Page 394 of In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

aised both hands.

The wind came up just then, as though she had called it, and possibly she had. Or maybe it was just the night wind rising off the cooling ground. There was a hint of salt in that air, a fine hissing spray carried in from the sea. And another scent as well, a witching smell that made her ears itch.

The prisoners fell silent. The blood knives covered their faces and prayed. With a puzzled frown, Feather Cloak lowered her hands.

The Pale Sun Dog opened his eyes and, without letting his gaze rest even for an instant on the other Pale Dogs, he scanned the heavens and then the surrounding slopes, the tender grass in its pale splendor and the thorny shrubs that lay along the slopes as strands of darkness. A nightjar whirred. An owl who-whooed.

The night breeze was cool, teasing her hair, kissing her cheeks. That salt breath of the sea faded, and now after all it was only a common night, cloudy, cool, and filled with the crickling of nocturnal insects.

Feather Cloak spoke. “Among the Wendish there is a saying: ‘the luck of the king.’ If the king’s fortunes fail him, then no warrior will follow him. ‘A prince without a retinue is no prince,’ which means that without followers, he cannot rule. If we are not strong enough to defeat Sanglant and shatter his army, then we need only cause such devastation in his country that his people cry for a new feathered cloak—a new regnant—to save them. There are others who claim the right to lead. It matters not which one leads, or which one claims. Best if they fight among themselves, because that will weaken them. Destroy Sanglant’s support, destroy the trust his people have in him, and you have destroyed him even if you have not killed him.”

“He is your son,” said Zuangua, looking a little disgusted.

“He turned his back on his mother’s kinfolk. He swore allegiance to the Pale Dogs. He can’t be trusted.”

Zuangua shrugged. “No one distrusts the Pale Dogs more than I do. Yet if your son can’t be trusted, then neither can this one. For it seems to me that he has done worse by turning his back on his kin and his kind, all and together. At least your son keeps faith with those he has sworn community with. This one is no kind of trustworthy ally.”

“I did not say I trusted him. But what he offers, we can use. We will learn as much as we can from him, and after we are done, we will kill him. We will let the blood knives have him, if they can bind him. We will kill all of the human sorcerers, those who know the secret of the crowns. Then the sorcery of the looms can never again be used against us. For this reason, I will accept his alliance.”

The blood knives nodded eagerly. The mask warriors stamped their feet and barked and howled and shrieked approval. The prisoners huddled close to the priest-woman in her long robes, and even she with her words of power looked afraid. The flickering light made a golden mask of Feather Cloak’s face.

Zuangua nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. We must kill all the human sorcerers. They are the most dangerous of all.”

Feather Cloak raised both hands, palms facing heaven, to allow the gods a glimpse into her soul. “I accept his offer of alliance. I offer him in turn the woman called Liathano.”

“What of a powerful offering for the gods?” demanded the blood knives. “What of your promise to us?”

“You can have her afterward,” said Feather Cloak, and she smiled mockingly at them. “If you can bind her.”

“This is a bad thing,” muttered Secha.

“To protect ourselves is a bad thing?”

“To seal an agreement on a lie is a bad thing.”

But Kansi-a-lari, The Impatient One, was Feather Cloak now.

“I have spoken,” she said irritably.

She beckoned to Sun Hair. She let him approach her. The prisoners watched in dread and anger, and her company watched with an intense excitement so palpable that it seemed to Secha that the ground trembled beneath the soles of her feet, shaken by their eagerness.

These were the tokens they exchanged: He gave to Feather Cloak an iron feather whose essence was so pure that it gleamed with a light all its own. She gave to him a folded mantle, a humble item, to be sure, but he pressed the cloth to his face as though it were the end of his desire.

Thus was the bargain sealed, and their path chosen.

9

MIDNIGHT—or as close to midnight as they could estimate, since no stars were visible to measure out time. They measured by psalms instead, and when they finished singing “Vindicate me, God, for I have walked without blame,” all quieted.

Because the church in Novomo had been built in the waning years of the Dariyan Empire, it boasted an impressive processional frieze worked into both walls of the nave above the twin rows of columns that separated the nave from the aisles on either side. In those shadowed aisles waited courtiers and servants, their faces unseen except as pale washes marked by the dark stones that were their eyes and the occasional flash of a ring or gold necklace catching candlelight. Above the waiting masses, the frieze marked the ascent of saints and martyrs toward the Hearth. Each held a saint’s crown to place before God. The colored stones in the mosaic shimmered to mark their holy robes and their holy crowns. Even their eyes shone; in this way the saints differ from the guilty who live and suffer on Earth, whose eyes are only pits in whose depths the righteous can discern the black stain of the Enemy.

Candlelight alone lit the church except for a single oil lamp placed on the Hearth itself and burning with the confidence and constancy of the just. By the smoky flames of threescore slender candles the ancient faces of the holy saints and martyrs watched and judged, their serene expressions caught forever in mosaics so cunningly worked that they almost appeared to be a painting. In the empty nave, threescore clerics lined up in two rows. Each cleric carried a taper in cupped hands. Back by the portico, Empress Adelheid and her consort waited under a mosaic rendering of the old palace that had once stood in Novomo; that structure was now half buried within the new palace, which had been erected about a hundred years ago and restored and remodeled several times since then.

So it was with the world: The skopos stood closest to God, beside the altar, and her clerics faced her with the light of truth in their hands. Secular power must wait at the doors of the church, because it could not enter fully. As for the rest, they must huddle in the shadows and pray.

Antonia raised her hands although she had already commanded silence. To her right Lord Berthold knelt on one knee, an arm braced against his thigh. His companion, Lord Jonas, stared at the ground, cowed and frightened, but Berthold studied the scene with the expression of a man who has seen the loveliest rose on Earth trampled and shredded before his eyes. He had grown up well loved and well protected by his father’s affection and by his high rank. No doubt the youth had never before understood how cruel and ugly the world was in truth. He did now. You could see it in the way he stared as if he wasn’t seeing, in the way he heard and saw without showing the least color of feeling, as if all emotion had been drained out of him with one sharp, deep cut. As it had been, because weeks ago he had woken to find Lady Elene dead beside him and her blood coagulating around his fingers and sleeves and in the tips of his hair.

That was the truth of the world. It was long past time he discovered it for himself, although unfortunately it had not seemed to bring him to prayer service more often, as it should have. She had offered him a position in her schola—in time a youth of his lineage could hope to rise to become presbyter—but he had refused her so tonelessly that she had known at once that his soul had already fallen into the Pit and was spinning and tumbling in the darkness.

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