by Mike Shel
“That’s a dagger against your nuts, shit-wit!” she spat. “Back away or I’ll geld you where you stand!”
The man let out a long, heavy breath, kneaded her right breast and gave another experimental thrust of his groin. Agnes drew the blade across the front of his apron and trousers, feeling it part the rough woven fabric. He froze and let out a whimper.
“It’ll be worth it,” sang the blond-haired woman, a malevolent songbird. “That cunt will feel like Belu’s Blue Heaven when you’ve sunk your shaft in it, lad.”
Jannep paused, staring into Agnes’s eyes without any sign that he recognized her as a human being, as though the blond woman’s suggestion was that he mount a life-sized doll. His weight still pinned Agnes against the rough brick of the alley courtyard wall, and she felt the manic pounding of his heart. “Worth it,” he grunted, and moved the hand that clasped her breast to her throat, closing it tightly there as he pressed his erection into her blade. Agnes’s breath was cut off; she tried to cry out, but couldn’t. A terrible claustrophobic terror threatened to envelope her as the ensorcelled man’s fingers started to constrict her windpipe, a sort of paralysis locking her muscles for an endless moment. Her lungs fought for air, she saw stars again—consciousness was slipping away. The ensuing darkness brought on another burst of adrenaline. Gritting her teeth, she dragged the sharpened steel of her dagger across the man’s crotch, felt it bite deep into flesh. He let out a piercing scream directly into her ear, but improbably, he continued to rut against her, each thrust growing weaker. Warm blood washed over Agnes’s hand as at last she severed his penis from his body. He staggered back then, staring dumbly at the pulsing blood soaking his apron and trousers, filling his shoes. He fell to the ground squirming, pathetic, crying like a little boy now. In a short while he was silent and still.
Agnes gasped for air, bracing herself now against the wall. The tall, red-haired man sat on the ground, rocking back and forth, cradling his ruined hand in a bloody apron like a broken toy. Her rage returned and she scanned the courtyard, seeking out Kennah’s assailant amongst the crates and rubbish bins. But the braided woman was nowhere to be found.
The city guard contingent consisted of two men of slovenly appearance and a younger woman who stood in stark contrast to her peers: not a hair was out of place and her equipment was immaculately maintained. Perhaps she felt she had to work harder, given her girlish appearance. While Agnes waited for them to arrive, fat and sweaty Nalco giving her hostile glances as he tended to the wounded red-haired man, she feared how her story might be greeted. Two butcher’s apprentices, with no past run-ins with the law, forcing themselves on an armed woman of the Syraeic League? Preposterous! But instead of disbelief, the three city guards exchanged sour expressions and began searching the grounds, eventually locating the discarded vial whose contents the blond woman had splashed on Agnes’s attackers.
A priest of Belu arrived just after the watch, summoned from a nearby shrine. The tall man’s bleeding had stopped, and Agnes watched with a grimace as the priest pocketed the severed fingertips before leading him out of the courtyard, presumably to that shrine where he might provide greater aid. The young guardswoman, whose burnished breastplate with rearing griffin reflected the lamps now lit in the courtyard, took Agnes’s bloody hand. It was then Agnes realized she was trembling. This was different from the shaking thrill that followed a confrontation of uncertain outcome. It was different, though it wasn’t the first time her life had been threatened, not even the tenth. She had prevailed many times before in circumstances equally dire. But this was different. This was fucking different.
“We’ve seen this half a dozen times in the past week,” said the young guardswoman, her voice a girlish soprano. “Sexual assaults, and this.” She held the vial up so that Agnes could see the symbol etched into its base: a wheel with eight curving spokes radiating from its central hub, the spokes poking through the outer circle like the blades of sacrificial knives.
“Timilis,” said Agnes.
“Aye,” said one of the guardsmen, whose malodorous breath matched his sloppy appearance. “Fuckin’ Timilis. We’ve seen the same behind at least four murders, an’ a few thefts, and vandal’s work as well.”
“Gods be good! Has the guard confronted the church?” Agnes asked, brow knitting with worry and anger.
“O’ course,” answered the other guardsman with a big square-toothed sneer. “They says they can’t answer fer each and every fanatic, but they’ll be sure to let us know if they finds anything out. Happy t’be helpful, they says.” He punctuated his statement by hawking a gob of phlegm onto the ground.
“It’s like it’s all falling apart,” said the guardswoman in a distant whisper.
“Don’ be so dramatic, Maggie!” barked Square-Tooth, sparing Agnes a glance. “We’ve had unrest bubblin’ in the streets b’fore you came on board, and they quieted themselves down eventually. We just need to bust a few heads.”
Bad Breath shook his head. “With the cult o’ a great god in the mix? Light some pale candles for Saint Yubec when I get off duty, I will. We need some divine in’ervention if you ask me. This feels…diff’rent.”
Different. Agnes held her trembling hands to her side, willing them to stop. The bloody courtyard seemed like a bad dream, but she still felt a phantom echo of Jannep’s erection pressed against her belly, thrusting. She had been accosted by some Syraeic brothers in the past, but none who persisted after a firm rebuke or, if necessary, a broken nose. Had she thought herself immune to this sort of assault? Thinking of the butcher’s superior strength, despite all her training, threatened to bring tears to her eyes. She needed to get out of that accursed courtyard. Its grimy brick walls seemed to close in on her, menacing.
Agnes asked the city guard if she could leave for the Citadel. Square-Tooth nodded and waved her off, as though she were only one of many witnesses to a common tavern brawl. With a hand firmly gripping her rapier’s hilt, she walked back up the narrow, poorly lit alley. She navigated its twists and turns until at last she was again on the cobblestone street. She looked left and right, wary for the tell-tale blond braids of Kennah’s attacker in the crowd, waiting for a chance to pounce on her again. Agnes held out her hand, saw it trembling still, and sticky with a man’s lifeblood. She retrieved the cloth she used to clean her blades and tried to wipe the gore from her flesh, but most of it had dried. She had the irrational thought that she was stained now forever by this blood, felt an urge to head for a sin eater hovel. It was then she became aware of the blood soaking the belly of her shirt. Agnes looked around her, wondering why none among the pedestrians of Boudun seemed to notice the signs of carnage marking her. But marking her as what? A victim, she thought, and she braced herself against a building as she gagged, her stomach heaving.
No face in the milling crowd registered alarm at Agnes’s plain distress or blood-painted figure. Instead, she sensed a wordless, stupid malice—surly glances, odious sneers, a nasty soup of hatred bubbling in a cauldron left too long on the fire, ready to boil over into open violence. Were her eyes and emotions playing tricks on her, stoking paranoia? Less than thirty minutes before, she had cut off a man’s fingers and killed another in a most gruesome fashion, and now here she was, swimming back through the crowd to the Citadel, her sword hand and clothing defiled with human blood, and a sea of evil about her.
Agnes considered that this might very well be what it felt like to go mad.
16
Conversations
It was a trio of burly priests of Velcan who came to Kennah’s rescue. The three were returning to their temple after a day of blessing the forges of artisans and armorers in the Metalworkers’ District. They wore their singed vestment aprons, muscular forearms and faces black with soot, sacramental hammers slung over their shoulders. Auric kept pressure on Kennah’s bleeding gut while the soot-stained trio carried the wounded Syraeic to a roadside shrine of Belu four block
s away.
A moon-faced, sandy-haired cleric of indeterminate age was burning fragrant incense before a worn and antique effigy of the great goddess festooned with fresh laurel leaves. He gave Kennah all his attention when they arrived, the serene expression on his face never wavering, even when the Syraeic’s terrible wound was revealed. Auric found that serenity unnerving but said nothing. Sira Edjani had a similar quality about her, of almost unshakable calm, but somehow this man’s demeanor didn’t foster the same reassurance: Auric imagined the man sitting peacefully in the middle of his burning kitchen in Daurhim, unworried as the blaze consumed all. The priests of Velcan stood by awkwardly, fiddling with their hammers or staring at their feet, until Auric thanked them with a small tithe to their forge-temple. Thus released, they nodded affably and were on their way.
Auric stayed beside Kennah as the moon-faced priest laid hands on the grievous wound and called down divine healing. When at last the bearded man’s eyes fluttered open, he stuttered a single word.
“P-peregrine.”
“Set off,” Auric responded, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder, “in pursuit of your attacker.”
“Not me,” he said weakly.
“Sorry?”
“Not…me. The knife…meant for Agnes.”
Auric felt a catch in his throat. “You’re certain?” But the man was unconscious again.
“Let him rest now, sir,” said the placid priest, smiling softly, fingers stained with Kennah’s blood interlocked over the belly of his soft blue vestment. “The wound was deep; it’s best if our bearded friend stays abed for at least a few days. My brethren and I will keep a vigil here, imploring the Blue Mother’s continued mercy.”
Auric nodded and stood, reaching in his purse for a few coins as an offering. The smiling cleric pocketed the gold without a word. “If not me, someone from the League will be by tomorrow to check on him and provide any necessary assistance. You believe he’ll live?”
“Only Belu knows our fates, but I think this man will survive his injury. You can do no more. Unless you wish to stay here with me and pray for our wounded brother.”
“I’ll leave that to you, Father,” Auric answered, corralling a strangely impious retort that tickled at the back of his mind. “I’ll be away then, to the Citadel.” The priest said no more, standing there with sublime countenance as though posing for a saint’s portrait. An image of that burning kitchen conjured itself again, now with the fiery beast he drove off grinning. Auric turned back up the street from where they had come, thinking he would try to track Agnes’s pursuit of the would-be assassin. He had gone a block before he noticed his right hand stretched across his body, resting on the hilt of his Djao blade, as if for comfort. At first, he resisted the urge to draw Szaa’da’shaela—it seemed silly and pointless.
But then he remembered the same impulse to draw the weapon in his burning manor home. He halted, pressing up against the brick of a tavern so as not to impede the evening traffic. He let his fingers curl around the exotic hilt’s grip, closed his hand tight on the ancient metal. Then he drew six inches of the blade from its scabbard, the polished gray steel catching the flickering light of a nearby lamppost, a sparkle from the etched Djao script. Warmth flowed up Auric’s arm from the weapon, as though he’d submerged it in a bath. The sensation was intimate, soothing. Of the passersby, most ignored him, absorbed in their own affairs. But a man about his own age, with an oily complexion and long, stringy blond hair going a dirty gray, noted his gesture and froze. He looked warily at Auric, slipping a hand into his own cloak, no doubt reaching for a weapon. Auric froze now too, not returning the blade to its scabbard, but drawing it no further.
“I mean no harm, friend,” he said to the wary stranger in a low voice, as though the two stood face to face in a private room, the milling crowd about them absent. “The blade isn’t meant for you or any other soul here.”
The man licked his lips, right hand still hidden in his cloak, then nodded slowly and faded away into the flow of humanity headed north along the thoroughfare, an eye locked on Auric until he disappeared.
You feel it loose in the city tonight as well, don’t you?
It was Szaa’da’shaela, speaking to him, somehow clearer and more certain than the other sounds in the street.
“A nameless malice,” he answered aloud.
One might give it a name.
“Timilis,” he whispered.
He is but one of the Besh’oul, but that name will do for now.
“Besh’oul? I don’t know that word.”
There are few who do. They are your true enemy, Auric Manteo. It is the Besh’oul who pull at strings and orchestrate your suffering.
“Agnes—”
Is unhurt. She will be at the Citadel soon after you return there yourself. Both of you must speak again, with the Ush’oul in the cell. You will walk him out of that prison, and he will tell you where you must go.
“Walk him out—”
Without question or hindrance.
“Simple as that?”
Ask the boy. He will oblige your request.
“And where will the Aerican tell us to go? Why didn’t he want to speak with us when Kennah was present? Will Kennah live?”
But the sword said no more. And it was then that Auric became very aware that he was a man with graying hair, his weapon half-drawn from its sheath, standing alone in front of an alehouse, speaking to himself.
Like the mad do, he thought.
Pallas Rae was in her private quarters, ailing again, but she admitted Auric for an audience when he returned to the Citadel. He recounted to her all that had transpired, save the conversation he had had with Szaa’da’shaela. He wasn’t ready to announce that development just yet. As he finished his telling, Agnes was admitted to the lictor’s room by a wide-eyed novice girl, clearly in awe of his daughter. Auric stood from the chair at Rae’s bedside and embraced Agnes.
“Thank all the good gods you’re unharmed,” he said as he let her go, noting a stiffness in her. Then he saw the look on her face, anxiety tinged with anger, making him doubt his assessment. She seemed ready to burst into tears, or worse. “What happened, Agnes?”
“The woman got away,” she said, clearing a catch in her throat. “I had her cornered, but she used some sort of charm on two men nearby. They…attacked me.”
It was then Auric noticed the copious dried blood. Had he been blind before?
She saw his alarm and shook her head. “I wasn’t injured. But I killed one of them and maimed the other. It was Timilis. The woman…she was an agent of the god.”
Auric’s jaw clenched and a rage filled his chest. He took a moment to master the feeling, staring at the flagstones of the chamber.
“How do you know she served the god?” croaked Rae.
“She said as much. Said my name, in fact. Knew it. The vial that contained her potion had the god’s eight-spoked wheel etched in it. Is Kennah dead?”
“He lives,” answered Auric, still feeling the fury. His eyes lighted on the basin atop Pallas Rae’s chest of drawers, and from it he retrieved a moistened cloth. He walked over to Agnes and began cleaning the blood from her hand with gentle, methodical attention. “We have to go back to the Aerican and speak with him.”
“But Kennah…”
“They’re tending him at a crossroads shrine. He needs rest. The old man said we should come back when the big man can’t attend. I’d say this qualifies as ‘unable to attend.’”
Agnes grimaced and gave a curt nod.
“It is galling, is it not?” croaked Rae in her hoarse, weakened voice. “Batted about so by these mystical matters?”
“Like a cat’s ball of yarn,” Agnes answered. Auric looked up from his work to his daughter’s face, struck by the aptness of her phrase. There was worry there, a shaky nervousness in her that he recognized, and it fr
ightened him. It reminded him of his own malady, seemingly cured in miraculous fashion this past year by possession of Szaa’da’shaela. The thought to place the blade in her hand crossed his mind. Would it calm her, provide the solace he had received?
“The powers that manipulate you seem as capricious as cats, I agree,” said Rae. “But it appears this will be part of the burden that must be borne for our…task.”
Task, thought Auric. To hunt down a great god and slay him. Task did not feel an adequate word for what he and his only surviving child had been asked to do. He held Agnes’s newly cleaned hand in his, gave it a squeeze. There were tears in the corners of her dark brown eyes that she quickly winked away.
The two of them returned to the dungeons beneath the palace in a silence pregnant with unspoken thoughts. As they walked there, Auric found himself thinking for the first time of the other burden placed upon his daughter: whatever secret it was that must be kept from him. Rae had been right, of course. He had foregone the ladder of leadership, which meant he would not be privy to the League’s deepest confidences, nor the reasons for those secrets. But why should Rae give Agnes the responsibility of making the decision to keep him in the dark about…whatever it was? The lictor wasn’t a cruel woman; there had to be some compelling reason for giving his daughter this duty. It weighed on the poor girl, he was certain of that now. His anger grew as they walked, goaded by this sense of being led about by the nose, by unseen entities. Auric concluded that this was the way a chess piece must feel.
They were allowed back into the dungeons without challenge. The jailer boy, Ghallo, led them down to the old Aerican’s cell again, still in awe of both him and Agnes, looking back at them now and again as they walked the dank corridors of the prison. When they reached the iron-bound oak, still adorned with the ute sigil, the lad switched his lantern from one hand to the other and rapped on the wood.
