The wind was cold on Yurelalte's face, cold enough to numb her lips and sting her cheeks even with the golden sun shining down from a blue and glorious sky, so clear one might think clouds were only a dream. She blinked away the involuntary tears that sprang to her eyes from a sudden gust and scanned the horizon, then shook her head and sighed as she dug her heels into the horse's flanks to urge it faster. It was ill fortune indeed to be so high in the foothills this late in the summer when the Holy Ones were stirring, but Yurelalte was the riding's best hunter. That damn Hequray was going to get a piece of her mind when she got back for his poor shepherding.
As the horse crested the rolling summit of the next hill, Yurelalte briefly glimpsed a tiny dark dot against the sky over the snow-laden peaks farther south. Without slowing, she stripped the thick fur-lined leather glove from her hand, worked her lips a few times to warm them, and used her fingers to let out a piercing whistle. Ever so faintly, it echoed back from the distant cliffs.
The speck reappeared after several more hills, resolving more clearly as it winged its way closer. Soon enough it circled above, lazily flapping huge wings before diving down and swooping to a halt on Yurelalte's outstretched arm. "Ushqe!" she cried happily, dropping the reins in her other hand to scratch the golden eagle under the beak. The bird ruffled her feathers and shuffled her feet, pleased. "Did you find the sheep? I don't know how far they could have gone."
Settling back down, Ushqe whined disappointedly and beat her broad wings for emphasis. Yurelalte grimaced. "No sign? Damn. Nothing for it, then." She reached into her saddlebags, woven in intricate geometric patterns of crimson and yellow wool, pulled out the bloody carcass of a marmot, and tossed it to the eagle, who flew up to catch it in fiercely hooked talons, then settled down on the rear of the horse to eat it.
While Ushqe tore into her meal, Yurelalte dug through the beaded leather pouch belted to her side to find half a gold coin and a slender iron knife. She carefully shaved off a thin sliver from the coin and blew on its tip, sparking the filing to light with a tiny rosy flame. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply in, feeling her blood boil to molten gold in her veins, and exhaled her vital essence out into the world, feeling, prodding, searching. There a marmot sleeping in its burrow, there a pika nibbling flowers amidst the stones, there a herd of gazelle grazing at the foot of a stand of pines by a slender mountain brook—farther, farther, wince with pain, breathe shakily—ah! There, hidden beneath the earth, some six miles southwest, nestled in some burrow or cave, were seven sheep, frozen stock-still and shuddering with fear.
With a snap of burning pain, Yurelalte withdrew back to herself, soul pouring back from all the crevices of the hills. The little flame scorched the fingers of her ungloved hand hotly, gold burned away to nothing. She snuffed it out neatly and tossed the last cooling droplet of gold to the earth, nose wrinkling at the smoky, pervasive odor of flowers which had invaded so suddenly.
The sun had fallen near to the horizon by the time Yurelalte had picked her way through the steepening ever-more-rugged slopes and cliffs nigh to the place she had divined. It was colder yet, though the wind had abated some, and the land was stained gold with the thick, slanting light of evening. She had slowed her horse to a walk for quiet in the chill air, and to secure its footing in the treacherous darkling rocks. Now she reined in entirely, eagle circling low above, and dismounted, sliding her bow from its case and slinging her quiver around herself such that it hung at her hip across from her iron axe. Dropping the horse's reins, she left it with the terse command, "Stay." Obediently, it bent its head to the grass as she crept away.
And there it was, a cave's gaping black wound rent in the fabric of the hills, aimed away from the sun's warm rays so that only a few feet of its interior could be seen. As Yurelalte neared it, Ushqe landed on a rock above the opening and chirped nervously. The woman laughed gently and said, "You don't need to go in, bird. I can handle myself." Ushqe chirped again in disagreement, but hopped away a little, still looking down with apprehension. Gingerly, Yurelalte began to clamber down, cursing silently at every tiny shift in the loose rock of the slope, supporting herself with one hand while the other carefully held the bow elevated. Carefully, carefully, she made her way into the dark. There was a clear scent on the air now, faint charnel and gore mixing with a queer staleness.
The pebbles and stones slowly gave way to water-smoothed stone as the ground leveled out and the earth closed over Yurelalte's head. The cave grew tighter and lower, twisting and turning; the stink of slaughter grew until it was thicker with blood in the enclosed space than the butchering grounds on the great feast day of the Queen of Shepherds. Mixed in, putrid and wrong, was that other smell, which she still could not name.
A moment later, she heard it, and froze: breathing, heavy and steel-edged. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark, and with a squint she could just barely make out shapes against the cave's walls. To the left, the living sheep, huddled in a tight mass and hyperventilating with panic at the edge of hearing, and left next to them as if in warning, the slumped, eviscerated carcasses of two more. Behind them, however, loomed a shape yet more indistinct, a darkness greater than dark, as if it absorbed light by its very presence. That awful breath came from its bulk, laden with menace, but it did not shift. Perhaps it was asleep.
"O Light of Dawn," Yurelalte breathed as softly as she could manage, "Illuminate this beast my prey, and guide my hand true." She carefully pulled an arrow from her quiver and set it to bowstring. As she drew back the coiled spring of wood, sinew, lacquer, and string with practiced ease, she could feel the eagles tattooed into her bow arm and the horses on her thighs itching and pulsing, yearning for the breath of life, but there was no war-leader here to unleash them with blood. Yurelalte breathed out; the arrow twanged free almost deafeningly as the sound echoed off the walls. Again her insides pulsed with red-hot liquid gold, and the arrow flared to rose-red flame as it flew directly into the dark mass—and disappeared.
For an instant, the darkness was as complete as if light had never been. Then a gout of flame burst out from where the arrow had been, bright and vicious, spattering thick tendrils of darkness across the cave. One landed on Yurelalte's woolen robe, where it sizzled acridly as it burned through to the leather scutes below. The sheep yelped and bleated. She untensed, breathing freely, as she watched the slumped mass for movement,
Suddenly, twin flames burned open at the top of the thing. Flames, yes, but they cast no light and burned cold and uncanny in a color without name, and they blinked languidly as the mass lurched to movement, drawing up as if to stand, and then closer, closer.
Yurelalte snapped out of her stupor—but no, her head did not shake for clarity, her arm did not reach for another arrow, her legs did not turn and run. The thing kept on its casual approach, and it was tall, so tall, and those flames, or were they eyes, were inescapable, inexorable. It stood before her and reached out a long, long arm towards her, and all was darkness, she was darkness, all except those awful flames, and she was falling towards them, she was so cold.
And then there was pain, bright knifing pain, and the weight of eight sharp talons piercing her armor into her shoulder's meat, and loud wings buffeting the air, and a wicked beak tearing at her ear. By sheer instinct, with nary a thought, she reached into her quiver, drew an arrow, and nocked it in one swift motion, but that arm reached towards hear, and when she stepped back, an errant outcrop of stone caught her heel. As she fell, the arrow sprang awry and burst into flame to stick in the ceiling and cast the whole scene in a flickering light.
Ushqe sprang back into the air, squawking, and the noise of her flight filled the cave. The thing was outlined in dawnlight, now, and Yurelalte could see that it resembled a man, tall and thin and terrible, horribly elongated, steaming amidst the scent of flowers. Its chest gaped open with a massive weeping wound, revealing nothing within but darkness, save for a single glimmer of green. It swung an arm at her, suddenly moving fast as a wrestler and screaming in a thin sourceless voice. She rolled out of the way, dropping her bow when its tip caught on the ground and fumbling for the axe at her waist. The ghoul lashed out at her again, and she freed the axe just in time to swing at its wrist. She struck only with the haft, misaligning the head, and the impact only send droplets of darkness flying. One caught her on the cheek, burning like lye in an open wound. Still, the indistinct claws bubbling at the end of the arm missed her torso by a finger's breadth, and she took the opportunity to scramble back to her feet.
When the ghoul dove at her again, she was ready. Her axeblade caught it in the elbow, and nearly severed it in a spray of thick shadow. It screamed with a thousand hoarse voices and kicked out reflexively, leg seeming to stretch to catch her in the gut and hurl her across the cave to crash into the wall. Lurching towards her stunned form, it kicked her fallen axe away. She could not dodge its arm this time; its razor-edged talons grasped her shoulder and squeezed, slicing through her armor to cut and burn.
With her other hand she seized its injured arm and pulled, ignoring its flesh corroding away her glove in an instant and scalding the flesh below. The ghoul hissed like an angry snakebird, shuddering away in pain, and releasing her for but a moment. In that instant she acted, crying out in rage, to pull her lasso from her belt and yank it over the creature's head. It struggled as she pulled with both arms, cinching the strong wiry fibers murderously tight around what passed for its neck and through its sizzling flesh. Claws met her torso, scraping and flailing and carving through her robe, but the strength was leaving it, and it accomplished nothing but scarring the hardened leather. With a last strangled gasp, it collapsed, pulling her down with it.
It couldn't have taken long for Yurelalte to come back to herself, for her arrow's shaft was still flickering and alight where it had stuck in that crack in the stone. She was lying on the cold floor with her shoulder, face, and palm in agony, and she groaned with it, voice joining Ushqe's panicked cries. The eagle was surrounded by her antithesis, a place she was never meant to go. As Yurelalte dragged herself up, she saw that the ghoul had withered away to nothing, leaving the corroded, blackened remains of her lasso tight around a long staff of pale wood, inlaid with silver runes and studded with five small green gems at one end, glinting in the firelight.
Then, steadying herself on trembling feet, she saw the wall: in the back of the cave where the ghoul had been resting, there was no raw rock, but a sheer wall of living stone, carved all over with intricate reliefs that seemed to writhe and sway in the shadows, women and Holy Ones, elk and bearsquirrels, and above all, the sleek striped bulk of the Mother's Beast. Outlined clearly between the figures was the clear seam of a door. Yurelalte stared for a moment in surprise, then shrugged, picked up the staff, and went to the work of gathering her charges, who were flowing unevenly towards the cave's exit now that the threat was gone, and calming her faithful bird. A matter for another time.
