Wings of Wrath (22 page)

But it was a long, long while before he could stop thinking about her.

 

Cold. Knife-edged white sheets of pain: wind-driven, flesh-scoring. They lanced through the boy's soft flesh and sliced to the center of him until his heart felt like a jagged icy mass, threatening to shatter with each and every heartbeat.

He could see the broken body of one of the sacrifices dangling from the talons of the god flying right ahead of him. She had struggled briefly when the god had first grabbed hold of her, but terror and cold had finally robbed her of life; now she dangled like a shattered doll from her captor's claws, her hair dusted with frost, her eyes glazed and lifeless.

That would be his fate soon enough if they did not bring him to some kind of shelter, the boy thought, shivering violently. But at least he still felt cold. He was savvy enough to understand how important that was. It was when you stopped feeling cold that you knew you were about to die. Supposedly the gods had designed Man thus so that he would have a warning sign when he overstepped his bounds, and a chance to retreat to safety before the frigid wrath of the gods snuffed out his life.

The problem was that in this situation, there was no retreat possible.

The priests taught that the world had been created out of ice and snow; both land and sky were originally frozen solid. But the gods had discovered that such a place could not sustain life, and every attempt they made to populate it failed miserably. Finally a god named Kuta had stolen a piece of the Sun and buried it deep within the earth, so that the land directly above the Sun Stone thawed and water ran freely there. Then Man was created, along with all the plants and animals that required sunlight and flowing water, and they were given that place as a home. And so the world was created.

The boy had always been skeptical of such tales. But now, looking down upon his world from the vantage point of the gods themselves, seeing with his own eyes how the Land of the Sun gave way to endless fields of glittering whiteness in every direction, he could believe that the entire world had indeed been dead once, and that if mankind's precious fragment of the Sun ever expired, it would become dead once again.

It should have been a humbling thought, but it wasn't. There were gods who tended to the sacred fires of the Sun and men who served those gods. It was whispered that those men carried sparks of the Sun with them so that they might brave forbidden places where the heavenly light never shone, and that they even rode on the backs of the gods as if they were true companions to them, rather than humble servants. The boy had never been sure those tales were true until today, but now that he had seen it for himself at the caldera he could think of nothing else.

Some men rose above the normal status of men to share in the freedom and the power of gods.

He was determined to be one of them.

A sudden gust of frigid wind burned his eyes and he shut them for a moment, struggling to blink away the pain. When he opened them again the world below him had changed. A thin line of jagged gray protrusions now jutted up from the whiteness, like the half-buried bones of some long dead animal. But then his captor dropped down toward them—so suddenly that he thought for one heart-stopping moment that he had been released and was falling—and he realized the “bones” were in fact a line of jagged hills, robbed of scale by the featurelessness of the white plain surrounding them. Clearly that was their destination.

He saw another god swoop low, carrying a man upon its back. Or at least he thought it was a man. A set of small wings from the god's shoulders had folded back over the figure, encasing it in a glossy, blue-black cocoon. At first glance it did not look like a man at all, but rather like a part of the god's own body. Only when he kept staring at it could he make out enough features to figure out the truth.

The boy shivered.

Below him now he thought he could make out the faint throbbing glow of a sacred pool nestled between two of the hills. Warmth. That meant warmth. Then a black vein of open water came into view, not unlike the narrow channels that surrounded his homeland, when the ice began to crack in the spring.
A piece of the Sun has been buried here as well,
he thought in awe. Who would have imagined that there was another such place in the world? Certainly the priests had never hinted at it. Did they know about it? Or was he the first of his people to learn of this secret place?

He watched in amazement, the cold forgotten, as the ice and snow beneath him gave way to naked earth, and then to sparse patches of vegetation surrounding a steaming lake. He could see no herd beasts, but surely they were there. And wild beasts, hungry to feed upon those herds.

And men?

In a rush of blue-and-violet wings, one of the great creatures landed by the edge of the lake. Others followed. Each kept apart from its fellows, roaring belligerently if another god came too close, baring razor-sharp teeth in warning. The boy had heard killer seals roar like that when rivals crossed their paths in the mating season; it was a sound of mindless rage, primal and terrifying. He shivered with fear at the thought of being set down in the midst of such a scene, even as he hungered for the warmth of a Sun Stone beneath his feet again.

But his captor had other plans. Though his god banked down low toward the lake at first, he pulled up suddenly before reaching it, and veered sharply to one side. The movement was so sudden and unexpected that it drove the breath from the boy's body. Even as he struggled to take in a lungful of frozen air, the sky about him suddenly went dark; in his weakened and distracted state it took him a minute to realize that his captor had flown into a gap in the hillside, broad enough in its entrance to accommodate the great wings. They passed into the depths of a vast cavern, its floor covered with patches of mud and loose gravel. Then the great talons opened at last and the boy fell roughly to the floor. Sharp pumice bits scored his shoulder and arm as he landed on them. For a moment he lay there, breathless, feeling the dull heat of his blood seeping out through dozens of lacerations. Dimly he was aware of his god bellowing as it left the cavern, no doubt some sort of challenge to the gods below. How like beasts they sounded! He would have expected gods to have a language that was more harmonious, more . . . civilized.

Then he realized suddenly that the ground beneath him was warm. Likewise the air was no longer painful to his lungs, but robbed of its wintry chill by what seemed a fragile, tentative heat. He drew in a deep breath, feeling precious warmth seep into his flesh. His fingers and toes throbbed in pain as they buried themselves reflexively in the warm pumice grit beneath him, almost as if they were creatures independent of his will, seeking the Sun Stone buried far below. For a moment he was aware of nothing save a purely animal hunger for warmth. In that moment he would have buried himself in the gravel from head to toe if it had been deep enough, and been happy to bleed for it. He lowered his face to the ground, eyes closed, oblivious to anything but the life-giving heat beneath his cheek.

“What is this?”

It was a male voice that broke his reverie, in an accent so thick the boy could hardly understand the words. “Are they sacrificing boys now?”

“Does it matter?” a second voice challenged him. “Food is food.”

“Food stays out there,” the first man said gruffly. “This one has been brought in here. Why?”

The boy blinked and looked up, trying to focus his wind-burned eyes on the men that suddenly surrounded him. There were maybe a half a dozen of them in all, and as he watched, still more stepped forward from the shadows of the great cavern. They were not like the men of his own people in appearance, nor even like each other, but a mismatched group of individuals, as foreign to one another as different species of animals. One was tall and thin and pale of skin, with yellow hair falling in long, tangled locks about his anemic features. Another was almost black of face, with eyes that stood out like white stars in a midnight sky, and a thick layer of black fleece in the place of hair. Another had eyes without lids, only slits in his face through which black pupils shone. The boy blinked as he twisted around to see them all, trying to absorb their strangeness. Yet though they were all different in size, shape, and coloring, they had one thing in common that chilled the boy to his very core. Their eyes. Different shapes and different colors and sizes, some of them human in form and some more lizardlike, but all of them without exception were haunted, hollow things. As if their owners had gazed upon something so terrible that their very spirits had been sucked out of them, and what was left was not quite human. The eyes of living men did not look like that, the boy thought, shivering. Were these men ghosts? Was this the place of eternal warmth where the spirits of the dead were said to reside? If so, was he being allowed to see it as a living man, or had he died in the cold skies during his journey here, so that his spirit truly belonged in this realm?

“He cried out to be brought to us,” a third man announced. He was a lanky creature with sharp, protruding joints and equally sharp movements. His tight-fitting garments glistened with an oily sheen that shimmered blue and violet, neither fabric nor sealskin nor any other substance the boy could identify. The others were dressed in different sorts of garments—some sleek and long and cut from a single piece, others fashioned out of smaller fragments, cobbled together in seemingly random array—but as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the cave, the boy could see that all their clothes were made of the same curious substance. It looked like it was the same color as the skin of the gods, as if the great creatures' wings had been wrapped around these men and then fixed in place. Or perhaps these were not truly men at all, he thought, but some supernatural amalgam of human and god, and the blue-black coverings were not clothing at all, but a kind of composite skin. Perhaps these were half-breeds, who might in time transform themselves fully into gods. Or maybe they were the cripples of their kind, the failures, who acted as servants to those who were fully transformed, and in return were permitted to share the heat of their caverns, but could never grow their own wings. His mind buzzed with possibilities, too terrible and too wonderful to contain.

Is this what you want to become?
an inner voice whispered.
Truly?

He thought of his village, struggling against the twin demons of cold and darkness, always so close to losing the battle. Of young girls mutilated so they could serve as sacrifices. Of the great Sleep that would come over the village sometimes, a weakness so terrible that crops would rot unharvested on their stalks and herd beasts would waste away while the villagers lay in a mindless stupor, too weak to care about anything. And then when the great Night came his people would die in droves for lack of food stores, and death would rule the land.

Heart pounding, the boy forced himself to his feet. Whatever these creatures were, it was unthinkable that he should display weakness before them. “I have come to serve the gods,” he told them. And then, his heart beating thunderously, he added, “Like you do.”

For a moment there was silence. Then one of them—a stocky man with long red hair, who wore a breastplate made up of coarse patches of god-skin—threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You wish to
join
us?” He slapped his thigh. “To join
us?
”

The flush of shame that came to the boy's cheeks was a hot thing. “Yes.”