The priest started toward the doorway, where the landlord had suddenly awakened and was gesturing three shabby customers into the suddenly crowded shop. The only connection, and he was leaving. I shoved the drinkers aside and hurried after. “Is there nothing I can do to convince you?”
He spoke over his shoulder. “Nothing.”
“Then I thank you,” I called after him.
He stopped just outside the doorway and stared back at me.
“I don’t agree with you. I am not what you believe. But I thank you . . . for taking your duty so seriously. I could ask nothing better.”
He accepted my words as if they were a gift that he didn’t quite recognize, and he took the time to consider them as if turning the gift over and over in his hand to discover its nature. After a moment he gave the gift back again. “You needn’t fear. He will grow well.”
I followed him into the alley and waited until he joined the crowds in the broad street beyond the corner. I had meant it when I thanked him. He had no reason to know I was not what he feared. But even though my conscience would not permit me to force him to speak, I wasn’t going to give up so easily. As soon as the river of people took him out of sight, I ran down the alley and merged into the street traffic just behind him.
CHAPTER 8
I was a superior tracker. Though I had not yet regained the complete mastery of my sensory abilities since my return from slavery, I could again trace the disturbance in an ocean where a fish had swum past an hour earlier. I could distinguish which branch a bird had used for its perch on the previous day. I could hear the ripple in the air made by a woman’s passing, and know it was a woman, not a man. Though I was depressingly average at many aspects of sorcery, I worked at such skills as these. They were necessary in my profession. Yet I lost the priest before we’d traveled two hundred paces through the streets of Vayapol.
I stood like an ox in the teeming throngs of the busiest market town in the eastern Empire.
Lost him. You should be hanged for incompetence.
After a few moments scratching my head and trying to think what to do next, I decided I’d best keep moving. A parting of the crowd and darting furtive movements among many buyers and sellers signified the approach of a redyikka, the Derzhi magistrate who oversaw public markets. From the direction of the disturbance came a loud whack and a gut-twisting scream that quieted the throngs for a moment. The redyikka had likely caught himself a thief or a cheat and executed summary judgment—cutting off the hand or nose of the accused. Such was justice for those who were not Derzhi. Before a moment’s passing, life took up again . . . for all but the unlucky victim.
Blundering idiot.
I needed no encounters with Derzhi.
I pushed aimlessly through the crowds for a while, then bought a roasted chicken from a Thrid woman who was sweating over a small brazier and a slab of hot bread from a ragged Manganar boy with only one arm.
“Dolgar defend you,” said the boy, when I gave him the copper coin from my tiny hoard, the remnants of those given me when Aleksander had sent me home from Zhagad.
“Tell me,” I said, sitting down on the warm stone next the boy to eat my meal. “Do you know of a place where Dolgar’s priests live, a hermitage perhaps—somewhere near the city?” It wouldn’t be far, for word of the meeting passed between the priest and Vayapol and my Teryna contact in only three days, and Teryna was a day’s journey.
“Priests live at the shrine,” said the boy, jerking his head back the way I’d come. “Don’t know of nothing else.”
The shrine. Of course. I gave the astonished lad one leg of my chicken, stowed the rest of it in my pack, and set off for the shrine of the hero god.
The place was little more than a mud hovel, but was interestingly wrought inside. Walls and ceilings were completely covered with bits of metal. Every scrap of copper, steel, tin, or bronze that the god’s devotees could scrounge together was cut into a square or a triangle and stuck to the interior with mud. The worshipers who had no metal brought candles or simple clay oil lamps, which illuminated the metal mosaic like the inside of a star. Devotees believed that Dolgar—a poor and humble hero god—would come someday and forge himself new armor to wear in the battles of the gods.
I found a brown-robed priest tending the lamps and asked him if his order had a nearby hermitage.
“Is your life to be given to holy Dolgar, then?”
“I am in between lives,” I said. “I’ve always been solitary, so perhaps the hermit’s life might suit me. I’ve lately become interested in Dolgar, and I’ve heard of his brotherhood and the good works they do.”
The man was old, his skin like folded leather, his bald head mottled. “There’s hardship in a hermit’s life. Service. No easy pleasure. Young lads like you . . . educated as I hear by your speech . . . like as how you’ve known only soft days. Don’t know what it is to lift your hand in real work.” Clearly his eyesight was none too good.
For the first hour of his warnings, lecturing, and five hundred questions about my ancestors and their choice of gods, I was patient. His shrine didn’t seem to get much business. After two hours, I yearned to work some enchantment that could silence his holy snobbery and loose his secrets, yet I still refused to use my skills to coerce him. But as the third hour passed with no hint of how to find his brothers, and only more questions about the exact location, day, hour, and minute of my birth so he could begin some astrological query as to my fitness to forego meat, women, bathing, and literacy to join his brotherhood, I overcame my scruples. I invited him to visit an ale shop with me to talk more deeply about these things. We stayed away from the good Feydor’s alleyway shop, but found a jolly place with barrels full enough to quench the prodigious thirst of a man who could talk for seven hours straight without saying anything. I learned what I wanted to know.
After a night in a wheat field, sleeping off far too many mugs of ale of my own and most of two days’ walking, I hiked up a steep rocky track toward the hermitage. The bleak edifice of gray stone was perched atop a hill of terraced gardens. Though a few of the plots held a recognizable tangle of onions and potatoes, most were thick with briars and coarse grass. The building was imposing in size, three floors of massive stone blocks built in a U-shape, with a thick outer wall, an iron gate, and corner towers, but it was no fortress. The stonework of the outer wall was in poor repair, tough vines and weeds eating away at the stone, and crumbling mortar leaving long spans of the curving wall sagged or slumped into heaps.
No one answered the gate bell. After a brief wait, I pushed open the rusty ironwork and walked into a shabby courtyard that had once been paved with bricks. Weeds grew freely through the broken paving. A few nausicca vines flowered on the inner walls, but the herb beds laid out in rows between the main expanse of the court, and the cloisters were sadly neglected, the herbs overgrown in weedy clumps.
“Hello,” I called out, standing beside a stone well ring in the middle of the courtyard. No one came.
Seeing and feeling no eyes from the windows around the courtyard, I strolled through the shady cloisters, pushed open the front door, and walked into the ancient pile of rock. Though plain and simple, as such places tend to be, the windows were generous, open to the air and blue skies of southern Manganar. Heavy wooden shutters, in somewhat better repair than the outer walls, could be closed and barred to keep out the winter wind that would blow cold off the plains and the river. One room had two long plank tables with stools pulled up beside and wooden mugs and bowls stacked on shelves on the wall. But spiderwebs hung heavy from the lamp hooks, and my steps echoed from the stone floor without answer. The place was deserted.
The double doors in the far end of the refectory went to the kitchen, its ovens cold, its scarred tables bare. Beyond the refectory I found a room where candles had been made and another where leather work was done. Scraps of wax and leather, glue and twine were all that was left scattered on the worktables amid dead flies and rodent droppings. Another room held a long table stained dark, and shelves with a few broken jars. At first I thought it was a writing room, but when I ran my fingers over the dark stains, it was not words I felt, but blood and pain and death. A physician’s room, perhaps. Uneasy, I abandoned the first floor and went up the central stair.
On the second level of the central wing I found fifty small rooms, a few with thin straw pallets laid on the floor. Most of the rooms were empty. On the third floor I found the children’s dormitory. Two long rooms on either side of the central passageway. Large, airy spaces open to the morning. A few small, ragged mattresses remained. Straw was scattered on the wooden floor, and against the wall stood a rickety table where a washing bowl and pitcher might have been kept. In one corner I found a mouse-chewed doll, made of cloth and stuffed with straw, a smiling face painted on the cloth. And on the walls . . . my heart, tight with grief, smiled when I saw. On the long inner walls were drawings made with coals or burned sticks: faces and stick figures, suns and trees and awkward horses, with a hundred smeared fingerprints mixed in. The old priest had fooled me completely. Years had passed, not days, since priests of Dolgar had cared for children here.
Tired and empty from the futile journey, I stood for a while by one of the windows that looked out over the green vastness of Manganar, letting the warm afternoon wind cool my dusty sweat. The view from the hermits’ vantage was astonishing. The wide bends of the Dursk River were a flat shimmer in the noonday. Broad block-shaped fields of wheat stretched all the way to Vayapol on either side of the river. And just beneath the ridge to the west lay the Emperor’s Road, the wide smooth way that led from Zhagad, in the desert heart of Azhakstan, to the fertile trading centers of the east. If the children who had lived in this room were not
in
the world, they could have at least watched it passing by.
I had lost him. No children were coming back to this place.
Three days later I sat alone at a crossroads spring in the shade of a long-leafed nagera tree, drinking cool sweet water and wrestling with the dilemmas of money, purpose, and homesickness.
Money, because my few zenars were almost gone, and it seemed foolish to use them up when I had so little idea of where to go next. When I had returned to the shrine, no priest had been there. The old woman I found tending the lamps said they’d had no priest at the shrine for ten years; Dolgar wasn’t as popular as the newer Derzhi gods. By the time I returned to the alleyway and found no white dagger and an entirely different landlord at the ale shop and queried every person in Vayapol who knew anything of Dolgar and his followers with no result, I decided that my only course was to go back to Teryna and try to pick up the trail. And so I had started out. But now, after only a few leagues, I found my steps slowing. I was certain that I would find none of those who had directed me to the priest.
As for my purpose, even if I were to find my son, what life had I to offer him? The priest had seen it. I had studied war. I lived it. Breathed it. Every day of my life I worked at the art of killing. What nurturing was that for a babe? Better the child stay with an ignorant priest of good heart, than with a man who walked with demons.
And with no money and no purpose, it was difficult to fight the homesickness. Despite the penalties of my disgrace, I longed for trees and green and rain and quiet days. I had never planned to leave my homeland again. Ezzarian Wardens seldom passed the boundaries of our land, even in past years when there were more than one of us. Our lives and our power were bound up in the trees and the hills and the work we carried on there. I needed to be home, to help my people find out what was to come, whether they wanted to learn it or not. Though I had not dreamed since leaving Col’Dyath, memories of devouring darkness plagued me. I became convinced that I needed to study, to investigate, to look inside myself, even if I had to submit to Caddoc’s prying for a time. Yet it was exceedingly disturbing that I could not envision myself back in Ezzaria, working in the fields, being counseled by Caddoc, living in a house with a woman I no longer knew. Stalemate.
So I sat at the spring and drank my water, watching a shabby, hollow-eyed family of three brothers, their wives, and their children pile back in their wagon, on their way to a new life in the borderlands. I wished for the ordinary hopes and fears they carried with them.
Inspiration is often likened to a bolt of lightning in the mind, but never had an answer to a dilemma struck me in quite so graphic a way. As I leaned over to refill my cup from the mossy basin, my head was invaded by the image of a monster—one with a long neck, leathery wings, and a snout that breathed fire. The monster was neither living nor fearful, but only an image from Derzhi legend. A smile came to my lips as I whispered words that anyone hearing would have counted strange. “So where are you, my lord? And why, after so long, do you seek me out?”
A few months after my return to Ezzaria I had heard news of the Derzhi heir’s marriage to the fiery noblewoman who had helped me save his life. I had sent Aleksander a gift for his wedding day—a small jade figure of a gyrbeast, a mythical monster of Derzhi legend. Though I put no name and no message with the gift, I was sure he would know who sent it, and that he had but to touch it and say the proper word to know where to find me. I had taught him of such spells when we escaped from Capharna, and that particular enchantment had been attached to the figure of a gyrbeast. I had no idea how long it would take him to reach the meeting place that I had buried in the enchantment, but I had nowhere else to go. So, happy at an event that staved off harder decisions, within half an hour I set out to meet the man who had once bought me for a pitiful twenty zenars.