1
THESE SONGS OF MAGIC
Aoleyn looked back from the windswept bluff to the small group winding down the rocky decline.
So small. A hundred, perhaps, no more.
The tears in her eyes were from the wind, the woman told herself. Yes, the previous night had brought amazing and dramatic changes, a wall of mountains melting, a huge and deep lake pouring forth across the flatland low desert.
Yes, her world had so suddenly turned upside down. Not for the first time—or the last, she knew, wiping some moisture from her cheek.
It was just the wind, she told herself, trying desperately and futilely to put aside the reality that, for every one of that band of refugees moving down from the Ayamharas Plateau, thirty other men, women, and children had been slaughtered in the course of a single day.
Yesterday.
Aoleyn hadn’t many friends in the world—no close ones beyond Bahdlahn, who was now among the refugee group fleeing the conquered plateau—but that didn’t lessen the pain, however she tried to hide it. The sheer scale and suddenness of the destruction overwhelmed her.
The woman pushed a long strand of her black hair out from in front of her face, blinked her dark eyes determinedly to push the sadness and the tears away, and then put a hand on her bare belly, feeling the chain she had fastened there and the multiple gemstones set upon it. Her finger brushed the smoothness of one, a moonstone, and there her hand lingered, connecting her more intimately to the magical energy within that small stone.
She coaxed the power, bit by bit, until her fingers trembled with the magical vibrations, until the song of the gem filled her thoughts.
She called upon the magic, she leaped away, and she began to fly, like a bird on the wing. Around the side of the great chasm, which had only yesterday been a mountain lake, she went, staying low, not daring to go over the rim and expose herself to the conquerors, who were already as thick as ants along the southern rim of the bowl.
Not daring to expose herself to the giant among them, a huge and beautiful and terrible creature she had seen riding a monster, a snakelike dragon that seemed to swim through the air.
Sometimes no more than her own height above the ground, sometimes weaving about clusters of trees, she sped along the new canyon’s western rim, avoiding any signs of movement, giving wide berth the one village on this side, a place that had been sacked even as she and the others had made their desperate escape across the deep and dark waters. In a very short while, she had traversed the length of the canyon and come to the thicker trees and sheltering rocks of the foothills of the great mountain looming above the southeastern rim. Fireach Speuer, it was called, thick and tall and casting long shadows each morning across the waters of the lake that had been. The huge and hulking mountain that had been her home. One area of flat ground, more than halfway up those slopes, had served as the summer camp for her people, the Usgar, and a stony plateau at the mountain’s high peak had been their winter home, the seat of their power, the source of their magic, of the Coven’s magic, of Aoleyn’s magic.
Aoleyn had to set down in those foothills, to pause and consider her luck—or was it, perhaps, fate? For only because she had been fleeing her people, running away from the Usgar and all that they believed, had she escaped the tide of strange-looking conquerors that had crested every mountain pass and ridge like a great wave of death breaking over Fireach Speuer itself.
She wasn’t even sure how she felt about the obvious conquest and destruction of the Usgar. Had these invaders done her a favor, done the world a favor, in ridding everyone of the foul barbarian tribe and their murderous ways?
No, Aoleyn found that she couldn’t bring herself to think like that. She had not hated all of the Usgar, after all, and had considered many, particularly the tribe’s subjugated women, to be victims beaten into acquiescence. She had wanted to save them all from the ways of Usgar, not from these strange invaders, who, after all, she hadn’t known existed until she had flown over them as they destroyed the lake village known as Fasach Crann. Only when Aoleyn had come to understand that she could not save the Usgar from themselves had she fled.
Aoleyn grimaced, which looked much like her crooked little smile, when she thought of Tay Aillig, the leader of the Usgar, her tormentor, whom she had brought down from on high in an avalanche of stone in the midst of her escape. She looked down at her hand, now the small and delicate hand of a young woman, tattooed with the pad markings of a cloud leopard’s large paw.
She felt the vibrations of that tattoo, of the bits of gems she had implanted to make the image, and the magic they contained, a power that had transformed that hand and arm into the limb of a cloud leopard. She imagined those long claws now, and saw again the last look of horror on Tay Aillig’s face as he lay there, trapped among the fallen stones. She had shown him no mercy.
She grimaced again as she remembered the killing move—her sweeping claw taking the man’s throat so easily, so fluidly; the blood, so much blood, gushing down the front of Tay Aillig; the shocked expression of a confused man who had thought himself a god—frozen forever in the mind of Aoleyn.
So be it.
A deep breath blew the memory aside for the moment and brought Aoleyn back into the present, where she quickly realized that she was not as alone as she had hoped. She ducked fast amid a tumble of boulders.
She heard them. Their voices, melodic, a bit higher-pitched, undeniably beautiful, sounded not so far away.
Aoleyn crouched lower in the shadows of the boulders. She called upon the magic of the diamond set in her belly ring to absorb the nearby light and deepen the shadows about her.
Many enemies were nearby, she quickly realized. Her thumb rolled across the band set on her ring finger, feeling the ruby and the serpentine set there.
Serpentine to protect her from flames, ruby to create fire.
Aoleyn winced yet again, remembering the smell of the charred corpses she had left in a cave. Men, Usgar men, guarding her and taunting her.
Then melting before her.
I did what I had to do, she stubbornly told herself, and though it was true, the image haunted her still.
And then she forgot it, in the blink of a surprised eye, when she saw him, a tall, golden-skinned man whose nose was as red as the blood that had gushed from Tay Aillig’s neck, and that patch lined by blue streaks as brilliant as the waters of the lost Loch Beag under an autumn sun. He wore a shirt of armor, rows of golden bars, it seemed, and shot with lines of brilliant silver. So, too, was his helm of gold. How could it be anything else, for what mundane metal might have been worthy of this beautiful golden-skinned man?
Aoleyn’s trance broke when she scanned to his lifted arm, for he held a spear above his shoulder—no, it was at the end of a Y-shaped throwing stick!—and was aiming it right at her.
Aoleyn had not yet coaxed to a crescendo the magical song of any of her gemstones.
Aoleyn had no fire or lightning to throw.
Aoleyn had nowhere to run.
* * *
His wounds would not kill him. He knew that now. He looked down at the golden cast that had been poured over his hip and side.
Poured! Liquid gold!
It should have killed him, of course, and surely it had hurt, bursts of agony the Usgar warrior had never imagined possible. But whatever the wrap was that these strange, tall, painted-faced humans had placed on him before pouring had kept him from melting under the molten metal.
Now he was feeling better, too much better to deny. His strength was returning, though one of his legs obviously had been broken in his fall. They were going to pour gold on that injury, too, he believed, judging from the way the shaman or priest or whatever he might be had been indicating the course to his helpers. He couldn’t feel any pain down there, couldn’t feel anything at all, and he desperately hoped that their medicine would fix that, as well.
He propped himself up on his elbows as one woman passed him.
“Do you know who I am?” he declared imperiously. “Tay Ail—”
She punched him across the face, then put her foot on his throat and slammed him back down to the ground, her weapon, a flat wooden paddle with the teeth of some animal lining both its edges, hovering threateningly just above his face.
Tay Aillig is my uncle, Egard finished in his thoughts, but he wisely said no more.
He closed his eyes and tried to fall far, far away.
The woman’s return, with another of these strange-looking people, surprised him. They grabbed him by the shoulders and hoisted him up to a sitting position.
“What—” he started, but then he shrieked as the woman drove something sharp into the back of his shoulder. He turned fast to look at her, then shrieked again as the man did the same to the other shoulder.
They each stabbed him again in a different location—no, not stabbed, he realized when the woman got him in the back of the arm. They weren’t simply stabbing him; they were hooking him!
A third stranger, or perhaps more than one, pulled on ropes behind him. Up went his arms, above his head, then up went Egard, hoisted by eight separate hooks driven into his flesh. He was standing then, though his legs remained numb and were not supporting him, and then he was off the ground, hanging there helplessly, shocking bolts of pain, blisters of agony, shooting through him.
Barely, through the pain, he felt pieces of that same healing cloth being set about the hooks, and he watched, mesmerized and horrified, as these handlers poured more liquid gold, sealing and supporting the hooked areas, stopping his flesh from simply tearing and thus dropping him to the ground.
Copyright © 2019 by R. A. Salvatore
