When he reached the detachment, Captain Peles raised her chin to motion back behind him and he turned. She stood there. The captain signed for her detachment to move on.
He watched her. For the longest time they remained unmoving, studying one another over the stretch of dusty dirt road between, she motionless beside the unfinished gate to their little yard hemmed in by the house and paddock. Such a small allotment, hardly enough to get by, let alone prosper. He thought of his family’s many estates in Unta. The largest, hard by the Gris border, a man could not cross in a full day’s riding. All that had been his before the Insurrection, before his choice to side against the Empress’s edicts on the Wickan pogrom had stripped him of it. Now the Emperor offered it all back for his return to active duty — and just where, he believed he knew. And he’d accepted. Not for himself of course, but for Halgin. It would be his legacy now. He hoped his son would have better luck of it than he or his father before him.
He raised a hand in farewell and she answered, slowly. He lowered his arm and turned away.
In the end Kiska had no idea why she agreed to Agayla’s request that she accompany her up-island for a walk among the windswept hills. Perhaps it was the daytime sight of the Deadhouse: if anything even more foreboding in the full glare of the sun and even more unsettling to her senses now than she remembered from her youth.
Could this tomb-like dilapidated hulk really be of the Azath? A mysterious network of dwellings, caves or houses, call them what you would — structures, of some sort — that some claimed pervade creation? All she knew of them was what she had overheard speculated about in Tayschrenn’s presence, and that precious little. In fact, she remembered scholars who had approached Tayschrenn for his knowledge of them and their outrage at his opinion that the Azath were not a matter for human investigation. ‘They are waning,’ she heard him say once. ‘We should let them go in peace.’
She rested a hand on the low wall of piled fieldstones surrounding the house’s grounds and thought of another night, seemingly so long ago, when she had faced the brooding presence last. That night saw the only known successful assault upon an Azath; and that by the most cunning — and probably most insane — mage of their time. The Emperor himself. All other would-be assailants through the ages, human, daemon, Jaghut, now crowded the many mounds humping the dead grounds, enslaved to the house.
Agayla was probably right. Perhaps but for the older woman’s intervention she too would now be rotting within one of those burial mounds. That would have been the most likely outcome. Too perilous a throw by far. She turned away to head to the river road to join Agayla for their walk. She would spend the day with her then say her farewells. Another tack, then, towards finding Tayschrenn. Genabackis, perhaps. The Moranth may be of help.
Leaving, she noticed an old man squatting against a stone wall across the way; his great thick arms hung over his knees, and a white thatching of scars criss-crossed his bald pate. The man’s gaze followed her as she left. She thought he looked vaguely familiar: probably from her youth on the island.
She met Agayla just outside the town proper, where allotments and garden plots widened and irrigation channels of set slate bordered the flint road. The fields were dull now with dead stalks. Low bruised clouds pressed overhead, cast up from the south, the Strait of Storm. The chill winds hinted at worse to come.
Her aunt carried a wicker basket on one arm, a shawl over her shoulders. ‘Remind you of the old days?’ she asked, and brushed wayward strands from her face.
‘I suppose so.’
Agayla headed off without comment in her swift energetic walk that Kiska recalled from those old days. Following, she pulled her thick lined cloak tighter and felt about for her gloves. After a time she called, ‘Mushrooming, are we?’
‘A little late for that. Roots mainly. Some stalks. Like the arrow.’
Kiska wouldn’t know an arrow plant if it jabbed her in the eye.
They climbed inland. Agayla struck off the road, following a narrow dirt path that wound between low brush. Looking back, Kiska caught glimpses of the town and the bay beyond before it was cut from view by an intervening hillock. She began to wonder just how far her aunt intended to take them.
At last she pushed through a dense stand of alder, their limbs cast backwards by the constant sea winds, to find Agayla sitting on a lump of rock before a circle of tall standing stones.
‘There you are!’ her aunt announced, patting the rock next to her. ‘Come sit with me.’
Kiska shrugged within her heavy cloak and came to stand next to her aunt. ‘Agayla,’ she began, awkwardly. ‘This has been… pleasant. But I really must be getting back to town…’
The woman raised a hand for silence. ‘Shh. It’s almost time. Now sit.’ She produced an apple from the basket.
Kiska grudgingly sat. ‘Time for what?’
‘This circle is sacred to many gods. Did you know that?’ Before Kiska could reply, she continued, ‘In the old days people were sacrificed here.’
Kiska eyed her aunt, wondering what the old woman was on about. Her mind wasn’t starting to meander in her old age, was it? She bit into the apple.
‘Ah… here we are.’
But Kiska had felt it too. She stood, dropping the apple, and slipped her hands into her cloak to rest where twin long-knives hung sheathed tightly to her sides. A shimmering was climbing between the stones… a wavering curtain of opalescent light. It fluttered to life around the circle’s full circumference.
‘What is this?’
‘Mind your manners now,’ Agayla said. She was pushing back her hair, adjusting her shawl.
Kiska eyed her, mistrustful. ‘What’s going on?’
Agayla stood before her, looked her up and down then gently laid a hand on her cheek. The palm was warm, smooth, and dry. It seemed as if the woman was examining her face for something and Kiska had no idea what it was she sought. ‘We are about to speak to one of the greatest powers presently at play here in this world,’ she began. ‘No — hush. Many name her a goddess but to me she is more, and I suppose less, than that. Not like Burn or Fanderay or Togg. Not some ancient entity or force that has come to represent what we choose to cast upon it. She remains a real living person whose influence transcends others’ because she is here, now, and can intervene directly as she sees fit.’ She gave Kiska’s chin a squeeze and gently edged her head side to side. ‘So behave yourself. Speak only when you are spoken to. Bow. Show some of those fancy manners you should have learned in Unta.’
The woman released her and Kiska shook her head as if to recover from some spell or blow. Greater influence than the gods’? What could her aunt possibly be on about? She eyed the shimmering barrier. ‘Who then? What mage?’
Agayla laughed. ‘Oh, Kiska. Not some mage or magus. The greatest. The Enchantress. The Mistress of Thyr. The Queen of Dreams.’ And she took her niece’s hand and led her through the curtain of light.
The brilliant glare momentarily blinded Kiska, and as she blinked to clear her vision she slowly became aware of her surroundings. It was the circle of standing stones she knew, but surrounded by a shimmering reflective silver border. And, standing at its centre waiting to meet them, a woman wrapped in loose pale blue cloth that was draped about her in countless folds. Kiska held back, dazzled by the vision of this diminutive, slim, raven-haired beauty. How could this be real? She’d heard that this woman walked with Anomander generations ago. Yet was she not the greatest enchantress of the age? She could appear as she wished and this was her choice; it was up to her, Kiska, to take from it what she would.
Agayla shared no such hesitation. She knelt before the woman, murmured something that sounded close to an invocation. But the Enchantress laughed and raised her up with her hands, saying, ‘Do not kneel before me, Agayla. Surely you of all people have not fallen to the cult of worship.’