by K. Eason
“Sacrifice. I know that.”
“Good. Then you must know who and what. Dogs. Goats. Svartjagr, sometimes. And if a godsworn really, really wanted her prayers answered, she’d use a man. A slave, maybe, but if it was something too important, she’d use a Dvergir. An Illhari citizen. An uncut boy, or the father of one of her daughters. Her extra sons. Kids like Kenjak, yeah? Sacrificed to Tal’Shik for the fortunes of her House.”
“This is the history of the Purge, Snow, and the foundation for the Reforms. I did have lessons.”
“Right. Well. Bet your lessons didn’t cover this. Godmagic’s not conjuring. It comes straight from the god. Tal’Shik or the Laughing God. Alviri and Taliri gods, too, I imagine. It’s what they give us for all that sacrifice, all the worship. We give them power, they give back. Tal’Shik used to have the whole Republic on their knees to her. You think she might not be a little pissed off that those sacrifices are gone?”
Dekklis thought about that, honest thought that came with silence and scowling. Finally, low-voiced, “So this attack is the beginning of some kind of revenge on Illharek and the Dvergiri. Tal’Shik’s got new Taliri friends to pray to her. All right. Then how’s your Laughing God fit into it? Because I have read my histories, and his cult hates hers.”
Tsabrak’s face on the back of her eyelids, beautiful and cold and angry, always angry. Snow imagined an alliance between Tsabrak and Ehkla, fanatics together. She shivered and pretended that cold was the reason.
“I don’t know. But.” Snow dragged a last lungful of jenja. A little stale, a little sour. “Listen to me, Szanys Dekklis. I’m not sorry for the Purge. I don’t want the temples back. Any of them.”
“Then why ally with the God at all?”
“Best offer I had at the time.” And Tsabrak had been asking. Beautiful, angry Tsabrak.
“Hard to believe that. You’re Academy trained. You’ve got a master’s ring.”
“In chirurgery, yeah? Not conjuring.” Only gold rings for that. Second rank. Never Adept, not enough talent for it, and hell if she’d tell Dekklis that. “And I’m half-blood.”
“Ah. All right. Then I understand.”
“Do you, Szanys-daughter?”
Dekklis’s gaze slipped for the first time. “I’m highborn, but I’m not blind. The Reforms didn’t change who’s in power. The Academy wouldn’t give you a post, would they? So you came out here.”
“Close enough.” Snow flicked her butt after Istel’s. Flare and hiss as it hit the snow. “There’re more freeborn Alviri in Cardik. No one looks twice at a half-blood.”
“Even a half-blood with an Academy topknot.”
“Well. Not many know what that means, out here.”
“Your friends understand?”
“Some of them. The ones who appreciate what I can do.”
“Heretic friends? Huh. Right. The Laughing God doesn’t love women, Snow. Ever think of finding different friends? There’s always work for chirurgeons in the legion.”
Snow laughed, sharp enough Logi looked up and whined. “Just when I think I could like you, you say something like that.”
“Well. That’s the problem. I do like you, and I’d hate to end up killing you someday. Or drinking Red Lady by accident.”
“You’re safe from me. And I won’t mention your name to my friends. But look to your own, yeah? What will you tell your First Spear?”
Dekklis shrugged. “Nothing about you. I say we found shelter and outwaited the storm.”
“Istel’s wound?”
“Dekklis stitched it,” said Istel abruptly from inside the cave. Shrugged when two pairs of eyes landed on him. “Not that different from mending a shirt, is it?”
“Corrupting my partner,” Dekklis muttered. “See that, half-blood?”
“Not sorry for it. What about Ehkla?”
Dekklis grimaced. “Godsworn isn’t a word I can use without proof.”
“What, then? Talir bandit? Rogue conjuror?”
“Something like. You’re the one who knows what she is. You’re the one who’s got experience with gods.”
It took Snow a moment, eyelocked with Dekklis, to understand. “Oh no. I’m not going back with you.”
“We can arrest you. Protect you.”
“From my friends? No. I don’t owe you that much. The legion is your problem. You make them listen.”
“And what will you do?”
“Make sure my friends haven’t made a mistake. Make sure they’re not making really bad friends themselves.”
“And if they have? If they are?”
“Then maybe they stop being my friends.”
Dekklis said nothing, very loudly. Waited until there was only fire-snap to compete with Veiko’s rapid, ragged breaths. Sounded like he was running, or fighting.
Dying, yeah? That’s what he’s doing.
Not her fault. She hadn’t asked for his help, had she? He’d offered it to her. His people’s customs, his skraeling notions of honor had got him this far. But it wasn’t unpaid debt that made her stomach hurt, no, wasn’t obligation making her wish for that little twist his mouth got that passed for a smile, and his clear witchfire eyes.
“If Veiko dies,” Snow said slowly, “then I’ll have business with Ehkla. And maybe even if he doesn’t.”
Blink and sudden stillness on that highborn face. Calculation. A careful, “Do you think you can kill her?”
“Don’t know. Depends whether you’re right about all the things I am.”
A smile, dark, fleeting, dry as summer winds. “I’m right.”
“Then I can. And I will.”
Believe that, yeah.
Please, Laughing God.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The glacier went on forever.
Veiko was not cold, despite the wind that should have sliced through leather and wool and did not. His hands did not ache, although he had no gloves. The chill soaked up through the soles of his boots and did not, somehow, sink into his flesh. He did not slip, not once, on the ice.
He walked, following Helgi’s crescent tail and grey haunches. The takin had long since vanished. Only ice on the horizon, chunked and broken and jagged as teeth.
He had his axe with him. His bow, a quiver of arrows, the long-bladed knife in his boot. No flint or meat-knife or blanket. No gear besides weapons, as if he were going to war.
It had been his wish, as a boy, to do that very thing. Dreams of axes and spears and battle. Taliri raiders, Alviri rangers, Illhari soldiers in their banded steel. Child Veiko had slain them all, sent them to the spirit world and their ancestors.
But a crofter’s son did not go raiding. A crofter’s son—the third and youngest, not counting his sisters—might look forward to his own herd of takin someday. His own household, too, if he married well. He might, maybe, defend his home from bandits, but that was as close as a man got to battle in this age of peace.
His village’s noidghe had said only a fool would seek violence. Then he’d spoken instead about how a hunter might appease an animal’s spirit after killing it. How a man honored his ancestors and bound restless ghosts to their graves. Those were practical things that every man must know, whatever his station.
Veiko did not remember the noidghe mentioning endless glaciers in his stories, or what a man should do if he found himself walking the spirit world. Child Veiko might’ve asked, because the noidghe loved to tell tales, but child Veiko had cared only about fighting. Besides. A crofter’s son did not become a noidghe. Noidghe chose their apprentices from better-born sons and daughters, unless there was an obvious talent. Which Veiko hadn’t had back then. What the old noidghe would make of Veiko now was another matter.
What Veiko was sure of: a crofter’s son turned outlaw might need to learn what a noidghe knew, and quickly. His body would not live forever with him wandering, no matter Snowdenaelikk’s skills. Best he figured out what he was supposed to do. Follow Helgi, who seemed to know where they were going.
Who sle
wed a sudden crossways and stopped, stiff-legged and stiff-ruffed. Helgi growled and stared at a crack in the endless ice that had not been there a moment before. The crack widened, soundless, while the ice underfoot remained steady. A river, Veiko thought, black and deep and so smooth that it seemed frozen, except for the tepid sunlight shattering on wavelets and ripples. Deceptive, fast-moving water, solid darkness. And wide, yes, farther than a man might jump.
Veiko stepped around Helgi and knelt on the bank. The ice fell away in a steep and smooth-sided slide into the river. He stretched flat on his belly and crawled, knees and elbows, until he could look down into the water. He could not see the bottom. Saw himself instead, in the mirrored black. A young man just past twenty wearing hunter’s braids, slant-boned and pale-eyed and perfectly unremarkable. A young man who showed no signs of
foolishness
having murdered a chieftain’s son, or fought a witch-woman, or bargained with dead soldiers. Who did not look at all like he was dying.
Veiko leaned closer. Held a hand over the water, as if he might reach down and pull himself out. A newer self, stronger. Whole. Wiser, maybe. A simple enough gesture, to reach down and touch that reflection, to draw it into himself. Noidghe could do such things, he thought.
Helgi growled warning. Veiko hesitated. It seemed to him now that the reflection wasn’t quite his own face. Perhaps a little more gaunt. A little older.
And still moving, he realized, still reaching for him. Its fingertips broke the water’s clear black. And then, only then, did Veiko notice the other faces in the water. Eyeless sockets, gaping mouths, cheeks nibbled raw by fishes, rising up from the darkness. He jerked backward. Too fast, too sudden: he skidded on the ice. A hand colder than Kenjak’s seized his wrist and pulled.
Helgi lunged and bit hard, just above Veiko’s elbow. His claws furrowed the ice. At the same time, Veiko twisted and reached and tore his axe loose from its lacings, short swing and chop. The blade bit, and Veiko held hard to the handle. Stopped his slide into the river. He strained backward, all his strength and Helgi’s together. Won a fingerwidth before ghoul fingers ground into the bones of his wrist and stopped him.
It wasn’t a victory. He could not remain strung between river and glacier forever. Already the strain shivered through shoulders and belly and thighs. Spirit flesh would weaken. Exhaustion would win eventually, and so would that ghoul. He would be dead in that river, dead forever, beyond the reach of his ancestors.
Helgi snarled around his mouthful of Veiko’s sleeve and arm.
Veiko’s fear fled then, left a cool anger behind. He thought he might manage—if he moved quickly and did not slip—to rip the axe loose, to cut himself free. Sever his own wrist, yes, but a spirit-self would not bleed to death. The maiming would not follow him back to his body.
And if it did, well, a man could survive the loss of a hand.
Veiko held his breath. Gathered wits and will and wrenched at the axe. The blade rocked. His body did, just a little. And his river-self seized that moment to wrench at him. Veiko felt his clothes tear on Helgi’s teeth, felt his flesh rip beneath that. And then he was loose, slinging sideways around the pivot of the axe. His head and one shoulder slewed out over the river. And then Helgi grabbed his leg, and Veiko drove his knees and boots into the ice. Stopped and damn near tore himself into three pieces, but he kept his grip, and the axe did not come loose.
And so he hung there, pulled between the river-ghost and Helgi and an axe blade only one fingerspan deep in ice. If it broke loose, he would die, because Helgi would not be able to hold him. He was already halfway over the river, looking down into his river-self’s open mouth and hollow eyes. It smiled, and Veiko wondered how he had ever mistaken that thing for his reflection.
Fool.
No. Spirit-world trickery. A lesson, if he lived to remember it. Things were not what they seemed.
At least the dead thing in the water was not much for strategy. It relied on brute force and patience. Maintained a steady drag on his wrist to wear him down and moved only in reaction to his movements.
So. Like a puppy, then. And there were ways to outwit a puppy. Please, oh ancestors, the ghoul was more Logi than Helgi.
Veiko strained backward. And then he relaxed and let himself slip half a fingerlength farther toward the black river. The river-ghoul’s grip loosened on his wrist in the unexpected slack. Then Veiko wrenched backward with all that was in him. The ghost lunged to keep its grip. Veiko granted it that small victory, borrowed its momentum, rolled onto his shoulder and used his weight to jerk the axe free.
The steel glittered in a last thread of sunlight. Hung there, for a small eternity, like a ribbon caught in a breeze. Then it fell and cut cleanly through the ghoul’s wrist, with only a brief hitch on dead bone.
The ghost-hand slipped off his wrist and sank into the river. The faces sank with it, all of them, dropping like stones into the depths. The river itself stiffened, as Veiko stared at it, into smooth solidity.
A man might walk across that frozen river if he trusted that surface.
A man might well lay on its bank, too, and shake for a very long time, before he sat up and examined the damage—because Helgi was not a small dog, nor weak, and he’d played his own game of tug with Veiko. He found rips in the leather and wool over his calf and elbow, no great matter. Bruises underneath that, certainly, and blood, but his ankle moved well enough. His knee flexed and held him when he stood. His elbow bent.
“Good dog,” he told Helgi. It seemed wholly inadequate for thanks, but Helgi flattened his ears and grinned.
He tried a few practice swings with the axe and grimaced. His dog-gnawed leg twinged. His ghost-wrenched wrist and shoulder ached. Best if he avoided a fight, yes, best if he walked for another forever before he trusted that damned river. He squinted across its width.
And blinked. There were trees, suddenly, on the far bank. A whole forest sprung up from nothing, mixed evergreen and naked white birch. There was a trail on the other side, winding away from the river, which had suddenly shrunk to a narrow trickle.
Helgi bounded across it, with more enthusiasm than Helgi needed, and darted into the brush. Veiko followed more carefully, half expecting the river to spread again, midstride, and swallow him. But it didn’t, and the bare earth on the far side felt steadier under his boots than the glacier had been. The wind disappeared, too, as if someone had slammed a door on it. Damp-rot chill to the air that collected in the back of his throat when he breathed. Ink-spot shadows, darker under these trees than the watery sun should create.
Then he noticed that Helgi had not returned and that he did not hear any dog-in-the-underbrush noises. Fear threaded cold through his chest.
“Helgi!”
That might be a bark in the far distance, much too far for a dog to have run in so short a time. Veiko hesitated, one foot on the trail, while the forest brooded around him. He had never feared a forest, but he was afraid of this one. Safer to stay on the trail. Helgi would find him again. Helgi always did.
He walked alone for what might’ve been an afternoon or two days, with only an awful silence for company. The trail widened from deer track to a hardpack and then to sunbaked bricks. An Illhari road, like the one he had crossed near Davni, wide enough for soldiers to run four abreast. Veiko drifted close to its shoulder, where the stones scuffed less loudly.
He did not see the woman until he was almost on top of her. She stood a little off to the side of the road, where the shadows gathered around the skirts of evergreen trees, tall and pale as one of his own people. And close. Very close. He should have noticed her.
Veiko stopped and put his hand on his axe.
“You have no need of that weapon.” Soft-voiced, a little rough, like fingernails on the back of his neck.
“Perhaps not,” Veiko agreed, but he did not let go of the axe. He must not trust appearances in this place. The ghoul had taught him that. And still. Her voice was not unpleasant. He wished she would say somet
hing else.
She smiled, and it seemed as if the sky went a little dimmer. Twilight now over the treetops, purpling like a bruise. She reminded him of Kaari’s daughter, and a summer night when the sky had rippled green and pink and gold. Reminded him of other things, too, that did nothing at all for his wits.
“I have no business with you,” he said. She was no woman. Some spirit. Some trick.
“I hope we can change that,” she said. Then she stepped onto the path, and he saw she wore nothing but shadows. They lapped her hips and breasts like waves on a lakeshore, and Veiko found himself wishing they might recede just a finger’s width. Heat pooled and spread south from his belly.
“Stop,” he croaked.
The spirit-woman did, which surprised him. She widened eyes gone dark in the twilight. Offered her hands, just as Kaari’s daughter had on that summer night.
“Come with me,” she murmured, and his skin ached. All he had to do was take those hands, and then she would lead him
up onto the tundra
into the forest
under the summer sky
into the twilight.
No.
Eat his soul, more likely, and bury his bones beside the trail.
“No,” he told her. And, a second time, “I have no business with you.”
He walked around her. Pointed his eyes at the Illhari road and thought very hard about snowbanks and wet socks and stepping through ice into cold water. Anything except women’s curves and women’s smell.
“Ah, but I have business with you.” Her voice changed into something cooler and harder. “Veiko Nyrikki. Stop.”
His leg, the one Ehkla had cut, buckled and cramped. Veiko caught himself on a convenient tree. Leaned on it, panting, and traced the heat throbbing up from his thigh. Another lesson: that witchery left marks deeper than muscle and bone. If Ehkla’s marks on him responded to this spirit’s voice, then he knew who she was, and how she knew his name.
He drew a deep breath. “Tal’Shik,” he named her in return. “What do you want?”