The Gathering Storm (93 page)

Zacharias crouched beside him. “Can I learn to do this?”

Marcus replied without glancing up. “Can you write? Have you knowledge of numbers and sums and geometry? No? Then you must wait. I can only teach one step at a time. You must play Brother Lupus’ part now.”

“What is Brother Lupus’ part?”

“Cauda draconis. The tail of the dragon. Least among us. Be still.” It was hard to be still. He wanted what Marcus possessed so badly that his desire was like the grit: everywhere, rubbing in the folds of his skin and at the creases of the corners of his mouth, caught in his eyebrows and worked deep into his hair. Each time he shifted his clothing shed grit, and it filtered through his leggings and his boots to grind between his toes. He had a blister, too, although he had thought his feet too tough to develop anything but calluses.

No man was permitted to build a fire atop the sacred hill, and a cold night wind off the desert wicked away the day’s heat. Zacharias shivered under his cloak as he paced under the moon’s light. To the east distant pricks of light marked the walls of Qahirah, and he saw, surprisingly, the unsteady waver of a campfire in the ruins of Kartiako, briefly glimpsed, then lost. Had he only hallucinated those flames, or had they been extinguished? The barren flat lay so dark and featureless that it seemed more ocean than land. Their position out here, so far from human haunts, seemed precarious although Meriam had hired fully twenty retainers to accompany her. If bandits skulked in the lands hereabouts, surely they did not roam so far into the wasteland.

What was there to kill?

His boot scuffed the ground, and a small object rattled and rolled away from him, coming to rest where the ground sloped slightly up again.

Were those finger bones?

He shuddered and turned back toward the lamp in whose wavering light Marcus sat, with Meriam beside him, making his marks and wiping them clean while the old woman whispered comments. Elene paced among the stones, lifting a staff
not longer than her arm and measuring it against the stones and the stars. All of them glanced frequently at the sky.

An unholy cry rose from the east, a moaning that trembled through the clear night air. Meriam’s servants leaped to their feet, but the locals shouted hysterically one to the next and grabbed staves and axes. One man wept.

That moan chilled Zacharias until he shivered, and yet he broke out in a sweat, staring into the darkness. There was nothing to see. A scent drifted over them, borne by the wind: stinking carrion steeped with the sweetness of honey, so reeking and foul that he gagged.

The caretaker appeared from the shadows that half drowned the stones and hurried over to the blanket where Marcus and Meriam worked their equations. He called out to the others, and the locals rushed in a group to huddle within the stones, deathly quiet and obviously frightened.

“No light! No light!” The words came in recognizable Dariyan, and the rigid mask of terror that tightened the caretaker’s eyes could be understood in any language. “Go! Go!”

Too late Marcus pinched out the wick. Meriam’s servants ran to fetch her and carried her within the stone circle as Marcus and Zacharias hurried after. An awful grinding, slithering noise rose from the east.

“Where is Elene?” cried Meriam.

The old man shouted words Zacharias did not know as he lifted his staff above his head. Light sparked from the stone columns. Threads danced between stars and earth to form a shimmering fence woven around the columns, and by that light Zacharias saw, sliding in and out of the light’s verge just beyond the stones, a massive shadow writhing and twisting, first a woman and then a monstrous snake.

The men clustered behind him moaned in terror, crying out “Akreva! Akreva!” and cast themselves on the ground as though prostrating themselves before the Enemy.

“By God’s Name, Meriam, what is that creature?” demanded Marcus.

“Where is Elene?”

A figure darted forward from the hillside where it had strayed, but the hideous woman-snake slithered faster than any earth-bound creature could move and cut off Elene’s retreat.
The girl was stuck beyond the safety of the encircling spell, easy prey for the monster as it closed. She raised her staff, but it was a frail stick with which to fend off death.

The choking sound of grief and horror that came from Meriam’s throat catapulted Zacharias into action. He would not stand by as he had when the Quman had attacked the party guarding Blessing outside the walls of Walburg. He would not run away.

Better to die than find himself a coward again.

He grabbed a staff out of the hands of a cowering servant and dashed past the glimmering net of the spell. The threads burned where they touched him; cloth blackened; his skin stung and turned white.

The monster reared up before the stunned girl, its tail lashing. Its scales were coated with a noxious substance that gave off a phosphorescent glow. Its tail bore a barbed stinger, and it whipped its tail forward, and struck. Elene darted sideways. The tail thunked into the ground. Dust spattered. The monster opened its mouth to trumpet its rage, a high, horrible scream echoed off the distant hills and vibrated the stones. The threads of light sparked and wavered. Behind their net of safety, men shrieked in terror.

Zacharias jumped forward and whacked the monster across the coils as hard as he could. It reared back, twisting to confront him. Its body was massive, as thick as a tree trunk and rippling with muscles, and it was shiny pale and so grotesque that he wanted to cry, or vomit. The stench brought tears to his eyes. The long snake body bloomed into a monstrosity, the grotesque semblance of a woman with round breasts and narrow face but so crudely formed that it seemed an ill-trained craftsman had botched the job.

Elene’s voice rang out. “Hear me, Misael, Charuel, Zamroch. Come to my call. I invoke you, Sabaoth, Misiael, Mioael. Prepare for me a sharp sword drawn in your right hands. Prepare for me seven radiant lights. Drive this evil creature from our midst!”

It struck.

He was slow, unlike the girl. The tip pierced his shoulder. He did not remember screaming. Suddenly he lay on the
ground and a cold swift burning blew outward from the sting, turning his flesh to stone. He couldn’t move.

It stared down at him, its youthful face like that of a girl but lacking all intelligence and emotion. It clacked sharp teeth together and drew its tail back for a second strike.

How strange, staring upward, that time should move so slowly. The creature had hair, of a kind, but in that last instant he realized that it was not hair at all but a coiling mass of hissing snakes writhing around its face.

A falling star flashed in the heavens. A burst of fire exploded before his eyes, and its brightness shrouded his vision. The monster screamed in such agony that the sound of it might as well have turned every soul there to stone. He could not move but shivered convulsively as that tail was dragged across him, drawn by what force he did not know, nor could he see, nothing except those heavy gray coils pressing their weight into his chest, the tail dwindling until the white stinger floated before his eyes, a bead of venom dangling from the barbed tip, ready to fall into his mouth.

It would burn off his tongue. He would never speak again.

The ground shifted under him. Hands gripped him and hauled him away over the rocky ground, then let him drop onto the hard ground as voices exclaimed in fear and excitement.

“It was a demon!”

“Nay, it was an angel, you fool!”

“It was a phoenix! Are you blind?”

“Not so blind that I don’t know lightning when I see it! That was no creature at all.”

“Gah, gah, gah,” he said, but no words came.

“Is he safe?”

“He is stung, Sister.”

They conferred, but he could only stare up at the heavens where light burned just as it burned across his skin. He shivered, so cold. So cold.

“The old one says there is no cure for the sting of the monster?”

“So he says, but I am not so willing to give up on a brave man.”

When had it become so foggy? A haze drifted before his eyes. Yet those words blazed:
a brave man
.

Those words gave him heart.

“What do you suggest?”

“I am the only one skilled in healing among us. We will remain here while I do what I can.”

“We have no time for such luxuries, Meriam. In any case, the creature is wounded, but not dead. It may return.”

“Even if we go, you will still be in danger.”

“Perhaps. It is easier to protect one man than an entire retinue. You know I must change my plans because Brother Lupus deserted us. I can bide in Qahirah until Sister Anne sends a brace of soldiers to guard me, if that is necessary.”

“Soldiers cannot defeat such a monster.”

“Enough! You and Elene and your party must leave at dusk tomorrow.”

“Will you abandon him to death after he saved the life of my granddaughter?”

“Nay. He can be our messenger to Anne. He can still serve us, and in serving us may serve himself….”

The wind’s moan tore away the rest of Marcus’ words. Sister Meriam had called him a brave man.

It was better to die bravely than to live with shame.

It was better to die, but he lay there not precisely in pain but unable to move or see, with his skin on fire and yet not really hurting. He lay there and felt the sun rise, although the touch of light hurt him. They shaded him with a lean-to of cloth, and he lay in that shade while Meriam coaxed a bit of honeyed water down his throat, but the smell of honey nauseated him. That stench of honey-carrion that pervaded the monster welled up in his memory, in his throat, and he threw it all back up.

Elene sat beside him, staring at him with solemn eyes. “I didn’t look at him,” she said to her grandmother. “I thought him beneath my notice. How strange that God should act through such a common, ugly, dirty man.”

“Even a cringing dog can bite, Elene. Look more closely at humankind. The outer seeming may not mirror the inner heart.”

“I know! I know!” said the girl impatiently, as though she
had heard this lecture a hundred times before. “That isn’t what I meant! He just didn’t seem to matter.”

“Neither did the mouse spared by the prisoner, who later gnawed through her ropes and thereby freed her.”

The shade drew a line across the girl’s tunic as she smoothed it down over her knees; she had her head in the sun and her legs in the shadow. “I’m afraid, Grandmother. I don’t want to go into the wilderness. You don’t know what we’ll find on the other side of the gateway. What if there are monsters there, too?”

“We must be strong, Elene. We have been given a task. I alone can speak the language of those who bide in the desert country, so I must go. So be it.”

“So be it,” she breathed, bowing her head.

“Gah,” he whispered, but the sound vanished in the trickling tumble of grains of sand down the sloped cloth lean-to as a wind blew up from the flats.

His body was ice, his thoughts sluggish. Somehow, the lean-to came down and he was rolled onto a length of cloth and dragged over the bumpy ground to be dropped again, left lying with a rock digging into the small of his back.

There he lay. A haze descended, and for a while he heard faint sounds, none of them distinct enough to identify. A drop of moisture wet his palm. Through the haze the sun shone as it sank low into the west, but its glare had the force of ice, creeping into his limbs.

He drifted. It was getting harder and harder to see people; they seemed so tenuous and insubstantial set against the pale hills and the darkening sky, which were older creatures by far, populated by ancient spirits that stalked the shadows. Light winked in the heavens; a star bloomed. Figures moved outside the circle, raising and lowering staffs and murmuring words too softly for him to hear or understand.

A spider’s thread spun down from the heavens to latch to one of the stones, followed by a second. His heart sped as he realized they were engaged in the art of the mathematici, who could read the movements of the heavens and discern their secrets. Years ago Kansi-a-lari had woven a spell into the stones while he cowered and prayed, but she had woven it with the intent to keep them in one place while time moved forward
around them. Marcus wove a gateway into the stones through which Meriam and Elene and their retinue might travel to a distant land.

The stone circles were gateways, each one a gate that could lead to any one of the others, but he did not know how to weave the spell. He wanted to know how to weave the spell. He tried to lift his head, to look, to learn, but none of his limbs moved and that waxing torpor dragged him down, and down, and down into the pit. A shadow bent over him; hands pinned parchment to his robes; the cloth on which he lay strained and tugged around his body and he moved into the web of light. Blind, he floated while all around blue fire burned with a cold breath that soaked him to the bone.

It is so cold that it burns. He sees branching corridors and down each one a vision, whether false or true he cannot say
.

A man, grimy, thin, half naked, walks and walks as a rumbling wheel rolls around and around him, never ending
.

Wizened creatures whisper and skulk in the depths of the earth, listening
.

A merman glides through smoky waters, pulled by the wake of a slender ship
.

A small party of robed figures strides hastily through the blue-white fog. Is there a familiar face among them? Isn’t that the Eagle called Hanna, who was freed from slavery to Bulkezu? She turns as if hearing his thoughts and calls aloud.

“Who are you?”

Light flared, and died, and he hit hard ground, his back and head and hips jarred by the force of the impact. That flare of the light washed away until no light remained. Was it night? Or was he blind?

He could no longer move his lips. But he could still hear.

“Who is this?”

“See, there is a message pinned to his robes with a fine brooch. Ai, God! He stinks!”

“Feh! So he does!”

“This is signed with the name of Brother Marcus. Here is the man who dragged the filthy one. He has the look of a servant.”