After another stretch, the trio left the streets and pushed into the black warren that was Punt. It greeted them with its reek, dark laughter, and sudden cries.
“You have friends down here?” Tylar asked Rogger.
“Aye . . . as well as anyone could have friends in Punt.”
Delia slunk closer to them. Dressed in her finery, she was as out of place as a diamond in a sow’s ear. Throughout their long flight, he had tried to get her to flee, to head back to Summer Mount.
Her answer was always the same: “I have nothing back there. All I cherish is tied to you.”
He hadn’t pushed too hard. He had a thousand questions he wanted answered, and she seemed to know more than she let on.
But the handmaiden wasn’t the only one with secrets.
Tylar watched as Rogger led the way now, heading toward whatever low friends he knew down here. He remembered the thief’s shout as his sword hand was pulped under the hammer, repeating words supposedly spoken by himself in ancient Littick.
Agee wan clyy . . . nee wan dred ghawl.
Break the bone . . . and free the dark spirit.
After what happened, the truth of those words could not be denied. There was clearly more to this bearded thief than lice and larceny.
Rogger wended down byways and crawl throughs. Here the walls ran thick with black mold, and the buildings tilted drunkenly. Windows, when not broken, were shuttered tight against the night. The trio had to fight through piles of refuse, chasing rats and dire vermin from underfoot. The air reeked of fetid humours, blood and bile of every ilk.
As they marched, Delia paled even further. With her black-daubed lips and dark hazel eyes, she looked like some risen ghoul, fresh from the grave. Her dress was soiled and clung heavily to her. She had long shed her lace cap, revealing black hair, lanky and loose to her shoulders.
Occasionally some scabber would spy at them from afar, but Tylar kept his sword in plain sight. None could mistake the weapon . . . nor the stripes on his face.
Let them think me a knight if it will hold the worst at bay.
But Tylar suspected there was a clearer reason they passed the narrows unmolested. The underfolk had an uncanny ability to pass information from one mouth to another. The creatures of Punt knew a godslayer walked their streets and stayed away.
Delia spoke at his side, her voice soft and concerned. “Are you hurt?”
Tylar glanced to her as he walked, the confusion plain on his face. Was she asking if there were any repercussions from his torture?
“You’re limping,” she said, nodding to his gait. “And hunched oddly.”
Tylar straightened. Distracted, he hadn’t even noticed himself falling into old patterns, moving as if his body were still broken. He continued onward, forcing himself to walk more evenly.
Rogger cocked an eyebrow at him. “Your bones may be healed, but I ’spect it’ll take a bit longer for your mind to catch up.”
Tylar scowled and waved him onward.
At last, Rogger ducked along a dark alleyway and marched up to a low door made of rusted iron. “Here we are.” He knocked.
A small window opened, enough to peer through.
“Show yourself,” a dark figure spat at them.
Rogger turned, lifted the edge of his pilfered cloak, and bared his naked arse to the doorman.
Delia covered her mouth at such a rude introduction.
Rogger, still bent over, noted her response. “Have to prove I’m a thief.”
Tylar recalled the sigil branded on the man’s buttock. A sliding bolt scraped, and the door swung open on oiled hinges.
“What is this place?” Tylar asked.
“Guildhouse of the Black Flag,” Rogger answered, straightening and covering himself.
“Black Flaggers?” Delia lowered her hand. “Scuttlers and pirates? These are your friends?”
Rogger shrugged. “Now’s not the time to be choosy, my dear. We need a way off this island.”
Tylar couldn’t argue with that.
“Besides, I’m owed a favor here.”
“A favor?” Tylar asked.
Rogger waved a hand. “From another life, ser knight . . . one life among many.” He glanced significantly at Tylar. “Truly, who lives only one life?”
Tylar motioned with his sword. “Let’s get this done.”
Rogger climbed down a narrow passage, surprisingly clean. Tiny braziers blazed merrily at corners, scented with thyme and honeythistle to drive away the worst of Punt’s odors.
After crossing several side passages, the main chamber opened at the end of the corridor. A pair of men, faces blackened by ash, flanked the entry. They dwarfed Bargo and Yorga, clearly loam-giants, young men blessed in the Grace of loam. They leaned on heavy axes, looking bored, but Tylar knew how swiftly such giants could move.
Rogger nodded to them, good-naturedly. They followed his passage as if he were a scrabbling ant.
The same could not be said for the room’s lone occupant. A voice boomed from beyond a desk. “Rogger! I can’t believe it!”
A tall figure rose, dressed in a fine cut of black leather, from boots to cap. The man’s face was ash blackened, a custom among the Flaggers, making them harder to identify, even among their own guild.
But no one could mistake this pirate. His hair was snowy white from years of salt and sun. The length was knotted and hung over one shoulder, striking against his black leathers.
Rogger pulled on his beard and crossed to shake the man’s hand. “Krevan! It is good to see that no shear has come within a lick of you! Before long you’ll be tripping over that rat’s nest.”
“The same could be said of that beard of yours.”
They clasped hands.
The sun-crinkled eyes of the pirate traveled past Rogger to Tylar and Delia. “I see you brought the godslayer with you.”
Tylar started, his fingers tightening on his sword.
Rogger merely shrugged.
Krevan released the thief’s hand with a short laugh. “Then again, you always kept the strangest companions. I remember that blood witch from Nevering who—”
“Please!” Rogger interrupted. “There is a lady present.”
“Of course.” Krevan broke into a soft smile, gentle and respectful. “My lady, be welcome.”
Delia offered the smallest curtsy.
Rogger opened his mouth, but Krevan cut him off with a lifted hand.
“Yes, a boat. I know. Arrangements are already under way.
The Flaggers know how to repay a debt, even one owed as long as yours. But . . . ?” His smile faded into harder lines.
Rogger nodded. “To cross ships downline, many palms will need pressing.”
Krevan sank back to lean on his desk.
“We have this sword to trade,” Tylar said, stepping up.
Rogger shook his head at the offer.
Krevan leaned back. “He is amusing. Wherever did you find him?”
Rogger shrugged. “Dungeons.”
“Ah, same as the blood witch.”
The thief scratched his beard thoughtfully. “You’d be surprised what can be found abandoned with the rats and chains.”
Tylar flipped the sword hilt up. “What about this diamond on the pommel? It must be worth a handful of gold marches.”
Krevan sighed. “Aye, but you’ll need ten times that to press the proper palms.”
Tylar’s eyes widened.
Rogger explained,“To silence the passage of someone of . . . well, of your reputation, does not come cheaply. We’ll need to hide your trail in gold.” He turned to Delia. “But luckily we brought with us something of considerable worth.”
Delia paled and backed up a step.
Tylar put up a protective arm. “I will not trade in flesh.”
Rogger raised an eyebrow. “Do I look a slave trader? Remember I’m a thief . . . specializing in certain sacred objects.”
Tylar suddenly understood, remembering what Rogger had been caught stealing in Foul
sham Dell. “Repostilaries.”
Delia gasped, growing even more pale.
Tylar remembered the crystal vial she had used to douse her hand and send the daemon back inside Tylar. A repostilary bearing the blood of Meeryn.
“I cannot give it up,” Delia said, clutching the vial hidden in a pocket over her heart. “It holds the last drops of her blood.”
“Can you just imagine its worth?” Rogger said to Krevan. “The blood of a dead god?”
The pirate’s eyes had grown large, plainly yearning for such a prize. “The price it would fetch among the Gray Traders . . .”
“Enough to book passage safely away?” Rogger asked.
Krevan slowly nodded, unblinking.
Delia still clasped tightly to the pocketed vial.
Sighing, Tylar knew the trade was the only way. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “But if we’re to ever solve the mystery of what’s inside me . . . ever to learn the truth about Meeryn, we’ll all have to pay a stiff price.” He parted his cloak to reveal the black palm print. “If you would serve your god still, then it must be done.”
She closed her eyes and bowed her head. Her fingers reached into her pocket and removed the single repostilary. She held it out to Rogger.
He gently took it and passed it to Krevan, who handled it as if it were the most precious jewel.
“I will arrange everything,” the pirate said. He held the vial up to the flame of a wall torch. Fingers gently touched the crystal. Oddly, tears rose in his eyes. His next words were softly spoken but as hard as iron. “If I thought you had really slain Meeryn, Tylar de Noche, you would not be walking out of here.”
Krevan rose and crossed to a glass cabinet shelved with books, a few scrolls, and several boxes.
As he hid away the repostilary, Tylar whispered to Rogger, “Can this fellow be trusted?”
The pirate heard him. “I am not the one who broke my vow. I know how to swear an oath.” Krevan turned back to the torchlight and used his wrist to rub at the corner of an eye, smearing away the ash.
Three dark stripes were tatooed on his skin, the same as on Tylar’s face.
Tylar choked on his words. “You . . . you’re a knight.”
Krevan turned away. “Rogger, take your guests to the east wing. They can rest until the morning tide, when your boat will be leaving.”
Rogger waved them back toward the two loam-giants.
Tylar whispered to Rogger. “A fallen knight heads the Black Flaggers?”
Rogger glanced back to the tall figure. “Who said he had fallen?”
Tylar cast a sharp look at the thief.
“Not every knight breaks his vow,” Rogger said firmly, staring Tylar in the eye. “Some simply walk away.”
With his brow pinched in thought, Tylar left the room, bearing more questions than when he entered. He had thought himself wise, but now he felt like a swaddling babe, new to the world.
As the sun rose over the Summering Isles, Tylar stood at the rails of the deepwhaler. The ship had ridden the tide out and now swept toward the deeper seas. At midnight, they were to change ships in the waters off Tempest Sound, then again at Yi River, hoping to shake any hunters from their trail.
A scrape of boot heel sounded behind him. Rogger stepped to the rail. He looked a new man, in the fresh clean clothes of a whaler and his beard neatly trimmed.
He noted Tylar’s attention and ran a hand through his clean beard. “That Delia knows a thing or two about brushes and shears. Makes me almost want to lead a better life.”
In silence, the pair watched as the ship escaped the morning fog and sailed under open skies. Behind them, the misty isles appeared ghostly, more a dream of land than real.
“What now?” Tylar asked.
Rogger shrugged.
Delia was belowdecks, ill already from the roll of the ship in the swells. She had refused to remain behind, casting her fate along with Tylar, sensing in him a way to still serve her god. Tylar wasn’t sure why he had allowed her to come. It was something in her eyes, a pain and longing he could not deny.
Rogger’s motivation for accompanying them had been far simpler: “I have nothing better to do.” Sentenced as a pilgrim, he had been punished to wander the lands until he had collected all the branded sigils. But now, tied to the story of the godslayer, he figured his best chance of survival was to “walk beside the fellow with the big black daemon.” Still, despite his flippancies, Tylar sensed Rogger, like Delia, left much unspoken and unexplained.
Like that snippet in ancient Littick.
Tylar repeated it now, fingering his chest. “Agee wan clyy nee wan dred ghawl.”
“Break the bone,” Rogger whispered to the waves, “and free the dred ghawl, the dark spirit. I think that’s an apt enough description of the beastie.”
“What was it? A daemon? Some naether-spawn? Its attack was similar to the creature that killed Meeryn and her Shadowknights.”
“Outward appearances can fool the eye. As you well know, Godslayer.” He stressed the last word but offered nothing more.
The silence grew heavy between them.
Sighing, Tylar flexed his sword hand and held it up. “Break the bone,” he mumbled, switching to the first part of the phrase, to something easier. “What about that?”
“Aye, it seems I was right back in the dungeon. Clyy means bone, not merely body. The dred ghawl appeared only when the bones of your hand were crushed, not while you were whipped to the edge of your life. I find it interesting that Meeryn healed all your bones at the same time she blessed you with the spirit creature. It was as if she had made a cage out of your healthy bones, requiring only one crack, one broken bone, to set it free.”
“Leaving me crippled again until it returned,” he added sourly.
“There’s always a price . . . I seem to recall you saying that to young Delia earlier.”
Tylar shook his head. So much remained a mystery. Again silence settled around them. The deepwhaler caught a stiffer breeze, sails swelling. The islands faded behind them, sinking into the horizon.
After a long while, Tylar quietly asked, “Do you think we’ll make it?”
“Not a chance,” Rogger answered, pulling a pipe from a pocket.
Tylar turned, leaning an elbow on the rail.
Rogger filled his pipe from a pouch of blackleaf. “Don’t look so surprised. The Summering Isles will never let you rest. That Shadowknight, Darjon ser Hightower, will hunt you throughout the Nine Lands. And then there are all those other gods out there. Ninety-nine, at last count. They’re not going to let the murder of one of their own go uncontested. They’ll pool all their Graces into finding you. But even they’re not the worst threat.”
“What do you mean?”
Rogger paused to light a taper from a lamp on the deck, then set the flame to his pipe, puffing in and out until he had a good fire to the leaf.
“What could be worse than vengeful gods?” Tylar asked.
Rogger perked one brow. “Whoever really slew Meeryn, of course. The true godslayer. He’ll need you dead lest you prove your innocence. And whoever could kill a god . . . ?” He shrugged and chewed on his pipe, leaving the obvious unsaid.
He could surely hunt a lone man.
“So what do you plan to do?” Rogger finally asked, eyeing him.
Tylar rubbed his brow. “The only thing I can, I guess.”
“What’s that?”
“Follow the one clue left to me. Meeryn’s final word.”
Rogger glanced to him. “Rivenscryr?”
He nodded. “Meeryn healed me, gave me a daemon to protect me. All to deliver one word, a riddle I must solve if I ever hope to prove my innocence.”
“So where are we headed first?”
“To a place where I’m even less welcome than those cursed islands.” Tylar turned his back on the Summering Isles and stared far to the north, half a world away. “To Tashijan . . . the Citadel of the Shadowknights.”
SECOND
> TANGLED KNOT
god-realm, god-relm, n. [old Littickking-land] a region, domain, or land settled by one of the hundred Myrillian gods; a section of territory into which the unique Graces of a God are imbued and blessed; as the humours of a body course through a god, so they do its land.
—Annals of Physique Primer, ann. 2593
6
FIERY CROSS
SHE HAD NEVER THOUGHT TO HEAR HIS NAME AGAIN.
Kathryn ser Vail stood near the mooring docks that topped the highest tower of Tashijan. Though it was mid-morning, the light remained a twilight gloaming. Black clouds stacked to the horizons on all sides, whipping and rolling in from the seas to the south.
Tylar . . .
As she waited, cold winds flapped her cloak and tugged at the masklin pinned across her face. As a Shadowknight, she had to keep her face hidden from the laborers here. Her breath blew white into the frigid, thin air. Ice frosted the parapet stones and made the mooring ropes crack as they were run across the stones by line handlers and dockmen.
Clutching her arms around her, she fought to trap the fleeting warmth carried up with her from the bowels of Tashijan. The mooring tower of the Citadel thrust fifty floors into the sky, a thin spire built three millennia ago under the guidance of Warden Bellsephere. Aptly named Stormwatch, it took the humours of a hundred gods to build this one tower.
“There she is!” her companion shouted into the teeth of the wind.
Gerrod Rothkild was encased in bronze from head to toe, oblivious of the wind. He was squat of form, typical for a hill-man from Bitter Heap. But unlike his barbarous, uneducated countrymen, he was of sharp intellect and even sharper wit. Under his helmet, he bore the tattoos of fifteen disciplines, all masterfields. “That tub’d better have a skilled pilot to strike the docks in this gale.”
Kathryn watched the salt-scarred flippercraft lower out of the sea of clouds overhead. It was a wooden whale, blunt at both ends but flaring into a wide keel at the stern. At the prow, a thick window of blessed glass stared down at the mooring docks. Shadowy movement could be seen behind the glass: the ship’s frantic landing crew.
On the port and starboard sides, the score of balancing paddles battled the winds, some turning, others stationary, some extending out from the ship, others retracting. It took an experienced pilot, one ripe with air, to finesse the craft.