Forty-two

The Blessed Sun

Leather Hand was sitting on a coyote hide in his chamber, warming his hands over a firebowl brimming with red-hot coals, when an earthquake rumbled through his body. He shook so badly he was sure he was having a seizure. Toppling to his side, all he could do was jerk and gnash his teeth, staring wide-eyed at the soul pots on the shelves in the rear of his chamber. Jittering and glowing, they appeared more like multicolored blurs than finely painted houses for the imprisoned dead.

The fearsome pair of Black Ogres on the eastern red wall bent down to study him with their magnificent toothy muzzles gaping. The Ogre on the right slashed his obsidian blade through the air right in front of Leather Hand’s face, as though trying to keep his attention. Are you finally awake?

The tremors eventually eased enough that Leather Hand could sit up in his blankets. As he did, he shouted, “Get away from me! What do you want?”

The Ogre’s black blade glinted at the tip of his nose. It was a thing of beauty, the flaking of the obsidian done by an extraordinary flint knapper.

Watch.

“Watch what? I don’t see any…”

The hiss of a coiling serpent filled the chamber.

The Ogre leaned so close to Leather Hand that its black throat grew larger and larger until it swallowed Leather Hand and he stared into absolute darkness.

Then, far away, a slender blade of crimson appeared. It bobbed up the Ogre’s throat, fluid as a ghost. As it came closer, Leather Hand realized it was a woman. Young and very beautiful, she had huge haunted eyes. Cold eyes, like lumps of black ice shining in their sockets. Leather Hand frowned. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite place it. Where had he seen her before?

Still far away, Leather Hand could hear her chanting. As the woman floated through the ebony stillness, her voice echoed up the cavern, and he felt the ethereal beauty of her hunger, her yearning. The rhythm called to his blood, harkening to his own past, dredging up memories of long-gone War Walks, of skulls gloriously smashed beneath his club as he led his warriors through enemy villages, of last gasps for air torn from dying throats.

He closed his eyes, blocking the sight of her, just listening. The unknown words of the song hovered around him. Beneath the strange breathy cadence, a deep bass note stretched outward in all directions, and for a long while he drifted through glittering blackness that he was certain had never seen sunlight. Her alien words were almost pictures in his mind, patterns emerging from another world and traveling across unknowable gulfs of darkness to crawl inside him and quake in his bones.

When he at last opened his eyes, the woman had floated closer, close enough now that he could clearly distinguish the silver lamps of her eyes, like shells flaring in brilliant moonlight. They were the eyes of a patient monster who was also a Powerful shaman.

“Who are you, woman? Why do you come to me?”

Faint peals of laughter echoed around the abyss …