Sin Eater (Iconoclasts Book 2)

by Mike Shel

  “But by whom?” The look in Kennah’s eyes was almost pleading.

  “Fate,” said her father. “Destiny. Whatever the hell you want to call it. I hate this supernatural business every bit as much as you, son, but at some level we must acquiesce. Maybe bend is a better word, like a reed in a fast-flowing stream. Elsewise we’ll break.”

  Kennah tugged at his beard, muttering, “Madness.” But finally, his eyes closed, he nodded.

  Auric turned back to the cell. “Sir, we are asking you to join us on a quest, commissioned by the same queen who sent you and two thirds of the fleet south fifty-five years ago. The quest is to bring about the queen’s end and requires that we kill a god.”

  “Which one?” asked Qeelb, as though this was a sensible line of conversation.

  “Timilis.”

  “Oh,” said Qeelb, smiling with teeth stained by his own blood and clapping his metal-bound hands together, “That sounds like it might be fun.”

  The three of them walked back to the room from which the three dungeon corridors originated, failing to come upon Oxula or the jailer-boy along the way. Kennah called up the stone stair and Ghallo came trotting down with a key. “Oxula’s been called off on another matter, m’lords,” he said, bowing stiffly. “He asked I should let you in the last hall if you needed it.”

  “Good lad!” Agnes said with a smile, touching the boy on the end of his nose. The boy rewarded her with his own sheepish smile and led the way.

  The third hall was like the others: miserable prisoners locked in staggered cells, the way lit by fading sorcery. As they approached another turn in the prison corridor, the sounds of prayer carried down the hall. Kneeling at the door of a cell three doors down from the turn was a petite, youthful woman with mousy brown hair, clad in the pale blue robes of Belu’s priesthood. Agnes recognized the prayer, the Chant of Endurance and Faithfulness, favored by devotees of the goddess undergoing difficult times. The woman had one hand on the door, as though conducting the blessing through the rough oak. From behind Agnes came her father’s laugh. She turned to him, annoyed by his irreverence for this cleric offering comfort to one of the unfortunates here.

  “Agnes, look at the floor beneath her,” he said when he saw her angry glare.

  She turned and saw it now: the priest knelt on another Djao glyph, the one Helmacht had called Compassion. The priest halted her prayer, aware now of the presence of the three Syraeics. Her smile was big and lopsided, and her eyes lit up with recognition and joy.

  “Auric and Agnes Manteo,” exclaimed Sira Edjani. “By the blue laurels of the goddess!”

  15

  A Knife in the Dark

  When they emerged from the queen’s dungeons, blinking in the bright lights of the palace proper, Agnes’s father turned over their list to the Grand Chamberlain, noting that two of their recruits were prisoners, the third a ministering priest of the Blue Cathedral. Ulwen promised the prisoners would be released and transferred to them at the Citadel the next morning, and arrangements made with Belu’s hierarchy for Sira’s inclusion in their expedition. Of course, the clergy would be kept in the dark about the expedition’s purpose. Agnes wondered what would be safe for Sira to know and how the devout priest would react when she knew of their impious goal.

  The sun was setting behind Boudun’s stone spires when they passed the gates of the palace complex and joined the evening crowds in the city’s lamp-lit streets. The thoroughfares were teeming with traffic; late-entering travelers’ wagons from the Mouth, combined with the carts of streetside peddlers headed home for the night, made progress slow. Agnes sensed a surly miasma, invisible mists of ill will and anger, as if oozing from the pores of the pedestrians about them. She knew the League wisely kept a finger on the pulse of the populace and the politics of the queen’s court; Syraeic spies were spread across both Boudun and the empire. Before leaving for Daurhim, word around the Citadel was that the League’s informants were reporting assaults, rape, thievery, and drunkenness all on the rise. Even street brawls were more common. Something threatened to boil over in the city, and Agnes wondered if it somehow emanated from their increasingly feral monarch. She imagined the queen perched above a fresh corpse, a river of blood dripping down her chin and staining the lace of her magnificent, pearl-festooned gown. Then she saw her godmother’s grinning head sitting on a platter, winking at her.

  Agnes rubbed her eyes as though the gesture could dispel such images. How long would they haunt her before they sent her mad? She looked at her father, whose expression was strangely placid, a wink of lamplight in his eyes. “Where are we headed, Father? We have no idea where this expedition will lead us, do we?”

  “We don’t,” answered her father. “The Aerican said we would need to speak with him again, without Kennah. Perhaps he’ll enlighten us then. Otherwise we’re blind as bats.”

  “He said ‘when the big man can no longer attend.’ What’s that about? Why shouldn’t Kennah be with us when we speak to the old man again? He’s part of our expedition, after all.”

  Kennah grunted, muscling aside a cluster of well-dressed, inebriated youths arguing with a street vendor hawking aphrodisiacs. “Go and see that cryptic bastard in the morning without me,” he said, spitting on the tooled leather boot of one of the intoxicated fops. “I’d rather be working up a sweat in the practice yard in the light of day than go down into those fetid halls again anyway.”

  Agnes stepped over a fat woman passed out in the road, a liquor bottle in her hand, tongue lolling. Kennah’s hulking form was directly ahead. She gave his tunic a yank. “But you agree with our course at this point, yes, brother? Choosing Chalca and Qeelb to join us?”

  “The best outcome, in my opinion,” he answered over his shoulder, “is for both Brother Molly and that mad sorcerer to skip town the minute they can so we needn’t worry about one of them stealing our horses or opening our throats while we sleep.”

  Agnes gave his tunic another yank. “So you don’t think some greater power guides us?”

  The big man stopped and spun around, halting their progress. His brow was furrowed, and a look of fury played on his hirsute features. “Vanic’s balls, yes! Yes! I hereby submit myself to the supernatural whims tossing us about. But I feel like a goddamned leaf in a windstorm! I don’t have to like it, Agnes!”

  Agnes clapped him on his chest with an open palm. It was like slapping a deep-rooted oak. “Gods, Kennah, none of us like it! But this is the life we chose.”

  “Speak for yourself. I chose to crawl around in Busker ruins, scrounging treasure and smacking the piss out of hollow men. I never said I wanted to perform lunatic errands…” He paused, lowering his voice to a whispered hiss. “Hunting down a fucking god.”

  Agnes started a retort, but she was silenced by Kennah’s gawping mouth and arched eyebrows. Without warning he lunged at her, grabbing her by the shoulders with his meaty hands and casting her roughly aside. She spilled onto the sidewalk and into a rough-looking woman peddling colorful ribbons dangling from a pole. Her protests at Kennah’s sudden assault were muffled by the merchant’s defensive elbow connecting with her cheek as the two of them fell to the cobblestones. She made to stand, tangled in red and blue and green ribbons, the woman whose goods she now wore cursing her with a toothless mouth. Agnes managed to get to one knee and steadied herself with a hand, looking for Kennah so she could meet his eyes while showering him with profanity. But the big man was face down on the street, pinning a lanky woman in the winter hides of a highway warden beneath him.

  Agnes stood, unwinding ribbons and brushing herself off. “What the hell is wrong with you, Kennah?” she raged. “You’d lay hands on a sister because she vexed you?” The crowd kept moving, parting around the scene like a river flowing around a great rock, barely sparing them a glance. Her father was fighting to get back to them, carried off by the disinterested traffic of the street: Agnes saw alarm on his face. She
grabbed Kennah by a muscled bicep and they both grunted as she turned him over. Kennah let out a long moan, like a mournful bull—a crimson stain was spreading across the belly of his tunic. The furs of the woman beneath him were also sticky with blood, and it was then that several things jumped out at Agnes: a highway warden in the city, rather than the byways of the island, clad in hides suitable for winter at the height of summer; Kennah’s right hand on his blade, halfway out of its scabbard, and a blood-slick knife in the woman’s hand.

  Her father reached them now, going down on his knees and putting a hand to Kennah’s belly wound. The lanky woman righted herself and stumbled backwards, the hood falling off her head, revealing golden-blond hair shaved short at the sides and left long on the top, woven into braids. She had an angular face with tattoos of blue tears cascading down her cheeks. Agnes’s eyes met the woman’s and there was malice there…and something else: mirth. The woman gave her a malignant grin and shed the heavy, blood-covered hide jacket, then plunged down the street, plowing into the crowd gathering with interest now that blood had appeared. Agnes exchanged a quick look with her father. In that briefest of moments, her eyes delivered a message: I’m faster. You tend wounded Kennah, I’ll get the bitch who did this.

  The crowd parted for Agnes as she set off in pursuit, just catching sight of the woman’s golden braids bobbing ahead in the clutter of humanity. Agnes kept her rapier in its sheath, knowing that drawing it now would slow her and she’d likely end up skewering some innocent in her path. The blond-haired woman turned down another street, slamming into an apple vendor’s cart as she did. She spun off as a bushel of shiny red produce spilled out onto the paved road. Agnes sailed by the vendor’s flurry of curses, then knocked down a messenger wearing a crier’s feathered green hat. She called out an apology as her prey turned down a narrow alley.

  The lamps of the street offered little illumination in the cramped alley. A feeble glow cast hints and shadows on the rough brick of the adjacent buildings. The sounds of the crowds were muted now, and for a moment Agnes was struck by the fanciful notion of heading down a mystical tunnel to another world, like the fairy tales her mother told her when she was a girl. But that silly conceit vanished when after several twists and turns she emerged into a courtyard, where crates were stacked against the backs of buildings and bins of trash overflowed. Two men were there, sharing a pipe between them, sitting on barrels as they cast dice onto the top of another.

  Agnes glanced from left to right, seeking out the braided woman, catching her at last trying to scale a wall via its drainpipe. Agnes ran to her, drawing the rapier from its sheath, and grabbed the back of the woman’s tunic to tear her down. The woman giggled as she fell, landing like a cat and spinning around to face Agnes with her malicious smile. Her yellowed teeth were crooked, and Agnes noticed now that her eyes were crossed—a nystagmus that gave a wicked madness to her appearance. The woman pulled the knife from a pocket in her tunic. It was still wet with Kennah’s blood.

  “Drop the blade,” hissed Agnes, feeling a trembling anger welling up from inside. “I’ll run you through as soon as look at you, bitch, and you have no reach with that pig sticker.”

  The woman’s smile broadened, as though the idea of Agnes driving steel into her flesh amused her. She waved the red-hued knife before her with menace and spoke in an incongruously pleasant alto. “I’m as quick or quicker than you, pretty girl. I killed a bear and two boars in the wilds with this ‘pig sticker’ and can leave you with more than a scar to remember me by.”

  “Nalco!” cried a man’s voice behind Agnes.

  Agnes risked a quick glance over her shoulder and saw they had finally drawn the attention of the two men playing at dice. They stood by their barrels, both wearing bloody aprons with smears of the same on their hands and faces. The taller of the two, with close-cropped red stubble and a weak chin, held up a hand. “Why don’ you two jus’ put away the angry iron fer now, eh?”

  Agnes turned so that she could face the man, her back against the wall of the building the blond woman had tried to climb. She kept her blade trained on her target as she answered. “This woman stabbed a brother of the Syraeic League, citizen. I mean to turn her over to the city watch so that she can answer to Marcator.”

  “She lies, good sir!” the blond woman whimpered, her expression transformed now into a mask of fear that would earn an actor’s appreciative whistle. “She’s an agent of Timilis, come to kill me for sport!”

  Timilis? Agnes marveled, staring back at the woman whose feigned terror nearly provoked her own sympathy. No coincidence that the trickster god’s name is invoked by this would-be murderer.

  The loud squeal of a door’s unoiled hinges interrupted their exchange. Misty tendrils spilled from the opening, marking the place as a butcher shop, its back room magically chilled to preserve meat. An older man in a blood-stained apron, an enormous belly beneath it, stood there, wreathed by the sorcerous cold, wielding a meat cleaver in his brawny hand. He was a pale, sweaty man, his hair sparse, snaky strands pasted across his pate. “What’s this, then?” he barked, jowls waggling as he spoke. “Brawlin’ in my courtyard?”

  The shorter of the two men, younger than the first, a mop of unkempt black hair on his head and a whisper of a moustache, hid the pipe they had been smoking behind his back. Agnes caught a whiff of their vice: kyfe—a narcotic spice sprinkled in the tobacco, outlawed by the crown, but readily available on the streets of the city if one knew where to seek it.

  “Blondie says the one with the sword’s an assassin, devoted to Timilis, Nalco!” the dark-haired man said to the butcher in the mist-rimmed doorway “Means to kill her for a joke!”

  “Timilis?” grunted the fat man, like a curse. He brandished his cleaver, pointing it at Agnes. “Deny it, woman! I hate that fucking swindler an’ his bloody congregation, as any god-fearing Hanifaxer should!”

  “I’m a swordswoman of the Syraeic League. Agnes Manteo. This woman shoved the knife she holds now in the belly of a good man, unprovoked. Alert the city guard and let them sort it if you don’t believe me.”

  The butcher looked to the blond woman, saw the bloody weapon in her hand. His jowls quivered, framing his frown with jiggling flesh. After a pause he called out to the two other men standing there. “Boys, keep an eye on these two while I call for the watch. And lose that damned pipe, Jannep, ‘less you want t’answer to them fer what yer smokin’.” The butcher walked back inside his shop and closed the door behind him, chilly wisps wafting through the cracks between brick and wood. The two men approached Agnes and Kennah’s assailant, fists balled up as if ready for a fight.

  The blond woman’s feigned alarm vanished as they drew closer. She tilted her head to Agnes and smiled. “She’s a pretty one, ain’t she, lads? Wonder what it would be like to lie with her for a minute or two, huh?” Before Agnes could even process the woman’s words, she reached into her tunic and withdrew a vial. With lightning speed, she unstoppered it and with a swing of her hand emptied its contents at the men approaching. The stuff splashed on their faces and aprons, staining them a milky blue. The men stopped, wiping at the stuff with hands to which the liquid clung as well, a strong odor of anise in the air.

  The shorter man—the butcher Nalco had called him Jannep—started tugging at his crotch through his apron. The taller went slack jawed, rubbing at his chest. “I think she got some big milkers hidden ‘neath that shirt there, Jannep,” he slurred. “Would’n mind stickin’ my wick b’tween ‘em.”

  “Yeah,” replied the black-haired man, a stupid grin on his face as he massaged his manhood through the fabric.

  Agnes felt lightheaded. Whatever concoction the braided woman had splashed on these two, it carried an enchantment. She glanced at the woman, who smiled back at her with sinister glee. “The great god Timilis says hello, Agnes Manteo,” said the woman. “I trust you are no virgin, else this will be harder for you.”

 
Agnes turned her blade to the approaching men, faces alive with stupid lust and violence. “Come no closer, citizens!” she shouted, knowing as she spoke the words, they were futile. “You’re under a spell! Get hold of yourselves before I’m forced to—”

  “I’d rather get hold o’ you and them dugs, sister,” said the tall man, reaching out, hands trembling with anticipation. “I bet that hole o’ yours is real tight, too.”

  “Dugs,” echoed Jannep, starting to work his erection in earnest.

  Agnes grimaced and swept her blade upward in an angry arc, catching the tall man’s extended fingers with its wicked edge. Two digits fell to the ground as he yanked back his hand, howling in pain and surprise. Jannep seemed not to notice his companion’s agony, blood from his maimed hand now staining the apron. Jannep leapt forward, grabbing at Agnes’s chest and throat. Though short, he was still taller than Agnes and a solid man—the force of his bulk slammed her back against the wall. Stars danced before her eyes as her head struck brick. He began groping at her breasts and pressing his erection into her, too impatient with lust to pull it from his trousers.

  Agnes tried to bring the hilt of her rapier down on the man’s head, but with her bicep pinned against the wall by the man’s weight she couldn’t muster the force she needed. She cursed his superior strength, the insistent banging of his swollen member into her belly, his stinking breath in her face. It was the sound of the blond woman’s maddening laughter that summoned her own strength: Agnes managed to unpin her left hand and banged a balled-up fist against black-hair’s head twice before reaching for her sheathed dagger. She drew it out and pressed its edge into his crotch between animal thrusts. His rutting assault stopped for a moment.