Yet, here were more. He and Teirn had stumbled upon some heretics.
"How many times has Athanaric even been out to our village?” the second voice said. “A handful? All he does is send out his children and they do all the work, while he just—“
“No need to get blasphemous,” the third man said, again looking behind him. “He’s still our god.”
“Don’t be a fool,” the first voice said. “We’re going to kill him. That’s as blasphemous as it gets.”
Wrend shivered. He needed to find and warn the Master.
Or did he? If these rebels succeeded, the proving would end. Neither him nor Teirn would have to die.
He pushed the thought away. He couldn’t think like that. He needed to learn to accept the Master’s will, to make the hard decisions. If either he or Teirn had to die, surely there was a good reason for it—or an acceptable way to convince the Master against it.
“Everyone’s ready,” the second man said. “I spoke with them all this morning.”
“Good,” said the first. “Then today at the Strengthening, it won’t be Steffan that dies, but Athanaric.”
The three men moved out of sight, and Wrend stood up. Teirn did the same. His face displayed no emotion, but his eyes spoke of hurried turnings in his mind.
“Do you think,” he said, “this is part of our proving?”
The idea hadn’t occurred to Wrend. “We need to warn the Master.”
A resolve settled over Teirn’s face—the same expression he’d had back at the Seraglio, when telling Wrend that he would win the proving. It made gooseflesh rise on Wrend’s arms.
“We? No, not we. We can’t do it together. This is part of the test.”
Wrend pushed panic down. “Then here’s our chance to throw off this proving. Let’s work together. Let’s warn the Master together. We can say we didn’t know it was part of the proving—and then ask for clarification on the purpose of the proving. Here is our chance to get me out of the proving.”
Teirn shook his head. “No. I can’t afford to risk anything like that.”
He turned to go. Wrend tried to grab his arm and stop him, but he yanked his arm free, gave Wrend a scowl, and hurried away.
Wrend watched him, frozen in shock. But it only took a moment to realize he needed to act if he wanted to stay alive.
So he got moving.
Chapter 32: A conspiracy uncovered
Conspiracies to get gain and power abound throughout the world. Some people will roll their eyes and shake their heads at such an idea, but these people are simply deceived. Conspiracies abound, and will one day threaten the very fabric of our society.
-Athanaric
By the time Wrend returned to the synagogue, he had few options left. He’d looked everywhere, and the afternoon had grown late.
He paused on the top step of the synagogue, in the shadow of the Master’s statue, which stood high above, atop the synagogue steeple, and looked out over the street. The crowd had thinned. The few people about no longer loitered, but walked with purpose. Down on the street, a woman holding a man’s hand sprinted past, and her wide-brimmed hat with a red ribbon flew off her head. She cried out and started to turn back, but the man pulled her on.
Soon, not far beyond the city borders, the Strengthening would take place. Those who hadn’t already arrived would have to hurry if they wanted to attend. Including Wrend.
Since overhearing the conspirators, he’d spent hours searching in the city and camp for the Master. He’d last looked at the hill of sacrifice, where a priest had said that sometimes the Master meditated at the synagogue before a Strengthening. Sometimes he came from his tent. Other times he spent the morning at the hill, greeting the people as they gathered.
This time, it seemed he’d done none of those things, for Wrend couldn’t find him anywhere. Now he’d come too far, spent too much time, and would only barely make it to the hill on time. He should’ve waited there for the Master to arrive.
Everywhere he’d looked, he’d seen renegades. In every face and smile. If people could conspire against the Master in his own sanctuary, everyone was a suspect. Wrend trusted no one. He couldn’t tell anyone about the overheard conversation. Not even priests, mothers, or paladins. He could only tell the Master.
Sighing, he resolved to sprint back to the hill of sacrifice and hope to catch the Master before the ceremony began. To interrupt the ceremony was blasphemy. It disrespected both god and demigod, and the Master wouldn’t tolerate such dishonor. Wrend had grown up watching children who’d disobeyed the Master in small ways die for those infractions; no one would consider interrupting this ceremony a small infraction.
The doors to the synagogue opened behind Wrend, and a bustle of voices and footsteps erupted. A group of eight or nine priests dressed in the crimson robes of sacrifice, with hoods drawn up over their heads, filed out and brushed past him. One bumped him and murmured an apology. Two stayed behind to pull the doors shut. One of the priests locked the door with a large key, and the two followed after the others.
The last of them stopped half way down the steps. A shadow from his hood deepened over his face as he looked at Wrend.
“You should hurry,” he said. He had an unusually high voice for a man. It seemed familiar. “The ceremony is slated to begin soon.” Then he turned to follow the others.
Wrend tried to place the voice, but failed. The priest in the very front walked with his hands held out before him, with a sheathed knife lying across them. The blade of sacrifice. These priests had spent the last hour praying over the steel, preparing it for the moment it would kill Steffan. They would pass through the midst of the crowd at the hill, carrying the blade up the slope to the Master as other priests gathered the people’s seeds to be sprinkled with the demigod’s blood.
Wrend started down the steps. He would have to beat the priests to the hill by several minutes. He reached street level only a few moments after the last priest, but stopped.
There’d been a paper on the steps. One of the priests had dropped it when bumping past him.
He leapt back up the stairs, three at a time, and indeed found a folded parchment resting on the top step. He bent and picked it up, unfolded it, and read the hasty script. It was written in the sacred flowing style of the demigods—which was different than the blocky type the rest of the country used.
My beloved followers, plans have changed. Attack only after Athanaric lifts the knife to slay me. In the moment of distraction, I will rise from the altar and slay him myself.
Wrend looked up from the letter, after the priests. They marched with their heads bowed and bodies swaying in unison as they chanted a prayer. Two had taken up positions ahead of the one with the knife, carrying cisterns that belched black smoke around them, into the faces of the priests behind.
At least one was a rebel. More importantly, Steffan, the demigod who would die that day, was also corrupt.
The priest in the rear broke away from the group and darted to the side. He leapt up onto the wooden boardwalk, looked back at his brethren and up at Wrend, and ran into the alley. It was the same priest that had spoken to him.
Wrend jumped down the steps in two bounds and started down the street.
He didn’t follow the priests or run ahead of them. Instead, he cut into the alley after the priest who’d fled. He ran past the barrels and crates lining the buildings on either side. Already breathing hard, he burst into the next street over. His feet clattered on the wooden boardwalk for two steps before he stopped. He turned his head from side to side, searching for a flash of crimson cowl or the pumping feet of a fleeing man.
But he saw nothing. Only the last few people hurrying down the street, northward toward the hill of sacrifice.
“Did a priest run past here?” he shouted.
The people looked at him, startled. One man shrugged, but another pointed down and across the street, at an alley.
Wrend bolted on, focusing on his discernment. The usual Ic
hor waves emanated from his body, and beneath them flowed others—the elusive ones he’d almost grasped before. They bore a white hue and pulsed faster than the Thew waves. They especially emanated from his legs and pumping arms. Flux Ichor.
But he didn’t have the skill to harvest it while binding Ichor to his legs—his clear priority. With the Ichor bound, he applied it, pushing in that half mental, half physical way. He didn’t know if it would work to make him run faster, but it stood to reason that it would.
And it did. His legs grew stronger, and he began to leap farther with each stride—not much farther, perhaps a foot, but it was enough to notice. He also found he could move his legs faster than ever, almost just by willing it.
The street disappeared past him, the few faces nothing more than blurs. He burst into the alley at such a speed that he glanced off the side of a brick building, and in two steps climbed an unintentional staircase of several crates because he couldn’t stop. He leapt off of them, nearly careening forward to the dusty ground as he landed, but stumbled past the texture of gray bricks on both sides.
Praying that he wouldn’t lose his balance or run into a person, he leapt up and over the boardwalk, into the street.
This time, he couldn’t keep his feet. With a grunt, he fell forward. His palms, face, and chest slid across the dirt street as he skidded to a halt. He stood, ignoring the pain in his face and hands, and looked both right and left.
Empty. Not a single person walked along the street length. Only the cowl of a priest lay in its center, not four feet from him.
Wincing at how much it hurt to use his legs, and paying no heed to the blood running down his face and palms, he again applied Ichor to his legs and headed for the hill of sacrifice.
Although he’d lost the trail of the priest, the Master needed warning, and Wrend would provide it.
Chapter 33: A minor inconvenience
It would take an army of paladins to kill me.
-Leenda
Leenda left Krack in the foothills and headed down the slope toward the city, hoping she could escape notice.
She’d given some thought to the problem of how to convince Wrend of his identity, and concluded that her best option was to get Rashel to talk with him. Most of the serving girls agreed that Rashel was his mother; they practically had the same nose and eyes, and had developed a relationship over the years. Certainly Rashel knew the origin of Wrend’s soul, and if she confirmed to him what Leenda had already told him, he might believe it.
So, Leenda went to the tents of the serving girls because she needed to blend in. A proper dress would accomplish that. The yellow one had driven her nearly insane, and besides had become a mess of dirty old rags.
She snuck through the city of tents, dirt streets, and sagebrush, her only worry the paladins left behind as guards. But even many of them seemed gone, probably to the Strengthening with all of the people. She had double cause to bless the Strengthening, because it also meant a black dress, and she looked stunning in black. It complimented her red hair.
She slipped into a cozy tent with a bunk on each side, a small dresser in the back, and the vague scent of cinnamon perfume in the air. A mirror atop the dresser reflected the crack of light from the tent flap. At the foot of each bed, dresses hung on hangers dangling from a free-standing rack.
Leenda chose the black dress that would fit her best. From the lower drawer in the dresser, she withdrew a pair of white undershorts and a shirt. It was cool in the tent, and as she changed, goose bumps riddled her arms and rear.
She pulled the dress on, relishing the fresh cloth—which led to a grunt of disdain at how human tendencies had taken hold of her. It was puberty. Until she’d started to develop into a woman, she hadn’t cared much at all for human things.
She considered herself in the half-mirror. The dress fit too loosely around the bust, but otherwise looked nice. Her hair had become a tangled mess, and so she grabbed a brush from a table and began to straighten her locks out. As long as she had red hair, she would stand out. With Thew she could’ve changed the color over time, as new hair grew, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d purposefully made it red many years before; it was the color of her draegon fur. To change it now would be like leaving the rest of her draegon self behind; and so even if it made her noticeable, she would keep it.
She continued to brush it, enjoying its sheen. Someone would recognize her unless she did something about it, so she retrieved a black bonnet from a drawer and tucked as much hair beneath it as she could. She pulled the front brim low over her face. It covered everything except for a little red around her temples. She searched for a scarf to wear under the bonnet, to hide the rest of the red, but found nothing.
Satisfied, she headed out of the tent to find Rashel. She would be at the Strengthening, in the back of the crowd with the other mothers. Leenda would pull her aside and talk with her. Hopefully, in the crowd, no one would notice her.
Dressed as a proper serving girl, she walked through the city of tents openly. Here and there, paladins passed around her. Most ignored her. A few looked at her with curiosity. Just as her confidence in her disguise had peaked, a handful of patrolling paladins approached her.
“Girl,” the tallest one said. “Halt.”
It spoke in a raspy voice born of vocal chords that had started to decay even despite the best salts the world had to offer.
She tried to ignore it, and go around the group, but five of the paladins fanned out, to fill the width of the street. On each side ahead and behind her, gray canvas tents blocked her way. She could only move forward or backward on the dirt street.
Each paladin in front of her carried a sheathed sword and held a burnished halberd and shield. Athanaric’s emblem, a human silhouette standing over an altar, decorated the front of the shield as well as the chest of the red and black livery over each suit of studded leather armor. The paladins wore puffy black pants tucked into knee-high boots and kept their skin covered, wearing tight gloves and a leather mask that revealed only their eyes and lips. Beneath the masks and gloves, they would have linen wrapped around their skin, to help preserve it against the elements and wear.
They looked at her with unblinking eyes. That had always disturbed her. She could handle their leathery skin, patchy baldness, or varying states of decay—but they never blinked. Their unnatural spasms—how their bodies trembled with barely-contained enthusiasm—also didn’t bother her because she understood why they were like that: all dogs possessed a certain amount of barely-contained excitement, and these were simply dogs in human bodies. She just couldn’t figure out why they never blinked.
“Girl,” the same paladin said. “Why aren’t you at the Strengthening?” He had to be an old paladin; it took years for them to learn how to speak in complete sentences.
She kept her face down. “I’m on my way there, right now.”
The leader stepped close and leaned down, so he could look into her face. She tried to avert it, wishing that she’d found a scarf, but he came within a few feet of her, so she could smell the salt inside of him and couldn’t look away without being too obvious. Other nearby paladins watched the exchange with the interest of a dog watching another eating a steak. That was another problem with paladins: they enjoyed their work. Dogs!
The paladin straightened and stepped back.
“This is her. The girl with red hair.”
She bound her Thew and Flux to her body. The guards lowered their halberds. They moved forward to flank her on both sides.
“You must come with us,” the leader said.
She stepped back. Goat guts—she should’ve been more careful.
“I need to get to the Strengthening,” she said.
A shorter guard stepped directly toward her as she backed up. It pointed its halberd at her.
“No. You come with us. Or you die.”
“I don’t think so.”
The shorter guard lunged at her with his halberd. She jumped to the sid
e, dodging the thrust with pure reflex. But the other paladins fell upon her from the two sides, and she had to resort to Flux and Thew.
Her discernment leapt to the forefront of her mind. She became more aware of ripples of Flux flowing out of her arms, legs, and body, crossing over the Thew emanating from her stomach—the remnants of her last meal still digesting. Several feet out from her body, the waves slowed, reversed, and returned to her, filling her soul like water rising in a glass.
She applied Thew to her legs in a burst as she jumped backward, also applying a trickle of Flux to her torso, in the center of her balance. A wind born of steel and wood touched her face as halberds missed her. She landed a dozen feet back, stumbling and nearly falling, yet maintaining her feet as she cut off the flow of Flux.
The paladins paused. They stared at her as if not understanding how their halberds hadn’t skewered her. The tall one, in particular, gaped with obvious surprise. Behind them, other paladins had arrived and congregated in the street, lowering their halberds and pressing forward. There were a dozen of them, packed in tightly.
From behind her, other paladins approached.
Now steady on her feet and wishing she’d thought to bring a weapon, Leenda raised her eyebrows at the tall guard.
“It’s my duty to attend the Strengthening.”
“Kill her,” the tall one said.
He rushed forward. The others followed, filling the street in front of Leenda with the promise of a pointy death.
She waited until the last moment, coiling her body in preparation for a leap and taking the opportunity to consider what to do, how to react to this opposition. She never even considered abandoning her purpose: she needed to find Rashel.
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