Sin Eater

by Shel, Mike

  Before Agnes could respond, her tongue like a knife unsheathed, one of the guards, who stood with halberds against the ancient brick of the tower beside the gate, stepped forward. She was a stout woman with a ruddy complexion and short-cropped brown hair, features plain and heavy. She lifted her polearm and aimed it at Agnes’s breast. Agnes reached instinctively for the hilt of her sword but froze when the woman gave her a wink and wide grin of crooked teeth.

  “See there, Clyde,” she said in a deep, rumbling voice, “on the pectoral? That’s a Syraeic star.”

  “What of it?” replied the clerk. “Don’t Syraeics wait with the rest?”

  “When a Syraeic makes a request, it ain’t on a whim,” she said. “Now, she’s gonna go get her friends, and you’re gonna scribble their names in your book and let ‘em pass.”

  “Who’s in charge here?” whined Clyde, his voice rising two octaves as he stomped a petulant foot on the ground. “You’re to follow my orders. I’ll report you to the watch commander for insubordination!”

  “You do that,” she said, lowering the blade of her polearm and bringing it beneath his beak of a nose. “But in the meantime, I’ll beat you bloody, while these boys watch and give me helpful suggestions.” She gestured to a pair of guards who still leaned against the bricks, each wearing a small smile. Agnes sighed with relief.

  “Thank you, friend.”

  “No worries, sister,” said the woman in her deep voice, slapping her breastplate twice. “I once dreamed o’ wearin’ that same star, but I washed out. Can barely write my name—letters seem to dance on a page before me. A Syraeic needs her letters.”

  Agnes smiled warmly and nodded. The thin clerk called Clyde scowled, but held his tongue, the halberd blade still hovering under his nose. She knew this act of kindness would cost the woman. Not now, but later, when the clerk was clear of her and her blade and could make his complaint to the watch.

  “Now summon those friends of yours, little sister,” said the woman. “We’ll get you through the Mouth and on your way in two shakes. Just gimme your word you’ll tell Lictor Rae that Mila kept the promise she made all those years ago, all right?”

  “All right, Mila,” said Agnes, her tone sweet. She turned and waved Kennah forward. Her smile vanished when she saw that her father leaned in his saddle against the bigger man, his eyes closed tight, his hair slick on his forehead. Between the two of them, they helped her ailing father stay horsed and made a beeline for the Blue Cathedral, grand temple of the Cult of Belu.

  Auric was under the priests’ care for four days, and for most of that time it was uncertain if he would survive his wounds. But in the end, the prayers of the priests, including those of Archbishop Hanadis herself, saw him through the ordeal.

  The black banners that greeted them at the Mouth of Boudun were for Crown Prince Kedrech, who had died the same day Agnes left for Daurhim with her Syraeic brothers. It was no great surprise, as Kedrech was well into his seventies and known to be frail. Who would take his place next in line for the throne was the subject of wagers in Boudun’s gambling halls and taphouses, but was otherwise only of academic concern. No one living had memory of any ruler on the throne of Hanifax but Queen Geneviva, sovereign for over one hundred years.

  The Citadel was a hive of activity, even busier than when Agnes was last in its hallowed halls. Try as she might, she could gather no more than rumors of what lay behind the excited commotion. She decided to ask Lictor Rae point-blank, both angry and mystified about the contents of the letter to her father, with its prophecy that either Ruben or Kennah would be killed on their journey. But Pallas Rae was ill herself, tended by a trio of Belu’s priests who refused Agnes an audience; they insisted the lictor must rest.

  Agnes went about her duties, sparring in the training yard with the many novitiate groups recruited to replace the numbers lost last year to the plague. She thought them a sorry lot, and more than once checked herself after giving a few of the cockier novices more lumps than perhaps they deserved. She had to admit that she resented being on the outside of the flurry of activity in the Citadel, the whispered conversations conducted between furtive glances. Secrecy and tension floated in the air like swamp gas, stinking and hinting at poison and mystery. It was an insult that she should be excluded from the circle of secrets. Hadn’t her actions last year saved the League countless more deaths? What if the contagion had spread beyond the walls of the Citadel, across the city, the islands of Hanifax, to its duchies? Hadn’t she earned a seat at the table? Twenty-two years old, yes, that was young, but she was no green initiate. She had demonstrated her mettle in half a dozen Busker ruins since finishing her training. She wasn’t a naïve novice like these too-eager adolescents who tried to impress her in the yard. They thought their feints unexpected and clever, but to Agnes their attacks were announced by their posture and eye movements clearer than any temple gong.

  Several of her peers approached her in the dining hall, or in the corridors of the Citadel, asking about the fate of Ruben. It seemed Kennah was refusing to share details of his death himself. On the few occasions when she had passed Kennah in the halls he was gruff with her as well, offering no more than a curt, perfunctory nod, as one might with a brother or sister whose face was recognized, but whose name one couldn’t quite recall. She thought back on his drunken compliment at the Blessed camp, if she could call it that, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. Kennah, she concluded in that moment, was an idiot.

  And Agnes worried about her father. She visited him whenever her duties spared her. On the third day of his convalescence, she sat with him for more than an hour, his welfare still uncertain. He slept fitfully, sweaty and twitching like a guilty man the day before hanging, muttering words she couldn’t decipher that still seemed full of consequence. When at last she left his room in the cathedral’s hospital, willing her tears not to fall, she came upon Raimund, the priest with whom she had begun an affair just before the momentous events that had drawn her father back to the League’s business the year before. There was no outward sign that Raimund was upset she hadn’t contacted him since her return, but knowing him as she did, she knew it was there. Instead, he was all sweet kindness, letting her weep in an alcove with him, then whispering an invocation of Belu’s mercy for her father.

  Agnes felt a strange impulse to grab Raimund by his mop of light brown hair and jerk him about. Did he think his little prayer would succeed where the others uttered for her father hadn’t? He must have read the anger on her face, for his expression became sheepish, and he bowed his head.

  “It’s all I know to do, love,” he said, apologizing for his act of compassion.

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” she said, turning away from him and wiping tears from her cheeks. “There’s something evil afoot, and it stands in the way of Papa’s wounds healing. And whatever is happening at the Citadel frightens me.”

  Raimund brushed her hair aside and cupped her cheeks with his hands, softer than her own. Then he kissed her. Agnes closed her eyes, tried to let herself melt into his gentle touch, but an image of her father’s suppurating wound came to her mind’s eye, making her jerk back from his embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” Agnes said, feeling more tears come to her eyes, feeling like a fool. “I have to get back to the Citadel.” Raimund made no protest. Raimund never made any protest. He simply stood and nodded, smiling at her and touching her lightly over her heart, then her forehead. A priestly benediction.

  “Belu bless and protect you, sweetheart,” he said. She found his serenity maddening.

  It was late morning on the fourth day when Agnes was called from the training yard, hardly having broken a sweat against the novitiate in her charge that day. Her summoner was a goggle-eyed man named Melker, one of the flock of scholars called to Boudun from some distant Syraeic outpost. He informed her that her father had rallied, as had Lictor Rae, and that both waited for her in one of the smaller libr
aries at the heart of the complex. She sheathed her rapier and pushed past the man, starting down the corridor before realizing she didn’t know which library Melker had meant. She waited for him to catch up and serve as escort.

  The library to which he brought her was known as the Too-Tall Library, because while it was only twenty feet square, the ceiling was two stories above, three of its four walls lined with books and scroll niches. A precariously narrow ladder on wheels was mounted on a rail above to allow scholars with sufficient courage to reach any volume ensconced on its towering shelves.

  A single table occupied the center of the room, dark oak stained and worn with age. Her father was in a high-backed chair, looking wan and tired, but he smiled at Agnes when she appeared at the door. She went to him, stooping down to hug him, again willing herself not to cry. “You’re better, then?” she asked as she stood back from their embrace, feeling stupid.

  “Much better, Agnes,” answered Auric, wincing a bit.

  Lictor Rae sat in another high-backed chair, looking as fragile as a porcelain vase, propped there with pillows, a blanket covering her lap. Her white hair was loose and her wrinkled flesh, paper thin, had a dullness to it, as though the life was leached from it. One hand perched on the knob of a walking cane. The other quaked as she adjusted the velvet patch over her left eye socket, the orb lost in some forgotten ruin years before Agnes was born. “Hello, Agnes,” she said in her hoarse, whispery voice.

  Agnes’s anger at the lictor was still there, but it was muted now, seeing how infirm Pallas Rae appeared. “Hello, Lictor Rae,” she responded with a formal nod. “I’m glad you’ve risen from your sickbed.”

  “Oh, but for how long?” she said with a weak laugh.

  It was then that three more entered the Too-Tall Library. One was Kennah, wearing a simple cloth shirt and breeches rather than the leather armor Agnes had come to believe he wore to bed and the bath. His expression was as sour as ever. He gave everyone a brusque nod and deposited himself like a sack of potatoes on the bench away from the table, set against the bookless wall. The other two Agnes recognized from last year’s inquiry. One was a sorcerer—Helmacht of Aelbrinth—the green gem set in his forehead announcing his vocation. She noted that his hairline had receded considerably since she last saw him. He carried a bundle of scrolls and nodded several times, nervously acknowledging the others in the room. The last to enter was Olbach, blond hair cut short, blue eyes heavy-lidded, his left ear covered with bandages with bits of red seeping through, a wry smile on his face. “Greetings, all,” he said, setting a stack of books on the worn table’s surface. Though the bench was long, he sat down right next to Kennah, who frowned at his arrival.

  “Kennah, the door, if you would,” whispered Rae. Kennah stood, pulled the door shut, and returned to the bench, putting a few feet between himself and Olbach. The linguist seemed unfazed by the big man’s surliness, still smiling and putting a hand to his bandaged ear to tug at the linen. The lictor resumed. “Sir Auric, Agnes, and Kennah, I know you must have many questions for me, and we will answer what we can here today, but let me allow these two bickering old hens here to bring you up to speed on the particulars of our recent revelations.” She touched the table softly with a shaking hand. “Helmacht?”

  The sorcerer had narrow, close-set eyes and prominent worry lines across his forehead, interrupted by the gem set there. At the sound of his name he raised thin eyebrows and began. “For the last year we have worked with the tumultu drafted during the divination conducted on Sir Auric’s Djao blade Szaa’da’shaela by adepts at the Counting House in Serekirk. For the most part we were baffled by it, in the way most tumultu baffle—”

  “I’m sorry,” said Kennah from his bench. “What’s a tumultu?”

  “Simply put, a terribly garbled divination or reading of an object,” answered Helmacht. “And we were nearly ready to surrender Sir Auric’s tumultu to the collection of others that have defied our understanding. But then, we had something of a…well, a breakthrough…”

  Olbach smiled and laced his fingers behind his head. “Lictor Rae has forbidden us from explaining the nature of this breakthrough, the assistance we received.” Helmacht looked fretfully to Rae; the flesh on her face sagged, as though it was as weary as the lictor herself seemed. Agnes was disturbed by the man’s words, though she knew not why. Her father frowned.

  “Are you a coy player of games, then, Olbach?” Auric said, looking at the scholar with not a little contempt. “I’m afraid I have little patience for that kind of nonsense. Lictor Rae, what’s this about?”

  Rae’s tired gaze stayed fixed on Olbach, even after Auric’s question. She took in a deep breath, coughed, then turned to him. “Sir Auric, it is true that I think it best certain aspects of this matter stay hidden from you.”

  “For what purpose? Your letter contained a prophecy, and you knew of the fire that burned down my home, or at least that something terrible had happened. I’m no goddamned novice to be led around the practice yard by the nose!” Her father was on edge, his anger a cauldron ready to bubble over into the coals of the hearth. Agnes thought of her own indignation at being kept from knowing whatever was up, but couldn’t fathom why her father would be kept at arm’s length as well. Hadn’t he saved the League in the Barrowlands last year?

  Rae closed her eye, her thin lips held tight, bleaching them of color.

  “The man does have a point,” muttered Olbach.

  Rae struck her cane against the table, sending a shock through the room. “Olbach,” she said, her voice still calm, “shut up. Sir Auric, I pray you will trust me when I say that this is for the best. I think it essential that you not be distracted from the import of what is happening here by…ancillary matters. Helmacht, continue.”

  The sorcerer, who had been worrying the gem in his forehead with a fat-knuckled hand, nodded. “In a word, the tumultu you brought back from Serekirk is a key. With it we have begun deciphering the Higher Djao pictograms that have confounded us for centuries.”

  Auric’s eyes widened. Kennah gasped. Agnes put a hand to her gaping mouth. The hieroglyphics found in ruined Djao temples and tombs had never been decoded, despite hundreds of years of scholarly examination, divination magic, even necromantic efforts to consult the dead, always a decidedly dangerous endeavor. Higher Djao was the single greatest mystery the League had wrestled with since its founding.

  “Lictor Rae, with respect,” began Agnes after a few moments of stunned silence, “I understand the excitement now, and why scholars from every corner of the empire were summoned. But why the secrecy? Why should we keep this marvelous discovery from the rank and file?”

  “That will be made clear in due time, dear. Let Helmacht continue.” Agnes found the use of an endearment by the lictor vexing, but nodded and sat down in a chair near her father.

  Helmacht sorted through the cluster of scrolls he had brought with him. Olbach’s knowing smile remained in place, the back of his head cupped in his palms. The sorcerer finally placed three scrolls on the table and unfurled them, revealing a hieroglyph on each.

  “We call this one Compassion,” he said, pointing to one pictogram, then pointed to another. “And this, Subtlety.”

  Each pictogram was drawn within the boundaries of a square. Agnes had seen them before in texts she had studied as a novice, the strange, stylized swoops and shapes a muddle to her now as much as they had been back in her student days. “So how do you read them?” she asked.

  “Well, this was a great part of our challenge. Imagine you have a page of unknown script before you. Which way is right side up? Is it to be read from left to right, right to left? Top to bottom, bottom to top? Does the direction you are reading change when you reach the end of a line? What if you believe you are deciphering prose, but instead have a sheet of music in your hand? We assume so much, as our own writing runs left to right.”

  “As does Lesser and Middl
e Djao,” growled Kennah. “Why shouldn’t their glyphs be read the same way?”

  “That seems the obvious answer,” said Olbach, reaching over to put a hand on the bearded man’s shoulder. This drew a scowl from Kennah, but he managed not to recoil. “But when it comes to the Djao, our assumptions aren’t always rewarded.”

  “In the past year we have managed to decipher fewer than a dozen of the Djao pictograms,” Helmacht said. “Consider this and recall that to date we have identified over seven thousand distinct Higher Djao glyphs. You can do the math. This project will not be completed in the lifetimes of our grandchildren.”

  “Not that you’ll have grandchildren,” whispered Olbach, loud enough for all in the room to hear. Helmacht’s mouth was a thin, tense line and his skin flushed.

  “The proper way to read a Higher Djao glyph,” he resumed, bringing the third unfurled scroll to the fore and tracing it with a finger as he spoke, “is to consider each in four quadrants with an additional point at the center. Start at the outer edge of the left lower quadrant, following that edge up to the right, eventually spiraling into the glyph’s center. For instance, this one.” He tapped a finger at the center of the hieroglyph, dozens of notes scrawled around it in a swirling gyre. “This was the first we decoded. We’re calling it Terrible Purpose.”

  “Bloody purpose is more the like,” muttered Olbach, who had stood up from the bench and now peered over the sorcerer’s shoulder. Helmacht looked back at Olbach, shooting him a quick, sour grimace before turning back to his lesson.

  “This here,” he continued, pointing to a descending cluster of swooping arcs roughly parallel to one another. “It represents the edge of a blade being brought down. Now moving up to the upper left quadrant, this is the neck of a sacrificial victim, awaiting the cut of the knife. As we move to the upper right, we see what looks like raindrops—in fact we believe they are stylized tears, representing regret. Then the lower right and moving in toward the center of the glyph, a great mouth, filled with sharp teeth: this is the recipient of the sacrifice.”