In the Shadow of the Gods (24 page)

The merra stopped, but she did not need to go on. Scal could see how the story would go. Building a fire, big enough to bring the voice of a goddess. Staring into the flames, hearing a whisper. Shock, perhaps, or rapture. Leaning too close, too eager. The voice drawing her in. The flames swallowing. Skin boiling and melting. Screams, dancing with the flames. He could see the memory in her eyes, alongside the reflected flames.

Her voice was small, scared, hardly even spoken. “I can never sleep at night.”

Long ago, in a life he had long left behind, Scal had been a boy who could not sleep. There had been a priest, who softly sang his prayers in a voice not meant for singing. In another life there had been a woman, holding her swollen belly and singing her own songs before a night-fire, calling to the boy who crouched on the landing above and stroking his hair as she sang. It was those songs that came to his mind, as they did most nights. Softly, in a voice as ill-fitted for singing as the priest's, he began to sing the old songs of the North. Of cooking, and cleaning, and building. Of children, and children growing into men. Of quiet nights spent waiting for the men to return. He did not know when Vatri finally slept. It was before he drifted into his own sleep, leaving the stars to their silence.

T
he wide world hadn't much changed in the thirteen years since Joros had last gone wandering. The roads were still packed dirt, winding in strange patterns, never taking a straight route if they could detour by a pond or an unusually large rock. The villages were still ramshackle collections of huts, hardly deserving of whatever name the villagers had branded the place with. The people, overwhelmingly, were still stupid.

It was much how he imagined things would be if he returned to his family's home. Disgust and disappointment from both sides, and an excess of sullen glares. At least in the villages, Joros wasn't causing his sisters to cry.

They'd run into a traveling merchant a few days ago, a merchant who'd looked so much like Joros's puffed-up, pompous father that his hand had gone instinctively to the sword at his belt. Wise men were better than their emotions, though, and Joros had made his fingers loosen. Instead, he'd had Anddyr weave a distraction while Joros had robbed the merchant blind,
horse and all. It hadn't improved their traveling speed, with Anddyr still trudging along, but it had spared Joros's feet and given him clothing that drew less attention than his preacher's robe. His brothers would have laughed at the irony of Joros finally wearing merchant's garb.

He'd hesitated before giving Anddyr one of his black robes; the mage wasn't deserving of the black, but the days were growing colder, and he was starting to shiver in his simple tunic and breeches. Joros couldn't have his mage dying of the cold, but it stirred a small anger in him each time he looked back to see Anddyr plodding in a preacher's robe. Still, the mage would fare better than Joros if any of the villages should turn sour quickly at the sight of a black robe. Anddyr usually had enough presence of mind to hide himself before entering a village, a simple spell that directed eyesight away, but his stores of magic weren't endless.

Joros had considered having the mage attune more seekstones, but it could take just as long as the first set—years of Anddyr's searching to even find the proper locations, and years more for the mage to devise a way to twist the seekstones' magic to affix a location. They'd be a waste of time, in the end, so long as Anddyr didn't get himself killed. The man was like a walking seekstone. He would cast his searching every few hours to see if they needed to turn from their winding road onto one that went winding off equally foolishly.

Waiting as the mage searched, Joros would brush his fingers over all the seekstones his shadowseekers had brought him through the years. The work of a lifetime, of many lifetimes; careful discoveries, and careful markers. They were the shadowseekers' greatest accomplishment and purpose: one
seekstone matched to each set of twins they'd found hidden throughout Fiatera. The stones showed little different than they ever did, flashes of imagery and a faint tug in the direction where the matched stone sat, far away. His best prospects seemed to be in the capital, Mercetta, which was at once surprising and unsurprising: there were so many people living there that someone should have been able to recognize twins, yet so many people that it was easy enough to hide in a sea of faces. Joros only needed to find one set, and so—much as it made his skin itch—they were traveling toward the capital.

The villages became less scattered the closer they drew, but that was good for one thing, at least: inns. Warm taverns with beds that were soft, if also buggy, and enough food to make his stomach swell up. The first nights out from the mountain, they'd slept on the hard ground and eaten what they could, after they'd gone through their meager food supplies. It had been berries and roots until Joros had commanded Anddyr to kill them a deer or a bird or
anything,
and the mage had returned bawling with a dead rabbit cradled in his arms. The fool had burned away nearly half the rabbit with his killing blow, but the meat had been better than berries. Joros had to force Anddyr to eat his portion, and the mage had thrown it back up after two bites. That had earned him a royal thumping, but the uneaten portion had comfortably filled Joros's belly.

How Joros had ever survived as a wandering seeker, he couldn't remember. It had been over a decade ago, and truly he hadn't ever wandered far unless it was to follow a promising lead. Any time he hadn't spent inside cozy Raturo was likely spent in an inn after a day of walking, and for the times when no shelter could be found . . . he'd blocked those dark
times from his mind, honestly. He'd survived them, and that was that. Joros wasn't a man prone to failings, or to admitting them. They were past camping now, for a while at least, and that was a blessed thing. There was nothing like a real bed for a man's health and happiness.

Anddyr, strangely, seemed to thrive in the outdoors. At the first inn they'd come to, the mage had sheepishly asked if he could be allowed to sleep behind the building. Joros had lost half a night of sleep to suspicion, but he'd kept all the skura jars in his bought room and slept holding the seekstone that was tuned to the matching one around Anddyr's neck. In the morning he'd found the mage dew-wet and curled into a ball around that stupid stuffed horse, sleeping as peacefully as a child who didn't know any better. It had been much the same all the nights to follow; Joros still had a faint chariness lurking in his mind, but the mage knew better than to run, and certainly wasn't brave enough to go anywhere without his skura.

They were perhaps four days outside of Mercetta, if Joros's memory was any judge, and the villages were slowly becoming veritable towns. It made his fingers twitch, the places starting to look too much like the town where he'd grown up. He was happy to avoid them when he could, happier still when he could find a crossroads inn between towns, full of travelers as dispassionate about conversation as he was. It was still a few hours until the sun would flee the sky, but there might not be another inn or another town in that space, and Joros wasn't about to chance a night in the brush when there was an inn standing right before him. He dismounted and waited for Anddyr to plod by.

The mage was so bound up in his own head that he walked
past Joros without even noticing, his eyes fixed on the ground and his lips moving as they always were.

Joros cast around until he found a good-sized rock; his aim was off, hitting Anddyr on the hip, but it was enough to get his attention. The mage trudged back to take the horse's reins and immediately began talking to it in low tones, pressing his forehead against the beast's nose.

Frowning, Joros reminded himself to check the skura supply later. It seemed to him that his pet mage was growing slightly more unbalanced with each passing day. He might have been dipping his fingers too deeply into the skura jar of late.

“Anddyr,” he said sternly, to pull the mage from his reverie with the horse. The man liked that horse more than he should; it was the same as it had been with those blasted twins, an unhealthy relationship, but there was little Joros could do about it. “There will be a trough around the back. Care for the horse, and clean yourself up before you track any of your filth inside. I daresay the place has enough as it is.” Joros left the mage to it, and ducked into the inn.

It was everything he'd expected: a dozen quiet travelers mostly sitting apart from each other and nursing mugs or plates of food, a roasting lamb spitted over the hearthfire, a pretty but sour-faced woman bustling about and showing no reaction to suggestive gibes or roaming hands, all watched over by a barman with an honest face and hard eyes. It was the same sort of inn that existed at every dusty crossroads across the realm, straight down to the hard-on-their-luck mercenaries eyeing his merchant's robes, and a musician glumly plucking at a lute near the fire. Truly, the world hadn't changed in Joros's
absence from it. Some things simply were that way, as constant and unchanging as the sun in the sky.

Joros chose a table where he could overhear a few different murmured conversations and keep an eye on the mercenaries, and told the sullen maiden to bring him food and wine. There was no telling how long Anddyr would be out with the horse; the mage could find his own food if he took too long. Joros could only do so much to care for the man.

There was talk of bandits to the north, of increased killings in Mercetta, of a lake near Fozena mysteriously going dry. The food was good; warm and filling, which was all he had come to expect from roadside taverns. Altogether, it was nothing too enthralling . . . and yet, somehow, Joros didn't notice the hooded man until he already stood before the table.

“Cappo Joros.” The man's voice was a deep rumble, sounding like rocks scraping together inside that hood. “Apostate. You have stolen something that is not yours to take.” There was a faint flash, fire off metal as the tip of a knife poked from the man's sleeve. “The shadows have come to claim you.”

Joros would later tell himself that it had been quick thinking that saved his life, but truly, it was the hooded man's stupidity in giving him a moment's warning combined with a surge of raw panic that made him throw his goblet of wine. The goblet grazed the hooded man's shoulder, spilling wine down the side of his robe. It did no lasting damage, but the man was as surprised by it as Joros himself was. In the moment of shared confusion, Joros had time to scramble out of his chair and wrap his fingers around the hilt of his shortsword, and then the hooded man leaped forward.

Joros backed into another table, scrambled sideways amid
the surprised curses of the table's occupants as a very sharp knife upset their cups. That was enough time for Joros to pull his sword free, and that got the attention of the rest of the inn.

“Hey now!” the barman called, voice ringing and stern. “I won't have none of that in here. Take it outside, lads.”

The hooded man ignored him completely, cat-stepping toward Joros, the tip of his knife drawing patterns in the air like Anddyr's sigils. Joros stepped with him, his sword's length keeping the man at bay. Joros would be the first to admit he was a poor fighter; he'd never had the time to properly learn, and anyway he had the luxury of employing others to do his fighting for him. But he could swing a blade well enough when he had to—and with his blasted mage nowhere in sight, it seemed as though he had to.

“He's a fecking preacher,” someone spat, and there were disapproving murmurs all around. Frightening words, at first, until Joros remembered he'd traded in his black robes. This would-be assassin hadn't had the same forethought. For the briefest moment, Joros hoped the crowd would do his work for him—drag down the hooded man and pummel him bloody for the crime of wearing black.

“Betrayer,” the hooded man growled at Joros, loud enough for all the others to hear, and the rising tide of righteous anger flattened out to encompass both of them. There'd be no help from any of them.

“How did you find me?” Joros demanded, stalling, hoping Anddyr would amble in any moment.

The hooded man laughed. “You should know there's nowhere left to hide in this world.” It was true enough; the shadowseekers were highly trained, thanks in part to Joros himself,
able to track down a mark better than a hunting hound. Joros hadn't even considered he might have been marked.

“Who sent you, then?” Circling carefully, Joros got a table between himself and the hooded man. “Whatever they told you is a lie. I'm on important business for the Ventallo—for all the Fallen. You'll regret getting in my way.”

It didn't give the hooded man pause. “Betrayer,” he said again. He grabbed the edge of the table between them, gave it a sharp shove so it caught Joros's thigh, then flipped the whole thing toward him. Cursing, Joros scrabbled backward, though not quickly enough—the table's edge bit at him again, crashing down onto his foot with the crunch of small bones breaking. He twisted away to avoid the knife that followed the table down, ignored the pain as he tugged his foot from beneath the table, and got the length of his sword between himself and the hooded man again.

There was no room in Joros's life for hesitation; that was doubly true on the road. His mage was missing, and there were no friendly faces around. As far as the inn's patrons were concerned, one less Twin-worshiper was no bad thing, no matter which one of them lost. It made things simple. Joros was going to have to kill the hooded man.

Joros lunged forward, his sword leading him. It missed the hooded man's stomach, and Joros had to twist to avoid the swinging knife. He stumbled into a chair, hooked his crushed foot around the rungs, and let the pain leave him in a shout as he kicked the chair toward the hooded man. It hit squarely against one of the man's legs and Joros brought his sword swinging up and then down with both hands, aiming for the corner where the man's neck met shoulder beneath that hood.
Somehow, the man got his knife up in time, Joros's sword skittering down the blade and the man's arm; he at least took some flesh with that deflection, the hooded man bellowing with pain. But Joros was left off balance, his bad foot crumpling beneath the weight, and the hooded man's pain seemed to lend him strength. His left fist landed against Joros's ribs and sent him sprawling to the floor of the inn.

That was how it should have ended: with the hooded man falling onto Joros and plunging the knife into his heart, letting poor Joros's blood empty onto the inn's dirty floor. Instead it ended with a flash and searing heat, the hooded man screaming as he fell burning on top of Joros, his knife plunging by some fluke into Joros's shoulder. The knife wound, combined with the man's flaming arm pressed against Joros's neck and the side of his face, were enough to tear a scream from Joros's throat. Pain could lend him strength, too, it seemed, and he managed to heave the hooded man's form off. The man was screaming still, writhing, though the flames were flickering out on his red flesh. There was no hood left to him, not that Joros could have recognized the ruin of his face anyway. The flames faded, but the trails they had left did not.