Michael Stackpole - Of Limited Loyalty

Owen nodded, glanced at his gear, then pulled his hood on. Nathaniel followed suit, tying it snugly around his neck. The hood immediately became hot and stuffy. Nathaniel swallowed to create a little space around the edge, to let fresh air in, but had little success. He shoved his hands into the mittens, felt the beaded pattern inside them as well, and waited.

Rough hands grabbed him, poking and prodding, spinning him one way and back. Fingers jabbed at wounds. A couple reopened. He could feel blood begin that slow, oozing crawl down his forearm and thigh. Then something splashed in the wounds and he yelped. The bag didn’t muffle other shouts, so he knew he wasn’t alone in how he was being treated.

Hands shoved him forward. At the point where he would have expected to pass the post-line, he met resistance. It felt no heavier against him than a spider-web, but it took heavy shoving to get him through it. He stumbled on the other side, but hands caught him. One man on either side marched him along the trail. A couple hundred yards further on they cut off the path. Grasses lashed his thighs, then he found himself on sand and could hear a stream burbling nearby.

His captors forced him down onto hands and knees, then shoved him forward. He crawled along and felt a leather curtain play over his back. Once inside other hands guided him to the left and shoved him down on his side. Another person, straddled him, grabbed his shoulders and hauled him up into a sitting position. The person loosened the hood’s tie and brought the edge up to just beneath his nose, then pressed a narrow-mouthed gourd to his lips.

Nathaniel tipped his head back and drank. Even before the turgid, sour liquid hit his throat, he knew what it was: salksasi. The Shedashee brewed it from mashed roots, adding some maple sugar and peppers. The scent immediately filled his head, clearing it, and the pepper burned his tongue and throat. The Shedashee saved it for rituals of all sorts, usually allowing a warrior only a mouthful because it could produce visions more easily than a gallon of whiskey drunk real fast. Nathaniel couldn’t swallow quickly enough, letting slender ribbons of the liquid roll down the side of his face like saliva.

Finally the gourd disappeared and the hood descended again. Nathaniel lay back and found himself propped up by skins. He tried to shift around, but his hands were numb and his legs had already been arranged so he sat cross-legged. I should have remembered that, shouldn’t I? Then he felt heat building against his chest and legs.

Someone pulled the hood off him, an old man wearing a carved turtle mask. A man in a hawk mask had removed Owen’s hood, and the man wearing a bear mask had removed Kamiskwa’s hood. The other two sat back awkwardly as Nathaniel did, blood trickling from the demon wounds. A small fire burned in the center of the circle, Nathaniel slowly realized, which sat beneath a short dome formed of birch boughs lashed together and covered with hides.

Turtle tossed something onto the fire. The flames shot up, shifting from red-gold to green. A sweet scent, part pine resin, part cedar, filled the enclosure. Smoke drifted down and Nathaniel breathed it in. It erased the last trace of salksasi.

Hawk fed a small wooden disk into the fire. Nathaniel found his eyes drawn to it. The surface had been worked with a sigil that reminded him of the squid motif from the ruin. And yet, even as he stared at it, the octopus’ limbs straightened and the symbol became that of the sun.

And Msitazi’s voice emerged from within the bear mask. “In a time before there was time, when young were the ancient spirits that tread the winding path…”

Msitazi’s voice faded, as did vision of anything but the sun. Nathaniel looked down from the yellow ball in the sky toward a valley, a broad green valley through which snaked a slow, blue river. He stood high on a promontory, yet could not see himself, nor feel himself. He was just there, an observer. He believed himself to be as light as a feather, and willed himself forward and down.

He went down because there, in the valley floor, was a vast city, built within a hexagonal series of mounds, just to the south of the river. To the east and west of it, vast fields had been cultivated, clearly made possible through the network of irrigation canals. Forest abutted the cleared areas, and the wood had been used to build many huts and even larger buildings-buildings that dwarfed the meeting houses, with wings added at odd angles which should have struck him as wrong, but seemed proper. They made the buildings stronger, not in the material world, but in the world of the supernatural. As the canals channeled water, so these walls could divert magick. Courtyards allowed it to pool. Towers sucked it skyward, letting it rain down in displays that teased him. They glittered like icy lace that collapsed when he studied it too intently.

In a large courtyard at the city’s heart-and Nathaniel knew instinctively that this city boasted more people than Temperance-people had gathered for a massive market. The Shedashee were well represented, with tribes he recognized from the east, and those he had dim knowledge of from tales. He even recognized symbols of tribes that no longer existed, which marked the vision as having taken place a long time ago.

In and among the Shedashee, moving between traders, laughing as did people in Temperance as they strolled the streets, were a golden people. Taller than the Shedashee and more slender, with golden hair and golden flesh, they appeared so achingly beautiful that they made Nathaniel weep with desire. Men and women alike wore broad girdles decorated with jewels and golden buttons. Pectorals of gold, worked with lapis and turquoise flashed in the sun. Nathaniel saw not a single weapon among them.

The golden people named themselves Noragah in his mind. They treated with the Shedashee fairly and happily. As the market day ended, the Shedashee retreated to the forests, and the vision vanished in a long night, which passed in an eyeblink. When it returned, the Noragah still strode among the Shedashee, but the Twilight People were not there as friends. They had been enslaved and their bonds appeared fashioned from the same magick that rose in wondrous fountains.

Fountains which now had become fouled and oily, stinking of rotting flesh. Noragah lashed out with magick, killing Shedashee, torturing the land. They forced it to produce food quickly, as had Deacon Stone, but the Noragah never bothered to harvest it. They would let it rot in the fields, then use magick to raise another crop. As they had enslaved the Shedashee, so they enslaved the very world in which they lived.

Nathaniel tried to pull back from the city, for he could feel the evil pulsing from its heart. Fight as he could, however, the city held him. He did not want to watch, but he recognized the need.

Winged demons followed their masters, doing their bidding and inflicting cruelty on slaves for pure amusement. And though this cruelty entertained the Noragah for a while, it was not long enough. Cities raised armies of the bat-winged demons, and the behemoth which had come after Kamiskwa in the Temple. There must have been rules to their wars, but Nathaniel could not bear to study them long enough to learn. If score was kept, if points were earned, it seemed they went for the most spectacular and torturous methods of destroying an army.

One of the Noragah tired of the game as quickly as Nathaniel. He removed his army from sport and used it to conquer his neighbors. From cities hidden in forests and plains across the continent, rainbows of energy arced through the sky and flooded the valley. The Noragah of that valley grew prosperous. Other Noragah sent their daughters as tribute and accepted sons as governors.

And all around, the land sickened and died. What had been lush and green, turned grey. Swaths of forest burned or blew over. The earth became so exhausted that even more magick could not make it fruitful. So the Noragah began killing the Shedashee and irrigating the fields with their blood. Whole tribes vanished to slake the earth’s thirst and yet even that was not enough.