Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

surely had to be a recent addition. Perhaps an offering herself. I kept a hand upon Strife and was aware at all times of my surroundings, but the pit was enclosed and bore no signs of animal life.

Alert, I edged nearer. The blue light of the torch at the lip of the sepulcher illuminated the darkness. By virtue of this friendly flame I absorbed, in awe, the stern features of a deathly goddess. Her pale face was artfully decorated in smudges of kohl as black as raven’s feathers—as black as the hair that plumed around her pallid features to form pillow and shroud in one. The body, interned beneath what I now realized was not a natural plateau but a deliberate cairn, was without the least hint of breath, yet I swore she still possessed the tension of life and the strength of a woman as healthy as my companions. Animal furs enfolded her flesh, but the muscles of one slender, spry leg left exposed by the position of the furs made her good health on death clear enough.

And oh, what pain! What terrible pain swept over my heart to see such a beautiful woman left dead. Had the gimlets committed this crime against one of Weltyr’s finest creations? Perhaps Branwen had been right to chastise me for my love of women, but my love of women was really only my love of Weltyr and the fine world he had made for all of us to live in. When I saw that sacred creation profaned, it wounded me—and there was nothing more profane than the annihilation of life from a creature so sacred that I almost feared looking up her face. The dark lines arcing around her orbitals and over her lips, this latter the tip of an arrow pointing up from her delicate chin, somehow only made her more exquisite. I averted my eyes, unable to bear my own mournful thoughts, intending to find a way out of the pit by climbing a wall or some such.

To my surprise, my investigation yielded not a way out, but a sort of instruction manual. I might have been almost grateful to the gimlet, had its theft of the torch that lit the images not been the reason I’d become trapped in the first place. In such incidents lie Weltyr’s higher plans. I saw evidence of this in the rudimentary pictures painted on the wall beside the sleeping demi-goddess.

How old these images were! I could not have guessed, but I was sure the depictions were well and truly ancient. The shapes were so rudimentary it took several minutes in the dimly lit darkness before I could fully discern what they were intended to represent. A feminine figure, distinguished by long hair: doing battle, I thought, or perhaps hunting. At any rate, a great deal of creatures surrounded her, some of them—little lizard-like humanoids included—being grabbed or otherwise poised before her hands. Another of the same figure with some kind of power emanating from her. The figure arranged in her mausoleum.

Two faces pressed together, followed by an illustration that looked like a blossomed flower.

This last image gave me pause. I looked at it for a few long moments, along with all the others, and tried to discern a clearer meaning. There was none.

Slowly, still as uncertain as I have ever been, I turned back to the unconscious woman and reached down to touch her cheek. I have seen ghouls and zombies and heard terrible tales of undead magicians who had spent eternity as immortal sorcerers called “dirges;” I had even had my share of encounters with skeletons by that time in my short adventuring career. Among all these undead, not one of them produced any body heat when close enough to touch.

Yet the woman, unconscious, unbreathing, was warm to the touch. Warm and soft as any I had known.

With one more reluctant glance at the images upon the wall, I leaned down and pressed my tenderest kiss to the woman’s soft mouth. The mark on her underlip trailing down her jaw, I was amazed to find, was a tattoo; and her lively mouth was soon as awake as mine. As the flower petals concealing her tongue parted, I was beset by the urge to recoil in fear. At her soft, sleepy moan, however, I urged myself onward. Soon my tongue was invited in to slide against her cool one, and another, longer sigh of pleasure rattled up from the base of her unpracticed lungs. When at last I lifted my head she had begun to nuzzle eagerly against me, her hand lifting to caress my chest.

“Sweet moon,” she gasped, sitting up beyond me, her senses sliding into full awareness from the thickness of her enchanted sleep, “good shadows! What sacred night to look upon again—who is this hero who disturbed my slumber? Let me look upon your face—”

She turned to see me. As her hibernating eyes found focus, they widened with a kind of shock. I told her, “I am Rorke Burningsoul, Paladin of Weltyr. And I get the feeling that you have been here, asleep in the mountains, for a very long time.”

The woman laughed heartily in the way of warriors and witches. “Somehow I do get the sense that King Hundil of Iltraxia has no more qualm with me…I’ll travel the world freely again, how good it’ll be!”

Her accent was thick with a brogue I’d not heard, and neither the monarch nor the nation were familiar to me. I made a mental note of it all and asked, “So, you can remember names of cities and monarchs—I assume that you remember your own?”

“What a pity that Gundrygia the Sorceress should go unrecognized by sight! One look at me once inspired cold fear deep in the hearts of the bravest men.”

“I assure you, Madame, that fear is still among the plethora of feelings you inspire…but only by the humbling point of your poison-tipped beauty, rather than any reputation.”

The wild woman threw back