Milkeila didn’t respond at all, didn’t blink or sneer or speak.
“Your duties await,” Toniquay reminded her, adding as she walked by, “You would do well to prove yourself.”
“I am shaman-”
“For now.”
The warning did indeed shake the woman, visibly so, and she turned and hurried away.
Toniquay turned his withering gaze back to Androosis. “And you,” the shaman said, “would do well to learn and accept your place. My patience nears its end for Androosis. I took you to dangerous waters. Men of honor paid with their lives!” Androosis’s stunned expression spoke volumes, clearly arguing that the disaster on the boat was hardly his fault.
But Toniquay wasn’t hearing any of it. “We went out of our way to try to save you, young and spirited one. But no more. Prove yourself or you will be banished-if you are fortunate and the elders are feeling generous.”
“Yes, Toniquay,” Androosis replied obediently, hanging his head in humility.
The shaman walked away, eyeing the young man’s every step sternly.
A somber mood accompanied Brother Giavno and the rest as they went to work collecting the larger stones from the area of the island they had come to regard as their quarry. Giavno winced and couldn’t help but recall the last time he had been down here, when powries had arrived and Cormack had battled them so magnificently, so bravely.
The loss of Cormack was no small thing to the brothers of Chapel Isle. The manner in which it had occurred had left them all, particularly Giavno, tasked with delivering the very likely fatal beating, feeling empty and desolate. No one had spoken the fallen brother’s name since he had been pushed out adrift in the small boat. No one had to.
It was written on all of their faces, Giavno clearly saw. To a one they had been shaken. To a one Cormack’s betrayal had asked primary and devastating questions about their purpose and place in this foreign land and among these foreign societies.
Why had Cormack done it? Why had the man betrayed them, betrayed the very tenets of their mission, according to Father De Guilbe’s interpretation?
Giavno thought he had the answer to that, echoed in the sounds of Cormack’s lovemaking to the barbarian woman. Love was the strongest of human emotions, Blessed Abelle had taught, and more people had been brought down by love than by hate. While there was no specific prohibition of marriage in the Order of Blessed Abelle, such relationships were scorned among the brotherhood. If you gave yourself to the Church, it was to be wholly so. Worse still, to foster a love affair with a heathen, with a barbarian shaman, was far beyond the bounds of acceptability.
Cormack had earned his beating, Giavno believed, and had told himself a million times since that awful day. He could still feel the tug of the whip as its barbed ends dug into and hooked on the flesh of Cormack’s back.
He shuddered, and only then realized that one of the brothers had been asking him a question, and probably for some time.
“Yes, Brother?” he replied.
“The stone?” the younger man inquired.
“Stone?”
The monk offered a curious stare at Giavno for just a moment, then nodded as if he completely understood (which he likely did, for the cause of distraction was quite common at that time) and motioned toward one large rock that had been set off to the side.
“Is it too large, do you think?” the monk asked.
Giavno looked at him curiously. “No, of course not.”
“I cannot carry it alone,” the monk replied.
“Then get someone to help you.”
“They are all busy, Brother Giavno. I thought that perhaps you could help, either with your arms or through use of the malachite stone in lessening the weight.”
Giavno was about to reprimand the brother for being so foolish; Giavno was overseeing the work detail and not participating. But then he caught something in the young brother’s eye, a look of both hopefulness and sympathy, and when he glanced out at the wider scene, he realized that more than one of the other workers had taken a subtle, covert interest in this distant conversation.
Brother Giavno smiled as it hit him fully: They were trying to distract him. As the work was keeping their minds off of the tragedy of Brother Cormack, so they had thought to include Brother Giavno in that blessed busyness.
“Yes, Brother,” Giavno addressed the young monk. “Come. Together we two will carry the stone to the chapel, and what a fine addition to the wall it will be.”
Together, he thought, for all that the brothers of Blessed Abelle had was each other. So far from home, so far from kin, without that mutual bond they would all surely lose their minds.
That was what had made Cormack’s betrayal so particularly difficult.
Ye might remember Bikelbrin, and these are me friends, Ruggirs and Pergwick,” Mcwigik said, splashing at the water’s edge behind Cormack.
Cormack nodded to each in turn, wondering uneasily what this unexpected meeting might be all about.
“We’ll take ye to her,” Mcwigik announced, and the fishing spear fell out of Cormack’s hand. “Not sure how we’ll do it, but we’ll find a way. But we got a price.”
Cormack held up his arms, fully displaying his now-ragged brown robe. “I have little, but what I have-”
“Ye know yer way about out there,” Mcwigik interrupted. “That’s the price.”
Cormack looked at him curiously.
“The four of us’re done with this rock, and have been for a long time,” the dwarf explained. “We’re wanting to be gone from the lake, but we’re not for knowing the land about. Been a hundred years since I walked those paths, but for yourself, it’s not so long. So we’ll help ye get yer girl, and in exchange, ye’ll take us along.”
“My road will be south, no doubt, out of Alpinador and into the Honce land of Vanguard-maybe even across the gulf and into Honce proper, itself. I’m not sure how well-received a powrie might be…”
“Ye’ll take care of it,” Mcwigik said. “So start thinking on how we might get ye to yer girl, and then we’re off this rock, all six-or five, if she’s not to come.”
“Or nine or ten, perhaps even twelve,” said Cormack, “if her friends decide that they, too, wish to see the wider world.”
“Bring a hundred,” said Mcwigik. “A thousand! Long as me and me boys get to get out o’ here and to places more interesting.”
Cormack settled back on his heels. He could hardly believe the sudden turn of events. One moment, he was floating on a raft of tied troll carcasses, about to be eaten by fish, and now he was looking at escape, at what he and Milkeila had dreamed of for a long, long time.
He nodded-stupidly, he figured.
“We can find Yossunfier at night,” Mcwigik said. “And we’re thinking to go in one of the next few.”
Cormack nodded again, no less stupidly. Mcwigik thumped his hands on his hips and walked off.
Cormack retrieved his fishing spear. Oddly, he couldn’t hit another thing the rest of the afternoon.
TWENTY-FIVE
For the Enjoyment of the Ancient
They huddled in the cold on the glacial ice with little or nothing to eat or drink, growing weaker by the day.
The fortunate ones continued to huddle in misery, for every couple of days one was grabbed from their midst and dragged to the crevice, to be wounded and lowered into the gorge as food for the beast that lay below.
Ancient Badden presided over those ceremonies of sacrifice, and he seemed to truly enjoy it. How much like Bernivvigar he appeared to Bransen. The same feral look consumed him in those moments of inflicting agony upon others.
The only other time they saw the old wretch was during the daily troll sacrifice. This was done differently, with several trolls hanged over the gorge with slit wrists so that their blood rained into the dark chasm.