In the Shadow of the Gods

by Rachel Dunne

  Iveran watched dry-eyed as they laid his wife and son on the pyre. Scal stood at his side as old Kaija the midwife chanted the songs of passing. But Iveran stepped forward alone, a torch’s light shaking in his hand, and touched fire to the pyre.

  It caught quickly, for the wood was dry and hungry. Iveran stayed close to the fire, closer than he should have, the torch hanging down by his side, eyes far away. Gently Scal took his arm and pulled him back, among the others. No more words were said, but the midwives began their keening once more.

  They stayed until the last of the coals had cooled. Some sat, the children slept. But the midwives kept their keening, and Iveran kept his watch. Silently, through that long night, Scal, standing dutifully next to Iveran, prayed to the Parents. All the prayers Kerrus had taught him. Prayers he made up, too. Asking Patharro to give Hanej comfort, for Metherra to consider Jari gently. Asking them both for guidance, in this place where he felt so lost.

  The sun rose, touching the embers of the pyre, and the midwives fell silent. The Valastaa Clan rose, touching their brows in respect to the departed dead. And they started up the ladders to their homes. Iveran was the last to leave, and Scal with him.

  There was another fire that day. After Iveran had emptied his house. Thrown out everything Hanej had ever touched. He burned it all. Recklessly, on the very ice shelf, in front of his house. He would have burned the house, too, Scal guessed, but the stone would not catch. When that second fire was blazing, Iveran left it and got sobbingly, roaringly drunk.

  He had killed four men before the sun set on that second day. Ones who had tried to stop him, or help him. It did not matter. He killed them each in their turn, and threw their bodies over the edge of the ice. In a fit, he ripped his cloak from his neck, the cloak made from a snowbear’s pelt, and threw that over the ice, too.

  He was still drinking, still trying to pick fights, in the middle of that night. Scal left him to his grief, and made another descent down the ladder. Alone, this time, and carrying nothing but his clothes, and the sharpened sword Kettar had given him, and the knife with Iveran’s death promised to it, and the snowbear-claw pendant. The only things he had. The only things that mattered. His boots touched the ground, and he began to walk.

  He stopped only once. To look at the wreckage Iveran had made of four of his clansmen. Four loyal men. Good men. Or as good as any Northman. Once, it seemed like so long ago, he would have been on his knees retching at such a sight of human destruction. Once, in another life. His second life, after the snows that had sent him to Aardanel. In this third life, a life of hardness and cruelty and sharp, painful love, the dead men had no effect on him. His own flesh was too torn and scarred for theirs to matter.

  One thing more he took with him as he left his third life behind. He bent to pluck it from the snow, from the ice already trying to suck it into its depths. Matted with frost and dead men’s blood, he took it still. The North was cold and heartless, and the warmth of a snowbear’s pelt might get him to his fourth life, wherever it lay.

  810 Years after the Fall

  Run all you like, but with enough time, everything’ll come back around to find you.

  —Tare

  CHAPTER 14

  Joros’s anger was like a thing alive, clawing and howling and wanting to destroy. There was an ache in his jaw from keeping his teeth so tightly clenched, but that was distant, like his nails digging grooves in his palms, unimportant, only serving the boiling fury.

  Thirteen years! Thirteen years he had served the Ventallo, and nearly a decade as a shadowseeker before that, serving the Fallen with all the faith he could muster. He had done everything right, exceeded all expectations, achieved the impossible—and this was his reward! In the absolute darkness within Raturo, he felt the brush of a passing preacher and, snarling, lashed out; there was a cry of mixed surprise and pain, but Joros was already moving on, anger driving him forward.

  His chambers were as dark and cold as the rest of the mountain, but a single barked word sent Anddyr scrambling forward to fill the hearth with fire. The first thing he gave to the flames was his book of research, all the ideas and experiments meant to make the lives of preachers easier. The flames ate the paper as eagerly as the paper had eaten the ink. Then the piles and piles of letters and reports and rumors from his shadowseekers, useless fools who couldn’t do the simplest tasks, a lifetime of records fed to the hungry fire. The flames burned bright and red, perhaps the first natural fire Raturo had seen in years. He could see, almost, why the Parents’ priests thought fire sacred.

  When he was out of things to burn, with his fury cooled to smoldering embers in the face of the roaring fire, he sat before the hearth and he began to think how he could kill the new Uniro.

  Joros had quarreled with Delcerro over the years, and he would be the first to admit he hadn’t exactly wept at the old man’s passing, but he would give an arm to have that old bat back. Valrik Deuro, now Valrik Uniro, had revealed himself as something of a fanatic.

  Though Joros had spent his thirteen years in the Ventallo doing everything to prove he was a faithful believer, Valrik still remembered him as the power-hungry young man fresh from the mountain, and the new Uniro had made quite clear his suspicions that Joros was still that same man. While Valrik was Uniro, Joros wouldn’t be trusted with anything more complex than paperwork—and perhaps not even that, since paper was so good at carrying secrets.

  Joros could have withstood Valrik’s mistrust and his insults; he had long years of experience working in secret, working in the shadows, and he could have done it for many more years.

  But for this latest insult, Valrik would have to die.

  “You’ve done well, brother Sedeiro,” Valrik had said flatly, regarding the five seekstones in Joros’s hand.

  The praise would have meant nothing even if it hadn’t been empty, but Joros still gave a shallow bow. Praise was praise, and Joros would be the last to deny that he was due some. “I’ll leave at sundown to begin the search.” He’d need a few hours to prepare everything, to put his affairs in order, but with the seekstones finally made, he didn’t want to let any more time trickle by.

  Valrik snorted. “You’ll do no such thing.” He was an old man, but he was spry still; he snatched the seekstones from Joros’s hand quicker than a blink. “You have too many duties to attend to here. I will send others.” And he had sat silently and listened to Joros’s screaming and cursing, turning the seekstones in his hands until Joros had stormed from the room.

  Years of Joros’s efforts, robbed from him in a moment. His greatest work, and unworthy others would reap all the benefits. He would see Valrik burn for it.

  “Cappo.” Anddyr barely breathed the word, knowing better than to disturb his master.

  Joros had his hand raised to strike the mage when the flash of a black robe caught his eye. A hand rested lightly on his shoulder, and Dirrakara asked with careful nonchalance, “Are you out of that blue powder, love? The fire will hurt your eyes.” She waited for a reply, and received none. She tried again: “Valrik has summoned us.”

  “Let him come for me himself, then.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I think you’ll want to be there for this.”

  Finally he looked at her, saw how drawn her face was, her smooth skin pale even in the fire’s warm light. He felt a flash of concern. “What’s happened?”

  They walked together through the halls of Raturo, Anddyr trailing dutifully behind as ever. The main floor was already full to bursting with black-clad bodies, but they parted to let Joros and Dirrakara through, recognizing the red Eyes stitched above their hearts. The stream of human flesh flowed into the Cavern of the Falls, where many of the Ventallo had already gathered before the preachers who’d been lucky or pushy enough to get into the Cavern early.

  Valrik stood on a slight promontory at the edge of the ice lake, staring out over the press of bodies before him. Illo Deuro and Ildra Trera flanked him, the three of them together a
walking exhibit of the dangers of aging. Joros joined the other dozen Ventallo who’d already gathered, his eyes hard on Uniro, trying to guess the man’s motives and glare him to death in the process.

  More and more preachers filled the room, bodies pressing in too tight. Anddyr nearly leaped back as someone pushed him too close to Joros, but there wasn’t enough space for the mage to move away; instead he stood there trembling, nearly a head taller than anyone else in the room, his nervous-quick breathing stirring Joros’s hair in a way that was almost intolerably annoying. Joros jabbed his elbow into the mage’s stomach until he turned his head away.

  There had never been so many bodies in the Cavern of the Falls, not that Joros had ever seen. The Icefall actually began to drip, slow droplets pooling at the tips of the fall’s spines and falling heavily to the frozen lake. And still more preachers pressed in, filling the cavern with their unwashed warmth, panting their heat into the air.

  Finally, finally, Valrik Uniro raised his arms into the air. Silence rippled through the cavern, strangling noise to the far walls and up the tunnel, until the only sound in the wide room was the drip of melting ice. “Brothers and sisters!” he called out, voice still strong and carrying for such an old man. “Hear me now, and listen well. You have been misled, all of you.” His hands fell to his sides, no longer needed to hold the attention of all the idiots listening with hanging jaws. “Our forebears, the first of the Fallen, would weep to see us as we have become. We have turned from our true purpose, the only purpose. We have become too focused on changing the world, trying too hard to shape it to the visions of gentle Fratarro and unyielding Sororra. I tell you now, my brothers and sisters, that is not what we are meant for. It is not the purpose held by the first Fallen, who built their mighty halls within the throne Fratarro pulled from the earth. We have been led astray for too long, caught up by the petty squabbling against which we were made to fight. No longer.”

  Valrik stepped down from the promontory, and the Ventallo parted before him like the tide around a stone. “Do you know our true purpose, my brothers and sisters? Our first purpose?” He stepped slowly through the gathered masses and they all fell back, heads bowed, hands clasped, utterly silent. “I tell you now, and listen well. We are not meant to shape the world for the mighty Twins. We are only human, and the power of true shaping is not ours to bear.” To the edge of the ice lake, the preachers parted. Valrik didn’t pause at the break between stone and ice, but continued his confident steps. In the heat of so many bodies, the ice groaned beneath his feet, a sheen of water over the ice. Valrik didn’t falter. “We are meant instead to find them, to free them, to restore to them their stolen powers. They will shape the world, my brothers and sisters. We need only find them.” The sound of ice snapping was unspeakably loud, and Valrik held aloft a long spear of ice from the Icefall. “Today marks our return to that purpose. Today marks our faith renewed.” At the last word, Valrik lifted his icicle with both crabbed hands and brought its tip down into his left eye. In the resounding silence, Joros heard the wet squelch, the burst of blood. Valrik didn’t hesitate as he pulled the shard free, blood steaming on the ice, and thrust it into his other eye. The icicle fell from his hands, shattering against the frozen lake, and Valrik looked out upon them with the red, weeping wounds where his eyes had been.

  There was a pit in Joros’s stomach, a gaping hole that threatened to swallow him down. Unexpectedly, his hands were shaking.

  Valrik Uniro, first among the Fallen, newly blinded, raised his arms as if to embrace them all. “Fratarro shelters us still in this place of his power. By his mercy, we have been shown the path to our redemption. My brothers and sisters, I tell you this: the greatest task of our fellowship has fallen to us. The longest road shall be ours to walk, but the greatest reward lies at its end.” He lifted his hands into the air, and between his fingers gleamed five seekstones. Joros knew them instantly, the ones Valrik had taken from him, and anger coiled in his stomach. “We have done it, my brothers and sisters. We have found them.”

  There was outcry, shock and denial and joy, all weaving together to make one swell of sound. Over the noise, Uniro spoke again: “I promise you all, we will go to them, and we shall restore them to their birthright. It shall be done, and done in our lifetime. Sororra and Fratarro shall once more walk the earth, and they shall bring their judgment.” There was acrimony in the emptiness of his eyes. “I remind you that we, the faithful, shall be judged first. That even as we raise the Twins from the earth, they shall turn their eyes upon us, and they shall read our hearts.

  “I pledge my faith to the Twins,” Valrik Uniro cried in his ringing voice. “I shall face their judgment without fear. Who among you can say the same?” The blood flowed slowly down his cheeks, pooling in the wrinkles and folds, painting his visage a vengeful mask. “Today we begin anew. Today, in this sacred place of the gods, we cleanse our souls. To those of you who would atone for your transgressions, I call upon you to step forward. Receive my blessing as Sororra’s, my forgiveness as Fratarro’s. For those of you who would not fear judgment, I call upon you to join me.” He stepped to one side, the lake creaking beneath his feet. Steady, unwavering, his hand pointed to the Icefall.

  In the mad press of bodies that followed, Joros held his ground, his hand like a claw around Anddyr’s arm. Dirrakara was swept away from him, her face burning with a delirious light, and the frozen lake howled louder than the frantic prayer that swelled to the ceiling and shook the spines of ice hanging there. He needed to be gone, away from this place. Joros pressed back through the surging crowd, dragging Anddyr with him, and he couldn’t make his other hand stop shaking.

  Stepping into the tunnel was like the first breath after drowning. Now that he was free of the screeching, crying crowd, his thoughts began to arrange themselves in some sort of order. He didn’t like the paths they were taking.

  “Cappo?” Anddyr’s voice surprised him; the man was all but invisible more often than not. “Do you want . . . should I . . . ?”

  The mage’s question, half birthed though it was, at least turned his brain in a productive manner. “Yes,” he said finally. “Follow Valrik, see what he does next. Don’t be seen.”

  Anddyr swallowed hard, but he nodded resolutely. At his waist, his fingers wove a complex pattern Joros had long given up on deciphering. Like blinking, the mage disappeared from sight. Joros nodded vaguely, mind already twisting back to what he could possibly do.

  Raturo had never felt hollow, though it was. Like an anthill, it boiled with hidden life, always a voice whispering, feet sliding softly across stone, the gentle flicker of pale torchlight. The place felt empty now, dead, all the life drained out from it. It was what all the priests of the Parents would wish for, the mountain cracked open and excised like a boil, darkness reclaiming all the places where life had dared to take root. The image stuck with him.

  The fire was still burning in his hearth, though it was a dull shade of what it had been. A sad thing, compared to the brightness it had once held, all the potential. He watched it burn down to embers, watched it die its slow, flickering death. The red glow leached from the room, and the life, and Joros sat alone in the darkness. His hands, finally, had stopped shaking.

  “Cappo?” Something clattered, followed by a curse. Joros didn’t bother looking; Anddyr muttered something and a faint light shimmered. It drew closer, the mage kneeling down next to Joros’s chair. “He’s sending five of the Ventallo,” Anddyr said, voice barely a whisper. The mountain had ears and eyes aplenty; it never hurt to be cautious. “They’ll go searching, each with a small retinue. Report what they find, or bring it back, or—”

  “Who.” Joros didn’t ask it as a question, his tone utterly flat. His eyes didn’t leave the dead fireplace.

  “Essemo Noniro. Saval Tredeiro. Dayra Quardeira. Ebarran Septeiro.”

  “That’s four, Anddyr.”

  Still the mage hesitated. Joros knew the answer before he finally said it: “Cappa Dirrakara.�
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  Joros nodded vaguely. It was fitting. He had dedicated his life to the Fallen, spent his finest years in service to the Ventallo—and they would leave him with less than nothing. If that was the way things were to be, then Joros would play that game as well. He was not a man given to losing—no matter the cost, no matter the end. And if there was a game he couldn’t win, he would just as soon overturn the board.

  He rose to his feet, eyes finally leaving the hearth where the red flames had gasped out their death. “Come, Anddyr,” Joros said, the new purpose rising in him like a fanned ember. “We have much to do.”

  He was sure the mountain had been buzzing after Valrik’s blinding, and all the other blindings that surely followed his speech, but the excitement had waned. The scattered time-candles had burned low, and the halls of Raturo were empty and dark, silent as death. Joros sent his mage to gather supplies, and though he was starting to show the twitch that meant he was close to needing his skura, Anddyr was too cowed to do anything but obey.

  Joros walked alone to stand before the great arch, where prideful Sororra turned away from spite guised as righteous punishment, and Fratarro wept for the beauty and the love that had been torn from him. Every day for nearly thirteen years, he had walked beneath that arch, but he had rarely paused, never stopped to study it. He stood close enough that he could see in Fratarro’s eye, big as Joros’s palm, faint, shallow traces of a paradise aflame, the ground cracked, and a horde of mighty creatures plummeting through the air as their wings burned. Fratarro had created his own worshipers when none would turn from the Parents, winged beasts he called mravigi. All the old stories said they had been beautiful, majestic, more worthy of a god’s love than fallible mankind. When Patharro had burned all that Fratarro had created, it had included the living beasts. Reflected in Fratarro’s other stone eye were the Parents’ faces, brutal and uncaring as they watched their children fall. So high up, almost lost in the darkness, the likeness of the Parents lurked over all at the top of the arch. There couldn’t be one without the other, twined together like a complex knot. The light and the shadow, fire and embers, blood and ice.