Mortal Rites

by Melissa McShane

  “Shouldn’t we warn them?” she asked the second time they’d passed a couple of men on foot going the opposite direction, back toward the outpost and, possibly, Murtaviti.

  “Of what?” Alaric said. “We don’t know what Murtaviti plans. And they likely wouldn’t believe us anyway.”

  “But if he’s following us—”

  “There is still nothing we can do, save pray for the best,” Perrin said. “Much as I would wish otherwise.” He brought his horse to a halt. “There, that looks an adequate place. Sufficiently away from the road and safe from interruptions.” He pointed off to the left, where a line of cypress trees marked an invisible river.

  They picked their way across untilled ground covered with tall grasses and huge clumps of thistles they carefully avoided. Sienne hated thistles. She’d fallen into one as a child and had never forgotten the stinging pain. She thought about burning them, decided that would be too much effort, and gave them a wide berth.

  The river was narrow, not much bigger than a stream, and burbled merrily as it flowed past. The ground under the cypresses was soft and mossy, clear of grass and muddy in places. Perrin regarded it thoughtfully. “It is not as dry as I would like, but it will have to do.” He removed his vest and folded it into a pad, then lay down on the bank with the vest under his head. “If you will stand between me and the river…I would prefer not to roll into it in my extremity.”

  “Are you going to thrash around?” Dianthe asked.

  “I have no idea. I have never successfully achieved communion before.” Perrin smiled. “Granted, I have never attempted communion when my need was so great. I choose to believe that Averran rejected my earlier attempts because they were somewhat frivolous, in the eternal scheme of things.”

  “Is there anything else we should do?” Alaric said.

  “Just pay heed to what I say. I have been told by those who know that the things one sees in communion with one’s avatar rarely stay in memory. It is rather like magic in that respect. So I will speak aloud what I perceive, and you must remember it for later analysis.”

  Kalanath took up a position between Perrin and the edge of the bank. His lips were pinched tight together, a disapproving look, but he said nothing. Sienne stood next to him. Even after nearly a year of being companions, she still didn’t know how he reconciled his own faith, in which God was approached directly, with hers, in which God was too powerful to be worshipped face to face, or however it was Omeirans worshipped. Averran had never withheld his healing or protection blessings from Kalanath, so the avatar didn’t hold the Omeiran’s beliefs against him, but it had to feel strange to Kalanath. And now Perrin proposed to link himself to Averran in some way. That seemed closer to Kalanath’s beliefs, so she didn’t know why he was unhappy about it.

  Perrin arranged himself comfortably on the ground, interlacing his fingers and resting them just below his breastbone. “Silence, please,” he said, and closed his eyes. No one spoke. No one moved. The sound of the river seemed even louder with their stillness. A bird twittered nearby, then flew off in a rustle of wings. A breeze ruffled the leaves, then died away. Sienne wanted to fidget, but was afraid of disturbing Perrin’s concentration. He was breathing rhythmically the way he always did when he prayed, but slower, with longer pauses between exhalations.

  “O most cantankerous Lord,” he said, his words as slow as his breathing. “I wish to commune with you. Pray, let me see as you do, past, present, and future unwinding as one.”

  Silence fell again. “We face a great danger, o Lord,” Perrin went on after a minute of nothing but slow, ponderous breaths. “We wish to see his plans, the better to thwart them. Please, grant me this boon—” His words cut off, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “A child—she is—no, that is memory. A field filled with workers, their faces empty of emotion, and a man standing on a balcony watching them. Master Murtaviti, touching someone who falls to the ground. I cannot see her face. Dianthe, and bars—”

  Dianthe caught her breath, but Perrin didn’t wait. “Glowing yellow eyes in a sallow face. We are surrounded. Roses, many roses, and Sienne, very young—that too must be a memory. I see each of us now…the unicorn, running with a dozen others of his kind…Sienne again, wielding a knife to strike at someone’s heart…Dianthe on the streets of an unfamiliar city…Kalanath and a woman who touches his face…my—”

  He swallowed, and a look of terrible sadness crossed his face before he regained control. “I must see Murtaviti. He is at the edge of so many visions, a dark blotch bleeding into other lives. He is on the road, heading north and west. I see a door. There is a woman, not his wife, dressed all in red. She faces him, and falls.” Blood trickled from his nose, slid down his cheek to pool in his ear. Perrin’s body was rigid, his back arched off the ground. “Yellow eyes. A knife, dripping blood. The staff—the staff—o Lord, have mercy, I cannot—”

  The last words came out choked, and Perrin’s body convulsed. Quick as thought, Kalanath raised his staff and cracked Perrin across the temple. Perrin shuddered and lay limp and still.

  “What did you do?” Dianthe said, dropping to her knees beside Perrin.

  “Freed him from the grip of his vision,” Kalanath said, gripping his staff so tightly his knuckles showed pale. “It was his request.”

  “You couldn’t have known that,” Dianthe said. “What if it hurt him to be dragged out of it so abruptly?”

  Sienne knelt across from Dianthe and helped straighten Perrin’s limbs. He stirred, and she pressed down gently on his chest to keep him from rising. “Lie still. Are you all right?”

  “I will be. That was more dangerous than I had believed.” Perrin opened his eyes and looked at each of them in turn, ending with Kalanath. “Thank you. I might have gone mad otherwise. You were right, touching the face of God is dangerous.”

  “I wish I was not right,” Kalanath said. “I do not know what we learned, if it was worth the danger.”

  “We know Murtaviti is heading this way,” Alaric said. “We know he’s headed home. We know he’s going to kill again—maybe already has—and if I’m right, he has a particular victim in mind.”

  “The woman in red,” Dianthe said. “How are we supposed to find someone with that nebulous a description?”

  “We don’t,” Alaric said. “I think our next step is to pay a visit to Mistress Murtaviti. We need to know what she knows about all this. Even if she didn’t know her husband intended to become a lich, she knew something was going on. We need to learn what that was.”

  “What about the man watching the workers? He must be important, to be associated with Master Murtaviti,” Sienne said. “But it’s like the woman in red—we probably won’t know who he is unless we stumble upon him.”

  Alaric extended a hand to Perrin. “Can you stand?”

  “I need a drink. Of water,” Perrin said, taking Alaric’s hand and pulling himself to a standing position. He staggered, and Kalanath put one shoulder under Perrin’s arm to steady him. “Thank you, both,” Perrin said, accepting Sienne’s waterskin. He poured some water on his handkerchief and mopped the blood from his face. “I believe I will be well enough to ride in a few minutes.”

  Sienne walked to the riverside and watched the rippling water. She wished his communion had been clearer, not just because it would help them defeat Murtaviti, but because his visions of each of them had been so cryptic. He’d seen her wielding a knife to kill someone. She’d never killed anyone with a weapon—didn’t even have the training to do so. But she had no doubt whatever Perrin had seen was true.

  “Do not think of it,” Kalanath murmured. She startled. He’d come upon her silently, and now planted his staff in the soft ground and leaned on it. “If it is to be, it will be, and you cannot stop it. But it likely means something you do not know what.”

  “Do you mean I’m fated to kill someone? What if I don’t want to?”

  Kalanath shook his head. “That is not how prophecy works. It is a glimpse of a moment in time
, with no sign of what led to that moment or what comes of it. The glimpse is true, and will happen. It is the sum of who and what you are at the moment it occurs. But the why…that is not in the moment. You will know when it comes what it means, and what you will do about it.”

  “How do you know?”

  He grimaced. “It is not a story for this time. I will tell you all someday. And then you will choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  Kalanath turned away. “What you will do with me,” he said.

  12

  They rode into Fioretti a day and a half later, under sunny skies that felt completely inappropriate for Sienne’s mood. They’d ridden as hard as they dared and slept as little as possible, which meant she was tired and achy and wanted this adventure to end already. Whatever Murtaviti’s motivations for becoming a lich, she was sure they couldn’t be important enough to justify the murders he’d committed or the evil he was no doubt wreaking on his way north. She resented him for his selfishness. If only he’d been content to stay with the theory of necromancy!

  They stabled their horses—poor Spark looked pitifully happy to see her stall, and Sienne felt another flash of rage at Murtaviti for having made the punishing pace necessary—and set out on foot for Murtaviti’s house. The sun was setting, turning the brown bricks common to Fiorettan architecture dull orange and throwing splashes of yellow light across the harbor. Sienne glanced at it as they passed and felt, not her usual pleasure at the sight of the waves, but a tired frustration that seeped into her bones along with the aches. If Bernea Murtaviti couldn’t tell them anything, they were stuck trying to find the woman in red, and there were probably a thousand women in Fioretti that matched that description. Assuming she was in Fioretti, which didn’t have to be true.

  Sienne tried to shrug off the hopeless feeling and reminded herself that they’d been through worse. Probably. Just because she couldn’t remember anything worse right now didn’t make it untrue.

  Alaric pounded hard on Murtaviti’s door. “I hope she’s home.”

  “It’s dinnertime. She’s home,” Dianthe said.

  “If she—” Perrin began.

  The door opened. This time, Bernea Murtaviti was dressed in an evening gown in the latest fashion. She’d piled her black hair high on her head and donned earrings made of dozens of tiny gold rings and a single diamond solitaire pendant. She was smiling as if she’d been expecting someone else. Her smile faded when she registered who was at her door. “You’re back,” she said. She looked around Alaric at the rest of them. “Where—did you not find him? Where’s Pauro?”

  “This is not a conversation for the doorstep,” Alaric said. “May we enter?”

  “I’m expecting guests.”

  “You might want to change your mind about that,” Dianthe said.

  Bernea hesitated. “Come in, then,” she said.

  The comfortable sitting room had been rearranged, the chairs and sofas grouped in small knots to allow for several intimate conversations at once. Bernea did not invite them to sit. “He’s dead, isn’t he,” she said without preamble.

  “Mistress Murtaviti,” Alaric said, “why did you lie to us about your husband’s necromantic pursuits?”

  “What? I—I didn’t lie about anything!” Her gaze flicked to the wall of portraits again.

  “We already know he’s a practicing necromancer,” Alaric went on. “And that his activities went well beyond the theoretical.”

  “Did you think we’d claim you were complicit?” Dianthe said. “This isn’t about you, Mistress Murtaviti. Your husband has murdered dozens of people, maybe more than that. He’s raised the dead. You may not have had anything to do with that, but if you keep trying to conceal it from us, you are complicit.”

  Bernea turned away and took three steps in the direction of the empty hearth. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “You didn’t want to know,” Sienne said. “Some of those portraits are of his victims, aren’t they? You knew that much.”

  Bernea turned around to face them. “Pauro’s done something terrible, hasn’t he? That’s why you’re back without him.”

  “More terrible than killing all those people?” Sienne exclaimed, gesturing at the portrait wall.

  “Pauro wanted immortality, and he sacrificed hundreds of lives to get it,” Alaric said. “We need to know how to stop him. There’s no more time for you to stay silent, Mistress Murtaviti.”

  “Immortality?” Bernea’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “I thought he wanted—I swear to you, I thought his experiments were aimed at just what I told you, that he wanted to know why necromancy worked when it wasn’t divine blessings or wizardry. It was just a game, a challenge among himself and his cronies. His blight, isn’t that what they call it?” She laughed bitterly. “What did he do, exactly?”

  “He transformed himself into an undead creature called a lich,” Perrin said. “He is on his way here. You may be in danger.”

  “Surely Pauro wouldn’t hurt me!”

  “The Pauro you knew is gone,” Alaric said, “and the creature he’s become is pure evil, with no human feeling left, or so our priest tells us. You can’t count on him having once cared for you to protect you. Now, who are his cronies?”

  “I don’t—”

  “We know you do, Mistress Murtaviti,” Dianthe said. “If they were all trying to achieve the same goal, one of them might know how to stop Master Murtaviti. Just tell us.”

  Bernea half-turned back toward the hearth, closing her eyes as if it held some horrific vision. “Pedreo Giannus,” she said. “Pauro went to visit him—it’s why he was returning from Tagliaveno. Drusilla Tallavena. Ivar Scholten. There was the Samretto woman, but she died years ago. So did Selten Kondus. That’s all. Now, get out.”

  “You have to leave, Mistress Murtaviti,” Perrin said. “You are in danger here.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Bernea said. “Whatever Pauro might have done, whoever he’s become, he would never hurt me. He’s tried to protect me all these years. And I’m not going to flee my home like some coward. Get out of here. If anyone’s in danger, it’s you.”

  “It’s your choice,” Alaric said. “I’m sorry.”

  Once they were in the street, Sienne said, “Every one of those names was familiar except the last one.”

  “Penthea Lepporo wasn’t on the list,” Dianthe said.

  “She died thirty years ago. That might predate the Murtavitis’ marriage,” Perrin said. “I think we have definitely found our blight.”

  “Which means we need to track down Mistress Tallavena, right now,” Alaric said. “Dianthe, is Renaldi on duty tonight?”

  “Yesterday and tonight,” Dianthe said. “But there’s no guarantee he’ll know where Mistress Tallavena lives.”

  “The Havens, right?” Sienne said. “He might at least have heard of the neighborhood. It’s worth trying.”

  “Since we have never heard of it, we know where it is not,” Kalanath said. “I think the captain can help.”

  Denys Renaldi’s guard post was halfway across Fioretti from the Murtavitis’. The companions stopped to eat roasted meat and vegetables from skewers sold by a round-cheeked woman who tried and failed to joke with them. Sienne felt slightly ashamed at how the woman’s smile faltered and died when her humor didn’t get a response. Under normal circumstances, she’d have been happy to laugh at even such obvious jokes as this woman told. But the knowledge that Murtaviti was on his way to Fioretti, and that they had no idea how to stop him, kept her from feeling cheerful.

  She tossed her skewer into the basket kept for that purpose and wiped her mouth with her hand. “Thanks,” she told the woman, and let her inappropriate guilt give the woman an extra couple of centi. “What do we do if Denys is out on patrol?”

  “Wait,” Dianthe said. “He doesn’t like being approached for personal business while he’s on the street. But he’s likely to be there. Being a captain means more time in the guard post and less on patro
l. I think he likes it. I would have thought the excitement of fighting crime directly would be more interesting, but he says all the interesting stuff comes to the guard post, and walking the streets is more tedious than not.”

  Alaric muttered something. Dianthe slugged him on the arm. “Denys is not a humorless stick.”

  “Be nice,” Sienne said. “We want him to help us.”

  “I’ll be nice,” Alaric promised. “It’s not like he doesn’t know how I feel about him.”

  “I do not know why you are not friends,” Kalanath said.

  “They are. They’re just the kind of friends who enjoy tormenting each other,” Dianthe said. “Let’s go. If we’re fast enough, we might be able to speak to this Tallavena woman tonight.”

  They hurried across one of the many white bridges spanning the Vochus River, which flowed sluggishly now that the tide was in. It was the twilight hour between day and night, when few people trod the streets and the magic lights that burned night and day were beginning to be visible against the darkening sky. Sienne observed someone, probably a wizard, standing on a ladder and touching one of the glass bulbs, frosted with an invulnerability spell. What would that be like, to be employed doing nothing but maintaining the lights of Fioretti? Though maybe it wasn’t his only job. That would be so tedious.

  Denys Renaldi’s guard post was located in one of the older areas of Fioretti, where three- and four-story buildings butted up against each other, their shared walls making them appear like canyons of brown brick. The presence of the guard post, which inhabited one of these tall buildings, kept the neighborhood from sliding into the near-anarchy of some of its poorer neighbors, but men and women still loitered on the street corners, eyeing passersby as potential customers. Sienne didn’t meet their eyes. Nervy of them, to ply their trade just down the street from the guards, but she knew from things Denys had said that the guards weren’t as interested in cracking down on prostitution as they were in stopping theft and murder.