A barely human sound escaped him, and he rolled onto his side beneath the blankets, curling tight into a ball. Shivers thrummed through him.
A god. A god has found me. But which god ?
It was night, perhaps only a bell from dawn. The camp outside was silent, barring the distant, sorrow-filled howls of desert wolves.
After a while, Heboric stirred once more. The dung fire was out. No lanterns had been lit. He drew aside the blankets and slowly sat up. Then stared down at his hands, disbelieving.
They remained ghostly, but the otataral was gone. The power of the jade remained, pulsing dully. Yet now there were slashes of black through it. Lurid-almost liquid-barbs banded the backs of his hands, then tracked upward, shifting angle as they continued up his forearms.
His tattoos had been transformed.
And, in this deepest darkness, he could see. Unhumanly sharp, every detail crisp as if it was day outside.
His head snapped round at a sound and a motion-but it was simply a rhizan, alighting light as a leaf on the tent roof. A rhizan? On the tent roof ? Heboric’s stomach rumbled in sudden hunger.
He looked down at his tattoos once more. I have found a new god. Not that I was seeking one. And I know who. What .
Bitterness filled him. ‘In need of a Destriant, Treach? So you simply… took one. Stole from him his own life. Granted, not much of a life, but still, I owned it. Is this how you recruit followers? Servants? By the Abyss, Treach, you have a lot to learn about mortals.’
The anger faded. There had been gifts, after all. An exchange of sorts. He was no longer blind. Even more extraordinary, he could actually hear the sounds of neighbours sleeping in their tents and yurts.
And there, faint on the near-motionless air… the smell of… violence. But it was distant. The blood had been spilled some time earlier in the night. Some domestic dispute, probably. He would have to teach himself to filter out much of what his newly enlivened senses told him.
Heboric grunted under his breath, then scowled. ‘All right, Treach. It seems we both have some learning to do. But first… something to eat. And drink.’
When he rose from his sleeping mat, the motion was startlingly fluid, though it was some time before Heboric finally noted the absence of aches, twinges, and the dull throb of his joints.
He was far too busy filling his belly.
Forgotten, the mysteries of the jade giants, the innumerable imprisoned souls within them, the ragged wound in the Abyss.
Forgotten, as well, that faint blood-scented tremor of distant violence…
The burgeoning of some senses perforce took away from others. Leaving him blissfully unaware of his newfound singlemindedness. Two truths he had long known did not, for some time, emerge to trouble him.
No gifts were truly clean in the giving.
And nature ever strives for balance. But balance was not a simple notion. Redress was not simply found in the physical world. A far grimmer equilibrium had occurred… between the past and the present.
Felisin Younger’s eyes fluttered open. She had slept, but upon awakening discovered that the pain had not gone away, and the horror of what he had done to her remained as well, though it had grown strangely cold in her mind.
Into her limited range of vision, close to the sand, a serpent slipped into view directly in front of her face. Then she realized what had awoken her-there were more snakes, slithering over her body. Scores of them.
Toblakai’s glade. She remembered now. She had crawled here. And L’oric had found her, only to set off once again. To bring medicine, water, bedding, a tent. He had not yet returned.
Apart from the whispering slither of the snakes, the glade was silent. In this forest, the branches did not move. There were no leaves to flutter in the cool, faint wind. Dried blood in folds of skin stung as she slowly sat up. Sharp pains flared beneath her belly, and the raw wound where he had cut flesh away-there, between her legs-burned fiercely.
‘ I shall bring this ritual to our people, child, when I am the Whirlwind’s High Priest. All girls shall know this, in my newly shaped world. The pain shall pass. All sensation shall pass. You are to feel nothing, for pleasure does not belong in the mortal realm. Pleasure is the darkest path, for it leads to the loss of control. And we mustn’t have that. Not among our women. Now, you shall join the rest, those I have already corrected… ’
Two such girls had arrived, then, bearing the cutting instruments. They had murmured encouragement to her, and words of welcome. Again and again, in pious tones, they had spoken of the virtues that came of the wounding. Propriety. Loyalty. A leavening of appetites, the withering of desire. All good things, they said to her. Passions were the curse of the world. Indeed, had it not been passions that had enticed her own mother away, that were responsible for her own abandonment? The lure of pleasure had stolen Felisin’s mother… away from the duties of motherhood…
