The fierce warrior smiled widely, grotesquely, even, at that, and moved his face very close to Aoleyn’s. “The fossa will eat you,” he said wickedly.
A shaken Aoleyn tried not to reveal her fear—fear of the man and not the beast called fossa.
She thought the fossa a fable. Though the tribe spoke of the beast often, it was never, so it seemed to her, actually seen.
When the warrior finally backed off from her, though leering still, Aoleyn set off quickly, Bahdlahn in tow and struggling to keep up. She did glance back, and grimaced as she noted that the poor boy was bowing under the weight of the three full baskets.
But he did not complain, and with the image of the leering warrior still chilling her bones, Aoleyn dared not slow, and certainly dared not help the slave.
With the gloom deepening and the moon not yet beyond the black barrier of the mountain’s silhouette, the bonfire of the camp burned bright, and many milled about it. Not wanting any more confrontations, Aoleyn stayed in the shadows just outside the perimeter of the camp, leading Bahdlahn all the way around to the back of Seonagh’s tent. She did not really feel like dealing with the teacher at that moment, even though she had completed her task efficiently and effectively and would probably receive some praise. For some reason, though, Aoleyn did not desire any interaction with any of the tribe’s adults at that particular moment. But she knew it had something to do with the boy at her side.
On her nod, Bahdlahn set down the three baskets, then straightened and turned slowly left and right to shake out the tiredness; he seemed relieved to be rid of the heavy things. He didn’t stop himself in time, apparently, for he looked Aoleyn in the eye and offered her a little smile.
He clearly understood her lie to the sentry about falling, and knew that the lie had saved him more than a little grief.
In a flash, though, Bahdlahn’s expression turned to one of panic and he dropped his gaze to the ground again. Aoleyn understood. Out in the forest, the child could smile at her all he wanted; here, in the village, he had to be a slave, a disciplined uamhas, and nothing more. He had to keep his eyes down, to not look an Usgar in the face.
“Come on, Thump,” she said, her voice full of sympathy, and even a hint of regret in using his more common moniker. “I’ll bring you to your shelter.” She reached for his hand, but he refused it, wisely, and Aoleyn let out a frustrated sigh, aimed not at Bahdlahn but at the rules that said she couldn’t take this boy by the hand.
After all, the Usgar men took the uamhas women by a lot more than their hand.
She led him to the pine grove, and through the tangles of boughs. The many natural shelters used by the slaves opened up all about her, a veritable maze of paths, tree trunks, thick branches, and small shelters beneath the heavy canopy—a maze made all the more confusing by the many skins that had been hung to separate different chambers beneath the low ceiling of tree limbs.
There was little light in here—no fires, of course—just what little bonfire glow could sift through the pine needles and drips of starlight here and there.
“Which way to yours?” she asked Bahdlahn.
The boy brought his finger to his lips, making a slight “shush” sound, then pointed off to the left, through a break in the trees.
Aoleyn took him by the hand—it was unlikely that she’d run into any Usgar, so she decided she could ignore some rules here—and led him across the way, pushing aside an old ram-skin hung between two widespread branches. Bahdlahn followed her in, but only a step before he stopped cold.
“What’s…” Aoleyn began to ask, confused by the scene in front of her. The light in the small natural chamber before her was brighter, a break in the branches allowing more glow from the campfire and the starlight. A pile of skins formed a makeshift bed on the far wall of branches, and atop the skins she saw an Usgar warrior, his naked back covered in tattoos, moving up and down, and beneath him a slave woman, one that he had punched in the face more than once, apparently.
Not just any slave woman, Aoleyn realized. It was the woman from the lake villages, who had been brought back from the prewinter raid.
Bahdlahn’s mother.
The man seemed to take no note of the children entering the chamber, but the woman did. She looked over at Aoleyn from under the warrior’s straightened arm. There was no fear in her eyes, no worry that she should not be meeting the gaze of a tribesperson.
No, Aoleyn saw something else, something she had seen before, a sadness so deep and profound that Aoleyn could hardly bear it.
Rage welled up in Aoleyn’s chest. She wanted to scream out, she wanted to run over and shove the man off the poor woman. She wanted to break off a nearby branch and beat the warrior over the head with it until he was bloodied and bruised. She went so far as to take one deliberate stride into the room.
But she felt a tug on her hand, slight but insistent. Bahdlahn grunted, barely audibly, and pulled on her arm. It took all of Aoleyn’s willpower to not simply shove the boy away and charge at the distracted warrior.
But she did not. She turned away, swept Bahdlahn up, and dragged him out of the room.
“Come on,” she whispered. “We’ll wait out here until the warrior—”
Bahdlahn looked surprised, and so small and helpless. But he shook his head and motioned for Aoleyn to go.
She was shaking her head right back at him before he finished. “No! I’ll be waiting with you,” she said, and sat down on the ground between the branches. A rare break in the canopy gave her a clear view of the starry sky above, and she motioned for Bahdlahn to sit beside her.
He paused, but did indeed take a seat.
They waited in silence. The moon came up above Fireach Speuer, and Iseabal’s full red face did rise into the night sky above the mountain: a Blood Moon, brightening the area. They heard louder noises from beyond the ram-skin flap, but tried not to listen, and then the Usgar stalked out, casting a curious glance at Aoleyn as he passed, tossing her a chuckle, too, but saying not a word.
When he was gone, Aoleyn motioned for Bahdlahn to go back inside, to go to his mother. She considered joining him, but the look on the woman’s face was too fresh in her mind, and she did not want to see it again, not right now. The rage she’d felt welled up in her chest again, impotent and directionless.
She watched Bahdlahn cross beneath the ram-skin door, watched the old thing flop back into place, and shoved her way back through the tangle, pushing past the branches as if they, as if the haunting emotions of this desperate place, were suffocating her.
10
TORMENT
The creature flung itself against the stone wall, all four paws raking and clawing. The demon beast’s devastating hooked claws dug deep gashes into the stone and held the fossa aloft on the vertical surface for many heartbeats.
Catlike, the beast leaped away, clunking down and scuttling about on the bone pile that floored its smelly den. So many bones—human, bear, lion, deer. It didn’t matter. If a creature lived free of torment and crossed the angry fossa’s path, that creature would be destroyed.
It had to be destroyed.
But mostly the humans—yes, the humans! They were the ones who pulled the crystals from the mountain. They were the ones who gave maddening voice to the magical flecks of gem and mineral.
And that voice, that song, drove the fossa mad.
Particularly so on nights such as this. Those about the mountain would see the red moon lifting from the eastern horizon, but the fossa could feel it, could hear it.
The Blood Moon called out to the beast, summoning it to the hunt.
The old memories of the fossa, before it came to hear the discordant and maddening song of the crystals, tried to resist, tried to fight back against the call to murder.
The creature flung itself against the wall once more. Claws dug deep gashes, cutting the stone, sending flecks flying to rattle into the bone pile.
Against the wall, the creature could hear the song, humming from deep within F
ireach Speuer, from the subterranean crystal garden near the mountain’s summit. And that song drove it to heightened fury, the claws scratching furiously. The fossa hated the song, and yet that was what sustained it. Without that magic, the creature would have died long ago.
Somewhere deep inside its animal brain, the fossa understood that truth, and it only made the demon beast hate the magical song of Fireach Speuer even more!
Better to be nonexistent than this madness!
The beast fell to the bone pile, its scythe-like tail swiping through, throwing leg and arm bones about and crunching through the rib cage of a long-dead victim.
The fossa thrashed, launching bones all about, flinging them up the walls of the pit it called home and caring not at all when they crashed back down upon its own head. Not content with its tantrum, the fossa clawed and grasped the largest bone it could find, the thigh of a great brown bear, and gnawed at it with all its might, biting right through in short order.
It sensed the red glow of the moon, and it was a call the fossa could not ignore.
Hating its very existence, hating the magical song, hating everything alive, the fossa leaped straight up, clearing the twenty feet of the pit with ease and grasping at the sloping stone of the lone tunnel, the singular exit from the secret mountain cavern.
Claws dug in and the fossa pulled itself along, low to the ground and through an opening barely wide enough for it to squeeze through. Growling and snorting, the creature dug along, coming to a wider opening and a drop to a larger tunnel.
The aroma of the death pit filled the lightless air even out here, and the fossa breathed deeply, reveling in it, thinking it sweet.
A few moments later, the fossa leaped over a boulder and through a small opening to emerge into the open air, the nighttime air of Fireach Speuer, and with the red moon beginning its climb up the eastern sky.
On padded paws, claws retracted, the fossa stalked off, sniffing for the stench of life, human or animal, it didn’t matter.
Just something to kill.
And with every stride, the fossa listened for the song of magic, and hoped in its black heart that it would find the human singing it.
That would be the sweetest kill of all.
The beast charged through some trees to a cliff face and leaped straight up, thirty feet, to the ledge above. Three more strides and the fossa sprang far and high over a ravine, landing silently, sprinting off, but then skidding to a sudden stop, its hairless, scarred face coming up and swinging about.
Ears twitched and the fossa curled the remaining half of its upper lips, showing gleaming fangs, its few whiskers, remnants of another existence, feeling the night wind, measuring the scent against the currents, honing in. Then it was off at a blistering pace, springing up the side of a tree, leaping far to land lightly upon a large boulder, where its supernatural claws dug in and froze it in place, to pivot and spring off to the side.
The fossa could outrun anything on the mountain, with ease, and it was so quick with its four legs that it could change angles over a berm or fallen log without the slightest of hops, keeping its back smooth and straight and fast across broken ground, even small ravines.
The scent grew stronger, driving the hungry creature on.
It noted the flicker of white, the tail of a deer, and veered, buzzing through the brush, singularly focused.
A short distance ahead, the deer leaped a ravine and turned down the descending mountain trail, around a high outcropping. The fossa went up instead, leaping godlike to the top of the outcropping, thinking to fly down from on high to bury into the deer on the other side.
And indeed it spotted the animal, and tamped down its rear legs for the killing spring.
But then the creature’s snarl dissipated and its expression changed as its head came up, turning to the sky, to the southern sky. For there, splayed across the starry sky, lay the Halo, the planetary ring of the world of Corona, glowing softly across the spectrum of colors, a great rainbow encircling the whole of the world.
The fossa could not ignore its call, for this ring, full of gemstones and minerals, was the magical god of Corona, the antithesis, the mortal enemy, of the demonic magic that gave the fossa immortality.
The ring gave this world its name. The ring of Corona fed the magical gemstones to the world, the blessed items that had birthed a religion in the east, that bolstered the power of kings and given monks the ability to produce fireballs and lightning bolts, even to fly. In more ancient times, the ring of Corona had scattered across the world its seeds of magic, like those that had grown to become the crystal cave of Fireach Speuer.
The demon fossa knew all of this, and knew most of all that this ring taunted, that the magic of this ring threatened.
The demon fossa was death.
The ring of Corona was life.
Far below, the deer was long gone, leaping and springing along the slopes of the huge mountain.
The fossa did not try to spot it among the lower slopes, or to regain its scent.
No, the demon beast stood there and stared at its nemesis. It flexed its claws, digging them into the stone as easily as a man might clench his fist in the sand. The lip curled again and a long and low roar came forth, rolling through the mountain valleys, echoing off hard stone walls, carried on the night breezes all the way down the mountain, where the villagers of the seven tribes took note.
All about that high outcropping, deer fled, bears scrambled aside, leopards sped away, and small animals crouched deeper in their burrows.
They all knew. They all understood that the moon was red and death itself had ventured out onto the slopes of Fireach Speuer.
For a long while, the fossa sat there, growling at the glow of the planetary ring.
Finally it turned away and plodded off around the mountainside, but no longer looking for something to kill, its appetite stolen by the sight of the awful ring. Now the creature was more interested in defying the energy that gave life to the world of Corona.
It turned and stalked for a high crevice, a gorge from which flowed the magic of the mountain, a place the Usgar called Craos’a’diad, the Mouth of God.
11
STARING INTO HELL
Aoleyn sat in the tree in the sacred grove, the same tree, the same spot, where she had first viewed the crystal obelisk, the physical manifestation of Usgar, more than a dozen years previous. She remembered that long-ago day, when the warriors had returned from their lakeside raid. That was the first day she had seen Thump’s mother.
“Bahdlahn,” she corrected herself aloud. His name was Bahdlahn, not Thump. The helpful and friendly little boy deserved a better name than Thump.
Aoleyn had returned to this grove only a handful of times over the years, and not at all in the last couple. She was older now, and coming here was forbidden, and she knew that the consequences of being caught here could be dire. There were whispers that she would one day become a witch of the Coven, and though she didn’t understand all that such a position entailed, if it brought her closer to magic, to the crystals and the Crystal God, it would, she thought, be a very good thing.
Better that than stepping on pinecones like a serving girl, or bending over to the demands of a warrior husband who probably hated her as much as he loved her, who sated his carnal desires with slave women whenever he so chose.
She winced and tried to put it all out of mind. Too many bad things swirled in her head this night.
“Better to be a witch,” she whispered. Yet here she was, where she didn’t belong, and being caught here could jeopardize all of that.
But she didn’t move, didn’t leave, for where was she to go? Far to the west before her, long from the slopes of Fireach Speuer, the huge moon, tinted bloody red, rode low to the horizon, the lines of moonlight streaming across Loch Beag’s wind-stirred water, casting sparkles.
Aoleyn locked her gaze on that mesmerizing dance, trying to use the mystical night light to remove the images from her mind.
&n
bsp; To no avail.
She saw Bahdlahn’s mother, the warrior rutting atop her. The woman’s eyes stared at her, helpless and hollow, as if her soul had long ago departed and only her body remained—and only remained for the sake of the boy.
That image had chased Aoleyn from the thick boughs of the slave encampment. Haunting her, those eyes had chased Aoleyn right past the tribe’s proper encampment, running and scrambling, hands to the ground on the steep slope before her, up the side of the mountain. Up to the winter plateau, and to this grove just beyond.
And to this tree, to a place of her past, that she could hide from the present.
But she could not. She brought her gaze in closer, to the bank of the nearest lake, to the foothills of the mountain. Her gaze roved up the mountainside—far below her, she could see the low-burning fires of the Usgar camp.
The distance surprised her. She must have run and clawed up the mountainside for half the night! When first she had arrived here in the tree, she had looked back, expecting to see torches moving out from the Usgar camp, or perhaps the magical light of enchanted crystals, as Seonagh and others went out in search of her.
For a long while, she searched the darkness below, and for a long while, she wondered why they were not looking for her. Then the moon dipped low enough before her to demand her attention.
The full moon, hanging red in the sky. The red face of Iseabal.
The Blood Moon, the Fossa Moon.
The enormity of her journey had struck Aoleyn hard. She could not deny the unusual moon, wonderfully round and seeming flush with blood. The demon would be hunting!
Good fortune alone had kept her path separate from that of the demon beast.
Or had it?
She told herself that the creature wasn’t real, reminded herself that the fossa was a fairy tale meant to scare the children of the tribe. That had been her opinion, at least.