Lueski bounded off at once. After he’d pulled his ax and knife free of his belt, leaving the gladius strapped over his shoulder, Raz made his way upstairs to one of the three small bedrooms on the second floor. He’d claimed the middle one—Arrun’s old room—for his things, and once he’d closed the door behind him he started undoing the clasps of heavy steel plate around his arm and leg. The largest of the chambers would have served him better, but Raz had felt claiming Warren and Marta’s former room would have been heartless.
Before long, Raz was mud-free, every inch of himself scrubbed clean in the warm water Lueski had already prepped in a bin for him. After that, his armor came next, caked earth knocked off as best he could before wiping everything down with a damp cloth. Once he’d hung everything to dry and changed into clean clothes—leaving his dirt-soaked ones in a pile against the wall for Lueski to clean in the morning—he made his way back downstairs, gladius still on his back.
Arrun and his sister already had dinner ready, plates—one of the few purchases they’d made other than food—set out by the fire to warm. Accepting one from Arrun as he made his way to the hearth, Raz sat down as close to the flames as he could stand, basking in the heat.
For a time the three of them sat in silence, content in the meal and heat and company. Arrun had prepared a hearty spiced soup for he and his sister, but for Raz he hadn’t bothered doing more than searing a pair of large trout steaks that barely fit on the platter. The meal had become a quick favorite of Raz’s, who’d only ever had silverfish from the Garin growing up.
When dinner was almost done, though, Lueski looked up expectantly. Arrun, too, seemed a little on edge, but hid it better. Tilting his head back to swallow a last mouthful of fish, Raz chuckled.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to hear about my day, then?” he asked.
Lueski nodded fervently, and Raz smiled.
It had become a ritual for them, and as Raz threw himself into the details of his day’s fights—leaving out certain unnecessary details Lueski didn’t need to hear—he felt the comfort of routine take hold of him. It had been too long since he’d been able to stay in once place for more than a few nights at a time. He remembered his old room at the White Sands with an odd sense of loss, but shook it off.
Despite the bleakness of the house, despite the precariousness of his situation, despite the weight of the shadows he could feel dancing around him, moving steadily closer with their knives and swords and axes wielded aloft, it had been many years since Raz had felt so content. It was something to hold on to, something nearly tangible for which he fought. This peace, this satisfaction, bore the comforting weight of a heavy coat, fighting off the cold that was all the other horrors waiting for him out there in the world.
And I won’t lose it.
It was with this thought that Raz put Lueski to bed later that night, tucking her thick feather-stuffed blankets around her mattress by the fire. It was this thought that pulled him down into sleep a few minutes later, laid out on his bedroll before the front door, one wing pulled over him under his own quilts.
And it was this thought that had made him draw the gladius free of its sheath before doing so, laying it out, bare and ready, between his body and the door.
XIV
In twos and threes they’d face the beast,
each thinking themselves worthy.
In twos and threes they fell like wheat,
while the beast was hardly dirtied…
—“THE MONSTER COME NORTH,” BY UNKNOWN MINSTREL
“SPECTATOR or combatant, sir?”
Carro blinked.
“I beg your—” he started in alarm. “What do you mean, ‘spectator or combatant’?”
They stood outside the east gates of Azbar. Talo had left Carro to deal with gaining them entrance to the city, standing a little ways back, horse reins in hand, allowing himself to gaze up along the high stone wall that loomed over them like a sleeping giant. It reminded him of the walls of Cyurgi’ Di to an extent, but with a sinister ambience that lacked in the defenses of the High Citadel. There the sleeping giant seemed a calm sort, peaceful in its slumber.
The walls of Azbar, on the other hand, felt more like the titan could wake at any moment and crush Talo where he stood.
“Do you declare yourself spectator or combatant, sir?” the officer at the gate was asking impatiently, quill poised over the pages of the open booklet on the narrow desk he was sitting behind. “Are you here to watch the fights, or take part?”
Talo, glancing behind him, couldn’t blame the man’s ill-tempered demeanor. Though the snows had yet to come—an odd blessing for what promised to be a hard winter—the cold had arrived in force. Frost tipped every blade of the grassy field that surrounded the town, giving the green of the pasture a smoky tinge. The ground of the path beneath their feet—in the summer churned soft and muddy by the comings and goings from the gate—was hard and sharp, frozen into whatever wear it had shown when the freeze descended. The Priests had long since abandoned their traveling tunics for the warm layers of their faith’s robes once more, but even so the chill still bit at them now that they had stopped moving.
And yet, despite this bitter cold, behind Talo the line of men, women, carts, and horses trying to get into the city extended halfway between the wall and the woodlands across the plains. Most of the figures seemed harmless enough, travelers come from afar to see the fights, judging by their packs and wagons, but there were other sorts mixed in among them. Some—like the unsavory fellow directly behind Talo in line, wide frame slouched over the old dappled charger he rode atop, clothed with tattered furs and with a massive two-handed claymore hung from the side of his saddle—were of a different make altogether.
“I—well I—” Carro stumbled over his words, obviously taken more than a little aback by the officer’s query. “I—that is to say we—”
“Spectators,” Talo interrupted at last, deciding to put his lover out of his misery. “Come to see what’s become of the Arena since last we were here.”
The officer glanced between the Priests, giving Talo a particularly hard look, then nodded. Not bothering to write anything down in his little book, he waved them through.
“What was that about?” Carro hissed after he’d taken his horse from Talo and they were safely through the gate. Talo, in response, put a finger to his lips and kept walking a few paces into town, then led Carro and the horses around the corner of a natural slate fountain that had frozen over in the cold. There he stopped, hugging the wall so that he was half-hidden by the stone, and watched the gate.
“Spectator or com—” the officer began, but the haggard, hard rider than had been behind them in line cut him off.
“Combatant,” he growled at once in a gravelly, hoarse voice.
The gate officer, choosing to ignore the interruption, looked the man and his horse up and down.
“Name and occupation?” he said after a moment, dipping his quill into the ink well at the corner of his desk, set up next to a couple of lit candles to keep it from hardening.
“Wehn Galen,” the rider replied. “And my occupation is none a’ yer business.”
The officer, obviously a great deal more patient than Talo had given him credit for, didn’t bother responding. Instead he jotted something down in his little book, pulled a sealed letter from a small drawer to his left, then gestured towards the gate.
“Make your way to the town hall and present this”—he held up the envelope—“at the gate. A few of you have already passed through today, so it won’t be long before the Captain-Commander comes to fill you all in on the details of your agenda and agreements. Keep the peace of the town, stay away from other combatants, and report to the Arena at your assigned day and time, or forfeit your fight. Lodgings you will need to procure for yourself, and know that none of the inns and taverns in town are accepting credit as payment.”
Finally, as the officer stood and held out the envelope for the rider to reach down an
d grab, the man allowed himself something of a vengeful smirk.
“Few of your kind are expected to live long enough to pay the debt, you see.”
The rider muttered something unintelligible in reply, then pulled his horse around, kicking it into a trot through the gates. As he rode by their little corner, Talo turned away, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping.
“Seems our friends in Ystréd weren’t exaggerating,” he muttered, looking around at Carro. “They’re padding the lists.”
“Lists?” Carro asked, peering around Talo towards the gate again.
“Fight lists. The pool of names they can draw from for the pit.”
“Ah.” Carro frowned at the gate for a moment, then turned to face the city. Though most of it was hidden by the buildings, walkways, banners, and rooftops that immediately surrounded them, the highest points of Azbar were visible in the distance. At its apex, cresting the cliffs that hung over the gorge at the city’s back, the town hall watched over all. Though they couldn’t see it, both men knew the Arena was somewhere below it, dark and hungry and waiting.
“A list of dead men walking,” Carro said sadly after a moment, then sighed. “So much blood spilled. It seems such a waste, Talo. You may have left a good man in the South those years ago, but if Arro is responsible for this butchery, I’m not sure he’s deserving of our help.”
Talo didn’t reply. They’d left Ystréd in too much of a hurry to find out more about the situation in Azbar. They’d debated asking around and trying to find out more on what was going on, but had decided against it. In part they couldn’t really afford to delay their arrival, but there was also the fact that they couldn’t risk word of their nosing into the city’s business reaching Azbar before they did. Given what Kal Yu’ri had told them in his letters, Talo wouldn’t have put it past the new Chairman to have the entirety of his guard alert to their coming.
Whether the soldiers would be instructed to merely block them from entry, or deal with them through less peaceful means, he wasn’t so sure about.
Still, despite the evidence to the contrary, Talo wasn’t just ready to pass judgment on Raz i’Syul Arro. Most like it was nothing more than the sense of debt he felt he owed the man, or maybe the memory of how many had judged the Lifetaker a bloodthirsty beast in his own time, but something held Talo firm in his conviction that Arro should have the opportunity to explain himself.
The aging High Priest thumbed the steel of his staff, cool even with leather gloves between skin and metal.
Conviction, after all, he thought to himself, has an endless value all its own.
“Let’s find Kal,” he said finally, turning to lead them north, deeper into the city.
Azbar’s Laorin temple was a pitiful thing by most standards. In comparison to the fortress that was the Citadel, it was particularly ramshackle, a hunched, unadorned building sheltered in the hugging canopies of the evergreens that rose up on either side of it. Its entrance was a plain stone archway, stained with lichen and moss, set into a crumbling hip-high wall surrounding the temple and the gardens beyond in its entirety. The grounds were meticulously cared for, tended undoubtedly by the heedful hands of the temple’s limited population of Priests, Priestesses, and acolytes. Despite the freeze, the paired plots on either side of the slate walkway that led to the temple itself were alive with late-season flowers, weather-resistant shrubbery, and vines that had browned in the cold but continued to climb handsomely over the walls of the building. In the summer the place would be abloom with all shades of greens and blues and whatever brighter colors the flowers of the warmer season would bring along with them.
Leaving their horses tied at the archway, Talo and Carro followed the narrow path right up to the heavy oak doors of the temple. As Carro reached out to knock the head of his staff briefly against the wood, Talo looked around them, thinking of the first time he’d set foot on the ancient reed mats they stood upon, right in front of the entrance.
It doesn’t change, this place, he thought as there was a clunk of a lock bar being shifted out of the way, and the door swung open with the quiet grind of well-oiled hinges.
A face appeared in the entrance, youthful and curious. At once Talo got the distinct impression that unannounced visitors did not often frequent the temple, because the boy eyed them with a mixture of suspicion and excitement as he took in their garments and the paired steel staffs.
Then he spotted the thin line of unassuming black along the ridge of Talo’s white hood, and he blanched.
“High Priest!” he exclaimed at once, leaping forward to tug at the second door, swinging it wide. “Please, come in! High Priest Yu’ri made mention we might have visitors, but I don’t think he was expecting you for some time.”
“He made it clear the need was urgent,” Talo told the acolyte with a nod, stepping into the temple after Carro. “That, and the road wasn’t as harsh as it might have been.”
“And thank the Lifegiver for that,” Carro muttered, pulling his traveling packs from over his shoulder to set down beside the door.
The interior of the temple was just as unadorned as the outside walls, but at least it was warmer. They’d entered directly into the great hall, much of the slate floor taken up by a single long table with several dozen mismatched chairs pushed under it on either side. Above them the roof jutted upward, angled sharply in order to shed the unforgiving snow that would bear down in due course. Curved rafters cast odd shadows against the incline of the ceiling, shifting about in the light of the massive fire that burned in a wide hearth jutting out of the wall at the end of the hall. Heat washed in waves over the room, and the flames outlined a large huddle of figures sitting and standing around the fire, talking in quiet murmurs to one another. As one the group looked around when Carro and Talo were let in, and almost at once a figure broke away, hurrying towards the door.
“Talo! God, man! Has Laor seen fit to give you wings? It’s been barely three weeks since I sent the bird!”
“Kal,” Talo greeted the smaller man fondly, accepting his embrace with one arm, his other hand still holding tight to his staff. “No wings, sadly. Though I hear there are more of them in this town than last I was here.”
Kal Yu’ri chuckled, breaking away to step back and take them in. He was a slight man, with darkened skin he’d inherited from a Southern father. His eyes were still the same blue of his Northern mother’s, however, and the crinkling around them—only hinted at the last time Talo had seen the man—was deep and sharp, but kindly. His High Priest’s robes, bearing the same single black stripe as Talo’s, were frayed and patched in places, but still crisp and clean. All in all he looked like a man worn by time and responsibility, but carrying it all well.
“Yes,” Yu’ri nodded, still smiling and turning to Carro, “Raz i’Syul has certainly been making waves, to say the least. And you, sir, I can only assume must be Priest al’Dor.”
“In the flesh, though not for long in spirit if we don’t get nearer to that fire of yours, Priest Yu’ri.” Carro returned the smile easily, accepting and shaking the High Priest’s offered hand. “And please, no need for formalities. Carro is fine, if I may do the same.”
“By all means!” Kal waved them towards the fire, where the group he’d left still waited. “I don’t know about your Citadel, but I think you’ll find formalities only go so far in the valley towns.”
“I remember,” Talo chuckled, following Kal’s lead as they made for the far end of the hall, his staff clinking on the slate. “It seems not so long ago your mother was scolding me for my ‘appalling choice of verbal diction.’”
“Ah, Mother,” Kal said sadly as they reached the group. “Yes… the Lifegiver saw fit to return her to his embrace some dozen years ago now, and she left me with the High Priest’s mantel. I like to think it might have gone to my father, but he’d passed a few years before her. Don’t let the woman fool you, though. I once heard her tell one of the other Priestesses in secret how amusing she found your ‘gutter lang
uage.’”
“Hard woman, gentle soul,” Talo agreed with a nod before looking around at the figures gathered before them.
The group was an odd mélange of sorts. Talo was relieved to see that Kal had understated their number somewhat in his letter, but there still couldn’t have been more than two score men and women around the fire. Among them, perhaps a dozen wore the robes of consecrated Priest and Priestess. About the same number wore the plainer robes of acolytes, pressed and clean as Kal’s own despite being in varied states of shabbiness. The rest wore plain clothes of all styles, marking them most likely to be followers of Laor, men and women of faith who came to the temple to pray and seek guidance. Such people made the occasional pilgrimage up to Cyurgi’ Di during the highest points of summer, but aside from that were rarely seen in the Citadel.
“My friends,” Kal announced, stepping through the ring into the firelight, motioning Talo and Carro to follow. “Allow me to introduce High Priest Talo Brahnt and Priest Carro al’Dor, come from the High Citadel. They’ve traveled hard to get here in such short time, and undoubtedly would appreciate a moment’s rest before delving into the matters at hand. I think it best if we end the morning’s discussion for the time being, to be resumed once I’ve brought our friends up to speed.”
There was a stirring among the crowd. Many of the individuals—mostly among the Laorin—were looking at the pair of them with rapt attention and interest. A few, however, had harder looks, specifically among the members of the city itself. Talo was unsurprised to see that these gazes were reserved almost solely for him, and came mostly from those about his age or older.
Not for the first time, an old sadness touched surface, stroked to life by the fingers of bad and bloody memories. Talo imagined each of the men and women watching him with barely veiled dislike were feeling some similar form of those same emotions.
The Warring Son (The Wings of War Book 2) Page 13