With a shout, Astrid buried the sword in the creature’s torso. Gripping the handle, she swung her feet forward and planted them on either side of the sword. The beast thrashed angrily, trying to smash Astrid against its chest, but the girl was too quick, even in the sunlight. She yanked the sword out of the beast in a flying leap. A spray of blood arced out as Astrid twisted in midair and brought the sword down to sever a flailing monstrous arm. The massive claw fell to the ground in another shower of bright blood.
Knot leapt to his feet. Astrid’s frenzied attack on the Outsider had taken only a few seconds. And yet, while the Outsider was clearly enraged at the fact that one claw was no longer attached to its body, it did not seem otherwise deterred.
Knot drew the dagger from his belt, but he knew the weapon would be useless. Then, he saw one of Astrid’s short swords nearby on the grass, and sprinted to pick it up.
Another volley of arrows hissed through the air, piercing the Outsider, and this attack finally seemed to affect the thing. It stumbled as the arrows struck, one leg buckling beneath it. But, just as quickly, the monster regained its balance, and turned its attention back to Astrid.
As Knot approached, everything seemed to slow around him. The Outsider slashed at Astrid with its one good claw, both forms moving sluggishly. For the first time, Knot looked into its eyes. Deep, dark pits, unfathomably black. Lifeless and dead. And yet… not entirely so. For a brief moment, Knot thought he saw a flicker in the Outsider’s eyes.
If there was one thing Knot had learned to recognize in a look, it was fear.
The monster swiped at the girl again, and Astrid dodged. Her movements were easier, less frantic now that the monster was short a claw. The Outsider stomped again, roaring at Astrid so loudly Knot’s ears rang, but the girl was not fazed. She twirled around the monster’s next attack, slicing the back of its leg with Knot’s sword. The Outsider buckled and fell. Astrid followed immediately, plunging the sword through the thing’s skull again and again.
Finally, the Outsider was still.
Knot rushed to Astrid’s side, short sword gripped in one fist.
“Dead?”
Astrid, covered in blood, kicked the thing’s head, which didn’t budge—it was easily twice the size of the girl. She grunted. “That was supposed to be more dramatic.” She looked up at Knot. “But yes, I think it’s dead.”
Knot glanced up, worried he might see the portal still open, shimmering darkly, but he saw nothing.
“Why only one? Why not others, like in Izet?”
Astrid adjusted her hood to cover more of her face. Knot noticed scars there, already fading; she’d been touched by the sun during the fight. “When someone gifts you a horse, nomad, you don’t ask after the shape of its teeth.”
Knot squatted down to get a better look at the thing. He’d never seen one up close. In Izet, he’d passed out before the battle had ended. Next thing he knew, Astrid was helping him escape, the Outsider bodies buried in rubble behind them.
The Outsider bodies, Reaper bodies, and Lian and Winter, too. All buried somewhere behind them.
Knot shook himself, and took a closer look. The creature’s skin was black, so smooth it almost shone in the sunlight. Truth was, now that he was looking closer, there wasn’t much more to see. No scars, no marks whatsoever that Knot could discern.
“We need to talk with the disciples,” Knot said. He had no idea what they were going to do with the body.
4
CINZIA CAUTIOUSLY APPROACHED KNOT and Astrid. Jane and the other disciples were rounding up and calming the panicked, scattered crowd of Odenites—in the chaos many had run into the forest, while others had even rushed the Sons of Canta at Kirlan’s gate. Fortunately, while the Sons had barred any Odenites from entering, they had kept their word and refrained from seriously harming anyone.
The Odenites, it seemed, would be all right. Cinzia was much more worried about the possibility of this—whatever it was—happening again.
Cinzia eyed the monster’s sleek black body, unmoving in the soil, now muddied with blood. “Is it…?”
Knot looked up at her. “Dead. But best keep your distance for now.”
Cinzia looked back at where she’d left Arven, in Elessa’s care. The young woman had not said a word since the man had killed himself in front of her. Cinzia could not blame her. She, too, was shaken by the whole thing. First the man’s violent suicide, and then this monster emerging in the light of noonday, of all things. That it happened in the sunlight made it seem all the worse. Things like Astrid, at least, were not as menacing in the sun. What was different with this creature?
Miraculously, other than a few minor injuries, it seemed the Odenites had escaped mostly unharmed. Knot, Astrid, and the quick reaction of the guard force had saved them. And yet, despite the relief Cinzia felt at the fact that everyone was still safe, that Astrid and Knot had defeated this monster, another feeling expanded, burning and wild in her chest.
Anger.
“What was that thing?” she asked, keeping her emotions in check with some effort.
Knot and Astrid looked at one another.
“I do not have the patience for you to pretend you do not know.”
Knot’s jaw was clenched tightly before he answered. “One of the monsters we encountered in Izet. An Outsider—that’s what Astrid calls them. Don’t know much more than that.” He looked pointedly at Astrid. “Do you?”
Astrid shrugged. She had wiped the blood from her face, but messy smears still remained. “There are daemons even daemons fear. This is one of them.”
“And yet you defeated it,” Cinzia said. “And not even at night. Is that really something to fear?”
Astrid scowled, but Cinzia did not care. Now was not the time to be cryptic.
“Just because we killed one of the things does not mean I don’t fear them,” Astrid said quietly. “And… I’m less worried about the Outsiders themselves, and far more about what they serve.”
“Azael,” Cinzia whispered. A voice, deep and rumbling, echoed in her mind.
You will all die screaming, and I will watch, and take pleasure in it.
She remembered Kovac’s eyes, leaking iridescent green smoke.
“How is it possible,” Cinzia asked through gritted teeth, “that we know so little about him?”
“About who?”
Cinzia turned to see Jane approaching, Ocrestia and Baetrissa trailing behind her.
“Azael, the Fear Lord,” Cinzia said.
Astrid coughed. “Not sure saying his name is the greatest idea.”
Cinzia wanted to spit. “What difference does it make whether I say his name or not? If he wanted to be here, to kill us, he would.” Cinzia wanted to believe what she said was true, but she really had no idea. Was she provoking an unknown force? And yet, at the same time, she could hardly control her anger. Just when she thought they were making progress, they had run into the blockade. And now this.
“The Lord of the Nine Daemons?” Jane asked. “Was this his doing?”
Cinzia nodded to Astrid. “She seems to think so.”
Astrid raised her hands, palms forward. “Just saying what comes to mind.”
“That man who killed himself… he had just arrived in the camp?” Jane asked.
“That is what Arven said.” Cinzia hoped the young woman was all right. “But our numbers grow at an unmanageable rate. Arven updates our records daily, but even she cannot keep them updated quickly enough. He may have been with us for some time.”
“We need to interrogate Arven,” Jane said. “See if we can figure out the identity of this man. See if anyone else in the camp knew him, who he associated with, where he came from.”
Cinzia’s anger flared. “The man just slit his throat in front of her, Jane. Did you not see Arven’s face? Her hair, her hands, her clothes covered in this man’s blood? Give the girl a break, for Canta’s sake.”
“We will give her the time she needs to recover,” Jane said. “
But we must find the truth.”
Cinzia could not argue with that. Her emotions were getting the best of her.
“What connection exists between what the man did to himself, and the daemon that emerged?” Jane wondered.
“We saw the same thing in Izet,” Knot said. “Not sure what exactly happened, but there was a connection with the Ceno order.” He glanced at Astrid. “And with blood, too.”
“It’s always blood,” the girl muttered.
“Could this happen again?” Jane asked.
“No way to tell,” Knot replied. “In Izet, the Tokal-Ceno… he needed both royal blood and tiellan blood. The man who killed himself today was human, and wasn’t no king I’ve ever heard of.”
“But only one Outsider appeared today,” Astrid said. “In Izet, there were half a dozen at least, not to mention that huge bastard that appeared at the last.”
Knot crossed his arms in front of his chest. “And Azael was there, too. Wasn’t here today.”
“Not that we know of,” Cinzia added. She had yet to tell anyone about her encounter with Azael after the Kamite battle. She had killed the man Azael had possessed. He might have been dying anyway, but Cinzia did not know that for a certainty. Just thinking of the event made her feel hot with shame. There was no way she could tell Jane. She wanted to tell Knot, but she had yet to find a good time to do it.
“Is there anything else we can do to protect ourselves from another event like this?” Jane asked.
Knot shrugged. “Getting that information from Arven is a start. Maybe assigning more people to help her. We could train the Prelates in some specific tactics that might help in taking another one of these things down. Other than that, ain’t sure what else we can do.”
“Then in the meantime, I suppose the rest of us should occupy ourselves with this blockade problem,” Jane mused. “Ocrestia, do you—”
“Jane,” Cinzia said firmly, interrupting her sister.
Cinzia felt Jane’s eyes rest on her, wide and expectant.
“We cannot continue to ignore the problem behind all of this,” Cinzia said, voice straining with the effort of keeping herself calm.
Jane let out a heavy sigh. “I believe our best hope of addressing that problem awaits us in Triah.”
“I do not agree,” Cinzia said.
The others around them were silent. It was the first time any of them had openly expressed such direct dissent against Jane.
Well, it’s about bloody time, Cinzia thought. And yet she was surprised to find herself so ardently on the attack. She, too, had experienced Canta’s power recently. She had healed her own father. They had nearly finished translating the Codex, too. All things considered, she had witnessed miracles.
But she had witnessed horrors, as well. Horrors they still had no means to understand, let alone deal with.
“We are nearly finished with the translation,” Cinzia said. “We need to finish it. See if there is anything in the Codex that can help us with the Nine Daemons, anything other than the scraps we’ve already found.”
“On that, at least, we agree,” Jane said.
That was the easier of her two suggestions. “We also continue to ignore the Beldam’s splinter group. They’ve traveled behind us since we left Harmoth, but we’ve hardly acknowledged them, let alone done anything about them.” The Beldam, an eccentric old woman who had once been a prominent member of the Odenites, had nevertheless seemed to have her own agenda— including “getting rid of all the tiellans,” as she’d put it—and preached as much to the Odenites. Cinzia had approached the woman with an ultimatum, a deal, that if the Beldam shared what she knew of the Nine Daemons and stopped her campaign against the tiellans, Cinzia and Jane would offer protection from the Nine as best they could. But the Beldam had broken that arrangement, holding secret meetings where she still postured against the tiellans, eventually leading a group of Odenites who agreed with her on that count away from the Church of Canta.
Then, the Beldam had left, taking a few hundred Odenites with her. They had not gone far, however, and had eventually followed the Odenites all the way down Khale’s eastern coast, always keeping their distance, but always within sight.
Jane pursed her lips. “We’ve already tried dealing with the Beldam once, and it did not work.”
“Dealing with her, one way or another, can come later,” Cinzia said. “Right now, I think we need to work with her. The Beldam broke her part of the deal, but she has still been following us. I would wager she still thinks we can protect her.”
“You really want to ally yourself with her, of all people?” Ocrestia asked. So far, Ocrestia was the only tiellan appointed as one of Jane’s disciples, despite more than a third of the Odenites being tiellan.
Cinzia’s heart softened just slightly. “I do not agree with her, Ocrestia. But I think she may have knowledge we need. We need to talk with her. Beyond that, there is no place in this movement for that woman or her philosophies.”
Ocrestia said nothing to that, and Cinzia could not tell how her explanation was met.
The Beldam wanted to annihilate Ocrestia’s people, yet Cinzia wanted to deal with the Beldam. Cinzia could not imagine how that must make Ocrestia feel. But Cinzia needed to do this. She needed to find out more about the Nine Daemons, and she would go to any lengths to do it. They had other problems, to be sure, and she hoped Jane and the others could do their part to get them through what lay ahead.
But this was what she was going to do. This was what she needed to do. No one would convince her otherwise.
5
Cineste, northern Khale
THE FIRST RESPECTABLE INN Winter and her companions found in Cineste was the Wolfanger Inn, which lay near the merchants’ quarter of the city. Spring was quickly becoming summer, and she welcomed the late afternoon sun on the streets instead of ice and snow.
The sounds of musical instruments, singing, and loud conversation drifted out to them from inside the inn, but Galce hesitated before entering.
“My garice, I am not sure I am comfortable with this plan.”
Winter turned to regard him. “This is our best option, Galce. We just need to get settled in, then I’ll leave the two of you here with our belongings and find the tiellan inn.” She didn’t intend to stay there, of course. This would be her base of operations while in Cineste. But if Gord, Darrin, and Eranda were in the city, that was the best place for her to start looking for them.
Galce closed his eyes, and Winter rolled hers. “You’ve consulted Chaos a dozen times now.” An exaggeration, but not by much, if Winter had gotten as good at reading the man as she thought. “Chaos approves. It’s your turn to get on board.”
“Very well, my garice.” Galce nodded, and Winter opened the door, allowing both Galce and Urstadt to enter first.
Winter immediately saw why it was called the Wolfanger Inn: dozens of mounted wolf heads decorated the walls, and wolf pelts covered the floor. She grimaced. She wouldn’t have batted an eye at a few pelts or heads, but this was just excessive.
Galce approached the bar, where an innkeeper was pouring ale into a set of mugs on a tray. Winter followed behind him, doing her best to look meek. She drew a few glances, but most humans in the inn apparently still didn’t mind a servile tiellan.
“We’ll take two rooms,” Galce said.
“I’ll take two silvers, then,” the innkeeper grunted. He didn’t look up at Galce until he’d handed the tray of ale mugs to one of his servers. When he saw Winter, the corners of his mouth turned down.
“She a friend of yours?” the innkeeper said, regarding Winter with narrowed eyes.
Galce looked back at Winter.
Bloody stick with the plan.
“Course not,” Galce said, turning back to the innkeeper. “She’s a servant of mine. The extra room is for her and my guard.”
Good. Just as we’d practiced.
The innkeeper nodded. “As it should be,” he said. “Two silvers, then.”
> Galce paid the man, and Winter and her companions were about to walk up the stairs to their rooms when the common room’s commotion quickly died down, and the entire inn grew eerily silent.
Winter turned to see a young couple that had just entered the inn. A husband and wife, she suspected. They looked very young, maybe even Winter’s age, but they had three children. Two girls stood between them, and a little boy at their feet. Winter could not imagine such a life. To have three children at her age? Such a thing seemed impossible. She had married late, and then her husband had been killed. That had changed much more besides.
The man was human, but the woman, Winter quickly realized, was tiellan, and each of their children bore the pointed ears of the tiellan race—slightly smaller than their mother’s, as was the case with most mixed-race children, but prominent all the same. She hadn’t even realized the woman was tiellan because she wasn’t wearing a siara, and her dress was much more stylish than that of a traditional tiellan.
That could have been my life, Winter thought. She had married Knot, a human, in the hope of making her life better than it might have been otherwise. Based on the reaction of the people in this inn, however, Winter began to doubt whether it actually would have made anything better at all.
“Bloody elf-lover,” someone in the common room muttered. A few grunts and shouts of agreement followed.
“You aren’t welcome here!” someone else shouted.
Winter was about to turn and usher Galce and Urstadt up the steps when the next comment arrested her.
“Look at those mongrels,” someone laughed. “Those brats are somewhere between human and tiellan. Probably the worst of both.”
Winter turned. They were just children, for Canta’s sake. But she felt a firm hand on her shoulder.
“You wanted to keep a low profile,” Urstadt whispered. “Getting involved here will not help with that.”
Winter clenched her jaw, torn between intervening, somehow, and leaving it all behind her. She hadn’t come to Cineste for this. But was it really possible for her to stand by while it happened?
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