As he began to tuck the stone away, the door creaked open behind him. His free hand went for his knife.
But it was a familiar figure, a page cloaked in black.
Before Dart could say a word, a call reached them both, arising from Kathryn ser Vail. The Tashijan party was departing.
Dart glanced over her shoulder, back into the room. She retreated toward the castellan, but not before her blue eyes latched upon him again. She bowed her head as if they had just agreed to something.
A secret between them.
Then she also vanished, closing the door with a snap.
Brant remembered the word she had whispered with such urgency when first caught creeping into the High Wing.
As if she had been searching for something.
Pupp…
And the strange shooing motion at him a moment ago.
Had she been warding him away-or someone else?
Brant stared at the stone in his palm. Two stones had led him to this moment. One had been pressed into his palm by Lord Jessup’s Oracle, selecting him to serve in the god’s household. But before that, another god had gifted him with another stone, the one that hung around his neck.
Was this one also a call to serve?
He pictured the fiery figure on the jungle path, crumbling in flames and rolling the stone to his toes. What did a rogue god of the hinterland need from a lone boy out of Saysh Mal?
Brant tucked the cursed stone away.
To root out that answer would take a great hunter.
But at long last, Brant had finally found his first trail marker.
He pictured the girl’s blue eyes and mumbled a name to the empty hall, full of promise as much as curiosity. “Pupp.”
A REGENT IN BLOOD
Cloaked in black, Tylar Ser Noche waited on the docks. The stars shone and the greater moon had set. It was the darkest point of the night, when both moons were gone and the sun remained only a rumor. It was also the coldest part of the night. Ice crusted the edges of the sludge canal and made the planks of the ironwood dock treacherous underfoot.
His party had been waiting for a full turn of a bell. All were buried in woolens, furred boots, and heavy cloaks. Their breath steamed the air.
“Perhaps he won’t come,” Delia whispered through a scarf about her mouth. She stood close, a head shorter and a decade younger, wrapped in an oiled black cloak lined with fox fur, its hood fringed in snowy ermine, a perfect complement to her pale skin and exacting contrast to her shadow-dark hair. The only color about her rose from the shine of her eyes, a warm hazel, green-tinged in the torchlight. “Or perhaps the letter was a forgery, one meant to lure us where there are few witnesses.”
“It was no forgery,” Tylar assured her.
The missive had arrived a fortnight ago, urging secrecy. It had been coded properly and signed with the proper sigil.
Ancient Littick for thief.
Tylar had first seen the same sigil branded on the letter-writer’s buttock. Plus a few telltale drops, richly crimson, had stained the white parchment. Not blood. Wine. Testament enough to the verity of the letter’s author.
“Rogger was never one to mind the precise ringing of a bell,” Tylar said, urging patience with a slim smile.
“Let’s hope he was precise enough about the turning of the day, then,” Sergeant Kyllan said, stamping his boots to warm his toes. The master of Chrismferry’s garrison did not like this moonless rendezvous. He scratched the tortured scar across his left cheek, scowling slightly. Kyllan had refused to allow Tylar to cross the city alone, especially in the middle of the night. There were still many who wanted Tylar dead.
And the numbers were growing daily as this endless winter stretched on. Rumbles and rumors spread through alehouses and wenchworks of a curse upon his regency. Though Tylar had slain the daemon that had attempted to usurp the god-realm of Chrismferry, the city’s gratitude was as short-lived as a bloom after the first frost. And as winter’s hardships grew, it seemed even the change of seasons had become the responsibility of the city’s new regent, a mantle Tylar wore with ill comfort.
For Tylar’s security, Kyllan had ordered ten of the garrison’s pikemen to accompany him on this dark journey across the city. But Tylar suspected it was an unnecessary escort. He had more than enough protection from the party’s one other member.
Wyr-mistress Eylan stood at the foot of the docks, dressed in deerskins and fur, a sword in hand, a half ax at her waist. Her cloak had a hood, but she did not bother pulling it up, seemingly impervious to the frigid breeze that swept up the crumbling canal from the distant Tigre River. Her skin glowed with a flushed ruddiness, a shade darker than her tanned leathers. Her black hair trailed to mid-back in a thick braid, decorated with three raven feathers.
She seemed to note his attention, glancing over to him, appraising him coldly, then looking away again.
Bound by an oath, Eylan seldom strayed far from Tylar’s side, not so much in concern for his safety as to protect a debt sworn to her lord. A year ago, Tylar had promised his seed in trade for his life and the lives of his companions, a humour of significant Grace that Wyr-lord Bennifren intended for the forges of his Black Alchemists. Tylar was determined to avoid paying that debt for as long as possible, preferably forever.
’Til then, he had gained, in Eylan, a second shadow.
Tylar returned his attention to the stagnant canal.
Nearby, a small single-sailed trawler, long abandoned, lay stripped and on its side, half-beached, hull burst, locked in ice. Tylar was surprised to find it here. The long winter had taxed the city of Chrismferry, especially the underfolk too poor for the rising cost of coal and wood. Scavenging had become commonplace. The planking of the old trawler would heat a hearth for a good turn of the moon. Yet here it remained, untouched.
Of course, here was the heart of the Blight, one of several sections of the great city long gone to seed, as abandoned and broken as the old trawler. Chrismferry spread across both sides of the Tigre River. Founded four millennia ago, it was the oldest and greatest of all the cities of the Nine Lands of Myrillia. It would take a man on a horse two days to cross from one end of the city to the other. The world was the city, the city was the world. Such was said about the first city of Myrillia.
But if true, what did the Blight signify?
The city seemed to be decaying from the inside. The borders continued to extend along the Tigre River and out into the surrounding plains, but in the past centuries, sections of the inner city had fallen into ruin. Canals filled with silt, houses fell under the rotted weight of their roofs, cobbled streets were stripped of stones, leaving only muddy, pitted tracks that daunted all manner of wheel. Soon the only inhabitants of the Blight were those seeking to lose themselves, but even these low dwellers seldom stayed long. Easier prospects could be found at the edges of the city.
Why did Rogger insist on returning to the city under such strange circumstances? The former thief had left Chrismferry a year ago under the guise of a pilgrim, to discern what he could of the state of the Nine Lands and to seek any thread or crumb about the Cabal. Since Tylar had freed the city, nothing more had been learned about the faction of naethryn-the daemonic undergods of Myrillia-who sought to kindle a new War of the Gods. Nothing until Rogger’s cryptic letter had arrived by raven. What had the thief learned that required such a dark place to meet?
The answer was not long in coming.
From the depths of the canal, a tall black fin split the waters and rose, steaming, into the frigid air. The bulk of the underwater vessel splintered ice as it surfaced, one of Tangle Reef’s undersea crafts. It appeared like a small wooden whale, fueled by the blood of Fyla, the god of the watery Reef.
A hatch behind the wood fin pushed open and was thrown back by an arm scarred by branded sigils. The owner of those brands climbed out next and balanced on the wet back of the vessel. Tylar stepped forward, recognizing his old friend. But it seemed Rogger’s time abroad had wrought ill changes in him. His scraggled red-gray beard framed a face gone gaunt. Bony cheekbones poked from beneath green eyes, his lips were cracked and split, and his skin shone with a yellowish tinge. Tylar prayed this last was just the reflected sheen of the flickering torchlight.