Feast of Souls (42 page)

“Is this where it came from?” he asked. “The thing the boy saw?”

Colivar nodded grimly.

Sulah put the shell fragment down. The nest—if that’s what it was—was a large one. There must have been dozens of eggs in it once, though most were now shattered.

“Are there then… this many? Of those things?”

Colivar shook his head. “They fight each other when they first hatch, so that only the strongest survive. They don’t leave the nest until much later. Sometimes a dozen will survive that stage. Sometimes only one.” He studied the part of the nest that still lay buried, as if trying to calculate how many were born, and how few of those might have survived. “Even one is not good,” he said at last.

Sulah dared to ask it, finally. “This is what killed the town?”

Colivar hesitated. “This is the cause of the Black Sleep,” he said finally. “So many of these making their transformation at the same time… once they cease to feed on one another they need another source of food. But this one nest should not have killed a whole town…”

“Are these what the ancients called Souleaters, then?”

Colivar nodded. “Men used to hunt the nests, trying to kill them before they came forth. But it was hard. The presence of that many, even in their hatching form, acts as a kind of sorcerous barrier; one can stand right on top of a nest and not realize it is there.” He looked at the fragment of shell he held in one hand. Then crushed it. “Only witches could find them, back then. And the effort cost them many years of life. Few would risk it, in the early days.”

“And after that?” Sulah asked the question softy, as if afraid that sound would scatter his teacher’s thoughts. In all the years that he had been with Colivar the man had never spoken so openly of what took place in the Dark Ages, when mankind had waged a losing war against the beasts that fed upon human souls, and lost everything that was precious to them as a result.

“Then the hunting flight of the ikati darkened the skies, and all that was within man that was intelligent, or creative, or civilized, died.” His voice had dropped to a mere whisper, hardly louder than the breeze stirring the trees nearby. “They had come to prefer men for food, you see, and from that time onward, it was said there could be no peace between the two races—one or the other must die.

“So the witches finally came together and hunted them down—or drove them out—until there were none left… on either side.” He turned his hand over and dropped the crushed bits of eggshell to the ground. “Their blood was the purchase price for the Second Age of Kings.”

“The witches all died?”

“If not in battle, soon after.”

“You never told me that.”

Colivar looked at the younger man. “You are not a witch. And there were no ikati when we spoke. Why remember things that have no purpose?”

“So where did the first Magisters come from?”

“Later. They came later.” He brushed his hand against his breeches, dislodging the crushed bits of eggshell. “Now, it seems, we must learn these things anew.”

He stood up beside the mound, slowly, as if the weight of all those stones was upon his shoulders. Then he turned north and gazed at the cold skies as if answers might be found in them. Sulah did the same, but found no enlightenment in the pattern of clouds—whatever his teacher was gazing at had clearly more to do with memory than with the current situation—and he finally brought his gaze back down to earth—

And gasped.

Colivar looked down at him sharply. “What is it?”

He couldn’t speak, for a moment. So he pointed. To the mound of rocks perhaps ten yards away, almost hidden from view by the tall grasses between them.

With a muttered curse Colivar strode to the place. It was smaller than the first nest but similar in structure, and this time he didn’t pick it apart with care. A quick gesture served to bind enough soulfire to blow it apart, sending the small rocks hurtling toward the forest, baring the pile of broken shells beneath.

“It can’t be,” he whispered, staring at the fragments. “They would never do this…”

Now that he knew what to look for, Sulah could make out another bare spot some yards beyond them. It, too, seemed to host one of the great nests, stones just visible in the shafts of cloud-filtered sunlight.

“Another, my teacher.” He said it quietly, but the words had great effect; a shudder seemed to run through Colivar’s body as he turned to regard the newest find, and a new emotion stirred in the black depths of his eyes that Sulah had never seen there before.

Fear.

“They are hostile creatures,” he whispered, “even to their own kind. If they had been otherwise, if they had been capable of gathering together in great numbers, and of acting in a unified manner, mankind would have stood no chance at all. For the females to share a nesting site… it is…
was
… unthinkable.”

“They have changed, then.”

Colivar didn’t respond. He turned to the north and gazed into the skies as if somehow answers could be found there.

“This is what killed the town, isn’t it?” Sulah pressed. “So many of them at once, all drawing their strength from the nearest source of life.”

Colivar nodded. “Yes. So many at once… more than a human settlement could handle.”

Without further word Colivar began to walk back to where they had left the horses. Sulah attempted a few more questions, but they went unanswered; the elder Magister was clearly too lost in dark thoughts of his own to play the teacher’s role any longer.

There was only one more thing he offered, as he mounted his horse, and as he shot one last look toward the nesting ground and the tone of it made Sulah’s blood run cold.

“May the gods save us all…” Colivar whispered.

It was a moonless night, and a fog hung low over the High Queen’s courtyard. The ancestor trees were shadowed and ghostly, lit only by the flickering light of a half-hooded lantern set upon a marble bench, and her spears glistened wetly in the damp night air. It reminded Gwynofar of how the real Spears appeared back home, when morning’s moisture condensed on the chilled stone; the sight of them made her ache with homesickness.

She was spending more and more time here of late. There was no other place in the castle she could go to escape Kostas but her own chambers, and she refused to let him make her a prisoner in her own rooms. Once she could have sought refuge in her husband’s presence, taking comfort from his obvious devotion to her but now that had changed, too. It was hard to be in Dan-ton’s presence without remembering what he had done to her. Hard to remember that act and forgive.

With a sigh she offered up drops of her blood to the spears, placing one on each glistening surface, praying to the gods of the Wrath as she did so that they would lend some kind of peace to her soul. They were gods of war and generally did not oversee such gentle tasks, but she had nowhere else to turn. Her family was too far away for comfort, her memories of home were fading in the face of her long absence from the northlands, and the one member of Danton’s household who had brought her real joy had taken his own life.

Suddenly there was a rustling behind her. With a terrible sinking feeling in her heart she turned to see who it was, half expecting Kostas to be standing there, or perhaps her husband. But it was neither of them, though in the flickering shadows her visitor might have been mistaken for the High King.

“Mother.” It was Rurick, her firstborn. “I don’t disturb your prayers, do I?”

“You are never a disturbance.” She reached out a hand to welcome him; he took it and kissed it with rough grace. “But I thought you did not care for this place.”

Rurick shrugged. In the darkness he was the spitting image of his father, from his heavy brow and narrow black eyes to his hawklike nose. He was not as stout as Danton—yet—but had the same solidity of frame that lent the High King an aura of uncompromising substance. In truth, it was sometimes hard to believe that a creature so utterly unlike her had come out of her womb, but that was the way of it with Danton’s sons. All of them except Andovan.

The sudden reminder of her loss threatened to bring tears to her eyes, and she lifted up a hand to brush a lock of hair from her face, wiping the corners of her eyes before moisture could gather there. Even in front of her sons she hated to look weak.

“Not my favorite place,” Rurick allowed, “but there are others who like it less. And so it has its uses. Are we alone here?”

“No servants come here, by my order. And your father does not, by his own choice.”

“And Kostas hasn’t the balls to. From what I hear.”

She bit back on her first response. “No,” she said quietly. “He does not come here.”

He nodded. “Good enough.”

He was an impressive figure, dressed in a rich knee-length gown, with the Aurelius double-headed hawk repeated in gold upon a velvet background. Hie fabric was too heavy for the season, but that never mattered to Rurick. Strutting about in fine clothes and being feared and admired by all within eyeshot was very important to him. In that he differed greatly from his father, who only cared about the “feared” part.

He looked over the area surrounding the Spears, peering into the shadows as if making sure that no one was hidden there. Was he really so worried about eavesdroppers, or was his message so unpleasant that he was stalling its delivery? Neither explanation was reassuring to her. She waited silently for him to broach his business, dreading the worst.

Finally he sighed heavily, and rested one foot upon the end of a pale marble bench. “Frankly, I am afraid that if I tell you what is going on in my mind, you will judge me mad.”

She smiled faintly, with a mother’s eternal indulgence. “Never, my son.”

“Or that I merely desire the throne before my time. That I seek signs of trouble in House Aurelius, to make that come about.”

She kept the maternal smile carefully in place. “No, Rurick. I know you better than that.” In truth it was very possible that he lusted after the throne, and had possibly even harbored dreams of claming it ahead of his time—what ambitious young prince would not?—but he was not a creature of great subtlety, and was unlikely to weave some complicated plot to undermine his father, if only out of certainty that Danton would catch him at it.

She came to the bench and sat on the other end. After a moment she took his hand in hers. His was a large hand, as heavy and coarse as Danton’s own, but it returned her grip with a warmth that made her heart ache. There was a time when her husband had touched her with similar affection. Now the last memory she had of Danton’s touch was the night he had come to her bedchamber. A very different relationship.

“Your words are sacrosanct here,” she promised him. “I will neither judge you for them nor share them with others, unless you allow it. This I promise you, by the gods that watch over this place.”

He nodded, his expression grim, and squeezed her hand tightly. Rurick was not the most eloquent of her sons, and she sensed now how hard it was for him to find the words he wanted. She did not try to urge him onward, but simply waited until he was ready.

“Things have changed,” he said at last. “It’s like—like the very air in this place is different, somehow. Unhealthy.” He shook his head, clearly frustrated with his own verbal inadequacy. “Father is changing. Not for the better. The things that once brought him pleasure no longer do. The political gestures that once satisfied him now only whet his appetite for violence. His temper—it grows shorter and shorter, with his sons, with his ministers, with everyone that surrounds him. And every day he is more of a hermit, locking himself in his rooms with his accursed
Magister
for hours at a time”—he fairly spit out the title—“while his court whispers in the shadows of his growing madness, and wonders where he will lead the kingdom. Such rumors can bring down a ruler, mother. You know that. Yet he seems oblivious to it all. That’s not like my father at all.”

No, she thought, her husband was uniquely sensitive to such things. She sometimes thought that not one word passed in the castle without his hearing it, not one piece of gossip was traded but that he knew the source. That he should no longer pay attention to such things was yet another sign of how much was wrong with him.