Wicked Saints

by Emily A Duncan

  Bloodletting to test for magic was a heretical act in itself, made worse by the fact a heretic blood mage would be doing the deed.

  Malachiasz’s pale gaze locked on Nadya.

  Fine. If he tries to kill me for my power, I’ll just have to kill him first.

  He took her hand, fingers curling around her wrist. The heat of his touch made Nadya’s skin crawl. She saw the flash of silver as the blade lifted, felt the shift of fire to ice as the metal touched the top of her index finger.

  “No,” she whispered. She tensed, pulling back, but his grip was firm, locked around her like a shackle.

  Without breaking eye contact, she drew her voryen, using his hand around her wrist as leverage to yank him closer, snapping the dagger to his throat. He tensed, head forced back to keep her blade from cutting flesh. A slow smile tugged at his mouth.

  “You already know it’s me,” she said, voice low. “Don’t think I’ll be complicit in your heresy.”

  “Suspicion and confirmation are two different things. And heresy is such an ugly word.”

  Nadya glanced at Anna. It looked as though the other girl had stopped breathing. Anna shook her head, alarmed.

  “Well, I want proof,” Rashid said.

  Malachiasz’s hand was still clenched over Nadya’s wrist and there was a thin trickle of blood trailing down his pale neck, damage from her less than steady nerves. He moved his other hand up, his movement cautious, and wiped the blood from his skin with his thumb.

  “Complicit in heresy, indeed,” he murmured.

  Nadya pulled her dagger back.

  “The moons going out wasn’t enough for you?” Malachiasz asked Rashid, dropping Nadya’s wrist and sheathing his knife. She darted back to Anna’s side. “I am a bit curious about the long-term ramifications of a spell like that. What havoc will be wrought on the tides from canceling out the moons for that long?”

  “We’re thousands of miles away from any oceans, Malachiasz,” Parijahan said wearily.

  “It’s something to think about.”

  “He’s Tranavian. They always have water on the brain,” Rashid said. “Their country is practically under water as it is.”

  “A few lakes—” Malachiasz said.

  “And swamps.”

  “So many ponds!” Parijahan said.

  “Bordered by an ocean on the north and the east,” Rashid continued. “Why do you really think your war has never moved into Tranavia? No one in Kalyazin can swim. Can you swim?” he asked Nadya.

  She shook her head.

  “When you put it that way, buried alive under snow does seem like an altogether more satisfying way to die,” Malachiasz mused.

  “I can think of a hundred better ways for you to die,” Anna muttered.

  He smiled, pressing a hand to his heart. “Surely all one hundred are deserved.”

  Parijahan said, quite solemnly, “Tides are controlled by gravity. My people figured that out centuries ago.”

  Malachiasz made an indignant sound and looked at Rashid, who nodded seriously.

  Nadya wondered if their idle chatter meant her magic had been forgotten, but she found she wasn’t so lucky as Rashid pointed to her. “Magic.”

  “What will you do with the proof?”

  “Marvel at how a country who lost their mages and have been hanging on to a war against mages by the skin of their teeth may finally have a chance again.”

  She glanced at Malachiasz, wondering what his reaction might be, but his face was impassive. “What will he do?”

  “Oh, he’ll probably want to kill you for your power. Isn’t that how all your clerics died out in the first place?”

  Malachiasz grinned.

  Nadya shuddered. That had definitely had a hand in it.

  “But,” Rashid continued, “he will not do that. Because he is not in the Kalyazi mage killing business.”

  “I could be,” Malachiasz mused.

  Parijahan rolled her eyes but a shock of terror ran through Nadya at his quiet contemplation of her death. The Akolans weren’t taking him seriously and she couldn’t understand it.

  Nadya ran her hand down her necklace, fingers catching against the beads as she considered what spell she could use, until she reached Krsnik’s bead. Perhaps simple was the way to handle this. She had already done flashy.

  Little help?

  Krsnik, an old and grouchy god, grumbled something that was apparently an assent because Nadya was given the spell a heartbeat later. She blew smoky, glimmering symbols onto her palm and her hand lit into flames.

  Parijahan exchanged a delighted glance with Rashid. Nadya moved over to the table and trailed a burning fingertip over what was clearly a discarded spell book page. She picked up the paper and it burst into flames. When only ashes were left in her hand, she tilted them into the blood mage’s palm. She brought her gaze up to meet his and was unsure of what she saw in his eyes.

  Tension, curiosity, but underneath it all was something darker. Something that made a shiver jolt down her spine. It made her wonder why a heretic had been placed before her path. To kill him? What other reason could there possibly be?

  A smile flashed on his lips, as if he could read her thoughts the way the gods did.

  “So, what is the difference between you and our blood mage friend here?” Rashid asked. “Forgive a handsome young foreigner his ignorant questions.”

  The blood mage in question flopped down on the pillows beside Rashid, opening his spell book in his lap. Nadya never saw him cut himself, but the back of his hand was bleeding. He used a quill to scratch the blood onto the pages of his book.

  “I think your mage is making the differences fairly blatant,” she said. “Blood. Spell books. Heresy. That’s Tranavian magic.”

  Malachiasz smiled without looking up from his work.

  He smiles too much, she thought.

  “My power is divine. I am not. There’s no blood. No spell books.”

  “Just the requirement of constant approval from the gods,” Malachiasz said. “No pressure. One misstep and it’s all over.”

  “Is it so hard to live by the will of the gods? They ask for so little. You give them no credit.”

  He shook his head. “So little?” he asked incredulously. “They ask for far too much. Why do you think Tranavia broke with the gods? Who yearns for life yoked to another being’s whim? We wished to choose our own destiny.”

  Nadya rolled her eyes. “And is your destiny worth the torture and mutilation of a century of innocents to reach the means for your magic? Hundreds upon thousands of people.”

  His expression flickered but he recovered so quickly Nadya questioned if it happened at all.

  “Sacrifices were made willingly. No one is forced into tests.”

  “Except prisoners of war,” Nadya shot back.

  He leaned forward. “Even prisoners of war are made to understand the greater good they’re serving in the end.”

  “Greater good?” Nadya cried, finally losing her temper. “How dare you speak of a greater good, like your kind has any right to pretend you are anything but heretics and abominations revolting against the gods.”

  Malachiasz was grinning now, sharp-toothed and dangerous. He lolled his head to one side, lazily closing his spell book. He took a bandage out of his pocket and slowly wrapped his hand. “All right, you win. She’ll be useful,” he said to Rashid.

  Nadya didn’t like the sound of that. “Useful? Are you going to experiment on me as well?”

  Malachiasz stood and crossed the room until he was standing over Nadya. He was very tall. He took her chin in his ink- and blood-stained hand and tilted her face up toward his.

  “You would not be so lucky,” he said, his voice soft, his breath a whisper against her cheek.

  “Malachiasz…” Parijahan said.

  He released Nadya, taking a step back. “We can keep you safe,” he said. “The High Prince could be right outside the door and never realize the church is even here. I’ve made cer
tain.”

  “The High Prince, maybe, but what of Tranavia’s other horrors?” Anna shot back.

  Now it was Malachiasz’s turn to go still.

  “What?”

  “The monsters you Tranavians let foul once-holy churches. What about them?”

  “The Vultures do not venture onto the battlefield,” he said, but his voice was strained. One of his hands absently rubbed his forearm. “They haven’t left Tranavia in…”

  “About thirty years,” Nadya said. “Funny, that.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he shook his head, backing down.

  Woven into the darkest of Kalyazi nightmares were the Vultures of Tranavia. Blood mages so twisted by their heretical magic they were no longer human, nothing more than violent monsters. It was true, they hadn’t been seen in Kalyazin in a long time. It was also true they had been one of the final nails in the last of the clerics’ coffins.

  If they came for Nadya, she wasn’t sure she could escape so easily this time.

  “Why would you help us?” Nadya asked after a beat of uncomfortable silence.

  “We’re no friends to Tranavia,” Parijahan said.

  Nadya shot a pointed look at Malachiasz. He smiled at her.

  “We’re here because Tranavians burned down the last, what, three refugee camps we found?” Malachiasz said, moving back to the tables and hopping up next to Parijahan.

  “Three camps, two outposts, one military encampment, and one village,” Rashid said.

  “The military camp was before my time,” Malachiasz said, answering the question Nadya was about to ask: how could they ever get him into a military encampment?

  “Again, we want this war to end,” Parijahan said simply.

  “Don’t we all?” Anna muttered.

  “Yes, well, keeping a Kalyazi cleric alive would do that, wouldn’t it? Even with the differences in ideology.”

  “It’s a start,” Nadya allowed.

  “What if we go further?” Parijahan asked. “The boys kept telling me to wait until an opportunity arose, and now here you are. So, tell me, how do you feel about assassinating the Tranavian king?”

  7

  SEREFIN

  MELESKI

  Svoyatova Alisha Varushkina: A cleric of Bozidarka and a seer, Alisha’s visions protected Kalyazin from an uprising in the western provinces. This protection did not extend to her. Years later, a low prince from the west, Dmitri Zyuganov, would burn out her eyes with a flaming poker for interfering with his plans.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  “Your Highness?”

  Serefin clenched a fist, reflex causing his index finger to brush against the razor in his sleeve. He forced himself to relax. Being on edge wasn’t going to help anything. “Yes?”

  He was relieved to find Kacper trailing along behind Teodore, less relieved to notice Kacper had something in his hand that looked suspiciously like a royal missive. Dread coiled in his stomach.

  “Did you speak with my father?” he asked Teodore.

  “I did, Your Highness. He expressed—” he paused and Serefin sighed, knowing what was coming “—displeasure at the outcome of yesterday’s attack.”

  “Well, he wasn’t here,” Serefin muttered.

  Teodore said nothing, and Kacper handed Serefin the missive. He took it gingerly between two fingers. The seal was his father’s. The king generally sent messages via courier instead of with magic in an effort to mask the disappointing reality that he was a less than impressive blood mage. Contact could be made with blood magic—like Teodore had done the night before—but it was discouraged.

  “Did this arrive this morning?” he asked.

  Kacper nodded.

  There was no telling how long it had taken to reach Serefin’s hands. He broke the seal, scanned the letter, became confident that his eyesight was finally failing him completely, scanned it again, and looked up at Kacper with a frown before reading it closely once more.

  “Did my father mention this?”

  “He did not,” Teodore said.

  “Nothing? Nothing at all? Not even the littlest hint that he had been planning this for months without giving me so much as a warning?”

  “It would help, Ser—Your Highness,” Kacper said, shooting Teodore an irritated look, “if we knew what the message was?”

  “He wants me to return to Tranavia,” Serefin said, handing Kacper the missive and ignoring Teodore’s scandalized expression. “Immediately, apparently, as there’s a matter of an upcoming Rawalyk.”

  “What?” Kacper looked startled.

  “The ceremony to choose a royal consort—” Teodore started.

  “I know what a Rawalyk is—” Kacper said, just as Serefin snapped at Teodore, “He’s aware of the tradition.”

  Teodore gave Kacper a dark look.

  “I need to go after the cleric, I don’t have time for this,” Serefin said. “We are so close to a turning point with the war, and he wants me to drop everything for a pointless charade.”

  “He did mention that the Vultures requested to be sent after the cleric,” Teodore said.

  Serefin raked a hand through his hair. Kacper’s eyebrows lifted.

  “So he’s stripping me of my command and ordering me home,” Serefin said softly.

  Teodore didn’t respond.

  It made sense, of course, for the Vultures to want to get their hands on the first Kalyazi cleric in more than thirty years. There was a new generation in the cult, ones who had never seen Kalyazi magic before. It stood to reason.

  But Serefin hated the idea of his victory going to someone else. His father was the one who had sent Serefin to the front when he was only sixteen; he wanted a war hero for a son so that was what he got, and all the mess that came with it. It wasn’t fair to ask him to fill a role he had grown unused to for the sake of tradition when they were so near the end.

  There would be no arguing. It was not a choice. If he left that day, he could reach Grazyk in a few weeks, potentially longer depending on what they found when they reached the border. If he took only Ostyia and Kacper with him, he could make the journey in even less time. But they were behind enemy lines. Anything could go wrong.

  “I will,” he started slowly, each word a sharp arrow piercing through him, “leave you in charge of the company. You are to take the prisoners to Kyętri, am I right?”

  A nod from Teodore.

  “Right. Lieutenant Neiborski will be coming with me,” he said.

  Kacper looked relieved, as if he briefly thought Serefin was going to leave him behind. Ridiculous.

  “General Rabalska, as well, obviously. I expect you to have the prisoners outfitted and removed from here by tomorrow morning at latest.”

  Teodore was aware he was being dismissed. He bowed and Serefin waved him away. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t have to see the man again for months.

  He moved through the cold, unadorned hallways until he reached the vast wooden doors that opened out into the courtyard. While they were plain on the back, the fronts of the doors were covered with ornate carvings and icons of saints. Six of them, three to each door. Serefin gazed at them after the doors closed before turning and jumping down the stairs leading to the courtyard where Ostyia was waiting. She was perched on the wall that led to the seven thousand steps down the mountain.

  Serefin dropped his pack on the ground and hopped up onto the wall beside her. Kacper sat on his other side.

  “I have to go home and get married.”

  Ostyia had the decency to wince. “What about the cleric?”

  “The Vultures have gone to fetch her.”

  “She’ll be dead within a day.”

  Kacper shuddered. “I wouldn’t wish that fate even on a Kalyazi. Can you imagine?” He flashed a hand over his face. “Those masks are terrifying.”

  The Vultures were a complicated part of Tranavian society and politics. They were the blood mage elite, a cultic sect of individuals, closed off from the rest of their kingdom, li
ving in the hollowed-out carcass of an ancient cathedral in Grazyk under the leadership of a king of their own, the Black Vulture, who sat on the Carrion Throne.

  When Tranavia broke from the gods, the Vultures filled in the gaps left behind by the church. They acted on their own, citing magic as a higher voice of command than any mortal king could ever be. The Vultures could have gone after the cleric without permission from the king, but Tranavia had in place a careful balance of power. The Vultures would act as advisors to the throne, but their authority only extended to the realm of magic—which in Tranavia was a vast reach. They skulked through the palace with their iron claws and torn robes, more monster than human, yet revered nonetheless.

  For decades, the image of Tranavian politics was that the king kept the Vultures on a careful leash. They were to train the royal children to harness their magic as well as maintain a certain level of security in Grazyk, but they were not to leave Grazyk or Kyętri, the two cities that housed the cult’s leaders.

  They were kept away from the front owing to an unfortunate measure of unpredictability to their actions that made them more liability than asset on the battlefield. That said, Serefin had been through many a battle that would have been turned if they’d had even one Vulture in their midst. But he would never request one. They unsettled him.

  Serefin scratched the back of his head as he squinted up at the monastery’s onion domes. The glare from the whitened stone irritated his bad eye. “My father wants the prisoners to be taken to the Kyętri mines.”

  “That’s a lot of activity from the Vultures suddenly,” Ostyia said.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

  A hush fell over them. Contemplating the Salt Mines where the Vultures held their experiments was hardly pleasant.

  “I don’t like this,” Serefin said finally.

  Ostyia glanced at him.

  “The timing, the Vultures, that my father had this”—he waved the missive still in his hand—“sent instead of just having a mage contact me, which gives me less than no time to return home. I don’t understand what he’s doing.”

  It was no secret that Serefin’s relationship with his father was strained. He didn’t know if it was fear, distaste, or the simple reality that sending Serefin away to war at such a young age had put a rift in their relationship. Whatever it was, erratic behavior from the king was becoming increasingly normal, so Serefin didn’t know why all these strange things converging at once surprised him.