They cut off Svoyatovi Dimitry Teterev’s ears, burned out his eyes, cut out his tongue, but still that did not stop him, nothing could stop him, and he brought down the city of Kowat alone.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
The boy returned with an extremely tall woman whom Malachiasz thought was potentially the cult’s leader, until she hauled him to his feet to stand before the boy.
“If you are expecting me to be scared and incoherent, I am sorry to disappoint,” Malachiasz said.
A smile pulled at the boy’s mouth. He had feathery black hair and golden skin, the high features of someone from the Kalyazi north. One of his pupils was the wrong shape—a horizontal slit of black within brown. He lifted a hand to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear, two of his fingers as well as a chunk of his ear missing.
“My expectations are low, I assure you.”
“Even better!”
He was hoping to get a better read on this boy who had survived his claws, but he got no reaction and a shiver of anxiety itched at his hands; he picked at a hangnail on his middle finger behind his back.
“Are you sure this is the one?” the woman asked. “The other has a godstouched eye.”
Serefin jolted, as if trying to cover his eye but forgetting his arms were tied. Malachiasz knew what the woman was not saying. He stifled a sigh.
“You want a show,” he said flatly.
It was a constant effort, holding the roiling chaos at bay, and thus a release to let his body succumb instead. He closed his eyes—though he saw through every other damn eye that opened on his skin, a veritable assault on his fragile senses. No limbs this time, odd since that had happened during his episode on the floor earlier. He supposed there was no predicting chaos. After what felt sufficient, he carefully pulled everything back, smothering it down, knowing that every time his shields fell it was a little bit harder to put them back up.
He opened his eyes, watching as the boy’s pupils dilated, a hitch of breath at his throat. The boy’s pulse quickened in a beat so fast that Malachiasz could almost see it against his skin.
“What’s your name?” he asked, like he was leading this conversation.
The boy’s eyes narrowed, but after a pause, he allowed, “Ruslan Yedemsky.”
Malachiasz liked that moment of surrender. When someone handed him their name, not realizing what they were giving him. So few realized the power held in their names, especially not Kalyazi.
Serefin frowned slightly, his face pale, sweat beading on his skin. He needed to get that eye treated or it was going to kill him. Malachiasz was surprised to find he didn’t want that; he wanted Serefin alive.
“You have the blood of gods underneath your fingernails,” Ruslan observed.
“And yours.”
Ruslan’s fingers kept tugging at a ring on his finger—a bulky thing that Malachiasz suspected held a relic. Malachiasz caught a flash of an ugly open wound on his palm. A wound made by a spike of iron being driven through flesh.
Had that happened? Who was this boy? A flash of something passed over Ruslan’s face. Malachiasz couldn’t quite decipher it. Interesting.
“What did you mean by purified?” Serefin asked.
Ruslan cast him a glance. “I wanted to be certain I’d found what I was searching for.”
“Me? I’m flattered,” Malachiasz said. “What do you want?” he asked, though he knew. Someone had awakened, whatever that meant, and this cult wanted Malachiasz to kill them.
He would address that particular moral quandary later, he decided, because he still didn’t know if he was going to aid this god or fight him. If Serefin could rip himself free, he certainly could.
“I allowed the boy to go,” Chyrnog said. “You will not be so lucky.”
Malachiasz shuddered.
Ruslan didn’t deign to answer Malachiasz’s question. “Let’s bring our guest upstairs,” he said.
“What about the other two?” the woman asked.
Ruslan peered at Serefin and Kacper, focusing in on Serefin, eyes running over his features.
“Brothers, you said? We’ll keep you both as incentive for this one to cooperate. Also,” he tipped Serefin’s chin up, “we can use you.”
“Can’t say I’ll be much use,” Serefin said. “He and I are deeply estranged.”
They were taken up the stairs. The windows cast light down the bleak hall in jagged knives. Malachiasz had the vaguest feeling that it was a torture chamber. He trembled, his heart beating too fast in his chest.
Ruslan pulled him down a different hallway.
“Well, that answers one question,” he said. “Chyrnog’s priests and prophets cannot be touched by the light lest it burn them.”
“I’m not a priest or a prophet,” Malachiasz snapped.
“Yet still blessed.”
It wasn’t a blessing. Malachiasz didn’t even know how to twist this into something he could use. He stumbled as a hunger pang struck him. He hissed out a breath through his teeth, suddenly dizzy.
“Has the god told you to keep me chained up, then?” he asked instead, ignoring the jittery feeling in his chest. He was going to pass out. “Doesn’t it make more sense that you would be delighted to find someone like me?”
“We’ve been waiting for Chyrnog for a very long time,” Ruslan said. “It’s unexpected, you see, for him to choose a Tranavian.”
“A heretic, you mean? It’s fine, I don’t mind.” The word never had any true bite to it, and Nadya had used it against him enough that he had almost grown fond of the term.
Ruslan frowned slightly, as if unsure what to make of him. Good, he wanted the boy unstable. To wonder if maybe Malachiasz wasn’t so bad after all, maybe he really did have Chyrnog’s best interests at heart.
He didn’t, of course. Only his and Tranavia’s. And Tranavia above all else.
Though wasn’t that what had gotten him into this whole mess? He should have been more tactful, careful. He shouldn’t have given Nadya such an easy way to destroy everything. He should have questioned her intentions. He hadn’t expected her to be so adept at lying.
He had been willfully foolish. Because of course she wasn’t still the scared, naive girl from Kalyazin that he had manipulated. If she had been, he never would have … well, he wouldn’t have cared so much. It was because she was clever and cunning and absolutely ruthless that he was so damn fond of her. She was far more trouble than she was worth.
But he’d liked the trouble.
He held back a sigh, pushing her from his mind.
The building they were in was large, a fortress of some sort. Malachiasz couldn’t quite figure out the structure of it, but this wasn’t a church, it was too big.
They were taken into an open, airy space. A vast tree, dark and brittle looking, sat in the center of the immense room. Clearly dead, its branches dry and thin as they raked up to the top of the ceiling.
Interesting.
Malachiasz’s attention lit on a single white flower that had blossomed on one of the branches. Benign enough, but when his vision split, the flower was crawling with worms. Chained to the tree was a young man, only a few years older than Malachiasz. There was something wrong with him. It took Malachiasz a heartbeat to realize that he wasn’t chained at all.
Serefin let out a soft, distressed sound.
The tree had grown into and around the man, roots digging into flesh, flesh becoming root. His eyes were closed.
Malachiasz was struck with a very particular kind of hunger.
“Good, you know what you must do.”
Ruslan stepped toward the man in the tree, tipping his chin up. His eyes did not open.
“He was one of ours, once,” he said, sounding sad. “We noticed something was wrong a year ago but thought little of it. His daily life had been unaffected. But a few weeks ago, something broke within the world.”
The wall he’d torn through. Tranavia’s magic stripped away. The death of Nadya’s goddess. So much had changed. Pelageya had said things were waking up. What had Chyrnog called them? Awakened ones.
Malachiasz swallowed hard, his mouth flooding with saliva.
“What is his name?” he asked.
Ruslan lifted an eyebrow. “Ivan.”
He was very, very hungry.
“You know what you must do.”