Once I breathed again, I turned my mind to important business. Somewhere just beyond Dolgar’s shrine was an alley where my informant had said I would find an ale shop marked with a white dagger. There, after two weeks’ journeying from Ezzaria and three days being passed from one contact to the next and waiting for my request to be relayed and responded to, I would meet the man who had taken custody of my son.
The air was stifling. Nothing brought my dislike of cities so much to life as the broiling noonday stink of dung and butchered animals, cheap perfumes and scented lamp oils, rotted vegetables and thousands of animals and unwashed bodies in so close a space. Though the stench was no less in the alley, at least there were fewer people: a few beggars, a brawny tradesman hauling a broken cart, and a young woman dressed in a servant’s apron hurrying past. Just ahead of me the houses were built right over the alleyway, casting the narrow lane in deep shadow. The first thing I saw, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the overhang, was a splash of white paint on the mud-colored wall. The white dagger.
I hesitated before entering the dark opening, as pointlessly nervous as a Hollenni youth setting out to meet the bride chosen for him at birth. I was a warrior who had faced down hundreds of demons, including the most powerful of their kind. I had stood nose to nose with the heir to the Derzhi Empire and dared him to kill me. How could a three-month-old infant and a priest have me in such a pitiful state?
Before I could steel myself and step inside the doorway, a hunchbacked old man in grease-splattered rags bumped into me, trampling my foot. He wobbled and flailed his arms, threatening to smear his pustule-covered face against my own. I recoiled in disgust from his stink and disease, while grabbing his arm to keep him from falling.
“Dolgar’s grace, your worship,” he mumbled. “Pardons. Pardons.” Touching one hand to his head, he bent over and tried to back away, but I didn’t let go. “Please, master . . .” With none too gentle a movement, I twisted his other arm into a knot and snatched my leather packet from the surprisingly strong hand that had been stuffing it into the deep folds of his filthy robe. Fortunately, I had not lost my reflexes completely in my summer’s madness. When I glimpsed the glint of steel beneath his robe, I whirled about, and kicked the knife into the air, hearing it clatter against a mud-brick wall. To my astonishment the beggar growled in fury and came after me. But I caught his hand in my free one and spun him about until I had him wrapped in my arm like a stinking caterpillar in its bundled web.
“Do not,” I said, glaring into his black eyes that were not at all so decrepit as the rest of him. Then I shoved him away, retrieved his knife, and stuck it in the waistband of my breeches. Only as he scrabbled away into the shadows cursing did I flatten my back against the wall and take a few shaking breaths, replacing the precious packet under my shirt yet again. Too close. Already nervous, I almost swallowed my tongue when a large bird of brown and white, some kind of hawk or vulture, swooped down from a nearby rooftop, passing not three handspans from my nose before soaring into the sunlight at the end of the alleyway.
I shook off the disconcerting encounters and stepped into the doorway of the ale shop. The place was dark and airless, scarcely large enough to hold the three small tables and the rickety crates and barrels pulled up to serve for seats. A large man sat on a barrel in one corner, slumped against the wall. From the sound of his snores he was deep in ale-fed dreams, but no sooner did I move past the plane of the door than he growled and gurgled and cleared his throat. “A hot day, traveler,” he mumbled. “Have ye a thirst needs easing?”
“Aye,” I said. “A mug of your best.”
He disappeared through a back door, and before I could find a seat that looked sturdy enough to hold a man safely, he slammed a brimming tankard on the battered table. I pulled a coin from my pocket and spun it upward over my head, and as I expected, his movements reflected no ale-drowned dullness. He plucked it from the air like a lizard’s tongue nabs a mosquito.
“Where have you come from, traveler?”
“Karesh,” I said. Near enough. Karesh was a Manganar town just over the border from Ezzaria. I knew it as well as I knew any town, and chances were this man had never been more than two streets from the lane where he was born. “I’ve come to meet a man. I’ve been told he frequents your shop and picks up packages here. Says it has the finest ale this side of Zhagad, though the brewers in Karesh disagree. Have you seen him?”
Those were the words I’d been told to say by the last of the three contacts in the web of misdirection begun by Catrin’s information.
“And who is it has told you that?”
“I was sent by the guardians.”
How I could have missed the other man sitting in that dark room, I could not imagine, but no sooner had I said the words than I felt him there, just to my right, sitting at the third table and leaning his chin on his hand. I spun quickly on my seat, almost toppling the tankard in my surprise.
Watch your back, fool. You’ve let yourself get careless
.
“I see no package, sir,” said the quiet voice from the shadows.
“Perhaps I wanted to see what manner of man it was before I entrusted him with my business.”
“Good Feydor, a light, if you please. Your shop is like the mine pit of the Nurad, where blessed Dolgar was held prisoner.”
The portly landlord produced an earthenware oil lamp and set it on the grimed, knife-gouged table between the soft-spoken man and myself. He kindly transferred my ale as well, then set a barrel—and himself on it—in the doorway of his shop and promptly set to snoring again.
The man revealed by the lamplight wore the wrappings of a priest of Dolgar—shabby, threadbare swathes of dingy cloth wrapped about his chest and his waist—and, like all his brother priests, he had shaved his head. The dark circle on his forehead would be ashes—to remind him of the fire that burned the hero Dolgar into ash—and the burn scars on the backs of both his hands would complete the tale, for the fire had transformed the human man’s ashes into a god. But signs and symbols were not the whole story of this priest. I could not fix him anywhere in the span of people I had known. He was a younger man than I expected, no more than twenty-five, and his face was coarse, all angles and bones and deep hollows, his lower lip protruding and malformed. Though his sagging lip and awkward features spoke of peasant ancestry, as was common for the poor priests of the Manganar low gods like Dolgar, his dark, deep-set eyes were as keen as a Warden’s knife blade. His long fingers had worked the land. They were cracked and had dirt ground in that no amount of washing could remove. Yet he wore an air of stillness that I had seldom found in those whose lives were defined by hardship and poverty. Peasants, even priests, had little leisure for studied quiet.
“You may skin my looks as you will,” he said in the fluid dialect of the Manganar countryside. “There’s little enough to see, as my mam always told me, and nothing fair about it. But I don’t know you’ll be able to tell what manner of man I am by your looking. It’s the history of deeds must speak for me.”
“Then speak,” I said.
“I am but a poor priest of mighty Dolgar. My brothers and I serve our holy master, giving refuge to innocents left without family, whether from war or disease or whatever reason. We ask nothing in return but to be left to our work. Is that introduction enough?”
Both his speech and his gaze were open and frank, no trace of slyness or hidden meaning. I almost felt guilty when I shifted my senses and looked deeper. Perhaps he had been examined in that way before. I didn’t know what other Ezzarians had come to this place laying their torn hearts in this man’s bony hands. But I would see . . . and he did not look away. It was very strange . . . I saw a good and simple man, one with no great aspirations, a man at peace. Nothing to make me wary or fearful. Yet as I pulled away, I felt a momentary dizziness, as sometimes happens when you are just at the point of slipping into sleep and suddenly feel as if you’re falling, though your back is solidly on the ground . . . or as I did when I jumped from a cliff in an alien soul and grew wings to break my fall. I thought it was only me, and the strain of being in the city, for it was glimpses of the city that shot through my head like flickering light beams. Colors, faces, Derzhi warriors with swords drawn, the bird that had flown past my face, beggars, white daggers smeared on walls and flags and faces.
“Introduction enough,” I said, taking a drink of my ale to cover my jumpiness. The room was very hot. “You know who we are. I mean, you’ve seen those like me before.” Ezzarians were the easiest to recognize of all races in the Empire, save the dark-skinned Thrid. We had worked for years without success to devise enchantments to mask our features, but to our eternal annoyance could maintain such an illusion no more than a few moments at a time.
“Aye,” he said. “But I know naught of your secrets nor do I care to know.” He leaned forward. “And now will you tell me exactly why you’re here? You’re not at all the usual messenger from those of your blood. You’ve brought no little one with you, have you?”
“No.”
He wrinkled his gangly face into a knot. “You don’t think to put a stop to our service?”
“No. Nothing like that.” Now that the time had come, I wasn’t sure what to say. “Tell me . . . you have seen . . . these that my people bring you . . .” Damned awkward.
“Children. Dolgar’s eye, they’re naught but children.”
“The children . . . They grow well? Healthy? Happy?” Or did they cut the wings off of birds or set fire to their cradles or kill each other before they could walk?
“We tend them as we do every child in our care. We give them everything within our power to give: food, medicine, someone to be glad they’re alive.”
“You didn’t answer me.” I found it hard to look at him.
“Why should I answer? Will you not keep bringing them? Is what I offer not better than what you offer? What difference to you is the outcome of what we give? We don’t sell them into slavery. We don’t trade or bargain them. Our god commands us to do our best, and that’s what we do.”
His calm response held no antagonism, only simple reason. Yet I felt . . . I knew . . . that there was more than he was saying. He just gave me no hook upon which to hang my conviction.
“What is it you want?” Clearly he had no intention of answering my question unless I gave him a reason. And so I proceeded.
“There was a child came to you a few months ago. An infant. Brought by a scholarly man with only one eye . . .”
“I remember him. A kind man. Not easy with infants, or cities either, as I recall. But I honored him and took his charge. To a priest of my order, a supplicant with one eye cannot be refused.”
After a moment I remembered that Dolgar’s enemies had taken out one of the poor man’s eyes before burning him. Lucky for his priests that the ashes and the burns were the only symbols of their god they were required to mimic.
I sipped my ale. I shifted on my barrel seat. I looked him over again, but he was so still he almost faded into the shadows. I could see no way to dance around the subject. What could I do but trust him and try to gain his trust in return?
“That child is my son. I’ve come to see him and . . .” And what? Take him with me? Where? What did I know of children? I had put aside these troublesome questions in my journeying, delighting in the thought that there was one death fewer to my tally, believing I would know what to do when the time came. But as the dark-eyed young man gazed on me in quiet waiting, I still didn’t know what I should do. “He should be with his family,” I blurted out at last.
“His family didn’t want him.”
“I was beyond—” I bit my tongue in annoyance. I couldn’t tell him that I had been in a place no ordinary human could walk, battling monsters that he could not imagine in his dreams, that I had been flying on wings of gossamer in airs woven of madness and horror. An illiterate Manganar priest would never understand it. “I’ve never even seen him. My wife sent him away before I knew. I thought he was dead.”
His speech was still calm and soft, yet I heard the rumble of righteous anger buried deep within him, imperfectly masked. “If you had spoken fairly to this one-eyed man who brought the child, then he could have told you of our agreement. We make it clear before we touch the child. We ask no questions, and we answer none. Once the bargain is struck, there is no turning back. You are free of your unwanted burden. The child is free of his.” He stood up abruptly and shoved a heavy barrel aside so he could get out of his corner. “If what you say is true, then I’m sorry. But you’re too late. May I offer a blessing for you before I go?”
I stood up, too, and forced myself calm. Killing him would do me no good, nor would strangling or pounding or any of the other forms of coercion that came instantly to mind. My fingers were making dents in the dark pine table. “He is my son. Please. I’ll do anything you ask. You must—”
“I must not.” He leaned forward over the table, so that the force of his words buffeted my face. “I vowed to keep him safe. I have no way of knowing what you did to the man who brought him or to your wife, if indeed the child was yours. It may be your intent to carry out your barbaric customs. You are not a simple man, my friend. Even an ignorant priest can see it. Your very posture is violence. So in order to keep the vows my god demands, I must be wary and assume the worst.”
“I’d never hurt him. Nor you. That’s the last thing—”
“The children we take are rescued from their fates, and we will not send them back. You may do with me as you wish, my friend, though you must realize that none of my brothers will ever again answer this call if I do not return.” He held out his hand in a gesture of peace. “If you care for this child, then leave him be.”
I did not take his hand. I was trying to conjure words—some reason that would appeal to him, some way to convince him that I was not a threat. But I could come up with nothing. Everything he said was true.