Way of Gods

by Rhett C. Bruno

  Torsten knelt as he listened to them go and rearranged the mess he’d made of Oleander’s flowers. His heart paused as his hand grazed hers which was draped off the glass pedestal on which she was arranged. His forefinger rubbed hers, and for a moment, he thought about taking her hand, but with so many potential men of the Glass watching, he merely lifted it and lay it back across her chest.

  “At least a priest coming is good news, right?” Lucas asked.

  “Because delays to their decision are all this kingdom needs,” Torsten grumbled, satisfying the itch below his right eye.

  “She’ll need all the help she can get.”

  Torsten didn’t scowl at the boy, but he didn’t have to.

  “Sorry,” Lucas said. “I just meant—”

  “Relax. I’m not a fool, I know what she’s done, but she won’t die in vain.” Torsten didn’t wait for Lucas. He didn’t even find his cane before he swept off toward the exit. He knew the way back to his quarters, after all.

  “What are you thinking?” Lucas said as he caught up.

  “Valin Tehr is connected to all of this, and I plan to find out how. He can flash his wealth around our young king and outsiders like Lord Jolly all he wants; the truth will come out.”

  “He and Codar were like brothers, Sir Unger. Everyone knows it. Those monsters killed him too. I know you don’t trust Valin, and you shouldn’t, but maybe he really does want to help.”

  Torsten whipped around. “One of those monsters was Sigrid Langley,” Torsten said through clenched teeth, ignoring all the murmurs from the sycophants filling the Great Hall.

  “What?” Lucas asked, incredulous.

  “You heard me. Dom Nohzi, upyr, or not, she was Sigrid.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me,” Torsten said.

  “She lied,” Lucas said, matter-of-factly.

  “I am blind, not dumb.”

  “The legends about upyr say they’re known for illusion magic. What if it was a trick on your mind.”

  “It barely sounded like her anymore, but it was her. I know it. Valin Tehr said she left with Rand, but she hadn’t.”

  “Sir Unger,” Lucas said. Torsten could tell by his tone that he didn’t believe him. It was Winde Port all over again, liars and snakes making him seem insane. He no longer wondered why Oleander seemed the same in this place.

  “I didn’t know her or Rand, but I’d seen her plenty at the Maiden’s Mugs,” Lucas said. “She wasn’t a pushover, but she wasn’t a warrior like that. You couldn’t see. The way the killer moved… And her hair. It was white as snow, her skin the complexion of uncooked dough and her eyes were gray, not green.”

  Torsten’s lip twisted. All these days since, he’d never thought to ask what she looked like. Plenty talked about the male assassin as if he were death incarnate, but the woman they simply said looked similar. He’d imagined they’d just meant how she was dressed.

  “I don’t care what you saw,” Torsten decided. “It was her. She knew me, she knew Rand, and I knew her.” Torsten shoved him away and continued on his path toward the stairs.

  “Sir, what are you going to do?” Lucas asked.

  “What I should have from the start. Valin Tehr is many things, but he truly is exceptional with gold. Men like that keep records of everything. Yuri Darkings did—even had records of his traitorous dealings found in his Old Yarrington mansion. Something in the Vineyard will prove Valin’s guilt.”

  “Guilt of what?”

  Torsten didn’t bother answering. He could feel it in his veins, Redstar happening all over again. Only this time, the man wasn’t foreign or a wielder of blood magic, he was a Glassman. Easier to trust, charming, manipulative—Torsten wasn’t sure when or how the man had won Pi over, but it seemed it had already happened. He wondered what messages passed through the castle that he’d missed to make it all happen so fast. All the things his handicap hid from him.

  Using the railing, he reached the floor of his quarters. He knew which door it was. Only a few doors closer, in Lord Jolly’s chambers, he heard the man weeping. He pressed his ear against the door.

  “I should have never pushed her, Abijah,” he whispered, pausing every few words to weep.

  “Just lie still, my Lord,” the Royal Physician said. “You must take this lest we risk further infection.”

  “I failed Liam. I failed to keep his family safe.”

  Torsten considered entering, but if Lord Jolly had supported Valin, he was no longer sure who could be trusted. Perhaps he was just too broken to care what he’d done. Just as Pi was too hurt to think of anything but revenge.

  For most of his life, Torsten wasn’t privy to the inner workings of the castle. He wished he’d spent more time paying attention to the sort of enemies that could dwell within it and not only those from foreign, conquered lands.

  There’s still one of them left to protect, Torsten thought. And I won’t fail him again.

  Torsten retired to his room. He reached out and allowed his fingers to graze the broken part of the wall where it was said Redstar threw Rand, and where he’d hung Oleander up and left her to die. He stopped there, then one by one removed the pieces of his armor. He paused as he removed Liam’s own sword, Salvation, from his back-sheathe.

  “Where I go, you can’t follow,” he whispered. He kissed the hilt, shaped like a dragon with the Eye of Iam at the pommel, then placed it in the center of his bed. Then he followed the wall over to his desk within which he kept a small dagger he used to open scrolls. It was an old thing without an extraordinary story of how it came to be, and it had never done anything special. In a way, it reminded Torsten of himself. For that reason, he strapped it to his belt, then headed back for his door, looking more like Whitney Fierstown, ‘the world’s worst thief,’ rather than a proud Shieldsman and once-Wearer of White.

  His leg got caught on his bedsheets, causing him to stumble a few steps.

  “You should have this,” Lucas said, reminding Torsten that the boy was there. He softly tossed something Torsten’s way, and his hearing was good enough for him to catch his cane.

  “Thank you,” Torsten said.

  “Sir Unger, what are you planning on doing?”

  “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

  “Sir Ung—Torsten, please.”

  “I meant everything I said earlier,” Torsten said. “You’ll be aa fine a Shieldsman as any. But this is something I have to do.”

  “Then let me come with you.”

  Torsten shook his head. “I don’t need eyes with me to see the truth. I’ll find it even if it kills me. Just listen to Sir Mulliner, and you’ll do fine. He’s a grump, but I can tell he likes you.” Torsten extended his cane to the floor and moved for the door. Lucas stepped in his way.

  “What did Valin do to you?” he asked.

  “Move, Lucas. I won’t let another snake whisper lies into the king’s ears.”

  “Please, just tell me!”

  Torsten had never heard his young aide raise his voice in such a way. It stunned him for a moment. Then Torsten remembered Winde Port again, how nobody had believed him. He recalled how the Shieldsmen treated him like a cripple after he’d lost his sight, despite having just saved the kingdom from Redstar.

  Lucas was still there. He didn’t run when Torsten claimed the killer was Sigrid, something Torsten knew nobody would believe. Only then did he realize that was why he hadn’t told anybody. It had nothing to do with Valin.

  “Please,” Lucas said again, voice cracking.

  Torsten sighed. He backed up slowly until his legs bumped his bed, then sat. “I was young,” he said. “It wasn’t long after I’d made the climb to take the vows of a Shieldsman. A very high noble whom Liam had an interest in protecting had gone missing, and Taskmaster Lars—a young man then—assigned me to investigate it. The nobleman’s wife hadn’t seen him in days. So, I followed the trail. I’d been so used to fighting in wars after the campaign against the Drav Cra. It w
as hard not to focus on violence.”

  Turned out, the noble liked to frequent Valin’s Vineyard. So much so, that one day he couldn’t pay for his infidelity. Valin said they kicked him out, but a few days later the body turns up floating in the docks, beaten half to death, parts chopped off him and…” Torsten buried his head in his hands, “...stuffed into his own mouth.”

  Lucas winced audibly.

  “Everyone said he must have been robbed. You know, the kind of things that happen in Dockside. But I knew; I could tell just looking at his bloated body that it was more.”

  Liam and Sir Davies advised I drop it—that Valin’s emergence and the Vineyard’s existence had kept South Corner in check after decades of lawlessness—but I didn’t. After unshaming the man, I took his body to the Vineyard. Not a soul said they’d ever seen him before except the young girl he fancied. She loved him, you see. Loved that lecherous man. And she had a different story to tell about what happens when patrons of the Vineyard are late on their payments too many times. A story about a rumored arena below Dockside and the ‘volunteers’ who fight there.

  “I’d never seen fear it someone’s eyes like when I asked her to come with me to the castle. All the men I’d killed in battle, none of them looked so scared. I promised her nothing would happen to her, but on our way back to the castle, we were stopped by soldiers. The nobleman’s wife had proclaimed her guilt that she killed her husband because she found out what he’d been doing, then cut her own wrists. I left the girl outside and went into their home to look. When I got out, the girl was nowhere to be found. Not at the Vineyard, not floating off the docks—nowhere.

  “Valin claimed he’d had nothing to do with it. I pushed for us to look deeper into his underground arena, but apparently, South Corner wasn’t worth the trouble. I obsessed over it. Sir Davies was finally going to give in when the Panpingese mystics attacked Builders’ Cairn in the east. Then we marched off, and all was forgotten.”

  “Why didn’t you go after him when you returned?” Lucas asked.

  “Dealing with rogue Mystics has a way of making you forget men like Valin. I thought about what happened from time to time until I saw more horrible things and lost more people I promised to protect. Until, eventually, like all the others, it simply felt like South Corner wasn’t worth the trouble. And then Valin stepped into the Great Hall last week like Iam had forgotten his sins as we had. Suddenly, him helping save me seemed less like protecting his interest and more like a play for my support.”

  “Of which he apparently didn’t need.”

  “Valin Tehr taught me that the worst of us aren’t those we fight against on the field of battle, but the ones sleeping in the shadows right by our feet. The monsters under our beds.”

  “I… Sir,” Lucas stuttered. “I get it. But what if all those years ago, he really was telling the truth? What if you were wrong and the wife did do it?”

  “Please, Lucas. You said you fought in his arena before. You’re telling me every man down there fought of their own free will?”

  “Every man I talked to did. Sometimes events were private though, for only specially selected patrons to watch. Men with enough gold to have a mansion in Old Yarrington.”

  “Exactly,” Torsten said. “He keeps the rabble tame and the lords entertained. Sometimes, you don’t need to see proof, Lucas. Sometimes, you just know, deep down in your soul, that something is off. I knew it with Pi when he was cursed. I knew it with Redstar. And I could have killed that wretch the moment I laid eyes upon his birthmarked face, but I didn’t. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Torsten stood to walk, but Lucas clutched his wrist.

  “Sir, I know he’s not a good man,” Lucas said. “He’s not even a bad man. He’s downright awful. But why would he kill the Queen now? If it was over something she’d done while in control, he could have had her killed months ago. But she was unpredictable, flashy. He has a stake in half the clothes-makers who dressed her, not to mention the parties she threw. I know it—my parent’s provided cakes, and he always got a cut, thanks to his protection.”

  “He’s Master of Coin now, isn’t he?”

  “And his closest friend in the world is dead.”

  “A Breklian, killed by Breklians he knew. Ones who’d taken in Sigrid, who they also knew. It’s all connected, Lucas, and I will find out how. Now, out of my way.”

  “Sir, don’t do this!” Lucas grabbed at him again, and Torsten’s hand fell toward the grip of the dagger at his waist. That was when he realized what Lucas thought he was about to do. Walk into the King’s chambers and slit Valin’s throat.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill him,” Torsten said. “Despite what he says, he and I are nothing alike. I seek only to bring his misdeeds into Iam’s light this time. He invited me to enjoy the Vineyard. It’s time I take him up on his offer.”

  “Fine. Then you’ll need eyes you trust with you.”

  XXVIII

  THE DAUGHTER

  Mahi stood with her back facing the portcullis she’d just been safely on the other side of. Before her, all around, it was a sea of gray as the Shesaitju people gathered from all over the nation. Arrayed around the pit stood nine other warriors—all men, all larger than her, all with more muscle than her, none of them more determined than her.

  Sure, they all wanted to live as much as she did—but not a single one of them had more to gain.

  “People of Latiapur!” the eunuch acting as game master announced to thunderous applause. “The God of Sand and Sea provides ten more tributes. May their hands be swift, and their feet steady as the beating sea.”

  Mahraveh watched all the other combatants spit in their hands, then kneel to run their palms across the sand. She did the same, just like she’d seen her father do countless times before battle or sparring. It was then she noticed the shallow ring of sea-water infiltrating the edge of the arena, stained dark red by the blood already spilled. It wouldn’t be cleaned out until after the tournament when drains in the dam against the cove’s sea-face were opened to flood the sands and wash away impurity.

  “We give honor to you, our combatants. Death comes to all, but for one of you, let it not be for years to come. May the eternal current guide you.”

  “May the eternal current guide me!” the combatants echoed, Mahraveh the last of them. She was too busy spinning in place, mesmerized by the sight of so many people. She’d long imagined what it might’ve been like the day her father won the Ayerabi afhemate, but even her imagination paled in comparison.

  It was only the sight of Babrak, leaning over the high ledge and staring at her, which drew her mind back to focus. It was the first time he’d left his comfy chair the whole day. He licked his lips like he was anticipating a great feast. In the distance behind him at the highest level, sat Yuri Darkings, a hood covering his face in shadow. She couldn’t believe that in an arena filled with her people, he would be the closest thing to an ally she had.

  “Fight with honor!” the games master bellowed.

  The volume of the crowd reached hair-raising heights. Then it grew so silent, Mahraveh could only hear the sound of sandals shifting across the sand. Her gaze darted from one wall to the other. The warriors circled each other, Mahi included, waiting for someone to make the first move.

  Finally, the representative from the Usef afhemate charged his closest opponent, stabbing out with his weapon of choice, a fauchard. The blade grazed harmlessly across leather armor. Behind Usef, Sanadir’s fighter brought his arm around, and a flail whipped out, catching Usef on the shoulder. Usef twisted around, now open to retaliation. Sanadir twirled, and the flail carried out a wide arc before smashing Usef in the face.

  He was dead before he hit the sand.

  Mahi’s breath got caught in her chest. The battle had just begun, and one of them was already dead.

  Sanadir moved forward to attack the next warrior, but Mahraveh didn’t see any of it. She felt a hard hit against the side of her head and fou
ght to stay upright. She hadn’t adequately judged how much her helmet obscured her view and missed the attacker on her right.

  When she spun, she saw a familiar face. Khonayn of the Jalurahbak afhemate rushed toward her, a round shield leading the way. It connected with her, and he shoved her backward. Still, she kept her footing.

  “Sorry, Jumaat,” Khonayn shouted. “There are no friends out here. I’ll make this quick. The current awaits you.”

  Careful not to repeat her first mistake, nor the one Usef had made, she glanced behind her just long enough to be sure no one was there. Then she advanced with her spear. She struck twice, both times connecting with the man’s shield and tearing off large chunks of wood.

  Khonayn pushed forward. He carried a scimitar in his other hand and stabbed it once with each step. By now, Mahraveh had driven all sounds of the congregation from her mind, focusing only on Khonayn and the openings he presented. Muskigo had always advised against shields in one on one combat, claiming it slowed one down too much and hindered one’s ability to maneuver correctly.

  As always, her father was right. Khonayn labored behind the thing, trying to keep himself guarded while weakly trying to attack. Mahraveh waited until he got close. The curved blade came out from behind the shield, and she stepped to the side while simultaneously hooking Khonayn’s wrist under her arm. Gripping it tightly, she pulled him forward, planted her foot against his shield, then pushed out, bringing her other foot up to give her even more strength behind it.

  There was a sickening crack, which sounded like twigs breaking underfoot, as Khonayn’s arm snapped. He cried out and toppled backward, slamming hard against the sand. He tried desperately to rise, fumbling to keep the shield up but stumbled over it. Mahraveh spun her spear around in her hand, hefted it above her shoulder, and was about to throw it when in her peripherals, she saw movement—another warrior trying to take advantage of her. A coward. She ducked just in time, whipped around low, and jammed the spear into her assailant’s stomach. The crowd erupted as he coughed up blood and slid down the shaft toward her body.