In the Shadow of the Gods

by Rachel Dunne

  “Do you know how to use that sword?” the burned man asked.

  “I do.” Scal was not a man to boast. He would be hired, or he would not be. Things happened as they were meant to.

  The man sized him up, and Scal sized him up in return. The mumbling from the corner was distracting. There was a twist in Scal’s gut. Different from the boiling rage. An animal instinct. A warning for caution.

  A muffled scream. In the corner, the shaking man was writhing now. Head thrown back. Mouth agape. Tendons standing out like cords on his neck. Eyes wide and staring.

  Scal stepped toward him, concern flaring. The burned man held up a hand. “Leave him.” As he said it, the screaming stopped. The man sagged into his corner. Eyes closed. A smile playing over his blackened lips. Into the silence, there came a quiet humming. A child’s sleeping tune Scal had heard sung before.

  “Abomination.”

  Vatri stepped forward, and she was shaking almost as badly as the man had been. She, though, with fury. Her hands were clenched, spine stiff. Her face could not be said to be expressive, but the anger was there to see, more than clear.

  The burned man faced the burned woman, and asked calmly, “And who are you?”

  She did not answer. She spat at his feet, and went to the humming man. Kneeling, cradling his head. Feeling at his neck and chest.

  “Anddyr.” The burned man sounded annoyed. “Tell this woman you’re fine.”

  “I’m fine,” the man said. His voice was distant, small. The voice of a child. A simple child, who was not let out of the house for fear he would drown trying to catch fish with his mouth. There was still a smile on his face.

  “You see?” And then the burned man dismissed Vatri. Turned back to Scal. “I find myself lacking in suitable protection. I need to hire someone who can keep me alive better than the mumbling idiot.” From a pocket, he pulled a pouch, tossed it at Scal’s feet. It hit the floor heavily. Scal knew the sound of coins.

  “You can’t,” the merra said. Her arms were wrapped around the man, who was humming again. He did not seem to notice her at all. “Please, Scal. We should leave.”

  He looked at her for a time. The twisting in his stomach wanted to listen to her. He did not like the burned man. Did not understand what had happened to the shaking man. Had never liked the black-robed wanderers who spoke against the Parents.

  Another pouch of coins landed next to the first. This one came open as it landed. Coins spilled onto the floor. Gold shimmered in the dull light. Arcettan royals, all of them. More money than Scal had ever seen.

  “Half now,” the burned man said, “and the other half when I no longer need your services.”

  There were few jobs Scal had taken that he had liked. He did not like the long, boring caravans. He did not like killing men, strangers, only because his employer told him to. He would have left his sword at the side of the road, if he had had any other way to earn a living. But he did not. He took what jobs were offered, because it was the only thing there was to do.

  Even the best of men, Parro Kerrus had said, must sometimes do bad things. It’s the way of the world, little lad.

  Scal knew the kind of man he was. He had made peace with it.

  “You may go where you wish,” he told Vatri softly. He could not look at her again as he bent to pick up the coins. “I will do as I must.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Distant Raturo, tall enough, almost, to view all the wide world, was little more than a smudge on the horizon. Keiro had fallen to his knees when he’d realized what it was, hands clasped to his forehead in prayer. He didn’t move until long after the sun had set, hiding the mountain entirely from his sight, though he knew where it lay as surely as he knew his own heart’s beating.

  “Should we see your face again,” Keiro said softly, sadly, “it shall mean your death.”

  He rose in the darkness, pulling the night like a shelter around himself as he stood trapped between desert and mountain. He could not go farther north, for Fiatera lay there and was forbidden, and he would not go back south, where death lay among the burning sands and killing heat, where the refused summons would be waiting for him, ready to swallow him whole in retribution.

  Slowly he turned to face west. His heart ached, and his body, and his feet, and for the first time in his life Keiro wanted to sit inside a firelit house and rest his callused feet on a stool. He could go west again, and find Algi. A year and more since their parting, and he still remembered the feel of her lips pressed gently against his. He was lonely, and tired, and wanting of comfort.

  It hurt to turn again, to turn his eyes from the mountain, though not so much as turning from the desert’s call. He turned east, away from the past, for there was another half of the world he had not walked. He was not meant for a house, or a wife, or peaceful comfort. He had been made for walking, though it had never felt so much like a curse.

  It had been two or so moon-turns since he had left the course of the river-that-ran-from-the-sun, for its gurgling had sounded too much like an accusation. He had changed to an eastward-drifting north, carving his own fork from the mighty river, so east was not so sharp a turn. He had passed through the hills of the Shrevan nomads, though he had seen none of the horse-folk, and those hills had flattened even as the grass reached high around him, to his shoulders or higher. The Plains had no other name, but they were as good a place for walking as any. East took him deeper into the high grass, high enough, hopefully, to mask the distant point of Raturo by the time the sun rose.

  It wasn’t, he learned. Raturo still hung like a smudge over the waving heads of the plaingrass, and his left eye, his only eye, kept wandering toward the sight of it. Eventually Keiro had to change course slightly, turning a touch south so that Raturo lay just behind his left shoulder. It was easier, then, to walk and not think overly much.

  Keiro spoke aloud, sometimes, his voice rising and falling with the rhythm of his feet against the ground. He would have been surprised had anyone told him his thoughts were spoken aloud, but there was no one to tell him that, and that was itself the reason for the talking. He was lonely, since Algi had left him. He talked to her, sometimes, as if she were still walking at his side. It made the walking easier, somehow, though each step took him farther from where she was.

  “You would like it here,” he told the girl who wasn’t there. “The grass would tickle under your nose, and the groundbirds taste almost like those red birds we loved.”

  There were footprints, sometimes, sunk deep into the rich dirt between the grass stalks. The prints were smaller than his own, and though the old stories, the tales of the gods that had been passed from mouth to ear long before they had ever been written down, said that Sororra and Fratarro had been giants among men, still Keiro liked to think it was their tracks he found, followed. After all, the Twins had come first to the Plains, when Patharro had sent them down into the world to wander and learn alongside mankind.

  “You would almost believe, here,” he told Algi. “Perhaps your sun god is Patharro, and maybe he’s not. But I have to believe he would send his children, if he had them, to walk here, too. It’s beautiful, in its own way. Peaceful. A good place for walking.”

  He thought, sometimes, of what his life had become, would be still. He was made for walking, to be sure, but was that all his life was to be? Often he remembered the words of the Ventallo who had thrown him out at the top of Raturo, the hope he had offered beyond Keiro’s own hope of preparing the world for the young twins within the mountain. “You are given a chance. A hope of redemption.” He’d thought for a while Algi was that chance, that hope, a heathen of faraway lands who heard all the old stories with wide wondering eyes.

  “But you only liked the stories themselves,” he reprimanded her gently. “Any story would do for you. You never cared for the truth behind the words, so long as they were spoken well.”

  He heard her voice, sometimes, the lilting tune, the playful tone. Her laughter. “A wonder I listened to so
many of your stories, then, Erokiyn.”

  “Demon spawn,” he said fondly, and then stopped, his feet falling still, for there was the point of a spear poking into his chest.

  The man at the other end of the spear was short, made shorter by the ready crouch, with skin smeared by mud and pieces of grass. He was naked, wearing nothing but bands of woven grass around his neck and arms and legs. All this Keiro took in, and he smiled broadly, for this was the first human he had faced in over a year.

  Keiro raised his hands, the universal supplication of harmlessness, and took a step back from the spearhead. Another point pricked his back. He didn’t need to glance over his shoulder to know there would be another muddy man there as well.

  “Peace,” Keiro said, and though his voice was dry and rusty, the word came out clear. He could not stop the smile that stretched his face, his burned lips cracking. It had been a day, almost, since the last puddle of water among the grasses. “I mean no harm.”

  The man squinted up at him, as if sizing up Keiro and his words. So little was known about the people who called the Plains their home. Keiro only hoped they might speak the same language. As he stood waiting, four more men stepped from the long grasses, each carrying his own spear. These were little more than sticks scraped into a pointed end, though the points looked plenty sharp. They surrounded Keiro, a ring of spears pointed inward, fixed at Keiro’s heart. Still he could not stop smiling. He had been too long alone, much too long.

  Finally the man before him turned and made a motion to his fellows, and the spear behind Keiro prodded him forward. And then it was naught but more walking, which Keiro understood well enough.

  At length they came to a village, the first village Keiro had seen in his long wandering of the Plains. It was no real village, truly—the grass was flattened in a broad circle, and woven-grass sleeping mats were strewn about, a few grass mats propped up on sticks as shelters. There was a small fire pit, hardly any bigger than the ones Keiro had carefully made to cook his sparse meals, at the center of the village. The people who stared, and there were a great many of them, were all as small and as naked as his captors, their hair dark even beneath all the mud.

  An old, wrinkled woman came forward to meet them, and the leader of the hunting band said, “We found him in the grass.” Relieved beyond all telling that they spoke in a language he knew, Keiro laughed aloud.

  The woman walked boldly up to him, hands planted on her hips. She stared, her eyes fixed on the empty space where he had once had a second eye, and looking back, he saw that one of her eyes was glossed over with a milky-white film. She grinned at him, showing missing teeth, and said, “We two, we know.”

  They called themselves plainswalkers, and though they were not arrogant enough to claim to be the world’s oldest children, Yaket, the half-blind elder, proudly said their people had lived as long as the Plain’s grasses had been sprouting from the earth. As they sat around the carefully contained fire, eating pieces of the cooked groundbirds Algi would have loved and a chewy root that grew beneath the grass, the young women of the tribe picked and plucked at Keiro, giggling, covering his skin with mud, winding grass bands around his arms, ripping away the tattered pieces of his clothes until he wore little more than his breechclout and the eyecloth over his brow. He stopped them, then, and wouldn’t let them pull out the beads Algi had woven into his hair either. With the sun setting, the children begged him for a story.

  It had been much the same with Algi. Young folk were the same no matter where one walked. It had taken a while, but once she and Keiro had found enough shared words, she had begged him to tell a story every night. He’d told her all the old stories, trotted out the entire preacher’s repertoire of tales, but even that was not enough to fill four years of nights. She’d made him make up his own stories for her. She hadn’t understood what a princess was, or a castle, but she’d liked hearing about the adventures of a mischievous young woman called Ilga—“Ilga!” she had exclaimed excitedly, patting her hand over her heart, but Keiro had shaken his head stubbornly at that and gently teased, “I really don’t see the similarity.”

  He didn’t think the plainswalker children would be as enthralled by the Ilga stories, and so he had only the old stories to fall back on. That was as it should be. Any story he chose would be new to the plainswalkers—he knew that no preachers would have traveled this far into the Plains, or even into the Plains at all. With enough work to be done converting the followers of the Parents within Fiatera, what point was there in looking to the primitive folk living within the sea of grass? “A hope of redemption,” the Ventallo had told him at the top of Raturo. “You may use our words still, and spread our teachings, and pray that the gods forgive you.”

  He had a hope, a very small hope, the first in years, beginning to form within his heart, knowing that the plainswalkers spoke in his own tongue. He had worried that he’d shunned his redemption when he’d turned his back to the calling desert, that he had condemned himself to endless, hopeless, purposeless walking. But here, perhaps, was another chance. A better chance. People who spoke his words, and who were untouched by the ancient quarrel between two gods and their children. People who could be won over, who could see the truth, who could bring glory to the Twins and perhaps even help, in their small way, to free them from their prison beneath the earth. He could not read the trails of future and chance. He could not know what might come from such a small thing as a story told in the grass sea. But he could hope. This story might matter a very great deal.

  Solemnly, he lowered his threadbare eyecloth for the first time in years, since the last of the old stories he’d told Algi. It was almost like a homecoming, the comfort of the preaching blindness and the well-loved words swelling his chest. “Do you know,” he began, and he could feel them leaning toward him as the expectant silence fell, “of the burning sands and the killing heat that live to the south?” They didn’t answer, they weren’t expected to, but he let the pregnant pause draw on. “The Eremori Desert is old, almost as old as this sea of grass—but not quite, for it was given shape after the rest of the world had grown. I tell you now how the desert was made. This is the oldest story.

  “We all know”—belatedly he realized they wouldn’t, but it was too late, the words had already been said—“how Metherra and Patharro shaped the world, and all the creatures to inhabit it, and in their joy they shaped two children of their own, a boy and a girl, who each were as a mirror to the other. The Twins sought to create as their Parents had, but they were young and untrained, and full of wild power. They were sent down from the godworld to wander our world, to learn humility and the way of things. Their first steps were taken on this very land. The lessons they learned, though, were not those that the Parents had wished.”

  Keiro had heard the priests and priestesses of the Parents tell their own version of the oldest story, and this was the point that marked the differences in the two teachings. “Sororra, seeing the petty squabbling that subverted mankind’s perfection, sought to repair the humans that were Patharro’s most-loved creation. Only, she thought, when all were made to see the power of the gods would they renounce their pettiness, and be equal under one firm and fair rule. She showed them miracles, and she shaped the very world around them. Thus did Sororra earn their fear, yet also their respect and devotion.

  “Fratarro saw the great beauty his Parents had wrought in the world, and sought to create something fully as beautiful. He pulled a great spire from the earth upon which to look out over all creation, and from there he saw an untouched space, far to the south. There he created a place of unsurpassed beauty, pouring his love into the very shaping of the land. When it was complete, he led any who would follow into this place. Thus did Fratarro earn their love, and their devotion.

  “But Patharro”—and Keiro pitched his voice lower, his words grave—“had not intended for his children to interfere in the world. He saw the land Fratarro had shaped, and he grew jealous of the beauty that surpassed his o
wn creations. He called on the people who had followed his son, for they worshiped Patharro still, and he drew them from Fratarro’s land, leaving it deserted, its beauty neglected. Fratarro grieved, but he poured his grief into a new creation: the mravigi, a living race to rival humans, peaceful and gentle and loving, and he gave them wings so that they might soar among the stars.

  “Sororra, who was furious for her brother’s sake at their father’s jealousy, acted in a thoughtless rage. She reached out with her power to shape—not the world, but the very minds of her followers, to show the Parents the imperfection of their creations, and to reveal her own power as well.” He felt the shudder roll through his listeners, the fear and caution that was Sororra’s purpose.

  “Metherra pulled the Twins back into the godworld, for she could not allow her power to be challenged. She saw in Sororra no repentance, and in Fratarro no relenting of purpose. The fire of her wrath burned the Twins, and Patharro sent a fire to scorch the land that his son had shaped, destroying the great beauty and killing the mravigi. It is the Eremori Desert now, a broken and lifeless place.

  “When the land was dead, the Parents cast their children back down into the world, stripped of their powers but not their immortality. Fratarro wept and pled for mercy, but the Parents turned their backs, and so Sororra turned her own back to them. And so they fell, and thus did Fratarro shatter upon the bones of the earth, his limbs flung to the far horizons, and a shard of ebon pierced his immortal heart, so that he would bleed for all his endless days.” The silence shaped by the words stretched, fractured, bent to breaking, and just before it shattered entirely, Keiro opened his mouth for the last words, the ones to put a seal on the tale—and the moment before he gave them voice, the plainswalkers spoke, their own voices raised in solemn unison, to finish the oldest story:

  “And so did Sororra vow vengeance.”