The Gathering Storm (70 page)

“Drink with me.” Her voice was light and airy but firm. She gestured for Liath to move forward. Liath’s footsteps made no sound on carpets laid over a woven grass mat. As she approached, the other woman swept aside the gauze veil so that Liath could sit on an embroidered cushion at the opposite end of the couch.

Liath had never had trouble seeing in dim light, but the breath of sorcery hazed her vision; she could not get a clear look at the other woman’s face although she sat little more than an arm’s length from her. She wore a robe woven of golden silk. Her ornaments gleamed in the dim light: a tall headdress stamped with gold from which hung streamers of beads and gold lacework, and earrings curved like reed boats dangling fish from a dozen lines which brushed her shoulders. Whenever she shifted, the earrings chimed softly and the gold lacework rustled.

The older servant, too, rang: she wore anklets and wristlets sewn with tiny bells and silver earrings that danced and sang when she moved. She carried the silver ewer over and poured them each a cup of the heady brew, stinging and sharp, from the camel’s mouth. When Liath drank, it went right to her head.

“You are the one who bears the name of my teacher,” said the other woman.

“In my own tongue I call myself Liathano.”

The other woman tried this several times but could not produce the softer consonants, so in the end she laughed, amused at her efforts.

Liath laughed with her, warming to her lack of arrogance. “You are called Sorgatani.”

“So I am. I, too, am named after one who came before me. Because she died the year I was born, her name and her soul passed into me.”

“Do the souls of your people not ascend to the River of Light?”

“They remain on Earth. Souls endure many lives. We are born again and again into the world below. Do your people not know this truth also?”

Liath shook her head. “I have seen many things recently that have made the world above and the world below look very different to my eyes. Yet it’s true my people do not believe as you do. The Lord and Lady bide in the Chamber of Light, which exists beyond the world above. It is there that our souls ascend after we die, to live in peace and harmony with God.”

“That is very strange,” said Sorgatani. She was silent, then broke into delighted laughter. “What do your souls do in this chamber of light? Do they dance? Do they eat? Do they find pleasure in the bed? Do they ride and hunt?”

A churchwoman might have been offended by such a questions, but to Liath they suggested a mind with an affinity to her own. “There is some disagreement among the church mothers on this point, actually. Some say that only our souls can exist within the Chamber of Light, that we will dissolve into the eternal bliss that is the presence of God. Others say that our bodies will be fully resurrected, that we will exist bodily in the Chamber of Light but without any taint of the darkness that gives rise to the evil inclination. The Enemy will have no foothold in the Chamber of Light.”

“If your bodies are resurrected, then what do you eat? Who feeds this vast tribe?”

“God are the food on which blessedness is fed.”

“Isn’t God consumed, then?”

“No. God has no material substance, not like we do.”

“I admit I am puzzled. Who is this enemy?”

“Darkness and corruption.”

“But darkness and corruption are everywhere. They are part of Earth. How can any place exist that does not contain all that is? Does this ‘enemy’ cause humankind to do evil things?”

“No, not at all. We live our lives according to free will. Darkness came into the world, but it is up to us to choose that which is good, or that which is evil. If God had made it otherwise, that we could not choose evil, then we would be slaves, ‘an instrument in the hand of Them who set us in motion,’ to quote the blessed Daisan.”

“Then who is responsible for evil?”

“Darkness rose from the depths and corrupted the four pure elements.”

“Surely this is impossible. The world has always existed as it was created in the days long ago by the Great God. Darkness was part of creation, not the foundation of evil.”

“Then who do you think is responsible for evil?”

“There are many spirits abroad in the world above and the world below, and some of them are mischievous or even malign. They plague us with sickness and bad luck, so we must protect ourselves against them.”

“What of the evil that people do to each other?”

“Are there not answers enough for this? Greed, lust, anger, envy, fear. Do these not turn to evil when they fester in the hearts of humankind?”

Liath laughed. “I cannot argue otherwise. This drink has made my tongue loose and a little clumsy. I have not eaten for many days.”

“No guest of our tribe goes hungry!”

Sorgatani clapped her hands. The younger servant brought a wooden tray and set it down in front of Liath. Three enamel bowls contained yogurt, dumplings stewed in fat, and a hot barley porridge. The two servants moved away, bells settling and stilling as they sat beside the threshold with heads bowed. Sorgatani averted her gaze while Liath ate, forcing herself not to gulp down the meal. When she had finished, the servant removed the tray.

“I ask your pardon if my questions have caused offense,” said Sorgatani. “You are my guest. We do not know each other.”

“Nay, do not apologize. As the blessed Daisan wrote, it is an excellent thing that a person knows how to formulate questions.”

The older servant refilled Liath’s cup, and she drank, savoring
the aftertaste flavored like milk of almonds. The fermented drink flooded her limbs with warmth and made the heavens, glimpsed through the smoke hole, spin slowly, as a sphere rotates around its axis. She and Sorgatani were the axis, surely, and the whole world was spinning around them, or they were spinning; it was hard to tell.

“How is it that you speak Wendish so well?”

Sorgatani downed a second cup as well. “Humans are born with luck that leads them either into ill fortune or good fortune throughout their life. We who are shamans among my people have so much power within us that we have no room for luck to be born into our body, so our luck is born into the body of another. My luck was born in the body of a woman of the Wendish tribe. Because I see her in my dreams, I understand and speak her language.”

“This is a thing I have never heard of before. Is it common for the luck of a Kerayit shaman to be born into a foreigner?”

“Our luck is born where fate decrees, and where our path lies. It is my fate that my path lies west, intertwined with that of your people. I think you know her, because she speaks of you in her dreams. She is called Hanna—”

“Hanna!” Liath had not seen Hanna since Werlida, when she had fled Henry’s wrath with Sanglant. “Do you know where she is? Better yet, I’ll search. Is there a fire I can look into?”

Sorgatani lifted a hand, and the older servant brought the silver cup over on the tray, now cleared of bowls. She set it down before Liath and retreated.

Liath passed a hand over the shimmering surface of flame, as smooth as water licked by ripples of fire. With ease, she drove a path through the flame and sought Hanna.

Only the coruscating blue-white flicker of the burning stone met her seeking gaze, as if Hanna were caught within the gateway, wandering the ancients paths woven between the stone crowns.

“How can this be?” she whispered.

Shadows danced, and faded, making her dizzy, and she found herself back in Sorgatani’s tent. The oil in the cup had all burned up to reveal, in the bottom, an astonishing wheel of horses’ heads, spinning like a pinwheel, one galloping after
the next, until she realized that she was staring at a pattern beaten into the silver. She took her hands off the cup. The jangling of tiny bells announced the arrival of the older servant, and the cup was removed.

“She does not walk on Earth,” said Liath, surprised to find she could still speak. The effort had tired her, and the question of Hanna’s fate weighed on her, an impossibly heavy burden. Hanna was her northern star, the one sure stable point in a tumultuous world. “I pray she is not dead.”

“She walks the crowns,” said Sorgatani carelessly, as if to walk the crowns was no greater a feat than a morning’s stroll down to the river.

“Who but the Seven Sleepers knows the secret of the crowns?”

“A woman, I think, whom Hanna saved from a deep pit, which you call a dungeon. Now they walk the crowns to escape those who pursue them. She is safe.”

“What woman?”

“I do not know how you call her. Your names are puzzling and difficult to pronounce.”

Liath squelched her frustration. This was no time to irritate her allies. “Do you have any way of knowing for how long she is safe?”

“Only the Holy One can see both ways through time. She can see across great distances and pierce the veil of time through the heart of the burning stone. Can you not as well?”

“I can see through fire, but not into the heart of the crowns. I saw glimpses of past and future when I crossed through the burning stone, but that sight is closed to me here on Earth.”

“Then what does it mean, to ‘see through fire’?”

“It is a gift known to those who have taken Eagle’s vows in my country, to see folk and places through fire. The Eagles are messengers for the regnant. In this way they can be also the regnant’s eyes and ears.”

“Can you teach me this sorcery? Or is it forbidden?” Her tone dropped wistfully. “There is so much I wish to learn, but there is much that is forbidden to me. We live under the tutelage of the Horse people. They have always been our allies and our mothers, our guardians.” She shifted sideways on the couch, smoothing out a lump in the embroidered cushion she
sat on, moving a little closer to Liath. “I know I am impatient. Some days I hope that my fate leads me westward where I can see new things.”

“Are you a prisoner?”

As if a muffling blanket had dropped down around them, the hiss of burning oil became the only sound. Liath could not even hear the breathing of the two servants. Of the camp outside, surely audible through the walls, she heard nothing. It was as if magic had torn them away from normal intercourse with the world and thrust them into the heart of a maze, where sight and sound altered and warped until they might stand a spear’s length from their companions and yet be utterly separated from them by a wall of stone or a veil of sorcery.

“I am a prisoner of my power.” Sorgatani spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone with which the steward of an estate proclaimed which cattle were marked out for the Novarian slaughter. “The Horse people are immune, as are my blood kin and the other shamans. Those who serve me are bound to me by magic so that they do not suffer in my presence.”

“Nothing has happened to me.”

“You, like me, possess a soul that was passed on to you from another being. Mine came from my aunt. Yours came from a creature born of fire.”

“Have you seen with your own eyes the fate suffered by ordinary humans who are brought into the presence of one of your kind?”

“Nay. This lore I had from my teacher.”

“Has it been tested? If you have not seen it for yourself, how do you know it is true and not just a superstition?”

Sorgatani laughed bitterly. “What if it is true, Liat-ano? Am I to walk into a camp of strangers with no care that I may bring death down upon people I do not know? We tell stories, in our tribe, of how a Kerayit shaman destroyed an entire tribe, one who warred against us, by walking through their camp at midday. Every soul there died, and their tribe vanished from Earth and memory. I dare not risk it. I seek knowledge, not death. I am not a warrior.”

“I am no warrior either, although at times I must fight. After everything I have seen, I wish it were not to a war that I have returned, for there is so much to learn and to study. This
war seems like a desert to me, a barren wasteland. But still, it must be crossed.”

“You speak as if with my own heart.” Sorgatani’s earrings chimed as she shifted on her cushion. Her words seemed freighted with reticence, the speech of a woman shy of speaking her deepest feelings because she had never had a close companion before, only the comradeship of duty, the tutelage of one more powerful than she, and the inevitability of the isolated life that she would inherit when she came fully into her powers.

Power frightened those who did not possess it, and well it might when It resided in the flesh of an otherwise ordinary woman.

“You must be lonely,” said Liath. The bitterness of the solitude she had suffered with her father as they lived as fugitives all those years was as fresh now as it had been when she had lived through it. It was impossible to trust when you were always running. It was hard to clasp hands with people soon to be left behind, never to be met again. Her years in Heart’s Rest had been Da’s last gift to her, and giving that precious respite to her, granting her the time to develop affectionate bonds with Hanna and Ivar, had killed him. He had given his enemies time to catch up with him, because he wanted to make his daughter happy.

Impulsively, Liath reached out. “We are alike, you and I. We might be sisters.” She grasped the other woman’s dark hand.

A spark burst where their skin touched. A report like the clap of thunder deafened her as she recoiled. The servants leaped up, bells jangling, but Liath nursed her hand and, when tears stopped stinging and she had enough courage, turned it over to examine it. Red blisters bubbled on her palm. They burned like sin.

“I pray you, forgive me!”

“Nay, you must forgive
me
.” Sorgatani sounded near tears. She cracked an order at the servants, and the older one hurried to the chest and brought out a tiny leather bottle. Bowing low before Liath, she produced a salve and, when Liath held out her burned hand, smoothed the sweet-smelling paste over the burned skin.

“I should have warned you not to touch me,” continued Sorgatani. “I should not have let you sit so close. If I could wish one thing it would be that you do not abandon me, now that you know the truth. You see how it is.”

“I see how it is,” said Liath, wonderingly, lifting her gaze. The sting had dissipated the sorcerous veil that disguised the Kerayit girl’s features. She could now see Sorgatani clearly—a beautiful, almond-eyed woman no older than herself, with black hair neatly confined in braids, an oval face broad at the cheekbones, and a lovely dark complexion. “I see you. I could not see you clearly before.”