Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One (24 page)

“Just a minute,” she told him. “I’ll have to clean it up.” She swished the medallion in water and washed away the blood. After drying it in a towel, she inspected it closely, marveling at the three perfect star-shaped holes. “Both sides are the same. No, I see now they aren’t. But here are Rulve’s great hands.” She looked at him and emotion tightened in her throat.
Dear God, hold him safe. Rulve, please heal him. 

As soon as she looped the pendant over his head, his right hand found and clutched it. After a while the potion took its deeper effect, and he lay still, his silver eyes blank, until they finally closed.

#   #   #

His thirst was gone. Cool touches eased his back. Strips of cloth held him together, restrained the roots. The bloody mattress was burned, wouldn’t attract Wask.

Mariat was here, the sweet fruit of all the pain. In spite of all he’d said, of all he’d done, she had come to him. Surrounded by her presence, he slipped away. In one hand he held her kiss, in the other the warm toltyr.

#   #   #

Mariat covered him to the waist with his blanket from the loft, pried the medallion out of his hand, and placed it close to his head on the mattress. “I’ll make some soup,” she whispered, smoothing back his damp hair, “and maybe later you can eat some of it.”

She pulled the rug from over the trap-door to the root cellar, descended the short ladder, and gathered carrots, a cabbage, and a few slices of salted pork. After the soup was simmering, she sank onto Tarn’s nodding chair.

It was twilight now, and quiet. She rocked—
creak
-crick,
creak
-crick—and slowly her energy drained away, leaving an aching void.

Oh God Rulve, please help him. Those terrible wounds! He got them trying to save a little boy, so please don’t let them fester. Please don’t let a fever come. Oh God, don’t let him die.
She soon found she was praying not only for Sheft’s healing, but also for that of the painful rent that had pulled them apart, for reasons she never fully understood.

I don’t know what’s wrong, or what went wrong. Mother God, we need you. Father God, we need your strength. Help us.
Help
us!

#   #   #

Following secret paths out of the Riftwood, Wask crossed the Meera. An old hunger made it stop at the K’meen Arûk, the sacrificial stone on which the wet white eyeballs used to be set out for him. They had thin skins that popped when its teeth bit down, and they filled its mouth with a salty juice.

But none had been left here for a long time, and it found only a dead bird. Wask sucked at it, but it was dry and bloodless, so it threw the body aside and moved on. Collapsing into a black mist, the creature that was now the Groper slipped along the riverbank, intent on its surroundings. To the right, it sensed the place where many people had gathered in merriment the night before. The torches were gone now, and the fieldhold lay in darkness.

A slight breeze brought a whiff of smoke, but underneath, it detected the lingering sweet scent it had detected earlier. The Groper turned and rushed along a newly dug ditch to the far side of a field. Here the blood had fallen, not long ago, full and strong.

Extending a tendril, the Groper fingered the blackened remains of what once had been a cart. But the dry wood—and what had flowed so freely into it—had been consumed by fire. Angry red flickers darted through the mist. It withdrew the tendril and sniffed the ground. A short distance away it found what it sought: a faint trail that smelled of blood. 

#   #   #

Darkness pressed against the window, but the hearth glowed brightly. Sitting in the nodding chair, staring at the fire, Mariat felt again the desolation of Sheft’s leaving her. Her father insisted that a strapping husband like Gwin, and then a child, would eventually fill the empty spot. She couldn’t imagine that ever happening—and certainly not with Gwin.

The chair creaked and a log in the fire settled. “Maybe it will be easier for me after you go away, Sheft. Then I can work on forgetting you. God knows, I’ll have a lifetime to do it.” In the years ahead would he remember her, ever think of her? She didn’t even know where he was going.

He lay with his eyes closed, the side of his face pale in the flickering light, the bandage barely moving with his shallow breaths.

She was so tired and dejected that tears sprang up again, and she dashed them away impatiently. “Gwin’s been coming around. Once he brought Oris with him. Etane said it was because Gwin thinks women are attracted to a man who holds a child on his lap.” She grimaced. “In this case, it didn’t work. Oris isn’t one to sit quietly while the adults talk.”

The fire radiated its warmth, the soup simmered gently, and the clean, cold smell of an early spring night wafted through the open kitchen window. These were cozy, everyday things, precious things that couples shared for a lifetime—but which she and Sheft never would.

Tears threatened again, and she leaned out from her chair to look down at him. “You could have told me Tarn wasn’t your father. That wouldn’t have mattered to me. You really didn’t know me very well to think it would.”

But at their parting he had given another reason altogether. He said he didn’t love her.

#   #   #

Low at first, merely troubling at first, an insistent inner warning brought him floating to the surface. Foggy memories came together, then congealed into horror. The mattress. She’d pulled the blood-soaked mattress outside, into the night, and it would act like a beacon to Wask. It seemed he threw off the blanket to take a torch to it, over and over, but never got through the door.

His eyes jerked open. He must’ve been dreaming. “Go!” he said thickly. “Go!”

Worried brown eyes looked into his. “What is it, Sheft? Do you need something?”

“Blood’s…everywhere. Go ‘fore dark.” He heard his own words, garbled and far off.

“It’s all right. Everything is cleaned up now.”

He plucked at the mattress. “Burn it!” he pleaded. “Get torches…root-cellar. Torches!”

She disappeared from view, and the next thing he saw was her leaning two torches on the wall near the door. He pushed the blanket aside and tried to raise himself.

She pressed him back down. “Lie still, Sheft. Please lie still. I think you had a nightmare, but all is well.”

“Yes! A nightmare!” It was moving through the Riftwood. Crossing the Meera. Groping its way over the fields. Black and inevitable, it was following the trail of his blood. He tried desperately to warn her, but the words got muffled in the fog.

She stroked his hair, his cheek. “It’s all right, dear. Everything’s all right. What happened to you is all over now.” She gave him water, which he swallowed eagerly until he realized it was more of the sleeping potion and pushed it away.

A nail through his ribs held him down, and the potion swirled through his head, but he had to protect her. It hurt to breathe, but he had to place himself between her and the door. The reason for that was slipping away. She said everything was all right. It was all over now. She was close to him, and he loved her. He reached out and touched her hand.
Lie down behind me, Mariat. Sleep with me. Stay by me, and never leave again.

She smiled at him through her tears. He was the one who had left.

“You don’t know me very well, Sheft.”

He wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake, but he held her beautiful face in his hands. “I always wanted to.”

#   #   #

He lay quiet, so Mariat took the soup off the fire. After forcing herself to eat a small bowl of it, she turned her attention to the state of the kitchen. The lantern revealed what looked like a week’s worth of dirty dishes waiting on the sideboard. She washed and dried them, then scrubbed the table. With the hearth fire stoked so high, it had gotten quite warm in the room and the smell of blood and medicines still lingered. Fresh air, her aunt always said, chased sickness away. As she headed toward the door, however, a lifelong fear scrabbled a warning in her stomach.
I’ll just stand on the doorstep,
she told herself,
and let a little air in
.

Brushing her hair behind her ears, she opened the door. A crooked rectangle of light fell onto the stony yard. All was still, but something was wrong. Something was out there that shouldn’t be.

Her gaze cut to the left. Caught at the edge of the light, a low shadow humped. Chills erupted all over her skin, and she stood transfixed. 

Nothing moved. She blinked, and then let out a breath of relief. It was only the blanket and the bloody mattress, folded over on itself. How silly—she’d forgotten they were out there. Yet, for some reason the pile made her feel uneasy, so she stepped back and shut the door. She made sure it was barred, and closed the window as well.
You were right to be afraid of that stained bedding
, she thought,
because it will be the devil’s own mess to clean in the morning
. She rubbed her tired eyes, then knelt down beside Sheft to check on him.

To her surprise, he was awake and looking at her, this time with full recognition. The pain had crept back into his face, pain she could not take away, but his eyes shone with tenderness. “You’re real,” he said.

Blinking back tears, she smiled at him. “Always was.”

“Sleep here with me.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

A rueful grin tugged at his mouth, followed by a wince of pain. With the wound on his left shoulder and a broken rib on the right, they both knew he could barely turn to her in the night.

She pulled out Tarn’s other mattress and a blanket and placed them where Sheft indicated, close behind him. Leaning over, she kissed his shoulder, then settled down with a sigh.

He reached out behind him, and she held his hand until he fell asleep. Only then did she tuck it under his blanket, close her eyes, and fall softly into the warmth. Sometime later, dimly aware the fire had died down, she pulled the covers up to her chin.

#   #   #

Sniffing the earth, the Groper followed the ruts of a wagon through the moonless night. Suddenly it reared up. There! Not far off. The mist coalesced into an inky rivulet and rushed forward. Unerringly the smell drew it, with ever-greater strength, until at last the Groper burst into a stony yard. The blood-smell lay directly before it, pulsing red in the dark, only hours old.

The Groper fell upon the straw mattress like a wave. The mist became a flat, peat-colored skin, and it summoned the night-beetles. Hundreds of them churned out of the ground. They swarmed over the blood-soaked mattress, digging and burrowing and devouring, their avaricious mouth-parts clicking.

“Enough! Now come to me.”

They surged into the skin, filling it like a swelling corpse, and slowly Wask the beetle-man rose into full strength. It pulled the skin close around the tightly-packed mass.

#   #   #

He surfaced, opened his eyes. What had awakened him? She breathed softly behind him, a healing presence he could not turn to embrace. An inner warning scraped across his spirikai. He raised his head. The fire burned low. Everything was still. The door, a black rectangle darker than the shadow-filled room, was barred. He stared at it, and all his senses scanned the night beyond.

#   #   #

The beetle-man half-saw, half-sensed the bulk of a house, and stumped to the door. Glittering filaments winked around the frame. Wards, put there by the woman now dead. They were weak, and its lumpy hands pulled them down like cobwebs. Staring at the door, the beetle-man willed it to open. With a faint groan, the bar inside lifted, and the heavy door turned inward. Warm air wafted out, as well as the rush of the heady, sweet smell.

This was the house. What it sought lived within. The beetle-eyes discerned only shadows.

One with bright hair stood in its way.

#   #   #

A chill was seeping into the room. Into her dream.

She was cold, even though, for some reason, she was wearing Sheft’s sheepskin jacket. Tense, listening for what she knew was out there, she sat against a great tree, her arms wrapped around her knees. The darkness of the Riftwood hemmed her in on every side and the presence of ancient trees bent over her. Light from the meager campfire in front of her shuddered over the ground. Roots lay over the soil like fat snakes—unmoving when she glanced at them, but creeping toward her the moment she looked away. She leaned forward, her eyes straining to penetrate the blackness beyond the fire.

Chills ran like centipedes down her arms. Something was approaching. It was crunching toward her, coming out of the dark.

Mariat jerked awake. Every instinct within her cried out. Something rustled beside her, and she rolled over. Incredibly, Sheft had gotten to his feet.

#   #   #

He stood there, eyes fixed on the door. Of its own, the bar began to rise. The door creaked open, to the sound of chittering beetle wings. Cold air poured in from the night beyond.

Something large filled the opening—a stiff and lumpy form.

A swampy odor emanated from the earth-brown thing that filled the entrance. It wore a robe of leaves so rotted it was nothing but a thin net of veins. The face and hands crawled with what looked like slowly-moving cysts under the skin. They contorted the lump that was its face into a series of expressions—avid, tortured, triumphant. Chitinous wings whirred in one of the eye sockets, and as Sheft watched in horrified fascination, a beetle crawled out. It left an empty hole.

Behind him, Mariat uttered a strangled sound. Her terror beat against his back, and he moved to block the creature’s view of her. Its gaze was fixed so hungrily on his face it did not seem aware of anything else.

Wask the beetle-man heaved itself into the room, and only the kitchen table stood between them. The lipless mouth flopped open and a tentacle—felt more than seen—flicked out.

Sheft jerked aside, but not in time. Like a fat night-crawler, the moist, ribbed power of Wask slipped inside him. Sickened, he clutched the edge of the table as, with a kind of slimy tenderness, Wask exuded words into his mind.

“Come. I will take you home.”

Home. In spite of the nausea that filled him, the word resonated. Home was a place where he belonged. A place where he would not be despised or accused, where his people would look him in the eye and accept him with a smile. Hadn’t Yarahe called him to go there? Hadn’t the voices, all his life? And now this creature called him too.

Except. Except, for him, home would be a place not of comfort but of challenge, a place where he would face failure. He struggled to break free from the beetle-man’s tether. “I will go home,” he got out, “but you won’t take me there.”

The beetle-man’s power inside him rapidly changed form—into something dry and many-legged. It picked its way over his veins as delicately as a spider over its web.

“Be rid of these roots inside you. Let me suck out of you this cursed black blood.”

It promised what he longed for: an end to self-disgust, an end to the filth that ran in his veins. He had once imagined how a knife would do the job, but ice had intervened. Now this creature offered him release.

“Yes!”
the beetle-man hissed.
“Come and be drained. Let me make you clean at last.”
Eager, it took another step toward him.

It was what he had prayed for. Now he could fall into the beetle-man, let it paralyze his will, roll him in silky threads of oblivion. Let it suck out his blood and do what the fire had not.

But even as his body leaned toward it, an inner instinct screamed in protest. Wask was offering, not cleansing, but beetles swarming over his skin, burrowing and gnawing—making of him what this thing was. He tried to twist away, but Wask’s power held him fast, and its awareness probed deeper.

It came upon his spirikai, and reaching out with one tentative spider-leg, touched it.
“Ahh,”
it breathed. It scuttled over the tensely-coiled strands, over the sensitive, looping nerves. It unearthed his deepest desire, and stroked it.

Sheft shuddered with a horrible mix of repulsion and pleasure.

“How you long to bleed,”
the beetle-man crooned.
“How you yearn to give your life! Beyond the land of Rûk, the soil is dying of thirst. It cries out for your sweet, black blood.” 

The words shivered over him like an obscene caress. He felt the shame of it, but could no longer deny it: to bleed into the ground was his heart’s desire, and for this utter emptying he knew he had been born.

The creature opened its arms for him, and it was the personification of the far-off voices he had heard all his life. It was the pull of the bell in his long-ago dream, the whisper of a wind that tousled his hair: “
Come, S’eft.”

His very veins responded. He moved forward.

And bumped into the kitchen table. Its mundane solidity brought him up short. It wasn’t suffering people that called him, but the voice that had almost ensnared him at the Rites. “Leave me alone!” he tried to shout, but only a strangled sound came out. 

A look of pity rippled over the lumpy face.
“For most humans there is only one end: the mold and the worms. For you there is a choice. Follow me into your destiny.”

A vision flashed. A yellow blanket disappearing under shovelfuls of dirt. Ane being buried under soil that writhed with blind and probing mouths. Even now, they were eating at her face. His gorge was rising and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow.

“She’s not down there, Sheft. She’s in Rulve’s hands.”

Rulve’s hands. Hands that had held him up in the forge, kept him alive while he burned. Hands carved into the pendant he wore, its cord rough around his neck. With an effort of will, he pushed words past the repulsion in his throat. “I’ve already died. I’ve walked through clean fire, and will not now be commanded by bugs!”

The beetle-man lowered its arms, then grinned horribly. One leg stumped forward. The kitchen table between the creature and Sheft began to slide away.

He grasped the toltyr, at the thin disk that was his only strength, and held it up. “I call on this Toltyr Arulve,” he choked out. “I claim the power of niyalahn-rista!” He hardly knew what he was saying, using words he didn’t understand and could barely pronounce. But the table abruptly stopped moving.

The beetle-man stared at him. Its grin disappeared.
“Ah, niyalahn-rista. Now I see. Listen, for I speak to your soul. Come. Pour out your life. Bleed freely and water the earth. Release your power and be transformed, and from a great height you will look down upon those who despise you.
”

Oh God, it was a seduction more powerful than he had ever known. It promised everything he wanted, everything he desperately needed: expiation, transformation, a final and glorious justification. The villagers would have to look up to see him. Gwin would shrink beneath his gaze. Every cruel remark, every untruth, every dark, hard look would be ground into their faces like a rotten potato. The creature stood only two arm-lengths away. Its hands were extended, full of power and the pull of truth. All he had to do was step around the table and walk into them.

“Sheft?” It was Mariat’s voice, small and tremulous.

The beetle-man’s head swiveled toward her, and Sheft’s heart sank. Its gaze turned back to him, and its power twined around his spirikai.
“Come, emjadi. She is nothing. Your destiny is beyond her. You are intended for sacrifice and redemption, and she cannot understand what you must do.”

It was true. Beyond his choosing, the burden was his. How could she understand what he did not? How could she bear what his own heart flinched from, yet burned to do?

He felt her at his back. Her kiss had anointed his shoulder and her eyes had looked upon him with grace. She had touched his wounds and was not repelled. Now he alone stood between her and this thing of the outer dark.

“You know you must leave her. You have already chosen it.”
The beetle-man took another step forward. Its hand snaked out, impossibly long, and grasped his wrist.

At the instant of physical contact, Sheft constricted his spirikai. Ice crackled, and with an abruptness that made him gasp, Wask’s power whipped out of him and back into the creature’s mouth.

But its hand tightened.
“You will come,”
it growled.
“You have no choice. One way or another, you will come.”

“No!” With a wrenching effort, Sheft thrust ice down his arm and slammed it into the creature’s hand. The beetle-man let go of him so suddenly Sheft sprawled onto the table. The cracked rib stabbed into his side.

“If you do not come, I will take the woman instead.”
The creature turned stiffly toward Mariat, its expression crawling into a leer. 

Sheft pulled himself upright. “If you want my blood,” he said through his raw throat, “ice comes with it.” He constricted, shoved the table aside, and with hands that felt like frozen, impervious blocks, advanced upon Wask. Grinning, it wagged the worm of power at him. With an icy fist, Sheft hit it in the mouth. 

The beetle-man reeled back, its lips rimmed with frost, but still the mind-words gloated,
“The Riftwood awaits you. Death will swallow you.”
It locked its hands together and smashed them into Sheft’s broken rib.

Hot pain shattered the ice. With a gasp, he dredged up more; but now the snake-like arms were grabbing at his throat, swiping at his eyes, trying to encircle his wrists. He fended them off, but fire streaked down his back and the fractured rib ground into him with every thrust.

The creature’s eyes whirred in glee.
“You are a fool to fight me, for I am part of your deepest self. There is no way to win.”

The beetle-man’s fist hit his cheek like a pouch packed with stones, but Sheft managed to block the next blow. Step by step, twisting out ice, he drove it back. The creature never stopped grinning, as if it were merely toying with him. But was it death or the truth that he fought?

“You contend with both, for in this speech I cannot lie.
”
Abruptly, it stepped backward through the door and disappeared into the dark.

Sheft grabbed a torch, lit it with a thrust in the hearth, and stumbled after Wask into the yard. Panting, half blind with fire and ice, he looked wildly around. Shadows jittered in the torch-flame, and the folded-over mattress seemed to quiver.

A blow from behind knocked him to the stony ground. Pain ripped through his back and the torch fell. The beetle-man stood over him, its face crawling.
“You will fail, niyal’arist.”

“Not yet,” he shouted. “Not here.”

On his knees, he lunged out and chopped at Wask’s shin with the side of his icy hand. Its skin tore open and the creature lurched back. Beetles poured out of its leg. A flood of them rushed at Sheft. He scrambled to his feet, snatched up the still-burning torch, and swept the insects back.

Fixed on Sheft, the beetle-man’s eyes spun and glittered. It began dissolving its other leg and more insects churned out, boiling over the ones that had fled from the torch. They swarmed toward him like a brown, chittering tide, surging in closer after each sweep of fire. Every movement sent pain clawing through his shoulder, he couldn’t fill his lungs with air, and still they came.

Bleeding, failing, he sank down to one knee, the creature’s voice thrumming in his head.
“The dark will take your blood, niyal’arist, down to the last dregs.”