Eve of Snows: Sundering the Gods Book One

by L. James Rice

  A blinding flash. An explosion rocked the chamber.

  Screams split the ringing in her ears as she cowered, and Lord Priest Ulrikt crashed into the stone floor a pace in front her. Shards of bone pierced his snow-white robes, bleeding bright crimson. He didn’t move. His eyes stared heavenward. Piercing blue, unblinking.

  Dead. The lord priest was dead.

  Eliles stared in horror before a rush of high priests knocked her to hands and knees, swarming over their fallen leader with shouts and commands. In the back rows, panic. Adherents fled the Hall in mass. Chaos, terror, confusion. Assassin? Wrath of Bontore? The first salvo in an attack? She heard every accusation in the screams.

  Dareun? Where was Dareun? She crawled between oncoming priests, bouncing off knees and her vision spun from a shin to her forehead before powerful hands yanked her to her feet. Her old master hugged her tight, then held her at arms’ length, adrenaline shaking his body.

  “You? Was it you? Somehow?” Furtive questions and desperate. Never before had she seen Dareun beside himself. He knew something, despite questioning her. Almost as if he preferred her to be guilty.

  She shook her head. She wanted to say more, but how?

  He hugged her again, whispering in her ear this time. “Find a safe place. This bodes well for neither of us. Go!” He shoved her, and she ran.

  But where could she find safety in Istinjoln? Ivin and the wardens had departed. Ilpen and the strangers… should she risk dragging them into her troubles? The depths of the caves offered dark and distance, but they were a trap. Upper Istinjoln offered open air and a gate to wilderness, but the temptation to run to Ilpen haunted her.

  The safest place was the eye of the storm. Hundreds would gather to pray for the lord priest’s soul. An innocent should behave as an innocent. She turned and slowed to a walk. The Chamber of Etinbin, Patron God of the Dead and Overseer of the Living Stars. Courage or foolishness, she sought safety in plain sight.

  DAREUN’S EARS rang from the explosion of the lord priest’s bone, and surrounding the body screams and shouts thundered amid shoves and elbows. The press of bodies frightened him, his joints and bones had spent too many years kneeling to wade into the jostle. He scanned the crowd for Eliles but it proved impossible, too many hooded faces. With luck she’d escaped the stampede.

  His thoughts returned to his night in the Hall of Bones; he’d witnessed the assassin’s meddling, but knew nothing worthwhile. Feeling ancient, useless, and afraid in the maelstrom, he considered leaving, but the chaos had left a woman forgotten.

  Dareun hustled to Meris. Slack-jawed and unmoving, her breaths gurgled. Dareun turned the woman’s head, and blood trickled from her mouth. Three shards of bone were lodged in her chest and abdomen, while the lord priest looked as if he’d fallen on a porcupine. Crass thoughts even for these times. He mumbled a prayer in apology.

  Crass or not, the observation bore meaning. Whoever sabotaged the bone possessed skills and knowledge beyond his own. The Bones of Divination reserved for the lord priest were guarded by deadly prayers so they remained unsmoothed. Clever and devious to alter those prayers to explode the bone with the precision of an attack.

  “I need a healer over here!” His prayers might suffice, but gods knew there were plenty more gifted in those arts.

  A young woman slid to his side, he couldn’t remember her name.

  Her hands went first to Meris’ chest, then neck and head. The intensity of her prayers made the threat explicit: Despite the lack of blood, Meris neared death.

  Dareun took deep breaths, ran his fingers through his hair. Meris wasn’t the target and yet was severely injured, which meant Lord Priest Ulrikt walked the Road of Living Stars the moment the bone fragmented. Could even Meris, Master of Bones for decades accomplish such a feat?

  He cast the ancient woman a suspicious glance. Meris lay sprawled on the floor, rasping and bleeding. The healer smiled and nodded, and Meris’ breaths came easier, clear of fluids.

  A Master of Bones for longer than any before, she was one of a handful. He couldn’t wrap his head around a motivation for the oracle to risk her life in murder, and it was hard to imagine her making the climb in and out of the Hall of Bones. Hells, she hadn’t even been in Istinjoln yet!

  She could’ve passed on the knowledge. Political underpinnings might fuel a plot, it wouldn’t be the first time a lord priest was assassinated, but best he knew, Meris sat in her stars and avoided controversies in the canon. She had written an interpretation of the stars in support of the Prayer of Edofus and its position on poverty for missionaries, but that had been over a decade ago. No, he doubted her involvement in such a horrific act.

  A commotion erupted as priests lifted Ulrikt and rushed his body from the Hall. The entourage disappeared through the west wing and a lull passed over the chambers. The silence was a blessing on his ears, but still felt wrong, considering the violence moments before.

  His thoughts cleared in the tranquility. He needed to check on Eliles. His girl needed him about now, after a dead lord priest landed within a stride of her lap.

  “Thank you for healing this woman.” The young priestess smiled. He’d be sure to remember her name tomorrow and show her proper gratitude.

  A commotion behind him, and before he turned to look, powerful arms grappled Dareun and crashed him to the ground, a knee driven into his back, blasting the air from his lungs. He gasped and choked, unable to breathe a prayer and too old and frail to fight back. His wrists were twisted and burned by rope and his joints wrenched. He screamed as priests he knew by name flipped him to his back. Anger and hate twisted their faces.

  He tried to speak, but his lungs heaved. The blur of a leather sap from the corner of his eye.

  30

  WRITTEN IN GLORY

  Wandering wooded mountains in dark and cold,

  without lodestone, or stars, or fungus, or moon.

  No sense of direction except faith in the teachings of man

  on the words of Gods. Cracks in bone, chasms in the world,

  Leading Somewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere, Red Hare?

  Red hair once white, silver meets steel meats crimson,

  Cracks, cracks, in palms, faces, mountains, and bones,

  cracks bleed blood, lava, or lies.

  —Tomes of the Touched

  Five Days to the Eve of Snows

  The Hall of Bontore crushed Meris’ spirit with claustrophobia when she compared it to the expanse of stars she called home. Small, cramped, and its only light supplied by mortal fires. Chandeliers flickered high above, highlighting speckles of silver that a healthy imagination once conjured into stars. She’d sat in the Hall as a young woman, pointing out constellations of her own making to a lover, but they were pathetic imitations now.

  Swollen rows of kneeling priests and postulants knelt before the dais on which she rested, adding to her claustrophobia. She’d never sought the priesthood for its crowds. In fact, a distaste of preaching to the masses drove her to Skywatch as much as her gift for reading the bones. She enjoyed the relative solitude, communion on behalf of the gods one-on-one with the faithful.

  Meris saw her calling as serving the gods first, the flock second. For many this might be counterintuitive, she brought prophecy and the word of Bontore to the people so they could use this knowledge to better their lives. While a service to the mortal, she saw her mission as providing the gods with a way to communicate with their obedient and devout servants, and even the occasional heretic, in order to manifest in the mortal realm the will of the Pantheon.

  On this the day before the Eve of Snows, while breaking bones for those moving on to the priesthood, as well as for the high and lord priests, she felt disconnected. She focused on each bone brought before her, searching so hard for what she needed to find, that the connection she felt with Bontore became a dull warmth in her spine, instead of a soothing heat enveloping her body like a steaming bath. Even the faces of those coming before her to hear their futures blurred i
nto a fog. She read the portents from every bone with practiced precision. The bones were smoothed, their cracks predictable before she struck.

  There were no surprises.

  Until the girl. Even as far away as Skywatch Meris knew the name “Eliles,” a girl gifted with prayers of fire unmatched in the history of the monastery. Rumors swirled of her as a chosen one, but nobody offered a clue of what for. She was attractive in the manner of teenage girls: Tall, with slender hips not yet mature, long blond hair, straight teeth, and an oval face unblemished by time or scar. Meris took the girl’s hands as she kneeled. When looking into her eyes, the girl was nothing special, except maybe a hint of violet in her irises.

  Meris smiled. Her favorite aunt had violet eyes, such a rarity, she didn’t recall seeing another since her relative had Walked the Stars.

  She glanced at the bone resting on its cushion. Smoothed, and more than once if she wasn’t mistaken. She’d never seen this before. Two factions within Istinjoln might battle for this girl’s future, and she couldn’t tell which way the bone would break. She rubbed the oracle’s sliver until it glowed white, turning frigid in her warm palms, and struck. The echoing pop of the bone breaking resounded as a thousand times before, but the cracks stretching across the surface were few and strong. In eighty years of breaking bones she’d never seen a pattern this strong.

  A tiny fissure stretched from the crack passing the Fires of Sol and spiraling around a tiny carving of a star known as the Light of Istinjoln.

  Meris interpreted the bone in typical words, “My child, Bontore smiles on you. Here we see a line crossing Januel’s Heart…” She continued but her mind focused on the spiral and what it meant. She would know, the Face had assured her, and before uncertainty forced a bead of sweat, she decided: To her knowledge, never had the bones declared someone’s priestesshood, let alone connected them to the King of Gods in this manner. Lord Priest Ulrikt didn’t just want this girl connected to Istinjoln, that could be achieved with subtlety, but this? The strength of the cracks, their precision, this meant Ulrikt wanted her shackled to Istinjoln and close to him.

  But why? A man so powerful couldn’t fear this child, but he wanted her close, no doubt. Eliles’ divining would be a first, and Meris didn’t fear to make the proclamation.

  “What name did you bear to Istinjoln?”

  “Eliles Hunvad.”

  “What name do you bear at Istinjoln?”

  “Eliles.”

  “From this day forward, you are known as Eliles of Istinjoln, Priestess of Sol’s Fire.” The girl faded to white before her eyes, and for a second she thought Eliles might faint as she stumbled from the dais steps. Meris suspected that Ulrikt would take this new priestess under his wing, hone her prayers, honing her prayers to be the next lord priestess? If that was the case, this poor child wasn’t the only one in these chambers feeling ill.

  No matter how bizarre, for Meris the prophecy came as a relief, the girl’s prophecy must have been her mission. A subtle play of smoothing, to get a girl proclaimed to the priesthood and tied to Istinjoln by an oracle’s words. She exhaled and relaxed, the high priests’ bones coming next.

  These bones cracked true and unsmoothed, challenging her art, instead of making her read bones which may as well be books. Meris enjoyed interpreting these bones more than she had in twenty-five years, and with Lord Priest Ulrikt’s prophecy still to come, there remained something to look forward to.

  Meris found Ulrikt a kinder and more gentle soul than she’d imagined. When Ulrikt ascended the dais from behind the golden curtain his bearing was regal, the stiff in his spine, the tilt of his jaw, the cool gaze of a man comfortable with his power. Meris rose to take his hands, and if a younger woman she would’ve blushed and perhaps deigned to flirt.

  She kneeled before him and he smiled at her. A young boy brought her the clavicle of a bear, and she rested the prophetic bone on a cushion. When her eyes parted with his she gazed at the bone and its carvings. At first nothing struck her as unusual. The bone held a deadly enchantment, assuring that any attempt to smooth its cracks ended in death. Except, the fine grains and growth patterns bore signs of smoothing. An impossibility. And striking this bone for prophecy meant doom.

  Meris looked to the lord priest and Ulrikt whispered, “It was good getting to know you.”

  She hesitated. Her first thought was to throw the bone from the dais, as far away as possible, but then she realized why she was here. She knew. She wouldn’t fear to speak of doom. The lord priest had invited her to his chambers in order to get to know the woman who would kill him.

  Meris wrote Ulrikt’s destiny when the glowing shiv of steel plunged into the bone.

  A flash. An explosion. Blind and deaf and lying on her back, she knew she bled with needles of bone deep in her flesh. As consciousness waned, she knew what she had done, she couldn’t grasp why. She hoped to live, so one day she might understand.

  31

  SCAT AND BLOOD

  Darkness sees light, but light is Blind to Darkness.

  Truths are ugly and beauty lies in lies.

  Fear me not, oh worthy!

  Surly, curly, whirly, oh Worthy.

  Fear not my Beauty and see not my Darkness!

  Come come and succumb, smiling blind and dumb.

  —Tomes of the Touched

  Five Days to the Eve Snows

  Icy water splashed his face and the reek of salt of hartshorn burnt his nostrils, making him gasp for air. Dareun’s face throbbed. He struggled to open his eyes, his right tearing through matted blood, but his left didn’t open. He blinked into torchlight.

  A dark shadow loomed.

  Woxlin leaned in with a depraved smile. “A sad… No, tragic day, when a lord priest is assassinated, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes—” The slap ground the fractured bones in his face, and consciousness wavered before salts pressed beneath his nose again.

  “I will tell you when to speak.”

  Dareun closed his eyes and prayed for healing, but couldn’t focus. Cloud Water, of course; they’d forced the poison down his throat to make sure his prayers would go unanswered.

  Woxlin studied him, but what did he seek? The man’s grin twisted. “You may speak.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “The question is what did you do? Or why?”

  Fog cleared. They thought he’d murdered Ulrikt. His head sank. “Meris.” Dareun didn’t believe the accusation himself, but he’d sacrifice the oracle for himself without a thought. “If anyone could—”

  “Meris! Oh, my. That’s desperate. That decrepit woman mustered the gumption to walk to the Hall of Oracles, smoothing the bone of her lord priest so she could destroy it in her own hands? Think long before that’s your claim.”

  The absurdity struck a deeper blow than the man’s palm. “I didn’t kill Ulrikt.”

  “A witness saw you at the gate to the Hall of Bones several nights past, but we thought nothing of it. ‘Faithful Dareun, what harm could that old man do?’”

  “I did nothing.” With his mind clouded by the blows, an excuse escaped him.

  “I will be your confessor.” Woxlin pulled a scroll from his sleeve, a quill and ink from his pocket, and set them on a wobbly table. “When you’re ready, call for me.”

  Dareun squirmed, letting the man walk from the cell felt like doom. “I admit I was there. I visited the bones, an odd habit of mine, I saw someone down there—”

  Woxlin spun, “Who?”

  “A priest’s robes, but I didn’t see a face. I swear.”

  “This priest, short, hunched, with a limp? First you try to blame a hobbled woman, now some faceless priest. I suggest the truth if you wish to avoid a Sundering.” Woxlin exited, the heavy door grinding closed. He didn’t bother to turn the lock.

  Dareun curled into the corner and wept. The torment of the Slave Forges would find him if they didn’t discover the real killer.

  Rusty hinges squealed, and the door groaned op
en. Woxlin returned. “Hello, old friend.”

  The face, the voice, they were Woxlin’s, but something was wrong. It could be sarcasm, and Dareun had met the man only a few times before today, but the tone rang different.

  “I’m not going to confess to a damnable deed I had no hand in.” Least not until you torture me.

  “I know you went to the Bones to smooth the defiled girl’s oracle bones. I’ve known since the first time.”

  Dareun’s heart stopped. Woxlin couldn’t know this. Twelve Hells, what was happening? His blurred vision sank to the floor.

  “You think you are so clever as to bring a defiled into my monastery and I wouldn’t notice? To smooth her bones year after year against my will?” The voice changed. “Without my noticing?”

  Dareun raised his head and with his one good eye stared at a ghost: Lord Priest Ulrikt. Dumbstruck. He couldn’t even protest. He’d seen the man die, hadn’t he?

  “I need your help, old friend.”

  They were never friends. But how to argue with a ghost? “You’re a ghost. Or I’m hallucinating.”

  “Ghosts need salvation and hallucinations need to be forgotten. I need your help.” The man tapped the blank scroll. “I need you to confess.”

  Dareun stared at his boots, the toes scuffed from his being dragged here. “You want me to confess to killing you? How about I scream you’re alive, instead?”

  “So much wisdom and foolishness in one man.” The lord priest squatted, his finger touching Dareun’s face.

  He flinched at the touch, expecting pain, instead, bones shifted and the agony subsided.

  “All your pain may be taken away, or it may be amplified until your screams are joined by your pretty pupil’s.”

  Why threaten Eliles? “What do I care of any of my students’ pains. Why? Why kill me?”

  “Convenience? Oh, I would’ve been fine blaming the whole thing on Meris and some cabal she’d fallen in with, but why, when I have you? Someone tried to kill me. I don’t know who, but I need to know. They will stay tucked away so long as they believe we’re looking for them. But with me dead, and the killer tortured into confession and executed? They will stick their head up from whatever hole they’ve crawled into, we will find them, and sever it. This comes down to two unpleasant choices.”