Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
VIOLETTE MALAN—
A bold new voice in fantasy from DAW BOOKS:
THE MIRROR PRINCE
The Novels of Dhulyn and Parno: THE SLEEPING GOD
THE SOLDIER KING
THE STORM WITCH
PATH OF THE SUN
Copyright © 2010 by Violette Malan.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1522.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-44302-6
First Printing, September 2010
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For Paul
Acknowledgments
My first and fullest thanks go as always to my editor and publisher, Sheila Gilbert, and my agent, Joshua Bilmes. My thanks also go to my good friend Vaso Angelis, who suggested the location for Path of the Sun. “Why don’t you write about my home?” she said, so the isle of Crete it is. I hope she likes what I’ve done. A belated thanks to my friend David Ingham. Way back when I was writing The Soldier King, David helped me out with a bit of theater business and I somehow forgot to acknowledge him then, so I’d like to do that here. To my friend Barb Wilson-Orange, who helps me with my proofs. And to Chris Szego, whose name I spelled wrong last time, even though she said it was okay. To mystery writer, friend and psychologist Barbara Fradkin, for recommending reading on psychopaths. And to add to the cast of old friends, I’d like to thank a new one, Dr. Kari Maund, who reminded me of how much I love, and how much I owe to that other mercenary brotherhood, especially to Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan.
The right to have a character named after her was purchased at silent auction for Winter Ashley-Maie Lucas by her mother Teresa Lucas. Your mother said you chose a bad guy, and I tried to make her all bad—but it just didn’t work out that way.
Prologue
EPION AKARION WAITED until moonrise to travel the last portion of his journey back to the palace in Uraklios. This part of the road was open and easy, even at night, and if it did pass rather closely to two or three wooded areas on its way through the hills, well, he had guards with him.
Still, he was surprised when one of the forward riders came back with news that there was someone on the road near the Path of the Sun. It was not unusual to find the curious exploring around the Caid ruins, which included the entrance to the Path of the Sun itself. But those who came at night generally came in pairs, carrying something to lie down upon while they watched the stars, and they were generally younger than this man. This was a man of Epion’s own years, dressed for the road and leading two horses, one saddled and one, smaller, burdened with several packs.
A man smelling of blood.
The smile on the stranger’s face was warm enough and charming enough that Epion Akarion found himself on the verge of smiling back—despite the blood that spattered the front of the man’s tunic, decorated the edge of his cloak, and streaked his hands.
“Check his back trail, Jo,” Epion said to the guard who had stayed with the stranger. He waited until Jo-Leggett and his brother Gabe-Leggett rode off before returning his attention to the blood-spattered man.
“I am Epion Akarion,” he said. “Of the Royal House of Menoin. Is that your own blood, sir?” Though his experience on the battlefield told him it was unlikely. “Are you injured?”
“Blood?” The stranger looked down at his hands, and for a moment Epion thought a look of surprise flickered over the man’s face. Perhaps he thought it too dark for the blood to be seen. But the moon was brighter than the stranger realized, and Epion and his guard had greater experience of wounds and the patterns of blood spray than ordinary men.
“Well, I’ve had a rather difficult experience,” the man said finally. “Very difficult, really. Trying in fact.”
“My lord.” The call came from several spans along the road, where a copse of pine trees formed a deeper darkness. The tone in Jo-Leggett’s voice sent icy fingers dancing up Epion’s spine. He signaled to his aide Callos to remain watching the stranger and went to join the guard.
Jo-Leggett led him to where his brother waited in a clearing Epion vaguely remembered. It was not many paces from the road, and full of moonlight. What Epion saw there tightened the muscles of his own throat and made him clench his teeth against the rising of his stomach.
“Fetch torches,” he said. Once they were lit and set into the ground and the guards instructed to step away—which they were only too glad to do—Epion paced his way methodically around the thing on the ground. Now that he was over the initial shock, he saw several points that intrigued him. First, he was certain this was no man of Menoin, not with that hair the color of old blood. And not from what he could see of the beading on the man’s clothes—what was left of them. Epion was also sure the limbs had been arranged—again, he’d seen enough soldiers fall in battle to know that bodies did not land like this naturally. And the cuts. They were precise. Some of them symmetrical.
This had the look of ritual. Epion drummed his fingers on the hilt of his belt knife. Nothing happened by accident. He could make good use of this.
“Bring him.”
The stranger came escorted between Callos and Essio, but though his arms were held, there was something in the way the man carried himself—an air of calm and of ready helpfulness—that made it seem he was bringing them, rather than the other way around.
“Did you do this?” Epion gestured toward the corpse.
Again, a momentary expression, this time of confusion, flitted across the man’s face and then cleared away. The stranger blinked and leaned back. “Of course not! Would I have been standing about on the road waiting for someone to find me if I had?”
Epion glanced at the Leggett brothers. They were the ones who had first encountered the stranger, the ones who could say. Jo-Leggett shrugged. Evidently the man could have been waiting on the road.
“You are covered with blood,” Epion pointed out.
“By the gods, man! I was trying to help him. Of course I’m covered in blood. Look at your guard; he has blood on him, and I’ll wager he hasn’t even touched the body.” Gabe-Leggett suddenly scrubbed his hand against the thigh of his trousers and managed to look green even in the torchlight.
It was possible. Possible that the fellow had stumbled
on the body, tried to help what he took for an injured man, and become covered in blood in the process. The stranger’s very calmness might be nothing more or less than a state of mental fugue, stemming from the shock of such a discovery. Epion looked at the man more closely. His cloak was of good quality, and he had rings on his hands, gold rings in each ear; a staff was thrust into the straps of his packhorse, but Epion saw no other weapons. Not a soldier, not a guard of any kind.
Still, the body was so carefully positioned. The cuts so precisely made. The man’s story was not very likely.
“And you did not see the condition of the body?” Epion gestured toward it with an open hand.
The man’s eyes followed the movement of Epion’s hand. He grimaced, but he did not look away. “Not until the moon came up, no, I could not.” The man rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, then frowned. “As soon as I did, I ...” he shrugged and looked away.
“You took his horse,” Callos said.
“To save him wandering off while I went for help.”
“You were heading in the wrong direction for help,” Epion’s aide pointed out.
“I’m a stranger here.”
Epion held up his hand, and Callos fell silent. That was something else that did not ring true. However much a stranger the man was, how could he be on the road for Uraklios and not know that a city the size of the capital was just on the other side of the hills? You could smell the sea from here—or could if there weren’t so much blood on the ground.
“My lord.” A different tone in Jo-Leggett’s voice this time. More triumph and considerably less nausea. He and Gabe-Leggett had been checking the stranger’s packs, and the guard now held up a roll of soft leather. The kind commonly used to hold a set of knives. The torchlight flickered, but it was clear enough to show bloodstains as Leggett exposed three knives in their leather pockets.
“A strange way to help someone, or did you merely pick these up to keep them safe along with the horse?”
“What would be the point of my saying that? You’d only wonder why they had been left behind and who had wiped them off.” Still the stranger was calm, in no way looking like a guilty man who had been caught out in a lie, but rather rueful, as if he were going to admit to something about which he was merely a little embarrassed. “I was benighted along the road there,” he said, pointing to the direction in which he was heading when they came upon him. “I saw this man’s fire and stopped to share it with him. When he learned I was a trader, he asked to see some of my wares. But when I took out some of my knives to show him, he went mad and attacked me. I did nothing more than defend myself, my lord.”
“Not judging by what was done here. In self-defense you might have stuck the man, even slashed him a little, but what then? Why didn’t you stop?”
“You can see I’m not a soldier, my lord. That staff’s my real weapon. I sell knives, but I don’t know their use—not in this way, not to fight with them. I panicked is the truth of it, sir. Panicked and struck out in a way I don’t like to think of.”
Epion might have believed him, so convincing was he, if it were not for the details he had already noticed: the positioning of the body and the style and nature of the cuts. And then there was something in the way the man hung his head . . . Epion was suddenly reminded of a troupe of players who had visited the Tarkin’s court the year before.
“You’ll have to do better than that, man,” Epion said. “I’ll have the real story, and we won’t be leaving here until I’ve heard it.”
Epion saw decision come into the man’s face. A firmness that had up until now been lacking. He stood a little straighter, and his face became less like that of a servant and more like that of a man of means.
“It was self-defense,” he said finally. “But not in any way that can be readily understood by the common person. I’ll tell you, my lord, but not these.” He indicated the guards with a tilt of his head. “What I have to tell you may be of great use to you.”
“My lord,” Callos began.
“Tush, man, I’m only asking that you go out of earshot. His lordship’s in no danger from me. He’s armed, for one thing, and for another, he has no darkness in him. That’s a lucky thing, a very lucky thing. The same cannot be said for all your men, I’m afraid,” the stranger said, turning back to Epion after he had waved his guards away. “That tall one—Callos? He has secrets.”
“And the dead man, did he have secrets?”
“He did indeed.” The man’s eyes wandered back to the body. He stood, shoulders relaxed, with his hands clasped in front of him. A wrinkle formed between his eyebrows. “I followed him here, to see what the secret might be, and once I knew it, I could release the darkness,” he said. “Let it out into the light of day before it killed him.” Still facing the body, the stranger moved his eyes back to Epion. “And now you will arrest me. Put me to death.” He tilted his head to one side. “Or will you?”
Epion Akarion smiled. “You have told me the truth, and you were right to do so.” Epion waited, but the man did not move, except for the widening of his smile. The flickering torchlight gave movement to his eyes. “I cannot use a man who stops to help people,” Epion continued. “Nor a man who defends himself so clumsily. But I can use a man who knows what to do about people with dark secrets. I can help such a man, and he can help me.”
The stranger turned finally to look Epion fully in the face. “Know some people with dark secrets, do you?”
“I think so,” Epion said. “And I’m sure you will agree with me.”
One
THE BRIGHT AUTUMN sunshine made Parno Lionsmane blink at the view from the rooftop terrace of the Mercenary House in Lesonika. The normally dark, pine-covered hills to the north looked a brilliant green, and the whitewashed walls of the town itself were almost blinding. A young page ran across the courtyard below, drawing Parno’s eyes from the view, but he had to squint to make out any detail in the deep shadows.
From this vantage point it was obvious that Lesonika’s Mercenary House had once been a private home. The building fronted west on a small square, with its northern wall running along a side street and the courtyard making up the east end of the structure. Its southern wall was shared with the building next door, the residence and workplace of Lesonika’s foremost Mender.
Of course, once the Mercenaries had taken it over, the building’s defenses had been strengthened. The front door was sealed with stone from the inside, as were the ground-floor windows; the upper windows were barred, even those on the third floor, and the staircase leading to the rooftop terrace had been removed and replaced with a ladder—easier to kick over should the need arise. The courtyard, with its iron-reinforced gate, had been restructured into the House’s only entrance.
Everything planned. Everything familiar. Parno grinned. That was one of the pleasurable things about the Mercenary Brotherhood. The Common Rule was the same everywhere you went.
“There,” his Partner’s rough silk voice murmured from behind him. Still smiling, Parno turned around.
Dhulyn Wolfshead lifted her hand from the vera tile she had just lined up on the small wooden table to the right of the trapdoor. Meant to hold arrows and spare crossbow bolts in time of trouble, it doubled nicely as a gaming table in time of quiet.
“Blood,” said Dhulyn’s opponent from the other side of the table. “You have the Caids’ own luck.” Kari Artagan pulled from her belt a pair of fine leather gloves, dyed a dark red with an intricate pattern of silver embroidery on the gauntlets, and dropped them on the array of tiles.
“Considering the Caids have long been dust, I think my luck is slightly better,” Dhulyn said, drawing the left glove onto her own hand.
“These are brand new. I’ve only worn them once.”
“I’ll take the greatest care of them, my Brother.” Dhulyn smiled. “You may wish to win them back.”
“Oh, yes, when the sun rises in the east.” Kari stood and stretched, moving her shoulders back and forth
. She was much more finely dressed than either Parno or Dhulyn, in blood-red linen trousers and a bright white silk shirt with a silver-embroidered vest over it. An elaborately plumed hat sat on the floor next to her feet. “It’s today, isn’t it?” she said. “Your, ah, your meeting with the Senior Brother.”
“No need to be so delicate,” Parno said. “We’re just waiting to be called in.”
Kari Artagan shook her head. Her red and gold Mercenary badge, identical to Parno’s, flashed in the sun. “And this one cool enough to beat me at Soldier’s Sixes.” She indicated Dhulyn with her thumb as she leaned over, scooped up her hat, and set it at an angle on her brow. Straightening, she rested her hand on the hilt of her sword. “I’m off to find some food,” she announced. “Losing always makes me hungry.” She touched her fingers to her forehead.
“You should lose more often, then,” Dhulyn called out, as Kari lifted the trapdoor and let it fall with a bang. “Soon you’ll be too scrawny to pull back your bow, let alone lift that sword.”
Kari grinned. “In Battle,” she said.
“Or in Death,” both Parno and Dhulyn responded as their Brother stepped into the opening and dropped from view.
“You could have won some money, don’t you think?” Parno said, taking Kari’s empty seat across from Dhulyn. “Not that the gloves don’t look well on you.”
“Nervous, are you?”
“And you’re not?”
Dhulyn frowned down at the tiles while she pulled off the glove she’d tried on and tucked it and its partner into the sash at her waist. She pursed her lips in a tuneless whistle, drumming her fingers on the edge of the table, as if she saw a pattern she did not like in the spread of the tiles. Finally she blew out a breath and swept the vera tiles back into their box.
Path of the Sun: A Novel of Dhulyn and Parno Page 1
