In the Shadow of the Gods (16 page)

He turned away from the preacher and the mage; away from the villagers he had come to know in so short a time, their kindness peeled back in layers by one cruel act. The Highlands, a place that had mingled so deeply with Fiatera, a place that had still been shaped by the hands of the Parents, were no longer a good place for walking.

“I'm sorry,” he said aloud, to Terron and the other villagers, to Lethys and his dead father, to all the dead twins, and the live ones inside Raturo. “I'm sorry,” he said as he left them behind.

“You've a gentle heart,” Pelir had told him, and Keiro's gentle heart could no longer bear this place. He would prepare the world for the young twins, and the Twins when they were freed from their prison, but Fiatera was too hard a place. Like Fratarro, he would find a corner of the world, a peaceful place, and quiet, and he would shape it for them. A place that was far from dead buried babies and their eyes that would not leave him. A place where he could hear the voices of his gods and know he had followed the right path. A place where, finally, his walking feet could rest.

J
oros found his mage talking to the children. That alone wasn't enough to send his anger near to boiling over, for Anddyr could often be found with the young twins—broken things had a tendency to drift together. It was the day that had come before, combined with the fact that the little beasts were
in his rooms,
that made Joros kick the chair.

It splintered against the wall, more force behind the kick than he'd intended, but Anddyr was the only one to flinch. The mage curled into a ball of fear, and the children turned to look at Joros with level eyes.

“You should really learn to control your anger,” the boy said softly.

Joros wanted to kick something else, but there was nothing near enough, and his foot was throbbing. He settled for grinding his teeth. “I have told you,” he said as levelly as he could, “that you are not to be in my rooms.” Dirrakara had chided him for being too harsh on the children, told him he'd regret it if he made them hate him. He'd been making an effort to hide
his distaste, but the monsters didn't make it easy.

Avorra sneered at him—she was working on perfecting that expression. “If you let Anddyr go out sometimes, we wouldn't have to come here.”

“I have also told you that you are not to speak to Anddyr.”

“But he's so lonely.”

Joros glared at the mage, who carefully avoided his eyes. “You're not lonely, are you, Anddyr?”

“No, cappo,” the mage said quickly.

“See? Now please leave.”

Avorra sneered again. “It's not the truth if you say it when you're scared.” She knelt down next to Anddyr and his eyes fixed on her face. “You're lonely, aren't you, Anddyr?” Her voice was a coo, startlingly close to Dirrakara's mothering-voice. “Don't you wish you could spend more time outside this room?”

The mage's eyes flicked from the girl to Joros to something he held in his lap. When he shifted, Joros got a clearer view of it: the lumpy, poorly made stuffed horse some preacher had given to Avorra when she was a baby. She'd carried it around everywhere until she'd discarded it a few months ago. He'd thought the stupid thing gone forever. And yet there it was, with his mage's hands wrapped tightly around its yellow body.

There was a story, one of the old stories preachers told of the times when the gods still walked the earth, of man's first death. Patharro had come down to visit the first man, Beno, one of his earliest creations; the man had grown wrinkled and bony, centuries old, but he still had the energy of a young man. The Father spoke with him for a time, until he grew tired of Beno's querulous nature; but when he went to leave, Beno followed
after him, jabbing at Patharro with his heavy walking stick and demanding why the Father had not shaped him better—made his bones stronger, given him claws like a greatcat, made his eyes sharper, made his skin thicker, given him wings. Finally Patharro turned and tore the stick from Beno's hands, using it to strike down the first man. Patharro had made it so that no man would ever grow so old as Beno, so that death would take everyone before they could ever grow so tiresome.

Joros didn't always agree with the Parents, but he thought the Father's actions there had been justified. Joros could barely manage living with irritating people for a normal life-span; he couldn't imagine what an eternity would be like. Honestly, it showed a good deal of patience from Patharro that he'd allowed mankind immortality for even a short time.

He stalked forward and pushed Avorra aside, stood glaring down at the mage. “Give me that,” he said sternly, holding out his hand for the stupid horse.

Anddyr's hands tightened around the horse's soft body, and something drifted into his wide-pupiled eyes that Joros hadn't seen before. A hardness, a sharpness, something that did not want to bend. “It's mine,” Anddyr said, and the words came out almost a snarl. There was a crackling in the air, as brittle as the mage's eyes.

Joros's heart took a pause in its measured thumping. It had proved easy enough to put the mage in charge of his own drugging—he'd stare at a time-candle for hours as his mind melted like wax, counting down the marks until he could patch his sanity back together with black paste. He never took the skura too early, and certainly never too late, but there was a madness in his eyes that Joros was not used to seeing. “Anddyr
,” he said, gentle and careful, “when was the last time you took your skura?”

The mage moaned, eyes screwing shut, hands wringing at the stuffed horse. The stone beneath Joros's feet shuddered.

“We told him not to,” a small voice said, soft but triumphant, and Joros rounded on the young twins, the young fools. They stared back at him with mismatched expressions on identical faces, the girl smug, the boy sad and resolute. Avorra went on, “He listens better to us.”

There was something very close to fear rising in Joros, surging along with Anddyr's strident muttering, more frantic with each crackling moment. He nearly flew to the cupboard where they kept the skura, neat lines of little earthenware jars, seeds and roots and careful poisons mixed with his blood. He grabbed at one, knocked over others in his haste, scrabbled at the lid until it came away with the earthy stench of rot.

The very air seemed to fight him, thick and suffocating, as he stepped back toward the mage. Anddyr writhed on the ground now, eyes locked on the ceiling in blind horror, the stuffed horse clutched to his chest. The damned twins stood still and silent, watching, the girl with contempt, the boy with curiosity. The air around them was visible, a crackling haze that lifted their hair in strands like live things.

His heart raced, but Joros's legs hardly seemed to move, like walking through chest-high water. “Fire!” Anddyr screamed at the ceiling, and then a laugh tore through him, a horrible rending sound. “Fire, all fire, fire at the end.” The air around the mage was hot enough to burn, made the skin over Joros's face feel stretched too tight. The jar of skura grew hot between his fingers, hot as a burning ember, and as he lurched toward the
mage, some instinct of self-preservation made him give up his hold on the jar.

It fell, by some lucky fluke, directly onto the mage's face. That startled him into silence, long enough for the skura to drip down into his mouth, and soon a different kind of convulsing took the mage. The fire fell from the air, and the stone floor settled once more, and a choked sound emerged from Joros. Relief, perhaps.

It lasted only long enough for the fire to settle into Joros, and he turned once more to the twins. The anger was wild in him, reckless at the near escape of whatever horrors an uncontrolled mage could bring crashing down. “Never again,” he snarled at them, and he reached down to tear the idiotic stuffed horse from Anddyr's slack fingers. The mage lay slack and useless, wallowing in the stupor the skura brought on. Joros shook the horse at the twins and said, “You will not speak with him again. Do you hear me?” He twisted the horse, the lumps of its body shifting under his hands, fabric stretching.

“It's mine,” a voice behind him said, and that put pause to the raging anger. Usually it took Anddyr's shattered wits a good while to knit themselves back together, to make him almost human again, but his voice was firm, if not loud. It put a twisting chill in Joros's stomach.

“You begin to understand.” The boy-twin stood facing Joros, face utterly calm and utterly unchildlike. His eyes had gone distant, staring at something far beyond seeing. “He is ours,” Etarro said, his voice strangely inflectionless. “You will keep him for a time, but he will always be ours. You will keep him from us at your own peril.”

Silence hung in the air after the boy's words, heavy as a fist,
until his distant eyes finally blinked and returned, features smoothing once more into those of a wide-eyed child.

“We'll try not to bother you anymore, cappo,” he said, voice soft as usual. He turned and walked from the room, and Avorra hurried to follow him. There was a strange look on her face, something between fear and wonder and anger.

The silence stayed after they'd left. Even Anddyr, who usually muttered incessantly to himself, sat quietly in the after-throes of his skura. “It's mine,” he finally said again, and Joros turned silently to offer the stuffed horse by one leg. The mage took it; intelligence had returned to his eyes but the madness was not entirely gone. Dirrakara said the drug would twist his mind over time, make the skura madness his reality, with the black paste offering the only relief from delusions. She'd also warned him, quietly, that the mage might not have a particularly long life. Anddyr had his uses, but Joros found himself praying earnestly that she was right.

Finally Joros went to sit in his chair near the hearth, flickering with bluish flame. It was a conceit of the preachers, a powder that changed the fire's color and little more; blue made for a softer light, and anyone found burning red flames inside the mountain would be severely punished. Still, the blue flame was as unnatural as those blasted twins. Years ago, when he'd brought their mother safely up the heights of Raturo, he'd been sure the children growing inside her would be his key and his crown. He'd grown less sure of it every passing year.

There was a stack of letters near his chair, and he shuffled distractedly through them until he saw the mark of one of his agents in Mercetta. The man had proved to be slightly unhinged over the years, but there was no arguing that he was
a good seeker, and he'd had the most interesting news of late. Joros had taken over the shadowseekers five years ago; it had been easy enough to do, once he'd been elevated to the Ventallo. His old mentor, Chevo, had been none too pleased with being replaced, but the old fool hadn't been able to do anything about it—when a Ventallo spoke, all others knelt. Since then, Joros's days had been filled with reports and letters and a shelf of carefully organized seekstones. Tedious things, usually, but entirely worthwhile.

Joros skimmed the report and smiled to himself.
Twins
. For long years, Verteira's children had been the only viable option; but there was change in the air. Just because a thing had been so for a time did not mean it would always be so.

There were more reports; his seekers were scattered throughout Fiatera, but they were nothing if not faithful about sending in their reports. Reading through page after page of possible sightings and disappointments and drownings at least took his mind off Etarro and Avorra, gave his anger the chance to settle. Anddyr's muttering was a constant backdrop—almost comforting, strange as that seemed. Joros snorted, and growled at the mage to be silent.

It took some hours to read through all the reports and pen the necessary replies, the longest going to the seeker in Mercetta with that most interesting news. Anddyr sealed each letter, fumbling with the wax, his fingers growing clumsier with each moment. That was the trouble with having an assistant who saw things that weren't really there. The mage would grow convinced that Joros's seal was a spider trying to eat his fingers, the wax a piece of the sky that had fallen, and he usually ended up throwing one or both into a dark corner and had
to be sent hunting after them. Finally Joros gave up on the correspondence and rose to his feet with a stretch. “Come, Anddyr,” he called tiredly, and the mage's head swung around. “We still have our work to do.”

Dirrakara often complained that Joros kept himself too busy; with his duties as Octeiro, heading the shadowseekers, and his newest project, he had little time to spare. That was well enough—he wasn't a man prone to indolence. He wasn't a man who wasted his time.

The Ventallo chamber was empty, as it usually was, or if any of the others were around, they were closed up in their private chambers. It was for the best; he'd rather none of them knew yet about his newest project. There were getting to be so many mages skulking through Raturo, their wits addled by Dirrakara's drug, that it wouldn't surprise Joros if one of his brothers or sisters shared his realization, but Joros was determined to have a head start, if nothing else.

Anddyr knelt down before the stone box, a creature of habit, though he forgot his purpose somewhere between standing and kneeling. A tired sort of disgust roiled in Joros's stomach, mixed with contempt; he had no patience for weak wills, but the mage had proved himself too useful to discard, and too dangerous to antagonize. He showed flashes of intelligence between his mutterings and his ravings, but they were rare; he'd settled easily into thralldom, and so Joros wasn't inclined to think he'd had much will to begin with. Still, he tried to be friendly to the mage—or as friendly as he was capable of being. “Do you even think of fighting anymore?” Joros asked, not bothering to hide his distaste, but genuinely curious.

The mage blinked, mouth dropping slowly open. His eyes
drifted sideways, flicked back, drifted away again. His lips formed the shapes of syllables, but no sound came out.

Joros's fingers curled tightly; he was wasting time, and there was none to waste. “Answer me,” he growled, and without thinking he kicked at the mage. His foot connected lightly with the mage's shoulder, and for a small moment of terror as he remembered what Anddyr was capable of, Joros wondered if this was how his miserable life would end.

But the mage merely whimpered as his eyes snapped back to Joros, flashing with fear. “No,” he blurted. “No. I don't think about fighting.” He flinched, though Joros hadn't moved.

No. Not someone worthy of any respect, or of any fear. “Go, Anddyr,” Joros said, hiding his deep relief as the mage sluggishly pressed his hands to the bier. “Find him.” Anddyr's eyes drifted shut, and his fingers twitched against the stone, and Joros very quickly grew bored.

They had been at this for almost two months, and Joros was becoming impatient for results. He hadn't been so foolish as to think it would be
easy,
but he had expected it to be quicker. In one of his more lucid moments, Anddyr had tried to explain how his magic worked, how it was much more complex than simply “like calling to like,” but Joros didn't care how it worked. He cared only about the answers it could bring him.