CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Armory—a horn of rock that jutted up from a low plateau—was prominent on the horizon when their last set of supragant bearers slowed to a walk. But the gait of those immense creatures was not leisurely but cautious, each step hedged against a possible need to flee in the other direction.
Since Aleasha rarely spoke the obvious, the words with which she broke the long silence struck Druadaen as odd. “We are nearing the end of our journey.”
He merely nodded. “Yes.”
Her pause was so long that he thought she had fallen fully silent again. “You have been very forthright about your past,” she said eventually. “Since our first meeting.”
He shrugged. “It is how people come to know each other.”
She nodded, frowning. After they had swayed back and forth a few more times in the crude saddle-hammocks that they had woven from the supragant’s long hair, her next, sharp words were almost an outburst. “I have been remiss. I have shared very little of my own background.”
Druadaen shrugged again. “Each person comes to sharing their past in their own way and in their own time. If they ever do.”
She nodded. “I am not hasty in such things.”
“I have noticed.”
She shot a look at him, saw his smile, and returned it. “Even now I am not eager to do so, but before we meet Ancrushav—if we do—there is something you must know.” She sighed the way one might before diving into a very deep, icy pool. “I began learning my art at a young age, apprenticed to a wyldwyrd. That meant roaming these lands with him, for that is what we do. Although our travels are not planned or regular, they are not aimless, either. Those of my craft bring healing to both the animals and hamlets in the further reaches of the Godbarrows, particularly secluded places where there is less danger.
“There is one such place that is almost large enough to be called a town, and we passed through it more frequently than others. It is on a river that runs from highlands all the way down to the Sea of Hystzos. My mentor was much attached to the place. His older brother—also a wyldwyrd—dwelt there. The age difference was actually more than is typical between a father and son, and the deference my mentor showed for the older wyldwyrd made me wonder if he had been apprenticed to him. But that was no more my business than what did or did not occur in that house’s one bed. I slept in a hammock or on a pallet, according to my whims.
“The older brother’s house was very far outside the town, even for a wyldwyrd. Over the course of our visits, I discovered why, albeit by remaining alert when they thought I was not.” She paused. “Five years before, he had sheltered a male child whose mother died even as she birthed him. The infant was malformed and grew very rapidly; surely, an abomination. But the wyldwyrd protected it until he either found it a haven far away from the town that wanted it killed, or it grew aware and old enough to flee for its life.
“I did not learn the child’s strange name—Ancrushav—until years later, when I passed through the town with my mentor and we learned that the older wyldwyrd had disappeared. There had been no sign of violence at his hovel, but also, no sign of preparations for a journey. Years later, when I was a wyldwyrd in my own right, it was said that Ancrushav had either fallen or run into the hands of Pagudon.” She frowned. “I will know, quickly, whether he is still in the service of that master.”
“If he ever was.”
“The few reliable persons who shared word of him say that he dwelt among the sorcerers. And that he would be very hard to keep as a prisoner.”
Druadaen answered with a small nod. “I will be guided by your assessments.”
Aleasha looked at him, quirked a smile. “Not the same thing as following my lead, though, is it?”
Druadaen smiled back. “Not quite, no.”
Aleasha laughed. “I have not encountered such polite—and subtle—stubbornness ever before. I have enjoyed our journey together,” she finished, sighing through her grin.
“You sound as though our ways might soon part.”
“Part? No. But end? All too possible, depending what we might learn upon meeting him.”
She peered into the distance, craned her neck and squinted. “Which should occur quite soon, now. It seems we have been noticed. We should ready our gear to go ahead on foot. The supragants will not go much further; they are already catching scents they do not like.”
The supragants stamped anxiously behind them as Druadaen and Aleasha entered the rough ground that ran away from the talus-ringed Armory in every direction. From among the rocks and draws of the narrow approach, abominations emerged: always behind them, and from places that Aleasha had not been able to detect in advance. It not only irritated but worried her; half a dozen of her birds were circling overhead and they had given her no warning.
“I don’t like this,” she muttered.
Druadaen agreed. “Neither do I. That is why I would like to stop and take a sip or two from my skin.”
She glared at him. “Are you mad?”
He smiled. “You and others ask that so frequently, I begin to suspect you are right.” He stopped and reached for his waterskin.
The half dozen abominations following them started when he reached toward his belt, settled again when they saw what he had produced from it. As they watched him drink, several of them muttered or whispered what sounded like a mantra: “Ancrushav.” They kept repeating the name, often struggling to string all the syllables together. Druadaen continued to listen and observe them until he finished drinking and resealed the skin, letting it hang loose over his shoulder.
As they resumed walking, Aleasha muttered, “And what did that accomplish?”
“Well, firstly, they are clearly under orders to not only deliver us intact, but not take us prisoner or exert any undue pressure on us to comply. So they kept their distance. And you no doubt saw what I did; over half of those following us are not Touched.”
“All true,” she muttered, “but what does it prove?”
“Prove? Nothing. But it suggests that if the Armory still is under Ancrushav’s control, he means to speak with us. And that if he has gathered all these ‘abominations’ to him, none of them seem ungovernable. Rather, they understand, and follow, orders.”
“That,” a distant voice announced loudly, “is also, ‘all true.’”
They looked toward the rocky tooth of the Armory and saw a woman—apparently human—standing alongside a tall, willowy girl who possessed only one distinctly atypical feature visible from where they stood, over a hundred yards away: batlike ears as rough and leathery as her hair was fine and flaxen.
“Approach and fear no harm, unless it is harm you intend. Be brisk; we may not display ourselves so openly for very long.”
Aleasha stared at the pair from under lowered brows as she strode forward with Druadaen. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered.
“What I’m doing?” he whispered back. “This was your idea.”
“Don’t remind me.”
The woman folded her hands before her as they drew near. She was dressed simply and wore her dark hair long and tied back. It was difficult to read her age from her features; her cheekbones and severe jaw suggested that even as a young girl, she would not have had the rounding facial fat of youth. The woman beside her had very similar features but the complete absence of wrinkles or sun spotting showed her to be significantly younger.
The older woman spoke before either of them could. “What business have you here?”
Aleasha spoke with chin raised. “We bring a message from Neeshu.”
“Neeshu delivers her own messages, particularly in this place where she is known and you are not.”
Druadaen lowered his head slightly. “When we found her, Neeshu already knew she would not be able to deliver this message. She asked us to do so in her stead.”
The older woman looked from one to the other, studying their faces. “I see,” she said. “But if she sent you in her stead, clearly she told you something of this place. She declared herself a Sister of Ancrushav, did she not?”
Druadaen heard what sounded like an encouraging tone, heard the trap in that. “No,” he answered mildly, “she said she was one of the Children of Ancrushav.”
The two women—they could be related, Druadaen realized—exchanged glances. “So,” said the older, “you did speak to Neeshu, after all. And she trusted you. Follow us.”
Only two Untouched trailed behind as they wound through a set of narrow switchbacks that ascended the side of the cuspid-shaped Armory. They were not merely walkways, but grooves cut into its granite flanks, their outward sides forming a low parapet. A third of the way to the top, they stopped before a deep, narrow fault; ten yards into the gloom, Druadaen saw hints of a take-up drum for ropes, akin to the kind he associated with drawbridges. He could not see anything attached to it until the mechanism groaned into activity and drew rope up to them from the chasm below. A narrow bridge, barely five feet wide but at least thirty feet long, emerged from the gloom until it was level with the walkway. Beneath them, they heard the creak of a door or hatch opening, a grunt and then a sharp, stony crack that jarred the bridge itself… which now rested firmly on whatever had been raised from below to brace it.
The woman led the way, followed by her companion, whose ears shifted and rotated upward. Aleasha glanced overhead, nodded at Druadaen: figures that were more shadow than substance moved quietly above them. Some paralleled their motion, others moved only occasionally. Aleasha glanced over her shoulder at the intermittent sounds of the latter. “Are some going back to the start of the ramp, do you think?”
Druadaen shook his head. “I suspect they are archers, changing their positions to keep a clear field of fire upon us as we move.”
Aleasha nodded somberly and then flinched as if stung by a bee. She made a small, sharp waving motion, as if shooing just such an insect.
Druadaen frowned. “What is it?” If there was some biting bug hovering around her, he could not detect it.
“You’re probably right about those archers,” she admitted, “since several just came out from a sally port near the top of the Armory. And they knew exactly where my birds were flying.”
“Did they—?”
“None loosed a shaft, but they tracked the birds with obvious intent. I bade them fly off as quickly as they could.”
Druadaen nodded. “Must you gesture that way, to send that command?”
She smiled crookedly. “No. It’s just a reflex.”
They stepped off the reversed drawbridge onto a stone landing. A broad, lightless cave mouth yawned before them. The bat-eared young woman disappeared into the darkness. The older one stood to the side. “The way is smooth, but it is not straight and it leads downward. Do you wish light?”
Druadaen answered before Aleasha’s growing anxiety could spark a sarcastic retort. “Yes,” he said, “I would appreciate that.”
As if summoned by that reply, the young woman emerged from the dark, her black pupils almost the size of her eyes, save a white rim of cornea. As she held out a glass sphere toward Aleasha, her eyes swiftly contracted back to normal proportions. Druadaen stepped back, mindful that if he was too close, any impending mancery might not work. The young woman nodded, murmured. “Reach out to what is within.” Her voice was as high and sweet as a four-year-old’s.
Aleasha frowned uncertainly “Do you mean—?”
The young woman’s eyes contracted further, the pupils becoming pinpoints.
The sphere began to glow a yellow green.
Druadaen stared and suppressed his first, panicked reaction: to shatter it. The color and murkiness of the glow were almost exact matches for the hungry, living lamps that had lit the way down into the depths of the Library of Imvish’al. The older woman’s gaze shifted to him, but just for the moment it took him to control his response.
Aleasha had nodded at the young woman and took the globe. As she did, it faded, but a moment later it glowed again. More brightly, it seemed. “Who taught you your wyldwyrding?”
The young woman shrugged, her blonde locks rising and tumbling around the large ears that resembled old, wrinkled leather. “No one. I just… do it.”
Aleasha stared. “I have never heard of such a thing.”
“Nor had I,” the older woman said with a smile. “But although my mother’s gift passed me by, my daughter has it in even greater strength.”
“Your daughter?” Druadaen asked, maintaining his distance from the globe.
With Aleasha holding it, they followed the woman into the opening as she answered. “Yes: my daughter. And no, I was not a child bride. This winter will be my thirtieth. It will be her eighth. It is often thus with the Children of Ancrushav.”
Aleasha’s question held a hint of sharpness. “Is your child not your child?”
“Yes, she is. And she could not remain so, anywhere else. He—Ancrushav—cares for them as a father would. So they name themselves his Children.”
“Besides,” the daughter added, “he really did bring that name on himself.”
Druadaen smiled, tried not to be distracted by the mischievous wiggle of her bat ears. “How did he do that?”
“He said we must not call him our leader. Or our king. Or anything else that means we have given the smallest bit of our fate or conscience to another person.” They entered a chamber, lit by the same globes. “So one of his first followers—now his steward—spread word that we should all call ourselves his children.” As Aleasha let her globe fade out, the young woman laughed; it was as high and simple as a toddler’s. “I like telling stories! Even more than hearing them!” She pointed to one of the high cavern’s many openings and, taking Aleasha’s hand, led the way into it.
Druadaen and the mother followed slightly behind. She stared up at him. “You have questions.”
“It is so obvious?”
“Any more so and your eyebrows would spell them out.”
“I hardly know where to begin… or what might give offense.”
“Then I will help you. ‘How,’ you wish to ask, ‘can you be the mother of a woman who appears to be barely ten years your junior?’”
And how did you come to give birth to an ab—one of the Untouched? But his only reply was a nod.
“It is thus with all the Changed, both Touched and Untouched. The Changing speeds growth.”
“And shortens life,” the daughter added without any hint of fear or resentment, her ears swiveling backward.
Aleasha’s voice was hushed. “Does that not sadden you?” She started by asking the daughter, but at the end, glanced back at the mother.
The daughter shrugged. “Why should it? I hope to live as long a life as possible and end it well before I no longer have control over my actions.”
Druadaen nodded. “We should all see our lives so clearly.” He glanced sideways at the mother. Her teeth shone in a proud smile but were not quite as bright as the watery glimmer in her pain-pinched eyes.
They left the lit chamber, and all was darkness except for the rekindled globe that led them downward.