3.2.5 – Vespers

A crowd had gathered in the Fire-Hall, fractured once again upon factional lines, speaking loudly and harshly over one another. I heard Rina’s voice, and Dermot’s, and Father Zachary.  

Galia Bridge stood most directly in my path at the edge of the circle, two children flanking her. Some steps beyond was the druid who had been dancing with her the night before, fighting to make his way through. Lia wore a light silver bracelet of two interlinked hoops on her right wrist; it chimed when she wrung her hands.  

Every fibre of muscle I possessed was aching, and my thoughts came grudgingly, one after another. It felt like my head was being squeezed through cheesecloth, and what emerged was thin and ineffectual. One of the few sentiments uppermost in my mind was a vague envy of Eris, whom I had left in the depths of an unbreakable slumber. This feeling of pervasive malaise was not improved by the conflict into which I was forced to inject myself at this early hour. 

I drew Grannine close to me, and Her presence seared the fatigue from my mind. I felt the cabochon in my breast burn hot, and a smell like sulphur and old brandy filled the air, an ominous cloud of smoke and fume.  

“Move aside,” I ordered.  

Lia started, pulling to one side before she even looked back. The druid craftsman caught sight of Us and stepped back. I did not hear him say suuna’astrea, but I saw his lips frame the word, and the two men behind him likewise yielded me room to advance.  

A dead man lay at the center of our turmoil.  

I had dressed too quickly to fetch a cloak-pin; instead I clutched at my mantle with one hand, very aware of the ember-bright stone beneath my palm. Because of this oversight, I could not honor the impulse to touch my hand to my heart and my head in the Church’s sign to ward misfortune. 

Arran Scour was stretched out upon the rush mats, swathed in a blanket that was drawn close about his chin. If not for the pallor of his features and the otherworldly calm upon his face in such close proximity to this uproar, I might have thought he was sleeping.  

His grandson Honor knelt at his side. One pale hand protruded from beneath the blanket, and Honor held it tight in his own. Father Zachary knelt with him, a hand on Honor’s shoulder, looking torn between pique and prayer.  

“–away to dismember him!” Kell Fenson stood over Arran with his hands empty, but arranged in such a way as to suggest that a knife was not far.   

Though Kell and Miles were taller, Rina stood against them without even a flicker of doubt—perhaps from her own store of confidence, or perhaps due to Dermot’s ominous presence at her back like the cockeyed steeple of a moldering church. The foremost figure among the druid side of our growing circle, she had evidently arrived to the scene in even greater haste; she wore breeches, a loose belt, and a simple deerskin shift that hung perilously from one shoulder. Watching the Lunanin men try not to look at her shoulder might have been amusing in another circumstance. 

“You say my brother’s lying, then?” Miles said, the quieter of the two. “I heard what your man said as well as he did.”  

“No one’s saying he’s lying,” Dermot said. “Only that he’s dense.”  

“What’s happening?” My voice was drowned out by the younger Fenson.  

“Say that again, halt-step.” Kell’s arms shifted as though he were going to lunge. Dermot laughed in his face.  

“Dermot-kan,” Rina shoved him with her elbow, forcing him back. “Please. We disturb the dead.”  

I drew in a lungful of cold air and raised my voice into the fractional pause that followed.  

“Will someone tell me what’s happened?”  

Elder Tabiir stood at Dermot’s right hand, pale and thin. He turned to me with a warm smile despite the hour and the circumstances, his necklace of quills hung over a pallid cotton robe.   

“Arran-dii is dead,” he said simply. “We must tend to him.”  

“My Lady,” Father Zachary said, with visible desperation. “As we seem to have little space for a burial, perhaps you could assist us in arranging a pyre?”  

“So soon?” Tabiir looked shocked. Not shocked. Appalled, mingled surprise and rejection in his stance, his voice, his expression. “What has the man done to earn this fate?” 

“Don’t play soft to us,” Kell snapped. “I heard what Rina there said. You’re going to cut him up.”  

“Keep raising your voice to Rina and he won’t be the only one today,” Dermot said.  

To my deep relief, I saw Faith Arquet pushing forward behind the Fensons, stopping only when she caught sight of Arran on the ground. 

“Please,” I said, without having considered what I would say after. But now there were eyes upon me, and a dead man at our feet. “This is a deathbed. Let’s not make it a spectacle.”  

Miles put a hand on his brother’s shoulder.  
“Arran wouldn’t have wanted a scene,” he said, in a low voice. “You knew the man. If he could’ve died without letting a soul know it, he would have.”  

Faith swept forward, past the Fensons, putting her hand on Honor’s other shoulder. She bent down to murmur in his ear.  

Kell’s expression was building toward another outburst. I tried to supplant it.  

“Rina-al, Tabiir-torex.” I looked to them with a turn as much for the Fensons’ benefit as my own. “This man was dear to us.”  

“He is an elder,” Rina said, as if this were agreement. For all that I had come to know her moods and manners, still in this moment I felt as though we were again speaking to one another across a divide that was unspeakably vast.  

“We would like to…honor him. How may we do this?” I became increasingly conscious that the circle was growing. I heard murmurs from both sides now, as more Lunanin joined the ring. “How do we tend to an elder who has passed on?”  

“We take the dead below,” Rina said, and she cast an uncharacteristic look of confirmation to Tabiir. “We clean and guard them.”  

“They are taken to the Mavet-akad,” Tabiir bowed his head to Rina.  

“I have…never seen this Hall.” I frowned. Below. A catacomb? A tomb?  

“We have had no new dead.”  

“Perhaps your newborn brought us Life’s fortune for a while.” Still smiling, Tabiir-torex advanced, and when Father Zachary looked up at him, he made the faintest gesture of interrogation. Father Zachary looked to me, and when I nodded, so did he.  

Tabiir-torex knelt at the side of the corpse, placing a hand on its chest.   

“Feital, Arran-dii,” he said, so quietly that I almost did not catch the words. He raised his voice. “You are children of Raven Lake. We will honor your dead as we would our own.” 

“Gim-Alarmecanin,” I agreed. “But these ways are new to us.” I glanced at Kell and Miles Fenson. In the interim, Miles had succeeded in pulling his brother back a half-step. “May we pray for him before he is taken below?”  

Another look of puzzlement from Tabiir, and not only from him—I saw Berel and Sadepa across from me in the gathering crowd. Epa had her eyes on Kell Fenson’s back, but still she and Berel found the time to exchange bemused glances. The feeling of fumbling novelty returned with a vengeance, a sensation that I had failed to understand the simplest of things, all the stronger for having faded these past few weeks.  

“He is taken below for prayer,” Rina said.  
“It must be done quickly.” Tabiir touched a hand to the corpse’s face, whitened by the pallor of death. “Already we have been neglectful.” 

“We would pray for the dead, first,” Father Zachary’s stellis hung from a chain around his neck, seven-pointed silver.  

“Those who wish not to wait will accompany him,” Tabiir said mildly.   

“Fenson!” Alan Lee joined us in time to grip Kell’s arms, joining Miles, pulling him back a single step.  

“He threatened the Lady,” Kell gritted.  

“Bit thin from you, Scarlet.” Dermot muttered. He started to elaborate, but Faith cut him off.  

“Boys,” she said sharply. Then, under her breath. “God save us from men!”  

“Peace.” I stepped forward, drawing Grannine into myself, Her firmness, Her mad surety. “I will not have violence here.”  

“Any who wish may join us,” Rina said, her voice ringing out. “All are welcome.”  

Honor looked, if anything, more frightened by this. Father Zachary put his arm fully around the lad’s shoulders.  

“She said they’re going to…cut him up,” the boy said hesitantly. He did not meet Rina’s eyes. Tabiir held out a hand. Honor looked at this gesture as though it were the head of an adder.  

“Tollel iv,” the Elder said soothingly. He lowered his hand again, placed it upon the corpse’s chest. “The heart, the liver, the…entrails. These things are the trappings of Life, and Arran-dii will not need them now. We must remove them, and guard them in his place.”  

They would cut out his heart?  

Tears started to roll down Honor’s face. It took me a moment to remember how to speak.  

“Rina,” I was aware of the edge of shock in my own voice. “…Must we?”  

“He is dead. This is how the dead are honored.”  

It was the manner in which Rina answered that I found most unnerving. She sounded just as I felt—saddened, respectful, with reproof towards those who had disrupted what should have been a scene of peace. Nowhere in her bearing was there any inkling that what Tabiir had just said was monstrous.  

She inclined her head towards the corpse.  

“Come with us,” she said, to me, to Honor. “There is peace in the Hall below.”  

“I…would I not intrude?” So early in the morning, I had no stomach for scene of violence they described—nor did I enjoy the prospect of some dark druid mausoleum. I nearly said this aloud before I looked to Honor Scour, who had flinched back from the corpse and into Faith’s skirts. She put a hand on his head and turned to glare at the Fensons, a scorching look of which I caught only the barest hint.  

“No one owns the dead,” Tabiir-torex answered. “The Mavet-akad is open to all who are dead, and all who have yet to die. We do not abandon them.” He glanced curiously at me, then spoke to Honor more directly. “It is common for family to take their turn at vigil soon after the death. To say farewell.”  

In answer to my unspoken question, Father Zachary shook his head. I hardly even had the chance to steel myself—to close my eyes or hesitate might have been interpreted by the onlooking Lunanin as an implicit condemnation of the druids’ customs. Rina and Tabiir are honorable. They are at peace with this. Must I trust them? Even with… 

I had lingered too long.  

“I will…” My throat betrayed me, rough still from the prior night’s excesses. “I will go in his grandson’s stead, then.” For the Fensons, and the others listening who might be as disturbed by these revelations as I, I added, “To see he is treated well.”  

“He will be treated well,” Tabiir-torex rose to his feet with a dry rustle of spines and soft linen. “Honor-kae.” 

Honor’s shoulders shifted. Before he looked up, he scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand. Tabiir bowed to him. “You are family to Arran-dii?”  

“I was.”  

“You are. Glet. Then you must say yes. We cannot bring him below until you free him.”  

The boy darted a look at me, at Father Zachary, uncertain. I took a useless half-step forward. Honor looked down at his grandfather’s body, and a soft, startled misery rose in his features. The entire watching ring of people seemed to hold their breath. A breath of air circled us, dry and cold, some creeping draught of the winter outside. Or perhaps the last valediction of a departing soul. 

“I do,” Honor said, barely audible. “Go with God, papa.”  

“Glet,” Tabiir-torex repeated. He looked up. “Caryg, moxnin. Who will carry him?”  

“I will,” Miles said.  

“Oli,” I heard Berel say, somewhere to the left of us along the circle. Sadepa and Dermot stepped forward wordlessly.  

“Yada,” Tabiir said. He inclined his head to Father Zachary, to Faith, and turned to look to me. “Suuna’astrea Mariead-dae. You will come?”  

I only nodded.  

“Glet. Honor-kan. When you wish to say your farewell, he will be waiting. There is no haste. The dead are patient.”  He lifted his right hand in a gesture of distant blessing and stepped back, allowing Dermot and Rina to pass him and reach under the body.  

Beneath the corpse was some board or bier of which these impromptu pallbearers took hold—evidently prior to this controversy there had already been some preparation made. I recalled seeing Arran seated the night before, huddled close to an oven for warmth. Had he already been dead when I had glimpsed him through the dance?  

They will tear out his heart?  

My thoughts turned to the last man I had buried. To Asher Stewardson and his lonely cairn in the woods of Farforest.  

“Death teaches, life learns,” Grannine murmured. I realized all at once that the warmth in my veins was Hers, that She had been at my back like a mantle throughout this entire exchange. She drifted with me, Her arms close around my shoulders. The words sounded familiar, but I could not place them.  

Despite the vehemence with which they had defended the body, none dared to follow us now. Faith and Father Zachary stayed behind with Honor, and I walked in the wake of the bier, behind Dermot and Sadepa. I could hear Rina saying something under her breath, though I could not discern the words.  

They did not cover Arran’s face. This alone made the procession seem less funerary and more curative, and I half-expected us to turn from the Ix-akad into the warm quarters of the Healing-Hall. Instead, we forged north and down, into the yawning black cavern below. On our way, I saw Tabiir-torex pilfer an unlit candle from its place on the floor, lighting it against one of its fellows, and this detail seemed to me almost unbearably pragmatic in a time that ought have been hallowed.  

Our footsteps echoed on the stone. When we first descended the stairs, the corpse shifted, and my heart froze for an instant in the mad belief that Arran Scour was about to rise once again. Dermot’s shoulders shifted sharply, and without letting the burden fall, he took hold of one leg.  

“Not yet, old man,” he said. Epa chuckled. 

Tabiir-torex and his candle became the central point upon which our world rested. At the back of this procession, I felt half-present, clinging to the light. When we reached the base of the stair and Tabiir turned the corner, light failed us entirely, but I was loathe to reach for Grannine’s sight here. The thought of seeing a corpse in such unearthly clarity unnerved me. In this endless night I glimpsed the faintest flickers dancing on the surface of the water.  

Tabiir led us away from the pool and deeper into the cavern, across a longer, deeper expanse than I had anticipated. At the back of the cavern, against walls I thought I had seen, the stone curled inward, concealing in this manner the mouth of a sloping corridor. I almost thought it seemed as though the walls of this corridor were graven with a pattern not unlike the frame of some enormous gate, but in the dark this was impossible to confirm.  

Once again we descended downward. This time, a cool draft crept past us, stirring the funeral wrappings and curling through loose locks of hair. Dry, acrid air seemed to carry the scent of an infinite and soundless time—the smell of death, of dry flowers, of parchment and gold.  

I saw Grannine’s face dip low into the edge of my vision, and in a flash of Her insight I realized that here was the final step in the bellows of Raven Lake; the pool produced warm air that was drawn up into the reaches above, and in the process this eternally dry, lifeless zephyr was drawn up from below. 

Light.  

For a moment I thought the dawning glow I glimpsed was a hallucination, or some fleeting ghost of the underworld. It played strangely across the floor, illuminating our features from beneath, and turned the clothbound length of the corpse into a slab of dark fluidity. Another few paces and I realized that I was seeing no sign or spectre, but rather the diffusion of light beneath a curtain—and almost as this realization struck me, Tabiir-torex struck out his candle and threw this curtain aside.  

A physical shock ran through me at the scale of the space revealed, the brightness of illumination here. The Fire-Hall was high, narrow, and dwarfed any nave or castle hall I had seen; this space was only half as long, but twice as wide, with walls of unadorned stone. There were lanterns—Lanterns! Underground!—set into the living rock, their lenses cut from amber. They burned without soot or fume, with an illumination like that of an oil-lamp that did not waver, creating a pool of light about the edges of this chamber. In the space between each lamp hung tapestries, weavings, mantles, vast lengths of cloth with brilliant color upon their faces. Some were green, or scarlet, or blue, and others cloth-of-silver. I saw one stretch of bare stone and realized that here was the source of the black-and-gold banner that oversaw our Hunter’s feast.  

At the farthest end of the room there was a single step upwards, to a raised section of floor like to a chancel. Arranged on the near side of this room in an arc were fifteen stone tables, or altars, each more than an arm’s breadth apart. Beyond them, upon the stage, druids lay sleeping.  

Not sleeping.  

Before us, on the stage, druids lay dead.  

There were nineteen bodies here, lying in stillness. The closer I grew, the less dead they seemed—they lay upon blankets or patterned reed-mats, some dressed in Hunter grey, some in the vibrant deerskin and jewelry that druids wore within their Hold. Their arms were at their sides, their hair neatly brushed and combed, save for one which knelt beside them.  

I had a terrible shock when that kneeling figure stood up from among the others and raised a hand in greeting.  

“Oli,” Saric said, and her smile was shockingly gentle. “Tabiir-torex.”  

The Elder bowed to her.  

“Child who keeps vigil,” he said, and to my surprise he spoke in words I could understand—perhaps for my benefit, or for Miles. “We bring another dead below.”  

Saric’s eyes roved over the procession, and she stepped down from the stage. Tabiir gestured to one side, and Arran was set upon the nearest table.  

“Stay if you wish,” Tabiir said to me, to Dermot, to the others.  

“We stay a time,” Berel said. Sadepa nodded. Despite the cheery tone with which Berel spoke, the words seemed muted, stifled by the tapestries that hung all around.  

I fought to keep my glance to Miles Fenson from being a pleading one. He made the sign of the Church to himself, and did not meet my eyes—instead he retreated back the way we had come, his stare fixed on that dais of the dead.  

“You’ll want a candle,” Dermot called after him, but too late—Miles had turned his back and was departing with haste. He shook his head, put his hand on my shoulder. “Sister. I’m not half convinced one of them won’t try something more. You staying here?”  

Whence I did not know, Tabiir had produced a sharp-edged knife of black flint, and another of steel. He laid these beside Arran upon the stone table, and I looked away as they uncovered his chest.  

“I must. I swore to bear witness.”  

Dermot snorted. 

“Fine witnesses for the Church we are,” he said, but he did not pull away. I saw at a glance that Tabiir was not producing implements from thin air—upon the leftmost table sat a number of silver tools, squat bowls, and heaps of folded cotton. Saric was fetching another even as I looked; in her hand, the thin silver knife glittered like a fang. She paused only a moment, looking to Dermot and I curiously, and beckoned for us to approach. Beyond her, Berel and Sadepa sat down upon the dais, their attention occupied by one of the Dead.  

In the Book of Life I had come to consider the vital force as one with will and agency—alive and active as an animal might be. For the first time I truly wondered if the same might not be true of the thing the druids called Mavet.  

Death teaches. I looked up to the black stone ceiling. What is it you teach me now?  

Death’s only answer was the hiss of parting flesh.  

*

3.2.4 – Devour

3.2.6 – Vigil