As A God Page 5

  “I come to think…that I should not have come here to think.”

  “Why did you come? I did not call. And so you need not stay.”

  The Voice of the God smiled bitterly.

  The Shadow of the Goddess sighed and took his hand. “Well, until you are granted leave, I am glad you are here. I think this will be turbulent at best.”

  “Indeed.” Looking over at the patch of shadow and stone where Sequa had leaped into open air. “But I still wish I knew what it meant.”

  “It means there is one person in this city with whom you might have to exert yourself.”

  ~ * ~

  The Center of the City seemed all shadows and mirages this night, false faces in the marbled stones of the statue bases, mysterious figures lurking at the edge of vision. Sequa flitted from cover to cover, the long habits of Measures would not let her walk openly on hostile paths. Ressen grew decidedly hostile. Swathed in anonymous veils, with those famous blades set aside nervously alone in her rooms, she had taken the measure of the ugly talk on the streets. Her head on a pike next to Cur’s, mostly. At least the obscene reveling in Cur’s impending execution had been snuffed out.

  She fetched up eventually against the curtain wall that hemmed the Center, the Temple close. Four large gates pierced each of the cardinal points, but she stood at the base of a covered, maintenance stairway that slunk up the wall to the top. Why it was on this side of the wall and not worked into the structure of one of the buildings butted up against the outside she did not know. But she used it for its intended purpose, albeit on the outside. The springy lathe made for easy climbing.

  At the top she paused and looked for guards patrolling the Noble’s Way that had been constructed along the broad flat stone of the wall. As lax as Ressen’s powers might have been about some aspects of royal decree and ancient customs, the Noble’s Way remained sacrosanct. She did not fancy a pursuit at the moment. She could not trust herself not to simply murder any challenging guard where he stood. The Goddess shone not over bright, nothing moved in the gloom as far as she could see. She did not intend to travel far on the Way, just touch down and over the other side.

  But when she looked over the retaining lip of the Way, she saw why the maintenance stair had been built on the far side. The building on the other side was low and massive, nearly three stories below the top of the wall and spreading several blocks in either direction. She could pick out details even in the low light that marked it as one of the blocks of living quarters the new rich among the Merchant class had built in the generation before hers. Each family group would have the same space that might house six or eight families in the Peasant quarters, with roof gardens and even bathing pools, richly appointed. The thought had been that if they did not build high to challenge the Nobles in their lofty houses then they could build well. The houses below would have servants’ quarters on the bottom floors, and they were never expected to be visited by one of the Noble blood. They would need no access to the Way.

  In a desperate moment, Sequa might have jumped that wall, tried for a precarious hand hold or somewhere to catch and slide until she could fall safely. Not being desperate for anything, but understanding why she had come here and done what she had done, she looked in either direction and found a building that ascended to the Way a little off to the west. She could use that as her stairway down to the humbler streets.

  The corners of the structure had been picked out with coldlights in decorative baskets, changing the pale golden radiance to different muted colors. The variety propagated eccentric shadows, making the dark spaces seethe as though alive. To maintain and renew the lights there would have to be an exterior stair for maintenance; once exposed to the breath of the Gods the bundles of coldlight vegetation faded out in perhaps a quarter of a Turn and would need to be refilled. Four times under the eyes of the Goddess as she waxed and waned some slave or servant would trudge up with a heavy basket to swap out the old for the new.

  From the top of that staircase and down to the Peasant’s Road, bypassing the Merchant’s Path that branched off halfway down, she had a swift run to what passed for home.

  Too swift and easy; nothing to distract her from what had just happened on the Temple roof.

  It was necessary. I could not answer. I dared not answer. And the God would have ripped the truth from me if I had stayed, even under Her light. She would start muttering aloud soon, and she might as well shut herself up in the madhouse now and spare everyone the trouble of carting her off. With a flick, Sequa jammed her helmet back on, needing the reassurance of the padded metal.

  The cheap boarding house where she had taken a room was nearly deserted, the occupants out and about. The streets of Under Roof and the poor Merchant’s Quarter would be busy till much later, since it became generally more convenient for those of foreign birth or uncertain class to do business once the God was set. The laws about who might be seen under the eye of the Goddess were a little more relaxed for them.

  Large and mostly secluded, her room could be reached by a back corridor from the main entrance. It was a lengthy walk to the street to empty chamber pots or fetch water, which kept her from having any neighbors. The privacy suited her. A window at the near end of the corridor spilled the Ladylight’s silver benediction onto the rough floorboards, soothing as the silence. The Goddess danced in Her first quarter, waxing to full. In the time it took Sequa to walk to the door of her room, the brief blessing of Ladyslight faded away, blocked by the nearby buildings. Sequa sagged with weariness beyond belief, longing to sleep for a few hours and then eat the nearest tavern clean. This close to Under Roof, most businesses stayed open late into the night. Her back hurt and the old shoulder injuries twinged whenever she flexed them. A thin, clicking noise came from the right joint.

  Sequa reached her room, entered and slipped the bar across the door. In her next breath, the knife and the person wielding it registered to her addled thoughts. She had left a small coldlight uncovered on the far wall so the figure seemed nothing but shadow and outline.

  The timing of the attack would have been perfect if her reflexes had been even a little slower. Motion copied motion, and she whirled in place even as the point flowed downward at speed seeming so deceptively slow. It hit a little off; rather than landing square in the middle of her back, it glanced down one shoulder, skidding off the leather and metal, close enough to clip the edge of her cloak hood. Blood surged in panic, making her limbs shake.

  Breathtaking, the desperate audacity of it. An assassin who would strike in her own rooms…like something she would have done.

  The deadly point withdrew to strike again. Sequa lurched forward to get inside the lethal arc, no time to draw her holdout knife. Her opponent seemed androgynous in loose black clothing and a blank, wooden mask not unlike the one she had once worn as a Runner. Slight, not much bigger than Sequa herself. Blindingly fast. Sequa took a forearm strike to the side of the head as she moved in, the knife almost clipping her again. The tip scraped across the metal of her mask. She batted the knife aside, ripped the whole helmet from her head with a chunk of flesh and hair because she could not see and this time faded away from the blade as it slashed, the evil wind of it passing near her eye.

  Hoping her scars might serve as some sort of warning or terrible effigy, Sequa bared her teeth, panting, no coherent thought in her mind. Her back was against the door and again she could not draw. Unfazed, the black-clad attacker moved in again, this time for a backhand, still astonishing in its speed.

  Unthinking, blind luck guiding her, Sequa caught the wrist of the weapon hand. Gripping the wrist and thumb as tightly as she could, she turned the hand by main force—easily, so easily, she was not that strong—pointing the weapon up and in at its wielder. Then she pressed her forearm with its metal sleeve against the base of the weapon and pulled the hand toward her. The knife ripped out of the hand through the thumb.

  Soprano skirl of pain.

  By sheer luck again, the ejected blade
missed its owner and landed somewhere on the other side of the room with a thock.

  Then Sequa noticed the knife in her own neck.

  On the right side—struck with the offhand during the disarm—a small dirk had been rammed into the base of her throat, just in the space between the collarbones. That she had not already choked on her own blood meant it had missed any of the great vessels that lined the space, but it had to be tremblingly near to at least one of them. Lucky again, but was it her good luck or the other’s bad playing out here?

  Instantly, Sequa sacrificed her grip and left hand, reaching across her body to clamp the blade into the skin, pinching the flesh, willing the sharpened metal to be still, not to nick or clip the elastic edge of a blood tube or air pipe itself. Did she dare pull it out, risk the ragged gash?

  No.

  She would have smiled if she could—this woman was good, exquisitely skilled. When Sequa released the maimed hand, the assassin had not even hesitated but leaped backward and now turned, intent on crossing the space to her lost weapon.

  Sequa had a few heartbeats of motion left before she either lost the grip on the knife, slimy with her own blood or her opponent regained her first weapon. They would both be fighting offhanded and wounded. Fair fight.

  Fair fights are for fools.

  Her opponent swerved around the right side of the table that bisected the center of the room. Sequa took the shorter route, across the top, leaping into a hooking slide that sheered splinters from the tabletop. Stretched almost flat, she grabbed the edge of the table, stopping herself with a single brutal jar, slammed her free foot down and pivoted her body around those points. Hips arched and her left leg scythed outward into her opponent’s path.

  Lucky again, once more and last, the assassin ran straight into her outstretched kick, the hardened leather tip of Sequa’s boot striking into the center of the woman’s masked face. Wood shattered with a loud crack. She went down as though pole axed and lay twitching on the floor. Her heels drummed a moment then came the smell of death as her bowels released.

  When Sequa opened the door to her room again, the knife still stuck in her chest, she had her traveling pack slung over one shoulder. She wore her veils with eyes uncovered in the man’s style. The helmet had jarred the blade. The small group lurking at the end of the corridor all checked back in horror.

  She counted five with perhaps one more gone in the instant she emerged. Two of them wore the brown-red leathers of the Iron Quarters, both men of similar builds to her own: slim, lithe, agile even in small motions. The rest dressed as peasants, one woman, two men.

  “You chose well as you might have,” Sequa said in a conversational tone as she limped lightly toward them. “But she is dead. You might do better to be gone by the time I reach you. I have no patience left this day.”

  They all turned and fled as one.

  ~ * ~

  She had courtesy enough to at least brace Anem on her way out of the brothel. She exited alone to the roof walk, a long, narrow space hemmed by brick walls, the private way for a Noble to visit this exclusive house of pleasures.

  “Hard at work?” rasped that harsh voice from the shadows. Anem, relaxed enough not to whip round and snarl, stopped dead and contemplated the idea that she grew lax in her advancing age. Somehow she had walked right past the other woman.

  “Facetiousness suits you ill, Sequa. What do you want?” She turned very slowly and deliberately—in Home you do not show back to anyone you want to have civil speech with.

  “Did you send them to kill me?” Sequa rose from her crouch at the edge of the weak, golden glow of the coldlight on the far end of the walkway. Such an elegant place, with an entrance directly onto the Noble’s Way, would be discreet, quiet, and very expensive. A place where one paid for companionship as much as anything physical. The clientele would be limited to the powerful and wealthy. They would not be interrupted here.

  Instinctively, Anem realized touching any one of her weapons would be her death and then the death of every person between Sequa and Cur. She very slowly and carefully opened her palms against her sides. Not submission but respect.

  The other woman vibrated on the edge of murder still, raw and unbalanced.

  Unbalanced? All deadly balance and violent grace, even now, in every line of the Champion’s body. Her turmoil was of the mind, not the body. What had driven her to this state?

  Then the words registered and she snapped her head back sharply, the strongest negation she could manage without moving her body.

  “I did not send anyone anywhere to brace you. I am not in the habit of casually murdering my own people. If I sent anyone after you, it would be a battalion armed with crossbows and war dogs. What happened?” From what she’d learned today, a direct negation might actually be heard. It helped that she spoke truth.

  Sequa checked back just a little and some of the unholy wrath left the lines of her body. She stepped further into the light and the matte-black hilt of the small dagger still protruding from her shoulder sprang into relief.

  “Oh, Holy Fire.”

  Which is how, in the long middle of the Goddess’ night, Anem found herself washing blood from her hands in the tiring room of a highly priced whore.

  Sequa moved her shoulder a little, her uncovered face hard and horrifying. She had explained the weapon and the wound and what would no doubt be a gap in the rolls of the Iron Quarters in the morning in a few terse sentences. Otherwise she sat silently as Anem and the mistress of the house—a doctor and abortionist—gently withdrew the blade, cleaned and stitched the wound. The small blade had been stopped by the broad bone of her chest, the yoke that protected the base of the throat. Nothing vital had been struck and the metal had been clean of poison. Before the mistress could leave—flee—Sequa handed her a small stack of coins and tried to smile.

  Whatever murderous rage had taken her earlier, now she seemed small and sad and tired. She listlessly sorted through her pack of belongings, meager on the expensive polished wood of the table top. A set of spare veils, a tunic and breeches in a thin fabric that had once been deeply hued, a dull and nicked eating knife, a few scraps of paper with odd notes in a strange language. Otherwise, everything else she owned she wore, all the accoutrements of war.

  Anem poured a cup of clean water flavored with herbs then offered the jug to Sequa who took it and drank directly from the vessel, finishing it swiftly.

  “What happened to the gold?” As the Champion of the last Run, Sequa had been given her own weight in gold by the Nobles, as well as her freedom. Actually, she’d heard they doubled her weight and still paid out considerably less than usual; most winners were hulking men.

  “Curran. Expensive, buying a near Champion. Almost won himself, worth a fair bit as a personal guard or a trainer. Some of it is…elsewhere and safe. And I have been out of the kingdom for three Measures. I had to eat.”

  After the end of the Run, Sequa had purchased Cur and freed him before fleeing Seahome in the night.

  “You’re not eating much,” Anem said.

  When they’d stripped off her veils to treat her wound, Anem had been able to count every rib on her body, seen the line of every muscle, every scar and adhesion proud from the pale skin. Despite herself, she’d also noticed the small, firm breasts, pared down by her training and harsh life and the little downy line of hair running from Sequa’s navel to under the waist of her breeches. Oddly titillating for one of her predilections; almost male and female in one form.

  “Hmm? I suppose. Can’t afford extra flesh. Speed is my advantage.” Sequa drew on the tabletop now in spilled water. “Not been hungry for food for many Measures.” What would have been a teasing smile on a normal face became a nightmarish leer.

  Anem left the room without a word and returned a few heartbeats later. In time, a young girl in flimsy clothes and a perfectly painted face appeared with a tray of cheese, fruit and cold, sliced meat.

  Sequa sighed and raised a hand in acquiescence then at
e, slowly but neatly. “I don’t suppose…” She trailed off, and Anem had to stop herself from staring at the hesitancy in her voice. This was the most disarmed and honest the Commander had ever seen the Champion.

  “I don’t suppose they can rent me a bed for tonight? I will have to go out tomorrow and find a new place to live, and it will be long and tedious to make sure no one is following me.”

  “I promise you—” Anem clenched her jaw because she remembered she could not promise anything right now. Her own people had betrayed her wishes, and she could assure Sequa of nothing until she found the source of the rot.

  “I’m sure they will, though it will likely not be this room,” she amended herself.

  “Just a bed and a door that locks, and I will be gone in the morning, I swear it.”

  Though barely a third of the already meager meal had disappeared, Sequa pushed the plate away from her and gathered her things into a small pile. Anem rose, picked up her own sword belt and cloak, and nodded. “I will speak to the lady of the house on the way out. That way I cannot know which room it might be.”

  Sequa tapped the table once and spread her hand flat against the surface. Thank you for a small kindness. Then she went back to rearranging her things in her pack, courteously not looking at Anem as she departed.

  The Commander left her alone, sitting small and quiet in a room that smelled of rosewater, blood and sex.

  Chapter 3

  It had seemed wise to blend in with the crowds of peasant-born as much as she could when looking for new lodgings, so Sequa again carefully concealed her armor and blades. Imperfect trickery at best, but it would work for a little while. The veils and cloth rested easier on her wounded shoulder than her armor.

  Her search was shorter than she had expected. On the edge of Under Roof she had spotted the sigil for “rooms to let” against the door of what seemed a large warehouse.