“Where are you taking me?” I demanded of the stag. “Will you take me to Khalim?”
Gnarled, gray trees pressed in around me. Making my way through them was like shouldering a path through a crowd of people. The bark yielded to my efforts like flesh, but it was cold as death—cold as a Northern winter. I drew my hand back in surprise. Crumbling brown leaves littered the ground beneath my feet, and above, a sickly, yellow-green sky cast eerie light on a lattice of gray branches.
Despite having spoken before, the stag gave me no answer. It walked with heavy footsteps as the trees parted before it, not even turning its oak-crowned head to acknowledge me.
I was aware that I was dreaming. The landscape had grown familiar over my many weeks of travel, and if nothing else, the soft trees that shifted away as I passed and closed in behind me could not have existed in the waking world. Looking behind me, I had already lost sight of the beach. The forest stretched on forever.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Have you been sent to me by the goddess of the deep, who keeps the gate of bone?”
I thought it a reasonable guess, as uneducated as I was in matters of spirit and the realm of dreams. I had undergone the rite of the Dreaming Eye, and after, both the specter of Fearghus and this uncanny creature had given me the same statement: the eye is open.
Was it a warning, or merely an observation? The stag would not tell me.
“Are you a god? Or are you a demon, intent on deceiving me?” I asked. “Answer me, creature!”
The stag plodded along, not so much as turning an ear to acknowledge me. A chill wind passed through the branches around us and the ones growing from its head, whistling like a hunter’s call for his hounds. I thought to return to the beach, and perhaps hail the ship I had seen on the far horizon, but the way I had come was lost. There was only the dead winter forest, the stag with its soft human eyes turned toward its unknown destination, and me.
You cannot turn back, it told me. I had no choice but to follow.
“Whatever you are,” I said, “I will choose to trust you. If you lead me astray, or do me harm, then I will challenge you and win. I hunted great elks in the mountains of the North, and I felled a full-grown bear with nothing but a crude spear and my wits. I do not fear you, even in this realm.”
On the stag went, and I followed at its shoulder. Before us, the trees leaned away, trembling in the wind. A shadow fell over me as the sky turned from yellow-green to the deep emerald of the tropical sea.
And then the forest was gone, and I stood at the creature’s side in a field of tall, golden grass, and the air tasted of an oncoming storm.
The stag turned to me, and its antlers obscured even the fading light from the darkening sky. “You must go forward,” it said.
“Where should I go?” I asked. “I’ve traveled half the world, spoken to gods and priests and adventurers, and yet I’m no closer to finding Khalim than I was when I left Phyreios.”
“Where should you go?” the stag said. “What will you do?”
I gave a sigh—the air was heavy as fog, though it remained clear. “Then you have no answers for me, after all. Why did you bring me here?”
“Nothing will be given to you, Eske of the Bear Clan.”
Before I could ask what it meant, I awoke to the sound of calling birds. A thin line of bright sunlight fell from the door across my eyes. Tendrils of mist curled around it. The storm had broken while I slept, and the first light of morning had begun to burn away the fog.
The house was quiet. Taherah had not yet woken. As a pale dawn crept up to its windows, I had the sense that this place still waited for Khalim’s return, and it would continue to do so long after I had left. It seemed hollow, like it was too large for its occupants, and I found myself unconsciously holding my breath.
Even so, I could make myself useful. Wet air had dampened the firewood, and it took several attempts for me to light a cooking fire with my flint. I thought I had known wet weather, but the rainy season here was a different beast entirely. The fire sputtered and smoked.
While Taherah slept, I paced around the room, unsure of how to comport myself as a guest. I drew back the curtain over the door, to let in the sun and a little cool air. I found a ceramic vessel of water, a basket of some kind of fine meal or flour, and several strong-smelling herbs sealed in paper, but I feared I would ruin my host’s supplies by attempting to cook them. I would hunt, I decided, outside the village, and thus repay her generosity.
I returned to my bed—to Khalim’s bed beside the door. I had hoped to feel a ghost of his presence there, but there had only been the hollow space that did not fit my body and the sense that I was taking a place that wasn’t mine. I’d thought I would feel closer to him in this, his childhood home, but I was as far away as I had ever been.
My hands found my harpoon in the dark, and then my pack, heavy and angular. I still had High Priest Ucasta’s book, though how long it would survive in this damp, I could not guess. The cover burned like a fever when I took it out, hotter than the surrounding air and swollen like an infected wound. I dropped it in surprise and disgust. It landed on the wooden floor with a muffled sound.
I picked it up again. The sensation was gone, fleeting as a dream, and the book was cold and solid.
Perhaps it was a stroke of good fortune that I could not read the words written therein. I could not imagine what might become of me if I could. It was likely that no one else in the village would be able to, either—that was one commonality between this place and my homeland—but I would not even inquire. The tome was my burden.
I thought of throwing it into the river, or burying it in the winter mud. It was nothing but added weight and a shiver down my back whenever I thought of it.
If I was going to get rid of it, I thought, I might as well take one last look, in case I missed some image or wicked incantation placed on its pages that might have given me some indication of its usefulness to my quest. Ucasta’s successor had suggested it might help me, but I had refused his aid in interpreting its pages. I trusted him no more than I had Ucasta and the undead king he puppeted.
With my harpoon over my shoulder and one of my boots halfway on, I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the book.
Pages bent under my hands, and the spine creaked softly in damp protest. I looked away, not wanting to see the terrified eyes of the image I had seen before, but the book fell open in a different place. Between blocks of cramped text inked in fading black was a meticulous depiction of a gate made of piled bones. It was a familiar image, rendered precisely in black ink upon the page: the hollow-eyed skulls of giants, stacked atop one another and supported by vast, heavy femurs, surrounding an obscure space as dark as deep water. Every detail was exactly as I remembered it from the vision of the Dreaming Eye.
I touched the drawing with one finger, tracing the line of some great creature’s backbone. A returning touch, light as the soft breeze from the door and gentle as a lover, pushed back at me from the page.
I drew my hand back. The book fell once more to the ground.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from the small house’s only other room. I had woken Taherah.
“Only I,” I called out, and I hoped that in her half-dreaming state she had not expected to hear her son. She did not reply.
I picked up the book and wrapped it in an oilcloth, returning it to the bottom of my pack, where I resolved not to open it again until I had found someone both skilled with letters and worthy of trust. I would go west, from whence this accursed tome had come, and I would find a way to pass through the gate of bone.
With the book put away, the dread that surrounded it cleared along with the morning fog. I had slept well, and the rain kept its distance for the moment. I would not waste the day worrying about a sheaf of paper bound in hide, no matter what words it might contain.
I waited until Taherah had dressed and emerged from the back room to inform her that I would be spending the day on the hunt in the forest, to repay her and her fellow villagers for their hospitality. I asked that she look to my horse from time to time, more to prevent injury to curious children than for his care, and promised I would return before nightfall.
“Of course,” she said, “but there’s no need for you to do this. We have enough food, and you’re the only traveler who has set foot in Nagara for a year or more.”
I assured her it was my wish to hunt, and asked only for some provisions I could take with me. As the sun climbed higher and the villagers left their homes for the shimmering fields, I left her house for the emerald forest. The steady, quiet rhythm of her loom followed me out.
I crossed the rope bridge and wandered past the god overlooking the rice fields. I gave his weathered form a nod and placed one of the strips of dried fruit Taherah had given me at his feet. I would not ask him for his help, but there was no reason to antagonize him. I imagined that Khalim might have done the same.
I had another reason to leave Taherah’s house. Khalim’s absence was a being unto itself, and there was no room for her and I and it in the confined space. I had been carrying it with me from Phyreios, and it had only grown larger as I walked the paths he had walked, spoke to those who knew him, and slept in his bed. Even if I had wanted to linger here, I found I could not bear it.
I stalked a deer for most of the morning, finally catching it by noon. Though my harpoon flew from my hand as it had in the chamber under Salmacha, it did not summon lightning as it had then. Perhaps it only did so in the face of black magic; perhaps it could sense my wish not to cook the deer until I had brought it back to the village.
I could not depart for the West, the land where wicked sorcerers worked to command the souls of the dead, without at least greeting the rest of Khalim’s countrymen. As much as I had grown accustomed to solitude and wished to withdraw, they deserved to hear the news of Khalim’s loss from the one who was most familiar with it.
And I needed their help, as well, as I had needed Taherah’s. I dressed the deer, my offering of friendship, and placed it over my shoulders to return to the village.
Back to Chapter XXVI: The House of the Weaver-Woman, Part Two
Forward to Chapter XXVIII: A Feast
I hope you’re well this week, and as always, thanks for reading.
Space Whales Press 
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