“Yes. It said it knew you. That you’d been waiting for a message, a second message, it said.”
Kelgris’s words, in the shadowed upstairs room, out of the dead girl’s throat.
He moistened his lips.
“So tell me the message.”
Ergund looked down at his hands again. “It said . . .”
His voice died on the syllables, the breath hissed out of him unused. The shaman felt a slow pounding begin in his chest. He held himself in check, and waited.
Finally, Ergund looked up, and now there was something almost pleading in his face.
“It said my brother’s time as clanmaster has come and gone,” he muttered.
The quiet descended like the finest muslin cloth, coating everything in the curtained alcove and, as it seemed, beyond. Poltar felt it tick through his veins, settle in his ears, send everything commonplace away.
He sat rigid.
Ergund opened his mouth. The shaman raised a hand for silence, then got up quickly and went back into the main space of the yurt. The acolyte looked up from his flensing, saw his master’s expression, and set down his tools immediately.
“Master?”
“That knife looks as if it could do with sharpening. Why don’t you take it over to Namdral and see if he can’t put a decent edge back on it. Or better yet, see if he’ll dig you out a couple of fresh blades and edge them up for us. Tell him I’ll settle with him after the ceremony.”
The acolyte frowned. There was nothing wrong with the flensing gear, and they both knew it. And new knives weren’t cheap. But he knew better than to argue with Poltar or expect explanations. He bowed his head.
“As my master desires.”
Poltar waited until he’d gone, watched from the yurt’s entrance as the man moved away through the firelit bustle of the camp, then pulled the hangings tight and went back to Ergund. He found the clanmaster’s brother getting to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Look, it’s . . . I shouldn’t have come. Grela talked me into it, she said you’d know what to do.”
“Yes. She’s right. I do.”
“Well,” Ergund grimaced. “I mean, it was just a dream, right?”
“Was it?”
“It
The shaman trod closer. “But?”
“But I . . .” Ergund shook his head. It was like watching a buffalo only halfway stunned by some incompetent butcher. “When I woke up, there was grass matted on the bottom of my feet. Still damp. Like I’d really been out there.”
“You
“In this cold?” The herdsman snorted, common sense shouldering through the press of arcane fear. “In bare feet? Come on, I’d have fucking frostbite by now. My toes’d be turning black.”
Poltar crowded him back to his seat, stood over him. Kept his voice low and hypnotic.
“The dream world is not this world, Ergund. It echoes this place, but it is an otherness, another aspect. It has its own seasons, its own natural laws. You
“But, I mean, this thing, the upright wolf. It might have been a demon, sent to trick me. Sent to sow discord in the clan.”
Poltar nodded as if giving it consideration.
“That’s a good point. But demons do not have the power to cross the expressed will of the Dwellers. If it was a demon that drew you out there and spoke to you, then it did so with the Sky Home’s blessing.”
And inwardly, he recalled something his father had once said, in an unguarded moment as they sat out at vigil together one spring night. Poltar’s mother had passed away the previous winter from the coughing fever, and Olgan had changed with her passing in ways the young Poltar was still trying to fathom.
