Children of the Bones

 

Smoke lay over the hills and forests of Tarakan, and the roads were emptied when the night came, for death had come to live in the night, and no man dared venture forth under the sign of the moon.  The smoke was from the burning of the fields and the lodges of those the Mordani judged to be rebels, and the roads were marked by the bodies of the executed, hung by their wrists until they ceased to cry out, and the birds came to devour their eyes and tongues.

By day the Mordani lords roamed the paths in armed companies, horses breathing hard as they rode with drawn swords and smoking matches in their guns.  The country they had once held as their own was now dangerous for them, and any man who went alone would not return.  Those lost vanished in the dark and the jungle and their heads were found when morning came, hanging from tree limbs, or at the crossroads where they executed those who rebelled against them.  By night the slain Utani were taken down and replaced by Mordani taken from their beds in the night, by women who vanished in the dark.  All knew the fear of the rebellion, and all feared the mark of the serpent and the tiger.

The Utani in the fields bent their necks and endured, working their crops by day, seeking to give no offense to their masters, but by night many of them covered their faces and crept out into the forest.  They slipped up on manor houses and set them afire, or they stole and slaughtered cattle and horses.  They poisoned wells, stole children, and took the heads of any man who fell into their grasp.

So by day the land simmered under the late-summer heat, the skies to the west dark with gathering storms, though the first real monsoon of the season had not yet some striding ashore.  Thunder often rumbled distantly while the sun yet shone and the rains fell through the afternoon light in scintillant color.  The Mordani warlords traveled the roads with swords bared and struck down any who so much as looked them in the face, striving to use terror to subdue.

By night the land belonged to the Tigress, and though none knew her name, some claimed to have seen her.  They said she was a witch out of the high country, tattooed as in the old ways and with the magic of the Old Gods.  They said she could vanish at will, that she transformed under the crescent moon into a tigress the size of a horse, and that no blade could touch her.  The young men and women, driven to rage by the cruelty of their overlords, had become her disciples, and it was she who nurtured the flame of revolt in Tarakan, and who had sworn to drive the Mordani out with fire and steel.

The Ancient Ones

 

The skies broke open when Jaya came to the high places at the heart of the island.  She emerged from the shroud of the forest and stood upon a rocky hillside looking out over the expanse of the central plateau, the jagged mountains lying all around her in a vista that stole her breath.  The peaks of the mountains stood like phantoms, the mist fading their shoulders so that they seemed to float above the earth like giants, the hollows and folds of the foothills heavy with fog and dark with jungle.

And before her stood the place where her race had been born.  Sigara had been the fortress of her people from the eldest days, a refuge from their enemies, and the womb of their strength before they broke forth upon the outer world and subjugated it.  It was not like any other mountain, being instead a solid mass of stone, not diluted with soil, but like a great rock set down upon the earth by the hands of the gods themselves.  Looking on it from the south, she saw the narrow path etched up from below, cut back and forth across the rock face, and the idol of Hamau near the top, many times larger than any human shape.

The stone was fretted with green where vines grew up from below or dangled down from the top, and she saw streams where water cascaded down over the edge of the rock and fell to the jungle below like rain.  Above there would be pools and channels cut into the stone to make reserves and keep the rain for the inhabitants of the shrine and to fill the hanging gardens.  She wondered if those ancient feats of construction had been preserved, or if they had decayed along with the veneration of the gods.

She started down the slope toward the base of the rock.  For days she had seen no marks of human hand, no sign of pursuit or ambush, and yet she moved cautiously through this dreamlike landscape, certain that there were those hunting her blood through the dark.  Now there was no way for her to hide.  The sky split apart and the rain turned to blazes of color between the clouds.  Lightning flickered among the ghostly peaks of the mountains, and birds screamed as they passed overhead in their thousands.

The path led through stone pillars now broken and covered in moss, and up a long, weaving stair thick with fungi and lichens.  She expected to find guardians, or at least a sentinel, but all was quiet as she reached the base of the stone and looked up along the switching stairs, higher and higher.  It was a long climb to the top, and she set the haft of her spear upon the path and began to climb.

The End of an Age

So there's no easy way to say this, but this blog is going to be coming to an end.  My personal circumstances have changed and I am just getting too busy to keep up with the content schedule anymore, and something in my life has to give.  So there's no review this week, and there will not be any more of my "in between" articles or reviews.  I am going to keep up with the stories - or try to - so I can finish out the current arc.  I am really enjoying the story, and I don't want to leave it half-finished.

There will be twice-monthly stories through the end of this year, but after that, I will not be continuing.  I am going to make an effort to finally get the rest of the ebooks done, but I don't know when.  Like I said, I am just getting a lot busier and can't keep up with the demands of the blog.

I have enjoyed my work here.  I wanted to inject some quality into the Sword & Sorcery genre, because I love it and Howard is a major influence on me.  I wanted to try and grow this place and make it into maybe a big enough income stream that it would be my job.  That never really happened, and that is probably because I never had the time or energy to add real membership perks to the Patreon.  Those of you who have contributed, I appreciate every dollar you have given.

The blog itself will not be taken down, and will remain here as long as the platform does.  I am proud of the work I have done here, and I thank you all for sharing it with me.