“He’ll find ways to communicate,” Socia muttered. “There’ll be a reason he fled to those islands.”
“Yeah.” Bernardin laughed. “There is. That’s where the storm put him down.” He explained. Serenity’s convoy, hugging the coast, had been caught in a squall and driven off shore. Serenity’s vessel had gone aground on rocks off Little Pinoché. The deposed Patriarch was among the few survivors. “He was headed for Arnhand. Anne of Menand would have taken him in.” But ships from Navaya’s allies had set a blockade almost before Serenity had gotten himself dried out.
Brother Candle pushed back from the table. “I’ve begun to suffer an intellectual malaise. I’ve become too comfortable here.”
Bernardin observed, “Here he goes, fishing for compliments.”
Socia snapped, “Bernardin, you’re too cynical. He’s a Perfect. They’re never happy unless they’re barefoot in the snow, starving, and being hunted by people who want to burn them.”
“This one squeals like a pig whenever we ask him to do something where he might get his tootsies wet.”
Pressed, Brother Candle would have admitted as much. But he was sixty-eight years old. That slowed a man. It left him inclined to ease the strain on his bones. “I’ll be back on the road soon enough to beat the first snow.” Snow arrived earlier every winter.
All conversation died. All eyes turned to the Perfect.
“What?”
“Why on earth would you…?”
“At your age?”
“My age? My age wasn’t a factor when somebody wanted me hustling messages and tokens back and forth between Antieux and Khaurene.”
Socia said, “It’s a factor because you mean so much to us. We don’t want you to leave.”
The Count agreed. “That’s as plain as it can be said, Master.”
Socia added, “You keep up this nonsense, I’ll get Kedle to break your leg.”
“That seems harsh.”
“Tough love, old man. Tough love.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. It is an intimidating journey and these old bones do have too many miles on them already. Meantime, though, I have to deliver you to the mercies of Mistress Alecsinac.”
“I was hoping you’d forget.”
“Get going, Socia,” Raymone snapped.
“An’ it please Your Lordship.” Socia rose, offered a mock bow. It was none too deep. Her stomach got in the way. Leaving the room a step behind the Perfect, she said, “Mistress Alecsinac may know how to convince this beast that it’s time to leave.”
2. Realm of the Gods: Great Sky Fortress
A small world. Just a harbor town with a mountain behind. Suddenly, sharp as a hammer strike, all color vanished.
The small world went on, but in tones of gray.
“The Aelen Kofer are gone. The Realm is closed.”
Nothing and no one could escape.
The spike of a mountain reared into ill-defined clouds of a darker gray. A determined eye might discern a ghost of a rainbow outside the structure that crowned the mountain, the Great Sky Fortress of the Old Ones, the gods who once ruled the northern middle world.
Light leaked from one trio of windows high on the face of the fortress. The Aelen Kofer, the wondrous dwarves who had created the Great Sky Fortress and its rainbow bridge, had abandoned the Realm of the Gods to folk from the middle world, the world of men.
The room behind those windows was large but crowded by nine people, including sorcerers, soldiers, women, children, and two men deeply tainted by the Night. Of artifacts most notable were four falcons loaded with shot capable of slaying the very gods and four huge bottles dwarf-blown from silver alloyed glass, teardrop shaped, with stems that narrowed to the diameter of a finger after a right-angle turn into the wall opposite the windows. Tables groaned under an abundance of materials and instruments both mundane and magical.
The sorcerers and Night-touched were up amongst the silver glass alembics, preparing. The others waited at the falcons with smoldering slow matches in hand. The woman in the forward group turned. “Everyone ready? Vali? Lila?” Those two girls stood behind the falcons farthest left and right. They nodded nervously. “Piper? Anna?” The man and woman at the center pair of falcons nodded. “Pella? Set to jump in where you’re needed?” The surly boy behind everyone else also nodded.
“All right, then. Let’s conjure some gods.”
She was Heris, elder sister of the soldier, Piper Hecht, playing the role of sorceress here though she had no talent in that area. The men forward with her were Cloven Februaren, Ferris Renfrow, called the Bastard, and Asgrimmur Grimmsson. Februaren might be the great sorcerer of the age. Renfrow was the get of a human hero and minor goddess. Grimmsson carried shards of the souls of that goddess and her divine father within him.
Heris turned slowly, considering the hundred lanterns and scores of mirrors that would make certain there were no shadows in which a supernatural entity could hide.
“Well?” the Bastard demanded, though in a whisper, as he scratched at a bandage on his left wrist.
The woman raised a beaker containing an ounce of his blood. Only the blood of a descendent of the Old Ones had the power to complete the ritual of opening. It had taken a year to gather everything else.
Heris emptied the beaker into a tulip-shaped piece of glass on the end of a long glass stem. The blood was still warm.
A scarlet bar an eighth of an inch in diameter descended the hollow stem.
Tension mounted.
Heris blurted, “Shit! I think I overlooked…”
The chamber shuddered. Glass rattled. Sputtering slow matches moved nearer the touch holes of falcons.
One of the silver glass alembics rattled. Both the Bastard and the ascendant, Grimmsson, talked to the wall, neither in a modern language. The Bastard spoke a tongue he had used as a boy, centuries ago. The ascendant spoke both Andorayan of centuries past and a language garnered from the fragmentary souls inside him. Both men counseled patience and caution. Anything less would be rewarded with instant oblivion at the hands of mortals who had discovered the art of killing gods.
The Night knew the soldier, Piper Hecht, as the Godslayer. He had found the means. His sister Heris had ruthlessly extinguished Kharoulke the Windwalker, the most wicked of the deities who first plagued the middle world.
The mission here was to release gods of the generation that had overthrown Kharoulke and his kin. Gods who had been tricked into imprisonment by the ascendant.
Some doubted the need for a release effort. Kharoulke was no longer a threat to make himself supreme god of a world buried under ice. Heris had ended that threat with help from the Aelen Kofer.
Heris wanted divine allies. One evil had fallen but Kharoulke had kin who were growing stronger, too.
The Bastard and the ascendant talked fast and loud. The Old Ones had to understand that there had been changes. If they behaved with customary divine arrogance they would be exterminated before they could collect their wits.
Piper Hecht said, “Stay calm, ladies,” from behind his falcon, to his companion, Anna Mozilla, and their adopted daughters. “The jars will hold them long enough for them to grasp their situation.”
Heris said, “As long as we don’t get a really nasty one first.” The rattling alembic filled with sudden smoke.
“Well, shit!” Renfrow swore.
The ascendant rumbled, “You had to say it, woman! That’s Red Hammer.”
“Of course,” Hecht muttered. The ever-impulsive and never-bright god of thunder always handled a situation by smashing things.
The ascendant roared in the tongue of the gods, face inches from the rattling big bottle-avoiding getting into lines of fire.
The other alembics filled, less quickly.
The emotions of the escaping gods were potent. Hecht felt them clearly. They were not pleased.
A second Instrumentality now shared the alembic first filled by Red Hammer. Ghost faces glared through the silver glass. Hecht did not recall the god’s name but did sense his role in the pantheon of the Old Ones.