Black Halo

The answer came on an invisible cloud of reek, filling her nostrils with knowledge and the pungent stink of roach innards. She glanced up, peered out of the foliage and saw the roach’s corpse loosing its incense onto the sunbeams filtering through the canopy.

And an idea came.

She could barely keep from laughing. The dragonman, the terror of all things that walked on two legs and four, laid low by a stinking bug. He had a weakness after all. And, if one of the many curses about shicts was true, it was that they knew weaknesses could be exploited.

Shicts, she thought with obscene pride, don’t fight fair.

The sole obstacle to capitalising on this pride was the expanse between her and the dead insect, dominated by a mass of red flesh and eager claws.

But that suddenly did not seem so grievous an obstacle anymore. He was only flesh and claws … and teeth, she admitted, but she was a shict. She was cunning, she was stealth, she was hunter. These were things the Howling taught her, reminded her of in faint echoes as she fell to all fours and crept about the bush.

‘What’s that?’

She froze.

‘What?’ he growled again. ‘No, I never said I couldn’t learn.’ Gariath sighed, unaware as she pressed on through the brush around him. ‘It’s just that the humans, round or pointy, have nothing to teach me. They know few things: desecration, degradation and indignation.’

He laughed blackly, a sound that made her skin crawl as it never had before.

‘No, it means she thinks she’s claiming some sort of victory here … no, an invisible victory,’ he growled. ‘It’s as stupid as it sounds. She pretends she’s avoiding me because she doesn’t deserve to be splattered on the ground. That is indignation, something humans claim to possess when everything else is taken from them.

‘In this case,’ he continued, ‘it’s stupid of her to think she’s going to die with anything more than mud in her teeth and a rock in her skull. That’s as invisible as victories get, I suppose. Eh? No, it makes sense to them morally.’

He’s speaking to you, she told herself, not the air … maybe both.

‘It basically means she’s lying to herself. Really, all we’re fighting over is killing rights, which is acceptable.’ He snorted disdainfully. ‘But she wants to kill the others, the stupid weaklings, to prove she’s less stupid and weak. This is a lie … sorry, a moral victory.’

He’s taunting you, trying to lure you out. Keep going. Don’t fall for it.

‘And this is why they look at her with hatred, why Lenk feared to turn his back to her.’

She froze.

‘She is a liar, a schemer. She tells herself they have to die for reasons she thinks will help, that she’ll stink less like a human after rubbing against their soft skin for so long. They know this. They hate her. What?’ He grunted. ‘Yes, I’d kill them, but only because I don’t like them. Honesty is an admirable trait.’

She was not prepared for this. Claws, fists, bellowing roars she had steeled herself against. But when he spoke with confidence, not rage, when his words were laced with cunning rather than hatred, she was stunned into inaction.

‘Ironic? Yes, I know what the word means. That’s different, though. I don’t protect Lenk. If he needed protection, I would laugh as he died. I give him the respect and honour of a fair fight by killing her first. He’s a stupid bug, all wings and stinger, that will leap into the jaws of a snapping flower because he can’t tell that the pollen stinks. He knows there’s something foul about the stench, but he sniffs it, anyway. She is the pollen. I’m just clearing his nostrils.’

Well? she demanded of her body. What are you upset about? That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Lenk’s hatred, his fear … if you’ve got that, it’s all so much easier, isn’t it?

It was supposed to be, anyway.

‘No, no …’ Gariath’s voice drifted softly over the leaves like a breeze. ‘That’s not the funny part. The real humour is that she’s running away when I’m doing her a favour she doesn’t deserve. If she does fear, as you say she does, not being so pointy-eared, then how is what I’m doing a bad thing? Eh? No, I disagree. The kindest thing here …’

She felt the shadow on her back, looked up into hard black eyes.

‘Is a swift and fair death.’

Move.

She did, too late.

His claws raked her, dug into the tender flesh of her back. She felt blood weeping down her skin, shallow muscles screaming, but not the numbing agony that would suggest a crippling blow. She tried to ignore the pain and scrambled away. She leapt to her feet, heard him fall to his feet and his claws as he charged. The bug grew large in her eyes, its stink brilliantly foul in her nose.

He lunged; she jumped.

He caught her ankle in a grasping claw; she seized a handful of pasty yellow innards.

She twisted and saw his teeth looming forward. With a growl to match his, she thrust the glistening, guts-laden fist at him and smeared the insect’s ichor into his nostrils.

Though he didn’t let go, he did howl. The roach’s juices vengefully filled his nostrils, seeped over his snout to sting his eyes. He threw his head back enough that she could pull her ankle from his weakened grip, claws scratching at her heel as she did.

He sprang to his feet, swung his fists out, lashed his tail out, stomped the earth in a blind, anosmic rage.

His roar filled her ears, as did the sound of his nostrils futilely searching the air for her. Such sounds continued as she ran into the forest, leaping over the river’s shallows and leaving him far behind. Without direction, without stopping, she ducked branches, leapt over logs. And through his howling and snarling she could hear his words, spoken with such venomous clarity. She could feel them continue to seep into her, as she could feel her eyes brim with tears.

She ran, and lied to herself that she wept because of the pain in her back.

She flew past a roach, the rainbow-coloured insect’s antennae twitching curiously as she sped past it without so much as a glance. It chittered quietly, confused. She did not look back at it.

Perhaps if she had, she might have noticed the pair of wide yellow eyes peering out of the foliage. Perhaps, if she had, she might have heard the sound of long, green footsteps that set off after her.

Thirteen

SCORN

Bralston, like most wizards, resented the term ‘magic’ as it pertained to his gifts.

Magic, in the accepted application of the word, was a dismissive means of explaining the inexplicable. The word ‘magic’ was uttered, whispered and squealed at everything from stars falling across the sky to a flower blooming in snowfall.

Wizards did not practise ‘magic.’ Wizards channelled Venarie. And as Venarie was the soul of the wizard, so too was reason the soul of Venarie.

‘Magic’ was no more mystical than a fever in the blood, the moisture in one’s breath, the faint shock that occurred when one touched a doorknob or the force that kept a man’s feet on the ground. Venarie was simply an added quality that allowed wizards to channel fever to flames, to freeze the moisture in their breath, to twist a shock to a bolt of lightning and to defy the earth itself.

This had been explained before, in countless theses, debates and lectures to the gifted and the unenlightened alike. Met with too many slack-jawed stares and the inability of the unenlightened to even fumble with these concepts, let alone grasp them, the Venarium had turned their efforts to more worthwhile studies.

Without the guidance of wizards, the unenlightened had turned to the only other source of explanation: their priests. And the priests offered only one explanation.

‘Magic.’

Venarie was the domain of wizards.

‘Magic’ was the practice of priests.

The explanation wasn’t always ‘magic.’ Just as frequently it was ‘fate,’ or ‘the will of the Gods,’ or ‘apologies that your son died in a war we told him was just; perhaps if you had just given a few more coins in the dish when it was passed your way.’ Whatever the explanation, priests lived to undo what wizards did.

The reasons for the Venarium’s enmity for priesthoods of all faiths had roots that sank into the earth of history, the greatest one taking years to explain in full every slight and grudge the wizards had meticulously recorded.

Bralston did not have years, so he simply settled for scowling across the table at Miron Evenhands.

‘I don’t like you.’

For his part, the priest seemed unfazed by this. He simply smiled, a sort of smile that irked Bralston to admit reminded him fondly of his grandfather, and brought a cup of steaming tea up to a long face beneath a white cowl.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Lord Emissary said.

‘Apologies suggest that there is something you can do to alter my opinion,’ Bralston replied sharply. ‘I assure you, my reasons remain steeped far enough in history and philosophy that any such suggestions are ultimately a frivolous, and borderline insulting, waste of time and attention on your part and mine.’

‘That’s one interpretation.’ The priest bobbed his head. ‘There are others. For example, it can also imply a deep lament that history and philosophy have more to do with an opinion than character and personal experience do. It can also imply a subtle desire that said relations could be repaired, if only through two open minds meeting at the right time with the right attitude.’

Bralston snorted, crinkling his nose in a sneer. ‘That’s stupid.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Look,’ the wizard said, rubbing his eyes. ‘I get my fill of arguing philosophical trivia in Cier’Djaal. I was hoping that this mission would heighten my appreciation for simplicity.’

‘You hoped that a mission to track down people who shoot fire from their fingertips and don’t soil themselves with the effort due to glowing red stones would be simple?’

‘What did I just say?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Miron smiled and held up a hand for preemptive peace. ‘Excuse me. In truth, I had hoped that summoning you here would result in a greater enhancement of your desire for simplicity.’

Bralston merely grunted at that. Thus far, the two hours of contact that he had shared with the Lord Emissary had been anything but simple.

He had arrived in Port Destiny shortly after dawn broke on the blue horizon of the sea, as scheduled, planning only on lingering for as long as it took to find a meal. He had been surprised to find a bronze-clad, fierce-looking woman with raven hair and a long sword, standing exactly three feet from where he landed, wearing an expression as though she had been waiting there specifically for him.

His surprise had turned to suspicion when she, one Knight-Serrant Quillian Guisarne-Garrelle Yanates, had revealed that she was doing exactly that. That suspicion had convinced him to follow her lead to the luxurious temple in the city, and from there to the table where he now sat, across from a priest of Talanas – an apparently high-ranking priest of Talanas – who somehow seemed to know everything about his mission.

And, he thought with a twitch of his eyelid, who just won’t … stop … smiling.

‘You’ll forgive me for being less than willing to nod my head dumbly and accept whatever you say, Lord Emissary.’ Bralston all but spat the title on the table. ‘But given that the Venarium acts with at least a modicum of secrecy, I must be more than a little suspicious at how you know what my mission concerns.’

‘Suspicion is a wise policy, even in times of peace.’ Miron shook his head and sighed. ‘In times of turmoil … well …’

‘That doesn’t explain anything.’

‘No appreciation for dramatic segues, I see.’ The priest smiled, took another sip. ‘I can see why, of course. Drama tends to be a word in a forgotten language that roughly translates to “long-winded, unimportant babble purely for the sake of entertaining idiots.”’

‘I would not disagree.’

‘When “long-winded and unimportant” tend to be the exact opposite of the concise and sharp-witted pride of the wizard, no? Curtness, forthrightness, everything explained, everything understood. That is what you believe, is it not?’

‘Priests believe. Wizards know.’

‘Indeed. However, what you apparently don’t know is that everything is not quite so neatly explained as you might think. This supposed rivalry between the churches and the Venarium, for example.’ The priest’s smile seemed to grow larger with every mounting moment of Bralston’s ire. ‘It would cast such knowledge into doubt to learn that there might be one or two wizards out there who find the company of priests tolerable, would it not?’ He smiled and winked. ‘Even to the point of sharing the details on missions conducted with a modicum of secrecy?’

Bralston’s eyes went wide, mouth went small.

‘You’re saying …’ he uttered. ‘We have a leak.’

‘Now who’s being dramatic?’ The priest’s laughter was dry, like pages turning in a well-read book. ‘No, no, my friend. I simply meant that, where our concerns coincide, Lector Annis and myself are not above violating enmities steeped in philosophy and history.’

‘Coincide?’ Bralston raised a brow. ‘The Lector mentioned nothing.’

‘I suppose he wouldn’t, for fear that you might believe what I am about to tell you is an order, rather than a humble request, something you would no doubt resent.’

‘And that request is?’

Miron’s smile faded, and a look of concern, so familiar as to have been etched on the face of every soft-hearted grandmother and hard-working grandfather that Bralston had ever seen, spread over his face.

‘I would like you to find my employees.’

‘Surely,’ Bralston replied, ‘agents of the church are more than capable of performing your will, given the funding and support you undoubtedly boast.’