Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  Nadya tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She hadn’t braided it and it hung loose around her shoulders. She picked up Malachiasz’s spell book from where it was lying on the ground, staring at it before handing it to Parijahan. Rashid pulled her into an embrace.

  “It broke him,” Serefin heard her say. “I wouldn’t have asked if I’d really thought…”

  Rashid kissed the side of her head. “He was already broken. He wanted to help. He gave us that.”

  She nodded, stepping back and wiping quickly at her eyes. She turned to Serefin. “Let’s go.”

  Kacper took his hand. “Just trust me,” Kacper murmured. “We’ll get to the other side of this like we have everything else.”

  Kacper nudged his forehead against Serefin’s temple and their lips met in a whisper of a kiss. Serefin reached back and made sure the blindfold was firmly tied against his head, and Kacper tugged him forward.

  37

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  A knife twisted in the gut of the divine as he waits and he watches and he knows that they will fall, they always fall, nothing is eternal except for the darkness.

  —The Volokhtaznikon

  One second, Nadya was with the others, picking their way through a forest that had not been trespassed in hundreds of years. The next, she was completely alone.

  Panic seared through her as the silence suddenly became unbearably loud in her ears. It was hard not to notice the absence of Serefin’s awkward steps as he struggled with only Kacper’s hand to guide him. She turned slowly, afraid of what she might find behind her.

  There was nothing.

  Nadya clutched at her prayer beads. Should she continue alone? Should she try to find the others? There was no telling what the forest was going to do to them before it allowed them to their destination—if it allowed them there.

  Would having Malachiasz for a little longer have saved them from the toying of the wood, or was this inevitable?

  What am I supposed to do?

  “You keep going.”

  Marzenya’s presence was stronger and more terrifying here. Something about it, about her, felt … different. Nadya didn’t know what to make of it. But her goddess was right.

  She had to keep going.

  Here the trees were vast, a single one wouldn’t fit in the width of the sanctuary at the monastery where she had grown up. Unfathomably large. It was perpetually dark, perpetually cold, and Nadya felt strange. There was a distracting humming in her blood.

  She could feel where she needed to go, but couldn’t bring herself to step forward. What if she was meant to search for the others?

  They can handle themselves, she thought, though that wasn’t even a little bit true. Serefin was a wreck, only barely in control of himself. And Parijahan and Rashid had no magic in a place where magic was everywhere.

  A pang of worry stabbed at her, but her decision was made. She had to continue and pray the others would be fine.

  Pray they didn’t happen upon Malachiasz.

  Pray she didn’t, either.

  Nadya tucked Malachiasz’s coat closer around her, rolling the too-long sleeves back. It smelled like him again, but it was a cold comfort.

  He had only been trying to help and it had broken what little he had left.

  Was this part of the curse? The dark omen upon them was going to strike eventually. But no. She had known pressing past that wall of magic would tear him to pieces and she had asked it of him anyway.

  “Do you want it to be? Would that make it easier to bear?”

  Nadya sighed.

  “He is not what should concern you. You have far greater things to deal with than that worm.”

  I really feel like your insults for him could be better.

  “Be grateful he still lives, child,” Marzenya replied dryly.

  Nadya smiled slightly. It was almost like a conversation she would have had with Marzenya before. She missed the rest of the pantheon, but having Marzenya back was enough. Almost. The difference in Marzenya was troubling, though. Always a little cold, a little cruel, but Marzenya did not control secrets—those were for Vaclav. Her words had a dispassionate bite to them, like she was talking to a stranger, not a girl she had spoken to her whole short life.

  But her smile fell away. He wouldn’t live for much longer, though, would he?

  It was oppressive, how the forest lived and breathed and wanted Nadya out. The underbrush was thick and difficult to navigate, full of leaves chewed by worms and bleached bones, and she had to completely reroute her path to go around the massive trees. Everything smelled of damp and decay, cut through by the bitter sharpness of cold.

  It didn’t take long for Nadya’s weariness to slow her steps and her loneliness to latch itself around her heart. It was hard to see the end of this and believe anything would be better.

  Was losing track of Serefin another failure? If he faltered, Nadya and the rest of the world would be lost. She couldn’t lie to herself—she knew, deep down, what would happen to her if the fallen gods were set free. They would take her and she wouldn’t be strong enough to fight back.

  Maybe she should try to find him instead.

  “Keep going.”

  She chewed on her lip, staring up at the dark canopy of leaves covering the sky. She missed the sun; she had been in the darkness for too long.

  She pushed into a clearing. Malachiasz lounged in the low-slung branches of a tree, casually picking at his fingernails. Something twinged in Nadya’s chest. This was the Malachiasz from the night in the cathedral. Kohl lining pale eyes, making them even more colorless and strange, black hair tangled with golden beads and bits of bone.

  He was wearing the clothes he had disappeared in. A black tunic and black leggings. And there was a cruel, detached look in his eyes as he gazed down at her.

  She couldn’t tell if he was really there.

  “Where do you think this is going to go, truly?” he drawled.

  “What?”

  He waved a hand. “All of this. The temple, the gods, that business with Serefin. What’s all this to do?”

  “To stop the war,” she said evenly. “Serefin has to break free from Velyos. I need answers. Marzenya—”

  “The bitch who bosses you around.”

  Nadya froze. “I’m sorry?”

  “You heard me,” he said slowly. A smile tugged at his mouth as he dropped to the ground, his movements as elegant as ever. “You don’t need them but you also don’t listen to reason so there’s really no point in any of this. You’ll remain irrational, this war will continue, nothing will change.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Give up, little cleric. You lost. You killed the king of Tranavia and nothing changed, except your petty gods cast you out because you dared think for yourself. Kalyazin is never going to win. They are underpowered and incapable of matching the blood magic that a Tranavian child could cast.”

  She took a step back as he inched closer, eyeing her like a predator. Her back hit a tree and she was trapped.

  He placed his hand against the tree—iron claws long and sharp, tapping the space next to her head. He leaned in close. “I was right and I always will be. You are nothing but a girl with a blade.”

  He was a breath away and she could taste something off in the air. Her heart tripped over itself in terrified, erratic beats that she couldn’t explain, because even at his worst—tearing out hearts and eating them in front of her—he never kicked off such a primal instinct of fear within her before. She never thought he would truly kill her, except here … she wasn’t so sure.

  His sleeve slid back ever so slightly. Nadya glanced from his arm to his face. She trailed the sharp thumbnail of her left hand against his cheek, a cut opening and dripping blood.

  “You would doom us all,” she whispered, “for the sake of your vendetta. But, of course, you do know everything, Malachiasz Czechowicz—” She waited. “Like you know to never underestimate a girl with a blade.”

/>   She reached for her bone voryen, panic settling between her ribs when she discovered it gone. Her fingers closed over one of her other blades and she tugged it from its sheath, holding it loosely.

  A beat of hesitation—if she were wrong—no, if she were wrong, he would be fine.

  She slid the blade through his ribs and into his heart.

  Blood poured over her hands, warm and not his not his. She was right—she had to be right.

  The eyes of the Telich’nevyi went white, shock and confusion twisting its face. It grasped the hilt of her blade, letting out a small, pained gasp that sounded like him and Nadya closed her eyes because she couldn’t watch this. It’s not him, it only stole his face.

  It crumpled to the ground at her feet. She shuddered, standing in the clearing with blood on her hands, forcing her nerves to settle before she moved, nudging at the body with the toe of her boot.

  “Nadya?”

  She whirled, voryen raised. Malachiasz was staring past her at the body at her feet. Nadya wasn’t sure it was possible for him to look paler than he did right then. She supposed stumbling upon one’s own dead body would be alarming. But, oh, gods, it was really him. Was it really him? Or was this another one?

  Telich’nevyi were also straight out of Kalyazi myth. Shape shifters who only needed a single strand of hair from someone’s head to copy them so completely that their loved ones would never know.

  “Give it a moment, it’ll change,” she said softly, any louder and her voice would crack, because this one might actually be Malachiasz.

  “Did you kill it?” His voice sounded off.

  “I did.”

  “Did it look like that?” Smaller, now.

  “It did.” She was starting to tremble. She had stabbed him. Not him, but him still. He acted like that normally, it wasn’t his behavior that had tipped her off at all. It was a guess, a lucky guess.

  “Oh.” More a strangled exhale than an actual word.

  She wiped the blood off her hands, searching through the underbrush for something to wipe off her blade.

  “How did you, uh, h-how—”

  “How did I know I wasn’t killing you?”

  He swallowed hard and nodded.

  I didn’t, gods, I really didn’t. She stared at him. He grew even paler.

  “Nadya,” he said quietly, desperation in his voice.

  She shook her head. “It—it didn’t get your eyes right. And you do this weird little shudder when you hear your name, it didn’t do that, either.”

  He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the body. It still looked like him. She turned his face, fingers skimming over the spot on his cheek she had cut open on the Telich’nevyi.

  “This place wants us to destroy each other,” she said. She kissed him, a gentle, quieting touch. “We can’t let it.” How easy it was to lie to him.

  His hand was at her waist, trembling as his fingers dug into the fabric of her jacket—his jacket. She turned to go, but when she took a step and his hand slipped from hers, her heart dropped. She turned. She was alone.

  “Shit,” she swore.

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  The voices had become incessant. The ones he was supposed to wake growing louder with each step. Their voices adding to the other two that rattled in the back of his head, growing to a fever pitch, a cacophony, insufferable. He lost track of how many voices there were, they lost anything that might make them distinct as they merged with one another in an awful chorus.

  He didn’t think he could fight this much longer. The best thing to do would be to obey and hope he survived to see the end of it.

  His eyes hurt. Kacper’s hand clasped around his was a warm and solid comfort even though he could feel his rapid pulse and knew he was terrified.

  Kacper was leading him in the wrong direction. He knew where he needed to go; knew where it was the fallen ones slept. Serefin jerked his hand away. The second he did, he was alone.

  “Wait!” he said, stepping forward as if he could pull Kacper back from wherever he had gone, but there was nothing but dark forest around him.

  His breath came hard and fast. He reached back with shaking hands and untied the cloth around his eyes.

  The nightmare came to life around him.

  He stood in the center of a graveyard of giants, their vast bones scattered and creating a forest of white. The moths kicked up in a frenzy around him, but they were unnatural. Marked, black and white with skulls on their wings.

  Serefin pressed his hands to his eyes. They came away bloody. He tried not to panic because if he panicked he would do something stupid and if he did something stupid he was lost. He needed to think.

  He needed to wake those who were sleeping.

  No. He was here to break this off. He needed to keep going because that was the only way to cut Velyos and the rest off.

  Velyos urged him on, through the graveyard of bone. He walked past skulls the size of the great hall in Grazyk. Some were almost human, except there were too many eye sockets, the shapes wrong, the jawbones too long. Some were like animal skulls: deer, wolves, rats, snakes, and one that looked terrifyingly like the skull of a dragon.

  Glittering spiderwebs covered empty sockets. One of Serefin’s moths was trapped in a web and he watched in horror as a spider the size of a wolf crept out from within the recesses of the skull to devour it.

  When I died, you showed me visions of what could happen to this world, didn’t you? he asked cautiously. Grazyk burning. Kalyazin a barren wasteland. Blood raining from the sky. But what would be the catalyst for that kind of apocalypse? Inaction? Continued war?

  “I did,” Velyos said. “You are but one veil away from my domain. One side step and you are there.”

  Where am I now?

  “This is also mine, if mine in a different form. You have exceptional power, Tranavian, but you feed on a whisper of magic. The girl drinks in so much more.”

  And Malachiasz?

  There was silence as Serefin continued on, bones crunching underneath his boots.

  “He has the power of a god,” Velyos finally said. “And that is why he must die.”

  Something close to sorrow filled Serefin. He kept remembering the boy with the mess of black hair standing in the servants’ hall, tears streaking his cheeks, terrified of his power. Kept thinking of his brother walking beside him and offering a truce. He didn’t know if he could do it in the end.

  “If you want to avoid what I showed you, you must continue. I have been putting the pieces into place for so long and I have lost many along the way. But finally I have found the pieces that will move in the correct directions and we are so close, you see, so close to real change.”

  Serefin paused. During the year of Velyos rattling in his brain, the being had grown coherent. Far more coherent than when he had spoken to him after he had been killed. Velyos was growing stronger. Each step west had given him strength.

  Serefin only wanted his eyes to stop hurting, to stop bleeding. He wanted his throne back. He wanted to save Tranavia.

  He wanted to sleep.

  He wasn’t so sure he was strong enough to break this off.

  How do I wake the others? Better to avoid it, he thought. He tried to take a step away from where Velyos wished him to go and could not. The only way out was to see this to the end.

  “You’ll know. It will be easy; you are nearly there. You already started the process and didn’t even know it! Mortals, so fleeting so fast but when you are nudged in the proper directions you charge headlong into the abyss without a second glance and that is good, so good. Wonderful that now the song can continue.

  “It was broken, you see. Long, long ago. There was a note, here and there, but the song needs to play to its end and we are so close, a few more instruments, a little more exquisite torture and we will have it.”

  Panic clawed at his chest. When he took a step forward the crunch of bone sounded too loud in his ears.

  “I wanted the four. I wanted all of t
hem, you see. Because, oh, the things I could make right if I had the girl and the monster and the prince and the queen. But I will make do. I am resourceful. You have been so very useful to me, young prince turned king turned instrument and omen. We are so close. So close to a beginning, so close to a reckoning.”

  Against the other Kalyazi gods? Serefin tried to put reason to Velyos’ words.

  “Who else?”

  interlude viii

  KACPER NEIBORSKI

  Serefin was gone.

  Again.

  He had lost Serefin again.

  Not only that, but he had lost all the others. Damn the Kalyazi, he wasn’t concerned with her, but Ostyia was out there somewhere alone. He had to keep calm but all he wanted to do was flee this bloody forest, go back to Tranavia, and pretend like none of this had ever happened. He had never been assigned to the prince’s company. He had never gotten into a fight with Ostyia because she had teased him about his crush on Serefin in front of the other soldiers. He had never been promoted into Serefin’s inner circle.

  None of this madness had ever happened.

  He was just a boy from the country. He wasn’t made for this. Royalty and Vultures and divine nonsense. He was good at blood magic but there were plenty who were better. And blood magic was so basic, so normal. Whatever this was wasn’t normal.

  Blood and bone, he hoped Serefin was all right, but he had a sinking feeling deep in the pit of his stomach that something very bad was about to happen and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He hadn’t been able to stop Serefin from leaving. He could do nothing to help Serefin as these beings tried to rip him apart, could only watch in horror as his eyes bled and he tried to claw them out even if he had to go through his own skull to do it.

  Kacper wished he had never left home. Taken over the farm from his sister. Did his duty at the front and returned the instant his contract had ended. But he had to meet a ridiculous prince with pale eyes and a grin that could light up a room full of soldiers who were tired and only wanted to go home.