As A God Read online

  Did he imagine he intimidated her? In a small space, weight and strength would overwhelm speed and agility. Many a slave woman had learned that lesson, in pain and humiliation.

  Sequa could think of four different ways to cripple or kill him before he even touched her.

  Parri had brought a cold light with him that he hung from a hook by the door. He stood barefaced here in one of his home spaces; she would be little more than a metallic shadow.

  Still he studied her carefully. She did not doubt he had heard the entire conversation in the cell. Which part of it did he now so desperately desire to confirm or clarify?

  “Why?” Parri said eventually then held an expectant pause. Trying to goad information out of her; he had no real purpose to the question. He did it because he had seen Anem do it.

  The rage rocked her back onto her heels. He read the motion correctly and reacted, hand going to the door to push it open behind him. Her hissed breathy words stopped him.

  “You think it wise to game with me, Merchant-born?”

  He stuttered some denial. Sequa rocked again, onto the balls of her feet. The thin veneer of respectability and discipline laid down over her truer self cracked, like glaze shattering on the skin of a pot. Underneath it lay the dark cold heart of her skills. Her chest filled with air, the echoing rush inside her skull drowning out his stammers.

  “You have not the right. You have not the skill. How dare you?” Her voice dropped lower and lower until nothing could be heard but breath and growling low in the chest.

  Step forward, right footed. He will shove at the door with his left hand or he will freeze and hold still. If he holds, boot edge strike to the shin as hands rise to draw vision. The pain will drop his head. Assist forehead downward into the rising knee. Dead or unconscious. If he goes backward through the door, he will either have to turn, give up his back—and die—or stumble. Out in the corridor, the chances change. Wait till they resolve.

  Parri crossed his arms against his chest and laid his open palms flat. To a Child, it signaled purest submission, hands away from weapons, nothing protecting the neck or inner leg—the two fastest blood-lettings the body allowed.

  The choice was still a risk. If the predator was ascendant, submission would recall weakness, and she would strike to kill.

  Her own armor saved his life. The subtle weight of its artifice, the hemmed motion, the silent echoes reminded her she was Sequa, she was human and this death was not her purpose here.

  Her next puff of breath became “Go.”

  He needed no more prompting.

  She huddled there for a long time, till the coldlight on the wall faded down and left her in empty darkness. No thoughts penetrated inside the echoing shadow, just the still quiet of the hunter. Parri had been heartbeats from death, which Anem would know by now as well.

  Internal pressure from her body made her move eventually; she needed to piss. External pressures moved her as well. She needed to seek word about the deaths Cur stood accused of causing. She needed to unravel the beginning of this story—which certainly did not begin with Cur watching a boy-whore fall to his death.

  She needed information. She wanted to leave. The building, the city, the kingdom. Almost three Measures of exile had been lonely and difficult and dangerous, and she had felt freer than ever before. Free of the burden of family and friends and enemies, free of the pressures of fate and duty. It had come to her more than once that if she wandered so far that she never returned, well, it might be better that way. Jesan’s heart would break, and his parents would grieve, and her own mother would grow stony and sad. But there would be no reason for anyone to attack them, not the Prince, not Home. They would be safe if she was presumed dead.

  He would know, though. Jesan would know her heart still beat, the same way she knew his ran on from the ring made of his golden hair that encircled her thumb, pulsing gently. The ring he wore was black mixed with strands of white, plaited into a tiny braid. It throbbed with the rhythm of her blood, the promise of their lives returned to them. They had made their marriage tokens themselves, in the old fashion, never expecting the stories of the shared heartbeats to be true. Her own blood drew her back to him, as the Lady drew the waters of the world to the sky.

  She tasted bitterness on her tongue from the self-contempt then copper and salt where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. Sick and leaden, Sequa staggered out into the corridor in search of a garderobe and the stairs to the upper levels.

  Anem leaned against the wall opposite, wearing a man’s veil and unarmed. Sequa eyed her warily but kept her posture still and neutral.

  “Would you speak with me?” Anem asked.

  “I would find somewhere to relieve myself first,” Sequa said, which Anem took for tacit agreement and led the way up the corridor to the necessary and from there to that small, private staircase at the back of the building. A few moments later, they were on the roof.

  The God had bowed His head long since, the Goddess not yet risen to muffle the sky in silver. The Feathers poked out here and there haphazardly, as though Hawk ruffled His plumage to settle it. On the very flat and totally empty roof of the Iron Quarters, the two women made their way to the south edge and sat down on the parapet. Sequa faced out politely, where she would not be able to read Anem’s body language. Under Roof started a few streets over, the building had a sheer drop to the paving stones. If she leaned forward, there would be a quick rush and then nothing. Her stomach felt filled with molten lead. Only that cloying weight kept her seat on the stone.

  Anem had acquired a jug of wine, two clay mugs and drinking tubes while Sequa had been occupied. Pouring out now, the wine looked black as the Empty’s Heart in the dying light. Sequa sucked the mug down and refilled it before Anem had even taken a sip. It would have been nice to get drunk—an impulse she seldom had chance to indulge. The strong, thick wine on her empty, acid-filled stomach had already sent her head into a lazy spin. Had she eaten anything that day?

  “Parri says…he didn’t understand what he was doing.”

  “Clearly.”

  “He didn’t apologize.”

  “Good.”

  They sat in silence for a long time, till the full night had fallen and the sounds of the city grew muter and muter, life moving wholly indoors and Under Roof. Anem cleared her throat gently.

  “We had a fire, in the Merchant’s Quarter. Old wooden warehouse, went up in heartbeats. The complex next door lit up as well. Families got out. We had to take the building down before it fed the fire to the whole block. Old building, built well, knocking out the corners and outside walls did nothing.

  “Parri found a war hammer somewhere and just charged into the building, started flailing away at the supporting walls. It worked, but he brought the building down on his own heels. Literally, the back of his legs burnt nearly to the bone.”

  Anem paused and drank some wine.

  “He looked less frightened going into that building than he looked today after talking to you.” Cough. “Well done.”

  Despite herself, her twisted soul, and aching heart, Sequa laughed. “Only a Child can understand what Home makes.”

  “It brought a few things I have been trying to explain to him to a nice sharp point. I meant to thank you for not introducing that point to more than his mind but I see…you have put up your steel.”

  Sequa let the spinning in her head make the Feathers spin above, as though the Hawk beat His wings about her brow. She could nearly hear it, the shush shush of His feathers across her face.

  “A heartbeat in either direction, Anem, stood his death without or without metal,” Sequa said. “Foolish and ignorant his words, yes, and yet I do not like how close he came to death. I do not like what this city is doing to me.”

  “Doing to you?”

  “Since I came here this time, something has…moved me. More than once. I am not usually so quick to take lethal offense.”

  No snort of derision came. No mockery sounded in Anem�
��s voice. “His offended greatly—”

  “Not enough. Not at this moment. I left once,” she confessed. “A few days ago, I walked out the west gate. Some thick blanket of dirty smoke and choking vapors cleared from around my head when I was not half a glass gone down the western road. So I turned around and came back.”

  Wine refilled into both mugs; Sequa drained hers dry again.

  “Why?”

  Why? The one question no Child ever asked another. Why. The one secret they were allowed to keep.

  When Anem asked it, she knew its weight, the shape of the pain, the steps of the dance that had surrounded them both. Trapped them both still. Anem lived because she had made herself the master of an important place, above even the Noble blood that resided here. Sequa lived by killing all those who came to kill her.

  Even bet which of them would live longer as long as Home hunted them.

  “Because if something works that hard to drive me away, I would know what it drives me from. And,” she added reluctantly, “I do believe Cur is not guilty of this crime.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  Sequa’s twisted mouth moved without her volition. “I won’t have to. This is not over. Damn him.” She spoke the last with a hissing vitriol directed backward, at the temple where the Voice would reside.

  “Ah. You noticed too?”

  “Is it always this bad?”

  “No. But once you have his attention, the truth just…comes. I always feel it a little, but it slacked from me some days ago. I take it you were at the temple?”

  “I am so blessed.” Ironic sarcasm expressed in Sequa’s broken voice had a violent edge. “It is theologically bothersome that I express truths that I am not even aware of.”

  “Theologically bothersome? Oh, you are trying too hard, Sequa, not to be a Runner anymore.”

  “Beloved darling of a Noble house for nearly all my life. Runner for two Measures, well, almost five Measures now and not by my own will,” she said in drunken affront.

  “It shows. I can talk like that too. But scrape the gilding off, and what’s there?” Anem’s voice grew edged now in turn, the wine taking them both somewhere they had never dared go before. A deeper slur entered her voice than just the drink would have caused, old accents dredged up in the dark. The sounds of the capitol, of an Under Roof darker and colder than any other. The sound of one born and bred to Home and its deadly games.

  The voices of the past could be pushed aside but never completely away.

  “Mud, blood, and shadows, sister.” Sequa pulled down her veils to hawk a glob of red into the street below. At this rate anyone who wanted to perform blood magic on her would be able to form a whole poppet out of her spit.

  “Metal and the reeking grime of the Peasant’s Road.”

  They clinked the edges of their mugs, and drank deeply.

  “I need to fight, Anem.” Sequa’s accent blurred as well, traveling up the stream of blood and privilege. Her voice became a Noble’s, precise, clipped.

  “We train here every day. Come without steel and be welcome. But take your time, rest that shoulder wound—”

  “Eh, that’s nearly healed. Wasn’t so deep,” Sequa muttered, sipping at her wine again.

  Anem went silent for a long time. “I stitched it myself. It went deep enough.”

  Sequa looked up drunkenly, squinting. “I heal fast. Always have.”

  “Have you know,” Anem murmured.

  Sequa studied her eyes for a moment then turned away to look out over the city again. She had nothing to say, having told the truth for once. She did heal quickly. Perhaps unnaturally quickly. She had grown uncomfortably aware over the last Measures of her life of an oddness surrounding her existence. Since entering Ressen this second time, it had gotten worse. Something deep inside her stirred to wake, roused by the Holy City itself.

  Anem did not press the matter and they finished the wine in silence.

  Chapter 4

  The next day, Sequa slipped into the training room without being marked. The wide room, running the whole length of the garrison on the ground level, rose two stories above a packed dirt floor. The peaked roof was crossed with thick beams to take the weight of the outside walls. Perhaps two hands of fighters scattered throughout the space; all men until she arrived. Some veiled, most stood bare. She circled the outside wall, watching them to confirm her suspicions.

  Little coordinated effort at the moment, with nearly everyone stretching and limbering up. The few who did not work alone were in pairs, moving through rote drills with blunted weapons.

  Most of them remained of the common type for such men. Big and strong, bodies marked and marred with the stresses of their work. A few—all the still-veiled ones—were more of her type, slimmer or smaller or more graceful. Women in men’s veils had joined in now. Foxes among the wolves. Ressen’s reputation as a haven for renegade Children came well earned.

  One of them noticed her first, breaking off his knife drill with one of the big men to approach her. His eyes glittered above the grey cloth of his veil.

  “The commander isn’t here. Not sure where she is,” he said bluntly, the dull practice blade in his left hand pointing toward her.

  That verged on a deadly challenge to a Child, where neither an edge nor metal was needed for lethality. At Home she would have knocked it from his hand at least; anything else would have made her seem weak. But here it would make her look like a madwoman to nearly everyone else in the room.

  Her own eyes glittered back at him, and she dipped her chin in acknowledgment. Nicely done.

  “I look to train,” she said in her clearest tones, which since the ravaging of her face sounded like a dog barking. It carried as nicely as ever. Verbal riposte to his physical posturing, and it carried more weight since everyone could understand it. “Anem said I was welcome.” She shifted her stance a little, bringing weight onto her back foot, as though relaxing. Hit.

  His own chin dipped in turn. They understood each other now.

  For the next turn of the glass, Sequa danced through the wide room like a beam of Godslight flitting from group to group, around but never in their midst. She stretched and limbered and used the equipment scattered around the edges of the room, training forms and dummies, some weighted bars for strength. She smiled behind her veil at the satisfaction of testing her limits against something that wasn’t trying to kill her.

  But watching the room, always watching.

  Any fighting school should be judged not from the best or the worst but from those with middling skills. The journeymen and women of the Iron Guard made up the most in numbers; disciplined, hard-bodied, and with strong, rote skills. There would be no flash to them, but they would train till their hands rubbed raw and bodies dripped sweat. The more blisters on the practice ground the less blood in combat. Even better, no weapons master attended this session, no petty tyrant to egging them on. They worked themselves hard because they knew they needed to, not because they were compelled to do so. Drills, coordinated and organized by the participants, left room for spontaneous additions and smooth, flying changes of order and skill.

  After the glass turned, the drilling lumbered to a stop and the group milled together around the central space, exchanging weapons and gathering shields. Now there would be sparring. Sequa hung back, roving the edges, watching even more intently.

  They followed an interesting pattern here. With no leader to pair people off, one person entered the center of the room, joined by another. They would, without preamble, spar with whatever armaments each preferred. On lookers and the combatants themselves would call the strikes; a lethal blow or convergence of non-lethal would end it, however long that took. The winner would stay and be joined by someone else, and they would start anew.

  Intelligent and unexpected, nothing she’d seen in Home or her Runner Stable. Never knowing what opponent one might face next, or what state of exhaustion each combatant might be in gave an excellent edge. More like real fighting tha
n measured matches.

  But she knew after the first fight what to expect and spent most of the rest of the next two matches not watching but thinking about actions and consequences.

  When the moment came, there could be no question what her answer would be.

  The man who had confronted her first had entered the circle, handily and swiftly defeating his sword-wielding opponent with a slashing pass around his shield arm to cut his neck. The dull edge of the wooden blade still raised a welt and blood, leaving no doubt to the victory.

  And the group shifted and flowed, and Sequa now stood in the center of the ring with the victor, willfully or not.

  She’d seen it coming of course; she could have flowed away with them.

  The grey man gestured at her empty hands. “Pick your weapons, Champion.”

  Sequa spread her palms up and out, the motion meaning one thing to the general populace and another to a Child. Acceptance. Contempt. Nearly everyone in the room could read both the messages.

  “I have them.” Empty hands versus his knife, one of the great skills of Home. A fabulously mocking gesture to make in a first fight. I read you so well I already know you cannot stand against my least.

  She must have made him angry, because he struck almost before her words had made the air.

  At Home, sparring was different. Fights on the street lasted heartbeats, single passes to bleed-out death. Children trained for precise strikes to vital places and nearly always with a sharp weapon. The Iron Quarters sparring had more structure, politer. Fights drew out to test and ingrain lightly used skills. An Iron Guard would seldom be alone on Ressen’s streets but almost never have numerical superiority. In any physical confrontation that led to this kind of fighting, they would be out numbered. Those fights would last much longer, and be deeply exhausting.

  The grey man fought as a Child, all on the first pass and be done. No wind-up, no great slash of the arm. He struck from his blade guard hold straight for the torso, feet tapping a brief rhythm. And he moved fast, faster than she on this sluggish morning. Equally skilled. He would have been the victor…