“If you’ve come for my forgiveness, you have wasted your journey.” Kellatra wiped her sweating palms on the folds of her dress as she forced herself to step closer to the man who could not be Menanthus. She noticed Abananthus slowly approaching from behind the stranger.
“I have come for my package.” The man who was not Menanthus stepped around the corner of the ale counter.
“I don’t know how you found me again, but I have nothing for you, and I want nothing to do with you.” Kellatra knew she could only feign ignorance of the man’s intentions for so long. Eventually, she would need to do something. Likely something she had sworn to herself never to do again. She focused her thoughts and silently repeated the words she had once said so often so many years ago.
A clear mind sees the truth.
“Don’t tuss me about, girl.” The man came closer. “Give me the package I gave you.”
“You didn’t give me any package.” Kellatra found it easy to speak this lie, as it happened to be true. The man who had given her the package stood dead, turned to stone in an alley across town.
“I think you have made a mistake.” Abananthus stepped up beside the man who was not Menanthus. “She does not know what you speak of. I think it best you leave.” Abananthus placed his large palm on the man’s shoulder. Kellatra noticed his other hand concealed a table knife.
The man who was not Menanthus curled his lips in a snarl as he turned to Abananthus, thrusting his fist to the large man’s chest. Abananthus flew through the air and crashed against the wall, dangling with his feet above the ground, suspended by an invisible hand. He clutched at his neck, choked by unseen fingers.
A clear mind sees the truth.
Kellatra’s senses expanded as her focus narrowed. In a single moment, she felt her heart beating in her chest, heard Abananthus gasping for breath, sensed the cool air from an open window, smelled the scent of stale ale and chicken grease from the rag sitting on the counter, tasted the sourness of fear on her tongue, and saw past the appearance of the man who was not Menanthus to glimpse the truth. She perceived the eternal energy at the heart of all things, throbbing through all existence, manifesting as her body and mind, the men before her, the inn around her, the town beyond its walls, the whole of the world, and all the cosmos. Then she aligned her will and her desires with the energy of all things, making it unfold into a reality of her design.
Kellatra raised her hands and rotated them as though spinning the wheel of a butter churn. The man who was not Menanthus turned to look at her even as his body continued to face the opposite direction, the loud crack of bone and sinew filling the still air. Abananthus dropped to his feet, still holding his neck as he gasped for breath, his legs unsteady as he leaned against a nearby table. The man who was not Menanthus blinked at Kellatra in surprise, and then the life faded from his eyes and he collapsed to the floor, dead.
“Are you injured?” Kellatra stepped to Abananthus, helping him stay steady on his feet.
“What is that?” Abananthus pointed to the dead man in horror.
Kellatra turned to the body, watching as the open eyes faded from green to black, the brown skin turned pale white, and the features of the face softened into a nondescript mass that might have resembled anyone. Only the absent ear remained missing.
“A soul catcher.” Kellatra pulled Abananthus away from the strange corpse. “They don’t usually possess The Sight.”
“What you did…” Abananthus left the rest of his thought unspoken as he stared at her.
“You must never speak of what I did.” Kellatra held Abananthus’s hand and looked into his frightened eyes. “Especially not to Rankarus.”
Abananthus nodded in confused silence.
A piercing scream from the upper level of the inn raised Kellatra’s gaze. A second cry followed the first, louder and more terrifying. A man burst from the far hall above, flames consuming his flesh and clothes, a human torch racing around the balcony, wailing in pain, the fire spreading to everything he touched, leaving a blazing trail behind him.
“The children!” Kellatra turned from Abananthus and raced for the stairwell even as the burning man fell over the balcony railing and crashed to the corner of the common room.
“Put that fire out!” Kellatra shouted to Abananthus as she raised the hem of her skirt and dashed up the stairs. Abananthus stared at the man in flames writhing on the floor, seeming uncertain what to do. She ignored him. She thought only of Lantili and Luntadus, her daughter and son. If someone had harmed her children, she would do more than break necks.
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THE SEER
RANKARUS
A COIN spun in the air, twinkling in the double moonlight, arcing upward before falling back toward the ground. A hand snatched at the coin, fingers fumbling, the currency tumbling into the muddy street.
Rankarus cursed and laughed as he bent to pick up his coin from a shallow puddle of murky water. He wiped the coin on his pants leg and held it in his hand. Best, he thought. He doubted his fingers could untie the coin purse beneath his shirt. Too much to drink. And he hadn’t even spent all his drinking money. He smiled and resumed his walk home, softly singing the tune of a drinking song, his free hand resting on the hilt of a short dagger, carried to ward off those who might see an easy mark in a drunken man wandering home.
Cups and dice and cats and mice.
Drink the wine and free the time.
Rankarus quietly whistled the rest of the tune as he walked the empty street. He had no desire to be that man who sang loudly in the night on his way home from drinking. Such men were an embarrassment to their kin. While he had no problem embarrassing himself, he never wished to embarrass his wife and children. People talked in a small town, and all they really had to talk about was the weather and the distant war and their neighbors. It passed the time. And while a man who came home drunk once a week attracted a few words, the men who drank to stupor more frequently gathered whispers around them like cloaks in the chill air. He did not wish to be the sort of man who caused women to murmur behind his wife’s back. He’d heard enough harsh words said for other men.
The poor thing. He drinks away their savings.
What does she see in him to suffer so?
His gambling will put them in the street.
This last accusation he knew he would never hear, for he refused all requests to gamble. He simply had no knack for it the way Abananthus did. Rankarus always lost his bets, his dice never rolled right, and his cards always came up wrong. He had given up wondering why or fighting against it long ago. When men asked him to join their gambles, he declined. “What would my wife do to me if I came home having lost the inn?” he asked. “And what might she do to the man who had won it?” The men of the town all knew Kellatra, and no man of sense wished to cross a woman of obviously greater sense, and no one in the town doubted his wife’s good sense. Partly, he thought with a small flash of pride, because he gave them no good reason to do so.
That explained his drinking one night weekly at the inn across town rather than his own establishment. An innkeeper could not drink in his own house without losing the respect of his patrons. The regulars needed to see him as the voice of authority within his domain. He smiled to himself. No doubt they saw his wife as the voice of authority, and him as the voice of good cheer, but they respected him all the same. The travelers who stayed in their inn for the dark ale and clean sheets saw a family of Juparti immigrants who would not judge or gouge them for being from faraway towns or far off dominions.
A good life, Rankarus thought to himself. A good life I have made.
Blend in. Charm the locals until they think of you as one of their own. Stay out of trouble. Keep the wife in smiles and the children in laughter. A good life that foolish acts might bring to a close. He would allow himself a few cups of wine or ale once a week, but he would not
permit himself to act the fool.
Rankarus smiled again as he turned the corner and saw his home. The Three Moons Inn. He had chosen that name. His wife thought it curious, but he had insisted it would bring them luck. And interest. “What is the third moon?” people would ask, pointing to the two in the night sky. Rankarus would look at them slyly and tap the side of his nose with a wink as though suggesting some secret that should not be spoken aloud. Over time, people created their own stories to explain the mysterious third moon. The inn had been called the Fallen Apple for a hundred years, but he had convinced Kellatra that new owners demanded a new name, which might bring new clientele. They had spent coin for a new sign, new mattresses, new sheets, new tables, and even new chairs. The investment devoured all their respective funds, but had also drawn them closer together. While they began as merely business partners, running a successful inn had led to other successful unions — just as Rankarus had planned.
He walked around the inn, past the small stable and vegetable garden, to the back door. Even with the lateness of the hour, he would not change his habit of entering from the back after drinking. One did not let one’s guests see one inebriated if it could be avoided. It might give them the idea they could cheat the innkeeper. He opened the back door to the kitchen and found a man standing in the doorway to the hall across the room. The man turned to him as he entered.
“Sorry, friend, no meals after hours.” Rankarus laughed aloud, hoping the fellow did not walk in his sleep. Guests sometimes did. Or claimed to have done when caught with a rice cake in their hands and crumbs on their lips. This man seemed awake. Rankarus looked in the man’s eyes, noticing the glare of anger, sensing danger even before his wine-clouded mind recognized the sword sheathed at the man’s waist.
Rankarus frowned. Thieves had tried to rob them over the years. A successful inn attracted the speculation of men with weak moral character. No thief faced him in the dim light of the moons seeping through the kitchen window. A thief would not carry a sword to rob an inn. Swords were fine weapons in wide spaces, but clumsy, loud, and harder to use in close quarters. Thieves preferred a knife for throwing or the longer blade of a dagger for near combat. Rankarus had always been good at judging people, seeing who they were and what they wanted in a glance. Before him stood a killer who desired something Rankarus would not give him.
A scream carried down the hall from the other side of the inn. Another scream followed it — a loud wail of agony.
The man drew a slender, slightly curved sword, and Rankarus abandoned concerns of the man’s motivations. Rankarus tugged at the short dagger at his waist and threw it in a single fluid motion. The man reeled back as the hilt of the dagger caught him in the nose. Rankarus cursed. He’d been aiming for the man’s right eye. Too much wine and too little practice. He cursed again and jumped back as the man charged and swung the sword at his head.
Rankarus dodged around the large cooking table as he ducked the blade of the mysterious man. His fingers groped along the table in the dim light, searching for a weapon. He grabbed a pot and threw it, followed by a wooden dough roller, and then a clay bowl. Taosee never left the kitchen in an orderly fashion so one could find what one needed. Finally, his hand clasped a handle that seemed to have the right heft. Rankarus lunged forward and threw the cleaver in his hand, the blade making a soft, wet noise as it sank into the man’s skull.
The man dropped his sword, moaned, and fell back dead, his heart continuing to force blood from the wound in wide arcs even as his eyes closed. The blood eased to a trickle as his chest ceased moving. Rankarus stared at the dead man for a moment, his senses overwhelmed. He had not experienced this feeling in a very long time. The thrill of being on the edge of death. It worried him that he missed it so.
Shaking off the distraction of his excitement, Rankarus pulled the cleaver from the dead man’s forehead and raced along the hall to the common room and the screams that were just then dying away. He burst into the room, cleaver raised in his fist, blood dripping down the blade to cover his hand. The sight before him momentarily arrested his motion. Flames leapt around the room, crawling up the walls and dancing across the balcony of the upper floor. Smoke filled the air, curling in great whorls put in motion by the curtain Abananthus used to try and put out the flames eating at the black-charred skin of a man lying still on the floor. Another dead man lay by the ale counter, his face a pale imitation of all faces.
“What in the name of the Seven Goddesses is going on?” Rankarus shouted above the growing roar of the flames.
Abananthus turned, his eyes locking on the bloody cleaver in Rankarus’s hand.
“I don’t know.” Abananthus wiped soot from his brow.
“Rankarus!”
Rankarus looked up to the sound of Kellatra’s voice. She ran along the upper balcony toward the stairs, the children in her arms. Jadaloo ran behind her, pounding on doors, rousing the guests to flee the fire.
Rankarus dashed to the stairs, meeting Kellatra halfway down, taking the children from her arms. Lantili still looked groggy with sleep, but Luntadus appeared completely awake. The boy’s eyes went wide at the sight of the blood-soaked cleaver in his father’s hand.
“What happened?” Kellatra also stared at the blade.
“The kitchen.” Rankarus explained no more. “There are two dead men in the common room, one burned to death and the other with no face.”
“I know.” Kellatra ignored his stare. “Take the children outside. Jadaloo will get the guests out.” She rushed past him down the stairs.
“Where the hell are you going?” Rankarus shouted after his wife, fear, anger, and confusion and the remnants of the evening’s wine jumbling his thoughts.
“I need to get something from the cellar.” Kellatra ran through the hall toward the kitchen.
“Leave it,” Rankarus yelled as the first panicked guest pushed past him at the bottom of the stairs. “We can get it later.” He assumed she intended to retrieve their savings from beneath the stone floor in the cellar. A cellar only needed a stone floor if you wanted to hide something underneath it, a fact thieves always seemed unable to grasp. Rankarus and Kellatra would need the money to rebuild, but it could be pulled from the ashes later.
He frowned, uncertain what to do, whether to follow his wife, help evacuate the guests, or run the children to safety. Lantili’s cough at his chest made his decision.
“Leave that!” Rankarus dropped the cleaver and shouted to Abananthus, where the man still attempted to squelch the flames with what remained of the charred curtain. “Help Jadaloo get the guests out.”
Rankarus ran around the edge of the common room, holding Lantili and Luntadus close to his chest as he dashed through the main door, two guests in sleeping gowns running just behind him. He stood in the street, his children whimpering in his arms, as he watched the Three Moons Inn burn. People rushed screaming and yelling from the front door as the flames escaped the open windows and climbed the side of the wooden structure.
Abananthus stumbled from the inn, Jadaloo coughing as he held her under his massive arm.
“That’s all of them,” Abananthus said.
Rankarus quickly counted the heads around him in the street. Fifteen in all. Only one missing. Just as he handed his daughter to Jadaloo and his son to Abananthus, Kellatra came running around the side of the inn, her face smeared in soot, her hair slightly singed, a bag of coins in one hand and a leather-wrapped package tucked under her arm. He ran to her and threw his arms around her.
“What were you thinking?” Rankarus held Kellatra’s smoke-begrimed face in his hands. “We could have grabbed the coins later. They aren’t worth your life.”
She did not need to speak for him to know that she had not risked her life to gather their savings. He noted again the leather-bound package she carried. He remembered the two dead men in the common room, one burnt alive and the other seeming never to have been a man at all. And the man he had killed in the kitchen. These events added
up to some total he could not calculate.
“What has happened?” Rankarus gripped Kellatra’s shoulders, searching her frightened eyes for some hope that the sum of his suspicions would not prove accurate.
“I made a mistake.” Tears etched jagged lines down her smoke-stained face as she looked up into his eyes, pleading forgiveness. “I made a mistake, and now we must flee for our lives.”
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THE SEER
ABANANTHUS
THE STARS faded from sight as the sun began to light the sky, the sister moons running to hide behind the curve of the world. Sunrise brought the chirps of birds and the calls of men and women throughout the pilgrim campsite. Dirt doused the night watch fires. Feedbags slipped over the necks of the horses. Cookware and sleeping rolls stacked the backs of wagons. By the time the sun crested the tops of the hills beside the road, wheels turned, hooves plodded, feet shuffled, and the pilgrim band made way again, heading for the coast, to follow the dream and the new star in hopes of meeting with their prophet and crossing the great Zha Ocean to the Forbidden Realm.
Abananthus swatted a deer fly at his neck and sniffed the crisp morning air. He loved the morning hours before the world fully woke and the heat of the day settled upon the land.
Morning prepares the blessings for the day to come.
He smiled and flicked the reins against the back of the horse drawing the open wagon he rode. Luntadus and Lantili still slept, each curled under an arm of the dozing Jadaloo, gently rocking in the back of the wagon. Kellatra walked ahead of the cart, speaking with one of the pilgrims, a woman who had joined the band the prior day. She always did this: interviewing the new arrivals, learning what they knew, what they had heard. She made it sound like idle curiosity to compare the experience of the dreams. It also gave her an opportunity to learn if anyone had heard of a woman and her family being sought for vague reasons.
The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1) Page 22