The Gathering Storm (61 page)

Liath.

He was dreaming. Bulkezu had cast a spell over him.

Moonlight gilded her hair to a pale glamour. Her face had not changed at all in the intervening years, and it seemed the spark of blue fire in her eyes blazed so brightly that he could believe he actually saw a flicker of fire reflected there, although certainly he was too far away to see the details of her face. Fire consumed the nest, smoke and flame billowing heavenward, and a faint shimmer of golden-orange-red light danced like an aurora around her as well, making her shine as invisible fire limned her body.

She was as beautiful as he remembered her, but she was something else now—powerful in a discomforting way like the blast of heat from a well-stoked hearth that prevents the blacksmith from approaching too closely.

She did not see him.

The hem of her cloak lifted as wind caught it, swirling it around her knees. She had braced herself on the rock, bow bent with an arrow ready to fly, yet she did not loose it. The griffin did not spring, although its tail whipped along the ground, stirring up a misty cloud of dust.

He stared, stupefied at the unanticipated sight of her. Where had she been all this time? Why had she never sought him out?

Ai, God. A single arrow was no match for a griffin.

He broke forward—and in that instant death brushed his shoulders. Turning and ducking in the same motion, he just missed being caught in the face by a spear point thrust out from the rocky shadows behind him. His enemy had crept up while he gaped, dumbfounded and witless, at his lost wife. He tripped, rocks slipping under his boots, and threw up his spear barely in time to knock away Bulkezu’s second thrust. Falling hard, he lost control of the spear, which rolled into the rocks. Bulkezu leaped forward with his own spear and planted himself before the prince, legs braced, hands sliding and then tightening on the haft as he spun the weapon a quarter circle and raised it for the final, downward thrust.

Time slowed, as it often did for Sanglant in battle, when the world around him shrank until only he and the enemy he fought remained in focus. He grabbed for his knife, but his
belt had twisted in the fall and the sheath was caught beneath his hip.

Could a man cursed as he was survive a thrust through the heart?

Bulkezu shouted—a word, a battle cry, a curse—his scarred face lit with triumph as he laughed madly and tightened his hands to drive home the blow.

The arrow blossomed to the left center of his torso, in the heart.

Sanglant flung himself hard to the right over the rugged ground as Bulkezu toppled forward, a surprised look on his face. Even so, the prince’s legs got tangled in the corpse, and as he struggled to free himself, the griffin cried shrilly behind him. A cloud of dust and a battering ram of sharp wind, the gust made by its wings, slowed him as he grabbed the spear out of Bulkezu’s hands and ran forward, half blinded by the stinging particles of earth blown up into the air, the grit pummeling his face.

It was too late.

The griffin had launched itself into the air and as he watched helplessly, too far away even to cast his spear, the beast lifted Liath off the rock, her shoulders caught in its talons. She had a new arrow half drawn from her quiver, but as the griffin carried her upward, she lost hold of it and it fell to clatter in among the tumble of rocks where she had been standing.

Cursing, he watched the great creature fly heavily westward out over the plain as the sun crested the heights behind him. Dawn came and with it a warm breeze off the crags. He was sweating freely now from both exertion and the change in temperature. Mist rose out of the valley, shrouding the lowlands in gloom, and into this haze of white the griffin and Liath vanished.

“Blessing!” he shouted. “Anna!”

There was no answer. An animal scrabbled through the rocks. A flock of early swifts circled over the nearest crag, swooping for insects.

Bulkezu’s corpse lay among the stones. Wind whispered in the arrow’s flighting where it protruded from his chest. Amazingly, there was no blood.

He called again, listened, but heard nothing except the wind moaning along the heights, the crackle of the dying fire, and the scratching of that damned animal. Briefly, it popped up into view—a rabbitlike creature with small ears. As abruptly it disappeared, bolting for cover. An owl ghosted into view and settled on a nearby rock. It appeared to study first him and then the burning nest before launching itself into the air again and flying away westward. He recognized the shaman’s familiar. Through the owl’s senses she saw all; perhaps she knew all. Yet she refused to aid him.

Swearing like a madman, he groped among the rocks until he found the arrow Liath had dropped wedged in a crevice. He wrenched it free and stood staring at it. He was staggered, his mind empty. The sight of Liath had utterly stunned him, who had always before acted swiftly and decisively in battle.

Slowly, in the way a sleeping man wakes up bewildered at his surroundings and takes in only one small detail at a time, he really looked carefully at the object he held in one hand. He had fletched this very arrow for her back in Verna. He recognized the goose feathers, taken from the same wing, and the horsehair from Resuelto used to secure the plume.

How could it be that after three years she still had this arrow? Had she lived all this time in no danger, a life of ease? Why was she here on the steppes? How had she got here?

Why had she never sought him out in all this time?

He wept without shame, as a man weeps when powerful emotion overcomes him. Anger, fear, loss, lust, duty, honor, frustration all tangled within his breast, a maze without end or beginning.

Grimly, he walked back to Bulkezu’s body, but there was no sign on the dead man’s boots, sleeves, or trousers of where he had trod other than fragments of steppe grass and slivers of rock and dust. He had no blood on his hands.

The arrow that had killed him was a mate to the one the prince held in his hand. He rolled Bulkezu up on his side and pushed the arrow through and out the back. Bits of flesh and heart clung to the point. Blood oozed sluggishly from the body, spilling over the rocks. The nest, still burning, crashed in on itself, wings of ash puffing up into the air to be dissipated by the wind.

A griffin’s cry echoed along the crags. He stared out over the valley but saw no movement except the blanket of mist unraveling into drifts and patches and fingers of white. The brilliant sun rose higher into the sky, heralding a glorious new day.

SHE and her mate had fed well the day before. They had tracked a deer for two suns before bringing it to earth beside the headwater of the lesser flowing water. That the deer was unexpectedly plump despite the season had been the first good luck of their northerly journey. The flight from the wintering mountains had been hard because bitter cold still raged all along the route to the nesting grounds. Snow and rough winds lingered unseasonably late this year.

Late snow made her nervous and wakeful as she curled in last year’s nest, beside her mate. The threads that wove the great nest of the world were disturbed by a shuddering touch so distant that it was barely tangible. She felt like a hapless fly settling down to rest on a dew-sparkled, innocent-seeming hair and feeling the brush of a spider’s foot at the very edge of its complicated web. Maybe the late snow was part of that disturbance. Maybe the nesting season would be disrupted by these unseen forces. Maybe the hatchlings, if there were any, would suffer and die.

Even the Horse Tribe was on the move, gathered from the four winds into a confluence of herds. That by itself would make any creature uneasy.

Now, a sound that was not a sound, a touch that was not a touch, a spark that was not precisely anything seen with the eye, troubled the air and caught her attention. Because she was wakeful, she smelled the exhalation of shrouded fire that swept along the hidden ways, those thrumming lines of force that wove the great nest of the world into one piece. At once, sensing the faint convulsion, her mate lifted his head.
He was a little smaller than she, of course, not as strong, but clever and resourceful and never quarrelsome, as many males could be.

“Go,” she told him in the language used by the griffins, not words precisely but comprised of small movements, scratching in the dirt, scents, and the rumbling pattern of her song. “We are come north too early. Go south along the greater flowing water to the sunning stone. I will meet you there.”

It was a short journey, but it would get him out of the way and keep him safe. He took flight, and she waited a moment, marking his path as he beat southwest toward the winding trail of the water where it cut through the hunting grounds. Once he was well away, she flicked her tufted ears, flexing her claws, as she sought that chance-felt disarrangement in the normally calm surface of the great nest of the world. Was the shrouded fire already gone, or still wandering on Earth?

There!

She marked it as she would a banked fire smoldering beneath a snow-covered slope. It moved across the lowlands, where the blizzard smothered the landscape. From the crag’s edge she launched herself out into the air and fought the gale winds as she plunged into the storm. The swirl and roar of the wind delighted her, although it proved a distraction from the hunt. She dove through the turbulence, banked, rose, and dove again above the valley floor and along the rim where the high crags thrust out of the plateau. Here the winds made merry, roiled by the meeting of lowlands and high crags, and it was sheer pleasure to fly.

By the time she recalled her purpose in hunting she had lost the trail. A hint of a warm front blowing in from the east clouded the exhalation of fire that had teased her. She felt it still, a constant but frail feather touch singing within the threads that bound the great nest of the world, but somehow it had moved up into the crags now, half swallowed by the deafness of stone. The cold wind still blew hard, but she tasted flower petals in the air.

Circling back to the nest with flurries of snow spinning around her head, she came upon the intruder unexpectedly. The man darted out from the nest and thrust for her exposed
underbelly, but he had miscalculated his distance. She landed and lunged for him, yet he slipped past her, as agile and slippery as a weasel, into the shelter of the rocks. The momentum of her lunge slammed her into the nest, which shuddered, but held, as it had held for years under the onslaught of storms.

She screamed her rage, furious at losing him. His scent, curdling in the air, maddened her: he was a killer. A very few among humankind stalked in griffin country, murdering her kin. Of those few, most died at the hands of her cousins. This one bore the stink of success twice over.

Why was he here yet again? Was it not enough that he had slaughtered and profaned two of her kinfolk? Had he also desecrated the nest?

She ducked down and stuck her head inside the nest, the musty-cold familiarity tainted by the lingering stink of his killer’s touch. No hatchling could thrive here, not now. By his presence alone he had poisoned the nest.

He had not been alone. A second creature had taken shelter within the cavernous nest. She looked, and was blinded.

The veil that shrouded aetherical fire had little utility at such short range. No ordinary earthly creature gave off such a refulgence. This daimone blazed with an aura of fire. She shrank back, fearful of its terrible power, and bent her head to show respect. Low in her throat she sang a song of courtesy and esteem, and a soft whimper of appeasement.

“Beware!” cried the fire daimone, leaping sideways.

A spear point stabbed into her hindquarters, and she whipped her tail to dislodge the point. The killer danced away with spear still in hand. He was laughing.

She pounced, but the light was dim. Humankind suffered and navigated the night better than she could. Stones rattled down as the daimone-creature bolted out of the nest and clambered up the untidy fall of rocks that rested uneasily to one side of the hollow.

The griffin circled the hollow, but the killer had vanished into the darkness. Above, braced on the rocks, the daimone-woman drew forth a bow and bent it, an arrow set against the string, ready to fly. The bow had an aetherical flicker, flashes of a blue aura clinging to its curved outline. The wood core
was yew, but the virtue inherent in the bow derived from the strips of bone glued to the core: not ram’s horn, but griffin bone. The essence of a dead griffin’s stolen potency and a remnant of its numinous soul welled up from those strips to infuse the entire bow with an enchanted power, sealed and bound by the yew core. Yet no stench of “murderer” permeated the daimone-woman. Although she wielded the bow, she had not tainted her hands killing any griffin.

Hadn’t she cried out a warning? Didn’t that make her an ally?

Wasn’t her heart of fire beautiful?

All lay quiet except for the moaning wind, yet only a careless hatchling would consider the killer gone for good. She lowered her head to peer for markings in the dirt that would reveal his path, but could make out nothing. It was too dark to see. A step whispered on the ground, the merest scuff of a foot on dirt.

“Hai!” shouted the daimone-woman.

The griffin shied sideways just as the spear was thrust out of the shadows, but although she swiped at the dark shape brushing past, she could not see him well enough to strike him.

The daimone-woman cursed. Attuned to the great nest of the world and the threads that construct it, the griffin felt the creature waken the sleeping sparks of fire that resided in the sticks and branches and dried matter out of which she and her mate had built their nest over the years.

Fire woke.

The nest erupted into flame.

Exposed, the killer stood rooted in the light. The griffin lunged. He fled back into the night as an arrow chased him, clattering on the rocks. Heat from the fire melted the snow in the hollow and sent rivulets streaming down the slope that plummeted westward into the valley.

They waited for a long while as the nest burned. The daimone-woman readied a second arrow, her entire body tense as she scanned the darkness for any sign of movement.