, even Lucian’s friend—her sword. She ran up into the open air. A thin crust sizzled
against her feet, cracking under her weight. Smoke hissed up from narrowing vents. Any other creature would have died in such heat and such fumes, but she was born half of fire, and this was her element.

A blessedly cool wind greeted her as she climbed to the rim of the crater made by the eruption and, reaching the top, wiped sweat from her brow. The wind that had blasted outward had left the air clean beneath a heavy layer of ashy cloud extending to all horizons. The sky turned a hideous red in the east, heralding sunrise.

She heard the shush and slap of a distant shoreline, which had once lain directly below the stone circle, and she wondered whether Gnat and Mosquito had survived. She wondered if anyone had survived, because standing on the crest of a ragged ridgeline with desolation on three sides, she felt she was alone in a vast new world.

Nothing is permanent except change.

There
the shoreline had once gnawed at the base of cliffs, but no longer. She stared out over new land extending as far as she could discern to the south and east into the Middle Sea. Mist wreathed its heights and valleys in a silvery gleam. Far away, felt more than heard, a moaning call rose out of the mist, the cry of a horn summoning the lost.

The Ashioi had come home.

IN the distant haze where sky met sea, islands rose out of the sound like teeth marking the horizon. The water gleamed, as still and smooth as burnished metal; seen from the height of the ridge, the swells were lost under the glare of the sun. The carter and the guardsmen paused on the path to wipe their brows against the terrible heat.

He had no shelter and no water to slake his thirst, and anyway over the numberless days of his captivity he had grown accustomed to the sun’s hammer. Today was especially hot and humid although he had an idea that it ought to be cooler, but he couldn’t remember why, and there was no wind at all, only the expectation of wind and a pressure in his ears as though someone were squeezing the air all around them. The heavens to the west and north were hazy along the ocean but clear above, while thunderous clouds had piled up and up in a black mass to the east and south.

“Don’t like the look of that,” said Heric to his fellows, nodding to the east. “Must be a mighty tempest. Hsst! I’ve never seen clouds like those, not in all my life.”

“Let’s get on,” said Ulf the carter. “I don’t like being exposed up on this ridge.”

“Dragonback, the townsfolk call it!” snickered Heric. “No doubt some girl or other does creep up here on a dark night with her lover to make dragonback! I’d do it!”

Ulf sighed. “The folk in Osna village weren’t too friendly, neither. I didn’t see no girls making eyes at us. I wish we was going back to Lavas Holding and rid of this stinking creature.”

“Soon enough,” said Heric. “We’ve a few holdings and villages yet to ride through before we’re safe home.”

Ulf snorted, scratching his nose, then spat on the dirt. He was not an unkind man, but he clung to his superstitions. “If we get safe home! Those clouds look ugly to me. These locals aren’t any too happy to see us, neither. They’re too worried about bad weather and a poor harvest to mind that foul creature.”

“It’s him what ruined their harvests with untimely rain and cold snaps! Brought about by his sin!”

“Maybe so.” Ulf shrugged. The other three guardsmen yawned; they followed Heric’s orders and ate their food but otherwise hadn’t any enthusiasm for the job. “But enough’s enough, that’s what I say.”

“Get on!” said Heric irritably. He had a willow switch and with this he slapped his mount’s croup to get it moving.

Ulf had a softer hand on the oxen. The cart lurched forward and they creaked down the path at a steady clop. A scatter of buildings lay beyond the tail of the ridge, arranged around a roofless church and a stone tower, which was still intact. For a bit they lost sight of the ruins as the path reached the base of the ridge, wound through a tumble of boulders and then, turning to loam, struck through a quiet forest, but soon they emerged into overgrown fields and trudged up past broken gates to take shelter for the night in the tower. Ulf watered the oxen at a stream and set them to graze, and the horses were given their oats and let wander within what remained of the fence that had once kept livestock within the compound.

Before building a fire for their supper, they rolled the wagon up along one side of the church, offering a bit of shelter if it stormed. From here he could stare at the curving ridgeline or out over a stony beach onto the sound. The water was so still that it seemed like solid ground, where a man might walk for leagues and leagues on its surface out into the wild lands beyond the guardian islands. Out there, strange
creatures traveled and wept, or so he remembered. There were fish with the faces of men and men with claws in their hands who raced across the sea on ships as sleek and effortless as dragons.

Memory came in flashes as sharp and as brief as lightning.

That window, half obscured by a rosebush run wild, opened into the scriptorium. The monastery boasted a precious
Book of Unities
bound between covers plated with gold and encrusted with jewels.

“I know this place,” he whispered. He saw in his mind’s eye an old man leaning on a stick, dressed in monk’s robes. But he was dead, wasn’t he? Hadn’t they all died? The storm had come in off the sea and slaughtered them all and burned and destroyed their home as it would sweep in again.

“Shut him up, will you?” demanded Heric. “All that babbling about dead dead dead makes me want to hit him across the face, and I will!”

“Poor mad soul,” muttered Ulf, but the carter brought him a crust of bread to gnaw on and, quite unexpectedly, a skin of ale so rich that he had to sip at it and not gulp it down lest he spew it all back up. At first it unsettled his stomach, but then it warmed him enough that he could curl onto the hard bed of the wagon amidst the remains of dirty straw, shut his eyes, and doze as the guardsmen gossiped by their fire in the shelter of the deserted tower.

He heard their voices.

“Don’t like the look of the sky.”

“What, them clouds? Not enough wind to blow them over us.”

“Nay, look at the color of that sky. It’s not natural. There’s some terrible nasty storm coming, mark my word.”

“What bitch’s tits did you suckle from? You’ve been harkening to the madman’s voice.”

“Oh, shut up, Heric. What have you got against him anyway?”

“He stole my girl!”

“A filthy beast like that? Not likely.”

“He was all cleaned up in a lord’s tunic and bright jewels. Of course he stole her! Thief and cheat—”

Thief and cheat, he slipped into darkness and he dreamed.

A noble youth sleeps in the midst of a heap of gold and gems with six companions surrounding him, but out of the shadows creep gnarled figures whose skin gleams like pewter, whispering and tapping, seeking.

Seeking, rivers of fire forge new paths deep within the Earth, and the world trembles.

The storm is upon them.

The Holy One bends her gray head as she watches the sun set. From her vantage point beside the stone crown, the farthest east of its kind, she watches the weaving plotted and planned in ancient days come to life once more in the hands of those who are now her enemies, not her allies.

She is so weary. A part of her hopes this night will be her last, that she is too old to endure the force of the storm. She does not weep, because she has lived too Long and made too many difficult choices to weep any longer along the trail of years, a path down which she can never return or retrace her steps.

But there was one whom she loved unforeseeably, inexplicably. Sorcery exacts a cost, although humankind in their immense arrogance have not always understood this principle, and each gesture, each choice, will be counterbalanced by a consequence of equal weight. Yet affection drowns reason. Although she knew it for a foolish act, she reached onto the paths of the dead and expended more power than she ought because she wanted to make happy the one she loved like a daughter. Adica. She had no daughter of her own among the Horse people; that was forbidden. She loved too well where she should not have loved at all, and that act of love rebounded on her in a way she never anticipated or desired. By meddling in the paths of the dead she dislodged the stream of her own soul.

For so long death has been denied her. She witnessed the unfolding effects of her great undertaking, and all did not transpire as she hoped it would. She lived while her people slowly died off and diminished, as humankind migrated into their ancient homeland, stole or gelded their puras, and hunted down their daughters one by one. She wants to sleep, but she must stay wakeful in order to save her people, whom she doomed although she never meant to. She will stay awake
one more night and then she will lie down and die and let others carry the burden she has carried for so long.

Be careful what you wish for

“Now!” cries Stronghand, heeding the command of the WiseMothers. He leaps forward with ax raised high. The blade glints and where light flashes

Lightning turns the sky white and in the place of thunder he hears a hoarse, gleeful battle cry as the ground begins to shake

“Ai, God! Ai, God! Get the horses!”

He shuddered awake, startled up by the earth shaking under him, and jerked to the end of his chains as he stared at the shadows of men chasing their mounts off into the forest to the north. Even the oxen tossed their heads and trotted away, spooked by that earthquake; Ulf, cursing, ran after them. Iron bit into his wrists and ankles, drawing blood, as he strained after them, but they had forgotten him.

Overhead, the sky was a sheet of lightning that veiled the stars, painting the heavens a color as loathsome as that of a corpse, life and soul drained from it. Along the shoreline the water had receded far out past the line of ebb tide, exposing the seabed and a line of sharp rocks along the curve of the ridge. Fish flopped in the shallows. He drew in breath, although the air felt like soup in his lungs.

A rumbling roar shook the ground and pitched the cart sideways so hard that it tumbled over onto one side and the post to which he was bound cracked and broke in half. The tower groaned as it leaned sideways and then in a roar collapsed entirely. Dust and grit rolled over him, choking him. He lay stunned, hearing the screams of panicked horses far away.

The wind dissipated the cloud with a sudden fierce blow that blasted the shroud of dust out over the sea.

The ground hadn’t done shifting. It pitched and yawed as though it were alive and when he was able to lift his pounding head, he saw the great Dragonback Ridge splinter as sheets of rock cascaded onto the waters of the sound. It buckled. The noise of its shattering deafened him. The booming
and crashing hurt his ears so badly that it brought tears to his eyes.

It moved.

The dragon’s tail lashed sideways, snapping trees. As its flank heaved up, dirt roared into the sound and buried the old shoreline. Where it lifted a claw and set it down, the earth shook. Atop a slender neck, its head lifted into the heavens. It slewed round its vast body, bent its neck, and lowered its head down to the ground not a stone’s toss from his cage where he lay trapped by his chains.

He struggled to his knees to face it.

It had scales the color of gold, so bright that he squinted. Its eyes had the luster of pearls. A single tear of blood squeezed from a cut on its belly, splashed, then coursed down through the furrows made by its claws to gush over him. That viscous liquid burned right through his rags, down to his heart.