Blackdog (76 page)

“And not my fault if it's cold. But there's beer from Auntie. At least, what they call beer in these parts.”

“It'll do for a wake.”

“Whose wake?”

“There's enough dead to go around. You pick.”

The sun slid below the horizon, no great stretching of summer days down here, and he found a tunic in the baggage, as much to keep off the cool night wind as for human decency. They sat hip to hip, flaking fish off the bones, watching the stars turning. Vrehna and Tihz ran together, almost touching, still days from conjunction.

“I found something odd in the temple,” Moth said. “A shrine.”

“Funny thing to find in a temple.”

“Quiet, cub. In some sister's private chamber. A wall niche where she'd painted a god on the plaster, the shape of a man all white and yellow flames. It was in the western wall of the room.”

“And?”

“And what about this new god they have in the west, in Tiypur, who doesn't speak and doesn't have a place or a body but sends out his priests to tell folk to obey or be damned?”

“Humans like an excuse to bully other humans and make them slaves in their heads.”

“I wonder.”

“Sun
in the first of three is ‘dawn,’ isn't it?”

“Or east, yes. Usually.”

“Can't call Tiypur east, wolf.”

“I'm not. I'm just…wondering. Cold. A goose on my grave.”

“More likely a partridge, in the Hardenwald.”

“Oh, funny cub. We go east to Marakand. But I think we should be listening to any winds from the west.”

It is said that the seven devils do not sleep, but lie ever-waking within their bonds, and they work against their bonds and weaken them, and they work against their captors and their gaolers sleep or they die, as even gods and goddesses can die, when the fates allow it.

And perhaps some of the devils are free in the world, and perhaps some are working to free themselves still.

K.V.
Johansen is the author of nearly twenty books for children and teens, including the award-winning
Warlocks of Talverdin
and
Torrie
fantasy series, and the “Pippin and Mabel” picture books, with translations into French, Danish, and Macedonian. She has also written two fantasy short story collections and two books of literary criticism. Born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, she has had a lifelong fascination with fantasy literature and the Middle Ages, which led her to take a Master's degree in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English literature from McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon's
Brut
, a Middle English epic poem. While now writing full time, she retains her academic interests and is a member of the Tolkien Society and the Early English Text Society, as well as the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. Visit her online at
www.kvj.ca.