Three Coins for Confession (6 page)

He spotted blood ivy twice, saw where the Ilvani horses had
skirted it. He saw black pools of water set around an ancient stump, had to
lead the horse around them to test the firmness of the ground, not willing to
trust the confluence of tracks there. He counted multiple trails, all of them
old, all of them running roughly east, deeper into the forest. Across them all,
the newest set of tracks traced their slow way into shadow.

Three times, he stopped when he sensed the heaviness of the air
punctuated by a faint but familiar tang. He knelt to scan the shadows, scenting
close to the ground to discover blood soaking into black soil. Signs that the
Ilvani or one of the fleeing horses had been badly wounded, the patches
appearing at irregular intervals. Places they’d been forced to stop and rest,
needing to push to go on.

What with Chriani’s show of defiance and the time he’d wasted
remembering the things he should have remembered, the Ilvani had a solid head
start. Chriani had been moving steadily, though, while his quarry had tarried.
It meant he was close.

A sudden wash of light from the forest ahead coincided with the
clack of stone, startlingly loud beneath his horse’s shoes. Chriani pulled the
horse to a stop, froze and flattened himself along its neck. Only when he had
taken a careful measure of the silence around him did he swing off carefully,
crouch low to the ground.

The light was the sun, filtering somehow through shadow above
him. Low stone walls marked the edge of the path ahead, loose rubble strewn
along it. The trees were smaller here. Stunted. The ground was bare earth and
thin patches of glistening mold, none of the leaves there that normally covered
the floor of the Greatwood. The reason for that became clear as Chriani’s eyes
adjusted to the sharp contrast of brightness and shadow, seeing the signs of
gnarled branches draped in darkness. Leaves hanging not dead, but covered in
some kind of mold. Silent trunks rising around and ahead of him in a bleak
grove of black.

In silence, he pulled the horse from the trail, pushing into an
open space behind a tumbled wall. He tied it to a thin stump, then ducked down
behind the wall, shifting a dozen strides away before he stopped. He waited
there a long moment, scanning the shadows to all sides for movement. Then from
within a double-seamed pocket set within the inside of his belt, he slipped on
a ring of black iron and vanished from sight.

Outside the haze of light that marked the sun descending below the
forest wall, the ever-present gloom of the Greatwood was fading to the real
dark of approaching night. But the ring draped all the world with its own haze
of shadow when it was worn, so that even as Chriani disappeared within the
unseen aura of its magic, he was as good as blinded where his eyes scanned the
deeper shadow around him. He had expected it, though, a torch already in his
hand, broken and thrown in a single motion.

A star rose bright from the gloom of the ground to arc and blaze
across the open space before him. He stayed low for another long moment,
needing to make sure the ring still concealed him. He knew its magic had a
fickleness to it, but as long as the ring was another of the secrets Chriani
was bound to keep, he’d had no real chance to fully test it. On the finger of
the assassin he’d taken it from, he had seen its power fade beneath the speed
and fury of a weapon attack, or of too-sudden movement. He didn’t know whether
hurling the torch would likewise disrupt the magic’s flow around him, but he
was willing to wait to be sure.

When he finally rose to look into the light, he saw the shrine.

The pulsating glow of the torch held back a gloom that was
absolute, the air seeming to blaze white against a rising globe of darkness and
the far-spread, twisting branches of a score of black trees. These were limni
by their look, but stunted, and more gnarled than even the most ancient of
those great trees. Their mold-black branches clawed at empty air like
splintered fingers, their trunks marking out a broad circle around a shattered
stone courtyard edged with crumbling pillars. A five-sided dais — an
altar, perhaps — rose at the center of trees and courtyard alike as
smooth walls of stone.

The beating of wings caught his ear. Movement in the shadows,
dark shapes on the air. From out of the deeper darkness, a half-dozen crows
were circling within the trees, sweeping down to settle on stiff branches.
Their movement reminded Chriani of insects drawn to the light, but the space of
that light was unnaturally empty. No haze of movement, no swarms of fly or moth
that Chriani would have expected to see. The black grove showing no signs of
life.

The crows were silent. Just shifting along their branches, taking
flight again to drift over to the next trees. All of them circling around the
clearing and the shrine at its heart. That shrine was Ilvani work. No mistaking
it. Centuries old to judge by its weathering, but the intricate lines and
inscriptions that twisted up every pillar, marked off each side of the altar,
were razor sharp. A magic of the Ilvani artificers who had scribed them, going
beyond spellcraft and into an understanding of form and material that no Ilmari
could match. Where the markings unspooled to glyphs, Chriani recognized the
lettering but not the words. The old Ilvani of the Valnirata, which he’d heard
spoken but had no tongue for himself.

The torch had fallen a half-dozen strides from the near side of
the altar, which cast a long shadow behind it like the gnomon of a sundial.
Sprawled half-in, half-out of that shadow, Chriani saw what had drawn the crows
on through the darkness.

He moved cautiously to the place where the dead Ilvani had
fallen. He was watching the black birds above him, though they showed no sense
that they noticed his movement with the ring’s power shrouding him. The warrior
was staring up open-eyed at the darkness, arms outstretched. Chriani read the
signs of the dark ground, seeing where the Ilvani had dragged himself toward
the stone. Then the frantic signs of him convulsing as he fell, twisting around
to his back before he died. Chriani watched the body for a long while, made
sure no trace of breath disturbed its stillness before he approached.

The broken stub of an arrow jutted out from the Ilvani’s armor,
just below the ribcage. The blood that soaked green leather and the cloth
beneath was already drying. A gut shot, deep and sharp, tearing as it went. A
slow death, and painful.

The arrow hadn’t been his, but even if it had, Chriani would have
felt no sense of victory in the scene before him. Just a faint wondering of
what would have driven the Ilvani this far, this deep into the forest. What was
here in this place of black trees and grey stone that would have made a
difference in the end?

He circled the shrine twice, still watching the birds. Still
watching the shadow beyond the haze of the torch’s alchemical light. There was
no sign of the missing horses, but Chriani picked up the trail on the far side
of the shrine, their tracks leading off at speed into the darkness. He checked
those tracks, found the mark of the half-moon with its three circles. Not
important anymore.

As he approached the body at last, a faint pulse of color flared
at its wrist. A stone talisman there, shining out its blood-red light against
the shadow. Chriani remembered that light from when the Ilvani had attacked
him. He made the moonsign this time, his hand marking out the crescent at his
heart that was the sign of the night. Warding against the darkness of this
unknown sorcery by appeasing it, but out of habit more than anything else. He
was still invisible, the magic of his ring more dweomer than most folk of the
Ilmar saw in a lifetime. The Ilvani were different, though. Arcana was in their
blood, part of their nature, it was said.

Chriani slipped the talisman from the figure’s wrist, saw the
light flare within its dark chunk of bloodstone. It spread out like liquid
across the gold claw that held it, tied tight with a black leather cord. The
stone was oily to the touch, Chriani stuffing it quickly to an inside pocket of
his armor. Something for the war-mages to look at later. He had no urge to
bring the body back.

What he could see of the Ilvani’s tattooed war-mark showed him as
Calala. A warrior of Calalerean, the northwest of the four provinces of
Valnirata, whose southern reaches Chriani had been patrolling for five months.
He recognized some of the mark’s lines on the carved stone altar, but the runes
there shaped words he didn’t know. He didn’t feel like cutting the armor to
read the rest of the mark, though he knew it might have told him more. The
Ilvani’s clan, at the least. But something about the shrine, the stillness of
the black grove, set a sense of unease in him. A feeling that if this was the
place the Ilvani had come to die, it would be best to leave him to it.

He did a last check of the body for weapons and magic, though.
Secret pockets, other markings on the flesh that he might read. As he did, he
saw the gleam of gold within the figure’s tight-clenched hand.

Chriani squeezed the fingers open, watched as a coin spilled to
the ground. He lifted the stiffening figure’s other hand, saw a second coin
fall.

The coins were clearly Ilvani by the intricate knotwork that
etched their faces, by the angular sweep of their lettering. They were scribed,
not stamped. An artisan’s touch to each of them, though Chriani didn’t
recognize them. Couldn’t read the writing even though he recognized the script,
as with the glyphs that adorned the altar stone.

The Valnirata didn’t trade with the Ilmari, but their Ilvani gold
bought its worth in Ilmari coin easily enough when taken from prisoners or the
dead. Most rangers with enough field experience set aside a comfortable pot for
retirement using the small coins, which were milled with a hole at their center
for stringing. The Ilvani carried their wealth that way, sheaves of coins
knotted tight and looped around the neck or upper arm like jewelry.

The gold of the Valnirata coins was tinted with a reddish tone
compared to Ilmari crowns.
Blood gold
they were called, for that and
other reasons. The coins that had fallen from the Ilvani’s hands were a pure
molten hue, though. Brightly polished, unscratched.

They were warm, too, when Chriani picked them up. Magic in them.
He made the moonsign as he realized he should probably have thought of that
before touching them. Acting without thinking, like always.

He was about to slip the coins into another of his many hidden
pockets when he caught a gleam of gold within the body’s mouth.

He stared at it for a long while. Had to steel himself to pry the
corpse’s jaw open, watching as a third coin slipped off the blackened tongue
and fell to the ground. He made the moonsign again as he picked it up, all
three coins in his hand now and getting even warmer, it seemed. A weave of
shadow seemed to pass across his eyes, and in that shadow, he saw that the
coins gleamed not just in reflection of the torch but with their own light. A
bright pulsing of gold, the same angry molten hue that filled the Ilvani’s
eyes.

Chriani glanced down. The Ilvani’s eyes that had been gold were a
deep emerald green now, their gleam all but faded where their moisture had
dried and congealed to tears that tracked across dead skin.

With a shriek above and around him, the crows took to the air.
Chriani’s arm whipped out and away from him as he shot to his feet, stumbling
back from the body. He had hurled the coins out and into the darkness almost
before the thought to do so had gelled in his mind, a stark reflex of muscle
and fear. He felt a spasm of pain as he did so, the wound in his arm, ignored
up to now, flaring with his sudden and frantic movement.

The birds were gone back to the darkness as he ran to the horse,
leaving the torch behind him but pulling another from the saddlebags. He
spooked the animal as he did so, had to remember to fumble the black ring from
his finger before he snatched up the reins, pulled himself to the saddle and
spurred away. He didn’t look back to the shrine behind him.

His injured arm was agony as he rode, a useful combination of
focus and fear masking it before, but now long gone. He held himself low along
the horse’s neck as he raced back along the trail that had brought him there,
the torch above and behind him to keep it from the horse’s eyes. It lit up a
narrow well around them, the motion of the ride setting it flaring, the light
pulsing back from the trees where they pushed in from all sides. For long
stretches, Chriani felt as though he and the horse were held suspended and
motionless, trapped in a shimmering sphere of light as the forest flashed past
them at speed.

When he rounded the bend that marked the haze of light where the
rangers were waiting, Chriani wasn’t surprised to see two of them with bows
drawn, tracking his approach until they confirmed it was him. He was surprised,
though, to find them already mounted, faces ashen and eyes bright with fear.

He slewed to a stop where Makaysa sat astride her horse. She was
six paces back from where the bodies of the four Ilvani prisoners were sprawled
across each other on the ground. Their hands and feet were still tied, their
limbs twisted as if they’d been broken. The three Valnirata who had died in the
initial assault had been inexplicably moved by the look of them. Within the
shadow of the fallen horse, their bodies were tossed across the empty ground,
backs arched and limbs splayed in some grim contortion.

Where he could see the mouths and hands of the fallen Ilvani,
Chriani saw the flash of gold shine bright in the torchlight.

“We were almost done waiting for you.” Makaysa’s voice carried
the same tone of indifference but the smile was gone. She made the moonsign as
she nodded to Chriani, as if warding herself against the chance that his sudden
reappearance was more than it seemed.