“Some now call him Morg the Merciful,” Horfnung said, spitting out the insult.
Morget nodded sagely again. “Who do you speak for?” he asked.
“Only myself,” Horfnung admitted.
“Ah. Very good. I am glad to offer you the hospitality of my tent,” he said, and stood up. Horfnung was smart enough, at least, to rise as well, and take his leave.
At the flap of the tent, however, Horfnung stopped a moment. “There are many others who would say the same things.”
“Let them come to me and speak, for there is no harm in it. Now-get out of my tent. You’re letting in the cold,” Morget said, and took a step toward the flap.
Horfnung all but ran away.
“Spittle of a man,” Morget cursed when he was gone.
Balint raised her head from where she lay on a pile of furs in the corner. “That almost sounded like a real insult,” she said. “You must be learning from me.”
Morget snarled. “I would wipe my arse with his kind if-”
“If you didn’t need their support,” the dwarf said. “Aye, barbarian, you can’t do this thing alone. If you’re still committed to doing it at all. You need to make up your mind, you know. A man sitting on a fence too long gets a post up his backside.”
But Morget had already decided. Horfnung had spoken true when he’d said many others thought the same as he. Morget had heard similar veiled threats from a hundred men already, and knew there would be no question when he made his move. Morg’s plan for taking the city wasn’t working fast enough. The barbarians were not famous for their patience. “I’ll go and make the challenge now, if you like, little one.” He reached for his axe.
“Don’t you dare. If you get cut down, they’ll make me one of their thralls. I’ll have to carry rocks and sharpen weapons for the rest of my life,” Balint said. “I could probably fuck my way out of thralldom in a month, of course, but it would be a very smelly, very sore month. No-you need to do this the classical way. In the middle of the night when no one’s looking.”
Morget scowled. He would have preferred to kill his father in broad daylight. But he supposed she had a point. Morg cheated-he was famous for it. Perhaps it was time to see how he felt when someone broke the rules on him.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
The rocks kept coming, though not as frequently as when the bombardment began. Most of the missiles struck Castle Hill-sticking up above the level of the wall, it made an excellent target-and did little harm. The constant fear of attack might actually have helped Malden a little, since it kept people off the streets.
On top of everything else-starvation, greedy thieves, a horde of barbarians-now he had to worry that the city would be overrun from within, by a mob of zealots.
The cry for blood sacrifice had been taken up all over the city. His thieves and whores seemed mostly immune, but the honest folk of Ness had given themselves over to religious mania. Every day more people claimed that if the proper sacrifices were made at the Godstone, the barbarians would have no choice but to pack up and leave. Conversely, a rumor started making the rounds that failure to appease the Bloodgod would cause the city wall to collapse.
That was not based entirely on conjecture. Malden had heard a rumor when he as a child-grisly stories being a favorite topic of conversation for street urchins-that when Juring Tarness built the wall eight hundred years ago, he had sacrificed his three chief architects to Sadu and mixed their blood with the mortar that held the bricks together. He had thereby made the wall impenetrable to mortal weapons. In eight centuries that theory had never been tested. Now it seemed an article of faith that the shield of blood must be replenished in time of need.
On his daily patrol of the city, Malden started finding the carcasses of animals lying before the Godstone. He knew better than to forbid it-even though the city desperately needed the meat. The common people of Ness, it seemed, would rather starve than risk the eternal punishment of their god. The looming altar had been ritually desecrated back when the Burgraves decided to outlaw the priesthood of Sadu, but it seemed the stone had been rededicated to the Bloodgod. For the first time in centuries it was being used for its original purpose.
The old religion had never died. It had slept for a while, but now was waking up again, and bringing with it all the old madness. Sadu called out for blood, and the people were afraid enough to answer that demand.
He went to Cutbill to ask for advice. “This morning,” Malden said, when he was seated comfortably by the ex-guildmaster’s fire, “a deputation came to me. Five men who said they wished to be ordained as priests of the Bloodgod.”
“Interesting. They think you have the power to bless them now?”
Malden raised his hands in bafflement. “They treated me like a prophet, with much deference. And it’s not as if anyone else has that right. There hasn’t been a true priest of Sadu in how long? A century?”
“Longer than that,” Cutbill told him. “Royal decree outlawed that priesthood three hundred years ago, and the Burgrave of Ness reinforced the ban a few dozen years later. And for good reason.”
Malden nodded. The priests of Sadu had once performed human sacrifices to appease their god. Some of them had not been above kidnapping and murder to make sure of a steady flow of blood-since volunteers had always been hard to come by. It had not been unheard of for one of Sadu’s priests to work as an assassin, taking money from clients and blood from victims. That was the priesthood Prestwicke tried to revive. The men who had come to Malden wanted a slightly more orthodox office to be set up, but still, they wanted the right to sacrifice animals and even humans at the Godstone. “I made them swear they wouldn’t kill anyone. But that wasn’t what they were really after. They said they would need some kind of official position in order to convince the people they truly were agents of the Bloodgod.”
“Official position? So they wanted more than just your blessing. They wanted to be part of your government.”
“They wanted me to put them in charge of distributing foodstuffs.”
“Ah. So they wanted to be the ones to eat first.”
“Everyone’s hungry. I told them as much-that I couldn’t afford preferential treatment for any of my citizens. They seemed offended. I told them I thought the whole point of Sadu-the only reason the poor still worship Him- was that every man was equal in His sight. That we all had to die and be judged, and that no social station made a man less blameworthy than his neighbor. That made them leave in a huff. But they warned me as they went. With or without my sanction, the priesthood will be renewed. And the sacrifices will start again.”
“You can hardly complain about their faith now,” Cutbill told him without sympathy. “Since it was that belief that raised you to the heights of fame in the first place.”
The former guildmaster had a point, of course. Yet it was enough to make Malden wish he’d forced the priest of the Lady to stay in Ness. The Book of the Lady forbade blood sacrifice in no uncertain terms. The laws of Skrae were founded on that book and the practice had been eliminated everywhere in the kingdom. Yet now those laws were ignored-statutes decreed by a dead king, issued from a fortress far away, impossible now to enforce. Malden knew that in the absence of such laws it was just a matter of time before he found one of his citizens at the base of the Godstone, throat slit in just the right manner. The priest of the Lady might at least have preached to the people about why human sacrifice was wrong. Now it felt as if no one remained who held that particular view-no one except himself.
If he was going to fight religion, he decided, he would need help from the occult. As soon as his duties allowed it, he headed down to the Isle of Horses. Coruth had promised him all kinds of assistance, but since the siege began, the witch hadn’t so much as showed herself in the city. He borrowed a boat at the Ditchside Stair in Eastpool (the Lord Mayor didn’t have to pay a security deposit) and rowed himself over to the forbidding island just as the sun hit the top of the wall.
Climbing up onto the withered grass on the isle’s shore, he braced himself for another attack by phantom horses. It didn’t come. There was a light burning in Coruth’s shack but no one approached him or welcomed him. He started walking slowly toward the door, expecting some nasty surprise, when he heard a shriek from within.
It sounded like Cythera. He broke into a run.
