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Page 6


  Slyur jolted against the door. The violence of his reaction nearly pitched him from the coach.

  His uninvited passenger now manifested, sneering in deprecation, revealing sharp ebony teeth. The figure was painful to look at. It wore blinding armor of alabaster fire; the hair of its beard and brows was similarly white flame. Its eyes were shrunken and cruel blood oranges.

  “Ch-Chagri,” Slyur stammered, “Great god, I didn’t expect you here.”

  “Slyur … I’m everywhere. I appear in chapels and temples to please priests. It suits me to be convenient.”

  The Hespet recovered himself somewhat and tried to slide casually from the doorway and onto his royal velvet cushion. “Yes,” he said, “of course. It’s simply that for years I prayed to you—to all of you—and never received a sign. I know that I’m no great visionary—not like the oracle in Spern—”

  “That oracle is a madman and a liar.”

  “What?” He almost cried out “Heretic!” but caught himself. This was a god, a god of war no less. What was he thinking to challenge the god of war? Though his voice cracked, Slyur managed to say, “Is-is he? Well.”

  “Yes. But we tolerate him, knowing that he can’t help what he is. He believes that he speaks with us. As do you, Slyur.” He laughed, a sound to churn bowels. “Nonetheless, disbelieve anything that fool tells you.”

  “I will, yes,” replied the Hespet. But he was recalling how that oracle had foretold of a great and frightening power that was soon to cross Slyur’s path. That had been a matter of months before Chagri appeared to him, shortly after the plague of Trufege.

  “So, a child frightened you—ha, you mortals …”

  “She looked into my mind! She knew her sister would die.”

  “Of course she did. She’s the other’s twin. Or,” added the silvery figure, “is it witchcraft you suspect her of?”

  “Witchcraft? Preposterous.” He could not help himself from going on. “There are no witches! It’s all fabrication.”

  Chagri smiled blackly. “Come, come. We know better, you and I. We know what’s in your soul. You believe in witches like most people believe the sun will come up, so deeply is it carved in you that you don’t even have to think. How much of you is witch, do you know?”

  The priest had grown pale. His teeth drew blood on his lower lip.

  “Don’t worry, Slyur. What matter is it to me? I have more important business with you. The gods wish to act on your mortal plane once more, Slyur. Your king is dead, murdered—an act so detestable that even the gods loathe it and cannot sit still. You represent us. I’ve chosen you to act for us.”

  “Of course. What would you have me do?” He stiffened proudly, so overcome at the honor that he scarcely considered what the request might be.

  “It’s a simple thing. The priest you have placed in Trufege …”

  “The one you told me to dispatch there.”

  “I want you to send a message to him to gather the people of his town together and lead them to Ukobachia.”

  “To the … witches?”

  “Precisely. To the witches.”

  “Why, lord?”

  “Because the Kobachs slew your king.”

  It was a moment before the impact of this hit Slyur. Then he cried out, “But that’s not possible, they—”

  “You argue with me?!” A sizzling skeletal hand emerged from the glowing figure, reached across the coach and grabbed Slyur’s empty wrist. Pain shot through the priest and he shrieked and flailed his arm until he had jerked free. He closed his good hand over the heavily scarred stump.

  “I am Chagri, Slyur, and you would do well to reacquaint yourself with that. I speak for all the gods. And you will obey me.”

  Slyur bowed his head. “Of course. I didn’t mean—it was the surprise.”

  “Surprise … if you’d think for yourself you’d know the king’s death was no act of common assassins. It was unnatural.”

  Slyur tucked his throbbing wrist beneath his robe. “But how would I know that? The men sent by Cheybal haven’t returned with the body yet. There’s no way for me to know. I’ve heard the report from the survivor, no more than that —”

  “—who mentioned soldiers that couldn’t be killed.”

  “He was out of his head. Feverish.”

  “He was not!” The god’s armor smoldered. The light it cast off intensified, and Slyur protectively averted his face and closed his eyes. His throat creaked.

  “He spoke the truth,” said the god. “Right at this moment, the body of Dekür is in Atlarma. Go look at it, see for yourself. You’ll send out your messenger. I know you’ll want to. I know what—as a favor to you, Slyur—tell one of your escorts to go back to that farm. Have the child brought to my temple and placed upon my altar. I’ll see that she is made whole.”

  Slyur turned back, smiling. “Lord, that would …”

  He was talking to an empty coach. The light stinging his eyes came from the rays of the bright morning sun that streamed in through the coach door opposite.

  He withdrew his arm from beneath his blue net robe. It burned in a prickly way. He began to rub his hand over the stump in delicate circles. This feathery sensation made the pain an almost rapturous ache. He performed it without any awareness of doing so; he had done it since childhood, whenever the arm hurt. He had come to associate the feeling with solace and peace of mind.

  *****

  Slyur had joined the priesthood to escape his father and older brothers.

  He had adapted well to the loss of his hand. In spite of this, his jeering brothers tortured and mocked him as if it were his mind and not his hand he’d lost. They no longer let him trap, despite knowing that it had been his favorite pleasure. Instead they dragged him along when they went hunting and forced him to beat the bushes with a stick, flushing out the small game they then killed and ate.

  Yet, perversely, the family expected him to push a plow and wield a scythe. If he failed to satisfy he went hungry. He went hungry often.

  He had run away to a desperate security—becoming a willing acolyte in the brotherhood of Voed. Ironically his remaining hand saved him. He became the chief illuminator of manuscripts for the priests of Voed. His intricate filigree and sweeping strokes adorned volumes throughout Secamelan. He became irreplaceable. But Slyur had joined the priesthood out of a need that had nothing to do with worship and, though he learned the litanies well, he believed in none of the dogma. Men had injected too much of their own character into the gods. The gods were reduced—if gods they were—to men no different in their behavior than his father and brothers.

  Slyur was shrewd enough not to mention this to anyone. He understood too well the politics of his new-found home.

  Keeping to himself, working scrupulously, passionately, he had moved steadily through the ranks to become the Hespet in his forty-first year. Slyur the silent iconoclast headed the worshippers of Voed, the order of Chagri, and the sisterhood of Anralys. He accepted the honor without false pride—without the pretentious lust that marked the fools who abounded in the priesthood, whom he counseled every day. Lacking the vanity of their fanaticism, Slyur had learned to play a political game of religion better than any of them. His “visions” were calculated and rehearsed performances to further his goals. His theological skepticism had never been a problem.

  Until Chagri appeared.

  One night as the Hespet sat alone in his bare chamber enduring the “hour of pious petition,” the god had simply manifested. As if it were nothing unusual to do so. Slyur had leaped from his bed and reached for the rope handle to open the door, to flee; but he found himself unable to grasp the rope, to move or even cry out. A bewildering calmness had settled over him, and he’d turned back and sat on his bed, sweat pouring from his face, his eyes helplessly wild with terror.

  Chagri had begun to speak: The god revealed to him his every thought, related his own unspoken uncertainties, laid bare his soul.

  Slyur had found himself on his
knees, begging forgiveness for having doubted so long. The god informed him that begging would do no good. Slyur would have to find a way of proving himself.

  Since that first meeting Chagri had required only one act of him: that he send Varenukha, a raver in the priesthood whom Slyur detested—to Trufege as their new priest. Slyur had agreed easily, because the appointment rid him of the man.

  But now this second command … to send Varenukha and Trufege against the Kobachs. Varenukha would relish the order. Trufege would bathe in their neighbors’ blood.

  Slyur shook his head. How many more vile acts would he have to perform to satisfy … to satisfy whom? There was the question that haunted Slyur.

  Who was Chagri?

  All Slyur knew for certain was that Chagri—impostor or not—would kill him with a touch if angered. And Slyur, no zealot, had no wish to play the martyr. He was forty-five, older than most men in Secamelan. He intended to live twice that long. There were just a few distasteful things he would have to do. Right now, however, there was a little girl whose life he could save. A decent act to offset the other.

  Slyur leaned out the window of his carriage and signaled to his escort.

  *****

  Through every passage and room in the castle of Atlarma sounded the deep, sonorous phrases of a melancholy dirge.

  The disembodied voices singing the lament were especially loud here in the room where the body rested in state. Painted canvases had been stretched across the windows. Torches burned on either side of the door.

  The body of Dekür lay on a red catafalque. A thin candle burned at each corner, collecting him in light without shadow. The hilt of his sword protruded still from his chest. No amount of force bad been able to withdraw it from the congealed wound. Instead, in a grisly act, the blade had been snapped off where it jutted from his back.

  A short, trim man stood over the body of Dekür. His red, sleepless eyes were open but unseeing. Cheybal, leader of Secamelan’s armies, held his hands stiffly at his sides and looked from the body to his own feet. His bearded chin pressed against his leather collar. “What has happened?” he asked the corpse without looking up. “Who committed this act? If you would just open your eyes, Dekür, and tell me who to condemn, who to call ‘enemy’.”

  He glanced up, as if expecting his words to have moved the corpse to revive.

  Cheybal recalled something he had said to Dekür one evening when the two of them were staggeringly drunk. “The unknown,” he had proclaimed, is a thing you can never prepare for, yet it’s the thing you have to prepare for.” A drunkard’s epigram. They had both laughed and toasted the unknown. But he’d been right and here was the unknown, revealed in its true colors: Dekür dead, Lewyn gone, and Cheybal floundering as temporary sovereign of Secamelan. All problems, however irrelevant to matters at hand, eventually came before him. His answers had to be the correct ones. No one ruled above him any longer to certify or refute his wisdom.

  He hated being king. At least it was only temporary.

  Soon enough, Tynec, an eight-year-old boy, would be thrust into that despised position … unless they could find Lewyn.. Cheybal held little hope of doing so. Her abductors had gone like ghosts, departing with the dawn to some world beyond this one. So where was he supposed to look for her? Where on Voed’s noble world? Where?

  The candles around the catafalque flickered. The body seemed to move as their light wavered, bringing abrupt shadows. Cheybal tensed.

  Then he realized the illusion. Someone had opened the door to this vast and empty hall.

  He turned to see Tynec standing alone inside the door. Cheybal’s mouth went dry. What idiot had let Tynec in here? He must not witness this awful thing. Cheybal wanted to shield him from it, but he could not make himself move between the boy and the corpse. It was too late to do so.

  *****

  Tynec stared fixedly at the body of his father as he moved closer. His face was set hard against the stirring horror; he hadn’t known what to expect; the phrase “your father is dead, boy” had somehow passed right by him without giving him some measure of its meaning. Just words, adult words, pointless words.

  He chose not to see the body lying away from him at eye-level ahead. His gaze shifted quickly to Cheybal, but the man seemed aghast, too awful to look at. Tynec stared at the gleaming sword hilt projecting like some grotesquely wrought silver phallus above the soles of his father’s boots. The echoes of the chanted dirge seemed to close in on him from the sides, to wrap around his head. He squeezed his eyes to put everything out of focus. The dirge roared in his ears. He arrived at the catafalque.

  He saw the rings on the left hand of the body, the hand folded across the right hand beneath the hilt. His eyes kept wanting to move against his will, to look at the face. They flicked that way, they saw, and could not look away.

  He found himself drawn along the side of the funeral stand until he stood beside the his father’s head. “Your father is dead, boy.” The meaning stabbed home at last. The hard shield he’d maintained crumpled. His face screwed up to hold back the tears, but they came anyway, rolling down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away.

  He forgot that Cheybal stood across from him. The sleeping face of his father filled his vision and his mind. There seemed to be a cruel twist to his father’s mouth, and he reached out to smooth the lips. They were hard, like lips of an ice sculpture. His hand twitched back, and he sobbed once. Finally, he wiped at his eyes.

  “Father is dead,” he whispered. His throat ached as he swallowed.

  “You’re the king now, Tynec,” Cheybal said. “There’s much we have to do, you and I.” He regretted saying it instantly. How much weight could the boy withstand?

  Tynec made no reply.

  Cheybal thought of himself, moments before, wanting Dekür to awaken and sit up. He waited with eternal patience and said no more.

  The dirge ended and began again.

  Cheybal found Tynec staring at him. “There s a lot to be done,” the boy answered, seeming to echo him. “We’d better go.”

  Silently, Cheybal led the way.

  At the door, they were met by the Hespet Slyur. The priest momentarily blocked the doorway, while catching his breath. He looked past them even as he greeted them, to the red-draped block and its lifeless burden. He allowed the man and boy to pass him, mumbled some respectfully sympathetic utterance, and then closed the door behind him.

  Gathering his robe in his one hand, he hurried across the room.

  The hilt of Dekür’s sword threw off scintillas of light as Slyur neared the foot of the catafalque. Dekür’s hands were cupped together beneath it. The stone face of death made Slyur’s jaw bulge. His teeth ground together. He’d known this man.

  The sword hilt unnerved him. Why hadn’t someone removed it? How could they leave it there like that? Disgusting thoughtlessness, letting the boy see his father that way. An awful thing.

  Slyur spread his arms wide. He began to whisper a death oblation that Mordus would accept the spirit of the king and lead it across the crimson bridge to eternal Mordun. He paused and noticed that the dirge outside had stopped.

  The candles flickered and for an instant the torches died. A shadow swept over the king. Slyur, thinking Cheybal had returned, glanced back at the door. No one was there; the door remained closed.

  When he faced the body again, the head had turned to face him. Its milky eyes were open. They pierced him with their glazed stare. Slyur cried out. He stumbled back, his arm across his face to block off those eyes. He tripped over his own feet and sprawled on the cold stones.

  He scrabbled on the cold slick floor to the wall, then dragged himself up. His cheek scraped against it. He uttered little whines, and looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Dekür upright, coming for him.

  Eyes closed, the body of the king lay solemn in death. Slyur pressed his arm against his pounding heart. Cold sweat trickled like worms beneath his clothes.

  He suddenly vaulted, frog-like, for the
door. There he glanced back one final time to be sure that the body had not moved.

  “See for yourself.” The words of Chagri whirled around him, dry leaves rustling on a wintry breeze.

  Slyur opened the door and hurried out in search of a messenger.

  Chapter 6.

  In the tavern yard the only sound was the jingling of bridles as Reeterkuv moved among his horses. Their coats were sleek, though the dull sky preceding dawn contained no source to show off the sheen. The sun lay somewhere behind the trees; a hint of it glazed the tip of the tavern chimney.

  Reeterkuv patted a nuzzling horse and murmured his assurance to it that soon they would be going. He watched the smoke and his stomach grumbled. Yes, they would leave soon enough, but first he would have his breakfast. He imagined he could smell the corn pudding that Grohd stirred at this very moment in the cauldron beneath the chimney, although there was no breeze and the smoke rose straight into the sky.

  Reeterkuv ducked beneath the wagon tongue and began checking the harnesses on his lead horses. The next trip could only be an improvement, he thought. By the time he returned from Miria with new passengers, the death of the king would be old news. Most probably the people who would ride with him on his return northward would be on their way to see the boy given the crown. He sincerely hoped so. Such people would speak of nothing but the coming festivities, and what they would wear and how much they might drink, and who might be there to see. Oh, yes, a little celebrating could do no harm just now, especially if it silenced the bickering over blame. Such profligate lies! The king had been a good enough man. He had tried to end oppression, superstition and intolerance. He deserved tears and grief on his passing; what worried Reeterkuv was the frenzy with which people would turn to celebration in order to forget their grief—never thinking in all that time that a child never actually govern them. Who would run the kingdom? Someone had to make policy. Who? Reeterkuv did not know much about the way a kingdom was run, but he thought he did. He envisioned a boy surrounded by nameless faceless advisors, all of whom had personal interests, all of whom must surely be greedy and untrustworthy. Reeterkuv saw the world changing and that he feared above all else. No one likes to wake up and find that today’s world is not the same as yesterday’s.