24: SACRIFICIAL RITES
Kihrin’s story Inside Vol Karoth’s prison
“We need a plan,” Teraeth said after we “returned” from another always-pleasant stroll through Xivan’s quest for revenge. Of course, this was also something like the sixth time he’d made that statement, and it wasn’t bringing us any closer to accomplishing it.
“Stay alive?” I said. “Or as close as some of us can come to it.”
Janel cocked her head at me. “That’s a shitty plan.”
“Thank you,” Teraeth said. “I happen to agree.”
“Look,” I said, half spoken word and half deep sigh, “I get that things went a little … off the path.”
Janel stopped walking so she could cross her arms over her chest and glare up at me. “A little off the path is what happens when you hire a Marakori to be your tour guide, and you end up at her cousin’s cellar house while he charges you three times the going rate for a room. A little off the path is when all you want is a relaxing drink at your favorite bar and a fight breaks out between supporters of your tournament favorites and some thorra from a visiting stable. That’s a ‘little off the path.’ This is the King of Demons killing everyone we care about, the world ending, and your soul getting devoured.”
“And let’s not forget the King of Demons is Janel’s ex, in this scenario,” Teraeth offered.
Janel lowered her head and took a deep breath.
“I really don’t think Janel’s forgotten that, Teraeth,” I offered.
“My point,” Janel said, “is that the literal End of Everything is perhaps not the time when you want to go on the defensive.”
I blinked, bemused. I looked at Teraeth, but he just raised an eyebrow at me and waited. I raised a finger, reconsidered, lowered it again.
“It’s just…,” I said.
“Yes?” Teraeth said.
“Well…,” I said.
We all stood there in silence for a moment. And there is no silence like the silence in the fake Kharas Golgoth inside Vol Karoth’s mind.
“Right now, he has all the advantages,” Janel said. “We need to change that. Stop reacting like a scared foal, put on your adult boots, and think.”
She was right. Of course she was right. I was thinking like Rook, the Shadowdancer Key who hid while Gadrith and Darzin D’Mon performed unspeakable rituals on hapless vané. I was thinking like the minstrel’s son.
But Vol Karoth …
Vol Karoth was thinking like Solan’arric, only without anything that might pass for moral qualms.
“Let’s break it down,” I said after letting out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “We’re in his mind.”
“So how is that possible?” Teraeth asked. The look on his face told me it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “He’s a horrible dark god created by a horrible ritual that went horribly wrong.”
Janel nodded slowly. “Exactly. There’s something there.”
“Something horrible?”
She waved away the (admittedly poor) attempt at humor. “I was talking about him.” She pointed at Teraeth. “He’s onto something.”
“Ohhh, do I get a prize?” he asked.
She ignored him even harder than she’d ignored me. “Let’s question assumptions; either we’re in Vol Karoth’s mind like we think we are, in which case, the geography here must be representational. Or we’re not in his mind, in which case we’re … where?”
“Representational?” I raised an eyebrow at her. “I realize it’s all a metaphor, so how is that different from the Afterlife?”
“Because the Afterlife’s rules are set, just as the Living World’s rules are set. But if this is Vol Karoth’s mind—or at least some sort of mental projection, then that means that the Vol Karoth we’ve been fighting isn’t really Vol Karoth. It’s a projection, like the one we encountered in the Korthaen Blight, but mental instead of physical. It also means…”
“Yes?” Teraeth prompted after a few moments of silence.
“What’s the word for it when one soul inhabits another, living mind?” Janel asked, looking directly at me.
“Oh. Shit,” I said.
“Hello?” Teraeth waved a hand.
“Possession.” I turned to him. “We’re not ‘just hanging out’ in his mind. We’re possessing Vol Karoth’s mind. Like … well, like demons. Or ghosts.”
“And that means that all of this”—Janel gestured around the city—“is along the order of a talisman he has created to keep us distracted, because ghosts can have a real effect on the minds of those they inhabit.”
“So what we need to do—” I started, but Teraeth already had the bit in his mouth and was running with it.
“—is fight the city, not the scary demon-man.”
“Right,” Janel said. “So … absent the presence of a Morios, how does one fight a city?”
“Dunno,” Teraeth said. “But we’re still gathering intelligence. So let’s explore the city. That building there, for example.” He pointed at a door. I blinked at it.
It was an excellent choice. It didn’t really match. I didn’t recognize it, but it seemed rougher hewn than the doors around it.
I looked at Janel. She looked at me. We both shrugged. “Sure,” I said at the same time she said, “Works for me.”
We walked through the doorway.
It wasn’t the largest of buildings nearby, nor the smallest. A wide, sliding door divided the entry room roughly in half, with stairs leading up toward the back. If there had been furniture, we might have had an inkling as to the structure’s intended purpose.
“So now what?” I asked Teraeth.
“Look for anything interesting,” he said. “We don’t know what will be important yet. I’ll look upstairs.”
“You and I can look through the first floor,” Janel told me.
Teraeth nodded and put actions to words, swiftly striding across the room and skipping up the steps.
“Wouldn’t it be faster if we split up?” I said.
She tilted her head in my direction. “It’s adorable that you think we’re letting you out of our sight after what you’ve pulled multiple times now.”
I glared at her, to which she seemed utterly immune.
I went for a closer look at the sliding door. A rail ran along the wall above the door, which hung on rollers. The workmanship was precise. A memory fidgeted in the back of my mind, but before it could fully rise up and reveal itself, Teraeth’s voice came from above.
“Up here,” he called.
We went up there.
The ceiling on the second floor wasn’t as high, but the floor was large and open, lacking the dividing wall of downstairs. But that wasn’t the interesting thing about the room.
The interesting thing about the room was what it contained: Teraeth … and a couch.
The style of it struck me with a visceral sense of familiarity that reached across my mind and pulled that other memory to the fore. I recognized the style of both the couch and the sliding door despite the fact that I’d technically never seen either in my life. The fabric was pale gold, velvety, and wrapped around thick padding. I’ve seen plenty of beds that looked less comfortable.
“Huh,” Janel said as we all drew closer to the tempting resting place.
“Something must be going right,” I said. “This is the first time I’ve seen furniture in the whole city.”
“Yeah,” Janel said. “So why’s it here? Trap?”
“Seems kind of obvious,” Teraeth said. “Unlikely to be trapped.” Which he underlined by sitting down and patting the fabric next to him.
“Teraeth,” I sighed. And they were yelling at me for being reckless.
“So evidently, it’s not trapped,” Janel commented.
“I mean it’s not quite a bed, but still…” He gave me a teasing glance.
“We’re information gathering,” I reminded him, smiling. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t serious, but he wasn’t going to pass up the chance to mess with me a little either.
Janel, however, was studying the couch with a frown on her face.
I sat down next to Teraeth, then promptly shifted so I was lying down with my legs slung over the back. “What is it?”
“Does the couch seem familiar?” Janel asked.
I looked down at the fabric. “I don’t think so. It’s not a House D’Mon—” I paused. “This was my mother’s couch. I mean—” I shook my head. I was still not used to these flashes of multiple lives. “S’arric’s mother’s couch.” I shook my head. “Fuck, I hated this couch.”
I couldn’t remember why, though. All I could remember was that the couch was a sore point. It was like remembering you had a fight with someone, but not why you’d been fighting or what words had been exchanged.
“Change it,” Janel suggested as she took position on one of the arms, riding it in a manner not too dissimilar to what one might do to a horse. Which was hard to look away from, if I’m being honest. “Change it into something that is a happy memory.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
Teraeth didn’t say anything, but he watched me carefully.
My teacher back in the Shadowdancers, a woman we all called Mouse, had a couch that she’d somehow managed to stash in the small back-alley store she used as a base of operations. I assume she’d had some of the larger, burlier folk in the Shadowdancers do the actual moving; the thing must have weighed four times as much as she did. Anyway, it was a ridiculously fluffy, overstuffed thing that no self-respecting merchant or freeman would be caught dead having anywhere in their house.
Naturally, I’d loved it without restraint; when you jumped on it, you bounced.
Teraeth chuckled and ran his fingers over the stuffed woven fabric. “This is a happy memory? It looks like it’s home to a dozen mice and at least three rabbits. Although it’s comfortable, I suppose.” He stretched out against it to emphasize that fact, setting his feet in Janel’s lap. “So I guess that answers that question.”
I jerked my gaze from studying his legs. “I’m sorry, what?”
Teraeth laughed. He hadn’t missed what had distracted me. “What Janel asked. How do you fight a city? I say, you don’t. You occupy it.”
Janel grabbed one of Teraeth’s feet, quickly stripped off the sandal, and began to massage it. Teraeth made a noise, and yes, I was distracted again.
But no. I concentrated on what he’d just said. They were both right. If I could change a couch, why not something larger? A room, a house … the city itself? If these things were reflections of Vol Karoth’s mind, what happened when I turned them into reflections of myself?
Before we could explore that idea any further, however, the world changed.
Jarith’s memory Stonegate Pass, Khorvesh, Quur
Three years before his death
When Jarith came back from patrol, the emperor was sitting in his office.
The hilarious thing about that—the seriously laugh-until-one-cried thing—was that his secretary, Hivar, had no idea. Jarith just walked back inside, still sweaty and dusty, wanting nothing so much as a bath and several gallons of mint tea, when Hivar had said, “Would you like me to block off your afternoon?” Which was Hivar’s exceptionally polite way of saying, “I know you’ve just returned from a three-day tour of the most miserable outposts on the borders of the empire. Maybe you should rest before you spend three more days filling out forms?”
As Jarith’s mother wasn’t stationed at Stonegate, his secretary had decided to fill in on her behalf.
Jarith gave the man a wry smile. “One report won’t kill me.”
“Oh, you say that now…” But Hivar didn’t try to stop him, and Hivar didn’t mention that anyone was waiting for him.
Because likely, he just hadn’t known.
Jarith realized the moment he stepped through the doorway and saw the unassuming man sitting there.
He’d only met the emperor on one previous occasion, but it wasn’t one he’d likely soon forget. Sandus still dressed in a way that might easily be mistaken for an itinerant musician, although his patchwork sallí was a little too nondescript. With the man’s hair and his clear Marakori features, Jarith imagined that most people probably assumed he was some sort of vagrant, and probably one a bit light with other’s property at that. Only the thin copper circlet on his head betrayed his true authority. He no doubt carried the Scepter of Quur on him as well, but Jarith couldn’t see it.
Jarith closed the door behind him before bowing.
“That’s not really necessary,” Sandus said, smiling as he stood.
“Your Majesty, I…” Jarith swallowed. He could think of no good reasons, no good reasons at all, for the emperor to be sitting in his office. “Has something happened to my father?”
Sandus’s face stuttered in surprise, and then he shook his head. “Oh? No, nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”
“Is it Kihrin? Because if—”
“Instead of you asking me questions until you hit upon the right one, perhaps instead listen to what I have to say?” Emperor Sandus chided, not unkindly.
Jarith crossed over to his desk and sat down and managed not to fidget like a schoolboy for at least three minutes.
“I’m here because of prophecies,” Sandus explained, looking like that admittance hurt him somewhere deep inside. “Hmm, that’s a rather indirect way of addressing what’s important here, I suppose. I’m here because of that girl you’ve started seeing.”
Jarith blinked. They’d have sat here for a long time if Sandus had been waiting for Jarith to hit upon that right guess. “Kalindra? But why—” He paused and swallowed. He liked to think he wasn’t an idiot, even if the world occasionally challenged that assumption. He examined the wall for a moment before turning back to Emperor Sandus. “Who does she work for, then?”
Jarith tried to wrestle his pulse back under control. Because if there was one thing he knew, it was the ridiculous lengths that the Royal Houses seemed to be willing to go to gain leverage on council members—and on his father. And then they’d try to blackmail his father over his affairs—or blackmail his mother about hers—only to have the high general laugh in their faces. His parents kept no secrets from each other. Certainly not their lovers.
Sandus looked sad. “Your father taught you to be paranoid.” He hesitated. “Not that it’s a wrong impulse in this case. Thaena.”
Jarith felt all the hairs raise up along the back of his neck. “I’m sorry? What do you mean, Thaena?”
“Kalindra is a member of an organization called the Black Brotherhood. Assassins, mostly, but they do other jobs. I would imagine most people think they’re a cult, but they answer directly to the Goddess of Death.”
“And you know this because of … prophecies?” Jarith felt dazed and feverish, his gut lined with hot lead. “So you could be wrong, then. The Devoran Prophecies are vague. Father says they’re wrong too often to be believed.”
“Oh, that is true,” Sandus acknowledged. He was idly thumbing a ring on one of his fingers, the only other piece of jewelry he wore besides the circlet. It was a red stone—ruby or possibly spinel, engraved with something. “But it led me to taking a look at her and I am reasonably sure of my facts in this particular case. She’s a Brotherhood assassin.” Sandus paused. “Given current events, if her mission has anything to do with you, it’s more likely to be protection than harm.”
Jarith let out a deep, shuddery breath. “Your Majesty—”
“Please, just call me Sandus.”
“Your Majesty,” Jarith continued, “have you told my father about this?” But even as he asked the question, he knew it was absurd. If Qoran Milligreest knew that someone, anyone, was trying to get close to his family, no matter what their reasons, they would be arrested already.
No. They would be dead.
And it wouldn’t be the Emperor of Quur breaking the news to him.
“No,” Sandus said. “I haven’t. It isn’t any of his business.”
Jarith stared.
“Well, it isn’t,” Sandus protested, looking a little flustered for a split moment before the kind paternal mask slammed back into place. “And please understand, there’s been a Black Brotherhood member in proximity to your father for years.1 A situation which only recently changed, largely because of me.2 So I imagine this is just Thaena replacing the last person. Nothing malicious. She’s just not of a sort to bother explaining herself. Goddesses are often like that.” Sandus reached forward and tapped the top of a stack of papers. “But it is your business, and I thought you deserved to know so you could decide what to do. This young woman is just doing her sacred duty to her goddess, but you’re the one sleeping with her. You’re going to have to decide if that’s a thing you can continue doing when you know she’s lying to you, no matter how well-intentioned those lies might be.”
“You’re telling me so I can … not do anything?” Jarith was starting to regret he hadn’t found them a bottle of brandy and poured them both a drink before this started.
“If you like,” Sandus said. “That’s up to you.”
“You just told me that she’s seducing me to—”
“No,” Sandus said. “I didn’t. I’m sure her assignment was to get close to your family. There are plenty of other ways she might have done so. I doubt her orders were specifically to seduce you.” He added, “I have been told that the Black Brotherhood gives its members a great deal of latitude to decide how a mission is to be accomplished.”
“If she knows her cover’s blown, would she leave?” Jarith finally asked.
Sandus gave him a very considering gaze. “I have no way to know that.”
“Right.” Jarith exhaled. “Right. Of course you don’t.”
Sandus was still staring at Jarith with uncomfortable intensity. “You’re not going to turn her in, are you?”
“My father would kill her!” Jarith’s snap was instantaneous. He quieted. “I mean. He would certainly have her arrested.”
“And you’ll keep seeing her?”
Jarith paused. Sandus waited on the answer so expectantly. So intently. As though it wasn’t trivial at all.
“Yes,” Jarith said slowly.
A flicker of emotion crossed Sandus’s face, so quickly Jarith would probably have missed it except, well, he’d been looking for some clue. Sorrow. Resignation. As if Jarith had just announced he was running out into the Korthaen Blight the next morning, naked and weaponless. Done something foolish.
Sealed his own fate.
Jarith stood up. “Thank you,” he said, bowing with all the politeness his father had ever ingrained in him. “I appreciate the warning, Your Majesty.”
The corner of Sandus’s mouth quirked. He seemed to understand he was being dismissed and found the experience amusing. “Certainly. It was the least I could do.”3
And with that, he vanished.
Jarith sighed, letting the echoes of the man’s presence slowly drain from the room, although there was nothing to be done about the slick taint of distrust and suspicion his news had left behind. That would stain, difficult if not impossible to clean.
He fled the office and headed out to find her.
Stonegate Pass was built on fear. The fear that the morgage might once more swarm through the gates of that fortress to rampage over the empire. The fear that another race’s desperation might prove stronger than Quuros loyalty.
The fear that sooner or later, everyone gets what they deserve, even empires.
Because of that fear, the architects of Stonegate had never stopped building, each generation adding to the fortress and its surrounding walls. They built higher and stronger until there was no chance—none at all—that the morgage would ever invade through that narrow cleft into the heart of Quur ever again. They ignored all the paths still open: north through the Dragonspires, east through the Kulma swamp, or simply anyplace along the western cliffs that wasn’t Stonegate Pass.
Often, Jarith truly wondered if anyone back in the Capital had ever looked at a map.
But it wasn’t his place to call his superiors idiots except in the privacy of his own mind. He made his way down the labyrinthine passages until he reached the town that had grown up in the military fortress’s shadow. The town (also called Stonegate) was larger than visitors typically expected, but that’s because Stonegate had existed for a long time. Long enough for generations to have lived there and have sent their sons to serve on the fortress’s walls. Long enough for all the amenities a soldier might ever want to become firm and traditional fixtures: velvet houses and taverns, smithies and stables. There were at least seven licensed mercenary companies, some of whom also operated as fighting schools.
Jarith had met Kalindra of Nevale in a local tavern when one of his men decided to be a little too pushy about demanding her company. As Jarith had picked his man off the floor, after, she’d pointed out how considerate she’d been about not breaking any limbs. Jarith had thought it was considerate; he’d also never seen anyone who could fight like that without a single weapon drawn. When he’d asked her about it, she’d just laughed and told him that if he wanted to know more, he could pay to take her classes at the Ten Metals fighting school like everyone else.
So he had.
Jarith nodded to the man at the front gate as he entered the compound, Kalindra in the normal courtyard she used for training drills, leading a group of students. Later, she’d make them repeat the drills while she roamed their ranks, correcting them with a sharp eye and sharper tongue. He had gathered that of all the teachers at the Ten Metals, she was considered the harshest. Her classes filled up months in advance.
He could believe that she was an assassin. Or at the very least, he could believe that she was someone to whom violence came easily. As good as he was with a sword, he knew perfectly well which of them would win in any fight without one. She would be lethal indeed in any situation where her opponent was unprepared.
But … surely, she hadn’t been ordered to seduce him. Kalindra wasn’t the sort of person Jarith imagined seducing anyone, let alone seducing someone on orders. She didn’t flatter or charm, never appeased, made no attempts to mollify. Nothing about her was yielding or soft. Kalindra was a lithe whip of a woman made of scars, calluses, and temper. If her honesty offended other people, she considered that their problem.
All of which objectively made her a massive bitch, but he’d also seen how she was with the younger students. How patient and kind, never mocking them while somehow managing to never lie either. How her eyes shadowed every time she saw a powerless person, be it child or slave, mistreated. And while she never did anything—at least not that he’d ever been aware of—Jarith had noticed something almost like a pattern to what happened to the worst offenders in town. The bullies and abusers, the ones who were happy to exploit their power—namely, they tended to have “accidents.”
Maybe he was being naïve. Maybe she was the perfect woman to seduce him.
When the lesson was over and a dozen children had retreated, scrambling outside to play because they hadn’t burned off enough energy practicing sword forms, he stepped forward. “Kalindra? Are you free for a few minutes?”
Her smile was wry. “For you, I’ll make the time.” She motioned over toward a room to the side where they stored supplies.
The moment she closed the door behind them, he pushed her against it. Her back only just touched the wood before she flipped them over so she was pushing him. They wrestled with each other to see who could grab the other by the wrists. The lone high window of the storeroom painted the sides of their faces with ghostly light.
The whole time, they never stopped kissing. She pushed him as he worked his way down the side of her neck, biting.
“Stop, stop!” she said, laughing. “You know I love this, but Dervala gave me dirty looks and cold tea for two weeks after the last time he caught us in a classroom.”
He almost said, “Since when has that ever stopped you?” but instead, he put his hands on the sides of her cheeks and gave her a softer, gentler kiss. “You’re right. I just couldn’t—”
The delight in her eyes turned into something else. “Jarith, is something wrong?”
Jarith rested his head against hers, smelled her hair. She still smelled like sweat from the class layered under the scent of roses because Kalindra always insisted on using the most ridiculously flowery soaps. But he also wasn’t answering, and he knew that with each passing second, Kalindra would grow only more worried and frustrated.
“You know you’re a good person, right?”
She pulled back and stared at him for an endless second, then flushed. “If you’re just here to mock me—” She reached and tried opening the door. Tried, but she’d flipped them around, which meant he now blocked it.
“No,” Jarith said. “I’m not making fun of you. It just … it just occurred to me that you might not know. How good you are. That maybe someone should let you in on the secret.” He caressed the side of her face. “You can hide it from everyone else, but not from me.”
She stopped pushing and met his eyes. Neither of them moved.
“Something happened. What happened?”
Jarith paused. This had been a mistake. He’d just been swept up in the need to see her, to tell her how he really felt about her. He opened his mouth to say something, anything. The words hung in the air, unspoken.
“Jarith.” Her expression was swiftly shifting from confused and worried to angry.
He leaned his forehead against hers, rubbed his hands over her shoulders. “I just realized today that what we have is precious and I was taking it for granted. And you…” He inhaled. “You mean so much to me. Because you are good and because I know you care.”
Kalindra stared.
Jarith could feel the compliments slide off Kalindra like water off palm leaves. She never paid any attention to anyone’s attempts to tell her that she’d done well or was good; she only ever heard the criticisms. It made him want to scream, want to take her by the arms and shake her until she understood. Which would only result in him having at least one broken arm and sabotage the entire fucking point.
“Are you drunk?” Kalindra finally asked him.
“No, I—” He swallowed, fought down the temptation to mumble a prayer to Khored. Jarith wondered for a fleeting crystal moment if he should tell her. Tell her that he knew the truth. Tell her that he knew where her true loyalties lay.
But he was too scared she’d leave.
“Marry me,” he said instead.
Kalindra laughed and then stopped laughing as she realized he was serious. “What?”
“Marry me,” Jarith repeated.
“No,” Kalindra said.
It was Jarith’s turn to look confused and incredulous. “No?”
“No!” Kalindra repeated. “Gods, no! How can you even ask me a thing like that? You don’t know a thing about me, Jarith. I’m a horrible person.”
“You’re not.”
She looked appalled and then angry. “You don’t … you don’t know that! You can’t make a snap judgment like…” She was so angry she was rendered near speechless and sputtering.
“Kalindra.” He kept his voice soft, his movements gentle as he reached for her. “Marry me.”
“No,” she said again, but her expression softened. “Ask me another time.”
He did. The fifth time, she said yes.