A Dark Sacrifice Page 13

  This one, who silently accepted the flask when she handed it back to him, was Dyonas. Inside the blood-red cowl his face, with its fine, sharp features, was bleached of color; his flat metallic eyes had no more humanity than ice or wind. And if, under the heavy layers of his clothing, his figure appeared boyishly slight, she did not for that reason make the mistake of thinking him weak or effeminate. No, he was as thin and bright as a new dagger, and likely to prove every bit as lethal. In truth, he had the look of a man who would die on the rack, who would perish in flames, before he would yield a point so trivial that no one else would take it for an inviolable principle. On either side of his forehead were short, polished ivory horns.

  As soon as he walked away, the questions began to hammer in her brain. Why had she been singled out from among so many? Or if she had been their object all along, what could they possibly want from her that they were willing to come such a distance to find her? So far, nothing she had seen or heard, none of the bizarre and terrifying tales she remembered about Ouriána of Phaôrax and her monstrous priests, provided any answers.

  Before long, all but two of her attendants drifted off and busied themselves with various tasks about the camp. In the field beyond the tents, the Furiádhin had gathered together a few of the black-robed acolytes and appeared to be holding a low-voiced council, darting occasional glances in her direction. They are deciding what to do with me, she thought. Or much more likely, when they will do it.

  Her fingers twisted in her lap, weaving charms as her lips formed the words, though by now she had little hope any of them would be effective. Again and again she made the signs, whispered the spells; again and again her charms refused to take hold. The silver bracelets were very light and delicately made—they hardly weighed more than air—but they did their work remarkably well.

  When the discussion across the way came to a close, Winloki braced herself for the worst. Just as she had feared, they all walked over to the knoll and regrouped around her.

  “Are you hungry?” asked the one called Camhóinhann. His voice was so deep and compelling, so filled with strange music, it sent shivers along her skin. When she stubbornly refused to answer, he spoke again: “Or is there anything, Lady, that you require for your comfort?”

  Winloki could hardly return his glance. This one, she thought, is a hundred times more terrifying than Dyonas.

  Just to look at him made her bones tremble and her heart quake. He was so tall that he towered head and shoulders over every man in the camp, and for all that he was so wasted and thin, a large frame gave the impression of great physical strength and power. His face, too, was striking: neither hideous nor handsome, yet with an indefinable something about the features or the expression that suggested both. Most of all, she thought he was someone who could sway others by the sheer force and magnitude of his personality—and Winloki knew with every fiber of her being that she did not wish to be influenced by him in that way.

  She shook her head, unwilling to let any word escape from her dry, scratchy throat, fearing some tremor or crack in her voice might be mistaken for cowardice. There were a great many things that she “required for her comfort,” her freedom first among them, but pride forbade that she make any request, accept any favor, no matter how trivial.

  When the others began to drift away to take up their several duties elsewhere, Camhóinhann remained, staring down at her with unsettling pupiless eyes. “If you wish to avail yourself of the privacy of those bushes over there, you may feel free to do so,” he suggested quietly. “No one will disturb you.”

  It was but one more indignity, she raged inwardly, that she should require permission for something so natural—something so private. She wanted to say no; the word trembled on her lips. Rebellion was strong, defiance was strong, but nature was stronger still. She started to rise, then flinched back involuntarily when a lean white hand reached out to help her.

  “You have no need to fear me,” he said, bending down to remove, by some trick she could not see, the chain from the silver cuffs. “I mean you no harm. Nor will anyone here offer you any indecency. The bracelets are meant only to prevent you from injuring yourself.”

  Winloki glared up at him in surprised indignation. “Am I to suppose, against all reason, that I am not your prisoner?”

  “You are our captive, certainly, but an honored one,” he answered gravely. “As for my companions and I, no doubt we appear monstrous enough to you, but we are priests and votaries of the Devouring Moon, essentially celibate.”

  With that vaguely ominous word “essentially” echoing in her mind, Winloki walked past him and into the screening shrubs, where she did what she needed to do. Emerging from the bushes afterward, she spotted a little rivulet running downhill over the rocks and started in that direction. Almost immediately, guardsmen and acolytes surrounded her once more, escorting her over to the water, where she washed her hands, then back to her former place on the slope.

  She sat down again, wrapping her skirts around her legs, brushed back her tangled hair, and inhaled deeply. After subsisting so long on the stingy air of the heights, she had almost forgotten what it really was to breathe.

  Almost immediately, Camhóinhann returned and chained her wrists together again. “Perhaps you are ready to eat now?”

  Coming to the disheartening conclusion that she only punished herself by refusing—and discomforted them not at all—Winloki nodded. Within moments a cold meal appeared, consisting of meat, cheese, cakes, and fruit (such a feast, indeed, as she had not known in weeks) offered to her on a wooden platter by a kneeling acolyte. She ate sparingly, only enough to keep up her strength. The idea of sharing their food robbed her of appetite, and the little that she did eat sat uneasily in her stomach.

  Meanwhile, a thin nail-paring of a moon had appeared in the sky and it was time for the evening rite. Wavering between guilt and a reluctant fascination, she realized that it was impossible for her not to watch. Though she cared nothing for their atrocious religion, or for their “goddess in human form,” she could not help being intrigued by their rituals.

  As one man, all of the priests and acolytes dropped to the ground in a profound obeisance, with their arms outstretched and their faces in the dirt. Minutes passed, during which the worshippers remained moveless, silent. But Winloki could feel that something was happening, something that raised the hair at the back of her neck, made the nerves jump beneath her skin. Finally, as if in response to an unheard signal, they all rose together in a single movement, and Dyonas began to sing in a clear, high voice.

  The words of his song were strange to her, and yet oddly familiar. It was as though he spoke in a language that she ought to know, but only halfway understood. Winloki closed her eyes, let the impressions wash over her. A great weariness and disgust began to press down on her, a crushing sense of futility.

  She seemed to see a vast landscape as of all the world spread out before her: hills and mountains, oceans and rivers—and everything she saw was hideous, ill formed, wounded past healing. The moon rained down vapors, the skin of the earth cracked; men spread out across the face of the land like the lesions of a disease.

  The entire race had degenerated: they were worse than vermin, less than apes, lower than the creeping things of the earth. The weak battened on the strong, the sick infected the well. Thousands suffered and died who should never have been born at all.

  But then some quality in the words or music changed, and her sense of futility and despair began to lift.

  She was in a place of burning gums and incenses, of hot, heavy perfumes. Skyrrans built no temples or fanes, yet something, some inner voice or the hymn itself, told her that this was a temple dedicated to Ouriána, goddess incarnated.

  Upon the high altar, fires of purification and regeneration were burning, consuming the sins and sorrows of a suffering world, and praise for the Goddess rose to the heavens on the smoke of a thousand sacrifices. What was ill made (said Dyonas’s song) would be unmade and cr
eated anew. Let the ignorant, the cowardly, the misguided beware. It was not in their power to prevent the inevitable; their efforts at resistance only prolonged the agony. All must pass through the fire, either to perish or be transformed.

  Finally, the hymn soared into sublime regions of felicity and hope.

  Winloki found herself alone in the blue-black dome of the night. Stars flashed like diamonds. The moon was a fiery crystal egg, cloudy but translucent, and she could see a luminous amorphous shape inside, as of something struggling to be born. Then there was a sound so loud it shook the firmament, it fractured the sky. A cold wind blew in from some place of dark vacancy beyond the stars. The egg cracked, and a younger moon emerged, brighter than the sun and more glorious. Its birth was more than a sign, more than a portent; it was a promise and a pledge: present pain would give way to future bliss. No life would be wasted, not one drop of blood shed in vain. After the violent purgation would come a New Age, when men would live as gods.

  As the last notes lingered on the air, Winloki discovered that she was weeping, though with what emotion—anger or fear or hope—she was not even certain.

  The rite was over and darkness was swiftly gathering when one of the acolytes approached her to say that a tent had been prepared for her use. Three guards escorted her across the campsite. On a sudden impulse of curiosity, she lingered for a moment outside the tent, studying the faces of her guards—hoping that they, who were solid and human and ordinary, might offer some clue as to what awaited her, might be easier to comprehend than the ghastly priests or the grim and austere acolytes.

  They were strapping young men, hardly older than she was herself, and they blushed like girls under her steady regard. As hard as she looked, Winloki could find nothing sinister about them, not for all their glinting, dark armor or their array of weaponry. If there was anything, anything to set them apart from the Skyrran soldiers she had lived with, healed, and (far too often) watched die in these last terrible months, she could not find it.

  A movement on the other side of the camp drew her attention. It was the third priest, Goezenou, standing where a shaft of moonlight illuminated his hawk-nosed, lantern-jawed face. Too many times, during the course of the last day and night, she had noticed him watching her, not with the same disinterested vigilance as the others, but as though he wanted something from her. The guards caught sight of him at the same time she did, and all three turned taut and watchful. One of them stepped between her and the furiádh, as if to shield her—or perhaps to prevent her from seeing something not meant for her eyes.

  Whatever he meant by it, the gesture came too late. She had already met the full force of a glance so intense and disturbing it made her feel violated. If ever she had looked into the face of raw, unadulterated evil, she had just done so now.

  She ducked quickly inside the tent and sank down on the ground, breathless and queasy, trying to regain control over herself, to quell the bone-shaking shudders of revulsion.

  At length, the sickness passed, and she began a listless examination of her surroundings. Gradually it dawned on her that the tent was not without its luxuries: a bed of heather and somebody’s beautiful fur-lined cloak to serve as a blanket; a lantern; a folding stool; a flask of wine and a silver cup; a basin of water and a cloth to wash her face. It was evident that someone had taken considerable thought for her comfort. But who had it been? And just how long and how far could she count on that someone’s goodwill?

  All through the night, lying restless and half awake, listening to footsteps or the clink of armor, a word passing between the men standing guard just outside, she had ample occasion to torture her brain with questions. If only the King and Elfhael had told her about her own origins, so many, many things that bewildered her now might have made perfect sense!

  Yet more than anything else, she wondered if there were any chance she might still be rescued. Her heart sank with the knowledge that it was almost impossible that any of her people at the Old Fortress had survived. I saw Haakon and Arvi die, she remembered. The battle was already lost.

  And no matter how she arranged events in her mind during that seemingly endless night, no matter how she tried to make them add up to some other outcome, she always came back to the conclusion that everyone was dead: Skerry and Kivik. Thyra, Syvi, and the other healers. All the refugees who had suffered so much and struggled so hard to win through to safety. The Eisenlonders, who took no prisoners, who spared no lives, had slaughtered them, every one.

  At dawn, a different set of guards came into the tent to wake her, escorting her outside so that others could take it down. They gave her a folding stool to sit on and, with the same bashful courtesy she was beginning to expect, brought her a cold breakfast of bread, water, and dried fruit. She had scarcely finished eating when the three priests and all eight acolytes surrounded her again.

  “There is something we should have attended to before this, but other matters took precedence,” said Camhóinhann, his great shadow falling over her, his broad shoulders blocking out the sky. “You have a ring made of bone with a runic inscription. Perhaps no one told you: it belonged to your mother. We know the ring was on your hand when we took you out of the fortress, and I must ask you to give it to me now.”

  Winloki was bewildered, and then uncertain how to reply. On the night of her abduction, during a brief pause to change the horses, she had removed the ring and concealed it when no one was looking. She had never imagined it could have any special significance for her captors, had certainly never guessed they would know more about it than she did; she had merely deemed it too valuable to lose. Now that it seemed so important, she was more eager to keep it than ever. She considered, briefly, if a lie would avail her anything.

  “No,” said Camhóinhann, reading her face, or reading her silence, all too easily. “If you told us you had lost it, we would be obliged to search you. We prefer to spare you that indignity—but don’t allow yourself to think we would hesitate if you make it necessary.”

  Again Winloki felt Goezenou watching her. Turning her head to meet his gaze, she intercepted another naked and disturbing glance—one that told her as clearly as words that he at least would welcome the opportunity to lay hands on her.

  Blushing furiously, she reached up under her hair, found the lock at the base of her skull where she had anchored the ring, and untied the knot. With a mutinous look, she held out her hand, palm uppermost, offering the ring to Camhóinhann.

  He reached out to take it, but before his fingers touched the ring his hand wavered and his face convulsed. He staggered back with a great cry of pain. All the lesser priests and acolytes reacted at the same time: hissing and cringing, raising up their cloaks to cover their faces. Even Winloki was shaken by the violence of their recoil.

  Several minutes passed. Then it was Camhóinhann, as if by some great effort of will, who recovered first.

  “It seems that you must keep it after all,” he told her. “Hold it, and keep it safe. We dare not take it, and it is far too rare and valuable a thing to be entrusted to one of the temple guards.”

  13

  Prince Cuillioc woke in the middle of the night with the scent of smoke tickling his nose and a burning sensation in his lungs. Bonfires, he thought groggily.

  But he came back awake a short time later at the sound of swift footsteps outside in the antechamber. Still heavy with sleep, fighting the weight of it, he had succeeded only in propping himself up on his elbows when the door flew open and two of his knights, Gerig and Brihac, burst into the room. “Great Prince, our galleys are burning! They’ve set fire to our ships.”

  Pulling himself up into a sitting position, Cuillioc shook the red-blond hair out of his eyes. “What—all of them?”

  “At least a third, perhaps as many as half.” As he spoke, Gerig moved around the room, lighting the oil lamps, closing the shutters to keep the smoke out. “It’s still very dark, and there’s little to be seen from this side of town.”

  By now,
Cuillioc was most thoroughly awake. “What have we done to put out the fires?”

  “Steps have already been taken to save as many ships as possible. Our men billeted down by the water claim to have the situation well in hand. But—”

  “But with our ships fired,” said the Prince as he threw off the covers and left the bed, “the next thing we can expect of the natives is an open rebellion. To stop that we will need to take swift action.”

  He could be decisive in a crisis like this one. Striding over to a table where pen, ink, and paper were waiting, he tore a sheet into several pieces, wrote out instructions on each one, and called for men to act as his couriers.

  He dressed in haste, careless of which garments were handed him. Opening a chest at the foot of his bed, he began lifting out pieces of armor—corselet, gorget, vambraces, cuisses, greaves—and passing them one by one to Gerig or Brihac, who discarded the protective silk wrappings before placing them on the bed. But all the time his mind was busy.

  “The galley slaves!” He stopped what he was doing and uttered a furious oath. “Those poor wretches chained to their oars in the middle of that holocaust—”

  “Your concern for criminals, traitors, and prisoners of war is somewhat misplaced,” said a familiar, flat voice. It was Iobhar, standing in the open doorway.

  “Do not grieve yourself,” the priest continued, sketching a brief genuflection. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten: rather than leave so many in idleness all of these weeks, we brought most of the slaves ashore and put them to other work.”

  With a curt nod of thanks for the information, the Prince turned back to his armor chest, took out the dragon-crested helm, and passed it on to Brihac. “So the Mirazhites finally show some backbone and lash out against us. But did they truly imagine there would be no reprisals?”