In the Shadow of the Gods (15 page)

Paavo's voice rang in the yard, and the dogs moved as one, rising and rushing into the cold air. Food. Scal's hands scraped numbly along the ground as he crawled out to join the dogs. Paavo was tossing hunks of meat, laughing as they fought over the fatty morsels. Raw meat, but the sight of it made Scal's
stomach roar. Still laughing, Paavo threw a chunk toward him and the dogs turned as one, teeth bared. Scal pounced before they could, grabbing the piece of meat and stuffing it into his mouth. Sharp teeth snapped shut on empty air where the meat and his hand had been seconds before. Scal bared his own teeth as he chewed and chewed, the raw meat sliding slimy down his throat. The dogs had moved on to the next piece of their meal falling from the sky.

The meat hit the ground a pace or two away from Scal. A big piece of it, enough that Fat Betho could have used it to make meals for a week, stingy as the bastard had been. Scal jumped at it, but the dogs were faster. Jaws locked around the steak, pulling it away, but Scal reached still. Teeth sank into his hand, into the thick flesh at the base of his thumb. The dog shook his hand as it would a rabbit. Pain shot tearing up his arm and he cried out. Tried to yank his hand back, felt the teeth rip deeper. He brought his other hand up, pounding it against the dog's skull until its teeth opened and the beast slunk snarling away. Scal cradled his bleeding hand against his chest. Felt the cold seep into the deep punctures and run through his veins. He ground his teeth, and air hissed sharp through the cross on his cheek.

Laughter flowed over the cold air. Paavo, of course. And next to him, wrapped in white, Iveran. Teeth and eyes flashing. Not so different from the dogs still watching Scal with wary eyes and curled lips.

“Come here,
ijka,
” Iveran called, waving a lazy hand.

Scal used his good hand to push himself to his feet. He was slow, unsteady. Two days of sitting and crawling had taken their toll. He shook and stumbled like a new-walking babe. The
dogs pressed their bellies to the ground, slinking away from him. Weak as he was, he was Man now, and Paavo had taught them well to fear anything on two legs.

As he made his slow way through the yard, the dogmaster continued to feed his beasts. The chunks of meat fell near to Scal's feet, so that dogs darted in snarling and snapping at his ankles, near tripping him as Paavo chortled. One of the dogs closed its heavy jaws around the toe of Scal's boot. Tugging and shaking, and Scal fell backward. Instinct set his hands down to catch his weight, and he cried out as his wounded hand took the brunt of the impact. His arm crumpled, and his elbow and tailbone connected sharply with the ice. Something slammed into his chest, pressing him all the way back as teeth snapped near his nose. He threw up his arm to shield his face, and so the dog took a firm grip on the offered limb. More teeth took hold of his shoulder. Fangs scraped along the sole of his now-bare foot as he kicked out. Barking, so loud it drowned out the sound of someone screaming endless terror. Strange, that someone nearby could sound more scared than he felt.

Barks dissolved to yelps. The weight lifted off his chest, teeth scraping against bone as the dog refused to let go its prize. The teeth held on until they passed bone and met in flesh, but still they pulled. Dragging, tearing, until finally the connection was severed. Paavo threw the beast into the wall, and it fell to the ground with a mindless cry and a crunch, and then lay silent and still. The other dogs swarmed to its body, filling mouths and dashing off with bloody muzzles. One carried a small mouthful, the edges of the meat pale around the blood. The size and color to match the dent in Scal's arm.

He managed to roll himself onto his side before throwing up.

Paavo dragged him up, set him on his feet. Gave him a hearty thump on the back. And together he and Iveran roared with laughter.

Bandaged, bruised, and limping, Scal trailed in Iveran's wake. All
of Valastaastad stared. The men with disapproving frowns. The women with concern, or perhaps pity. The children with the same hard, incurious eyes as the children of Aardanel. Even the buildings seemed to stare. Square-cut empty windows with flapping hide covers tracking their progress down the town's single street. If it could even be called a street. A strip of ice, lined by ice-seamed stone houses. The gaping hole through which Scal had been hefted was the center of the town, with lowly hovels stretching toward the lip of the ice shelf, clustering together as though afraid of being blown out into the great emptiness. To the other side of the hole, the houses became grander, if homes of stone and ice could be called grand. They were bigger, for the most part, and had spaces in between their neighbors' walls. A few raised up on platforms. Some even built two stories high. The grandest was at the end of the street. Stilts raising it up near man-high, and three uneven levels piled on top of it. It looked as likely to crumble as the shelf on which Valastaastad was built, which was fitting enough. Real glass filled the openings in more than half the windows. Scal did not need to be told that this was Iveran's home.

“My home,” the Northman said anyway, his face bright with pride.

A ladder as rickety as the rest of the place was the only way up. Scal managed it one-handed, though his bitten shoulder burned with the effort. Once up, Iveran clapped him on the
back and swung the door open wide. “Your home,” he said. “Until you make a place for yourself.”

A fire burned in a wide pit at the center of the room, fighting off the chill that hung in the air. A woman tended the big pot hanging over the fire, and she turned as man and boy entered. Her stomach bulged hugely ahead of her. She had a pleasant face. A faint, wary smile. “This is the boy?”

“Aye. This is Scal.” Iveran's fingers wrapped around Scal's unbandaged arm, drew him forward. “
Ijka,
this is my wife, Hanej. And”—a smile split his face, pure and bright, unlike anything Scal had seen since Brennon had wished him luck before the patrol left—“our son Jari.”

Hanej rested a hand over her broad belly, her smile softening to match Iveran's. “He is sorry he cannot meet you yet.”

“Soon enough.” Iveran stepped forward and wrapped her in a gruff hug. Scal stared at his feet. At the one boot with a gaping hole along the instep, puncture marks all around. Paavo had brought it to him as the midwife was wrapping his wounds. Thrown it at his feet and told him to remember. As though the holes in his flesh were not reminder enough.

Iveran led him limping up a creaking flight of stairs. The second floor was a narrow walkway, no more than two steps across, a hole in the center that smoke from the fire lazily climbed through. Looking up, Scal saw a similar hole in the ceiling, and another beyond, open to pale blue sky.

There were three doors, hides stretched over the frames. “Mine,” Iveran said, pointing to one with a snowbear's head hanging above. His finger moved to the doorway across. “Yours. Go sleep,
ijka
. We will talk more later.”

Stepping around the hole in the floor, Scal pushed aside the
door covering. The room was small, sparse. A pile of furs for a bed. A rough-hewn stone chest. A window, real rippled glass, looking out onto the edge of the ice shelf and the endless snows beyond. Inside the chest, a neatly folded pile of fur and leather, a set of boots. Some candles, a flint. A small, sharp bone knife for eating.

There was an ease to the exhaustion and pain that filled him. It was a simple matter to collapse onto the pile of furs, drag one around himself with his clumsy bandaged hand. He closed his eyes, and there was a comfort in the blackness. In not having to think, or to feel.

He dreamed of Brennon, of the easy smiling innocence that
seemed to warm the air where he walked. He dreamed his friend's laughter, the simple heart-lightening joy of it. He dreamed of Brennon smiling, smiling as arrows and swords and dogs' teeth tore at his body. Of his happy laughter ringing out as he bled into the earth. He dreamed of Parro Kerrus, making the sign of the Mother over Brennon with one hand while the other tried to fit his guts back into his belly. Of the parro's soulful voice intoning,
“And thus did Fratarro shatter upon the bones of the earth, his limbs flung to the far horizons, and a shard of ebon did pierce his immortal heart . . .”

“And so did Sororra vow vengeance,” Scal whispered into the furs as he woke, his head aching and tears drying on his cheeks, fresh blood leaking slow and warm from the rent in his arm.

It was dark, dark as the woods on a moonless night after Athasar's fires had all gone out. He went to the chest, crawling along the floor like a lame dog, his wounded arm folded
close. A low rumble filled the house, a rhythmic noise, achingly familiar. Parro Kerrus had snored like a bear in winter. It was not Kerrus, though, because Parro Kerrus was dead. Killed, murdered. He reached into the chest, groping blindly. The edge nicked his fingers, but it helped him to find his way. His cold aching fingers wrapped around bone, and drew the knife from the chest.

It was dark, but the little blade seemed to glow, a single curving line of fire. Righteous fire. Vengeance, and salvation. He crept to the hide door and pushed it aside, leaning his back against the frame, staring across at the white bear hide and snarling head. Watching. Waiting.
Patience is the Mother's gift; the wisdom to use it is the Father's.

I
t was, Keiro decided as his feet took him once more through the forest around Raturo, the third hardest thing he had ever done.

The first twins, the first he'd had to bury—always, they would be the hardest. His first failure, and his first true taste of what the world was like when civility was peeled back by blind fear.

There was the blinding, that had seemed such a good idea until the pain had brought him crashing down from his cloudlike grief. He could, he thought, have finished the blinding, appeased the Twins, if he hadn't seen the young twins. He had been ready to do it, even through the pain. It had been harder than he would have guessed to put a stop to it, once his eye had seen.

And so the twins. Walking away from them was hard, almost the hardest thing he had ever done. But they were safe, in the safest place they could be. Keiro could do nothing for them inside Mount Raturo that was not already being done.

Keiro had been made for walking, and though it was hard to leave the living twins, visible hope, his feet were happy for the road.

The exile hurt, to be sure, but he didn't let himself dwell on it. He had walked all his life, and if the rest of his life was to be walking as well, then that was as it should be. He turned his one eye north, and went to the best place he had ever walked.

Many preachers, after they ventured once more into the sun out of the darkness of Raturo, chose to go to the Tashat Mountains. The Highlanders, with their One God, were heathens who could be converted, shown the truth of the world. It was a good place to start, for it often taught preachers failure. That was an important lesson, for preachers by their nature would face it again and again. Keiro had found his own first failure among those snowy peaks, in the places where Fiateran blood and culture had hardly touched the deep-set Highlands ways. But he had also found his first success in the lovely, sprawling valleys scattered among the mountains.

He hadn't seen Felein for a long while—she, too, had been made for walking, and their paths rarely crossed. But he remembered her fondly, she with her faith already shaken by long mixing with Fiaterans. She had listened to him beneath the stars that were strung so beautifully above the mountain peaks, for she had a quick mind that wanted to learn all the world would give her. Her blood, too diluted by Fiateran stock, had none of the spark of magic that lurked in the Highlands, and so she was denied the Academy. “There are books there,” she'd said, with the same sort of reverence with which Keiro spoke of the Twins, “more books than there are stars. More books than anyone could read in a lifetime. In five lifetimes!”
Books she would never see, because she had been deemed inferior.

“When the Twins rise,” Keiro had told her, “it will be different. All will be equal under their rule. You will never be denied a thing that another is given. Without Metherra's sun, in the darkness, no man is different from any other.”

Her eyes had blazed with joy, but then the fire had died. “You can't read in the darkness.”

He'd thought it another failure, another in his growing count. But when he'd left the village a handful of nights later, another set of feet had left with him. “There's a way,” Felein had said with confidence, the stars glowing in her eyes. “There has to be a way.” And so it was a success, after all.

They welcomed him, the Highlanders of those little valley villages. They welcomed him same as they would any traveler, eager for news and trade and a face they had not seen a thousand times before. They stared, of course, at the raw socket of his lost eye, but it was healing, and he learned to wear the eyecloth crossed over the one eye only. They didn't always listen to him, when he spoke of his gods trapped beneath the earth, but neither did they chase him from the village, throw rocks at him, beat him with clubs. It was, in all, the best place he could think of to spend the first few weeks of his exile.

“God is good to us here,” Terron said, sipping the spiced drink the
Highlanders called hacha. “Why should I ever want to leave this place to wander, reviled wherever I go?”

“It's not like that,” Keiro said, though the half lie made him uncomfortable. He preferred honesty when he spoke of his gods and his people, but Terron had already proved to be just
as devoted to his own God, though increasingly curious about the Twins. “Fear is a strong motivator throughout the world, and we fear that which we do not understand. The world, generally, is a frightened place.”

“Frightful, more like.”

Keiro waved a hand to encompass the mountains that ringed them in all around and asked, “Have you never wondered what's beyond your comfy peaks? There's a whole world you've never seen, and places just as beautiful as this in their own ways.”

“‘In their own ways,'” Terron repeated, smirking into his hacha. “That's a kind way of tying a bow on a pile of shit.”

The village was called Two Rivers, a small place. A gentle place, so far from the cruelty of the world, and close enough to the Academy that they were well educated. Terron, himself a failed mage, had greeted Keiro eagerly and immediately drawn him into a theistic debate. It was a good place; Keiro could not and would not argue that point. If he had not been made for walking, he might almost have been tempted to stay a great deal longer than a few days.

“Don't sneer at things you've never seen,” Keiro said, a gentle chiding in his voice. “For all you know, your heart could beat in time with the Great Ocean's waves, or the crowded steps of Mercetta's streets. There are things a man cannot know about himself until he has traveled beyond the circle of the places that make him feel content and safe. And, more, a man who does not know himself cannot truly begin to guess at what hands shape and guide our world.”

“Ah, so you say because you have seen more water and hills and fields than I have, you know the face of God?”

“Not at all,” Keiro said, taking a sip of his own bitter hacha. “I merely say that I
have
seen more water and hills and fields than you have, and I have heard all the myriad voices that whisper in places of beauty to those who will listen, and I know the voice that calls to my heart.”

Terron's eyes fixed on him, the gentle, friendly mockery replaced by something Keiro could not quite read. It was a long, quiet moment before Terron asked, “You claim you have heard your gods?”

Keiro shrugged, hoping to banish the sharp suspicion in the other man's eyes. “I claim only to be a very good listener.”

Terron shook his head in flat denial, his mouth open to argue, and then his eyes went strangely distant, fixed on a place over Keiro's shoulder. There was a crackling in the air, a dryness like the moments before a strike of lightning, and behind his missing eye Keiro saw again the eyes of all the babies he had let die.

“Something's wrong.” Terron rose so abruptly he bumped the table, their earthenware mugs of hacha trembling and tipping, spilling the spiced drink with a sharp scent of cloves. In the silence, laced with a nameless sudden fear, the sound of one of the mugs shattering against the ground was unspeakably loud.

Two Rivers, small as it was, did not have much of a village square. The people gathered, when they needed to, in the green space behind the elder's hut. That was where they found the crowd. Terron had told him, in their long talking, that though the Academy had cut away his power, he still had his senses, sharper for a mage than for the average man. Average a man as could be, even Keiro could feel the
fear and anger, battling like live things in the air.

There were as many of the villagers as Keiro had yet seen, more than he'd thought had lived in the small collection of huts, and it seemed as though all of them were shouting. Their target was a woman, wearing the same black robe as Keiro, and his stomach knotted.

Terron touched a man's arm, made himself be heard over the crowd's fury. “What's happening?”

The man said only a single word, but it took all the color from Terron's face: “Lethys.”

Standing on his toes, Keiro tried to see above the heads of the villagers. Vaguely, he could make out a form at the preacher's feet. Nothing distinct, until a shift in the bodies revealed a hand, reaching from the huddled lump to clutch at the preacher's robe. Using his elbows, stomping on feet, Keiro forced his way through the press of bodies. His hair stood on end, the invisible storm close to breaking.

There was true fear in the preacher's eyes, her face pale but hard. She clutched a staff in one hand, not so different from Keiro's walking stick; her other hand rested on the matted hair of the man kneeling at her feet. His eyes were wide, almost entirely pupil, staring uncomprehendingly as his lips moved. He could have been shouting, but still his voice would have been lost in the crowd. There was an older woman, crumpled and sobbing, and a straining man being held back by others. And there was the shouting, too many voices to be words, no more than a primal scream shaped by many throats.

Keiro stepped forward, into the half circle of space between the preacher and the mob, and hoped he would be heard over the shouting. “Sister, what happens?”

Relief flooded her face for a brief moment, replaced just a quickly by horror, and then a blind hatred that mirrored the faces surrounding her. Clearly, over the shouting, he heard her spit, “Apostate.”

Out of the pressing crowd, Keiro could start to hear individual voices. The old woman sobbing, “What've you done to 'im, what've you done?” The man fighting against those who held him, two words repeated again and again, “My son. My son.” In the incoherent shouting, occasionally one sound emerged, that name: “Lethys.” Each time, the man huddled at the preacher's feet flinched, as though the word were a physical blow, but his lips never stopped moving.

“Please,” Keiro said to the preacher, “I can help.” Behind his missing eye, the small eyes swam, wide and blank. “Please. Let me help you.”

He would never know if the rock was aimed at him or the female preacher. It hit him, though, high on the shoulder, hard enough to spin him half around and send him stumbling. The preacher stepped back from him as he fell, letting him sprawl in a heap near the muttering man, and he saw the second rock fly over her head, a narrow miss. The third didn't miss. It hit her arm, and her staff fell from numb fingers, and her other hand clenched in the man's hair as she cried out in pain. The man's lips stopped, opened wide in a long scream that made the tendons stand out stark on his neck, and somehow over it Keiro heard,
“My son!”
The preacher fell heavily near Keiro, borne down by the weight of a father's fury and his fists, and all around they were shouting, “Lethys. Lethys. Lethys,” and through the battering fists the preacher shouted with bloody teeth, “Lethys, help me,” and the man's hands danced in wild
patterns. Lethys cried out as a light burst from his fingers, and the smell of burned meat came strong to Keiro's nose. The preacher pushed the man off of her, and Keiro saw the hole that went through him, from one side of his chest to the other, the edges of the wound a deep black.

In the Highlands, they told tales of the first mage, blessed by their God with powers beyond human reckoning. Garen Three-eye, who had stood atop a mountain and torn lightning from the sky.

The older woman who had been sobbing now screamed, high and piercing, and there was a screaming in Keiro's chest, too. For mages, using their powers to kill another brought a fate worse than death. The Academy had strict laws, and little sympathy.

“Shield us,” the female preacher said thickly. Her lips were bleeding, one eye already swelling shut. Lethys, the mage, quickly began to weave shapes in the air, and a faint prickling shivered across Keiro's skin. The crowd surged forward in fury, but they were halted by some kind of barrier that Keiro couldn't see.

The preacher rose slowly to her feet, using Lethys for support. When she stood, the mage clung to her robe as tears streamed down his cheeks, his wide eyes fixed on the dead man lying near his feet. His own father.

The preacher reached into her robe, brought out a little jar, and from it scraped a black paste across the tongue Lethys eagerly stuck out. His eyes closed as he swayed on his knees, still clinging to the preacher as though he would tip over.

It was all too much for Keiro to understand. “What have you done to him?” he asked softly.

The preacher didn't turn to look at him, just gently stroked Lethys's hair as he swayed. “There are things you do not know, broth—” She stopped herself, amended: “Apostate.” She was quiet for a time, eyes on the ground, carefully avoiding the crowd battering against the shield Lethys had created. Her hand faltered against Lethys's hair, and there was a different note in her voice when she spoke again. “I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't know this was his village . . .”

“What has been done to him?” Keiro asked again.

Briefly, her fingers tightened, clutching at hair. “He's mine. I was given permission.” Her fingers loosened, straightened, smoothing once more. “He is helping me.” Finally she turned to face Keiro, and the look in her eyes did not match the hardness in her voice. “You should leave this place, apostate. I am bound to kill you on sight, for whatever your crimes might be. But . . . there has been enough death here today. I will say you were never here, if you leave now.”

“Please, just tell me—”

“Go, apostate. Go far from here. Go farther than anyone can ever find you.”

Keiro could hardly breathe around the lump in his throat as he stepped from the shelter of Lethys's protection. The crowd grabbed at him, hands and fists and feet, looking for anything on which to vent their fury. He knew he would have suffered worse than those few strikes if the preacher hadn't drawn Lethys to his feet and begun to walk in the direction they had come. The shield stayed tight around them as they walked, though the villagers certainly tested it, with fists and rocks and their own angry bodies. They left Keiro standing alone, aching, near the sobbing and screaming woman, who crawled slowly
to her dead husband. He could not stand to watch it.