As A God Page 2

  Cur’s eyes narrowed, and his shoulders straightened even under the weight of his chains. Sequa nodded sharply.

  “That’s right. Stand like a man.” Turning back to the older woman, the Champion bowed again. “I am honored, Blessed.”

  Anem remembered that the only time you could tell just how much Sequa mocked most people was when she showed true respect to someone.

  The Shadow of the Goddess nodded sharply once. “You should be. But I am not here for you.” Her hands sketched a circle. “I come for them. To prevent the slaughter.”

  The wind blew chill in that little circle of women for a moment, and Anem suppressed a deep shiver. Sequa rocked back onto her heels, and both her hands lifted in confusion as though she had forgotten she held her swords. It made a very different gesture with steel in hand. She dropped them again swiftly and appeared discomfited, shoulders working under the blackened surface of her armor.

  “Don’t the Gods have better things to do than interfere with my life for once?” She almost muttered, deep in that ruined throat.

  The Shadow of the Goddess cut at Sequa with her eyes. “Don’t blaspheme.”

  “Apologies. To you.”

  The hostile noise of the crowd grew again, though more tentative as people remarked on the Shadow’s presence. On the other side of the gallows, one large, fully-veiled man in a butcher’s apron shoved forward far enough to break the ring of guards. Parri spun from where he stared at the three women and neatly backhanded him across the face; he fell, and his companions dragged him back into the crowd.

  “Shadow, what have you seen?” Anem tried hard to keep the urgency from her voice and mostly failed.

  “Not I. The Voice has come, and the God came with him. The Father of All But Himself spoke of blood and death…and injustice. I warned you, Commander.”

  “What was I to do about it?” Anem hissed like an angry cat.

  “Not execute an innocent man.”

  Sequa laughed in earnest, an aching cough of a noise that ended with a wet choke; there would be blood on her lips under the mask.

  “Will the Voice of the God call Cur innocent to the court of the mob? Will He clear his name?” Mockery now, full and clear in her voice as the light of the God now peeked out from the horizon. Sweat pooled under Anem’s armor, mostly not caused by the Godslight.

  The Shadow raised one hand palm up and tipped it over. “We have no secular power. We can have no direct intervention on the law or governance of the city. The Goddess placed that upon us at the founding. But others can, and the Goddess sent a blade to cut this knot. I told you to stop blaspheming. I will not ask again.”

  Silence swirled like a water funnel around them, even the growing noise of the crowd dimming and fading. Anem watched in sick fascination as the Shadow of the Goddess grew hazy with a pearlescent glow. Behind her head, the sharp, birdlike motions of the crowd grew slow and languid.

  Sequa…contracted. The snarling lips of the wolf face she wore rippled in the uncertain light. Behind the mask, only blackness could be seen.

  With a jerk, Anem shook her head, and the fanciful images vanished. The scene returned to just a tiny figure in armor looking up at a taller woman in a bone-white gown.

  Sequa turned to her and nodded, her words barely audible. “I will stand Champion for him, Commander. It is my title after all.”

  Sharp glances like assassin’s knives parried back and forth among the women. Anem sighed. “Do it then. Let this all play out.”

  The wolf’s mouth poorly concealed a sudden manic smile. Leaping lightly onto the gallows next to Cur, Sequa raised her uncanny blades over her head. The God chose then to burst from behind His veil of cloud. The steel flashed, casting a watery, silver glow in bands through the air. Under that net of light, the nearly raging crowd stilled and slowed.

  Anem closed her eyes for a heartbeat, her head throbbed with pain.

  Sequa’s throat might have been scarred but she could get volume out of it when she needed to. “I name this man falsely accused.” She took an audible deep breath and slowly revolved around to cover the whole crowd with her gaze. “Any who question me, I will take up their challenge. I stand in his stead.”

  Then she slashed the blades down, neatly—impossibly—severing the chains on Cur’s wrists. A second, slower cut and the rest of them slithered down his body to make a clinking pile at his feet. Free of their weight, Cur rose up and up, towering above the woman who had stayed his execution. For a long moment they stared at each other in some strange communion, hemmed and bound by metal. The crowd closest to the ring of guards started back in a slow, contracting wave—from his sudden menace, from those eye-hurting bright blades. From the pledge she had just made, as if even standing too close would be seen as a challenge.

  The two former slaves, large and small, jumped down from the gallows and came to stand next to the Commander and her second. Cur almost quivered with tension. Sequa’s posture became so indolent Anem wanted to slap her.

  “Form up,” Anem snapped at Parri. “Form them up. We need to get back to the walls before the mood changes again.” She looked over at the Shadow. “Of course you brought no attendants with you?”

  The living avatar of the Goddess shrugged placidly. “No.”

  Anem made an exasperated noise and gestured at her horse, being held nearby and stamping nervously. “Mount, Shadow. If the crowd breaks through our lines, ride them down.”

  The Shadow’s head tilt became an eloquent little study in polite negation, but she mounted the horse and took the reins firmly in hand.

  Sequa and Cur exchanged a look then flanked the beast without being asked. Cur put one hand on its glossy flank; Sequa stood facing the crowd on her side with her blades still drawn. No matter how enraged that crowd, the holy aura of the avatar of the Goddess would give them pause. The horse and its rider were the best shield they had.

  Anem stepped close to Sequa, bending down to mouth in her ear. “If the mob tries to take her—”

  “It will not.” Sequa’s eyes had taken on the same sheen as her blades, deadly and perfect. “It will die first.”

  Anem had been present at the Arena in Seahome when Sequa had fought for—and won—her freedom. Three Measures ago, she had seen the little warrior rise from the dirt soaked in her own blood, seen her kill, barehanded, her last opponent in the Run, seen her crawl over the line that marked the finish. Seen her rise from the dirt a free woman for the first time in her life. She made no idle promise.

  The guards had formed up around them and at Anem’s signal, began their slow retreat back down the road. If steel and bold words momentarily cowed the crowd, they lost their awe swiftly.

  More blood than that of the slaughtered beasts could be scented in the air.

  Even with the whole group of guards she had brought, the hasty reinforcements called from the city, the presence of the Shadow of the Goddess, and Sequa’s own storied blades flashing under the God they still barely made it back to the city alive. Four times some foolhardy soul tried to grab at Cur; twice they were beaten back by the guards of the Iron Quarters and once by Sequa laying the tip of a sword against a charging man’s throat.

  The fourth man lost the hand that reached out to the Hawk’s steel and the crowd kept a better distance for a little while.

  The crowd followed them all the way to the outer gates of the Iron Quarters. Anem finally breathed freely only when the barricade dropped behind them. The Shadow of the Goddess dismounted and gently stroked her mount’s nose; the brash, willful war horse cuddled into her shoulder.

  Like yard fowl sensing the high flight of the predator above, Anem sensed the moment Sequa tried to fade out of the group.

  “You cannot leave now… Champion. Champion twice. I would have speech with you most urgently.”

  Sequa turned casually from where she had been slinking along the outer wall to a main door at the far end of the courtyard and made a gesture of polite attendance…which carried a second meaning t
o a Child of Home.

  I am not yours to command.

  Anem responded sharply, unconsciously, with a gesture she had nearly forgotten she knew. In common parlance, it meant please remain.

  Children of Home learned that the common gestures had other meanings, to allow them to speak privately even in a crowd. Home twisted that gesture back on itself. Stay or die.

  Sequa straightened her shoulders slightly—exaggerated surprise—and then bowed.

  The Shadow of the Goddess had disappeared when Anem looked back. Not one of her people could say when the avatar had left.

  They lodged Cur in the Iron Quarter’s cells that night since Anem did not dare bring him out onto the streets of the city again. In the long term, he would have to go to the city’s only prison, The End of the Road as it was called, but for now, anger and weariness won over dealing with the logistics of the move.

  At the first landing, Anem gestured Sequa to continue up. The small woman paused next to Cur for a moment and had another brief dialogue with him, his lanky form bent nearly double to put his mouth to her ear. Then he was herded down the long hallway to his cell and the women—and Parri—proceeded to Anem’s office on the top floor of the building.

  The room stretched the width of the building and had a door to the Noble’s Way along the inward wall. It also had four windows, fitted with mobile slatted wood to let in air without breaching the holy law for any of the Commander’s ignoble visitors.

  Sequa could therefore have removed her helmet and mask at any time.

  Anem’s lips thinned, but she said nothing. Sequa could claim pious obedience to the law kept her face covered. Not for the insolence of it. Not for the concealment.

  The wolf’s muzzle faced the Commander, turning a little to each side as though studying the changes three Measures of the Dance in Ressen had made on the maps and lists pinned to the walls.

  When last Sequa had been in this office it had been in the middle of the most-recent Great Run. She had been one of the Runner slaves sent from the Michelian Stable to race from the capitol to the eastern city of Seahome, on the great waters. Less than half the slaves who started each Run, held every four Measures in honor of the gods, reached the mid-way point in Anem’s city. Less than half of those would make it to the end and their bid for freedom. The rest would fall to injury, to death by the elements, and to the other Runners. Sequa and Cur, from the same Stable, had both reached the Seahome. Cur had been found half-dead in an alley with one of Sequa’s blades pinning his foot to the earth at the end of the Run.

  Sequa had killed her final opponent with her bare hands in front of a screaming crowd and crawled over the line that marked victory, her blood turning the dirt to mud under her.

  “You still have that wonderful map,” Sequa said, gesturing at the miniature model city that took up one whole banquet sized long table on the back wall of the room. “Does someone come in and change it every time a building burns down?”

  “They don’t burn down that often. I just prise them from the board myself in need,” Anem replied.

  Parri frankly prowled around behind the former slave, who stood relaxed and openhanded in her expensive armor. The mottled, matte leather held the eye and drank the muted light of the God where He slipped between the wooden bars on the windows. Despite her still simmering anger, Anem found herself blurting out the question she had asked herself when Sequa had landed on the gallows. “Who made that for you?”

  Sequa made a gesture of appreciation, right hand to chest for a moment. “It was…a gift, in fact. From the master of one of the nomad markets in the south that move with the sand and the winds. The hand-bows they use are much more powerful than our own. It takes all their skill to make armor that even resists those bolts. In time, they found a way of fashioning leather that makes it fearsomely strong and supple.”

  “The steel plates don’t hurt for that, I’d think.” That got Anem a slightly more emphatic gesture of approval, and a shift in stance that would have indicated genuine surprise in anyone else.

  “Ah, my addition. They have skilled smiths, making blades as light as a feather and near as strong as mine. Yet, no one had thought to put those skills together before I suggested it. They might start exporting it here soon. I should take a fee.”

  Parri snorted. He had never met Sequa before, rising to his position only in last Measure with the death of her old second-in-command. Knowing this slight, arrogant figure only from the chaos and trouble she had caused, his opinion had not started high and had not gotten any higher. He didn’t recognize the gift she had offered them both.

  Ressen was a free city only by virtue of its preeminence in trade. Wealth made it possible to resist the royal family, to make a world where a woman could rule directly by the strength of her fist and not coyly by what rested between her thighs. Anem would make certain her eyes and ears in the south heard of this new armor and made good friends with the smiths who fashioned it.

  “I don’t think more’n a handful of people in all the kingdom could afford what that suit costs,” Parri said derisively.

  Sequa turned her head to look at him where he had come to rest, near the Noble’s door. “I would not know the cost. I paid for it, yes, but not in gold. I won it, truly.”

  “In what contest?”

  “Nothing that you could triumph in.” The boundless hauteur of the words belied the tone, flat and even. A statement of fact only.

  The memory of her entrance into his life seemed to flash before Parri. Whatever hot reply he had intended to make cooled and died on his tongue. His skill with a blade had brought him to Anem’s attention but it his skill with people—despite his bluff front—had raised him to her right hand. He had taken his first measure of Sequa. He settled back against the wall, studying now.

  “Sequa, take off the mask.” Anem made the words mild, a request rather than a command.

  “Why?”

  Expecting flat refusal, Anem paused in surprise a moment. Sequa smoothly pried herself into the gap.

  “Commander, I cannot think you long to look upon my…glory. So, why?”

  Anem, startled, spoke honestly. “I wanted Parri to see.” Spoken baldly like that, her words had a voyeuristic flavor that sat ill on her tongue.

  Her face had been Sequa’s most guarded secret—not a proud or happy one. Anem herself had seen it only once, in a brief moment of mourning and never desired to see it again.

  Silence gathered heavy in the air till Anem could all but taste it, ashes and salt. The small figure stood impressively still, not so much as a twitch of the fingers revealing the flare of thought and mood. Children of Home learned to keep their thoughts from spilling out into their bodies.

  She could not, would not, compel obedience to the request. The other woman deserved that respect at least.

  To her surprise, Sequa abruptly reached up and unclipped hidden buckles on the left side of the mask without arguing any further.

  Unevenly muffled as she slid the leather and metal off her head, Sequa simply remarked, “We will be working close beside one another—it is right that he should see my true face.”

  Startled again into honesty, Anem muttered, “As if anything about your surface was truth.”

  Mask off, Sequa aimed a twisted smile at Anem. It matched her twisted face. Anem looked—truly looked—at her for the first time that day.

  The last few Measures had changed the smaller woman very little. Still lean and hard, her breasts and hips pared down to bone by the effort needed to maintain her skills. And yet not mannish, her limbs slender bundles of flat muscle, her fingers long and mobile. She walked softly even in armor and stood lightly. Motionless on the edge of movement and moving with precise grace. Easier to remember she was as skilled a dancer as she was a fighter and beautiful in motion.

  Her face was a horror.

  The left side was smooth, pale peasant’s skin, framed by dark hair shot with white streaks and patches despite her youth; from the scant histo
ry Anem had of her, it had always been thus. The shaggy length folded and pinned to make a pad for the helmet. An errant stripe of hair brushed her high cheekbone, the strands of white in the black blending into the porcelain complexion. Thin, elegant fingers tucked the strand behind a small, flat ear with a swift gesture. Those strange eyes flashed blue turning silver that faded to pure black, making her pupils look depthless and oddly sized. Her lips, pale pink, downturned at the left edge.

  On the right half of her face, a ridged mass of scars and adhesions stood proud from the skin. It looked as though a child had drawn a razor across it in random patterns, slashing flesh to the bone over and over. Her jaw hung warped and offset on that side with the scars extending down the throat; her cheekbone was a sullen misshapen lump that looked to burst from the skin. The long, sharp line of the nose crazed to one side, jarringly. Most of the right ear remained in ragged shreds. Her lips, thinned and forced upward with the scar tissue, made that crooked, evil smile.

  Parri flinched away when she turned toward him, and there was no mistaking the naked satisfaction that flowed into her posture. Sequa completed the turn and abruptly pulled over one of the hard, wooden stools Anem kept for visitors, dropping the helmet on it but remaining on her feet.

  “You’ve been growing your hair,” Anem said.

  “I always preferred it longer, but then I could wash it as needed. Veils are more forgiving of long tresses. I have considered shaving it again, recently. I rarely stand barefaced. Under the leather and metal, it can chafe.”

  Anem grunted in commiseration. “I envy the men of my command who need never care for such things.”

  “Yeeeesssssss,” Sequa drawled, “for you and I are such frivolous, innocent maidens, with nothing to think of but our hair and our garments.”

  They both laughed. Sequa’s sounded like a dog barking.

  “I had thought to find someone here in the city to cut it suitably but I would have had to reveal my face to do that. And I didn’t… I thought it best to remain a shadow until I knew what was going to happen with Cur.” Sequa nodded slightly at Anem then.