Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered (11 page)

Tahn’s heart drummed in his ears and neck and chest. His throat throbbed with it. Wendra was in there! He found his bow and the one arrow. Shaking the mud and water from the bowstring and quickly cleaning the arrow’s fletching on his coat, he sprinted for the door. He nocked the arrow and leapt to the stoop.

The home had grown suddenly still and quiet.

Tahn burst in, holding his aim high and loose.

An undisturbed fire burned in the hearth, but everything else in his home lay strewn or broken. The table had been toppled on its side, earthen plates broken into shards across the floor. Food was splattered against one wall and puddled near a cooking pot in the far corner. Wendra’s few books sat partially burned near the fire, their thrower’s aim not quite sure.

Tahn saw it all in a glance as he swung his bow to the left where Wendra had tucked her bed up under the loft.

She lay atop her quilts, knees up and legs spread.

No, Will it not!

Then, within the shadows beneath the loft, Tahn saw it, a hulking mass standing at the foot of Wendra’s bed. It hunched over, too tall to remain upright in the nook beneath the upper room. Its hands cradled something in a blanket of horsehair. The smell of sweat and blood and new birth commingled with the aroma of Wendra’s cooking pot.

The creature slowly turned its massive head toward him. Wendra looked, too, her eyes weary but alive with fright. She weakly reached one arm toward him, mouthing something, but unable to speak.

In a low, guttural voice the creature spoke. “Quillescent all around.” It rasped the words in thick, glottal tones, the way outlanders spoke when they hadn’t yet mastered the common tongue.

“Bar’dyn,” Tahn muttered. His disbelief fell away.

CHAPTER SIX

Payment in Oaths

The man with sun-darkened skin strode in the early morning light, a thin cloak wrapped around his shoulders. In the land of his home, he’d have had no need of the garment. But here in the frost-covered hills at dawn, the chill had its bite. And while, for his part, the man might have borne that without complaint, the child he cradled close to his chest beneath the folds of that cloak would not.

The babe slept as the man walked neither slow nor hurried. Purposefully.

He knew his destination, and would arrive soon enough. So he kept a careful eye and a measured pace. When he came to the place, he wanted the infant rested.

He also kept his own counsel as he climbed hills, descended valleys, and marched down long stretches of road beneath the overarching branches of sycamore, hemlock, and oak. The child slept all the while, unaware of what awaited it when sun would first touch the sky. The man had stopped to feed the babe several times a day; it made for slow going. But an end to that drew near. The man felt the pangs of relief and loss all at once. As he ever did.

He topped a rise and spied a small farm on a gradual slope a league distant. “Almost your time, little one,” he whispered. “We will see how you are received today. I should not like to have to take you back. This is a one-way path for you.”

The child woke, as if understanding it was being addressed. Quiet and thoughtful the way a babe can often be, it stared up into the man’s sun-worn face.

“But we must have a discussion before we go our separate ways, little one,” the man continued. “And I will pray they have sufficient means to make the offer you rightly deserve.”

The child, still less than two weeks from its mother’s womb, looked up. For the briefest of moments it appeared to understand the words. But the unfocused eyes soon turned in a new direction, and the man refocused his own concentration on the path ahead. He possessed the discipline not to allow the softness of the child’s skin to recall to mind anything not useful in his errand. For his errand was his primary concern.

There was no equivocation in that.

Dew caught the radiance of dawn and shone back on the man a hundred points of bluish light. Long ago, in another life, he would have at least paused to consider the difference between his own life and that of the family he now approached.

He got moving again.

A small road blocked by a meager gate announced the farm he’d been angling toward. Up the path he went, the child tucked close to his chest, mostly covered by his plain, sun-ravaged cloak. Moments later he came to the back steps of the dwelling.

Always he rapped at a home’s rear door (if he knocked at all), because women and men who earned their way by the sweat of their brow rarely used their front door. Life turned on the axis of a home’s back entrance—closest to the kitchen and fire and stories. And while some did not recognize his subdued calling card (rear door and light knuckles), he felt it important that his errand be attended by the appropriate level of solemnity and discretion.

Life: traded at the back doors of the world.

There were bargains to be made.

And so today he rapped at this lintel, turning hard eyes on the yard as he cradled the child, who began to stir. No chickens scratched at the packed earth; no cattle lowed in the field nearby. He worried that these people would not have the resources to meet his demands. But then, there were many forms of payment, and that was one thing about which he felt good. For so many years …

The door drew back and a young wife dried her hands on a towel hanging from her belt before taking his hand in greeting and fingering the token of the hillfolk to identify herself. But as much as that, the look in her eye when she glanced down at the child in his arms led him to know that this woman would tend and love and teach and protect this child. To her credit, she kept any surprise or dread or gladness off her face. The man nodded to himself; her composure put her in good stead.

This may go well, after all.

The woman looked past him, eyeing the yard and everything else beyond, then stepped aside, indicating that he should enter.

So in they went, the man and the child.

He sat, resting his legs from his long journey, but still holding the babe close as he surveyed the modest home about him. Shortly, the woman’s husband stepped in, showing a wary eye: a large man with large hands. Good.

They bore one another’s company in silence for some time. There seemed no reason to speak, as the purpose of his visit manifested itself in the body of the infant he cradled. He measured the couple before him more by the appointment of their home than by anything they might have said.

Finally, the woman broke the silence. “Would you like some hot tea?”

The man with the sun-worn face shook his head at the hospitality. “No. But the child could use some milk. Have you any?”

In reply, the woman turned to a table behind her and took up a carafe. She crossed the room and waited for him to surrender the child. With interest he did so, and watched as the woman took the child in her arms, sat, and removed her towel. She twisted it at one corner and dipped it in the milk, then offered it to the babe in imitation of nursing. The child went right to it.

The man nodded his satisfaction.

Then her husband spoke. “We can offer you little for the child.”

The traveler turned to gather the man’s attention. “What is he worth to you?” The hill-man stared back, seeming to consider. But before he could speak, the traveler continued. “And be aware that payment is not always made in coin.” The intimations were many, and the man let them all hang in the air in this early morning gathering in the modest home of some remote hillfolk.

“It will have a hard life here,” the hill-man finally offered. “Many … most do not live to see their stripling years.”

“So your payment is uncertainty?” The traveler looked back at the sure hand of the woman feeding the infant.

“The child won’t go hungry,” the hill-man replied. “I’ll see to it. But beyond that, we’ve few promises here. And anything we give you will mean less to provision ourselves to care for it.”

The visitor looked up with eyes that might have appeared faded from so long under a heavy sun. His own wages in this affair were hard-won. “Your assurances aren’t grand, friend. There are others who have need of a child healthy as this one. A few days more on the road and I could return home with fuller pockets.”

The hill-man did not hestitate. “Choose that if you will. I’ve little use for quick hands to make a prize of a child. I can offer the little one my home, and the knowledge of the hills besides. I’ve no delusions; this is all meager. And perhaps not the best place for the child, after all. We will have our own questions to answer on how it came to us and from whom. These will not be easy to avoid, and the truth brings its own risks to the walls of our home, if you take my meaning.”

The man looked back at the hill-man. “I do at that. But I’ve my own balances to keep.” He stood. “For payment I will have your oath. And heed me that I will call that marker if it is broken. The child’s true parents, his origins, even me, we are all irrelevant now. No questions will you ask, or answer. And your covenant to the child will be as if your woman here bore him from your own seed.”

The hill-man took three great strides and put out his hand. The two clasped, and the hill-man wrapped his finger around the visitor’s thumb in the hillfolk token to seal his oath. The woman likewise nodded her assent. The traveler then went to the woman, whispering low, “He will grow to greatness, if treated hereafter better than was his start,” and put a hand on the child’s head in farewell.

He then strode from the room without another look at either of the hillfolk. Into the first light of dawn the sun-weathered man emerged, his darkened skin receiving the beams of the greater light as old friends. He set his feet back upon the road.

He had leagues to go.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Birth of Flight

The Bar’dyn stepped from beneath the loft, its girth massive. The fire lit the creature’s fibrous skin, which moved as if independent of the muscle and bone beneath. Ridges and rills marked its hide, creating a natural armor Tahn had only ever heard of in story—armor said to surpass the mail worn by men. It uncoiled its left arm from the blanket it held to its chest, letting its hand hang nearly to its knees. From a leather sheath strapped to its leg, the Bar’dyn drew a long knife. Around the hilt the beast curled its hand—three talonlike fingers with a thumb on each side, its palm as large as Tahn’s face. Then it pointed the blade at him.

Tahn’s legs began to quiver. Revulsion and fear pounded in his chest. This was a nightmare come to life.

“We go,” it gurgled deep in its throat. Its cumbersome, halting speech belied the sharp intelligence in its eyes. When it spoke, only its lips moved. The skin on its face remained thick and still, draped loosely over protruding cheekbones that jutted like shelves beneath its eyes. Tahn glimpsed a mouthful of sharp, carious teeth.

As his eyes adjusted to the light within the house, he looked again at Wendra. Blood spots marked her white bed-dress, and her body seemed frozen in a position that prevented her from straightening her legs. That’s when Tahn’s heart stopped. He realized that what the Bar’dyn held to its barklike skin, cradled in a tightly woven blanket of mane and tail, was Wendra’s child.

Pressure mounted in Tahn’s belly: hate, helplessness, confusion, fear. All a madness like panicked wings in his mind. He’d had only one job: watch safe his sister through her birthing time. The horror of what he saw roiled inside him. It all came up in a rush. “No!”

His scream filled the small cabin, leaving it that much more silent when it echoed its last. But the babe made no sound. Nor did the Bar’dyn. On the stoop and roof, the patter of rain resumed, like the sound of a distant waterfall. Beyond it, Tahn thought he heard the gallop of hooves on the muddy road.
More Bar’dyn!

He knew he must do something. In a shaky motion, he drew down his bow on the creature’s head. The Bar’dyn’s thick lips parted in the semblance of a smile, uneven teeth protruding at odd angles. It gave a rough, laughing snarl; its eyes and face twisted in hatred.

“I’ll take you while I clutch the child. Velle will be pleased.” It growled, and swiped its blade through the air in an impossibly wide, vicious arc. The sound of its awful laughter stole into Tahn’s heart, and his arms began to fail, his aim floundering from side to side.

The Bar’dyn laughed again and stepped toward him. Tahn’s mind raced, and fastened upon one thought. He focused on the mark on the back of his bow hand, visually tracing its lines and feeling it with his mind. With a moment of reassurance, his hands steadied, and he drew deeper into the pull, bringing his aim on the Bar’dyn’s throat.

“Unhand the child,” Tahn said, his voice trembling even as his mouth grew dry.

The Bar’dyn paused, looking down at the bundle in its arm. Again it showed its hideous teeth. The creature then lifted the child up, causing the blanket to slip to the floor. Its massive hand curled around the baby’s torso. The infant still glistened from its passage out of Wendra’s body, its skin red and purple in the sallow light of the fire.

“Child came dead, grub.”