The Godless, page 29
“How would you know how I look when I’ve just had sex?”
“Because I’ve seen you after you get home to Nora as well as when you’re thinking about getting home to her.”
Brogan shook his head and smiled. If nothing else he could always trust Harper to observe the world around him very well.
“What are your plans for the winter, Harper?”
“I’ll be finding a place to stay and a woman to keep me warm, I suppose.”
That was always Harper’s plan for the future. It was as reliable an answer as could be found in the Five Kingdoms.
Up ahead of them Mosely was rounding the final curve in the road leading to Kinnett. Not far from him stood Volkner, who owned the homestead nearest Brogan’s.
The look on Volkner’s face when he saw Brogan was enough to cause panic to set in.
Brogan urged his horse forward and kept his eyes locked on his neighbor, a dread sinking into his stomach that was deep and abiding.
Mosely looked back over his shoulder as Brogan rode forward.
Volkner’s dark eyes were wide and filled with sorrow. “Brogan, lad, I’m so very sorry. We’ve been trying to reach you. I sent Tamra to find which path you were on. He must have chosen badly.”
“What is it, Volkner?” His voice shook.
There are rules all people follow. Most of those rules are made by kings.
Volkner’s hands were empty.
“There are coins, Brogan. At your door. Four of them.”
“Coins?” Brogan frowned and shook his head. “What are you talking about?”
Volkner spoke again, carefully, with great emphasis, his eyes blinking wetly as he made sure Brogan was listening. “Coins, Brogan. There are coins at your doorstep. Four of them.”
“No.” Brogan could barely speak.
Harper came up from behind, his voice calm and cold. “Are you sure, Volkner?”
The older man looked to Harper and a faint contempt painted his broad features. “Oh, I’ve seen them before, Harper. Not as many as you, perhaps, but I’ve seen them.”
Brogan’s ears rang with a high, sweet note that tried to seal all other sounds away. “Have you looked in the house?”
“It’s forbidden, Brogan. You know that.” There was regret in the words.
“How long ago?” Harper again, asking the questions that Brogan would have asked if his heart wasn’t trying to break.
Volkner shook his head and spread his arms in a gesture of his sadness and frustration. “Five days since, that I know of. I visited two days before that and all was well.”
“Five days?”
The winter grew in Brogan’s chest. Without another word, he drove his horse forward, brushing past all of them. The gelding charged hard and the familiar landscape nearly blurred but it was not fast enough.
His dismount was more of a leap than a proper climb from the saddle. Brogan only took five strides toward the door before he saw them.
He had heard of the coins before. Had seen one as a child, but only the one and he had never touched the thing.
That they were valuable was impossible to deny. Brogan could see the weight of them where they lay on the ground in front of his home. They were large and heavy and worth far more than he’d made in the last few weeks of travel. He stepped over them and opened the door, calling out to Nora and each of his children as he entered.
It was a good place. He’d built it himself with the assistance of Harper and others. The people around him had helped as he had aided them when the time came. The town was good that way. He left Kinnett and knew that all was well with his wife and children, and that people as good and solid as Volkner were always there.
But the coins were different, weren’t they?
No one answered his calls.
No one was home. He’d known they wouldn’t be. There were four coins, one for each of his children and one for his wife.
When they came, when they took from a family, they always left one coin behind for each person they stole away.
One coin for each and every sacrifice.
“No.”
He backed away from the door and shook his head, that feeling of dread growing more profound.
“No. No. No. Nonononononononono…”
The coins.
He looked to the ground again and saw them properly. Four coins. Just as Volkner had said.
Without thinking about the possibilities, he bent and touched them. They were weighty, to be sure. The largest gold coins he had ever seen or touched. The metal was as cold as the air, colder, perhaps, as he held them in his hands. They were marked with unfamiliar images and symbols.
As he held them, Harper dismounted and came toward him.
“Brogan…” Had he ever heard so much sorrow in his friend’s voice before? No, surely not. Harper was not a man who held onto his grief. He was gifted that way. When his mother died as a child he’d cried for fifteen minutes then never again that Brogan knew of. When his father grew ill and withered five years later there were no tears at all.
“Harper.” He could barely recognize his own voice. “You know the Grakhul. You’ve dealt with them.”
“Aye.” Harper did not turn away from him, did not flinch, but held his gaze. “What you would do, it’s forbidden. You know this.”
“Four of them, Harper? My entire family?”
“Brogan, it’s the law in all Five Kingdoms. ‘When the Grakhul offer coin it must be taken.’”
“My entire family, Harper.” Brogan’s voice was stronger now. Louder.
“Brogan.”
“My entire family! How many do they take at a time?”
“Four. You know this, too.”
The world did not grow gray, as he feared it might. It grew red.
“How long do they take to offer up their sacrifices?”
“How would I know that, Brogan?”
Part of Brogan knew Harper was trying to make him see reason. But where it mattered, Brogan did not care.
“Is there a chance that my Nora is still alive?”
Harper licked his lips. He looked as nervous as he ever had.
“There is a chance, yes, but it is slim.” Harper held up his hand as Brogan started for his horse. “You don’t know where they are, Brogan.”
“No. I do not.” He looked away from the gelding and toward his friend. “But you do.”
“I cannot. You know this too.”
“My entire family. All of them. Has that ever happened before?”
“No one knows how they make their choices.” Harper shook his head as Brogan started walking again.
“Take me to them. Maybe I can make them change their minds.”
He could see Harper wanting to argue again. He knew his friend well. They had fought side by side on a score of occasions and traveled together long enough that even if they had not grown together in the same town they’d have claimed fellowship.
“I have to try, Harper.” His hands clenched into fists around the four cold, metal coins. They were of such a size that his fists could not completely close. “I have to.”
Harper stood completely still for one more moment, then he sighed. “So let’s go see if we can get your family back.”
“I owe you.”
“I’ve owed you for a lifetime.” Harper shook his head and spat. He was not happy. There was nothing to be happy about.
Volkner was coming his way, his ambling stride leaving him swaying one way then the other. Brogan knew exactly how much the man ached inside for failing to stop Nora and the children from being taken.
“I am so sorry, Brogan.”
“You could not have stopped them.” It was all he could manage as a defense for his friend. It was the truth. No one could stop the Grakhul. They were called by many names, not the least of which was the Undying. Every story of anyone trying to prevent a family member from being taken ended poorly for the would-be saviors.
Brogan climbed back into the saddle and turned toward the Broken Swords. The sun gleamed off the distant shards in a display of colors that was the envy of rainbows, and Brogan did not care in the least.
Somewhere beyond those mountains his family was being dragged to their deaths.
He would save them or he would die trying.
Niall Leraby walked through the woods and let himself commune with the world around him. Not far away he could hear the Weeping River living up to its name, the waters sighing and crying as they pattered over the crystalline rocks and worried their way past the thick roots from the garrah trees that leaned over the river as if to protect their young.
A dozen paces away a doe looked at him and froze, waiting to see what he would do. He nodded in her direction and ignored her otherwise. He loved a good cut of venison, but he wasn’t here to hunt for meat. He was looking for the proper herbs to satisfy Mosara’s needs. The master gardener was not a hard man to work for, but he expected nothing less than perfection in what was brought to him. Less than that, he often said, would lead to a person dying.
There were some gardeners who tended to the trees on an estate or two, and then there were gardeners like Mosara, who handled the landscape at the palace. Some day, if he were bright enough and learned his lessons well, Niall would take his place there. For now he learned and in the process he wandered the woods outside of the city and plucked this root or that leaf or even an occasional berry, because Mosara told him he had to.
“All and well,” he said to himself. “There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.” That was the truth of it, too. He was happy with his lot in life. There were few who could say that in his estimation.
The deer was almost behind him now, and he had let her drift from his attention when she suddenly bolted, charging past him and leaping a distance that was startling to witness. She did not wait around, but continued her rapid escape from the area.
He turned to see what might have startled her, and saw the cloaked figure a dozen feet away.
Niall was not a fool. Upon occasion he was accused of being too trusting, but he seldom let himself get caught unawares.
His fingers tightened on the walking staff in his right hand and he made himself appear calm.
“Well met.”
The cowl was filled only with darkness and whomever it was that looked back from under it made no response.
“Was there something you needed help with? Are you lost?” It happened from time to time, even away from the city. People could get lost. In the woods if they ate the wrong things they could easily get addled and forget where they were going.
Instead of speaking the figure tossed a glittering trinket into the air and Niall watched as the shining metal arced toward him. No. Not a trinket.
A coin.
The metal hit the ground in front of Niall and landed on its edge. The loam under his feet was soft, and the heavy coin cut the surface of the stuff and stood at a nearly impossible angle, like a dagger driven into flesh.
“What are you doing?” Niall asked, but he already knew the answer.
He took a step back and shifted his balance. The staff rose up from the ground and he held it in a two-handed grip.
“I do not follow your gods.” He did his best to sound stern. “Find another.”
The cloaked figure shuddered and came toward him, moving quickly. “No.” The word was not spoken, it was hissed.
Niall brought his staff around in a brutal arc and aimed the thicker end of the hard wood at the blackness of the cowl’s depths. Somehow he missed. His aim was good, but the stranger moved too quickly and dodged his attack.
Niall shook his head. He wanted this done and sooner rather than later.
While he was contemplating what he wanted something hit him hard in the back of his head. The wooden staff fell from his hands and he grunted then fell forward.
When he hit the ground, the cold coin of the Grakhul scraped along his jaw and narrowly avoided drawing blood.
There were more of them. Not one shape, but half a dozen or more, and they moved around him, cutting off any chance of escape.
He would have risen if he could have. The cloaked figure leaned over him and spoke again. “The gods do not need your faith. They need your life.”
They fell on him then, their hands feverishly hot, their breath rancid and diseased. He did not know how many of them attacked; he could not tell for certain, but he saw their faces and knew a fear deeper than he ever had before.
After that the darkness swallowed Niall whole.
They rode hard, and as they went they gathered more riders to join them.
They did not manage an army, but there were enough folk who either owed Brogan for past deeds, had suffered from the same loss in the past, or would work for coin, that they gathered twenty in all. More would have been too cumbersome.
Harper led the way.
Harper, who could be so secretive and who had spent time among the Grakhul, protecting deliveries to their nameless keep in the forsaken northeast. The laws of the Five Kingdoms forbade travel to the area. It was the land reserved for the Grakhul, and unless those very people offered safe passage, the foolish that trespassed did not live long to speak of their journeys.
“We have to follow the proper passages across the land. Stray too far and death will follow.”
Harper’s words dragged Brogan from his thoughts.
“How do you know these paths?”
The man’s smile was thin and unreadable. “I was trained to be here. I’m betraying a trust.”
“Do you think I don’t know what I’ve asked of you?” Brogan’s voice was soft as the finest leather. “Do you think I ask it lightly?”
“If I doubted you, I would not be here.” Harper did not flinch from his gaze. “She is your wife, and they are your children, but I’ve loved them too. They’re as much my family as you are, Brogan.”
“Why do they take them, Harper?”
“Why does the wind blow? The gods make demands and those who follow them obey those demands.”
Really there was no more to say and so they rode on as quickly as they safely could.
The land they finally reached was bleak, a dismal collection of black rock and broken shale that fell toward a dim, gray shoreline of more shale and dark sands. The ocean beyond it was equally uninviting and violent besides. The waves at high tide slammed themselves furiously against the shoreline and dashed into the blades of rock with murderous force. The vibrations from the impacts could be felt through the leather of his boot heels.
According to Harper more than one fool had attempted to attack by that route but none had succeeded. Few had ever approached the nameless keep of the Grakhul and come back. Those that did were never the same. Strong men were broken by what they saw and their flesh sometimes withered where they had strayed too far from the proper path.
Harper pointed out the Gateway to them. The place that the Grakhul claimed led to the home of the gods.
At a distance the monolithic Gateway rose from the night time waters, a massive bridge of dark stone that sometimes was merely an arch and other times revealed the land beneath it. They had heard of the Gateway before, but only one of them had ever seen it. Few saw the Gateway and fewer still saw the keep. These were forbidden things, as ordered by the royal families of the Five Kingdoms. Those rare few given permission to visit were allowed only because the Grakhul deemed them worthy. Harper was one of the fortunate souls trained to find his way through what seemed like an unremarkable terrain.
None of them looked at the Gateway for long. There was something about that odd stone bridge over the waters that hurt the eyes and made the mind ache.
After a scan of the area Brogan McTyre pushed aside the idea of attacking from the shore below. There were other ways that might prove slightly less dangerous.
“Well, now we know why no one ever attacks this place.” Laram scowled as he spoke.
The keep was built into the side of the dark stone cliff. Somewhere in the distant past madmen had decided to risk life and limb and carve the damnable place into existence. The very structure gave off a feeling of extreme age, even if one didn’t take the time to notice where the winds had smoothed a few of the edges.
Brogan looked toward Laram and nodded. He felt exactly the same way. The difference was that he was the one leading the assault and couldn’t actually voice that opinion.
He shook his head and spat into the cold sea air. If he thought too much about the dangerous air of the place, if he let himself worry, he’d lose his anger. He needed that right now to keep him warm and to keep him brave.
Unconsciously he let his fingers roam into the pouch secured on the inside of his broad leather belt, where the four coins rested. He did not need to see them. He’d memorized every detail of their surfaces. They’d been pressed between his belt and the fabric of his kilt for days, but when his fingers touched the heavy gold coins they still felt cold. He understood cold as he never had before.
“Enough. The sun’s up in a few hours.” He squinted into the wind and looked toward the east. “Though around here it might be hard to tell. Let’s find a way in. We’ve bloody work to do.”
A few voices muttered agreement but most were silent. They were here because they owed Brogan a debt or because they had experienced similar pains. Brogan couldn’t hope to offer enough to offend the gods. Where others had allowed the old ways to continue, Brogan intended to get his family back or make sure it never happened again.
Harper spoke up, dark hair flipping lazily around his lean face, dark eyes staring intently at Brogan. “You are sure you want to do this? It breaks all of the laws.”
Brogan knew the man was trying to be the voice of reason, but anger and reason have never been close associates. “I did not ask you here to stop me, Harper, and you know that.”
His thin mouth broke into a crooked grin that made the man look younger by years. “I never said I would stop you, Brogan. Only that I would aid you in any way I can. Sometimes that means saying the things you do not want to hear.”
Brogan put a heavy hand on his friend’s shoulder and nodded. “I thank you for that, but I mean to have my family today. Will you join me?”
