“It is my sworn duty to protect the honor of the grand vicar,” Sterling said rapidly, formulating a plan of attack. The cross-shaped altar still separated him from the dark stranger. He measured himself against the size of his foe. Sterling was no slouch when it came to swordplay, and the Bloodwood was not that big. If it came to a fight, he figured he could win it quickly. But for him to launch a strike now he would have to navigate around the altar, which could prove tricky. He figured it best to keep chatting whilst he strategized. “All of the vicar’s actions are sanctioned of Laijon.”
“You have the brains of a shit bucket,” the assassin said. “But I forget. You are all the same. Inadequate. You damn sick people, so beholden to your false Laijon and your power-hungry quorum. You will all soon be exterminated.”
“You dare blaspheme the vicar and quorum of five before one of the Dayknights?” Sterling’s voice rose in anger as he stepped to the side, getting set to spring. The black-clad figure mimicked his step—they were now circling the altar like two gladiators, sizing each other up.
“Who is worse, the one who rapes, or the one who enables the rapist?” the Bloodwood asked. “Or do you secretly wish to fondle the young woman yourself? I can see your sins, Captain. That you’ve raped both women and boys and even children is written on your face.”
“I’ll have your tongue for that.” Sterling’s mind was in turmoil. This Silkwood was accusing him of things that no man should. Tala’s allegations were far-reaching indeed.
“Oh yes, I can see your sins.” The dark figure leaped onto the altar. “For your soul has been laid bare before me.” Those previously hidden eyes under the hood now glinted with evil, piercing through the scarlet haze, aimed right at him. What he saw in those two black orbs, both pulsing with utter wickedness, drained him of all bluster. Sterling took one faltering step back. The room now took on a more reddish hue, which spread in crimson waves of light over the cross-shaped altar and the figure now poised atop it.
He came to realize that this wasn’t a confrontation he was likely to win. It now seemed this Bloodwood could read his mind, control it even. He did feel inadequate. He knew his lack, but that in itself wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t his present state of cowering before battle that hurt his pride either. It was the fact that he hadn’t served the holy vicar the way he should have. His sins were laid before him now. And the most grievous sin: he’d gone against Denarius, he’d gone behind the vicar’s back and worked in consort with Jondralyn and Culpa Barra to help Hawkwood and Roguemoore escape. And this assassin knows! Perhaps Denarius knows too. Sterling cursed his own weakness.
On the cross-shaped altar, the dark figure loomed over him like Laijon’s wrath, ready to strike him down. Sterling took another faltering step back, stumbling into the rough stone wall behind him. He noticed his sword hand trembled, and for a moment he felt it wasn’t attached to his arm at all but was instead a foreign, beastly claw belonging to someone else entirely, some dolt who scarcely knew how to wield a weapon of any kind.
Then the assassin pulled back his hood and a face was revealed.
“You,” Sterling muttered.
And the now familiar apparition struck—struck like a serpent, like venom flowing. The black blade had scarcely come into view and it was buried in Sterling’s chest just over his heart and then pulled free, red and wet. Sterling whimpered.
All feeling left his limbs; stumbling, he felt his face smack against the wall and slide down, the cold, coarse stone eating at his flesh. The last thing he saw was crimson waves of scalding brightness. And the fading memory of a familiar face as it hovered over him before all dissolved into total blackness.
The face of the Bloodwood, the face of the Val Vallè princess, Seita.
* * *
Take up your cross and wield it in righteousness, for it is a blade sent from heaven. Only the three-fingered sign of the Laijon Cross over the heart can stave off the wraiths and the nameless beasts of the underworld. Only the three-fingered sign of the Laijon Cross over the heart can stave off Laijon’s wrath, those Lightning Spears of Heaven. So let the sign of the Laijon Cross be like a sword unto you.
—THE WAY AND TRUTH OF LAIJON
* * *
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
TALA BRONACHELL
19TH DAY OF THE MOURNING MOON, 999TH YEAR OF LAIJON
AMADON, GUL KANA
Glade crawled into the small, dark chamber, letting the tapestry fall into place behind him. He wore all black—boots, pants, jerkin, and belt—with a shortsword at his side.
Tala felt along the stone wall until she located the wooden door above her head, pulled the Bloodwood dagger from her belt, and slipped the black blade into the crack. She heard a click and the door retreated inward with a rasp. With great effort, she pulled herself up and into the opening. A short corridor was disclosed before her with a ladder at its far end. She pulled herself the rest of the way through, dusting off her tan leather pants and maroon woolen shirt. She had been in these passages before, with Lawri, the day that she had first met the Bloodwood. “Follow me,” she said.
“Whatever you say, m’lady.” There was a hardness in Glade’s voice. Tala knew that Glade Chaparral, of all people, did not like being ordered about, especially by her.
She heard him climbing, and he was soon right behind her. “I only follow you on this fool’s quest to see the humiliation on your face when there is naught to it, Tala.”
He had been curt with her since she had sent him false word that Jovan wished to see him in Sunbird Hall, only to show him the latest note from the Bloodwood once he’d arrived. Reluctantly he read the note. After perusing its contents, he made her show him the black dagger mentioned in the note. “And you will come with me,” she’d insisted. The dagger was tucked into her belt now.
Just this morning, Tala had found the note from the Bloodwood in her room. After praying over Lawri in Lindholf’s chamber, she had stepped into her own rooms and immediately sensed something amiss. The shard of mandolin that Seita had given her under the Swensong Spire three days ago—the shard that she had so carefully placed in the center of the stone mantel shelf—had been moved. It had only been moved a few inches from where she had set it—enough to get her attention. When Tala had plucked the shard of wood from the mantel, she found the Bloodwood’s note scratched in tiny letters onto the back side.
The note had read:
Before the light of day fades away, return my black dagger to the red room with the cross-shaped altar. There you will be given one last task. You will know it when you see it. Your clue to accomplishing the task is hidden in the verse I asked you to study. You will know that the task is complete when you’ve found the antidote for Lawri. Once you have the antidote, make haste, for Lawri’s time of Absolution is near. Give the antidote to her and she will become as new. She will become even more than she was before, ready for the greatness that is her destiny.
Bring Glade Chaparral. Now that you have divulged our secrets to him, I am forced to give him a part to play in our game. He should play it well.
Leave my black dagger at the foot of the altar.
It didn’t take Tala long to recall the room with the cross-shaped altar. She remembered it from her foray into the secret ways with Lawri a moon ago. But it was the holy book that still vexed her; chapter twenty, verse thirty-one of the Ember Lighting Song of the Third Warrior Angel. It read, And it came to pass that at the time of final Dissolution, he died upon the tree, nailed thusly, purging all man’s Abomination, the sword of Affliction piercing his side. Thus all was sanctified. Upon the altar they laid his body in the shape of the Cross Archaic. And as prophesied in all Doctrine, she took up the angel stones. And it came to pass, the five stones of Final Atonement she placed into the wound manifest. The verse made no sense to her, especially in the context of procuring the antidote for Lawri’s poison.
Tala feared all she’d done for her cousin so far amounted to nothing but a sordid culmination of failure
s. Lawri was near death, each breath slower than the next.
Tala imagined the days a little more than a moon ago when her own cares had been relatively simple ones. She wondered whatever happened to those I-lost-my-shawl, should-I-stay-in-bed-a-little-longer days, those what-to-have-for-breakfast conundrums, those all-important should-I-scrub-my-hands-before-dinner questions, those don’t-forget-to-say-my-prayers nights, those runny-nose, bad-hair days. Lawri’s plight had certainly put her life into perspective, though. My life before seems so ridiculous. She knew she could no longer live in blissful ignorance again. Not after seeing Jovan and Leif together, not after seeing the grand vicar blessing Lawri.
Glade was staring at her in the dark. Just the sight of him could fill her heart with all kinds of terrible, conflicting emotions. Mostly loathing, even though his auburn hair glowed beautifully in the narrow ray of sunlight streaming down from a crack high above.
“Up there.” She pointed down the narrow hallway toward the wooden ladder at the far end. Together they crossed the length of corridor. Glade examined the ladder, which rose up and disappeared into a dark hole in the roof. It was rotten, but Tala climbed anyway, knowing from her previous venture here that it was safe. Glade followed, mumbling his displeasure with the entire journey.
The ladder emptied them out into another room, more of a crawl space really, and dark. Kneeling, Tala bumped her head on the ceiling anyway but located the trapdoor in the floor with its bolt cut off. Together she and Glade lifted the wooden door up and over and descended a cramped circular staircase and through a series of dimly lit rooms lined with wood-plank boxes and piles of discarded, moth-eaten clothes and rusted pottery. Tala felt rat droppings crunch under her feet. She had to duck scores of hanging spiderwebs. The stench of dead mice permeated the air. The dreary squalor of the unkempt place nauseated her. They came to another wooden door, also with a broken lock, and they both slipped through into a much wider and well-lit hallway. Pink light filtered in at regular intervals through the arrow slits in the walls. She knew there was a spectacular view of Amadon through those slits, but she passed them by without a second thought.
Their journey through the dank air of the secret ways passed in silence, a silence laced with fear. Tala now had the sense that they were being followed as they traveled through a few more dark, narrow corridors, down a twisting stair, and into the glowing room she sought. She opened the door to the red-hazed chamber.
Tala stopped in her tracks. Glade bumped into her from behind, cursing softly. But she paid him no mind; her eyes were focused on the naked man lying faceup on the altar before her. Her heart felt like a lump of cold wax in her chest when she realized who it was. “Bloody Mother Mia,” Glade muttered, and shoved his way past her. “It’s Prentiss.”
Sterling Prentiss lay on his back, arms spread in the shape of the cross, chains binding both wrists, the ends of both chains bolted to irons in the floor. The Dayknight captain was staring straight up, mumbling. A wild thatch of dark hair covered his chest and stomach all the way down to dark, curly hair around the flaccid stub of his groin.
“His tongue is cut out,” Glade said, leaning over the altar. “And look at these other marks on him. Rotted angels of the underworld.”
A small puncture wound was just discernable through the chest hair above Sterling’s heart. On the mound of his belly there was a three-inch vertical slit in his stomach. Blood welled from the sliced flesh.
“We must unchain him,” Tala said, swallowing the awkward lump in her throat.
“Certainly so,” Glade said, and for a fraction of a second, the tone of hardness that had been in his voice earlier was absent and a momentary glint of compassion shone in his eyes. “Actually”—he wiped the expression away and his demeanor changed abruptly—“why should we?”
“How can we not?” Tala answered, confused. Clarity seemed far beyond her reach. She had trouble focusing on what he was saying. “If we do nothing, he will die.”
“I doubt anyone even knows he is in here.”
Tala caught the dismissal in his tone. “The person who did this to him knows that he is here,” she said. “We could be implicated in the crime.”
Glade studied her in a distracted way—a contradiction somehow only he could pull off. “Whoever did this will not confess, and neither will I say anything, or you. There is nothing to be done for him.”
Tala could tell that even now he was working out some plan in his head. In the dim red light of the room, the purity of conceit and callousness in his eyes now burned like hot coals.
“It is time for my brother to be the Dayknight captain,” he said. “I say, the quicker Sterling dies, the better.”
Tala looked at him aghast—unbelieving. “How can you be so unfeeling when a man is dying right in front of us?” she asked, her fingers searching for the Bloodwood’s black dagger at her hip, her fingers curling over its hilt. She kept a tight grip on the knife—if only to steady her quivering arm.
“Leif is meant to be the leader of the Dayknights.” The words were coming out of him husky and feverishly ripe with bloodlust. “Your own brother wants it. Jovan only waits for this doddering fool to die before he makes the move, and now here he is, lying in chains before me, all but dead.”
“He’s not dead yet.”
“True.” Glade said, pulling a dagger from the folds of his own jerkin. “He is not dead yet.” Then, gripping the blade tight, Glade bent over Sterling and drew the edge forcefully across the man’s heaving neck, opening it wide.
Tala gasped, her eyes afire with the insanity of it all. Dark blood bubbled from Sterling’s lips and poured from the new wound spanning the width of his throat to cascade down over the altar.
The directness of Glade’s sudden, murderous act stole her breath. Frozen in immobility, she could do naught save watch in terror as the last of Sterling’s life flowed away. Her body was tense at first, and then it shook with nerves, as if her muscles were trying to crawl from under her skin. Her first indrawn breath was congealed agony, thick and rancid and clawing up her throat like wraiths from the underworld seeking escape. He’s more like Leif than I’d ever imagined. Could this Glade Chaparral before me really be the same person I knew as a child?
“What have you done?” The words slipped through her pursed and pallid lips. Her head hammered whilst sparks of rage formed behind her eyes.
“I’ve just secured a future for my brother.” Glade swiped the dagger over Sterling’s hairy chest, wiping away the blood. As he did so, Tala’s heart thundered. She had a strange aching to touch Sterling’s dead face. It was a morbid yet powerful desire that pulled at her. She had to take a step back to break the spell.
Glade rammed his dagger back into the sheath at his hip. “Now, let’s find this magic antidote for Lawri and leave this damnable place behind.”
Tala just stared at him, watching in sick fascination as he searched around the altar. He looked under all the benches, crawling, scouring the floor with his eyes, even folding back the Mia tapestry on the wall and looking there.
“There is nothing here,” he said. “Have you led me into some trap, Tala?” Glade’s eyes roamed the room almost frantically.
Tala’s mind raced. What do I do? The air she breathed was so stuffy, cloying. She felt as if she were sinking under water. Laijon forgive me. Lawri forgive me. I have failed. She closed her eyes and silently prayed, making the three-fingered sign of the Laijon Cross over her heart. And when she opened her eyes, there was something that flitted at the edge of her mind, a sudden understanding.
“ ‘And it came to pass that at the time of final Dissolution.’ ” The first words of the Ember Lighting Song of the Third Warrior Angel leaped from her mouth. But she stopped there, clamping her mouth shut. Still, she knew that in those words lay the answer to the Bloodwood’s final riddle, right at the edge of her grasp, unreachable.
“You can stay here and pray to Laijon all you want,” Glade said. “I’m leaving.”
She released Glade and whirled to face the altar. “ ‘Upon the altar they laid his body in the shape of the Cross Archaic.’ ” Her eyes went to Sterling’s arms, spread wide upon the cross-shaped altar, and then to the three wounds in the man’s body: the severed throat, the puncture just above his heart, and the small slit in his stomach. . . .
“ ‘And as prophesied in all Doctrine, Mia took up the angel stones. And it came to pass, the five stones of Final Atonement she placed into the wound manifest.’ ”
Her eyes focused on the three-inch slit in Sterling’s belly. The room now hummed with a music that would not quite form into melody—or was the sound only in her mind? Could Glade hear it too? It was hard to tell. He made no movement behind her.
“ ‘She placed into the wound manifest,’ ” Tala repeated the last line to herself, almost in a whisper. And then it hit her. The horror of what she now must do sank in.
She placed into the wound manifest!
The Bloodwood had hidden the antidote inside Sterling!
The castle shivered beneath her boots. Sickness and fear threatened to overwhelm her. It seemed the room was too loud and red and bright, although she knew that it wasn’t the case at all. The place was deathly silent. Sudden exhaustion hit her with force. She wanted to simply lie down and rest.
“Are you done praying?” Glade still watched her, his eyes silver glints against the darkening red haze of the room. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Let’s go.”
Tala stepped closer to Sterling and reached out her hand, running her fingers over his chest hairs to the slit in his belly. The hole in the flesh of his stomach was just large enough for someone to slip a hand into.
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