Shadow Over Avalon (10 page)

“Priests make dangerous enemies,” Ashira murmured, now nestled against him.

“I didn’t have water pipes extended to his domain after he objected to the idea. Cleanliness is an individual choice I wouldn’t inflict if the person concerned couldn’t take a hint from his fellows.” Uther caught a smile from her.

“Now go and make yourself useful. I need provisions for a party of ten over six days, and tell the cook I don’t like smoked fish. I know he has a huge store of it that he’ll try to lose in my direction.”

“Uther . . . if Outcasts are condemned from the moment of re-banding, unless they find others like themselves, why are there so many of them? How can they escape from forts . . . just one against a band of hunters? Why not kill them on fort territory?”

“Had you not avoided all religious occasions, you would know the answer. They will foul our land with their evil if put to death on their former home ground.” He attempted to restrict her curiosity by only answering her last question.

“I don’t see how the ill-wishes of a dying deviant can affect a fort.”

“Heathen.” He couldn’t help smiling at her lack of respect for religion. “The evil flows back to the living, where it causes deformed births, disease and even more sin. I don’t have to tell a woman how devastating it must be to bear a child to term, learn it is not human and have to watch as the priest performs the ceremony of purification. That is the ceremony you have a problem with I believe? Now be good and do as I asked, and then come back here.”

*

Uther had finished his tasks when she rejoined him. While she was busy implementing his orders, he considered what possible distrust his people might feel for her since he knew how fast gossip flew. An idea brought him to his feet and bowing to her; he used the gesture to throw her over his shoulder. She shrieked a little as he carried her to their bedchamber, but he wanted witnesses to his intentions.

Serving women scattered when he marched through the door and dumped Ashira on the bed they’d just finished making. Beyond thought at the vision of her now bared legs, he made an inarticulate gesture of dismissal. Not caring if they were out of sight or not, he unlaced his pants, pulled her skirt higher to thrust deep inside her.

Her dress kept bunching, getting in his way. He paused to take the edge of her bodice in his hands and ripped the thing open to the hem. She gasped, blushing a deep red, making him thrust harder until he released.

Expecting trouble, he tried a kiss, but she turned her face away. “Didn’t you think I’d want to get as much as I can of you before I leave?”

“You could have waited until the room was clear.”

“They knew what I was about. If they didn’t leave before I started, then that isn’t my fault.” He got his kiss, but she held back. “Ashira, the servers are more likely to obey you if they know how I treasure you.”

Her eyelids drooped, and he realized he’d kept her up half the night. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I can find my way out of my own fort without you sending me off.”

*

Ashira tossed the shredded dress in a corner once he’d gone. She considered creeping into bed, and then decided to change into her riding clothes after a relaxing bath, rather than have someone rouse her in her nightgown. The dress wasn’t to her taste anyway, and she enjoyed his attentions more than she let him know. More because she missed Uther already than for any need of protection, she laid her weapons belt on his empty place.

She hoped he would soon return from his encounter with the Outcast. While she knew of them as a War Maid, her knowledge had been slight, until now. The horror of their existence bothered her. Such a one would have no sense of humanity.

Hours later, a recurring bad dream of eyes watching her roused Ashira into a sense of wrongness. Only the time candle glowed, the others had burnt down, not replaced as usual by servers. Instinct guided her hands to her weapon. She eased off the bed and strapped on the belt, not yet sure why. Many footsteps moving nearer sent her hands to her sword.

Her door crashed open. Men rushed in, weapons drawn and torches blazing. Half-blinded, she grasped the hilt. Hands grabbed at her, pinning her arms behind her back. A fist crashed into her temple, making her head whirl, stars before her eyes. Silent soldiers, wearing the duke’s own dragon tabards, dragged her out.

Alvic, the duke’s second, walked at the head of the men. His face stayed blank when she cried out to him. None of the soldiers registered expressions of any type, looking as if they all walked in their sleep. Down through the fort they went, into Harvester chambers. Shoved from behind, she stumbled into the center of a circle of soldiers with hostile stares. Somehow, this room appeared both brighter and darker at the same time. The walls looked a deeper shade of gray with dark shadows lurking in cracks and crannies. Torches flared as if with a hidden source of fuel. Evil dwelt here.

The priest glided forward, his wide yellow robe swishing as he raised his rod of office. A tongue of power licked toward her. Ashira’s world dissolved into a nerve-screaming agony of blue. Pain upon pain, torment built until something snapped deep within.

Time, space, drifted in endless convoluted eddies. A spark of awareness floated, lost, helpless. Pictures formed against a blue background. A white horse changed to chestnut. A dark man’s face intent on passion, or was it the foxy face of one enjoying another’s anguish? Was this death, or the moment of birth? Shattered fragments of will coagulated slowly. A splintered soul groped for coherence, drawing together strands of itself. Danger registered at a cellular level – the force tearing thoughts apart must not know any remained. There lay the path to extinction.

The soul drifted, no longer attempting to establish will, but allowing feeling to return undetected, absorbing rather than probing. A sensation of weight came first, then pain. Agony heaped on agony. Tears of blood flowed from eyes of molten fire. Screams tore in silent, endless outcry.

Burning sight registered a form, a shape of horror. Blood-red, catlike eyes bored into the naked mind. The head was wide and flat, covered with thick, armored, scaly plates that tapered to a fleshy, bald crest. No nose, rather, twin breathing-pits where one should be. A mouth like a sword cut snarled, revealing sharp teeth when the creature articulated sound. The soul registered this image as important, to be retained.

Something else: a shadow-shape hovered just at the periphery of vision. A set of matte-black eyes gleamed from the walls of the cavern. The dream-watcher stalked, waiting.

Weightless, drifting, the soul found substance, folding into a waiting shell, a body. Feeling, sensation, sight, sound and smell returned, yet the soul remained wary. Shapes, forms resolved into a circle of rabid men’s faces, and one bland visage radiating casual cruelty. The soul writhed in a strange and hostile world. Faint strands of reason floated in the gray madness of its mind. A female once, from a distant recollection, she found she could access the minds around, know their thoughts. They considered her an animal, one who had sinned. Death stalked here. She would have to be very careful.

“Outcast, there is no place among the righteous for sinners,” an empty one wearing bright colors droned.

“Trespassers earn one fate,” the cruel hunters chanted in unison. She fought for strands of sanity as the empty one, mind bereft of thoughts, approached. Her banded limb lifted to the order of another’s will. A claw-like thing settled round her bracelet. What had been golden drained down to black.

From a deep haven of safety, she screamed in silent extremis. A pumping organ expanded beyond limits, exploding, weeping a black ichor. Time moved forward, remorseless.

One floating thought-strand attached to another, then a third and a fourth. Escape or die, said logic. The pair of black eyes glinted out of bare rock, pressing through madness, and then the picture of a four-legged beast came to her. The name came to mind:
Yes, a horse. Must get away—need horse,
logic demanded. She tried to speak her needs, but how to make those sounds? Why could she understand the sounds others made, but not make her mouth move right?

“Hor–se,” her dry croak of a voice pleaded.

“The gift is known,” one of the hunters said.

“Let it be so. Get this creature away from Tadgehill,” the empty one ordered. “This foul sacrifice cannot be completed where it might cause contamination.”

Released from invisible restraints, she fell with numb, prickling limbs and was dragged along a dark passage as senses slowly returned, to where a copper horse waited.
Copper
– an important word, but why? She gasped for air, thrown astride the beast. Two deep breaths before plunging out into darkness where a shushing wetness promised safety, but the horse didn’t want to go there. Reluctantly, she directed the beast up a well-worn trail into danger. Wind tore into her face on reaching a bleak flatness at the top of a rise. Aware she must run, she chose the most traveled trail.

Copper, why was copper important?
Another floating strand connected with the whole. A face swam into view. ‘Keep your blades sharp, Sister,’ a rough voice had said.

Blades, yes. I have blades. The hunters must appear honorable. They wouldn’t if they cut down an unarmed prey.
He had said more: ‘Soon you will be in my grasp.’ A sad smile from another who couldn’t make those sounds very well.
Sad – how do I know of sad? Ah, yes, this empty nothingness is sad.
Another creature who understood, needed finding, but where? One more strand aligned, bringing a sense of safety from the north. She knew the sun traveled east to west and would come soon. She also knew those hunters would guess her passage.
Not north then, not yet. Something south and west they feared. Head that way once the sun comes. Hunters need light to track.
She must find shelter to get a good start.

Some time later, a dull moon in the blackness above lit a jumble of rocks; the traveler heard water running and felt safer here. She dismounted, directed by instinct to picket the animal close to a stream. Curled up against a boulder for a windbreak, she slept until the sun shone again.

She woke with a wet face, unable to see properly in gray mist, and spent time stretching to ease aching limbs. Her long, sodden pelt became an added irritation, one she used her belt knife to hack away with relief. The golden tresses fell unheeded to a muddy resting place, an obstacle for a solitary worm still above ground.

She went to her horse to strap on the harness and found a bulge in one side of the leather saddlebag. Food – bread and cheese. Someone had stashed this bounty in a hurry, a small cup of kindness for the damned. One crystalline tear spilled over to fall on a dry crust. No testament to self-pity, rather the last drop of feeling spared for one who had put compassion over hunger. With that pearl of moisture went the last remnants of kinship with humanity.

Teeth bit down onto bread, the body drawing sustenance, digesting evidence of lost life. The traveler headed southwest, soon finding a stream running in that direction. She paused, trying to tease information out of a whirling void inside her skull. The pieces gradually came together: hunters use canines; canines could not track where they could not smell; water stopped smell. She steered her horse into the stream.

Why do they punish? How did I sin? What did the empty one do to me?
These thoughts went round and round in a mad spiral with no ending. She gave up the hopeless quest, concentrating on survival instead. More strands of memory latched together with each passing league to give her an acute awareness of every living form. She knew she could fight off attack with her blades and what form that defense would take.

In the place of the hunters, what had she left behind? There could be no return, not for years. Someday she would remember . . . perhaps by then the hunters would have forgotten about her.

Sunshine burned at hazy layers as the copper horse picked along the stream. She decided to follow this path west until midday. This was going to slow the pursuers, although they’d know she’d come out sometime. As the day wore on, the grayness of mind disgorged another image, one sharp in every detail. A creature covered with fur, which walked on two legs and yet bore predator teeth. The image of twin breathing pits . . . she shuddered. It had two names . . . a lucky creature to have two of them, one name for its own kind, and then one for people, this Nestine/Harvester. Nasty taste of the creature’s thoughts.

What did such a creature want with people? Why did it hold the minds of men in bondage? Why couldn’t the soldiers see the beast?

A line of trees ahead shielded a deep river valley where a stream flowed. Midday passed at a peaceful stroll, and the time approached to double back, head north. Best to make a very wide circle in case some of the hunters followed that trail.

The sound of fast white-water carried on the breeze as a branch of the river came into view. The traveler urged the copper horse to a bank. Water rushed over green, weed-covered boulders. This water ran south, ideal for the purpose. They wouldn’t know which course to follow.

The sun hung overhead, giving warmth to bring on a hazed, sleepy need. A lazy spiral of carrion birds squawked overhead, competing with the splash of rushing water. The traveler rounded a tree-packed bend straight into the path of a saurian. Memories of nature came flooding back at the sight of this beast. The reptile stood fifteen feet tall from hind feet to top of crest. This carnivore had a venomous spit that paralyzed, while partly-digesting victims.