Blood of the Gods

by David Mealing

  She sat still in her place, listening as the coach rattled around them. For weeks now, her mind had been consumed by politics and planning the Thellan invasion; even now, her divisions would be marching south, where her ships were blockading their ports, besieging their forts and coastal cities. Now it was ablaze, all of it.

  “How long do we have?” she asked.

  Ka’Hannat stared back at her, an unnerving emptiness in his pupil-less eyes. In the dark of the coach, she might have mistaken it for a trick of the light, but then, she’d seen the shaman in the throes of his spirits before.

  “Three turnings of the moon,” Ka’Hannat said. “The champions will rise. But the Old God’s ways have worn thin. The spirits remember. They remember now. War is coming.” With that he choked and coughed, cutting short whatever else he’d meant to say. Tirana moved to his side on their cushioned bench, cradling the shaman as he slumped forward.

  Erris left them to it; beyond a glance to be certain Ka’Hannat was well, the weight of all she’d heard pressed on her as great as any duty she’d ever borne. It was like being told children’s tales were real—the monsters in the night, come to spirit her away to the Nameless for misbehaving. She’d never believed any of it then, and struggled to do so now. The threats in front of her were clear: She’d misstepped, politically, and the priests and Assembly would be taking steps to remove her from command. Paendurion had seized power among the Thellan, threatening to raise another army to invade the northern colonies here in the New World. Her attack had been purely defensive in nature, wielding the combined strength of New Sarresant and Gand to smash the capacity of the Thellan colonies to make war. The straightforward path was to flee the city, then to regroup among Royens’s soldiers and decide her next move. All while continuing to lead her soldiers in the field, bypassing the Thellan forts to strike and secure their harbors.

  But now she had two chimeras taking shape in front of her. Voren’s warnings, that Paendurion’s tactics in the south were no more than a trap, meant to distract and ensnare her while he completed his conquests of the Old World. And Ka’Hannat’s visions, of monsters in the night, and soldiers of shadow on the far side of the world.

  “Is he well?” Erris asked after Tirana had steadied the shaman in his seat.

  “He is,” Tirana replied. “The spirits’ visions are hard to bear, and Ka’Hannat’s gift is strong.”

  “Just as well,” she said. “I need his strength, and that of your people. Tell him so. Tell him I need your best to sail with my army, when the moment arrives.”

  Tirana paused before repeating it in the tribes’ tongue, and Ka’Hannat listened with a weary head, leaning forward with his eyes closed as she spoke.

  “He knows,” Tirana said. “He’s already given the commands. Hunters, and spirit-touched among our women.”

  “Not good enough. I need him. I need—”

  The cart lurched as it came to a sudden halt.

  She fell silent in time to hear Essily’s voice from the driver’s seat, above.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Essily said. “Stand down at once.”

  Tirana exchanged a look with her, though Ka’Hannat remained slumped forward, his face obscured by his hands. Gods damn it. They’d been too slow.

  “Good day, Captain,” a woman’s voice said, loud enough to carry across an open street. “We have reason to believe you are transporting High Commander d’Arrent. We ask that you remand her into our custody at once, and without resistance.”

  The coach door clicked as Erris released the latch, pushing it open and stepping into the morning sun.

  She saw the brown-robed figures tighten their line as she emerged, Aide-Captain Essily managing no more than, “She’s not …” before her appearance spoiled his denial. First Prelate Casanne herself led the detail, standing a few paces in front of the priests blocking the street ahead of them. Twenty priests at least, and a confirmation Tuyard had been at least half-wrong: They must have been planning this even before her revelations from Voren. Death binders, and Shelter, meant to contain her if she attempted to resist.

  “High Commander,” Casanne said. “If you would consent to come with us, we can avoid unnecessary violence.”

  Erris stayed in place at the top of the carriage steps, looking down on the priests. Good on Casanne for dispensing with pretense. She could do the same.

  “Stand down,” Erris said. “Disperse, and I will forget the faces I’ve seen here.” She paused, long enough to sweep a look across their line. The brown-robed men and women held to their resolve, but she’d seen the same sort of zeal in raw recruits. Courage was easy when it came without a price.

  “Take her,” Casanne said.

  For a moment no one moved. Essily stayed seated above her in the driver’s seat, the shaman and his translator had made no move to emerge from the carriage, and the priests stayed arrayed against her, blocking the street in a line. The world had dimmed to Erris and Casanne, meeting one another’s eyes as she weighed the Prelate, measuring what would come next.

  Five priests broke the silence, moving toward the carriage together. Men, large-statured and clearly chosen for it. One or two might be Shelter binders, but the rest would have Death. Death was the key; no means to apprehend a fullbinder without it. There would be a handful of Death binders with tethers at the ready—and an all-too-ample supply of black ink on the leylines in the months since the battle.

  She blinked, trying Mind as a feint. Two separate Death tethers sliced her binding as soon as she made it, before even a single copy of her could blink into existence.

  No time to trace the connections to the individual binders, but she didn’t have to. She saw the signs of concentration, the sudden response after extended moments of waiting.

  Entropy came next, and this time they weren’t so quick.

  A billowing fire erupted in the middle of the priests, a blast of raw heat that knocked half their line to the ground and killed as many more. Death came again for her Entropy, but she was already moving, this time drawing Death tethers of her own to hold at the ready.

  “Go!” she shouted, and the carriage surged forward, in time for her Death to slice through the first signs of Shelter erected in their way.

  The shock of violence had yet to register for most of the priests. Brown-robed figures picked themselves up from the street to try Shelter again. Once more she found Death, slicing a path for the carriage to thunder through, leaving scorched flesh and more ink leaking into the leylines where victims of her Entropy lay dead or dying on the stone.

  The carriage raced away, toward the city walls, and she half opened the door, leaning from the side to look back on the priests. Casanne wouldn’t have acted alone, and now they had a dozen martyrs to rally more to their cause. She had to reach Royens’s camps, where the Great Barrier had stood and was beginning to be repaired. Ten thousand soldiers at her back would silence the worst of it, if she struck before the priests and militias could establish a hold on the city. But the black smoke rising from the bodies in the street seemed as ill an omen as she could have feared: the first dead in a second revolution, when far greater dangers gathered against them abroad.

  53

  SARINE

  The Starfield and the Strands

  Soulless Eternity

  Ka’Inari’s hand melted into hers, and they became one. Consciousness assaulted her through their connection, awareness of thoughts beyond her mind. Yanjin Tigai held her other hand, though his form remained distinct. His eyes were closed. Stars moved around them as they floated, beams of energy tying them to each other, threatening to ensnare them in wild surges of power.

  A figure moved in the distance. A massive shadow, blocking out the light.

  She knew it. It had seen her. It was moving.

  Light streaked past her eyes. She was whole again. She was herself.

  “See?” Tigai said. “Faster this way.”

  Ka’Inari released her hand, taking a step away from
her. Her senses still reeled, racked by the memory of what she’d seen, an echo of the figure that had attacked them when they crossed the Divide. It had lasted no more than a moment, but she felt it burned into her mind: the stars, the swirling patterns, like being submerged in the deepest parts of the night sky. And the creature, moving in the depths. Fixed on her. Coming closer.

  “We’re less than a league from the tower,” Acherre was saying. “Which according to Hashiro will put us near a concentration of Imperial soldiers. I’d bloody kiss the Nameless for a good map of this city. Can you ask whether our guides know the streets here? At least a rough guess of what’s in front of us.”

  Tigai looked between her and Acherre with impatience on his face.

  “Something’s wrong,” Yuli said. Ka’Inari seemed to notice at the same moment, approaching her slowly from the front.

  “Sarine?” Ka’Inari said.

  None of them saw it, Anati thought to her. Her kaas’s voice rang like thunder in her ears. Why didn’t they see?

  “What’s that?” Tigai said. “Is she well?”

  By now all five of her companions had taken note of her, turning to face her where they stood.

  “He … he saw us,” she said.

  Ka’Inari closed his eyes as Acherre rounded on Tigai. “What did you do to her?” Acherre demanded. “You said it would be safe.”

  Tigai regarded Acherre with a raised eyebrow, but then, he wouldn’t be able to understand without her to translate.

  “We have to move,” Tigai said. “Word of your attack across the river will soon reach the Tower, if it hasn’t already.”

  “Lord Tigai,” Sarine said. “What you did—moving us through the strands, you called it. Where did it take us?”

  “Nowhere,” Tigai said. “The starfield isn’t a place. I hooked us to—”

  Yes, it is a place, Anati thought to them both. It’s His place.

  “What?” Tigai said. He seemed unfazed when Anati appeared perched on her shoulder, staring at him as though he’d issued them both a challenge. “Look, whatever your pet thinks, we have to—ow, bloody fuck!”

  Tigai reeled backward, waving his hands as though he were warding away a fly. Anati glared at him, projecting her head forward, both eyes glistening.

  “Anati, stop!” she said. “Lord Tigai, I need to know you can take us somewhere safe, when we’re finished here. Something is coming toward this city.”

  “I can take us to half the cities in the Empire, once we have Remarin and Mei.” He stepped back from her, glaring back at Anati as fiercely as the kaas had glared at him. “But we have to go, and now.”

  She nodded, her head finally cleared enough to make sense of what was in front of them. The markets here had the same look of fighting she’d seen on the western approach. Terraced houses lined narrow, winding streets, built from a strange mix of stone and what looked like paper, or at least thin, painted wood. Fires raged on the horizon, where the ships in the harbor had shelled the waterfront, but beyond scorch marks and chipped stone from stray shots, the buildings here had been relatively untouched. Most of the city past the market was built on level ground as far as she could see, with even rooftops save for the grand tower rising between them and the harbor. That was their goal, and it fell to her to get them there.

  “Stay close,” she said. The haze of what she’d seen before had dulled to the same muted hum as the Veil’s simmering hate. Neither mattered. She was here to do an assassin’s work, fighting the only way she knew to fight. Axerian had already died for her lack of control, and she wasn’t about to let herself slip again.

  Anati gave her Yellow as their party moved into the city, and with the blue sparks she pushed the kaas’s net as far as it could go, feeling for emotions. Fear she felt in waves, anxious dread from scattered pockets of people caught inside buildings. Those might have been soldiers, but more likely they were citizens, hiding out and terrified as the battle raged around them. After a block it seemed as though Ugirin’s reports had been mistaken, or the enemy army had redeployed as quickly as the White Tigers and the Golden Sun. Empty streets greeted them at each intersection, these ones untouched by fighting but abandoned nonetheless, with laundry lines waving their wares like flags stretched between the houses.

  Then she drew near the bulk of the Imperial army.

  She saw nothing; the streets were winding, sharp turns obscuring vision of anything more than a hundred paces off. But a sea of emotions fed Anati as they drew within a half league of the tower, a thousand or more all in range at once. They had to be arrayed in ranks blockading the streets, rows on rows of soldiers all combining to pulse obedience, awe, duty, anxious fear.

  “They’re here,” she said, slowing.

  “Mei and Remarin?” Tigai asked.

  “No,” she said. “Soldiers. Thousands of them, between us and the tower.”

  “I’ll have a look,” Acherre said, and turned toward the nearest building, vanishing inside. Yuli followed behind, though with Mind Acherre could use a vantage from the rooftop to scan two or three blocks ahead.

  “What can we expect when we get there?” she asked Tigai, but it was Lin who answered.

  “The Herons’ magic is Force,” Lin Qishan said. “They borrow from one action and impart to another. Striking a Heron only allows them to deliver a harder blow in return.”

  Sarine nodded. Just as well if she didn’t have to do any violence at all. “Do you have any Black?” she asked Anati, earning an odd look from Lin and Tigai, though the kaas appeared on her shoulder before she replied.

  Some, Anati thought.

  “Black will let me drain their magic,” she said to the other two. “If we face their master, I can give you an opening to strike.”

  “Bavda Khon is grandmaster,” Lin said. “Not master. She will be no easy foe, even for six magi arrayed against her. And there will be others. The Tower is the seat of the Herons’ power in the Empire. Isaru Mattai would have sought to strike at Kye-Min to keep Lady Khon contained, not to kill her.”

  “So long as we reach Remarin,” Tigai said. “I can get us out safely, as long as we get to him.”

  “You agreed to help us,” Sarine said. “We’re here to face their master—their grandmaster—not to run as soon as there’s danger.”

  “Lord Tigai will keep his word,” Lin said. “He may be an honorless dog, but even dogs understand loyalty. He knows he will need your aid to reach his brother, and his brother’s wife, if she is elsewhere.”

  Tigai looked annoyed, but kept quiet as Acherre and Yuli returned from within the building.

  “The enemy is there all right,” Acherre said. “I make the count four thousand at least, and likely a division’s worth or more to the north, behind their front line. Looks like they fell back to tighten their perimeter around the tower. Are you sure you still want to attack them head-on? Going in with stealth might be the wiser course; no telling how many magi are placed among their lines.”

  “I swore I’d give Hashiro and Ugirin a distraction,” Sarine said. “I mean to do it.”

  “Keep on this street, then,” Acherre said. “We’ll be steeped in enemy soldiers in fifteen minutes.”

  “All right,” she said. “If we do encounter magi, I’ll do what I can to help, but—”

  “No killing for you,” Acherre finished for her. “I’d as soon you keep the Veil bottled in, if it’s all the same.”

  She nodded. “I can handle the soldiers with Anati’s help. The rest are yours.”

  All five of her companions fell in at her side, and they moved.

  Anati stayed visible, perched on her shoulder as they followed the winding street. The Veil’s emotions thrummed like a second heartbeat under her skin, though she kept an outward calm. Anati had seen the creature in the shadows, when Tigai had taken them through the field of stars. His place, Anati had called it. She understood the task immediately in front of her: use Yellow to scatter the army positioned around the Tower of the Heron; gain en
try to the tower; face the would-be ascendant Ka’Inari had seen would be there, waiting for them. But the shadow among the stars weighed on her with every step.

  Shelter sprang up in front of them as they rounded a tight corner, and thundercracks sounded, echoing off the building walls as wisps of smoke rose from the barrier.

  “Stay back!” Acherre shouted, gesturing to keep them all behind her Shelter. “Bloody bastards must have orders to fire on sight.”

  Sarine closed her eyes, focusing on Yellow. She reached within to grab the blue sparks to couple with Anati’s gift, feeling the energy of Life—the Veil’s gift—pulsing through her. Simple, to set wardings above the soldiers’ line. With them she could amplify Anati’s stored emotions, driving the Imperials away. She wove them in place, painting blue streaks a hundred yards distant, and then Anati’s power flared, and the soldiers’ anxiety became doubt, then worry, then panic.

  Metal and wood clattered to the ground as a roar spread on the far end of the street.

  “No magi that I can see,” Acherre said. “Best to move, quickly.”

  “Damyu curse me,” Tigai said. “That’s … that’s … unnatural.”

  Acherre’s Shelter had vanished, and Sarine followed as Acherre led them toward where the enemy line had been. Only a row of muskets and spears remained, decorating the street from building to building with discarded arms. It would be the same for the streets surrounding this one; she’d set wardings broadly enough to capture the entirety of the Imperials’ west-facing flank. The soldiers themselves had already vanished around the next corners, fleeing toward the tower.

  The buildings here had grown wider as they moved toward the sea, from townhouses and storefronts to warehouses and estates, though the streets still wound tightly, spiraling inward toward the tower looming over the rooftops. They stepped past the muskets and spears, following as Acherre gave hand signals to take the lead. Sarine kept her mind focused on Yellow, on the tableau of emotions Anati fed through their bond. The larger share by far were the soldiers still scattered by her burst of fear, but there would be more, and some few who resisted altogether. That, at least, had proved consistent here and on the other side of the Divide: Any with a gift for magic couldn’t be swayed by Yellow or Green.