Promise of Blood

Chapter 19

They buried what they could gather of Darden beneath a small barrow of rock and ice. There were more buried, Gavril told them, farther up the trail: pilgrims who did not survive the journey to the summit, and monks who had fallen prey to winter or to sickness or to predators upon the mountain. He assured them Darden would be in good company.

Taniel clenched a nub of charcoal between his fingers and began sketching Darden’s face in his book. The memory of how the man looked was already beginning to fade. Taniel just hadn’t known him long enough. He closed his eyes, trying to remember.

The vision of Julene – Taniel knew for certain it was her now – bouncing and screaming her way down the rock face and out of sight haunted Taniel throughout the night. He couldn’t sleep, for each time he managed to fall asleep, he saw Julene’s body, or that of the cave lion, thrashing and angry before his mind’s eye, mocking him. How could he not have seen it? Her anger, her recklessness. At the very least he should have been watching for a double cross. He ended up sitting in the cave entrance, watching the sky above begin to lighten as the sun rose in the east, on the other side of the mountain.

He’d disobeyed a direct order. What would Tamas do about it? What good could come of it? Tamas would just send another powder mage. Maybe he’d even come himself. He’d have Taniel court-martialed. Could Tamas have him executed? Taniel didn’t think even a man like Tamas could execute his own son. He hoped not, anyway.

How would Taniel explain this to Tamas? What would they do when another powder mage came for them? Taniel kicked a piece of ice over the ledge. They’d deal with those problems when they came up.

He heard ice crunch underfoot as Bo joined him. Taniel gave his friend a long look. Bo seemed as if he hadn’t slept well for weeks. His eyes were red, his face sunburned. He seemed to be constantly sweating, and he fingered the lapel of his coat nervously as he took a seat next to Taniel.

Bo watched the stars fade as Taniel sketched a likeness of Darden, until Taniel heard the first cries of birds looking for a morning meal.

“You’re getting quite good,” Bo said. “Looks just like him.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Taniel said. “I was having trouble picturing him.” He tucked the bit of charcoal into a pouch and folded his sketchbook.

“Tamas has a lot of gall sending you up here to kill me,” Bo said. His voice was pleasant, quiet. A feature many of his women found soothing, no doubt. “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I’m glad he did. Somebody else may have taken that shot. You could have chosen a better time, though.”

“You were expecting me,” Taniel said. He found he wasn’t surprised. Bo tended to know a lot of things, even when he shouldn’t. Taniel blew on his hands to warm them.

“A powder mage, eventually,” Bo said. “Actually, I expected Julene first. She’s the one I was preparing for.” He pointed down the trail, along the ledge of the mountain and the monastery far below. “I’ve been warding this whole trail for two weeks now. Ever since that inspector visited and gave me the message that she would try to summon Kresimir.” He fingered his lapel again, running a finger along the collar.

“ ‘She’?”

“Julene. That Predeii bitch.”

“Predeii,” Taniel said. “That Privileged I tracked in Adopest said she was a Predeii.”

Bo swallowed hard. “Two of ’em? Pit.”

“What’s a Predeii?” Taniel said.

“You don’t know?”

“Would I ask if I did?”

Bo frowned. “There’s a lot you find out in a royal cabal. Things only scholars remember. Secrets a thousand years old or more. I, uh… you said Tamas slaughtered the royal cabal, right?”

“Yeah.”

Bo looked up at the fading stars. “I suppose no one will come after me for spilling secrets, then.” He took a deep breath. “Kresimir didn’t come here on his own.”

Taniel gave his friend a skeptical look. “I haven’t attended a sermon since I was a boy. Only peasants listen to that stuff these days.”

“Peasants aren’t as dim as you think,” Bo said. “All superstition has basis in fact.”

“And you believe this superstition?” Taniel asked, looking down his nose at Bo.

Bo took a deep breath. “There’s a difference between having faith in something you’ve never seen or experienced and knowing firsthand that it’s true.”

“You’re saying you met Kresimir?”

“No, I didn’t meet…” Bo sighed. “Just shut up and listen. They show you things in the royal cabal that have been passed on through the minds of sorcerers for millennia.”

Taniel snorted. “Kresimir. All right. Assuming he is real, that was thousands of years ago.”

“Oh, Kresimir was real. Whether you call him a god or a mighty sorcerer, every history from that time agrees that he was real. And it was fourteen hundred years ago, give or take. The exact timeline was lost in the Bleakening,” Bo said. “He was summoned. Brought here, maybe even forced into this world by the Predeii. Some think that he was even bent to their will.”

“God or sorcerer, how could anyone force him to come to this world?”

Bo fiddled with his collar. “Predeii are the predecessors of the Privileged. Powerful sorcerers that make today’s Privileged look like schoolchildren playing with fire. They were rulers in the days before Kresimir, and they sought a way to expand their power. They summoned Kresimir from” – he made a mystical gesture with one hand and shrugged – “and they bid him use his power to bring order to the Nine.”

“The saints?” Taniel said.

Bo gave a shake of his head. “No. Good thought, though. The saints – Adom, Novi, and the rest – they came later, when Kresimir was not up to the task anymore and needed to summon brothers and sisters to help him. Their shared his power and his wisdom, and when he left, so did they.”

“But the Predeii remained?” Taniel asked. “They’d be thousands of years old.”

“Or more,” Bo said. He shrugged again. “They discovered a way to keep from dying from age or disease, even before they summoned Kresimir. Sorcery was more potent back then. I don’t even know if anyone has the power to kill a Predeii now.”

Taniel swallowed. He looked over the edge of the cliff, into the swirling clouds of nothingness below. “You mean she’s not dead?”

Bo’s face was grim. “I don’t know. Probably not, though I’m trying to remain optimistic. Either way, we have to go find out. If she survived, then Adro is in great danger.”

“How?”

“She wants to annihilate our armies, our sorcerers, and our powder mages. Half the work is already done with the royal cabal dead. If she summons Kresimir back, then he’ll do the rest of the work for her and Adro will be under her thumb. Kresimir made it clear once that he had no interest in ruling the Nine for very long. If Julene proves to him that the kings and their royal cabals are not up to the task, she thinks he’ll leave her in charge. She’s been waiting a long time to rule.”

Taniel scoffed. “Kresimir. Who thinks of things like that? Kresimir is long gone.”

“Julene doesn’t think so. Neither do the Kez nobility, and certain factions within the Kresim Church.”

“Why would she want a god here? It sounds like she’s nigh unto a god herself.” It explained the battle at Adopest University – how Rozalia and Julene seemed so powerful, and how Julene survived Rozalia’s assault.

“Power. That’s all Julene cares about. Power over others. The history books refer to the Bleakening, a time when knowledge of Kresimir was lost. Only the royal cabals remember what happened during the Bleakening. It was a war between the Predeii and the new kings of the Nine and their royal cabals. Julene claims, quite proudly, to have started the war. Millions died. In the end, the Predeii were vastly outnumbered and lost. Some died, some fled. Others hid. Julene was one that survived.”

“You seem to know a lot about her.”

“We were… together… once.” Bo grimaced.

Taniel couldn’t help but bark a laugh.

“I’m not proud of it,” Bo said.

“What in the Nine did you see in her?”

Bo sniffed. “She’s very good in bed.”

“She’s – apparently – fifty times your age!”

“That gives her a lot of experience.” Bo examined his nails. “And she doesn’t have the best judgment when it comes to her emotions. She fell for me and taught me things she shouldn’t have.”

“And now she’s trying to kill you? Why?”

Bo tossed a rock over the cliff and watched it until it disappeared. “You say she was employed by Tamas?”

“As a mercenary, yes. To hunt down the Privileged.”

“Likely she saw an opportunity she couldn’t ignore. She doesn’t like the other Predeii, and she certainly doesn’t like me. You saw how hard she came after me. A woman scorned, and all that. I barely even slowed her down, and I had enough sorcerous traps on this trail to kill an army.” He gave Taniel an annoyed look. “Too bad you sprang half of them.”

Taniel frowned.

“You don’t know?” Bo rubbed his temples. “God, how much do I have to explain? You’re layered in protective sorcery tighter than your own skin. Not even the strongest Privileged can create that kind of protection on a person. The human body is just too complex. I wove spells on this mountainside strong enough to disable a god – I thought, anyway – and you walked through them without even noticing. I’ve not seen sorcery like that before. Wards are weaker around a Marked, and some of the strongest Marked, like Tamas, can unravel wards completely, but it takes time and practice.”

“That’s why you yelled at me not to come any farther.”

“Yeah.”

“Well…” Taniel flicked snow off his coat. There was so much he didn’t know. Bo seemed to have a lot of answers, but even he couldn’t provide them all. There was something going on in Adro, beyond the war and the coup and everything else, that was much deeper than anyone knew. It made his head hurt. “Who the pit has been weaving spells around me? I don’t even… ah.” Her.

Bo glanced into the cave, toward Ka-poel’s sleeping form. “Tell me about the savage,” he said.

Ka-poel was bundled tightly in her bedroll, not a finger’s breadth of her visible but for a few stray red hairs sticking out from the top. The bedroll rose and fell steadily with her breathing.

“She’s a Dynize,” Taniel said. “Not from the Dynize Empire, but from the Fatrastan Wilds.”

“How’d you come across her?”

Taniel said, “When Fatrasta declared their independence from Kez I joined up in the war. I spent about thirteen months using her village as a base during the war in Fatrasta. Her tribe was allied with the Fatrastans. I ranged all over southern Fatrasta from there, hitting Kez camps with my unit, killing Privileged and officers. Even a couple of Wardens. Her village was deep in the swamp, impossible to find unless a native showed you the way. It was the perfect place.

“Another tribe lived in the same swamp. They stayed neutral through most of the war, but toward the end of my time they were bought by the Kez. They attacked Ka-poel’s village. Her people managed to fight them off, but not before they captured twenty or thirty children.

“The village wanted Fatrastan help getting the children back. The Fatrastans were spread too thin. They said no. My unit was ordered out of the village. I stayed behind and went with the natives to recover the children. Well, they’d killed most of them.”

Taniel felt his mouth go dry. The memory haunted him, even now. The sight of dozens of children, crucified on barbed crosses, hung to rot from the twisted branches of moss-covered swamp trees.

“Why?” Bo asked.

Taniel snorted. “They wanted to show the Kez how savage they could really be. The Kez had offered barrels of whiskey, spices, rifles, horses. Anything they wanted in return for helping take down my unit. We’d caused them a lot of grief over that year.”

“What’d you do in that village?”

Taniel tossed a rock off the edge of the cliff. “Justice,” he said. “I’m not proud. But I don’t regret it either.”

Taniel watched wispy clouds form and roll and disappear with unseen air currents far off their cliff edge. He felt cold suddenly and wrapped his arms about himself. Memories of murder touched his mind, long shoved to the furthest part of his recollection and locked away. Perhaps there were a few things he’d regret.

He shook himself out of his reverie. “Anyway,” he said. “Pole was quite a bit older than the others, but they had taken her just the same. Probably because she was a Bone-eye. I didn’t know what that meant to them. I still don’t. Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen her use her powers for more than just tracking, though I’ve long known she was a Privileged of sorts.” Taniel scrounged about his person and his pack until he found a spare powder charge. He bit the end, tasting the sulfuric powder on his tongue, and snorted half the charge in one go.

Bo was watching him, a worried expression on his face. He edged away from the powder and scratched absently at his exposed skin.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Taniel said.

“I’ve never seen sorcery like what she unleashed yesterday,” Bo said. “Nor the protection woven about you. As far as the royal cabals are concerned, there are three different kinds of sorcerers: Privileged, Marked, and Knacked. We’ve encountered minor sorceries from witches, and shamans, and warlocks in the far places of the world, but nothing with the potency of what she showed. Does she have the third eye?”

“Yes, I’m certain,” Taniel said. “She helps me track Privileged.”

Bo reached out and pressed a palm against Taniel’s forehead. He closed his eyes, muttering, and then jerked back. He dusted his palm off with snow. “God, you reek of powder. It’s gonna make my eyes swell up and the space between my fingers itch. As for your protection. Ugh. I have no idea. It shrugged off my wards well enough. I don’t know if it’ll stop a bullet or a knife. It could just be against sorcery. Either way, don’t risk it.”

Taniel thought back to the fight with the cave lion – with Julene. He’d nearly slid off the mountainside, taking a long plummet to his death. Then rock had sprouted from the very earth, jutting out to catch him. He wondered if that had been Ka-poel or Bo. He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to grow to depend on someone else’s protection. Bo might take credit even if it wasn’t his. Or even the opposite. He’d always been unpredictable.

“Tamas sent me to kill you,” Taniel said.

“Yeah.”

They didn’t look at each other.

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah.” Bo’s voice was wry. He gave Taniel a sidelong look, then a quick grin.

“Should I have?”

Bo’s grin disappeared. “He knows about the gaes, then?”

“It’s true?”

“Yes.” Bo grunted. “Part of becoming a member of the royal cabal.” He touched his collar gently. “I’ll have to avenge the king someday. I’ll have to kill Tamas.” He pulled a pendant from beneath his shirt. It was a simple thing, braided silver around a single gemstone. Taniel vaguely remembered seeing similar necklaces upon dead Kez Privileged. Not even the savages had looted those.

“Is… is that it?” Taniel asked.

“A demon’s carbuncle,” Bo said. “Very dark stuff. You don’t want to know. The gaes to protect – or avenge – the king is tied to this. Even now I can feel a pull, tugging me toward Adopest. It’s not very strong. It will grow stronger as time passes. I’m not sure how quickly. If I resist for too long, though, it will kill me.”

“The only way to break it is to avenge the king?”

Bo remained silent.

“So you have to kill my father.”

Bo picked up a rock and threw it off the cliff. He didn’t look happy about it.

“We should start looking for a way to break it,” Taniel said. He hoped he sounded confident. “Privileged wouldn’t attach themselves to something they can’t get out of. It’s just another secret. Maybe one of the Predeii knows.”

Taniel examined his friend, realizing just how much the fight yesterday had taken out of him. His cheeks were gaunt. His skin looked saggy, wrinkled, as if he were forty years older than he was.

“We’ll find out together,” Taniel said. “We’ll break it. I swear.”

Bo gave a tired chuckle. “My eyes are going to itch every day I’m with you, you optimistic bastard. Come on.” He stood up, stretching. “We have to go find out if we killed that bitch.”