Carol Berg - Breath and Bone

There…ahead of me…Voushanti’s dark bulk, and ahead of him a muffled cough that sounded like a wild dog’s bark. “Who’s there?”

They heard me. Saw me. Caught me as my foot slipped on an icy slab.

“Trap,” I sobbed, pain lancing every sinew like hot pokers. “Ambush. At least twenty of them ahead. Sentries on the cliff tops to either side. And beyond them—gods have mercy—a fortress. Hundreds of them. We can’t—”

“Do they know we’ve come? Answer me, Valen. Do they know someone’s here?”

They held me tight, and I reached out with my tormented senses and felt the night…the watchers…listening…a shifting alertness…stiffening…ready. “Aye. They know.”

Gram held my jaw in his hot hands. His face was distorted…swollen to ugliness with the scaly red signature of saccheria…a gatzi’s face with dark, burning pits for eyes. “We’re going to control this. Voushanti is going to get you out of these rocks and then you’re going to scream a warning to Gram and his companion Hoyl that this is a trap. You must be silent until Voushanti tells you. When you shout, you will think of me only as Gram, and Voushanti only as Hoyl. Do you understand? You must do this, no matter how it pains you.”

“Aye,” I said, though whips of fire curled about my limbs. Though I had no idea why he wished me to do it.

Big hands grabbed me and hefted me across a broad shoulder. Jostling, bumping, slipping, every jolt an agony. I bit my arm to muffle my cries, until at last he threw me across a saddle and bound me tight. I took shallow breaths. Somewhere in the braided silence a hunting bird screeched, and the man with red eyes whispered a count from one to two hundred. Then he snapped, “Now, pureblood. Warn Gram and Hoyl of the trap.”

Somehow I understood how important it was to do this right. The listeners mustn’t know I’d learned about the fortress. They mustn’t know I’d brought Osriel and Voushanti here. So I lifted my head and bellowed like a bull elk until I was sure my skull must shatter. “Gram! Hoyl! It’s a trap! Come back! Four…five of them waiting! Run!”

My shouts set off a riot of noise—shouts from right and left, clanking weapons, drawn bows. But before one arrow could loose, a thunder of moving earth raised screams beyond my own. Voushanti cursed and mumbled until pelting footsteps joined us. “Ride!”

We rode as if Magrog’s hellhounds licked our beasts’ flesh with their acid-laced tongues. I wept and babbled of Sila Diaglou and the fortress I’d discovered hidden behind the stone, and I swore I had not caused the earth to move and kill the sentries, though I feared I had done so. I cried out the anguish of my flesh until we stopped and Gram tied rags across my mouth. “We’ll find the boy again, Valen. On my father’s soul and honor, I promise you, we’ll save him.”

That was the last thing I heard before my brains leaked out my ears.

“Magrog devour me before ever I touch nivat seeds!” Words took shape as if they sat in the bottom of a well. “Are you sure he should travel, my lord? The brothers would gladly keep him here at the abbey. It’s astonishing; they still consider him one of themselves—even Nemesio.”

The cold air that brushed my face stank of manure and mold and mud. Mind and body were raw, gaping wounds.

“Ah, Stearc, I don’t think traveling could make things worse. He’ll be safer at Renna while he endures this siege. If he has a mind left by the end, Saverian will find it. Right, Valen?” The muffled voice of my tormentor moved closer to my ear. “My physician’s skills are exceptional, complemented and honed with a mage’s talents. You will marvel.”

I could not answer. My mind was long dissolved, my tongue thick and slow. They had tied rags over my eyes and plugged my ears with wool as I screamed. Light, sound, touch tortured my senses like lashes of hot wire.

“As you’re the only one can draw sense out of him, Lord Prince, it’s good he’ll be with you. And if it makes you ride in the cart and keeps you out of the wind until this cough is eased, that’s a double blessing.”

“I’ll survive. Brother Anselm has refilled all my bottles and salve jars. It’s still more than a month until the solstice. Valen is the concern for now. I need him well. It was I that Kol forbade from entering Danae territory, not Valen. Unless I can think of some gift to placate them, it will be left to Valen to warn the Danae of Sila Diaglou’s plot to exterminate them.”

“But if the pureblood’s vision was true, and we’ve actually found Sila Diaglou’s hiding place…that’s more promising than any of this Danae foolishness. Fedrol has already set up a discreet watchpost on the hill.”

“Carefully, Stearc. I’m still debating whether I was mad to set off the landslide, minute though it was. The priestess must not suspect that Valen recognized the place as more than a convenient site for an ambush. Was Gildas a fool to lead us there or are we the fools to believe we’ve gained a slight advantage?”

“We are certainly fools. Godspeed, Your Grace. Tell my daughter I will see her at the warmoot.”

“I doubt she’ll hear any greetings out of my mouth, but I’ll do my best.”

When the world jolted into movement, I screamed. They had bundled me in blankets and cushions and moldy wool, but to little avail. My bones felt like to shatter.

For hour upon hour, aeon upon aeon, I existed in darkness, in company with Boreas as he sobbed out his torment, with Luviar as he cried out mortal agony, and with Gerard, alone and freezing, as he fought so desperately to live that he tore his hand from an iron spike. I felt my own hand rip and my own belly tear, spilling my bowels into the cold to be set afire. I screamed until I could scream no more. Tears leaked from beneath my aching eyelids. Life shrank until I felt trapped like a chick in an egg.

Only the one voice could penetrate my mad dreams, and I clung to it as a barnacle to a ship’s sturdy keel. I tried to croak in answer, just to prove to myself I yet lived.

“We must travel to the Danae, Valen,” he said one mad hour. “Luviar believed that the world’s sickness derives from their weakness. Everything I know confirms that. Our estrangement from them surely exacerbates it. But, tell me, should we walk or ride as we approach them? My father said the Danae ride wild horses when they please, but most prefer to walk, to feel the earth beneath their feet. Perhaps it would show our goodwill to walk into their lands.”

“I hate horses,” I croaked, “and they hate me.”

He laughed at that and I hated him. Gram was Osriel; Osriel was a gatzé, Magrog’s rival.

We traveled onward…and the voice touched me again and again. I cherished it like sanity itself and loathed it like the cruelest Registry overseer.

“Tell me about your grandfather, Valen,” he said. “What did he steal from the Danae? They wear clothes only when they wish to hide among us or when the whim takes them. They carry nothing from place to place save perhaps a harp or pipe and would as soon leave it and make another as carry it. What do you steal from such folk? Tell me, Valen.”

Everything hurt—my hair, my eyebrows, my fingernails. He could stop it, but he wouldn’t, and anger enabled me to muster moisture enough to spit in the direction of his voice. “Their eyes, perhaps. Their souls.”

In the ensuing silence, pain came ravaging, and I wept and pleaded. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Please speak to me, my lord. The silence hurts.”

His breath scraped my face like hot knives. “Do not speak of matters you do not understand, Magnus Valentia. I am your master and your lord. My purposes are not yours to judge.”

As the flood of misery swept me along, my tormentor spoke less and less, and I sank deeper into chaotic dreams. I drowned in fear and pain, suffocated in madness, too weak to claw my way out. Though I feared him above all men, only my master could grant me breath.