Black Halo (30 page)

She felt the shadow on her back, looked up into hard black eyes.

‘Is a swift and fair death.’

Move
.

She did, too late.

His claws raked her, dug into the tender flesh of her back. She felt blood weeping down her skin, shallow muscles screaming, but not the numbing agony that would suggest a crippling blow. She tried to ignore the pain and scrambled away. She leapt to her feet, heard him fall to his feet and his claws as he charged. The bug grew large in her eyes, its stink brilliantly foul in her nose.

He lunged; she jumped.

He caught her ankle in a grasping claw; she seized a handful of pasty yellow innards.

She twisted and saw his teeth looming forward. With a growl to match his, she thrust the glistening, guts-laden fist at him and smeared the insect’s ichor into his nostrils.

Though he didn’t let go, he did howl. The roach’s juices vengefully filled his nostrils, seeped over his snout to sting his eyes. He threw his head back enough that she could pull her ankle from his weakened grip, claws scratching at her heel as she did.

He sprang to his feet, swung his fists out, lashed his tail out, stomped the earth in a blind, anosmic rage.

His roar filled her ears, as did the sound of his nostrils futilely searching the air for her. Such sounds continued as she ran into the forest, leaping over the river’s shallows and leaving him far behind. Without direction, without stopping, she ducked branches, leapt over logs. And through his howling and snarling she could hear his words, spoken with such venomous clarity. She could feel them continue to seep into her, as she could feel her eyes brim with tears.

She ran, and lied to herself that she wept because of the pain in her back.

She flew past a roach, the rainbow-coloured insect’s antennae twitching curiously as she sped past it without so much as a glance. It chittered quietly, confused. She did not look back at it.

Perhaps if she had, she might have noticed the pair of wide yellow eyes peering out of the foliage. Perhaps, if she had, she might have heard the sound of long, green footsteps that set off after her.

B
ralston, like most wizards, resented the term ‘magic’ as it pertained to his gifts.

Magic, in the accepted application of the word, was a dismissive means of explaining the inexplicable. The word ‘magic’ was uttered, whispered and squealed at everything from stars falling across the sky to a flower blooming in snowfall.

Wizards did not practise ‘magic.’ Wizards channelled
Venarie
. And as Venarie was the soul of the wizard, so too was reason the soul of Venarie.

‘Magic’ was no more mystical than a fever in the blood, the moisture in one’s breath, the faint shock that occurred when one touched a doorknob or the force that kept a man’s feet on the ground. Venarie was simply an added quality that allowed wizards to channel fever to flames, to freeze the moisture in their breath, to twist a shock to a bolt of lightning and to defy the earth itself.

This had been explained before, in countless theses, debates and lectures to the gifted and the unenlightened alike. Met with too many slack-jawed stares and the inability of the unenlightened to even fumble with these concepts, let alone grasp them, the Venarium had turned their efforts to more worthwhile studies.

Without the guidance of wizards, the unenlightened had turned to the only other source of explanation: their priests. And the priests offered only one explanation.

‘Magic.’

Venarie was the domain of wizards.

‘Magic’ was the practice of priests.

The explanation wasn’t always ‘magic.’ Just as frequently it was ‘fate,’ or ‘the will of the Gods,’ or ‘apologies that your son died in a war we told him was just; perhaps if you had just given a few more coins in the dish when it was passed your way.’ Whatever the explanation, priests lived to undo what wizards did.

The reasons for the Venarium’s enmity for priesthoods of all faiths had roots that sank into the earth of history, the greatest one taking years to explain in full every slight and grudge the wizards had meticulously recorded.

Bralston did not have years, so he simply settled for scowling across the table at Miron Evenhands.

‘I don’t like you.’

For his part, the priest seemed unfazed by this. He simply smiled, a sort of smile that irked Bralston to admit reminded him fondly of his grandfather, and brought a cup of steaming tea up to a long face beneath a white cowl.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Lord Emissary said.

‘Apologies suggest that there is something you can do to alter my opinion,’ Bralston replied sharply. ‘I assure you, my reasons remain steeped far enough in history and philosophy that any such suggestions are ultimately a frivolous, and borderline insulting, waste of time and attention on your part and mine.’

‘That’s one interpretation.’ The priest bobbed his head. ‘There are others. For example, it can also imply a deep lament that history and philosophy have more to do with an opinion than character and personal experience do. It can also imply a subtle desire that said relations could be repaired, if only through two open minds meeting at the right time with the right attitude.’

Bralston snorted, crinkling his nose in a sneer. ‘That’s stupid.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Look,’ the wizard said, rubbing his eyes. ‘I get my fill of arguing philosophical trivia in Cier’Djaal. I was hoping that this mission would heighten my appreciation for simplicity.’

‘You hoped that a mission to track down people who shoot fire from their fingertips and don’t soil themselves with the effort due to glowing red stones would be simple?’

‘What did I
just
say?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Miron smiled and held up a hand for preemptive peace. ‘Excuse me. In truth, I had hoped that summoning you here would result in a greater enhancement of your desire for simplicity.’

Bralston merely grunted at that. Thus far, the two hours of contact that he had shared with the Lord Emissary had been anything but simple.

He had arrived in Port Destiny shortly after dawn broke on the blue horizon of the sea, as scheduled, planning only on lingering for as long as it took to find a meal. He had been surprised to find a bronze-clad, fierce-looking woman with raven hair and a long sword, standing exactly three feet from where he landed, wearing an expression as though she had been waiting there specifically for him.

His surprise had turned to suspicion when she, one Knight-Serrant Quillian Guisarne-Garrelle Yanates, had revealed that she was doing exactly that. That suspicion had convinced him to follow her lead to the luxurious temple in the city, and from there to the table where he now sat, across from a priest of Talanas – an apparently high-ranking priest of Talanas – who somehow seemed to know everything about his mission.

And
, he thought with a twitch of his eyelid,
who just won’t … stop … smiling
.

‘You’ll forgive me for being less than willing to nod my head dumbly and accept whatever you say,
Lord Emissary
.’ Bralston all but spat the title on the table. ‘But given that the Venarium acts with at least a modicum of secrecy, I must be more than a little suspicious at how you know what my mission concerns.’

‘Suspicion is a wise policy, even in times of peace.’ Miron shook his head and sighed. ‘In times of turmoil … well …’

‘That doesn’t explain anything.’

‘No appreciation for dramatic segues, I see.’ The priest smiled, took another sip. ‘I can see why, of course. Drama tends to be a word in a forgotten language that roughly translates to “long-winded, unimportant babble purely for the sake of entertaining idiots.”’

‘I would not disagree.’

‘When “long-winded and unimportant” tend to be the exact opposite of the concise and sharp-witted pride of the wizard, no? Curtness, forthrightness, everything explained, everything understood. That is what you believe, is it not?’

‘Priests believe. Wizards
know
.’

‘Indeed. However, what you apparently don’t know is that everything is not quite so neatly explained as you might think. This supposed rivalry between the churches and the Venarium, for example.’ The priest’s smile seemed to grow larger with every mounting moment of Bralston’s ire. ‘It would cast such
knowledge
into doubt to learn that there might be one or two wizards out there who find the company of priests tolerable, would it not?’ He smiled and winked. ‘Even to the point of sharing the details on missions conducted with a modicum of secrecy?’

Bralston’s eyes went wide, mouth went small.

‘You’re saying …’ he uttered. ‘We have a leak.’

‘Now who’s being dramatic?’ The priest’s laughter was dry, like pages turning in a well-read book. ‘No, no, my friend. I simply meant that, where our concerns coincide, Lector Annis and myself are not above violating enmities steeped in philosophy and history.’

‘Coincide?’ Bralston raised a brow. ‘The Lector mentioned nothing.’

‘I suppose he wouldn’t, for fear that you might believe what I am about to tell you is an order, rather than a humble request, something you would no doubt resent.’

‘And that request is?’

Miron’s smile faded, and a look of concern, so familiar as to have been etched on the face of every soft-hearted grandmother and hard-working grandfather that Bralston had ever seen, spread over his face.

‘I would like you to find my employees.’

‘Surely,’ Bralston replied, ‘agents of the church are more than capable of performing your will, given the funding and support you undoubtedly boast.’

‘
True
agents, perhaps.’ Miron nodded. ‘However, for want of those, I instead hired adventurers.’

Bralston rolled his eyes and placed a finger to his temple, the reasoning suddenly becoming all too clear. ‘You hired some vagrant lowlifes to do your bidding, they broke their contract and they made off with your money or your daughter or whatever you wear under your robes, if not all three, and you want me to get them back?’ He sat rigid in his chair, uncompromising. ‘I’m not a mercenary.’

‘No, you’re a Librarian,’ Miron replied, unfazed by the sarcastic assault. ‘But more than that, you’re a good man, Bralston.’

‘I didn’t tell you my name.’

‘Annis did, amongst other things.’ The priest leaned forward in his chair, propping his elbows on his table. ‘He told me many things about you, many foul things you did for the right reasons.’

The Librarian had prided himself on being difficult to surprise. But it wasn’t the words emanating from the Lord Emissary’s mouth that caused him to feel so small in his chair. Rather, it was the intensity, that instinctual concern that played across the priest’s face that suggested he had known Bralston all his life.

Only one person had ever looked at him in such a way before …

‘You know …’ the Librarian whispered.

‘I know that you love a woman,’ Miron replied. ‘That you spilled blood to protect her, blood that nearly brought the Venarium to war with the Jackals. I know you burned two men alive without question for the agonies they inflicted on a poor woman. I know that your duties go far, far beyond whatever the Venarium claims they do in the name of their laws.’

Bralston expected to feel cold, expected that such a revelation should seize him by the heart and twist. Instead, he felt warm, comforted by the reassuring smile that the priest wore. He felt a familiar urge, the same urge that when young would cause him to run crying to his mother when he had skinned his knee, or to hug his father’s legs when a dog had growled at him.

An urge that he thought he had hardened himself to.

‘That is why, Bralston,’ Miron whispered, ‘I want you to find my employees. There are six of them, four men and two women.’

‘And …’ Bralston swallowed hard. ‘You want me to protect the women.’

‘If it is in your power, I would ask you to protect them all. As it stands, these adventurers are a capable lot. The men are well-armed, and one of the women, a shict, is possibly even better-equipped to handle herself.’ Miron’s face wrinkled with concern. ‘The sixth member, however … she is not weak, by any means, but she is … untested.’

‘I see.’ Bralston scratched his chin contemplatively. ‘This woman … I assume she’s one of your own.’

‘Do you?’

‘As compassionate as even a Lord Emissary is, I doubt his charity extends so low as to reach adventurers. They live to die, do they not, to be used and disposed of?’

‘Perhaps some hold that attitude.’ For the first time, Miron betrayed a hint of sadness in his face. ‘Though you are right. She is sacred to Talanas, serving her pilgrimage with the others. A priestess.’

The Librarian didn’t feel the usual cringe that accompanied such a word. Enmity steeped in years was forgotten, replaced by a sudden surge through his being, the same surge that had called him to burn men alive.

‘A priestess …’ he whispered.

‘I know you do not agree with her calling. But she is not yet hardened enough to know that anything beyond her faith exists.’ Miron smiled. ‘She is the one I wish to preserve the most. I fear the horror that was inflicted upon the woman in Cier’Djaal would shatter her completely.’