Dorian’s stomach turned. So they knew. Of course they knew. Dorian’s seed class had been taught flaying on a disrespectful concubine. Dorian, as the first of the class, had been assigned her face. He remembered his pride as he had presented it to his tutor Neph Dada whole, even the eyelids and eyelashes intact. The ten-year-old Dorian had worn that face to dinner as a mask, making japes with his seed class while Neph smiled encouragement. God help him, he had done even worse things.
What was he doing here? This place was sick. How could a people tolerate this? How could they worship a goddess that delighted in suffering? Dorian sometimes believed that countries had the kind of leaders they deserved. What did that say about Khalidor—with its tribalism and endemic corruption held in check only by its deep fear of the men who styled themselves Godkings? What did it say about Dorian? This was his people, his country, his culture—and once, his birthright. He, Dorian Ursuul, had survived. He’d demolished his seed class one at a time, pitting brother against brother until only he survived. He’d accomplished his uurdthan, his Harrowing, and shown himself worthy to be called the Godking’s son and heir. This, all of this, could have been his—and he didn’t miss it for a second.
He loved many things about Khalidor: the music, the dances, the hospitality of its poor, its men who laughed or cried freely, and its women who would wail and keen over their dead where southrons stood silent like they didn’t care. Dorian loved their zoomorphic art, the wild woad tattoos of the lowland tribes, the cool blue-eyed maidens with their milk-white skin and fierce tempers. He loved a hundred things about his people, but sometimes he wondered if the world wouldn’t be a better place if the sea swept in and drowned them all.
As sacrifices for abundant livestock, how many of those blue-eyed girls had laid their mewling firstborn sons on Khali pyres? For abundant crops, how many of those expressive men had caged their aged fathers in wicker coffins and watched them drown slowly in bogs? They wept as they did murder—but they did it. For honor, when a man died, if his wife wasn’t claimed by the clan chief, she was expected to throw herself on her husband’s pyre. Dorian had seen a girl fourteen years old whose courage failed her. She’d been married less than a month to an old man she’d never met before her wedding. Her father beat her bloody and threw her on the pyre himself, cursing her for embarrassing him.
“Hey,” Hopper said, “you’re thinking. Don’t. It’s no good here. You work hard, you don’t have to think. Got it?” Halfman nodded. “Then let’s strap this on and you can work.”
Together, they strapped the wicker basket to Halfman’s back. There were thongs that wrapped around each shoulder and his hips to help him bear the great weight of the clay pot full of sewage. Hopper promised to have another pot ready by the time Halfman got back.
Halfman trudged through the cold basalt hallways. It was always dark in the slaves’ passages, with only enough torches burning so the slaves could avoid colliding.
“I’m tired of banging toothless slaves,” a voice said around the next intersection of hallways. “I hear the new girl’s in the Tygre Tower. They say she’s beautiful.”
“Tavi! You can’t call it that.” Bertold Ursuul was Dorian’s great-grandfather, and the man had gone mad, believing he could ascend to heaven if he built a tower high enough and decorated it solely with Harani sword-tooth tygres. His madness embarrassed Garoth Ursuul, so he’d forbidden the tower to be called anything but Bertold’s Tower.
Dorian stopped. There was a torch at the intersection and no way he could retreat without being noticed. The aethelings—for no one else spoke with such arrogance—were coming toward him. There was no escape.
Then he remembered. He was Halfman now, a eunuch slave. So he slouched and prayed that he was invisible.
“I talk how I please,” Tavi said, coming into the intersection just as Halfman did. Halfman stopped, stepped aside, and averted his eyes. Tavi was a classic aetheling: good-looking if with a hawkish nose, well-groomed, well-dressed, an aura of command, and the stench of great power, despite being barely fifteen years old. Halfman couldn’t help but size him up instantly—this one would be the first of his seed class. This would have been one Dorian would have tried to kill early. Too arrogant, though. Tavi was the kind who needed to brag. He would never make it through his uurdthan. “And I can fuck who I please, too,” Tavi said, coming to a stop. He looked down each of the halls as if lost. His indecision froze Halfman in place. He couldn’t move without possibly moving into the aethelings’ path.
“Besides,” Tavi said, “the harems are too closely guarded. But the Tygre Tower’s just got two dreads at the bottom, and her deaf-mute eunuchs.”
“He’ll kill you,” the other aetheling said. He didn’t look pleased to be having this conversation in front of Halfman.
“Who’s gonna tell him? The girl? So he’ll kill her, too? Fuck! Where are we? We’ve been walking this way for ten minutes. All these halls look the same.”
“I said we should have gone the other—” the other aetheling began.
“Shut up, Rivik. You,” Tavi said, speaking to Halfman. Halfman flinched as a slave would. “Khali, you stink! Which way is it to the kitchens?”
Halfman reluctantly pointed back the way the aethelings had come.
Rivik laughed. Tavi cursed. “How far?” Tavi asked.
Halfman would have found some other way to answer, but Dorian couldn’t help himself. “About ten minutes.”
Rivik laughed again, louder.
Tavi backhanded Dorian. “What’s your name, halfman?”
“Milord, this slave is called Halfman.”
“Ooh hoo!” Rivik hooted. “We got a live one here!”
“Not for long,” Tavi said.
“If you kill him, I’ll tell,” Rivik said.
“You’ll tell?” The disdain and disbelief on Tavi’s face told Halfman that Rivik’s days as a sidekick were numbered.
“He made me laugh,” Rivik said. “Come on. We’re already late for lecture, you know how Draef will try to turn that on us.”
“Fine, just a second.” The vir rose to Tavi’s skin and he began chanting.
“Tavi . . .”
“It won’t kill him.”
The magic was a slight concussion inches from Halfman’s chest. It threw him back into the wall like a rag doll. The wicker splintered and the clay pot shattered, geysering human waste over Halfman and the wall behind him.
Rivik laughed louder. “We’ve gotta remember this next time we’re bored. Khali’s tits, it reeks! Imagine if we could break one of those pots in Draef’s room.”
The aethelings left Halfman gasping on the floor, wiping ooze from his face. It was five minutes before he stood up, but when he did, it was with alacrity. In the fear and in the miming of fear, he had almost missed it. The newest concubine could only be one woman. His future wife was at the top of Bertold’s Tower, and she was in danger.
9
The pit wyrm tore through the hole in reality and went for Kylar. The great wyrm was tubular, at least ten feet in diameter, its skin cracked and blackened, fire showing through the gaps. When it lunged, its great bulk heaved forward and its entire eyeless front opened as it vomited its cone-like mouth. Kylar leapt as each concentric ring snapped out. Each ring was circled with teeth, and when the third ring caught a tree, teeth the size of Kylar’s forearm whipped around into the wood. The pit wyrm sucked itself forward, its lamprey-like mouth inverting as the rings bit into the wood in turn, shearing a ten-foot section out of the tree trunk before Kylar landed.
Instantly, the pit wyrm lunged again. It had no visible means of propelling so great a mass. It didn’t gather itself to strike like a serpent, but moved instead as if this were but one head or arm attached to a much larger creature crouched on the other side of that hole. Again, it went for Kylar.
He flipped through the air as the tree the pit wyrm had cut fell, crashing to the ground, throwing up dust in the misty morning light. Kylar grabbed a tree and spu
n, the ka’kari giving him claws enough to sink into the bark and throw him back over the pit wyrm’s back. His sword flashed as he flew over the pit wyrm, but the blade bounced off the armored skin.
There was something white in the corner of Kylar’s eye. He dropped to the forest floor and saw it: a tiny white homunculus with wings and the Vürdmeister’s face, grinning at Kylar under an enormous nose. It clawed at Kylar’s face.
Kylar blocked. The homunculus’s talons sank smoothly into Kylar’s sword.
The pit wyrm lunged again even as Feir hammered its side, his sword ringing in the mists but doing no damage, not even slowing the wyrm. The pit wyrm couldn’t be distracted, wouldn’t stop until it reached its target.
Its target wasn’t Kylar. It was the homunculus.
Kylar dropped the sword and flipped once more. He landed on the side of a tree, thirty feet up, fingers and toes sinking into the wood. The pit wyrm slammed into Kylar’s sword on the ground, the cone of teeth slapping around the homunculus, digging deep into the soil as each ring of teeth slapped forward, devouring the white creature and everything around it. The pit wyrm pulled back, shaking dirt and roots and dead leaves through the air. Satisfied, it began to slide back into whatever hell it had been called from.
Then it shivered.
Feir was still striking the creature. For some reason, he wasn’t using magic. The mountainous mage struck again, a mighty hammer blow—with no effect.
By the time Kylar’s eyes found the real reason the pit wyrm had shivered, Lantano Garuwashi was halfway through its body. He was hacking at it near the hole in reality. But he wasn’t hacking. Wherever Garuwashi cut with Ceur’caelestos, the pit wyrm’s flesh sprang apart, smoking. The look on the sa’ceurai’s face told Kylar that the man was enrapt—he was the world’s best swordsman, wielding the world’s best sword, facing a monster out of legend. Lantano Garuwashi was living his purpose.
Garuwashi’s sword moved with Garuwashi’s speed. In two seconds, he had cut through the entire pit wyrm. The thirty-foot section of wyrm crashed to the forest floor, thrashed once, and then broke apart in quivering red and black clumps, dissolving in putrid green smoke until nothing was left. The stump writhed bloodlessly until Garuwashi slashed it with six slices in blinding succession and whatever was controlling it yanked it back into hell.
Kylar sprang off the tree and landed ten paces from Lantano Garuwashi. Having never fought a pit wyrm, the sa’ceurai couldn’t have known that they didn’t just appear; they had to be called. He let down his guard.
The big-nosed Vürdmeister acted before Kylar could, stepping out from behind a tree and unleashing a ball of green flame. Garuwashi brought Ceur’caelestos up, but he wasn’t prepared for what happened when that sword came into contact with that magic.
When Ceur’caelestos met the vir, a dull thump shook the gold needles off the tamaracks. The morning mists blew outward in a visible globe, the moss shriveled and smoked on the trees, and the concussion blasted Feir and Garuwashi and the Vürdmeister from their feet.
Only Kylar was still standing, shielded from the magical explosion by the ka’kari covering his skin. The men fell in all directions, but Ceur’caelestos stayed in the center of its own storm. It spun once in the air and stuck in the forest floor.
Kylar swept Ceur’caelestos into his hand. The fallen Vürdmeister didn’t try to stand. He gathered power, the vir on his arms wriggling in slow motion, their undulations becoming a movement that Kylar could strangely read—the magic would be a gout of flame three feet wide and fifteen feet long.
Before the Vürdmeister could release the flame, Kylar ran him through.
The Vürdmeister’s cool blue eyes widened in pain, and then widened again in sheer terror as every inky rose-thorn tracing of vir in his entire body filled with white light. Light exploded from his skin. The Vürdmeister’s body bucked and thrashed, then went limp. The vir was gone without a trace, leaving the dead man’s skin the normal pasty hue of a northerner. Even the air felt clean.
In the distance, to the northeast, a Lae’knaught trumpet blasted the command to charge. It was far away—within the Dark Hunter’s Wood.
“The bloody fools,” Kylar murmured. He’d lured them in, but it was still hard to believe they’d fallen for it. He looked at Curoch. The things I do for my king.
~You’re not really going to throw it away, are you?~
I gave my word.
~You have the Talent and the lifetimes it would take to become that sword’s master.~
I can’t exactly go out in public with a black metal hand, can I?
~Wear gloves.~
“We need to leave—right now,” Feir Cousat said. “Using magic this close to the wood is like begging the Dark Hunter to come. And there’s some kind of magic beacon on the Vürdmeister’s horse. I chased it away, but it’s probably too late.”
So that was why Feir hadn’t used magic in fighting against the pit wyrm. Smart.
“You have taken my ceuros,” Lantano Garuwashi said with a moral outrage that Kylar didn’t understand. Then he remembered. A sa’ceurai’s soul was his sword. They believed that literally. What sort of abomination would steal another man’s soul?
“Did you not take it from someone else?” Kylar asked.
“The gods gave me the blade,” Lantano Garuwashi said. He was quivering with rage and loathing, despair fighting to the fore in his eyes. “Your theft is not honorable.”
“No,” Kylar admitted. “Nor, I’m afraid, am I.”
A plaintive howl unlike anything Kylar had ever heard ripped through the wood. It was high and mournful, inhuman.
“Too late,” Feir said, his voice strangled. “The Hunter’s coming.”
The Wolf had told Kylar to stay back forty paces from the Hunter’s Wood, so Kylar gave it fifty. He looked through the lesser trees of the natural forest to the preternatural height and bulk of the sequoys. He felt small, caught up in events vast beyond his comprehension. He heard the whistling of something speeding toward him. He hefted Curoch and threw it as far into the Wood as he could. It flew like an arrow. As it crossed into the air over the wood, it burned like a star falling to earth.
The entire forest began to glow golden.
The whistling stopped.
10
The three men stood side by side, staring into the wood. Feir thought that he was the only one who was properly terrified. Kylar had distracted the Hunter by throwing Curoch into the wood, but there was nothing to stop it from coming back.
Kylar calmly folded his legs and sat on the forest floor. The black skin retreated into the young man, leaving him in his underclothes. He studied the stump where his metallic right hand had been, barely noticing as the Wood’s autumnal glow deepened to a bloody red and then began to lighten to green.
Lantano Garuwashi, now soulless, stared with disbelief. But he wasn’t seeing anything except the disappearance of Ceur’caelestos. The man who would be king was suddenly aceuran—swordless, an outlaw, an exile, not even to be acknowledged. The cruel rain of implications was beating his future to dust.
In the last week, Feir had seen this man act publicly as if Ceur’caelestos had been destined for his hands. But in private moments, Feir had seen glimpses of the young hedge sa’ceurai with an iron sword, who knew that whatever excellence he attained, he would never be accepted among those born to greater blades. It was an enormous turnaround for a man who’d reconciled himself to hard realities—and now he was staring a new, much harder reality in the face.
Feir wondered how long it would be before Garuwashi decided to kill himself. Lantano Garuwashi wasn’t a man who would easily give up his life. He believed in himself too much. But this disgrace would surely overwhelm that.
The thought left Feir oddly hollow. Why should he mourn Lantano Garuwashi’s death? It would mean Cenaria would escape another brutal occupation and Feir would be released from his service to a hard and difficult man. But Feir didn’t want Garuwashi to die. He respected him. r />
Magic flashed so intensely Feir’s vision went white. It lasted only a fraction of a second. Kylar gasped.
Blinking away tears, Feir looked at him. Kylar appeared unchanged: still half-naked, still staring toward the wood. He stood slowly and stretched his arms.
“Much better,” Kylar said, grinning.
He had both arms. He was whole. Kylar shook himself and his skin was cloaked in black again. He didn’t cover his face with the grim mask of judgment; this time, he carried a slim black sword in his hand.
Lantano Garuwashi dropped to his knees and spoke to Feir, “‘This path lies before you. Fight Khalidor and become a great king.’ This you told me, and I heard only my heart’s desire: that I would show those effete nobles in Aenu what their mocking was good for, that I would be Ceura’s king. I did not fight Khalidor, and now my ceuros is lost. Thus has Lantano Garuwashi reaped death for faithlessness.” He turned. “Night Angel, will you be my second?”
A brief look of confusion passed over Kylar, then his eyes showed recognition. After Garuwashi made a lateral cut through his own stomach with a short sword, his second would strike his head from his shoulders to finish the suicide. It was an honor, if a grisly one, and Feir couldn’t help but feel slighted.
“Feir, nephilim, messenger from the gods whom I ignored, I would have you serve another way,” Garuwashi said. “Please, carry my story to my warriors and to my family.”