Blood to open the way
Seed or menses to bless
Sweat to imbue
Tears to swell
Saliva to ebb
Phlegm to manifest
Yellow bile to gift
And black to take it all away
A GATHERING OF RAVENS
Kathryn knocked on the door, concerned. she had not heard from Gerrod Rothkild for over a full day. The last she had spoken to him was when Rogger had appeared at her own door, bearing the strange talisman of a rogue god’s skull.
Then nothing.
Not word, nor note.
Such silence was unlike Gerrod. Especially now. In the past day, Tashijan had swelled to bursting as retinues from all the god-realms of the First Land had arrived. But more importantly, Tylar ser Noche was due here before evening bells. With such an event pending, Kathryn had spent the morning pacing her hermitage. It had been a year since she had last seen Tylar. Certainly they’d shared messages by raven and scroll, but their duties after the Battle of Myrrwood kept them both too busy for a casual visit.
And casual was certainly beyond either of them.
Even now.
Her hands wrung at her belly. They had once been betrothed, certain to marry, sharing a bed already, first as a dalliance between knights, finally with a deeper stirring of the heart. Then Tylar had been accused of murder and broken vows. Kathryn’s own testimony before the adjudicators had gone a long way toward damning him to the slave ships of Trik and the bloody circuses that followed, where he was broken in limb and spirit. But his guilt had been fabricated from the start. He had been a blind piece in a greater game, used to weaken Tashijan and its former warden, Ser Henri.
And the cost had not fallen solely upon Tylar.
Kathryn still remembered the blood in her bed, the lost child, limbs as small as birds’ wings, expelled from her body by grief and heartache. It was this final loss that had driven her down here at that time, into self-exile, away from the staring eyes and whispers, betrothed to a murderer.
But Tylar’s only crime had been some gray dealings, traffic below the table with some sordid characters from his past, done at first to raise coin for the city’s orphanages, where both she and he had been raised. But after a time, a few silver yokes had ended up in Tylar’s own pocket. It was a familiar slide. Still, the murder of the cobbler’s family was not Tylar’s doing, despite the blood on his own sword. It took the death of two gods-Meeryn, who blessed Tylar as she lay dying, and the naethryn-possessed Chrism, whom Tylar had slain-to finally clear his name.
All should have been made right.
But it hadn’t been.
The pair remained lost to each other, bitter. Anger and guilt had rooted too deeply, becoming as much a part of them as their own bones. If Tylar hadn’t started his underhanded dealings with the Gray Traders, soiling his cloak…if I had trusted his professions of innocence to murder…if only I’d told him of our child… And though they had stumbled over words of forgiveness to each other, the words were spoken with the tongue and not the heart.
At least not yet.
But now Tylar was returning.
Kathryn knocked again, needing to consult Gerrod, ever her counselor. Long ago, Gerrod had helped lift her back into her life after she fell down here the first time. She trusted no one more, not even herself.
A coarse bark answered her. “I’m not to be disturbed!”
“Gerrod!” Kathryn called through the door. She leaned close, keeping her voice low. She had come buried in her shadowcloak, shying from others. Even now, Grace flowed through the blessed cloth to hide her among the shadows.
“ Kathryn…?”
“Yes!”
She heard steps approach, and a latch scraped back. The door swung open. Gerrod pulled it just wide enough for her to enter, but no more.
“Hurry,” he urged her.
She thought at first the master’s furtiveness was because he had shed his armor’s helmet, exposing his pale and tattooed flesh. Gerrod preferred to keep his true face hidden.
He closed the door behind her, leaned an ear against the wood, then stepped away. “Hesharian knows I’m dabbling in something secret. He’s already visited twice this morning.”
“Does he know about the skull?”
Gerrod shook his head and clanked over with a whir of mekanicals to the far side of his chamber.
Kathryn caught the whiff of burning black bile, which even the sweet scent of myrrh boiling on his braziers could not mask. She also noted the state of his room. Normally Gerrod was fastidious in his upkeep, but the four bronze braziers in the corners of the room-in the fanciful shapes of eagle, skreewyrm, wolfkit, and tyger-were blackened with smoke, and piles of ash lay unswept beneath them. At his wide desk, a teetering stack of ancient tomes covered the surface, some open, others facedown, spines bent. In one corner, a stack of scrolls had spilled to the floor, and a candle had burnt to a slagged puddle of wax with a wan flame floating in the middle.
Her friend looked just as wasted, sustained by as weak a fire.
She doubted he had slept at all since acquiring the skull.
“I think Hesharian grows suspicious of my studies,” Gerrod said. “The last time he appeared on my doorstep, he came with a strange milky-eyed master named Orquell. The man hails from Ghazal, where he has been studying among the Clerics of Naeth of that volcanic land.”
Kathryn was well familiar with the cult of Naeth. Unlike most of Myrillia, the followers shunned any worship of the aethryn, the sundered part of the gods that had fled high and away into the aether, never to be heard from again. The Clerics of Naeth sought communion with the naethryn, the undergods, through strange practices and acts of blood sacrifice. While no one had been able to prove it, if ever there was a ready source of Cabalists, it would be found there. But as the followers rarely left their subterranean lairs, they seemed harmless enough, for now.
“Why did this master come here?” Kathryn asked, suspicious of anyone associated with such clerics.
“Summoned, I heard-by Hesharian.”
Kathryn frowned.
“They’ve spent some time up in the Warden’s Eyrie. Behind closed doors.”
Kathryn suddenly remembered. “Dart mentioned such a man…”
Gerrod nodded. “From such meetings, I can fathom why Hesharian has summoned this master from Ghazal.”
“Why?”
“Because of Symon ser Jaklar, the warden’s best man, turned to stone by Argent’s corrupted sword. Hesharian still keeps the man’s body in some secret hole. But to lift the curse would surely raise our esteemed master’s status-at least within the eyes of the Eyrie.”
