Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  “Blasphemy on holy ground,” he murmured appraisingly. “Look how far you’ve come, Nadezhda Lapteva.”

  “Blasphemy requires intent,” she snapped. Nadya wiped at the blood dripping from her nose and reached into her pocket to anxiously roll Marzenya’s bead through her fingers.

  She was granted calm disdain in return.

  Malachiasz was eyeing something just past her head. “Towy szanka,” he said softly. The same thing he had said to her in the cathedral before he left. Little saint.

  “Does it bother you to fight your countrymen?” she asked. She was dizzy, jittery, like when Marzenya gave her a particularly powerful spell. And this magic was just … hers? Inherently? She was terrified of the prospect of burning herself up from the inside out. She didn’t know how witch magic worked, didn’t know how this magic would work.

  “I hate it.” He paused, then allowed, “Deal with the Vultures however you can.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, towy dżimyka.”

  “You’ve been doing plenty of that yourself,” she said flatly.

  He smiled wryly and lifted her hand, kissing her bloody fingers. He let it fall right as Kostya stepped up to the wall beside her.

  “Don’t get hit by crossbow bolts this time,” she said, bumping his shoulder.

  “Are they here for her?” he asked Malachiasz.

  Kostya recoiled when Malachiasz turned his murky gaze on him. Malachiasz grew thoughtful, a hand moving to tug on one of the bones tied in his black locks before he shrugged.

  “I can’t tell. It could be a random movement of war. That there are Vultures here says otherwise.”

  “Could they be here for you?” Nadya asked.

  “That would be suicide. I’m not particularly forgiving toward traitors.”

  “How many of the company are blood mages?” Kostya asked.

  “Hypothetically, all of them could be,” Malachiasz said, a thread of condescension in his tone that Nadya knew all too well. “That’s how blood magic works.”

  Kostya’s jaw clenched. “Anya,” he called over his shoulder. “Do you have any relics?”

  Anya stopped from where she was barking out orders. A slow smile spread on her face.

  “Aye, we do.”

  “Relics?” Nadya asked. “What relics?”

  Malachiasz had gone very still beside her.

  “What relics?” she asked him.

  He shot her a very dry look. She thought of the bone voryen and how easily it had hurt him when nothing else could. What could she do with that coupled with something else divine?

  Was that the easy way out? To use divinity through an object imbued with it instead of going to Marzenya? She didn’t trust Marzenya now to give her the magic she needed, and she had this thing, this darkness, this power, but using it would be turning her back on her divine calling. It was a step she would never return from. She closed her wasted hand into a fist and tugged her bone voryen from her belt.

  “Get them,” she said. “I’ll use them.”

  “Wasting your precious few resources on a haggard group of Tranavians far from home?” Malachiasz said, voice jagged, mouth full of iron nails.

  “We’ll leave one alive to tell the rest of the country that we’re done with them razing our villages and churches to the ground,” Kostya snapped.

  Malachiasz held Kostya’s stare, his eyes shifting darker and darker.

  Nadya sensed his decision before he moved. She reached out to stop him, fingers slipping off his elbow as he leapt from the wall, his black, feathery wings bursting forth as he disappeared into the darkness.

  “Shit,” she swore.

  “Where is he going?” Kostya asked.

  “To warn the Vultures.”

  28

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Svoyatova Inessa Besfamilny: A cleric with no record of which god or goddess had touched her. Inessa’s life was one of anguish. Her lover, Marya Telkinova, was corrupted by a kashyvhes, forcing Inessa to kill her and the entire village Marya had corrupted upon turning. It is said the Govanitsy River was created by Svoyatova Inessa’s tears.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  Nadya took the reliquary with shaking hands, opening the box. Inside was a cloth, stained with blood. Power emanated from the cloth, and her scarred hand pulsed as if there were a heartbeat in her palm. The power being hers didn’t explain why it hurt or why it was reacting this way. Maybe Malachiasz was lying. Except somehow she knew he wasn’t. There was something wrong with her. She just didn’t know what.

  She carefully took the shroud out of the reliquary, eyes closing as a rush of divine power spread through her. She shivered.

  Anya’s breath caught. She was looking at a point just past Nadya’s head.

  “Can anyone use these?” Nadya asked her.

  Anya shook her head. “Only some can feel the power left behind. Fewer can use it.”

  So, these were no replacement for Kalyazin’s clerics. A shame. Nadya wrapped the shroud around her hand, hissing through her teeth at the influx of power. But she knew how to handle a massive amount of power. It was the lack of it that was a struggle.

  The shroud belonged to Svoyatova Vlada Votyakova. The second it met her skin she saw the girl—her age, maybe a few years older—hair cut bluntly to her chin, tears streaking down dark cheeks as she pressed the cloth uselessly over a wound bleeding from her stomach.

  Nadya considered further and instead carefully wrapped the shroud over her hair, freeing her hand. Anya fetched a headband from a nearby sister, the temple rings made of dark iron. The temple rings of a high priestess.

  Nadya swallowed hard and fitted the band over the shroud. She didn’t deserve to wear this.

  “We lost our entire advantage because that monster—”

  Nadya didn’t let Kostya finish, snapping her hand out to clutch at his jaw and wrench his face level with hers.

  “You don’t need to tell me what Malachiasz has done, I am well aware. Shut up and keep yourself alive.”

  His dark eyes flashed. He looked at a point just past her head. Why was everyone doing that? “I’m supposed to protect you.”

  “You were. I don’t need protecting. Not anymore.”

  He flinched under her hand. She paused, tugging him down so she could press her forehead to his.

  “Keep yourself safe,” she said. “I can’t lose you again.”

  She started toward the stairs, yanking her voryen from its sheath. Rashid caught her arm as she passed.

  “What are you planning?”

  “To say hello to the Tranavians,” Nadya said.

  Rashid scowled. “That’s not what I was asking.”’

  She rolled her eyes. “He’s made it perfectly clear. Tranavia over”—she waved a hand—“whatever this is. So be it.”

  “Don’t kill him,” Rashid called as she took to the stairs.

  “No promises!” she called back.

  She ordered the gates opened and no one questioned her. No one questioned why a girl, small and wearing high priestess’s temple rings, was going out to meet a Tranavian company alone.

  Power, Nadya considered, had a tendency to make her a tad reckless.

  She tugged her other voryen out, flipping the one and catching it by its hilt.

  Votyakova had been a cleric of the god Krsnik. Nadya delighted in finally having access to fire without having to plead with Krsnik for it. But she didn’t know how long this power would last; how much magic was imbued in a relic after a cleric had passed?

  Cold flames licked at her blades and she worked quickly, dragging her blade along the ground, crossing the entrance of the monastery. Flames shot up from the ground where her blade touched, creating a wall of fire the Tranavians would be forced to traverse. She backed up to the gates so she wouldn’t be facing an entire company on her own.

  Reckless didn’t have to mean foolish.

  She tensed at movement amidst the trees,
going still at the sight of Malachiasz’s thin frame. He shot her a grin—half-crazed—eyes onyx black; he was completely covered in blood, and from what she could tell, half of it was his own. Her grip tightened on her voryen, unsure if she was about to fight him or—

  A snarling shape slammed into him.

  The Tranavians were upon them.

  It was different, accessing one very powerful kind of magic instead of all of it, and this made her clumsy. A ball of flame sent off the tip of her blade not quite hitting her mark, her movements slow enough that a blood mage’s spell caught against her shoulder, knocking her backward.

  This was the way clerics before her had fought, but she could feel something underneath the heat that licked at her skin but did not burn; it was something older and far more dangerous that she reached for, a singular thread underneath a tapestry that spelt out a defined type of magic. The remnants of a god, unfiltered, pure. The kind of power that a god would temper before they granted it to a mortal, here left to fester into something vast and uncontrollable.

  Ah, this is what she meant, Nadya thought, as she ducked under a spray of power and shoved a Kalyazi monk out of the way.

  The fire had allowed them more preparation; a way to earn back the advantage they had lost. But it became clear very quickly the Tranavians were there for a single reason: Nadya.

  She yanked on the thread of power from the relic just as a Vulture stepped through the flames.

  Old magic, untamed and rotted from decades of solitude, quaked within Nadya. She tasted copper and spat out a mouthful of blood. The Vulture’s mask was strange, nothing more than jawbones with teeth still attached tied with strings crossing her face. Her eyes were pools of black.

  “Can’t kill me with what you have,” the Vulture taunted.

  Nadya could feel the fire behind the Vulture, an extension of her will. She grinned back, and pulled hard at it, engulfing the Vulture, whose screeches ripped through the chaotic air.

  There was someone at her side and she whirled, but it was only Kostya. He eyed the flames, which were keeping the Tranavians back and giving the Kalyazi a chance to pick them off with crossbows. He grinned at her.

  The chaos had not truly hit, and Nadya wondered what was stopping them. Surely they had a mage who could counteract her magic. Surely one of the Vultures could. A blast of power shot through the flames, and Nadya only barely stepped out of its way. The Vulture she had burned slammed into her, throwing her to the ground.

  Her flames went out.

  It was the sound of battle that truly jarred Nadya. A loud cacophony of shouts and screams and of blades hitting flesh, the scent of burning magic. Iron and heat.

  She got her legs underneath the Vulture, kicking her off and slamming her back into the monastery wall. If the Vultures attacked the monks, none would survive. Nadya had to keep the monsters trained on her and her alone, but she didn’t know where the other two were. She hoped Malachiasz was dealing with them instead of warning them that Nadya had a relic that could do them true harm.

  True harm if she figured out how to harness it. The power was fluid and unlike what she was used to. It didn’t want to bend to her will; rather it moved chaotically through her. She took a step and the ground underneath her blasted out, a chunk of stone hitting the Vulture, another one slamming into a monk.

  There was no time for apology. The Vulture’s claws grazed inches from Nadya’s chest. Blood dripped from her eyes, staining the jawbones red as it caught between the teeth.

  Nadya had a bad feeling about where those jawbones came from. She kicked out, her boot slamming into the Vulture’s head and snapping her neck. But physical blows were useless. She had seen Malachiasz run a Vulture through with his claws and have her step away like nothing had happened.

  Magic, however. Magic could stop one of the beasts. She hoped.

  She had never been told how Malachiasz killed the last Black Vulture and ascended his throne. He would never give her such a secret, he would never tell how his kind were rendered mortal even as they could withstand such horrors done to their bodies. But her relic bone knife had hurt Malachiasz and surely this magic could, too. The relic’s power of fire surged, desperate to be used, and she whirled away from the Vulture, casting out a hand and throwing a spray of white flames that caught on approaching Tranavian soldiers. Divine power quieted, she yanked on the old thread again and grasped the chaos.

  Everything went white. Her vision blanked out. She was vaguely aware of magic at the Vulture’s bloodied hands. A clawed hand reaching for her throat. The Vulture’s blond hair shining against the flames still burning in patches on the ground.

  The gods were ancient and unfathomable. There were older, deeper things, but how much farther back could a mortal’s brain comprehend than beings of forever? Nadya had so much more to learn about the gods who had touched her and led her down this dark and terrible path.

  The relic retained the power of the cleric that had died with it; but it also held something more, and it was that something more Nadya grasped as time went sludgy around her.

  Nadya grazed against the will of a god.

  Everything stopped.

  She dropped back, breathing hard. But nothing moved. She reached up and touched the shroud wrapped around her head. This was not like her divine magic. That was condensed. That was power granted from divinity to be palatable to a mortal. Just enough for her fragile body to contain. This was far more than that, far more than any mortal should ever touch. And here it was, held within the piece of a dead saint.

  How many relics held power this way? What could she do with power of this magnitude?

  It was building within her, light edging out underneath her skin like veins, and it would destroy her. It would rip clean through her and there would be no putting her back together. Heat and flame and an anger so profound and so deep that it became the very core of her.

  How was she surviving this?

  Nadya pushed it out of her body.

  The magic shot out around Nadya in a wave of fireball. It struck the Vulture and she burned. Not like last time, not a heat so easily shaken. All that was left was a pile of charred bones at Nadya’s feet.

  Bile rushed into Nadya’s mouth, tinged with copper, and she retched. She turned, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. She could hear the battle but it sounded calmer, less chaotic, like the Tranavians had been fought off.

  There were still more than a handful of Tranavians, perhaps seven or eight. But Nadya’s power blast had hit more than the Vulture and charred bones were scattered in the clearing like discarded garbage. She clapped her hand to her mouth, horror rippling through her. There was no way she had only struck Tranavians with that blow. Kalyazi must have been caught in the chaos.

  She had just killed so many people.

  She staggered back a step. The remaining Tranavians were tossing down their spell books. A pair of monks were cutting off the sleeves of their coats and she could feel the horror of her people at her back.

  This had not been what she intended. She hadn’t meant to take in that much power.

  “This is what happens when a mortal plays at the power of gods.” Marzenya’s voice was calm and calculating and deeply pointed.

  Nadya threw up again.

  Something hard hit Nadya, sending her to the ground. Her head cracked back against a stone, vision going black and white and fractured as pain crashed through her.

  He said if he fell he could bring himself back, she thought frantically, but he had been lying and she knew, deep down, he would kill her for destroying one of his Vultures.

  She rolled to her feet, head spinning, reaching for her voryen. His boot slammed down onto her hand and a choked cry of pain escaped her. Her other voryen was out of easy reach and the power blast had left her dizzy and weak. She could pull at the thread of power from the relic but she had already done more than she could stand. What she had survived was impossible.

  Fear spiked adrenaline through her
as he dropped into a crouch, his weight shifting on her hand. She had to bite her lip to keep from whimpering.

  “What have I told you about taking things that are mine, towy dżimyka?” he asked, brittle and chaotic. Black hair shadowed roiling, monstrous features. Blood dripped from his onyx eyes.

  “You said to do what I had to,” she spat. Her other hand scrambled for the bone voryen at her belt but iron claws caged her wrist.

  “Did you think I truly meant that?”

  He cocked his head and moved suddenly, Kostya’s blade cutting through the air where he had been.

  Nadya struggled to her feet. Malachiasz would kill Kostya. She moved faster than she thought she was able, stumbling to put herself between them. Both boys froze. Kostya’s eyes flicked away from Malachiasz to meet hers.

  There was reassurance there. It had always been Kostya and Nadya, two little orphans wreaking havoc in the monastery to hide from her fate. He smiled slightly.

  Clawed hands dug into Kostya, horror crossing his face as one of the remaining Vultures pulled him away. Malachiasz lunged to strike at her.

  Panic thudded in Nadya’s chest. She reached past the relic’s magic for Marzenya—fire would do her no good here and she was terrified of touching the deeper magic again.

  Marzenya granted her a line of power, careful and controlled. A definitive message—Nadya was pushing too far and needed to hold back. Nadya would take it. She grasped onto the power and slipped away from Malachiasz’s claws, lashing out and cracking him on the jaw with her foot. She heard the sound of bone crunching underneath her boot.

  “Sorry,” she said as he hissed in pain, blood dripping from his chin.

  She didn’t know how to stop him like this. Kostya staggered into her and her irritation morphed into horror. The blood covering him was his own.

  “Kostya?”

  Everything moved too fast. A crossbow bolt thudded into Malachiasz’s shoulder, then another, knocking him back into a tree. His head slammed into the hard wood and he dropped like a stone.

  Parijahan loaded another bolt into her crossbow and shot the remaining Vulture, who simply laughed as he watched. Nadya, desperate, yanked harder on the careful piece of magic Marzenya had given her and threw her voryen. The blade lodged itself in the Vulture’s eye and he dropped, too.