Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [64]
One of the candles sputtered and went out with a sizzle. Only one tiny flame remained burning. He fondled the dog’s silky ears and he had no need to ask why Lleu had not murdered him while he was unconscious.
Rhys did not have to look far for his savior. Atta lay with her head in his lap, regarding him anxiously with her dark brown eyes.
Rhys had seen Atta stand guard on the sheep during an attack on the flock by a mountain lion, placing her body between those of the sheep and the lion, facing it fearlessly, brown eyes meeting and holding the cat’s yellow-eyed gaze until it turned and slunk away.
He let his eyes close drowsily, petting Atta and imagining her standing over her unconscious master, glaring balefully at Lleu, her lip curled to let him see the sharp teeth that might soon be sinking into his flesh.
Lleu might be invincible, as he claimed, but he could still feel pain. The yelp he’d given when Atta bit him had been real enough. And he could still picture quite vividly what it would feel like to have those sharp teeth sinking into his throat.
Lleu had backed down and run off. Run away … run away home …
Atta barked and leapt to her feet, jolting Rhys awake.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, sitting up, tense and afraid.
Atta barked again and he heard another bark, distant, coming from the sheep pen. The bark was uneasy, but it was not a warning. The other dogs could sense something was wrong. Atta kept barking and Rhys wondered grimly what she was telling them, how she would describe this horror that man had perpetrated on man.
He woke again to find that she was barking at him.
“You’re right, girl. I can’t do this,” he muttered. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”
He forced himself to stand, using the bench to pull himself up. He found his emmide lying on the floor beside him, just before the flame of the final candle drowned in its own wax and went out, leaving him in moonlit darkness, surrounded by the dead.
The throbbing ache in his head made thinking difficult. He focused on the pain, and he began to mold it and shape it and press it, compact it into a ball that became smaller and smaller the more he worked on it. Then he took the small ball of pain and placed it inside a cupboard in his mind and shut the door upon it. Known as Ball of Clay, this was one of many techniques developed by the monks to deal with pain.
“Majere,” he began the ritual chant without thinking. “I send my thoughts upward among the clouds—”
He stopped. The words meant nothing. They were empty, held no meaning. He looked into his heart where the god had always been and could not find him. What was there was ugly and hideous. Rhys gazed inside himself a long time. The ugliness remained, a blot on perfection.
“So be it,” he said sadly.
Leaning on his staff for support, he staggered toward the door. Atta padded along beside him.
First, he needed to determine what had become of Lleu. He thought it possible that his brother was lurking somewhere around the monastery, waiting in ambush to offer up his final victim to Chemosh. Logic dictated Rhys search the stables, to see if horse or wagon was missing. He kept close watch as he went, peering intently into every shadow, pausing to listen for sounds of footsteps. He looked often at Atta. She was tense because she felt her master’s tension and watchful because he was watchful. She gave no sign that anything was amiss, however.
Rhys went first to the barn, where the monks kept a few cows and the plow horses. The wagon his parents had driven was still here, parked outside. He entered the barn cautiously, his staff raised, more than half-expecting Lleu to attack him from the darkness.
He saw nothing, heard nothing. Atta buried her nose in the straw spread over the floor, but that was probably because she was not usually allowed in the barn and she was intrigued by the smells. His father’s draft horses were inside their stalls. The horse that Lleu had ridden was not.
Lleu was gone, then. Gone back to his home. Gone to some other city