“You know a great deal of what goes on in this kingdom, don’t you, Grohd?”
He gestured modestly. “Well, if you want to find out news, try a tavern. The fellow who pours the drinks has heard everything worth hearing.”
“So I see. How much more do you know of your country?”
“Well, let me think.” And he pondered, opening the pathways, allowing thoughts and recollections to pour out. He looked up at Lyrec, drawn by the feeling that he was being watched intently, looked up into eyes of silver fire. He continued to stare for some time, while a thousand bits of digested information were read and replicated. Then the eyes were black once more.
Lyrec took his hat from the bar and placed it on his head. “Good night, Grohd, and thank you.”
“Lyrec,” murmured the taverner. Like someone sleep-walking, he turned a laggard half-circle and shuffled into the back room. A large blanket swung down behind him to cover the doorway.
Lyrec shook the fat black cat. “Wake up, Borregad.”
The cat’s blue eyes opened, but rolled around independent of one another, and quickly closed. “Uhh, my head is cracking.”
“Shh! It’s time to go back to the loft. Everyone’s gone to sleep except us.”
“But we don’t sleep.”
“That’s a remarkable observation coming from someone who’s done practically nothing else.”
The cat raised his head with great delicacy into an imperious pose. His eyes remained shut. “A stupor is not the same as sleep. It’s the fault of this ghastly beast that I’ve become. Ooh.” His head lowered.
“Ghastly beast is right. And how would you know all this? You’ve never remained in mortal form for half so long before. How do you know if you and I sleep or not?”
“Why do you have to ask me so much? Why do you taunt me so? Can’t you let me be? Go pine for Elystroya or … I’m sorry. That wasn’t supposed to be spoken. I didn’t mean it.”
Lyrec’s lips pinched tight, but his anger passed. “Of course not. I know.”
“Anyhow, you shouldn’t grieve for her. She’s still alive.” When Lyrec made no answer, he opened one eye. Lyrec was staring down at the bar. “She
is
alive,” Borregad insisted, mustering all the belief he could into his voice, “you’ve told me so yourself. Now, admit it.”
“I’d like to.” He was silent for a moment, then said, “Odd, isn’t it, Borregad—that both of us think of her as
she
.”
“Here she would be a feminine principle.”
“Is that so, do you think? An opposite, a mirror image. A natural division, do you think?”
“Questions. I don’t know,” the cat complained.
“Well, come on.” He started away.
The cat sank back. “Nooh. Leave me here. If I move, I’ll be sick, I swear.”
“Borregad, my dependable ally. All right. Sleep here, but I tell you now you’ve had the last grynne you’ll taste in this lifetime.”
“Ennh,” the cat replied. His muzzle fluttered, whiskers twitching.
He was unconscious by the time the tavern door latched.
Chapter 5.
The Hespet, Slyur, knelt on one knee. His head hung low—an amber fleece-covered egg that protruded through the blue web work of his robe on a skew neck. The robe enfolded his body like a sea-soaked fisherman’s net hung over an ancient piling.
The words he spoke meant little to the small clustered family.
They knew he was petitioning Anralys, the goddess of health and beauty, in her own language, asking her to cure the scrawny girl who lay at the Hespet’s feet.
Slyur lifted aside the child’s rough skirt, revealing a thin and unwashed leg. A rancid yellow crust stuck in places to the skirt, breaking off crisply when he tugged it loose. A thin pus seeped out. The wound was a purple crescent, raw and ugly. A gangrenous odor assailed him, and Slyur cringed from it. His tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth.
The child, no more than four, had been playing yesterday in the fields where her father and brothers worked. And while her undernourished brother swung a scythe too large for him to wield, she had sneaked up impishly behind him. A surprise. A slip. The scythe had opened her thigh to the bone. The brother was twisted now with guilt. His sister was dying.
Slyur looked into the girl’s fevered eyes. He held the skirt up with his good arm and made signs in the air, calling upon the goddess to renew the child’s life, to make her whole. The child’s eyes followed the movements of his right arm as if watching a fly. Slyur made a crooked smile against his nausea and ended his prayer, lowering her skirt again. He held the stump of his right wrist nearer her face.
“I lost my hand when I was your age. A scythe took it—just like your leg. And I lived.” He doubted she understood his fabrication, and finished by saying simply, “So you see, child, there is hope.” Even if he didn’t believe so himself.
Slyur had been ten, trapping with his father in the reedy marshes of Novalok. Coming upon a forgotten trap left by some unknown hunter, he had carelessly reached down to pick it up and throw it out of his way. The trap sprang—he could still hear the twanging snap—and his hand was gone. Just like that. And the pain, the throbbing awful pain—he thought he would go mad feeling his heart hammer into his wrist, each beat a notch carved out of his sanity.
“Sleep now,” soothed the Hespet. He touched her puffy eyelids closed.
*****
Prayers ended, Hespet Slyur stood, his knee-joints creaking painfully. This capricious weather would be the death of him. Perhaps he would become like the last Hespet and refuse ever to leave the temple. He drew marks of blessing in the air before each of the family members present, then backed out of the circular hut.
In the shadow of the doorway he found another child staring up at him, and Slyur caught his breath. She was identical to the girl he had just prayed over. She looked at him as if she could see into him. Suddenly she drew near enough to take his blue net robe in her hands. She kissed a strand and said, “My sister will die, won’t she?”
Slyur started to answer, but the lie caught in his throat. She seemed so calm. He grimaced and hurried through the doorway.
The uneven ground beyond sparkled where early morning sunlight had not yet melted the many thin pockets of ice. Slyur plunged blindly through them, cracking and splashing up the chill water beneath. He barely noticed.
He passed one of his mounted escorts close enough that his flurry made the man’s horse shy back. The door swung back on his coach. He tumbled in and called, “Take me back,” to the driver. “Take me back his instant!”
The coach lurched forward, and Slyur, magistrate of all the priests in Secamelan, goggled back at the conical hut and hissed with fear.
From the depths of the coach came a wintry voice: “Frightened of children, is it?”
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.