In the Shadow of the Gods (32 page)

And so it began. A circle formed by stomping feet, ringed by angry, excited men. Iveran at one side, Scal at the other, forced now to see him. To meet his eyes. To see the pain there, and the love.

Love your enemies,
Parro Kerrus had told him, long years ago, in another life,
for they teach you what you'll never become.

T
ime crept by, measured in the slow fall of flecks of snow, in the steam of air that leaked out from noses and mouths, in the suspicion growing in three sets of eyes. They wouldn't stop staring at Joros, the merra with her ever-present anger but something new in her eyes as well, the boy-twin with his simple confusion and fear, and the girl with more intelligence in her eyes than he'd given her credit for. They watched him in silence, until they began to realize, one by one, how much time had gone by.

Rora, with her smart eyes and coarse voice that didn't match, was the first one to speak the new feeling rolling through their camp, covering the suspicion like a blanket of snow: “It's been too long.”

“It has,” the merra agreed quickly, her glare turning to Rora. “You never should have left him alone.”

They were tense, all of them, and with good reason. The North was not a hospitable place, and their only guide out was, to all appearances, missing. Returning the merra's glare, Rora
stood and brushed the snow from her breeches. “I'll go back for him.”

Behind Joros, Anddyr made a choked little sound. Joros held up his hand to stop her. “I believe we
all
will go. It may be that something more important than we realize is happening.”

Aro whined about it—it seemed as though he always found something to whine about, more useless than the boy-twin inside Raturo—but his whining stopped when his sister pointed out that if he didn't want to come, he could stay here
alone
and watch the horses. After that, they all moved in silence. The horses were reluctant to move, but enough of Joros's whip got his moving, and the others trudged on after.

Rora led them, eyes narrowed into the blowing snow. There was no knowing what sense guided her, but at some point she held up one hand to halt them, another finger held over her lips for silence. They all dismounted, staked the horses in a huddled ring. Rora led them on hands and knees up a slope, motioning them all to keep low. “This is where I left him,” she said softly, and then her eyes grew wide. Drawing up next to her on his stomach, Joros soon saw why.

He had expected to see the pit as she'd described it. Northmen crawling all over it, constantly digging. Instead, the Northmen had formed a press, the mass of them gathered around two of their number locked in combat.

“Scal!”
the merra hissed, and Joros could hear the fear in her voice. It was one of the first emotions besides disdain he'd heard from her. No wonder, with the only person in the world who could tolerate her currently one too-slow movement away from losing his head.

“Idiot,” Joros spat. He had no time to waste on fools, and if
the Northman had gotten himself captured, he was certainly a fool. His eyes roved around the pit, an ancient place, perhaps made by men long forgotten, or shaped by the strange-swirling winds and melting snow—or perhaps by a forceful impact centuries ago. At the far end, surrounded by three high cliffs of stone and ice, three forms still dug, stark against the snow in their black robes. There was a strange twisting in Joros's stomach at a flash of red hair above one of those robes. “Stay here,” he said to the others. “Anddyr and I have business to attend to.” He fixed his eyes on Rora, flicked them at her brother as an afterthought. “I may have need of you two at a moment's notice. Anddyr will fetch you here, if necessary.” He turned to his mage, then let his eyes drift back into the pit, to that damned point of red. The easiest way down would be to backtrack to the horses, circle around to where the Northmen were at the mouth of the pit, and slip around them while they were all distracted. That would take time, though, and there was a pounding in Joros's breast that said there was little enough time to waste. “Get us down there fast, Anddyr.”

Since he'd burned the town, the mage had become unfailingly dutiful in taking his skura. His control was renewed, and his subservience, so Joros was pleased to see the mage already beginning to weave a spell. He recognized the cloaking first, that infinitely useful little spell. If anyone was persistent about looking, Anddyr had explained the first time he'd cast a cloaking, they'd be spotted in a second, but the Northerners fighting should prove a good enough distraction to keep persistent eyes away. When Rora's surprised swearing told Joros the cloaking had settled over him and the mage, Anddyr began another spell, fingers moving too quick to follow, so much of a distraction
that Joros was taken entirely by surprise when the mage pushed him over the edge of the cliff.

Joros fell, the cold air whistling by fast enough to snatch the breath from his lungs, to keep him from getting out a good scream. The ground had seemed so far below from the top of the cliff, but now there was almost no space between it and Joros. He could pick out individual stones, guess which chunk of ice would crack his skull open. Screwing his eyes shut, he vowed to curse the mage with his dying thought. Yet it was that briefly glimpsed red hair that stuck in his mind.

The impact knocked the breath from him. Despite himself, his eyes flew open, determined to witness each horrid moment of his death. The ground was there, looming close—but no closer. He was stopped perhaps two handspans above it, something stretched around him like an unseen hand holding him safe. He wasn't dead, and he could move, and as Anddyr landed beside him, all of it made Joros irrationally angry. He scrambled to his knees—more difficult than it should have been, for the mage's invisible barrier moved beneath him like a blanket thrown over water—and fought toward the mage, growling curses. He saw the panic in Anddyr's eyes, but didn't see the mage's hands begin to move again. The barrier fell away beneath Joros, sending him sprawling to the cold ground. It was a gentler fall than it would have been from the cliff, but that did nothing to improve his mood.

“It's easier to fix the landing!” Anddyr squealed, scrabbling away as Joros rose. “The falling is the hard part. Please, cappo, I'm sorry . . .”

Joros stood over the mage, glaring down at the pathetic creature. There was no room in him to hate the mage more than
he already did. His last thought, when he'd been convinced of his death, had been of red hair. The mage's punishment could wait.

The sounds of fighting—sword clanging against sword, cheering and shouting—were louder inside the pit, echoing strangely off the cut walls. Joros himself had laid the groundwork for recruiting this Northern tribe, sending shadow after shadow into the wastes to find a tribe both vicious and motivated by hard Fiateran coin. Clearly, the work of those long years had been stolen from him, too, bent for the benefit of another. He was almost glad his idiot Northman had stirred them all into a useless frenzy. Joros turned from the noise and stepped over Anddyr, moved toward the far end of the pit, where shovel and pick against stone and ice were softer sounds, calling to him. He and the mage moved like shadows over the ice, unseen, silent. The three came into sight, black-robed like Joros, their backs to him, two bent over and working at the ice, the third watching with a waterfall of hair the color of fire.

Joros was not a man given over to emotions. He was strong, stoic, staid. Anger, though, was not an emotion—it was a driving force, a thing to propel him forward in life, to make him great. The anger swelled in him now, always just below the surface, but this wasn't a pure anger. It was touched with something he had no name for, and that alone gave more breath to the anger.

His shortsword didn't come quietly from its sheath, the sound of it making one of the preachers turn, enough that the sword biting into his neck turned his head obscenely around like an owl's. The blade stuck in the suddenly limp body, and
Joros had to fight to yank it free. It gave the other preacher time to lift his shovel as a weapon, but his darting eyes couldn't see through the cloaking. His sword drawing a spray of blood as it finally let go the first man's neck, Joros brought the blade beneath the raised shovel and into the man's stomach, twisted, pulled it smoothly out. The man screamed, fell, clutching at the hole in his gut. Joros made a sign to Anddyr, who let the cloaking slip away.

Dirrakara's face was a mixture of horror and shock, eyes huge in her head. “Hello, love,” Joros said levelly, the cold of his anger driving him forward. He took a step toward her, around the half-dug hole where the dead man and the dying man sprawled. She scrabbled at her hip, pulled out a knife to hold before her with both hands. Joros's sword was barely longer than his forearm, but that knife looked sad, pathetically ineffective. The thing that wasn't anger gave a twinge, and Joros shoved it down viciously, refusing to acknowledge it. There was only the anger, and his goals, and nothing would stand between them. The world would burn in the fire of his anger, if it came to it. There was no room for mercy. He took another step forward, Dirrakara stumbling back. “What have you found, hmm?”

“How . . .” She couldn't seem to compose more than the one word, her lips parted as she stared at him. There was always so much emotion in her.

“You've been busy, I see.” She must have traveled hard to have gotten here so soon, and to coordinate with the Northman tribe so quickly, but she could never be faulted for being inefficient. “Thank you, for doing my work for me.”

“How . . .” The knife shook in her hands. She'd never looked
at him with such fear before. He knew his face was still a mess, littered with the fading folds and ridges of burn-scars, but he didn't think that was what put the fear in her eyes.

“You think you know me.” He didn't know where those words came from or how they snuck out past his lips, but they spewed forth, propelled by the anger and the thing that wasn't. “You never knew me.” She would have feared him long ago, if she had. He stepped forward again and she jabbed the knife toward him, more a spasm than anything. “We could have been great.” Joros caught it easily, the fingers of his left hand wrapping around the blade. He felt the bite of it, but dimly, the anger running hot through his veins and pushing the pain aside. “You should have trusted me.” Disjointed words, boiling up with the thing that danced with his anger. One hand still around her knife, his blood leaking warm down his wrist, Joros brought his other hand up, raising his sword so that its tip rested beneath Dirrakara's chin. “You should never have left me.” The anger screamed for her blood, but he pressed gently, lifting her chin with the point of his sword so that her fear-wide eyes met his, and there was nothing else in the world. “You should never have loved me.”

Finally, she found her words. They came out a whisper, her throat careful against the bare blade so close. “I wasn't wrong,” she said, “not in any of it.”

A twist of his hand pulled the knife from her fingers, flung it aside. Dripping his own blood that steamed in the cold air, Joros raised his hand to wrap it around her throat.

“Cappo!” Anddyr's voice rang out high, startling Joros so badly his sword nearly pierced through Dirrakara's skin. He had forgotten about the mage, forgotten the search, forgotten
everything but her. He held her by the throat still, not hard enough to crush, as he turned to face the mage.

“What has our friend found in the ice?” His voice was rougher than he would have liked, and he let that feed his anger. Anddyr made an inarticulate little noise, and Joros walked to his side, pulling Dirrakara after him.

Anddyr had dragged the bodies of the two preachers from the hole and cleared away the loose snow and debris. The hole that the preachers had dug was smeared with their blood now, a red sheen already freezing over, but it was still possible to see, so very clearly, what they had been chipping carefully around.

There were two faces there, swallowed by the ice, skin desiccated and dry and flaking. Two heads, pressed together, one with long brittle hair, each face bigger than a man's could possibly be. All the old stories said the Twins had been giants among men.

And thus did Fratarro shatter upon the bones of the earth . . .

Joros's heart thumped in his breast, slow, steady. This was it. Finally. “Anddyr . . .”

The mage was already moving, fingers weaving so that heat radiated from his hands. His face was strained, he was likely close to the end of his power, but he wouldn't stop so long as he could keep doing
something
. He knew better.

The ice faded slowly, clinging to the dry flesh it had held for so long. A neck, and then another. More of the long hair, splayed out in a halo. A shoulder, an arm. Another arm, holding. A chest, a third arm, a hip. Legs, three, four. Two bodies, ancient, wrapped one around the other, larger than Joros, larger than men could be.

Over the ice, drifting with the sounds of fighting, a shouting began, voices raised in unfamiliar words.

There were two bodies, with four arms and four legs.

. . .
his limbs flung to the far horizons.

In the silence above the hole, above the two bodies that could not be the Bound Gods, the distant screaming gave voice to the fury within Joros.

Anddyr made a choked sound. “It's not them,” he whispered, and then flinched away, though Joros stood still as ice.

It was the mage who had led him here, led all of them here; it was Anddyr who had been wrong. Yet he was only a tool, and a broken one at that. It was no real surprise that a broken tool should prove false. He could turn his anger on a person who had performed only according to his own nature . . . or he could turn it to one truly deserving. There was a deeper hurt, here, than being wrong about the Twins.

Joros tightened his hand around Dirrakara's throat, his own blood dripping down her neck, and when he looked at her there was only the anger, burning pure like a furnace-flame, consuming the thing that wasn't anger. The anger would lead him, guide him, if he was strong enough to grab it with both hands and hold on to the bright flame of it.