there are orcs in these mountains. And giants. And on the north coast, in Trollclaw, even men. Not all of them are dead. Is that fair, do you think? Is it too much to ask, to be rid of them? To wipe this land clean?
There is room in the world for all creatures, murmured Marikke, sounding stupid even to herself.
Is there? Is there so?
He helped her to her feet. When he touched her hands, the pain in them disappeared, and she could move her fingers. Attend the boy, he said, nodding to the shifter. Stay with him. You know they hate him more than you. Because he is more like them. It is their own nature they can t stand. Do not stray from me. I will protect you. These others
He swung his sword, shaking the blood of the wereboar off the blade. The gesture took in the ruined stable and the nearby ground. At that moment their enemies did not seem intimidating. Many sat or squatted, staring vacantly, while others curled up, already asleep. But after Argon Bael wiped and sheathed his sword, he clapped his hands. And in a moment the circle had reformed. The lycanthropes surrounded them again, and caught them in a net of focused and intense ferocity, following every motion or gesture with their eyes, and giving the impression that it was only Argon Bael that kept them from tearing Marikke and Kip apart.
Come, he said, and strode through the collapsed wall into the bright light of the morning. Above him, Marikke could see his wings, which seemed incorporeal, not part of his body so much as implied, a shimmering trick of light that spread out behind him, where the air seemed unsteady and discolored. He extended them as if for her inspection.
She helped the boy to his feet. Grabbing, chafing his hands, she provided a small version of the comfort the angel and the goddess had given her. Murmuring a prayer, she stroked the blood into Kip s fingers and led him forward, stumbling through the ranks of wolves until they reached the open hillside and the beginning of the rock fall. There a fresh breeze waited for them, and a change in the weather. Clouds passed over the sun, wisps of fog blew over the mountain crests, and it began to rain.
Crouching above them in the rocks, the Savage welcomed the fog, which soon pressed around him like wet feathers. He welcomed anything that hid him. Soon the peaks were lost to sight, but he could still peer downward through the boulders and watch the lycanthropes pick single file through the scree. These were the conditions that submerged the beast in all of them, the small wet rocks unsteady, and slippery, and uncomfortable for claws and cloven feet, for anything but hard boots. And so as they toiled upward, they appeared to him more and more as a line of unhappy men, held in place by obedience or duty, because animals in this weather would crawl away to shelter and stay put.
Moving from boulder to boulder, taking particular care not to kick loose any falling rocks, the Savage shadowed the line, making a path that was parallel to theirs and a hundred feet above it. In time they climbed up through a ravine at whose bottom flowed a quick, gray stream fed by snowmelt. They had left behind the grassy meadows and the drier upland pastures, decorated that morning with buttercups and lavender and mountain columbines. The golden elf in his black clothes, intent as he was on never being discovered, nevertheless with part of his mind was always witnessing and worshiping the beauty of the land, as he climbed up through the gorse bushes and juniper trees, their flat green needles lined with droplets from the fog, and here and there a complete spider s web, hanging as if made of water.
He had no weapon save for the tiny dagger he had hidden in his underclothes, which he had used to free himself the night before. He scanned the line below him for the packhorses. It was peculiar how, even in their most human incarnation, the lycanthropes betrayed their animal nature, not so much in their physical morphology especially at this distance but in the language of their gestures and their social hierarchies. In the front of the lines there were the predators, the panthers and the wolves, swaggering and aggressive. Behind them the pigs, less truculent but more devious, enablers and counselors and minions, prey and herdsmen, too. In their most human shape they herded livestock, a few dozen sheep and goats, and the line of packhorses carrying the baggage. One of those horses, in one of those big packs, would have his sword.
He skirted through a patch of juniper above the scree. Up ahead he could see the angel, glowing in the dim, foggy light. He was the one who had taken the Savage by surprise, that night on the beach. And behind him the boy and the healer, stumbling and unsteady the Savage also, in the night, had struggled with his little knife, his fingers cramped and bloodless. None of them had eaten anything since they were captured. The Savage was lucky to have found himself close to a sleeping pig-girl, a small shoat of perhaps fifty pounds, whose throat he had cut while at the same time locking his cold palms around her snout, while he rolled onto her head and stifled her. With a strange sort of pleasure he had felt the hot blood flow over his hands. Later, he had even drunk some of her blood, which had disgusted him. But it was good to be alive.
The ravine narrowed and grew steep. The stream was now more of a waterfall, and the lycanthropes labored up through the spray. The angel disappeared through a keyhole in the rock. The Savage, clambering above him, could see the land open up. There was an updraft here, and the fog rose like a curtain to reveal a broad bowl below the peak of a high mountain, its summit clad in ice. And he could see among the tumbled stones the ruins of a town, and stone forums and amphitheaters. The angel strode along a double line of collapsed columns, roofless and headless, yet each one carved in a different geometric design. There were no emblems the Savage could see, no statues of men or beasts, no floral patterns or even curved lines, but only zigzags and jagged edges and hard angles, all indicating or leading to a single point, an enormous square opening in the granite flank of the mountain on the other side of the circle of ruins, perhaps a mile away.
This place was far older than the wrecked farmhouses down below. Those were remnants of the Northlanders or Ffolk who had once lived in this section of the island, not long ago. But these structures were grander, evidence of an extinct civilization perhaps not even of men but of some other more perfect, more gigantic creatures, now disappeared.
Moving along the walls of fitted stone, far from the central avenue of columns, the Savage followed the lycanthropes into the porch below the mountain.
Looking up, Marikke tried to imagine the labor that had slaved away this temple from the rock, hundreds of years, perhaps, and thousands of men. They stood in a broad atrium that led into the heart of the mountain, a vacant granite cube sheathed in marble, embellished with a relief that showed a line of carved symbols on either wall, a progression of geometric shapes leading to the tunnel s throat. There a hole had been hacked out of the living rock, rougher and older even than the porch, and black with accumulated soot. Ironwork cressets were fixed on either wall, and as the angel led them forward he touched with his sword the torches hanging there, one on each side. They flared up as he passed.
But at the tunnel s mouth, under the first pair of torches, he turned and made his preparations. Not everyone was worthy to descend into the rock. This was the temple of the Beastlord, and here a distinction had to be made between the hunter and the hunted, the predator and prey. The sheep and goats and horses, brought along as draft animals or food were left in the atrium with a single she-wolf to guard them. Marikke could sense her disappointment when Argon Bael stretched out his shining sword to indicate her, a brindled, powerful creature that along with only a few others had maintained her wolf s shape throughout. Now she gnashed her great teeth as if trying to argue, until the angel raised his hand.
The herbivores bolted out into the drizzle where they stood in dispirited groups while their guardian prowled around them. Over generations, she imagined, they had become used to wolves. But the angel kept behind another one of the wereboars, whom he slaughtered with his shining sword, and Marikke was horrified to see the creature at his most human with his cloven hands outstretched, with his snout upraised, his bulbous face full of understanding. By contrast, the others were at their most bestial as they tore him apart, there on the porch.
Marikke and Kip retreated to the side, where they climbed up onto some tumbled rocks. Marikke put her arm around the boy s shoulder. His clothes were damp, and he shivered with cold. His hair was bone white in the torchlight, and as his head fell forward against her side, Marikke could feel on the surface of her skin a pleasant sort of pain, his mind probing into her for comfort. And so she tried to provide it as she had for all these years, ever since she had found him orphaned on Alaron when he was just a kitten, as you might say, his family s isolated cottage in the high pastures broken into and destroyed by people who despised his kind, or mistook them for lycanthropes out of willful ignorance. All over the Moonshaes they d been hunted down.
But he was more than just a shapeshifter. He had another, more secret gift. Lady Ordalf had sensed it in Caer Corwell. As she watched the beast-men snarl and fight over their uncooked meat, Marikke prayed to Chauntea the Great Mother, whose servant she was. The rock walls impeded her, and her own dark mood. But the goddess was as merciful as always, and soon it was as if a small flower had pushed itself up through a bed of stones, and the
