As A God Page 3

  “Well, I suppose you need not worry about that any longer.”

  “No. Just the idea of letting anyone near my throat with a bared blade.”

  Anem coughed lightly into her hand and brought her fingers down to tap the table all at once. Well said.

  Parri cleared his throat into the little domestic interlude. “My wife has an artist’s touch with the shears. If you would see her, she might help.”

  “I would welcome it. A gracious offer. I thank you.” In her appearance, the warrior appeared ascendant, hard and terrible; when she spoke, Anem was reminded Sequa had lived most of her life as the darling of a noble house and learned diplomacy therein. The rough voice grew nearly smooth with sincere-sounding courtesies.

  Anem rubbed the back of her neck. She had a little, raised nub of scar tissue there where her own helmet rested. Sometimes she picked at it till it bled. A little pause came in the conversation. Sequa watched them both. Parri visibly thinking, and she herself speechless and thoughtless, simply at a loss. Of all the outcomes of this wretched day, this one had never so much as crossed her thoughts. She might as well start with that then.

  “I never thought we would see you in this city again, Champion.” Anem did not intend to squander the rare luxury of being able to study someone’s face in conversation despite the little advantage here. Speaking barefaced with Sequa had the quality of dueling with someone of great—but unquantified—skills, exhilarating and frustrating at the same time.

  “I had not expected to be seen.” In calm speech, Sequa obviously tried to soften her voice with the effect of dropping almost into a whisper. “But I had travelled south, to the principalities of sand and salt, and Ressen lies on the most direct path back… ” She faltered then and fell silent, her posture growing odd discomfited.

  Very likely feigned. But if it wasn’t?

  Anem weighed questions. Back to where? Back from where? Why were you in the primitive southern lands? Were you really there at all? Why didn’t you run straight to your husband, freewoman? The former slave would answer any of those questions with complete fabrications. She settled on one that might get a little truth in answer.

  “Why did you affect this rescue, Sequa, and put your own life in jeopardy?” The quiet air took on a charged quality behind the heart of the whole issue.

  Sequa graced Anem then with the most direct, honest answer she had ever given. “Because he did not answer you.”

  Parri made a confused sound from the wall. Sequa gestured with one hand, held out palm up at waist level. Wait; listen. “It is a Runner…custom. Gather a group of young men and they will rough house, they will play cruel tricks. If you are caught in some misdeed, you may lie or mislead or bargain your way out of punishment. Part of the game.

  But if you are accused of something you did not do, you do not speak. You stay silent. You take the punishment, and you never complain. Stature is gained from it and a twisted kind of honor.”

  “And no one ever perverted it?”

  “Not often and not ever twice. For afterward, you would still have to face your fellows on the field and they will show no mercy.”

  “So, by Blood and Bone, if they knew this, why would the stable masters ever punish the silent?” Parri questioned from his patch of wall. Sequa turned to look at him, and nodded slightly.

  “They knew, of course. They had to. But the world is as they created, constable. They made these little games of prestige and power, to create better fighters to die for their pleasures. They made it, wittingly or not. Why would they care to change anything about it?”

  In her own heart, Anem had always felt Cur innocent of these crimes. Something about his refusal to debate, to beg forgiveness, to bargain. She had no one else to blame, and there was much to recommend him as the killer. Still, she had been living with a niggling sense of doubt. “That is a fragile thread for me to hang a verdict on, Sequa.”

  Another deliberate gesture—hands spreading out to the sides. Normally that meant a consolatory I cannot help you—save when performed by a Child of Home. In Home, it became an aggressive gesture, I do not care what you think. The pain in Anem’s head increased; she had no way of knowing which Sequa meant or exactly how insulted she should be.

  “Commander, I did not expect the argument to sway anyone. Hence—Champion.”

  Anem stared into the broken face before her, searching for a twitch, a blink, a grimace. Anything that might explain why what should have been a simple afternoon of guilt and recrimination became now a sucking chest wound of complications.

  “No one even knew you had entered the city, Sequa.”

  “Good.”

  Parri rolled his eyes and broke in, “So you could have left just the same.”

  “Yes.”

  Sequa had a very clear look on her face now, which meant she wanted Anem to read it. I am going to be as difficult and bloody-minded as I can be. Because I can be. A game they could both play.

  “So, why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes.”

  Sequa’s eyes glinted in appreciation. “Why did no one know I was in the city?”

  “Not at the moment. I would know why you put your life in peril for a man I must admit I did not think you even thought well of.”

  Her response was a shrug and a flick of first finger and thumb on the left hand. I don’t care admixed with I had to. “I paid for his freedom, Commander. He is…mine.”

  It sounded honest, so of course she did not believe it. But perhaps that was intentional; the best lies came couched in truth.

  So for another long moment they stared at each other, the Runner and the Commander, little flickering glances searching out small twitches, shifts of stance, motions, and stillness. Their shared language, deeper and harder than the social conventions that had grown-up haphazardly elsewhere, turned the whole process into a sparring match. No, for sparring did not intend to be deadly, and speaking with the little, scarred creature before her always brought the sensation that a bad phrasing or vulgar jest would end in blood.

  Anem reconciled to knowing she was likely to be the loser, but she would wring some information from her opponent first. Something about her eyes—well, eye, the scar tissue around the right side of her face made any expression there unreliable, another unfair advantage—revealed some tension building across the cheek and jaw. Whatever the answer, it went deep.

  “He is a free man,” said Parri from his spot on the wall. “You don’t own him.”

  The timing was impeccably horrible.

  “He’s very good at almost everything else,” sighed Anem, relaxing backward and spreading her own hands out in the gesture of completion. “He’s never really had to deal with this sort of thing.”

  “It is a handicap of the merchant-born. They miss both the extremes of expression. Half the Iron Quarters are former Children, though, Commander. Surely they would have shown him something?”

  “No, they hold the code, mostly.” Over Sequa’s shoulder, Anem saw Parri’s eyes narrow as he registered they were discussing him. She flicked her hand out at the level of her shoulder—leave it—and refocused her attention on the Runner. She would learn nothing more now. This felt like the right time to present her conditions.

  “I’m not going to let you fight him free, Sequa,” she said softly. “And you shouldn’t want me to.”

  Sequa had the courtesy to nod. Unspoken came Anem’s acknowledgement that in a death match no one, no four, no eight fighters in the city, save perhaps the accused himself, could stand against her.

  “You truly believe him to be innocent?”

  “As the Lady shines, I do.” She repeated it, almost wonderingly. “I do.”

  “Then you leave me with a manifest problem, don’t you?”

  “Since you were about the execute an innocent man, you always had the problem. I stayed you from making an irretrievable error.”

  “Two young boys are foully murdered in my city, Sequa. I must and will know by w
hose hand.”

  Sequa turned her head away, so that Anem could see only the scars. “Three. Not two. Yes. Three.” Her voice held a silken weight that made Anem’s spine itch. She did not ask what the words meant. Something about Sequa’s posture looked almost as confused as her own.

  Anem tapped a finger on the table again and remembered the words of the Shadow earlier. The Voice had come to the city, and his aura extended itself across the breadth of her domain. Truth unbidden and irresistible as the God Himself. There would be friendships broken, partnerships dissolved, marriages wrecked in the wake of his coming; truth did not bring peace for many.

  “So, you have to travel the other route. Find me my murderer, Champion.”

  Sequa picked up her helmet one handed and levered it over her disturbing scars. Her voice echoed evilly from behind the snarling muzzle. “Who better to snare a mad dog than a mad hunter?”

  Then she was gone out the ostensibly hidden door in the outside wall in a swirl of cloak and dull black metal.

  Parri turned to Anem and made an open handed gesture of pure confusion. “How did she know that door was there?”

  “This is the second time she visited me. I suspect she noticed it then.”

  “That was three Measures ago,” he said.

  “It could have been thirty, and she would remember every way in and out of this room, Parri. I have told you before, knowing your escape routes is what keeps a Child of Home alive. We…they are not built to stand and trade blows but to strike and flee.”

  “I thought she was a Runner. I remember the outcry when the Michelian Stable fielded a woman for the first time in living memory.”

  “Did you think she learned to fight like a Champion in less than one Measure of the Dance? I watched her kill her last opponent in Seahome, and I have never seen the same style in any fighter I have trained or faced. She learned the trade of a Child, swift death, and turned it to a Runner’s straightforward skill. She is something else now, some strange, multiple creature. Light and dark at once, like her hair."

  Anem shook her head. “And perhaps now she is also our savior. Let the killer hunt the killer.”

  Chapter 2

  It shocked her to see the God high in the sky when she stepped through the final door to the open walkway; she never liked walking in the light. The Noble’s Path curved off toward the interior wall that had been the original curtain for the city before memory. One floor down on the far side of the building, the next class-dedicated road—The Merchant’s Way—covered every visible street but for the main road to the gates. Below that, at the level of the dirt and cobblestones would be the Peasant’s Road, where the poor and the classless could walk freely.

  Cur’s hanging had been set for Rising and it had been only a few hours since then—of course the Father would still be climbing. Sequa sighted on the Temple and hopped the retaining wall on the far side of the Quarters. Light steps on the woven, wicker roof that covered the Merchant’s Way, and then she crossed the street to one of the long blocks of buildings that made up the majority of the city.

  The roofs appeared generally the same height with some exceptions. Here and there cropped up the terminals of stairs and ladders, raised beds of flowers and small crops. Clusters of weather-beaten furniture, looked furtive and desolate in the bright Godslight.

  In contrast, the retaining walls and city-built structures seemed meticulously maintained, clean and neat. Its walls prevented it from spreading hither and yon as the smaller provincial seats had over the centuries. The very oldest areas remained a riot of different elevations and materials, even stone and thick, rough brick. Here at the center, long expanses of uniform height and construction made for easy running.

  Seahome and the Capital had solved the maintenance problem of a large metropolis with slaves, worked hard in permanent twilight, cleaning and repairing. Ressen did it with taxes. But then Ressen dripped more riches than the royal family.

  Even with all her skin covered as the law and religious restrictions demanded, she violated tradition by being out here now. She should have been down below, walking the earth and stone of the Peasant’s Road, under the creaking wicker bottom of the Merchant’s Way. Most of the city streets were covered over by at least two layers, though there was no middle Merchant’s Way in the rich areas and no open air Noble’s Path anywhere near Under Roof or the two southern gates. No one would spend the money to build roofs over roads that no uncovered Peasant could walk or bother to uncover pavements no Noble would ever see.

  It hampered her choices strangely. Used to either a city fully built out with all three roadways under the law or the open roads and trails of a Runner, it felt odd to have to pick her paths with such care. Odd to be running the roofs of a city in Godslight. She stopped abruptly, one knee to the rough stone as something like vertigo struck her.

  She danced along the wall tops of the Kimerian estate, her home from birth, the far ones that sectioned the orchards from the common gardens and the flower beds. Below, somewhere, she could hear Jesan blundering about in the trees, cursing her half in jest. She had filched his best knife straight off his belt by the back door of the estate and fled to the walls, guiding him on with laughter. There was a break in the smooth, mortared stone, and she leapt lightly down into the peach orchard, her bare, perfect face turned happily to the God for once.

  Sequa laughed, mellow and light, and Jesan dove out of the luscious scent of ripened fruit to push her back against the wall. In the first flush of his manhood he seemed bright as the God himself, all gold and blue. She caught her breath as her childhood playmate melted away before her eyes. How had she never known before this moment?

  “Forfeit,” he muttered and framed her face with his hands…

  In the bright harsh Godslight, even a perfect memory seemed unreal.

  She pitied her, the pampered darling of her youth, who thought she knew so much of pain and loss. So much left to come.

  Coming down to a Peasant’s Road uncovered by either a Merchant’s Path or a Noble’s Way, Sequa tried to fade into the crowds on the streets and mostly failed. The armor, the swords, were too obvious. People muttered and space opened around her; she grew uncomfortable to be that visible on an open street. She paused to step out of the stream of humanity at a public square, centered around an open air altar to the Great Good God and watched as a brace of white-robed and hooded clerics with yellow and orange badges lit a ceremonial fire in the stone bowl.

  She could still fade into shadows when she needed to, for the most part, and so she sank into a corner made by the meeting of two brick and wood buildings. Watching the little ceremony soothed her jangled nerves. The clerics doused a big lump of blackrock with the Tears of the Goddess, the heavy, oily smell pervading the air even where Sequa stood. Then one of them produced a round Godseye and the square went still.

  Sequa straightened and made the God’s gesture to her forehead along with everyone else. The cleric held the Godseye up to the rays of His light, and they jumped and sparked into a fierce brightness, a thin beam of His power focused on the rock. Fire flashed and seethed, sending up a stream of thick smoke into the sky.

  “For the gifts of fire and light, we thank thee, Father of us all.”

  The clerics fussed at the altar a moment longer, collecting the coins and small trinkets left there and then walked away. They left the offering burning, and from time to time some heavily veiled figure would step over to whisper into the column of smoke, seeking the ear of the God. Once came a Merchant-born woman, her dark arms uncovered and her feet visible under a calf-length skirt.

  Sequa shook her head. Ressen’s wealth never shone more obviously than in what it could give to the Gods. Only the richest homes could afford to burn blackrock, or fill a lantern with bright-burning Tears of the Goddess. In the Capitol, only the King had access to the Godseyes for starting fires.

  But this was the holiest of places, where the Goddess Herself had once stepped to the earth. It was right to be
lavish in worship here.

  She pushed off from the wall and went directly back to her lodgings on the ground floor of an inn near Under Roof. She would sleep for a few hours, away from the eye of the God, and then go to the temple. She and the Shadow needed to have…words.

  ~ * ~

  Sequa slipped into the main altar room of the Great Temple just before Transition that evening. The room was huge, stretching from one side of the building to the other and up five stories to an open, lattice roof woven with trailing vines. Goddess-breath flowers slipped their night-blooming heads over the bars to exude sweet perfume into the air, looking like little scraps of white cloth scattered on the blue-velvet sky. The tiers of seats were full to bursting, more than you would expect for a small, daily ceremony. Sequa peeled off to the side and faded back into the relative shadow of one of the supporting pillars, watching for what might have brought the citizens out in such force.

  The Shadow of the Goddess, looking as regal and untroubled in her place of power as she had surrounded by a baying mob in the killing fields, stepped into the center of the altar space. The long falls of cloth that made up her robes glittered shyly in the cast-off light of torches, silver threads on the bone white.

  Behind her man’s veil, Sequa grinned. Bone white; clever. How many of the other people in the room worshipped the fourth God. How many secret heretics?

  Then the man stepped up next to the Shadow and sang the God to rest. His voice was swallowing a mouthful of honey, so thick and sweet you drowned in greedy pleasure. His voice was milk straight from the udder, frothy and warm, rich with cream. His voice was cool water after hours in the sun, pouring over the skin like silk. His voice was knuckles cracking in under the ribs of your adversary, rising up and twisting with the perfect precision blow that drives them to their knees.

  His voice was the moment of entry after long, teasing play, you and your lover wholly one at last.

  Sequa shuddered, admixed pleasure and terror.

  His voice.

  His Voice.