The Bloodstained God (Book 2)

by Tim Stead

  Cain was clearly moved to see her. He turned his mount and rode it close enough to her that their knees were touching, and they looked at each other in silence for a moment.

  “I will never leave your side again,” he said.

  “Do not make promises that you cannot keep, my love,” she replied, smiling broadly.

  “I swear…”

  She reached out to touch his lips, to stop the words, and he acquiesced. “You are a commander, Cain. Would you have me stand by you when the arrows fall? Would you give me a shield to bear? You know it is not the way. Sometimes I serve you best when we are apart.”

  “I have been half dead these past days,” he said.

  “And I, but now we are together again, thanks be to the Wolf who saved my life at High Stone.”

  Cain’s eyes turned to Narak, who had not spoken a word as yet. “This is a debt that I cannot repay,” he said.

  “Build the wall and hold it until winter comes again, and I will hold the debt erased from our ledger, Cain,” he said. More than that. If Cain held the wall until next winter the kingdoms of the east would be saved. Cain would again be the man who had done what could not be done.

  “I will build it, and they shall not pass while a man of the Seventh Friend yet lives,” Cain promised. The men who heard his words cheered. They, too, had pride. Narak wondered if they would indeed all die at the White Road. It was a bleak enough spot for tragedy. He did not think it likely. Cain had more care for the lives of his men than to see them all die.

  “Just hold the pass, Cain. If more men are needed they will be sent.”

  Sheyani stepped forwards. “Will you fulfil your promise now, Deus?” she asked.

  “I have done so,” he replied. “I have brought you out of danger to Cain and the Seventh Friend.”

  “Your other promise. Will you wed us?”

  “Now? Here on the road?” He had not expected this. It was true that he had made the promise, but he had expected to do this duty after the war. Yet he looked at Cain and Sheyani and he knew that they both wanted it. They had come so close to death, both of them, that it seemed only the slimmest chance had brought them together again.

  It did seem foolish to waste such providence.

  There was a stir among them men who had overheard. They wanted this too, it seemed. Narak saw smiles. He saw looks of satisfaction.

  “Very well,” he said. “But I do not know the formal words. If you marry here it will be a rough hewn thing, a spirit of a marriage without the flesh.”

  “It suits the place, the time and the need, Deus,” Cain replied.

  “There must be witnesses and a scribe to write what has passed,” Narak said, and Cain picked quickly from among the volunteers, so that it seemed only a moment until the roadside was transformed into a temple. It was, Narak thought, the largest congregation that he had ever seen at a wedding, and the word had spread up and down the ranks like fire, and the regiment had become a dense circle of men with their commander and his lady it its centre point. They were quiet. Heads strained to see, ears to hear.

  Narak remembered a hundred weddings. He remembered the weddings of kings and dukes and princes, warriors and poets, the extravagant and the parsimonious. Such events had changed in fifteen hundred years, but Narak still preferred the old words, the old way. This was a good place for such simple things.

  “You are Cain Arbak,” he said. “Colonel of the regiment of the seventh friend, lord of Waterhill, innkeeper of the Seventh Friend, city councillor of Bas Erinor, Knight Talon of the Order of the Dragon, sometimes called the Wolf of Fal Verdan. Do you own to all these names and titles and no others?”

  “I do own them, Deus,” Cain replied.

  “Let it be set down.” He turned to Sheyani. “You are Sheyani esh Baradan al Dasham, Daughter of the King of Durandar, Mage of the path of Halith, Adept of the path of Belan Terak, Adept of the path of Gorisian. Do you own to all these names and titles and no others?”

  “I do own them, Deus,” Sheyani said.

  “If either of you has wed before this date, speak.” He allowed the silence to stretch a little. “If either of you is compelled to this end by any cause, speak.” The silence was shorter this time.

  “Do you, Sheyani, take this man Cain to be your husband?”

  “I do take him.”

  “Do you, Cain, take this woman Sheyani to be your wife?”

  “I do take her.”

  Narak took out his knife and cut a strip of cloth from the end of his cloak, he took Cain’s left hand, his only hand, and Sheyani’s right and bound them together. It should have been a silken cord, but somehow the ragged end of cloth seemed the right thing.

  “I am Narak, Benetheon God of Wolves,” he said. “With this binding I bind you together as husband and wife before the eyes of all men and women. May your happiness in this binding be as long as your days, and your days be long indeed. It is done.”

  He stepped back. Cain and Sheyani did not embrace, but the look they exchanged stabbed at Narak. It was a thing he had never shared. He saw that Cain’s knuckles were white, so fiercely did he grip his new wife’s hand. This was a right thing he had done. His words had made the world a slightly better place.

  Sheyani knelt, and Cain went to his knees beside her.

  “I thank you for this blessing, God of Wolves,” she said.

  He stepped forwards again and raised them both up. “Such things are made to be,” he said. “There is no blessing I can give you that matches what you already possess.”

  The sentimentality was too much for Cain. He bowed once more and turned on his men.

  “We march in ten minutes!” he shouted. “Form a column. You all know your places.”

  The regiment sprang back into being. The congregation was gone. Every one of them, Narak thought, each and every one would throw themselves in the path of an arrow to save Cain or Sheyani. He had never seen such belonging among men.

  Now that his second promise was fulfilled, Narak turned his attention to Lord Hesham. Hesham was the Earl of Lorrimal, his family as old as the kingdom, and his estates a large but poor block of land securely wedged into the north east corner of Avilian, on the border with Afael and adjacent Gods Walk where it delineated the border of the Great Plains.

  This far north there was a great deal of woodland and not so many people. Wolves roamed freely, and it was simple enough for Narak to find a pack that hunted the forests on Lorrimal land. He found them. He translocated.

  40. Bento Nesser

  It was a cold, blustery day that threatened rain when they arrived. Sara heard wagons and horses on the gravel outside the house, the shouts of men. She looked up from the book that she was reading for a moment. The interruption was an annoyance. Lira would come and fetch her in a minute, but for now she could continue to read. Her head bent back to the book and she pushed all thoughts of her guests from her mind, entered once again the world of Penshal Fitharmon, author, or at least editor of The Legends and Customs of North Eastern Telas.

  It was a surprisingly thick book. She would not have imagined that such a fragment of a country should have so many remarkable stories and practices that marked it out from the rest of the world. Apparently they even had a dialect of their own, a way of speaking that even other Telans struggled to master.

  She was looking forward to the next chapter which she understood from reading the description at the start of the book would contain details of their particular worship of Ashmaren, which was in startling and diverse ways quite different from the worship of the self same god in other parts of the six kingdoms.

  Sara shared the author’s opinion that there were six kingdoms, and not five, because she had read Simras Hecshal’s Geography of the Six Kingdoms, and also a slim volume entitled Travels in the Southern Isles written by a man who identified himself only as Kardios. This second book, a fascinating travelogue of strange sights and experiences, had cemented her agreement with Hecshal.

  An urge
nt knocking sounded on the door. Sara sighed. It was her duty to invite these great scholars, but she would have rather been alone here. The books and their tales were completely captivating, and she resented any time spent away from them.

  She placed a pheasant feather in the book to mark the extent of her reading and closed it carefully. She ran her hand fondly across the leather cover and stood.

  “I’m coming, Lira.” It was always Lira who came to fetch her. Since the first time that she had asked for Lira it had been that way.

  Lira opened the door and stepped in, smiling. “There’s two of ‘em,” she said, her voice bright with the excitement of visitors. “One’s as old as some of these books and just as dusty, and the other’s not bad.”

  It was overly familiar, of course. Sara knew it and Lira knew it, but she allowed it because she was a journeyman tanner’s widow, and no better than anyone else. Lira was always quite proper when others were around. Not bad meant that Lira thought him a pretty young man, which was fair enough, for men of higher station, it seemed, were permitted a dalliance with maids and the like without a stain on their character. That seemed unfair to Sara’s mind, when ladies were supposed to live and die by their virtue.

  “The old man is the scholar, Lira,” she said. “His name is Bento Nesser, and he’s a sage from Golt itself. The pretty one is his secretary, a man who writes down what he says and runs errands.”

  Lira wasn’t interested, Sara could tell. Pretty was pretty, old was old. She followed her maid down the corridor to the day room where she knew she was supposed to receive visitors and found the scholars waiting for her.

  It was a peculiarity of her situation that she was their social superior. She was a poor woman raised on the hard side of the low city, and they were men of great learning and refined manners, but because Lord Skal had given her his blood she was cousin to a lord, and not, she had learned, to just any lord. She’d read about his father and the treachery that he had done, which mattered not at all to her. Lord Skal wasn’t his father and he’d been found clean of any part of the plot. His family though, traitorous father and all, dated back dozens of generations. One of them had fought in the Great War, and they’d been mighty lords for generations before that. She had read about them, too.

  The borrowed blood of the Hebberd family was hers now. She was kin to some of the highest of high blood.

  The scholars turned to her as she entered the day room. The old man was old. He was even older than she had expected. A few wisps of white hair decorated the edge of his otherwise shining scalp and his face reminded Sara of pictures in Hecshal’s book of Afaeli badlands, where the ground was scored by rare deluges of water into lifeless canyons. His eyebrows, white as snow, sprung out from his face like tufts of painted wire, and he was bent forwards with a good deal of his weight resting on a stout stick. His eyes, however, were blue and as young as any she’d seen.

  The pretty man, the secretary, looked by far the better dressed. His trousers carried a crease, which she thought remarkable after so long a journey, and his clothes in general were decorated with the sort of discrete needlework that was hailed as the height of fashion. His shirt was white, his trousers black, and his tunic the sort of blue that excites envy in kingfishers. In spite of his finery she did not like his face. It was too pointed, closed and sour, though she could see why Lira had called him pretty.

  “Learned scholars, you are welcome to my lord’s house,” she said.

  The bowed old man bobbed on the end of his stick and smiled. She assumed it was a smile. He pulled back his upper lip and bared his yellow teeth. It could just have easily been a snarl.

  “We are most grateful for the chance to study the codex,” the old man huffed. “May we see it?” His blue eyes sparkled more brightly than his secretary’s tunic. Sara was impressed by his eagerness. It made her think of him as a kindred spirit in some small way.

  “You’re sure you would not like some refreshment first? To rest perhaps after your journey?”

  “Indeed no,” the old man said. Sara thought the younger man had a different opinion, but he did not voice it, but instead adopted a resigned air and smiled a weak, tolerant smile at her.

  “Then follow me,” she said. “I will take you to the library at once.”

  They followed and she led, hearing their footsteps on the boards behind her, the old man a rapid rhythm of tapping stick and shuffling feet, the younger a slow, measured tread. She came to the door and stopped, looking back at them. She had outdistanced the old man by a few yards, and noted that the younger had stayed behind him, though he could easily have moved more quickly.

  She was almost reluctant to open the door. This was her private place. It was the room in which she was changing herself from what she had been into what she hoped she might become, though this was the first time she had thought of it that way. Her reading was an intensely personal and private journey.

  “Here we are,” she said. She turned the handle and the door swung open. For a moment she did not know if she should enter first, and apparently neither did the scholars, for there was a moment of hesitation between them which Sara ended by skipping through the opening to stand on one side and cast her eye over her little kingdom.

  The old man came in and stopped inconsiderately close to the door so that his secretary was forced to peer over his shoulder to see what lay within. He looked at the books lining the walls, the volumes spread out on the table.

  “Silk curtains?” he enquired. Sara had put up silk curtains to defend the books from direct sunlight, which she thought was fading the pages.

  “For the books,” she said. “Against the sun.”

  The scholar nodded and moved further into the library. He must have seen far greater libraries than this, she thought. He came from the royal college in Golt, and had probably been a regular visitor to the royal library there. She had read about it and the thousands upon thousands of books that it was supposed to contain.

  Sage Nesser, as she told herself she should think of the old man, because that was his formal title, shuffled over to a nearby shelf and squinted at the titles. She heard him grunt with surprise and his hand reached out for a book, then stopped. He turned to her.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Of course, Sage Nesser,” she said.

  He plucked a book from the shelf. It wasn’t a large book, but Nesser cradled it in both hands as if it were a child. He allowed the pages to fall open at random and read in silence for a minute. He turned the page.

  “My father had this book,” he said. “The Compendium of Entertainments. You know there is a game described in here that I tried to play when I was at school, but the rules are incomplete, and it did not work…”

  “Butcher’s Boy,” she said. “When the tagger is caught there is no provision for when two do the catching.”

  Nesser stared at her for a moment. “You’ve read it,” he said.

  “Yes.” She was embarrassed by the way he stared, as though she herself were a book.

  “And you understood it. Did you try to play the game?”

  “No, Sage Nesser. I am too old for such things.”

  Nesser blinked and stared a moment longer, then he carefully closed the book and replaced it on the shelf.

  “I think I am going to be a friend to this place,” he said. “Now where is the codex?”

  She pointed, then because of the scatter of books on the table hiding the codex she stepped to where she had laid out the book, closed, and covered by a silk cloth that matched the curtains. She lifted the cloth gently, exposing the book to the scholar’s gaze. He shuffled over and laid a hand on the cover.

  “This is the Pelion Codex?” He asked, as though requiring further confirmation.

  “A Speculative History of the Mage Lords, Their Wars, Their Customs, and The Great Conflagration That Brought Them Low,” she replied.

  “Quite right,” Nesser said. “Such a book deserves its full, exalted title.”

&n
bsp; He sat awkwardly, lowering himself into the chair, propping his stick carefully against the table, and opened the book. He perused each page, each note and title with care, taking his time to get to the meat of the script. His fingers were gentle with the pages, lifting each paper leaf and sliding beneath it, turning it almost by its own weight. When he reached the beginning of the text he paused.

  “Anatano, sit next to me and I will tell you what to write,” he said to his secretary, then turned to Sara. “You will want to continue your own studies,” he said. “I hope that our conversation will not disturb you unduly.”

  Studies. He had called her literary wanderings studies. It seemed a kind sort of flattery to Sara. “I am certain it will not, Sage Nesser,” she said. “You will let me know when you are inclined to eat?” Anatano looked hopeful at this, but Nesser was not inclined to pander to his secretary.