Path of the Sun: A Novel of Dhulyn and Parno

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

THE MIRROR PRINCE

 

 

The Novels of Dhulyn and Parno
:

Copyright © 2010 by Violette Malan.

 

All Rights Reserved.

 

 

DAW Book Collectors No. 1522.

 

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-44302-6

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Printing, September 2010

 

 

My first and fullest thanks go as always to my editor and publisher, Sheila Gilbert, and my agent, Joshua Bilmes. My thanks also go to my good friend Vaso Angelis, who suggested the location for
Path of the Sun
. “Why don’t you write about my home?” she said, so the isle of Crete it is. I hope she likes what I’ve done. A belated thanks to my friend David Ingham. Way back when I was writing
The Soldier King
, David helped me out with a bit of theater business and I somehow forgot to acknowledge him then, so I’d like to do that here. To my friend Barb Wilson-Orange, who helps me with my proofs. And to Chris Szego, whose name I spelled wrong last time, even though she said it was okay. To mystery writer, friend and psychologist Barbara Fradkin, for recommending reading on psychopaths. And to add to the cast of old friends, I’d like to thank a new one, Dr. Kari Maund, who reminded me of how much I love, and how much I owe to that other mercenary brotherhood, especially to Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan.

 

The right to have a character named after her was purchased at silent auction for Winter Ashley-Maie Lucas by her mother Teresa Lucas. Your mother said you chose a bad guy, and I tried to make her all bad—but it just didn’t work out that way.

E
PION AKARION WAITED until moonrise to travel the last portion of his journey back to the palace in Uraklios. This part of the road was open and easy, even at night, and if it did pass rather closely to two or three wooded areas on its way through the hills, well, he had guards with him.

Still, he was surprised when one of the forward riders came back with news that there was someone on the road near the Path of the Sun. It was not unusual to find the curious exploring around the Caid ruins, which included the entrance to the Path of the Sun itself. But those who came at night generally came in pairs, carrying something to lie down upon while they watched the stars, and they were generally younger than this man. This was a man of Epion’s own years, dressed for the road and leading two horses, one saddled and one, smaller, burdened with several packs.

A man smelling of blood.

The smile on the stranger’s face was warm enough and charming enough that Epion Akarion found himself on the verge of smiling back—despite the blood that spattered the front of the man’s tunic, decorated the edge of his cloak, and streaked his hands.

“Check his back trail, Jo,” Epion said to the guard who had stayed with the stranger. He waited until Jo-Leggett and his brother Gabe-Leggett rode off before returning his attention to the blood-spattered man.

“I am Epion Akarion,” he said. “Of the Royal House of Menoin. Is that your own blood, sir?” Though his experience on the battlefield told him it was unlikely. “Are you injured?”

“Blood?” The stranger looked down at his hands, and for a moment Epion thought a look of surprise flickered over the man’s face. Perhaps he thought it too dark for the blood to be seen. But the moon was brighter than the stranger realized, and Epion and his guard had greater experience of wounds and the patterns of blood spray than ordinary men.

“Well, I’ve had a rather difficult experience,” the man said finally. “Very difficult, really. Trying in fact.”

“My lord.” The call came from several spans along the road, where a copse of pine trees formed a deeper darkness. The tone in Jo-Leggett’s voice sent icy fingers dancing up Epion’s spine. He signaled to his aide Callos to remain watching the stranger and went to join the guard.

Jo-Leggett led him to where his brother waited in a clearing Epion vaguely remembered. It was not many paces from the road, and full of moonlight. What Epion saw there tightened the muscles of his own throat and made him clench his teeth against the rising of his stomach.

“Fetch torches,” he said. Once they were lit and set into the ground and the guards instructed to step away—which they were only too glad to do—Epion paced his way methodically around the thing on the ground. Now that he was over the initial shock, he saw several points that intrigued him. First, he was certain this was no man of Menoin, not with that hair the color of old blood. And not from what he could see of the beading on the man’s clothes—what was left of them. Epion was also sure the limbs had been arranged—again, he’d seen enough soldiers fall in battle to know that bodies did not land like this naturally. And the cuts. They were precise. Some of them symmetrical.

This had the look of ritual. Epion drummed his fingers on the hilt of his belt knife. Nothing happened by accident. He could make good use of this.

“Bring him.”

The stranger came escorted between Callos and Essio, but though his arms were held, there was something in the way the man carried himself—an air of calm and of ready helpfulness—that made it seem he was bringing them, rather than the other way around.

“Did you do this?” Epion gestured toward the corpse.

Again, a momentary expression, this time of confusion, flitted across the man’s face and then cleared away. The stranger blinked and leaned back. “Of course not! Would I have been standing about on the road waiting for someone to find me if I had?”

Epion glanced at the Leggett brothers. They were the ones who had first encountered the stranger, the ones who could say. Jo-Leggett shrugged. Evidently the man
could
have been waiting on the road.

“You are covered with blood,” Epion pointed out.

“By the gods, man! I was trying to help him. Of course I’m covered in blood. Look at your guard; he has blood on him, and I’ll wager he hasn’t even touched the body.” Gabe-Leggett suddenly scrubbed his hand against the thigh of his trousers and managed to look green even in the torchlight.

It
was
possible. Possible that the fellow had stumbled on the body, tried to help what he took for an injured man, and become covered in blood in the process. The stranger’s very calmness
might
be nothing more or less than a state of mental fugue, stemming from the shock of such a discovery. Epion looked at the man more closely. His cloak was of good quality, and he had rings on his hands, gold rings in each ear; a staff was thrust into the straps of his packhorse, but Epion saw no other weapons. Not a soldier, not a guard of any kind.

Still, the body was so carefully positioned. The cuts so precisely made. The man’s story was not very likely.

“And you did not see the condition of the body?” Epion gestured toward it with an open hand.

The man’s eyes followed the movement of Epion’s hand. He grimaced, but he did not look away. “Not until the moon came up, no, I could not.” The man rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, then frowned. “As soon as I did, I ...” he shrugged and looked away.

“You took his horse,” Callos said.

“To save him wandering off while I went for help.”

“You were heading in the wrong direction for help,” Epion’s aide pointed out.

“I’m a stranger here.”

Epion held up his hand, and Callos fell silent. That was something else that did not ring true. However much a stranger the man was, how could he be on the road for Uraklios and not know that a city the size of the capital was just on the other side of the hills? You could smell the sea from here—or could if there weren’t so much blood on the ground.

“My lord.” A different tone in Jo-Leggett’s voice this time. More triumph and considerably less nausea. He and Gabe-Leggett had been checking the stranger’s packs, and the guard now held up a roll of soft leather. The kind commonly used to hold a set of knives. The torchlight flickered, but it was clear enough to show bloodstains as Leggett exposed three knives in their leather pockets.

“A strange way to help someone, or did you merely pick these up to keep them safe along with the horse?”

“What would be the point of my saying that? You’d only wonder why they had been left behind and who had wiped them off.” Still the stranger was calm, in no way looking like a guilty man who had been caught out in a lie, but rather rueful, as if he were going to admit to something about which he was merely a little embarrassed. “I was benighted along the road there,” he said, pointing to the direction in which he was heading when they came upon him. “I saw this man’s fire and stopped to share it with him. When he learned I was a trader, he asked to see some of my wares. But when I took out some of my knives to show him, he went mad and attacked me. I did nothing more than defend myself, my lord.”