The Ancient

TWO

Feeding the God Well

Samhaist Dantanna crouched low as he moved through the area of knee-deep white caribou moss. The plant could be mashed into a potent salve and made a fine tea, but Dantanna was looking for something even more valuable: dauba bulbs. They only grew among the moss, and never in great number. Even one bulb would make for a fine day’s hunting, though, for the Samhaist could then prepare the most wonderful dauba stew, a brew that would take all the pains from his joints for a week and more.

Dantanna didn’t like this land, Alpinador, far preferring the milder climate of Vanguard, south of the mountains.

It was not his place to question, though-at least not openly.

He had to keep telling himself that, for there was so much afoot in the world that Dantanna, still young and not completely jaded, did indeed wish to question. He bent low and brushed aside the moss as he quickened his pace. He knew there would be some dauba around this particularly thick strand of caribou moss-there had to be.

“That’s a bootlace, not a vine, boy,” came a gruff voice, and only then did Dantanna realize that he was not alone in the white field, though how in the world someone else had come in without gaining his attention he couldn’t begin to fathom.

Until he looked up to see the weathered face, the thick mustache, and the pointed, feathered cap. Then he knew. The man standing tall and straight before him might have been forty or seventy-he had those ageless features that exude both strength and the wisdom of experience. So much experience.

“Master Sequin,” he stammered, sidling back a few feet. The old scout didn’t answer other than to stare un-blinkingly and witheringly at the Samhaist. “I did not know that you were in the area,” Dantanna said.

“Like to state the obvious, do you?”

Dantanna nodded stupidly. “I am Samhaist Dantanna-once we met, in Vanguard and near to where the Abelli…”

“Chapel Pellinor,” the weathered Jameston Sequin said. Dantanna nodded, trying not to look too pleased that this great man had remembered him.

“I never forget a face,” Jameston went on. “Or the name of a man I consider worth remembering.”

Dantanna beamed all the more.

“What did you say your name was again?”

The Samhaist slouched. “Dantanna.”

“You travel with old Badden?”

“Ancient Badden,” Dantanna corrected, and (surprisingly to him) forcefully.

“You’re a long way from home, boy.”

Dantanna didn’t begin to know how to take that. “There is the war…”

“The one your Ancient Badden started.”

“Not so!” Dantanna protested with a severity that surprised him given his ambivalence, often disgust, at the fighting over Vanguard. “Dame Gwydre began it all. She chose and chose ill.”

“Because she fell in love with a man?”

“Because she fell in love with an Abellican monk!”

Jameston Sequin chuckled and shook his head. “An offense worth all of this?” he asked.

Dantanna half shook his head and half nodded, giving no verbal response, because he knew that if he did he would never get any true resonance or confidence in his voice.

“Well, you fight your battles as you choose them,” Jameston said. “I’ll let the folk of Vanguard choose which religion, Samhaist or Abellican, suits their needs.”

“And which for Jameston?” Dantanna asked, thinking himself sly for the instant it took Jameston to mock him utterly with a laugh.

The old scout brought his arm out in front of him, holding a sack, and still applying that withering gaze over Dantanna, he upended it before the man. More than a dozen pointy troll ears tumbled out onto the ground at Dantanna’s feet.

“It’s theirs to choose,” Jameston said.

“As it is yours,” Dantanna replied, still staring down at the multitude of ears-ears of creatures Ancient Bad-den had enlisted in the fight.

“If my choice is between a man and a troll, it’s not a hard one, boy,” Jameston said. “I said I didn’t much care, and I don’t, but you tell your Ancient Badden that I’m not for letting glacial trolls murder families in the name of Samhain or in the name of anyone else.”

“Our struggle is…”

“… none of my business,” Jameston finished for him, “and none of my care. But when I see a troll, I kill a troll, and I don’t ask who it’s working for.” He snorted derisively and started away.

“Master Sequin,” Dantanna called after him. “If we meet again, will you remember my name?”

Jameston didn’t stop or look back. “I forgot it already.”

From a high perch on the very edge of the great glacier Cold’rin, Ancient Badden stared out across the miles of the southland. In his mind’s eye, he looked past the frozen tundra of Alpinador to the thick forests of Vanguard. He envisioned the battles raging there, Honce man against goblin, Honce man against glacial troll, Honce man against the sturdy Alpinadoran barbarians.

His army, battling the men of Honce, punishing them for their growing acceptance of the heretics of Blessed Abelle.

A smile creased Ancient Badden’s face, strangely white teeth (for one of his age) standing brightly in the midst of his wild black mustache and beard, a gigantic affair that poked out in a semicircle of sharp points beneath the old Samhaist’s weathered face, its ends sharpened by dung and plaited with ribbons black and red. He would teach them.

Word had come that Chapel Pellinor had fallen-sacked as much by angry Honce men as by Ancient Badden’s hordes. The few surviving monks were even then being dragged north, to this place, to be sacrificed to Ancient D’no, the worm god of the frozen lands.

Ancient Badden lowered his gaze to the clouds of steam at the base of the glacier’s cliff face, where the ice met the hot waters of the lake called Mithranidoon. The mists seemed to him to thicken. An indication, perhaps, that D’no was pleased by the news? Or his imagination, his thrill, at the prospect of feeding the god so well?

Ancient Badden envisioned the hot waters beneath that cloud, the Holy Lake of Mithranidoon, the Rift of Samhain, the gift of the Ancient Ones to their children as a reward for their wondrous efforts here.

A particularly sharp retort turned the old Samhaist around, to view the crevice some fifty feet north of where he stood. A pair of giants, fifteen feet tall and with shoulders as wide as the wingspan of a great eagle, rolled heavy mallets up into the air, slamming them down concurrently upon the flattened head of a battered log, a sharpened wedge that drove deeper into the glacier with every smash. Once they had driven that one down to the level of the glacier, Ancient Badden would bless the spike and prepare its end with spells and fire, that another could be placed upon it and driven down, pushing the bottom one even deeper.

Over to the right of the giants, where the crevice was much wider and much deeper, several glacial trolls hung by their ankles, suspended beneath crossbeams by thin ropes. Their arms were weighted, forcing them into a diver’s stretch, and their wrists had been expertly cut, their thin blood dripping down into the chasm and turning into a fine, coating mist in the windy gorge. Troll blood did not freeze, and the coating of it in the crevice would prevent the melted waters from mitigating the damage to the edge of the glacier. One troll, at least one, was dead and dried out now, Ancient Badden noted, but no worries, for the wretched little beasts were as thick as hares in summer Vanguard.

He scanned farther to the right, to the elaborate ice bridge he had magically constructed: it spanned the widest expanse of the chasm, with enough room on either side so that it would continue to allow crossing even when the rift had become as wide as intended. Ancient Badden couldn’t help but smile as his gaze moved farther to the right, to the mountain wall bordering the glacier on the east, for against that dark stone loomed Ancient Badden’s greatest work yet: his home, Devongel, a castle of crystalline ice, of elegant, winding spires and thick walls, of defensive and confusing mazes both practical and beautiful.

His smile disappeared when he looked back to the left, over by the working giants, and noted a smaller form, dressed in the telltale light green robes of a Samhaist, though surely nothing as elaborate as Ancient Badden’s gown, decorated as it was with claws and teeth from various carnivores, and with leafy designs woven with threads green and yellow so that it looked as if the Samhaist could walk into a strand of brush and simply disappear. About his waist, Ancient Badden wore a thick red sash, tied on his right hip, with its frayed ends nearly reaching the ground. Only one Samhaist, the Ancient himself, could wear this holiest of belts, and Ancient Badden put his hand on that knot now, as the ever-annoying Priest Dantanna approached, to remind himself of that honor.

Wearing a sour expression, Dantanna circled wide of the giants and hopped the crevice, which, ten feet out from the spike, was no more than a crack, and neared Ancient Badden with a determined stride.

He bowed repeatedly as he covered the last dozen strides to his master, though not as quickly or as deeply as Ancient Badden would have liked.

“You have heard of Chapel Pellinor,” Ancient Badden began.

“Burned and with its stones scattered,” Dantanna replied, cutting off his words as if it pained him to speak them.

“Another victory over the Abellican heretics. Does that not please you?”

“Many men and women who were not Abellicans were killed in the fighting.”

Ancient Badden shrugged as if it did not matter, which, of course, in the greater scheme of Samhain’s universe, it surely did not.

“Killed by goblins and trolls and the barbarian mercenaries,” Dantanna added.

Another shrug. “That is the way of things.”

“Because we choose it to be! Once we battled beside the Honce men of Vanguard against the very army we now turn loose upon them.”

“Once and not long ago, they knew their place,” said Ancient Badden. Dantanna winced and quieted, the implications hanging heavily in the air. War was general south of the Gulf of Corona, laird against laird, with Ethelbert of Entel battling for dominance against the great Delaval. In that struggle, the true emerging winner seemed to be neither of the lairds, but rather, the Abellican Church, for the monks with their magical gem-stones, powerful in both healing and destruction, had gained favor with every laird. Though possessed of magic of their own, the Samhaists could not match that Abellican availability of useful tricks.

“They look to the south,” Dantanna dared to say after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. “The men of Vanguard see the turning tide amongst their Honce brethren.”

“A tide turning away from us and from the Ancient Ones,” said Ancient Badden. “It is a temporary thing, you understand.”

Dantanna didn’t reply, except that his face showed little in the way of concession.

“The Abellican monks dazzle with their baubles,” Ancient Badden explained. “And provide comfort and even battle advantage. But they have little understanding of the proper preparations for the greater course. Death is inevitable-to lairds and to peasants. What answers might the foolish boys who follow the distorted memory of that idiot Abelle offer to mortally wounded warriors?”

“Fewer are mortally wounded because of their work.”

“Temporary relief! Everyone dies.”

Dantanna shook his head. “Then perhaps we have a role to play in complement with the monks,” he said, or started to, for his voice trailed off and his eyes widened with fear as Ancient Badden put on the most fearsome scowl he had ever seen, a mask of danger and death, and the great Samhaist seemed to grow, to rise up above Dantanna, mocking him in his impotence.

But the growth proved short-lived, and Ancient Badden settled back easily, wearing a grin-though one that seemed no less dangerous. “You would like that, would you not?” he asked.

Dantanna tilted his head a bit, as if he did not understand.

“If we were to find a place beside the Abellicans,” Ancient Badden clarified.

Dantanna began to shake his head, and his eyes darted about as if he was looking for a way to flee.

“How long did you think you could hide your allegiance to Dame Gwydre?” Ancient Badden bluntly asked.

“I know not of what you speak.”

“Do not play me for a fool,” Ancient Badden warned. “You counseled Gwydre extensively before her association with the Abellicans.”

“Ancient, the Abellicans have been in Vanguard Town for years-before I ever came to know Lady Gwydre. Indeed, they were beside Laird Gendron before his death, when Gwydre was but a girl.”

“With all their magical baubles, they still did not prevent his untimely death, did they?” Ancient Badden gave a little laugh. Dantanna winced, for it was widely rumored that the Samhaists had played a role in the “accident” that had taken the beloved Laird Gendron from the folk of Vanguard.

“And so Gwydre rose to power in Vanguard Town, a young, impressionable girl.”

“Never that,” Dantanna interrupted, and Ancient Badden’s scowl put him back on his heels.

“And when your master died, Gwydre’s ear was passed to you,” Ancient Badden went on. “Your duty was clearly relayed: to keep Gwydre from the Abellican encroachment. Your own assessment if you will, Dantanna. Did you succeed or fail?”

Dantanna began shaking his head. “It was more complicated…”

“Are you couching an admission of failure?”

“No, Ancient. Dame Gwydre has sought a balance from the beginning. She counts me among her trusted advisors as she counts-”

“The monks of Chapel Pellinor?”

“Yes, but…”

“One of them in particular,” Ancient Badden said.

Dantanna swallowed hard, unable to deny the truth of it. Dame Gwydre had fallen in love with an Abellican monk, and the Church of Abelle had done nothing to dissuade the union-obviously for cynical, political reasons. Chapel Pellinor stood on the outskirts of Vanguard Town, by far the most important town north of the Gulf of Corona; Dame Gwydre commanded the army of the entire Honce province north of the Gulf of Corona, the region known as Vanguard. As her relationship with her lover monk had grown, so had grown the power of the Abellicans in Vanguard Town and across the land. Dantanna had not been able to resist that movement, and had come to believe that playing an amenable role was the only way he and the Samhaists could retain any semblance of influence over the feisty and headstrong dame of Vanguard.

He had improvised. He had taken his own initiative. He had gambled and had thought that he was carving out a suitable role for his Church-until the hordes had descended upon Vanguard from the north at the direction of Ancient Badden.

“You wear your answer on your face, foolish Dantanna. It is true, then.”

“Dame Gwydre beds a monk, yes,” Dantanna admitted.

“And you allowed it to happen.”

Dantanna balked at the words, spoken as they had been as an accusation. “Allowed?”

“Yes, allowed. You saw the relationship budding years ago, and you did not stop it.”

“Love takes its own course, Ancient. I tried to dissuade Gwydre. Indeed, I did. But her heart was set and immovable, and-”

“And you did not kill this monk.”

That took Dantanna’s breath away.

“Is the importance of this lost upon you?” Ancient Badden asked.

“No, Ancient. No.”

“Then why did you not recognize your duty and fulfill it long ago? It has been many months since the commencement of the unholy tryst and yet this Abellican still draws breath.”

“You ask me to murder a man?”

“Were you not so trained in the magic of poison? Do you think that training no more than an exercise in the hypothetical?”

Dantanna shook his head helplessly, his jaw hanging slack.

“Have you not the power to kill a single young monk?”

“I am no murderer,” the younger Samhaist whispered.

“Murderer, bah!” Ancient Badden huffed, and he waved his hand and walked to the lip of the glacier, looking down the thousand feet and more to the mist rising off the lake. “An ugly word for a noble task. How many lives would Dantanna have saved if he had mustered his courage and done as his duty demanded? This entire war could have been avoided, or surely minimized, if Dame Gwydre had not been smitten by a heretic Abellican, you fool!”

“The war was one of choice,” Dantanna dared to say.

Ancient Badden turned on him angrily. “Choice?” he roared. “You would cede the souls of thousands of Van-guardsmen to the heretic Abellicans?”

“We have our place…”

“Shut up,” Ancient Badden said simply, and he turned back to look out over the southland. “You have failed, in the one task which meant anything, the one action that might have avoided years of strife and carnage. The misery, the death, the rivers of blood are all upon you because you had not the courage to strike a single blow.”

“You cannot believe that,” Dantanna gasped.

“I suppose, though, that I should thank you,” Ancient Badden went on, as if he had not heard the comment. “The Ancient Ones saw fit to fill my divining pool with Images of the battle of Chapel Pellinor. And the screams and cries. It was glorious, indeed.”

“How can you say that?” Dantanna asked under his breath, despite himself and his fears.

“To hear men weeping like children!” Ancient Badden snickered. “To hear the cries of women who knew they were doomed for their heresy, who knew their children would be torn apart in retribution! Oh, the beauty of justice!

“And do you know the greatest victory of all?” Ancient Badden asked, spinning about and staring wild-eyed and wide-eyed at the stupefied younger Samhaist, who merely shook his head as if he was numb to it all.

“The captives!” Ancient Badden explained. “Lines of them, hundreds of them, perhaps, tethered together and marching for this very place.”

Dantanna turned about to regard the giants, lazily pounding home the wedge spikes. He viewed the hanging glacial trolls, their thin blood dripping down into the melt, hindering the refreezing of the glacier. Another platform had been constructed near to them, this one with a crank and a long, long rope, one that would deposit the anticipated sacrifices deep within the chasm, where the white worm waited. When Dantanna turned back to Ancient Badden, the man’s smug smile proved very revealing.

“They will feed D’no, and his frenzy and heat will facilitate the Severing,” Ancient Badden confirmed, using the sanctifying term he had coined for his work on the edge of the glacier. “As D’no burrows and further melts the ice, we will feed him more. We will make him stronger and swifter, that he will reach to the stones about the ice to join our efforts with the earth magic of the Ancient Ones.” He paused and regarded the younger Samhaist with a nod, one that seemed almost of approval. “I will allow you to offer many of them,” he said, and turned back to stare out-mostly to hide his grin at Dantanna’s horrified expression.

“Offer them?” Dantanna stammered. “You would murder them as food to further your ambitions here?”

“Murder,” Ancient Badden said with a dismissive laugh. “A word you use so easily. Their lives are forfeit, by their own actions. They sided with heretics and so we-you-will exact proper punishment. Perhaps if I teach you to better wield that knife you were awarded, you will be less likely to fail us in the future when you are called upon by all that is holy to put it to proper use.”

As he spoke, Ancient Badden summoned his magic to enhance his senses, and he clearly heard Dantanna’s approach. Thus, he was not surprised when the man, standing right behind him, gave a shout and shoved him hard. Nor did Ancient Badden resist that push, lifting his arms gloriously wide as he went off the edge of the glacier, plummeting toward the mist below.

Dantanna gave a gasp and even offered a contrite wail as the supreme master, the Ancient of the Samhaist religion, tumbled toward certain doom.

Ancient Badden heard it and smiled all the wider, knowing that he had pushed the young fool to abject desperation. He closed his eyes and felt the wind thrumming about his falling form, his robes flapping noisily.

He used that sensation of freedom from mortal boundaries to fall deeper into his magic.

Back up on the ledge Dantanna sobbed, his head in his hands, and so he did not immediately see the transformation as Ancient Badden assumed the most ancient form of all. His arms became leathery wings, his eyes turned yellow with a single line of black in the middle, and his face elongated into a snout, filled with fangs, and spearlike horns sprouted atop his head.

His shriek, the keen of a dragon, startled the sobbing Samhaist and those giants and other workers behind him-even one of the hanging glacial trolls, near death, looked up in horror. Dantanna sucked in his breath when he scanned far below to see a dragon swooping out from the mist, rising suddenly on the updrafts from the hot waters of the mystical Mithranidoon.

Dantanna scrambled to his feet and turned about, stumbling as he tried to flee. He got up but slipped again when he heard the sharp screech of the dragon. Seconds seemed to pass as minutes, every step became a chore- and most steps left him prostrate on the ice, trying to rise yet again.

Dantanna felt a thunderous slam against his back. He didn’t fly forward, though he surely would have, had not a large talon-tipped foot closed about him to hold him fast. Flailing and screaming, he went up into the air a dozen feet and more.

Then he was falling, landing hard against the ice.

Again he was scooped in dragon claws. Again Ancient Badden lifted him into the air. And again Ancient Badden dropped him, though higher up this time.

Dantanna screamed in pain when he hit, his leg snapping under his weight, ligaments tearing, bones breaking. He tried to curl to grasp the wound tightly.

But the dragon grabbed him again, carrying him even higher.

Down he fell, landing with a crunching impact, his breath blown away. He tried to crawl but his bones were shattered and he was too far from consciousness to begin to coordinate his movements, foolishly flailing about. Somewhere in the back of his rapidly fleeing thoughts, Dantanna expected to be hoisted again. But it didn’t happen, and he settled down into the deep, cold, gloomy recesses of darkness.

Sharp, agonizing stabs of pain in his shattered limbs awakened him some time later. He was hanging by his ankles from the very rope he had noted on the new platform suspended over the chasm. His hands were securely and tightly bound behind him.

“You failed,” he heard, distantly it seemed, though when Dantanna managed to turn his head, he saw that Ancient Badden was standing on the edge of the platform only a couple of feet to the side and above. At the man’s feet lay a sack, its contents of troll ears spilled. “A pity. I had thought to educate you. I had thought to build your resolve and your understanding.”

As he spoke, the Ancient lifted his arm and signaled behind him.

Dantanna’s eyes went wide, and he thrashed about painfully, pitifully. Ancient Badden watched passively as Dantanna was slowly lowered into the gorge, the younger man sputtering desperate pleas. The agony in his shattered legs did not even register any longer through the thickening wall of sheer terror. He screamed his repentance to Ancient Badden, but the old and wicked Samhaist had taken up an ancient song of praise to the great D’no, the white worm god.

Dantanna tried to settle his thoughts. He bent a bit at the waist to get a glance at the rope bound to his ankle, noting that it was the same one that bound his hands. He growled and tried to curl up to get near to that rope. He wanted to free himself, to fall the remaining distance and kill himself outright!

Better that!

But Dantanna’s executioner was no novice, and the young priest could get nowhere near the binding cord, nor could he hope to free his hands. In the dimming light he could see the myriad tunnels along the sides of the chasm. The ice was wet down here, as the pieces melted by D’no, blended as they were with the mist of glacial trolls’ blood, could not fully refreeze. The web of tunnels. The burrowing of D’no.

From somewhere deep within the ice of the gorge’s northern side came a guttural rumble, the growl of a monstrous beast.

Dantanna touched down on the wet ice, a trickle of water running past him. Now he scrambled more furiously, tugging his hands from side to side. Somehow he managed to pull one free, and the other slipped out of the noose. He rolled over and sat up, grimacing against the waves of pain emanating from his legs.

“Crawl, crawl,” he gasped, working desperately at the ties about his ankle. His hands were numb and cold, though, and he couldn’t get a proper grip on the rope. He cursed and fought harder. He heard a rumbling growl. Right behind him.

Dantanna’s heart pounded in his chest. The growl became a hiss. He could feel the intense heat of D’no. He turned to face his doom just as the giant worm lashed at him.

From the platform above the crevice, Ancient Badden could see nothing of the feast. But he heard the screams. Indeed, he heard the horrified, delicious screams.

The rope tugged and jerked a couple of times.

The screaming stopped.

Ancient Badden motioned behind him, and the trolls operating the crank began turning it furiously, working with the frenzy of creatures who knew that they might be the next down the rope if they disappointed their mighty master.

Ancient Badden chuckled when the rope came up, to see the bottom half of Dantanna’s leg still attached, the skin of the upper calf blackened by the heat of D’no.

Ancient Badden casually freed the limb from the rope and tossed it back into the gorge. Then, with a look of disgust at Dantanna’s betrayal, he used his foot to sweep the troll ears into the chasm, as well.

“Eat well, Ancient One,” he said.