The Darkness Comes (The Second Book of the Small Gods Series) (7 page)

This is what Ves sculpted.

He dragged his gaze along the clay man’s imposing figure of bulging muscles and impossibly smooth skin. Its broad chest heaved with breath, its lids blinked like any man’s.

Its eyes gazed upon Kuneprius.

“Today, your duties to the sculptor resume.” The priest’s voice sounded as though it came from a great distance. “Tomorrow, you leave to acquire a Small God from the Green.”

The words should have thrilled and excited Kuneprius with the promise of danger and adventure, but they barely registered in his mind. He could do no more than stare at the monstrous figure standing before him.

A figure he knew without asking had once been his friend.

“Vesisdenperos,” he said when he regained control of his lips. “It is you.”

V Danya - Spokes Market

When days of peace approach their end,

And wounds inflicted are too deep to mend,

A sign shall come, a lock with no key,

Borne by a man from across the sea.

A barren Mother, the seed of life,

Living statue, treacherous knife.

To raise the Small Gods, a Small God must die,

When stars go out, the end is nigh.

One must die to raise them all,

Should Small Gods rise, man will fall,

One can stop them, on darken’d wing,

The firstborn child of the rightful king.

What a horrible dream.

Danya rolled onto her back, eyes closed against the light shining on her. A sense of emptiness filled her belly, a residual feeling of her dream of a strange scroll, a mysterious prophecy, the death of her brother. This last made the nightmare most disturbing. What would her life be without Teryk?

She stretched her arms over her head and felt hardness press against her back. It jarred her senses, and she became more aware of her surroundings—sounds, textures, smells.

An overpowering stench.

It wasn’t a dream.

Danya’s eyelids snapped open.

The trash heaped around her had settled during the night, covering her legs with a stinking blanket of rotted food and torn and soiled fabrics. She scrambled back, pulling herself out from under the pile, hands sinking into other slimy substances she preferred not to identify. The princess wiped her palms on the sides of her breeches and rushed out of the lane before the fetor caused her to lose the contents of her stomach.

He’s dead. That was a memory, not a dream.

The weight of the realization landed on Danya as though someone had thrown it onto her from a third story window. She lurched away from the alley, drawing disapproving looks from passersby as she leaned against the wall gulping fresh air into her lungs and fighting the urge to weep.

She spit to clear the sour taste of bile from her mouth, wiped wetness from her cheeks on her sleeve. When she’d regained some composure, she straightened, put one hand on the hilt of her sword and the other on her knife—the first thing she should have done upon waking in unfamiliar surroundings, according to Trenan’s teachings. Both hung where they should be, but knowing so comforted her little.

She tilted her head back to judge the height of the sun in the sky and saw the day remained young. Men with bent backs and gnarled hands shuffled along the streets, making their way to begin another day of hard labor on the docks or in warehouses or a blacksmith’s. A few glanced at her furtively, but their gazes disappeared when she met their eyes.

The events of the previous day came back to her: blackmailing Trenan, the fight in the tavern, leaving the master swordsman so she could take up her brother’s quest to fulfill the prophecy. She recalled standing on the bridge and gazing into the river, half-dazed with shock as she tried to decide where to start, how to decipher jumbled lines inscribed on the scroll.

One thing I’m sure of: I’m not the firstborn child of the rightful king.

Beyond that, the stanzas seemed no more than nonsense. Man from across the sea; Small Gods; darken’d wing. Only the barren Mother meant anything to her—some of the members of the Goddess Sisterhood were called Mothers—but she couldn’t be sure the prophecy referred to one of them.

I can’t be sure it refers to Teryk, or even to our time.

She started down the street, allowing her feet to carry her away from the stinking alley, though she knew not where to go. If the Mother to whom the scroll referred was a member of the Goddess’ order, she might find help at one of the temples, but still didn’t know where to find one. She thought the city’s outskirts, but knew no more.

The street she was on intersected with a wider avenue and the princess stopped and attempted to orientate herself. If she faced left, it put sunrise and the inner city somewhat behind her. The direction of sunset was the quickest route to the city’s edge. Not much, but somewhere to start.

The outer city was a foreign place to her, never visited and rarely spoken of, but she knew that when she’d crossed the river, she’d moved into the part of the city called Evenside—a place where she’d want to take care. Hands on her weapons, she went left and put the inner city and Draekfarren castle at her back.

A wagon rumbled past, heading toward sunset, like her. It clattered and bounced on the chipped and broken cobbles, and Danya stepped back lest a loose rock be spat out from under its wooden wheels. She glanced up at the driver, who wore a cowl pulled up over his head, then directed her attention to the man’s cargo.

Three corpses lay stacked in the back of the wagon.

Her breath caught in her throat. Might one of them be Teryk?

The princess set out after the wagon, heels grinding in the loose pebbles and dirt strewn across the road. She quickened her pace, hurrying to glimpse the faces of the dead. In ten hurried paces, she’d caught up to within an arm’s length of the wagon.

One face she saw clearly—a woman of many turns, her face wizened, mouth open to reveal yellowed, toothless gums. Beside her lay a man with a wound across his face and white maggots spilling out of his nose. Green and black rot around the edges of the gash suggested he’d been dead for some time.

Danya gulped back the nausea rising in her throat. One more corpse remained for her to see before she’d allow herself to succumb to emotion or sickness, but the third had been stacked the other direction, head at the front of the wagon and feet sticking out by the others’ faces.

The princess inhaled a breath to steel herself and regretted it—the stench of the rotting man inhabited her nose and brought the threatening lump back to her throat. She turned her head away and reached out, setting her hand on the edge of the wagon to steady herself. She wiped her arm across her eyes to clear the tears the reeking corpse caused in them. When she could see again, she returned her attention to the corpses, her breath held.

Pink flesh showed through the holes in the soles of the boots worn by the third corpse. The sight encouraged her—Teryk’s boots weren’t in such disrepair.

What if the thief swapped with him?

She doubted the likelihood of a criminal taking the time to replace boots on a dead man, but she needed to be sure. Danya increased her pace, moving alongside the wagon. Her gaze followed up the corpse’s leg clad in dirt-caked breeches tied at the waist by a length of frayed rope. His shirt front lay open, his belly smeared with blood. A few more steps would bring her to a place where she’d see his face, and then she’d know, then she—

“Hey! What d’you think you’re doin’?”

The driver’s harsh cry cut through her thoughts, startling her. He jerked back on the reins, wrenching the horse’s head and pulling the animal to a halt. Danya’s feet skidded in the loose chunks of broken cobblestones and she grasped the side of the wagon to keep her balance.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m looking for my brother.”

The man threw back his cowl to reveal a face with a twisted nose and sunken cheeks.

“Ain’t nobody’s brother in the back of my wagon,” he snarled.

“Can I just have a look?”

Danya stretched up on her toes and caught a glimpse of dirty hair sticking up, but the legs of the rotting man hid the corpse’s face. She cursed under her breath.

“No you can’t,” the driver said and whipped his crop on the edge of the wagon, slapping the wood a few handspans from Danya’s fingers. She jerked her hand away. “If you’re that interested, I’ll sell him to you.”

The princess stared at the driver, her mouth open. “Sell him to me?”

“Where d’you think I’m taking them? To the market at the Spokes. They’ll be for sale whole or in pieces, I don’t care which. Do you want him or not?”

Danya faltered back a step, head shaking. She’d never have imagined people sold corpses, let alone entertained the thought someone else might want to buy them.

“What…what would someone do with a corpse?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” The driver pulled his hood back up, throwing shadow across his twisted nose. “If you don’t want him, someone else will.”

He snapped the reins, prompting the horse to whinny, and the wagon pulled away leaving Danya standing off to the side of the road. She stared after the wain rattling along the avenue, hardly believing the driver’s words. Did her father know such things went on in his city? Surely not, or he’d put a stop to it.

When the wagon was far enough ahead, she started out again, determined to follow it to market and find out for sure if the other corpse belonged to her brother.

***

Danya followed the wagon for a dozen blocks before the city changed around her.

Where she’d woken had been awful compared to the castle and the inner city—garbage everywhere, buildings falling apart—but the place yet held a sense of purpose. People went about their business as though they had business to go about. Blacksmiths and tanners lined the street, their shops beside carpenters and candle makers. All at once, the buildings in disrepair gave way to ramshackle houses and tumbledown shops. Men lay passed-out in alleys, drool dribbling from their open mouths and empty bottles clutched in their hands. Unwashed women leaned in doorways, tattered clothes hanging on their emaciated frames, asking for a coin in exchange for things Danya had never heard spoken of. She passed an open doorway and saw unkempt children sitting on the floor using chipped pestles to grind dried weeds into dust.

Selling corpses wasn’t the only aberration her father should put a stop to happening in this part of the city.

Afraid of seeing worse—though she couldn’t imagine what that might be—Danya kept her eyes on the wagon rumbling along the avenue ahead of her. An unseen goat bleated pathetically; something hard crashed against a wall; a man cried out in anger or pain. The princess turned her head toward none of them.

They passed a few more side streets before a murmur of activity reached Danya’s ears, clearly coming from somewhere ahead. She increased her pace, hands gripping the hilts of her weapons. The wagon driver reached an intersection and guided his wain to the right, disappearing behind a building. Beyond, the princess saw ragged awnings, their once colorful canvases faded to a near-uniform brown, and people milling around, moving from stall to stall.

The market.

She halted at the crossroads where the wagon driver had turned—a spot where four avenues intersected, forming a star of eight arms. The middle of the broad intersection gave home to the market’s tents and lean-tos, any traffic from the streets redirected into a roundabout on the outside edge instead of running through the center.

Danya caught sight of the wagon aiming its way around to the far side. Rather than following, she bolted across the roundabout and into the market, cutting across the middle of the square. At the first tent she came to, a man grabbed her arm and spun her toward him. Danya loosened her dagger in its sheath.

“You’re a pretty one, ain’t ya?”

The rotund man wore a once elaborately embroidered vest missing thread and buttons both, the red fabric darker where gold thread had once been. His patchy beard surrounded lips that parted to show a golden tooth. The princess pulled her arm away from his grip, but his expression suggested he hadn’t noticed her offence at his touch.

“A pretty girl like you needs herself jewelry, she does.”

He stepped to the side and waved an arm toward a gray awning under which sat a table littered with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Danya glanced at them and saw they’d been fashioned of teeth and bone strung together to form hideous adornments the likes of which she’d never seen. She took a step back without taking the time to identify what type of animal they may have once belonged to.

“No. Leave me alone.”

She turned her back on the man, ignoring his words as he called after her, imploring her to come back for a better look. Lips pressed together hard in disgust, she made her way deeper into the market, doing her best not to view the wares for sale, but occasionally giving in to morbid curiosity.

One bent old woman stood beside a table holding devices made of leather that looked as though they belonged in a torture chamber, not a market.

“Enhance your love life,” the woman said. She brandished some sort of harness, its many buckles jingling.

A skeleton-thin man selling powders derived of crushed bones and herbs; a butcher in a blood-stained apron hawking meats of questionable origin; a robed woman offering to view the future; a man with coal-black skin wanting to cure whatever ailed her. Danya scurried past them, determined to find where the man with the wagon set up shop to sell his wares.

Finally, she reached the far side of the market and stood on the edge of the roundabout, her heart beating fast. Never had she seen or heard tell of the things she’d encountered as she made her way across the Spokes.

How can the king allow this?

She put the thought from her mind and glanced to her right, expecting to see she’d made it to this point before the corpse-merchant. The street stood empty but for a few men and women hurrying to and from the market. Danya’s forehead creased and she looked the other way, wondering if the merchants who accosted her had slowed her enough the wagon had already gone by.