GREG KEYES, who also writes under the names Gregory Keyes and J. Gregory Keyes, was born in Meridian, Mississippi, to a large, diverse, storytelling family. He received degrees in anthropology from Mississippi State and the University of Georgia before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of The Waterborn, The Black-god, the Age of Unreason tetralogy, and the Star Wars: New Jedi Order novels Edge of Victory I: Conquest, Edge of Victory II: Rebirth, and The Final Prophecy. In 2003, he began his fantasy quartet called the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, which began with The Briar King and continued with The Charnel Prince, The Blood Knight, and The Born Queen. He lives with his family in Savannah, Georgia, where he is also the head coach of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s fencing club.
Fool Wolf woke slicked in blood and surrounded by corpses. Again.
The first time he’d been sixteen, and there had only been one casualty—a woman he had kissed, stroked, made love to, planned to have children with. He’d watched as the same hands and lips and body that once brought her pleasure took her to heights of sustained agony with such skill that she remained alive to experience it long after her heart should have stopped. When her eyes finally went hollow, he had heard his voice croon in disappointment.
There were many, many more bodies this time, all as ruined as hers had been. They looked small, as if he were high above them, gazing down.
She twisted in him, not quiescent yet, and he felt her stroke his flesh from the inside, smelled snake and lightning smoke.
Beautiful, she purred.
Trying not to retch, he pushed himself up to standing on limbs trembling with fatigue.
Chugaachik made sure he recalled every detail of that first death, but since then he sometimes had the good fortune to not remember the details of what he did under her influence.
Not this time, Chugaachik whispered mockingly.
“You should have freed her,” Inah pouted from the cell across from his, her usually jade eyes more like obsidian in the torchlight, the lithe curves of her body no more than shadow.
He rested his forehead against the heavy bars.
“You know better than that.”
“Do I? She’s saved us in the past.”
“She saved me. If she ever got my hands on you, she would rape and eviscerate you—not in that order.”
She has godblood, the spirit caged in his bones murmured. She could survive our games for a long while, my sweet. She might even enjoy them. Remember, she is something of a sister to me.
Inah couldn’t hear her, of course.
“I can take care of myself,” she said.
Fool Wolf grated out a harsh chuckle. “You still don’t understand? If I ever unleash her again, the only thing you can do is run.”
Yes, why not? A chase is always fun.
“I do understand,” she replied. “I would have escaped her—the river was right there. In the river, even she couldn’t harm me. Not using your body.”
“That might have worked,” he admitted. “But then she would have just turned on random people.”
Never random. I have my tastes, as well you know.
“So?” said Inah.
Good girl.
“Then you really don’t understand,” he replied, summoning his will to push Chugaachik down, away, to silence her if for only a little while.
He managed it, but realized he’d missed something Inah was saying.
“What?” he asked.
“I said, will you still feel this way when they take us to be executed?”
“We’ll see,” Fool Wolf replied. “We’ll see how I feel then.”
She was silent for a moment, then laughed lightly.
“You love me, don’t you? That’s why you keep her in.”
“Darken your mouth,” he said. “You don’t even know what that means.”
Men came for them sometime later, young men with pale, almost blue skin, dressed in brown sarongs and shirts batiked with turtles, snakes, and scorpions.
“This would be a good time,” Inah pointed out, in her native tongue. “There are only eight of them.”
He didn’t answer.
Presently, they were brought into the light and hustled into an enormous cedar house roofed in greenish slate. A narrow entrance hall brought them into a large room with high benches rising in tiers on three sides. Seated on the benches were men—he didn’t have time to count them, but there were more than twenty. They were of the same unfortunate paleness as the guards who had escorted them there, and they were all quite young—some looked no older than sixteen. They wore quilted coats that left their arms free, and all were armed, variously, with swords or spears. Some had shields resting against their knees.
One fellow sat alone, directly before them, in a chair with armrests. While the others wore their hair long, in complicated braids, his head was shorn.
He looked down at them for a moment, then spoke, in a language similar enough to that of Nah that Fool Wolf understood it.
“I am Hesqel, the Voice. What is your business in QashQul, other than petty thievery?”
“We have no other business here,” Fool Wolf replied. “We were only trying to procure enough food to be on our way. We would be happy to provide some service for what we took—”
“Your crime isn’t theft,” Hesqel replied. “Your crime is in coming here. Didn’t the Urled tribes tell you this valley is forbidden?”
Fool Wolf decided it was probably best not to point out that the Urled tribes had chased Inah and him into the valley, following another disagreement over property.
“They neglected to tell us that,” he said.
“Well. Normally this would be a clear case, and you would be executed, but at the moment we have need of an outlander, someone unhampered by the curse. And so your offer of service is accepted.”
This isn’t going to be good, Fool Wolf thought.
“Curse?” he asked.
Hesqel’s tone changed a bit, became a bit more like singing.
“In the ancient times, our people were lost in these mountains, starving and freezing. Then we came to this valley and found it fertile. But the gods here were wild, having never known men before. Many sacrifices were made, but all ignored. The goddess in the uplands, Qul, and Qash—the god of the river and its lands—were bitter enemies, and neither would allow the smaller gods to deal with our ancestors. But at last a sacrifice was found that appeased Qash, and through it gave him the power to subjugate Qul, and they became one—QashQul. We—those of us in this room—descend from him, and thus share his need for the same sacrifice that won him to sustain us.”
This could be very, very bad, Fool Wolf thought.
“So the curse is your need for this…sacrifice?”
Hesqel blinked and looked as if the question didn’t make any sense. Low laughter rippled through the benches.
“No,” Hesqel said, now speaking as if to a child. “We are the Sons of Qash, the Undefiled. The sacrifice is part of our nature and is our honor to perform. If we fail to keep the ritual, we wither with time and Qash himself will starve. The curse lies in the schism. QashQul was broken again with the aid of the sorceress Ruwhere. Qul reclaimed her ancient domain, and no descendant of Qash may step there.” He leaned forward. “Our curse is that our sacred sword rests in Qul’s domain. And it is also to her realm that Ruwhere has taken our rightful sacrifices.”
“Ah,” Fool Wolf said, relieved. “And you want me—”
“You will recover our sword,” Hesqel said.
That seemed straightforward enough.
He didn’t believe it.
“I’ll be glad to help,” he replied.
And like that, he was free, dressed in quilted armor and armed with a short, double-edged sword. He was smiling as he left the walls of QashQul behind him. His step felt light, the future replete with possibility. Of course, they’d kept Inah to ensure he would return, which only proved they didn’t know him very well. Oh, he might come back for her, one way or another—he was, after all, fond of her. But given her own powers—which the QashQulites seemed blissfully unaware of—she would probably find her own escape. The point was, he had choices.
The trail went by a clear pool, where he bathed and dallied, watching dragonflies dance in the warm sun. A bit after noon he dressed and—after some hesitation—continued to follow the directions he’d been given. He might as well see what the situation was. Perhaps the sorceress could be bargained with, if she seemed dangerous. Of course, he didn’t have much to negotiate with…
It’s best this way, just you and me, Chugaachik said.
“Best if it was just me,” he said.
You know better than that by now, sweet thing. Don’t you?
Fool Wolf slowed his step. Yes, a sorceress powerful enough to split a god in half bore talking to.
“This god they’re talking about,” he mused. “I’m curious. Let’s have a look at him, under the lake.”
Deep in his mansion of bone, she stirred. His skin felt like flint, his teeth like knives. He smelled blood all around him, practically tasted it.
Then he sank beneath the lake, what his people called the upper skin of the world that most people never saw beyond. The trees and mountains faded to shadow, and the light bled through them. The gods appeared.
He’d seen his first god when he was thirteen. It had been the god of a white juniper tree, a minor spirit, and yet the sight of it had driven him into madness and fever that nearly killed him, for Human Beings were not meant to look directly at gods. Only a few, born to be shamans, could see unmanifested spirits—and unless they became shamans by taking a helping spirit into themselves, they went mad.
His father found him such a spirit, believing her to be that of a lion goddess.
He’d been wrong.
But now, with Chugaachik to open his eyes, he could see beneath the lake and not lose his mind. Usually.
He distinguished the little gods first, those that belonged to things—trees, stones, the pool he had bathed in. Like most gods, their forms were not set; they played at many shapes. He wondered at how few they were; there should have been hundreds, but instead he saw only dozens, and all appeared somehow ill.
Qash was everywhere; he was a god of land, of place. Beneath the lake, these usually had no form either.
But Qash did. He appeared as an obscene, naked older version of the white-skinned men who held Inah, and he sat crouched upon the land, hands shifting aimlessly as if searching for something. His eyes were mirrors of insanity and his drool dripped upward into the streams and pools of his country. Veins erupted from his flesh and went out to connect him to the little gods, to the men in the city—and one sickly yellow quivering string went off ahead, in the direction Fool Wolf was supposed to travel. He could not see where it went; something blocked him there.
Something to bargain with, he thought.
He reached, and with Chugaachik’s power he plucked at one of the strands, pulled a new one from it and tied it to a nearby grapevine.
Then he came back up through the surface of the lake. He sat down, feeling dizzy and ill but that passed after a few moments. He rose, cut the grapevine, and wove it into a small hoop about the diameter of his forearm. Then he continued on.
The ground sloped up sharply into a forest of odd, twisting oaks, star pine, and juniper. The resinous scent of the last made the damp air fragrant, and for a moment he felt as if he was far away, on the windswept Steppes of the Mang, where he had been born, where his people still made their annual rounds, hunted grass bears and bison, raided Stone-Leggings and Cattle People.
How far was he from there? If he ever made it north out of these mountains, he ought to be somewhere near Lhe, and from there he could take one of the old, faded roads that ran up through the Sherirut chiefdoms. If he had horses, he might do it in a year, or better. It would be good to eat dube stew again, see Ch’ebegau, the White Spruce Mountain. Feel like a Mang once more, like he belonged. His mother—was she still alive? His sisters and cousins?
He tried to picture his mother’s face, but found only a blur.
He’d searched the world from the Northern Forests of the Giants to the ancient, decaying cities and febrile islands of the south for a way to be rid of Chugaachik, to have his life back. He hadn’t found any answers there. Maybe they lay back where it had all begun, where his father had first introduced him to Chugaachik.
But he didn’t belong there, now. He had never really belonged there.
So he continued on, and soon found the shrine that had been described to him: a building with walls of natural stone fitted without mortar, a roof of cedar shingles in need of repair. The door was open.
On the steps leading up to the shrine sat a woman.
Her hair was white and pulled back in a long braid. The face beneath was seamed by years of laughter, sorrow, and pain. Her blue-eyed gaze stayed on him, a bit curious, a bit accusing.
“I wasn’t sure what to imagine,” she said. “I see desert and red stone,” she said. “Scrubby trees in the sand and tall white ones in the mountains. Where are you from?”
“Mangangan.”
“I’ve not heard of it, but it hangs on you. You’ve been thinking about it.”
“It’s north, a long ways.” Feeling uncomfortable: “If I had been thinking about sex, would you be asking about my women now?”
She smiled. “I see her, too. From very far away, surrounded by water—not your place.”
“No.”
“Is she why you’ve come here, to do this thing? Do they have her captive?”
Fool Wolf shrugged. “They have her, yes. But I’ve yet to decide what I’m going to do.”
“I see,” she replied. “That’s good, to have an open mind.”
“Are you Ruwhere?”
“They told you about me, then. And about the freeing of Qul?”
“Yes, although they didn’t put it that way. They sent me after a sword.”
“Why do you suppose I’m here?” Ruwhere asked.
“To keep me from the sword.”
She nodded. “You really don’t want it, trust me. Did they tell you why they wanted it back?”
“No. Something about a curse and sacrifices.”
“You weren’t curious?”
“Whatever they told me, I would have to waste my time trying to figure out what was true and what wasn’t. It was easier to just come here and find out.”
“I might have chosen to kill you without speaking to you,” she pointed out.
“You might have. And yet they seemed pretty confident sending me up here.”
“That’s what the last three they sent thought,” she replied. “It’s not confidence—they’re just not very bright. They get stupider and weaker every day, without their sustenance. If you wait long enough, they will die, and you will have your woman back.”
“How long?”
“Without their ritual, they will age like men. A few decades, at most.”
“I don’t really have that much time on my hands,” Fool Wolf said.
“I suppose not,” she replied.
“What happens if I give them their sword?”
She shook her head. “You should put that thought out of your head. First of all, I won’t let you touch it. But even if you did—the fact is, they don’t want their sword. None of them can wield it without their lives draining back into Qash. What they want is some idiot who doesn’t know better to pick it up.”
“Why?”
“Well, to take it you would have to slay me, and they want that. And once you held the sword, Qash would possess you and send you after the virgins.”
Fool Wolf suddenly felt completely lost.
Virgins? Chugaachik hissed. This gets better and better.
Fool Wolf did his best to ignore her, but she was aroused, and he felt warm behind his ears, as if someone were kissing him there.
“I don’t understand,” he told Ruwhere.
“The sword is part of Qash,” she replied. “And Qash is quite mad. Our people drove him mad a thousand years ago when they sacrificed a virgin to him.”
“Ah,” Fool Wolf said, “and since they are his descendants, they also require virgin sacrifices.”
“Yes, you see that do you? But their union was unnatural, evil. Qul always strained to be free and finally—after centuries, with my help—Qul managed to break away and take her daughters with her.”
“The virgins are Qul’s daughters?”
“The men who sent you here are the sons of Qash. It is from the daughters of Qul that they must have their sacrifices. I brought the daughters here, the ones who remain virgin, to keep them safe.”
“I can think of better ways to save a virgin,” Fool Wolf said. “The problem is in being virgin, yes? If only virgins are fit for sacrifice—”
The air suddenly crackled with force, and his sight opened as he was yanked beneath the lake. Ruwhere was a burning brand, the knot in the heartstrings of a god, and the god was all around them, a half-formed woman, naked, mutilated. Her gaze was all deranged fury.
Ruwhere’s calm exterior broke, and that rage rushed through her.
“Wait—”
“You’re like them,” Ruwhere said, in a low, flat tone. The reasonable old woman was nowhere in that voice. “They don’t kill them. They rape them, just as they taught Qash to rape Qul, just as they now must rape to keep their youth.”
“I didn’t understand that,” Fool Wolf said, backing away. “I was only joking. I wouldn’t…”
It’s too late, Chugaachik snarled. Qul has her.
“You have!” Ruwhere screamed. “The things you’ve done, I see them now, the things…” She choked off, and her eyes rolled back.
He did the only thing he could do. He tossed the grapevine ring so that it landed about Ruwhere’s neck. Her eyes went wide with shock as Qash entered her by his vein, seeking through to Qul. Mad or not, Qul understood the danger, and in an instant severed the conduit. But by then, Fool Wolf had lunged past the sorceress and taken grip on the sword.
He turned and found Ruwhere blazing with godforce and knew that if it weren’t for Chugaachik, he would already be dead. Gasping as his bones began to burn, he threw himself at her, plunging the weapon in deep just below her breastbone. Ruwhere hung on the blade, her eyes gradually calming.
“You’ve done it,” she gasped. “You monster. You don’t understand what…”
But she fell away, and the presence of Qul diminished and then fled from the sword.
“It was only a joke.” Fool Wolf sighed.
He tried to drop the blade, but his head seemed to fill with locusts and his legs began jerking without his permission.
And he knew Ruwhere had been right, and Qash was in him.
He’s trying to make you walk, Chugaachik said. She seemed weak, far away.
“I’m not walking,” he noticed.
Because I’m fighting him. He’s trying to drive me out.
Fool Wolf considered that for a moment. “Can he?”
No. But this is taxing, and I cannot help you like this.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “I wonder if you’re lying. If he might rid me of you, given time.”
He would have you then, always. Do you want that?
“I could drop the sword.”
Not if I’m gone. But you can drop it now. You should drop it now.
Fool Wolf looked at the weapon, considering, seeing possibilities. If Qash forced her out, and he managed to leave the valley, wouldn’t he be free? Qash was a god of place—he would stay. It might be a chance worth taking.
But he didn’t know enough yet.
“Let’s not be in a hurry about this,” Fool Wolf said. “I think I’ll go have a look at those virgins, first.”
Ruwhere hadn’t made any effort to hide her trail, and even without his senses heightened by Chugaachik Fool Wolf was a good tracker. Her path carried him higher up the steepening valley wall, through rattling stands of bamboo and graceful tree ferns, and finally to a series of broad terraces planted in crops that Fool Wolf didn’t recognize. A few men and women working in the fields gave him odd glances, but no one spoke to him.
Above the fields he came to the village, if it could be called that. Tents, lean-tos, and a few crude houses—all clearly recent—clustered thickly around an older, much more solid building, an enormous longhouse of cedar raised up on twelve thick stone pedestals. A lot of people were watching him now, but he didn’t see any with weapons. He strolled toward one of the long ladders that led up to the house as if he belonged there. He almost made it before a young woman stepped in front of him. She was pretty, with a round face and pink cheeks, probably no more than sixteen.
“Who are you?” she demanded. She seemed frightened, but determined.
“My name is Fool Wolf,” he said. “Ruwhere sent me to make sure the virgins are safe.”
“They are,” she said.
He put on his most winning smile. “Might you be one of them?”
She laughed bitterly. “Not for a while,” she said. “You’re a foreigner aren’t you? You don’t know much about this place.” She looked him up and down. “But you wear their armor,” she said.
“I took this from one of them,” he lied. “After I killed him.”
“Maybe you did,” she said. “If so, thank you. But if you serve them, I will find a way to kill you.”
“I take it…” he trailed off.
“We all were,” she said shortly.
He noticed that a crowd had gathered now, mostly women.
“I’ll never bear children,” she said. “That’s how badly they hurt me—and I was lucky. I used to think that was for the best, because I would never have my daughter taken for the ritual. But then Ruwhere freed Qul, and everything has changed.” She lifted her chin defiantly. “You’ll have to kill me if you want them.”
“I don’t want…” he stopped. “How old were you?”
“Older than most. The younger we are, the more we sustain them. Or so they think, anyway.”
Fool Wolf looked up the ladder. He heard a long, piercing wail.
He shoved the girl out of the way, rushed up the bamboo steps. He heard her screaming and felt her weight join his on the ladder.
The longhouse was one vast empty space. A few older people looked up as he entered, but besides them, of the more than a hundred inhabitants of the building, none looked to be over the age of four. Most were infants.
The girl hit him in the back. He ignored her as the sword in his hand hummed in hunger and Chugaachik howled with lust. A wind came through the house, and he smelled juniper.
Hesqel looked down at Fool Wolf from his high seat and smiled.
“You’ve done it,” he said. “You have the sword.”
“That I do,” he replied. “And so where is my companion?”
“She is safe, in the prison. But you’ve only performed half of your task.”
“You sent me to get the sword, nothing more.”
“Something’s wrong,” one of the others said. “He should be—”
“Yes, he should,” Hesqel said. “He who bears the sword should be host to Qash.”
“Oh, he’s here,” Fool Wolf said, raising the blade.
Hesqel sneered. “I don’t know what witchery prevents his incorporation, but that weapon cannot harm any of us.”
“I believe you,” Fool Wolf said.
He dropped the sword.
Godblood, Chugaachik sighed as he stepped over the dead. Almost as good as babies. Release me again—we’ll go back up there, find out what Qash sees in virgins.
He didn’t even bother to answer her, but just shook his head wearily.
You’ve never been like that before, sweet thing. That was more you than me.
“I know.”
Why?
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
We’ve killed children before. We’ve done things these pathetic half-men never dreamed of.
“That’s right,” Fool Wolf replied. “Now, sleep.”
It was easy, because she was sated. As she slunk away, he could still feel her genuine confusion.
He had to kill a guard to free Inah. She looked at the yellowish blood that soaked his clothes and coated his face and shook her head,
“You let her out,” she said. “After all that talk.”
“I did it to save you, of course,” he replied.
“That’s a lie,” she said, “but I like it.” She leaned up and kissed him.
He bathed in the same pool as he had earlier, then donned some clothes they had taken from a line on the outskirts of the city. By nightfall they were at the rim of the valley. Unfamiliar dales and peaks walked off north, east, and west.
“Which way?” Inah asked.
In the darkening sky, Fool Wolf picked out the constellation his people called the Twins, used that to find the star called the Yekt Kben, the Hearth, the one that never moved. Then he pointed a bit to its right.
“What’s there?” she asked.
“Home,” he replied.