Rhys knew him.
“Majere …” Rhys whispered, awed.
The god regarded him steadily, not answering.
“Majere!” Rhys faltered. “I need your council. Tell me what I must do.”
“You know what you must do, Rhys,” said the god calmly. “First you must bury the dead and then you must cleanse this room of death, so that all is clean in my sight. On the morrow, you will rise with the morning sun and make your prayers to me, as usual. Then you must water the livestock and turn the cows and horses out to pasture and take the sheep to the fields. Then weed the garden . .”
“Pray to you, Master? Pray for what? All of them died and you did nothing!”
“Pray for what you always pray for, Rhys,” said the god. “Perfection of the body and the mind. Peace and tranquility and serenity…”
“As I bury the dead bodies of my brethren and my parents,” Rhys returned angrily, “I pray to you for perfection!”
“And to accept with patience and understanding the ways of your god.”
“I don’t accept it!” Rhys retorted, his rage and anguish knotted inside him. “I will not accept it. Chemosh has done this. He must be stopped!”
“Others will deal with Chemosh,” said Majere imperturbably.
“The Lord of Death is not your concern. Look inside yourself,
Rhys, and seek the darkness within your own soul. Bring that to the light before you try to wrestle with the darkness of others.”
“And what of Lleu? He must be brought to justice—”
“Lleu speaks truly when he claims that Chemosh has made him invincible. You can do nothing to stop him, Rhys. Let him go.”
“And so you would have me skulk here, safe inside these walls, tending to sheep and mucking out the barn while Lleu goes forth to commit more murders in the name of the Lord of Death? No, Master,” said Rhys grimly. “I will not turn away and let others take on what is my responsibility.”
“You have been with me fifteen years, Rhys,” said Majere. “Every day, murder and worse has been done in this world. Did you seek to stop any of them? Did you search for justice for these other victims?”
“No,” said Rhys. “Perhaps I should have.”
“Look inside your heart, Rhys,” said the god. “Is what you seek justice or vengeance?”
“I seek answers from you!” Rhys cried. “Why didn’t you protect your chosen from my brother? Why did you forsake them? Why am I alive and they are not?”
“I have my reasons, Rhys, and I do not need to share those reasons with you. Faith in my means that you accept what is.”
“I cannot,” said Rhys, glowering.
“Then I cannot help you,” said the god.
Rhys was silent, his inward battle raging. “So be it,” he said abruptly and turned away.
6
Rhys woke from a profoundly disturbing dream in which he denied his god to throbbing pain and flickering light and a rough, wet tongue licking his forehead. He opened his eyes. Atta stood over him, whining and licking his wound. He gently pushed the dog away and tried to sit up. Rhys’s stomach heaved, and he was sick. He lay back down with a groan. The monks’ rigorous practice session often resulted in injuries. Learning how to treat such injuries and how to bear pain was considered an important part of their training. Rhys recognized the symptoms of a cracked skull. The pain was acute and he longed to give into it, to sink back into the darkness, where he would find relief. Victims who did that, however, often did not ever wake up. Rhys might not have awakened, if it hadn’t been for Atta.
He fondled her ears, mumbled something unintelligible, and was sick again. His head cleared a little and a wave of bitter memory washed over him, along with the realization of his own danger.
He sat up swiftly, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain, and looked for his brother.
The room was dark, too dark to see. Most of the thick beeswax candles had gone out. Only two remained burning and their flames wavered in the melting wax.
“I’ve been unconscious for hours,” he murmured dazedly. “And where is Lleu?”
Blinking through the pain, trying to bring his eyes into focus, he cast a swift glance around the room but saw no sign of his brother.
Atta whined, and Rhys petted her. He tried to recall what had happened, but the last thing he remembered was his brother’s charge against Majere: He has neither the will nor the power to stop Chemosh.
One of the candles sputtered and went out with a sizzle. Only one tiny flame remained burning. He fondled the dog’s silky ears and he had no need to ask why Lleu had not murdered him while he was unconscious.
Rhys did not have to look far for his savior. Atta lay with her head in his lap, regarding him anxiously with her dark brown eyes.
Rhys had seen Atta stand guard on the sheep during an attack on the flock by a mountain lion, placing her body between those of the sheep and the lion, facing it fearlessly, brown eyes meeting and holding the cat’s yellow-eyed gaze until it turned and slunk away.
He let his eyes close drowsily, petting Atta and imagining her standing over her unconscious master, glaring balefully at Lieu, her lip curled to let him see the sharp teeth that might soon be sinking into his flesh.
Lleu might be invincible, as he claimed, but he could still feel pain. The yelp he’d given when Atta hit him had been real enough. And he could still picture quite vividly what it would feel like to have those sharp teeth sinking into his throat.
Lleu had backed down and run off. Run away … run away home .
Atta barked and leapt to her feet, jolting Rhys awake. “What’s the matter?” he asked, sitting up, tense and afraid.
Atta barked again and he heard another bark, distant, coming from the sheep pen. The bark was uneasy, but it was not a warning. The other dogs could sense something was wrong. Atta kept barking and Rhys wondered grimly what she was telling them, how she would describe this horror that man had perpetrated on man.
He woke again to find that she was barking at him.
“You’re right, girl. I can’t do this,” he muttered. “Can’t sleep. Have to stay awake.”
He forced himself to stand, using the bench to pull himself up. He found his emmide lying on the floor beside him, just before the flame of the final candle drowned in its own wax and went out, leaving him in moonlit darkness, surrounded by the dead.
The throbbing ache in his head made thinking difficult. He focused on the pain, and he began to mold it and shape it and press it, compact it into a ball that became smaller and smaller the more he worked on it. Then he took the small ball of pain and placed it inside a cupboard in his mind and shut the door upon it. Known as Ball of Clay, this was one of many techniques developed by the monks to deal with pain.
“Majere,” he began the ritual chant without thinking. “I send my thoughts upward among the clouds—”
He stopped. The words meant nothing. They were empty, held no meaning. He looked into his heart where the god had always been and could not find him. What was there was ugly and hideous. Rhys gazed inside himself a long time. The ugliness remained, a blot on perfection.
“So be it,” he said sadly.
Leaning on his staff for support, he staggered toward the door. Atta padded along beside him.
First, he needed to determine what had become of Lleu. He thought it possible that his brother was lurking somewhere around the monastery, waiting in ambush to offer up his final victim to Chemosh. Logic dictated Rhys search the stables, to see if horse or wagon was missing. He kept close watch as he went, peering intently into every shadow, pausing to listen for sounds of footsteps. He looked often at Atta. She was tense because she felt her master’s tension and watchful because he was watchful. She gave no sign that anything was amiss, however.
Rhys went first to the barn, where the monks kept a few cows and the plow horses. The wagon his parents had driven was still here, parked outside. He entered the barn cautiously, his staff raised, more than half-expecting Lleu to attack him from the darkness.