follow. Malar the Beastlord
As she spoke, the Savage found himself not so much listening to her as watching the scene that she described as if through her eyes. Or as if the world around him the rocks, the dry ravine, the little fire of twigs, the gorse bushes, the mossy freshet with a single trickle of water all had disappeared, or else receded into the background of something else, a vision that lingered halfway between reality and illusion, like painted images on a transparent screen images that moved.
He saw the boy Kip standing erect between two collapsed stone pillars, the black kitten in his hands. He raised it up above the pack, who swerved and turned around his boots. The little shifter grinned and licked his lips, his animal nature evident in his hooked nails and wicked teeth, more evident than the Savage had ever seen. And his hair, which previously had ranged from white to calico, depending on his mood, was dark now, black as the kitten who hung suspended from its nape. With a sudden gesture he dashed it onto the rocks so that it disappeared into the swirl of beasts it was so vivid, the Savage cried out.
But this was surely what love was, this ability to communicate, to see something through your beloved s senses. How long had it been since he d felt this way? Forty, fifty years? When Eleuthra s mother was a little girl, perhaps, he had known someone in Baldur s Gate, a girl with squinting eyes whose face he could now scarcely bring to mind. But he had felt in tune with her, in harmony. Like now.
He replaced the jewel in his pocket. I m the one he s searching for, he said, getting to his feet, rubbing the grease from his hands, the squirrel queasy in his stomach.
You could go free. Run away to safety under his nose. North of here. Down to the coast. In her beast s shape, he thought. And he would let her go, because he loved her.
She wrinkled her nose. I want to be there for the kill, she said. When the dogs rip you apart.
He shuddered, and a thrill went through him. She didn t mean it. How could she mean it? The night before she had curled up next to him, and he d felt the warmth of her hairy body. When he woke in the middle of the night, he d found new scratches on his shoulders and his ribs.
You ought to save yourself, he persisted.
Run down to the Northlander villages. They will take you in.
She looked at him as if he were insane. I ll stay with you, she said. They ll track you with my scent.
What was this buzzing in his head? Was this love? It had been so long. These human women had so much juice in them. Not like the long-lived fey. When she was close to him he felt the heat rise from her body, invigorating him, making him crazy. Now she came down from the boulders above him and stood in front of him, close enough so he could feel her breath and smell her smell, which even in this body had the partial stink of a wild animal. She reached out and touched him underneath his arm, the angry cicatrices where the doctors had maimed him, and yet left traces of his nature that could not ever be expunged. If he were a man, a human creature like her, a Ffolk warrior, or else a rich man in Caer Callidyrr, would she love him then? The Savage didn t think so.
I ll follow you, she sneered.
Where? But he knew. And he imagined she must know too, that her reluctance or ignorance was for show, because if he had a vision of the place and a sense of how to get there, where could it come from, if not from her? He was a stranger here. But she had run through every forest dale and mountain valley on Moray Island, or else seen them from the air through some druidic process he didn t understand. But now, in his mind s eye, he could see a place, a pool of water in a narrow wood, a grove of beech trees with silver trunks and copper-colored leaves turning over all at once as the wind caught them. And there was something in the water, a reflection that was different from the pattern of branches that spread over the surface, perhaps because of the soft breeze, or perhaps because there was something submerged there, some relic or portal of a simpler time before the Spellplague had altered the secret pathways of the world.
Had he dreamed about the place? If so, had the dream come from her, because she had slept with her head against his breast? In the middle of the night she had regained her human shape, and he had embraced her, and she had resisted after her own fashion, and then stopped resisting, and then scratched him on his shoulders.
She turned her face to him. So close, she was. His hands were slick with squirrel grease. He felt the bulge of the jewel in his pocket. His body was wracked with a dozen new sores and wounds. His head ached, and yet still he kept, as if in the center of his skull, the vision of the little pool in the beech grove.
You must know the place, he said, his voice a dry croak. And when she said nothing he went on, Tell me. Were there ever fey creatures drow or fomorians, dwarves or elves, or any monsters from the Underdark here on Moray Island?
He watched her teeth, the tip of her tongue, when she replied,
They annihilated them. One by one. Hunted them down. Scoured the land. Cleansed it. After the Spellplague. One hundred years, almost. Good riddance.
Where? he said.
She laughed. You tell me. You re the one with the telkiira in his pocket. You re the one who stole it. The loregem. Has it made you stupid yet? I think it would kill me if I touched it. Has it told you want you wanted?
It told me, he said. And he bent down to kiss her, only she slapped his face away.
Ten hours later, Malar the Beastlord paused in the same spot where the Savage and Eleuthra had camped. He examined the cold remnants of the fire. Almost on a whim he had maintained his human body, now the worse for wear. His feet were broken and bloody from the stones, his hands and arms ripped and pierced from following his pack of hunters through the brambles. They hadn t stopped since he had put them on the trail.
Jumping over a fallen tree, he had cut his leg to the bone, which caused him no pain. The boy, though, was in agony, which gave the Beastlord a distracted kind of pleasure. Like all gods he was a simple creature, intent on his own gratification, on revenge on the world that had imprisoned him. That it had been Kip who d freed him, he neither understood nor cared.
The boy was a prisoner inside his own body, as Malar had been inside his tomb, aware of time, able to feel, yet helpless. Occasionally, as he ran, Malar could hear the grunts and screams that came unbidden to his own lips he loved the sound of them. He loved the sight of his bloody footprints and handprints on the bare rocks. Cut and mauled in a dozen places, he squatted down and inhaled the fragrance of the campsite, which told him everything he needed. The pack was around him, tongues lolling out, panting or else lapping at the water from the little spring.
The quarry had turned. They were headed to the fens.
But he wanted to move faster. The boy was falling apart. He could proceed no longer. His small bones would break. With all his mind the boy prayed and begged for a relief to his suffering. He had started up above, below Scourtop, at the moment the pack had fallen on Chauntea s priestess. When the dogs had pulled her body back and forth between them, and her joints had first given way, when her red arm and clutching hand had been separated from her shoulder, then he had started his prayer, a small, weak noise. Malar lived in the landscape of the beating heart, the pumping lungs, the wheezing bowels; he did not listen to prayers. He had no interest in what was happening in the boy s brain. But in time he found himself annoyed as the words, by dint of repetition, finally impressed themselves on his divine consciousness Oh, my Mother, my Mother, my dear Mother A prayer to Chauntea, the great whore who had birthed the entire world. Or perhaps the priestess had been the boy s actual or adopted mother. Who could understand these human things? But hour after hour the boy had rasped out variations of the same words, squeezed them out through his bleeding lips, his broken teeth. At the same time liquid had poured out of his eyes, obscuring the god s sight it was enough. Time to make an end.
He let the prayer rise up. Because of the boy s pain it had become meaningless, a garbled shriek. But Malar had a command of his own. His hunters were in their simplest beast shape, but they could respond to human words. He called them back from the trail at the bottom of the ravine, where they were eager to set out again. In time, my beauties, in time. But first
They moved around him in a circle. A person standing up above, or a bird flying overhead, would have seen a terrible thing: a child, hurt beyond endurance, disappearing beneath the pack of wolves. Presently they drew back in a froth of red. The body, mauled past recognition, twitching still. Somehow, the corpse seemed larger than the child had been, as if clay or marl from the blood-saturated ground had coated it, or as if the wolves had added something of their own saliva and energy, without subtracting anything. And the corpse started to move, to split apart, revealing the larger animal underneath, the oily black pelt, the heavy claws. It ripped at what was left of the boy s shredded skin.
Follow the signs, said Lady Amaranth as she bent over the path. That s what she said.
