A Painted Goddess (13 page)

“That’s what I meant,” Brasley said. “That such a painting might be confusing to the layperson. Who do you suppose was supreme before Dumo?”

Olgen looked genuinely perplexed. “You know . . . I don’t know actually.”

“Perhaps the god of grass.”

“Probably not,” Olgen said.

No, probably not
.

Brasley leaned forward, squinted at the mural. There certainly were a lot of them. He supposed if they had a god for grass, then they could have a god or goddess for any old thing, and that would explain why there was such a mob of them. The turtle god? The goddess of dusty cupboards? The god of missing socks? There might be no end to them.

“At least they all look like they’re having a good time,” Brasley said.

“Of course, milord,” Olgen said. “It is a celebration of Dumo’s ascension.”

“All except for that guy?”

One of Olgen’s eyebrows shot up. “Milord?”

“That one all the way on the far end,” Brasley said. “There’s always one. Every party has that one fellow whose job it is to sour everything. Probably because he can’t get a girl.”

Now Olgen leaned forward, scanning the mural. “Milord, I don’t . . . I’m not sure I see . . .”

“Right there.” Brasley pointed to the extreme right of the mural. “Skulking in the shadows. Probably the god of being an asshole or something.”

Brasley stepped closer. Pointed directly at a figure standing under the low-hanging branches of a gnarled tree. The artist, Brasley suddenly realized, had been far more skilled than Brasley had originally thought. A quick glance at that section of the mural, and one saw only a shadowed area. A closer examination revealed the vague shape of some looming figure. The more Brasley stared at it, the more it came into focus, a hulking man in spiked armor, red eyes glowing from the depths of a great helm.

Brasley saw Olgen’s eyes widen and knew the young man had at last seen the god he was talking about. “Oh my.”

“Indeed. A party pooper if I’ve ever seen one.”

Talbun approached from behind, looking over their shoulders at the mural. “Is this where you two have been? Gawking at the artwork?”

Olgen pointed at the intimidating figure in spiked armor. “I believe I know who that is. The god of war. Akram. He’s often depicted in such armor.”

Talbun gasped so sharply that the other two spun to look at her.

“I know him,” she said.

Confusion crossed Brasley’s face. “You
know
him?”

“At the Temple of Kashar,” Talbun said. “He massacred all of my men. And slaughtered the monks there.” She swallowed hard. “And killed the great serpent god, Kashar.”

Brasley shuffled nervously. “Well, see there. I told you. The quintessential party pooper.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Like all young, brash, overconfident military officers, Kasmis Urlik would not have believed it if someone would have told him he was about to die.

He would have been doubly incredulous to hear that his death was the direct result of the poor decision he was about to make. He was a lieutenant in Sherrik’s First Lancers Cavalry and by definition invincible.

Such was his limited experience.

When Urlik saw the squad of Perranese soldiers, he raised his cavalry saber and prepared to sound the charge.

A world-weary sergeant spoke up immediately. “Sir, we were told to observe, not engage. Do you think it wise to—”

“It’s five men, Sergeant,” Urlik said, voice dripping with contempt. “I think thirty mounted lancers can handle it. I also think it would be rather nice to have a prisoner to question, but we’ll miss our chance if we let them vanish into the trees. Now come on!”

The sergeant’s next objection was cut off as Urlik lifted his saber and shouted, “Charge!”

The thirty lancers thundered toward the fleeing Perannese, horses’ hooves digging up turf as they left the road and headed for the tree line. The Perranese made the trees just ahead of the lancers, but they’d completely lost their head start.

We have you now
, Urlik thought.
My very first action, and I’ll be bringing back prisoners
. He imagined with pleasure what the decoration would look like on his dress uniform.

Once the lancers were within the tree line, the arrows rained down, at least a hundred of them. Men screamed and fell from their saddles. Horses reared. Urlik looked up, saw the higher limbs of the trees swarming with Perranese, all loosing arrow after arrow.

An ambush. The bastards!

He turned his horse and spurred it back toward the road. “Withdraw!”

White-hot pain exploded in his shoulder. The world blurred past his face, and something slammed him hard, knocking the wind out of him. The ground. He’d fallen from his horse and hit the ground. He rolled onto his side. An arrow must have hit in the small gap where his breastplate and back plate buckled together. One of these Perranese sons of bitches was either a very good shot or awfully lucky. He tried to reach the arrow sticking out of his shoulder but couldn’t.

Well, this was bloody embarrassing. Urlik had gone from capturing a prisoner and earning a medal to getting shot out of the saddle and sprawling helplessly on the ground.

He saw a bunch of boots, craned his neck, and looked up at four dour-looking Perranese warriors. One had an eye patch and jabbered in his heathen language to the others.

Urlik managed to summon some bravado. “Looks like you win this one, chaps. Well done. I suppose you’ll want to take me prisoner now.”

One of the warriors leaned over casually and stabbed Urlik through the eye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Having a tattoo inked on a shoulder or an arm or an ankle was one thing. Having one inked on her throat offered an entirely new form of discomfort. The pinprick sting of the needle was familiar enough, but keeping her head back so long so Maxus could apply the tattoo had put a stiff crick in her neck.

And having the needle work the ink into her flesh directly over her larynx was no picnic either.

If Rina moved or spoke, it might disrupt and ruin the process.

But
inside
she complained loudly.

Hurry up, you stupid old wizard!

An eternity later, Maxus stepped back from her, eyes wide with wonder. “It’s finished . . . I think.”

“You think?” Rina’s hand shot to her throat, but all she felt was smooth skin. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t think anything is wrong,” Maxus said. “It’s just not what I expected.”

Rina stood, feeling her throat with both hands now. “Damn it, tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Wait. Hold on.” Maxus turned away, rummaged through a chest of random items, then turned back, handing her a mirror the size of a saucer. “Look for yourself.”

Rina examined the bird in the reflection. Small, but intricately detailed. It looked like a colorful songbird, wings spread, head up, tiny beak open as if singing. Its wings were a deep blue with pink underneath. Its belly yellow. Somehow the colors all worked together and—no. She’d been mistaken. The wings were a bright green, and the pink underneath was more orange. No red. No . . .

The colors!
They keep changing
.

Before her eyes one color melted into another, constantly swirling and changing.

Dumo help me. If the eye tattoos draw stares, then what will
this
do
?

She looked up from the mirror and realized Maxus was looking at her expectantly.

“It’s beautiful work,” Rina said. “But I think I’ll be wearing high collars from now on.”

The wizard cleared his throat. “But what does it
do
?”

Rina had momentarily forgotten that the tattoo was supposed to do something besides just look garish. She tapped into the spirit. The songbird hummed like a new warmth at her throat. The Prime recognized it, fed power to it. It was ready and waiting to do whatever it had been made to do.

She felt it pulsing on her throat but had no idea how to command it. It taunted her, and she couldn’t do a thing with it.

“Well?” Maxus prompted.

“I don’t know how to work it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know what it does, and I can’t make it do what it’s supposed to do if I don’t know what it does.”

Maxus made a short noise in his throat halfway between fatigue and frustration. “Don’t you have some instinct or something?”

“Look, I’ll keep trying. I don’t know, okay?”

The wizard’s eyes narrowed. “With respect, your grace. You wouldn’t be keeping certain information to yourself, would you?”

Rina had forgotten how mistrustful wizards could be. They were especially stingy about sharing magical secrets.

“I’m not holding anything back, master wizard,” she said. “I’m not keen on this mystery any more than you are.”

Maxus had at least enough manners to look chagrined. “I beg pardon, your grace. I’d been so anxious to at last determine the function of the tattoo. Forgive my impatience.”

“Look, it does . . . something.” Like a lost word just on the tip of her tongue, she felt she could almost tell what the tattoo was for. It
wanted
to be used. The magic was right there for her, waiting to be triggered. “I’ll figure it out, and I’ll tell you as soon as I do.”

“Thank you, your grace. I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.”

Rina hoped they had time to wait. It would be nice to find out if the tattoo did anything helpful before the Perranese began climbing over the city walls.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She’d been awake for a while but simply hadn’t wanted to move. Grit under one cheek as she lay flat against the ground. Wet mist from the falling water on the other cheek. She was cold but not enough to shiver.

Of course, it was still pitch-dark.

Maurizan sat up, took hold of the little orb still hanging between her breasts, and gave it a hard shake. The little fish flashed dim light for a second, then faded dark again. They were all used up or needed rest or something. She had no idea.

She turned away from the water falling into the pool and felt her way deeper into the opening. It must have been a tunnel or hallway or something. She kept going, slowly, hands up in front of her to keep from walking face-first into a wall.

The farther Maurizan moved from the pool and the waterfall, the cleaner the floor felt beneath her bare feet. She suspected the level of the pool might rise or fall depending on the tides or rainfall or maybe the season. When the level rose, it carried grit and sediment farther down the hallway, but not this far.

Her hands bumped against something cold and smooth. She ran her hands all over the surface. Hinges, a ring. It was an iron door. She pulled on the ring, and the door swung open toward her, surprisingly smooth, the hinges not even creaking.

The air on the other side seemed stuffier, but drier. She hesitated only a moment, then stepped inside.

Lights flickered around her so brightly and abruptly that she thought she might be having some kind of fit. She stumbled back over her own feet, drawing both daggers, and ended up on the floor. She scrambled back up into a fighting crouch, daggers out in front of her, panicked and panting, heart flailing against her chest.

She started to tap into the spirit and stopped herself. There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and she desperately needed to let her well of spirit replenish itself.

The room was not like anything she’d ever seen before. The floor was so black and so glossy, she didn’t know if it was glass or highly polished stone or what. It didn’t even look like a material she’d ever laid eyes on. The walls were like highly polished silver, and the room’s furnishings seemed to grow right out of the floors and the walls.

But none of that was as startling as the lights. They were perfectly shaped glass spheres hanging down from the ceiling on thin metal poles. There was no flicker of flame. They were nothing like candles or torches. They simply glowed all on their own.

It has to be some spell. They come to life when somebody walks in the room and needs light
.

She lowered the daggers and proceeded slowly into the room. Her bare feet felt cold on the perfectly smooth floor. Nothing in here was dusty or dirty. Along the far wall was a line of glass boxes, a half dozen of them, five feet from the ground and almost as wide.

Maurizan approach slowly, and as she drew closer she saw that some of the glass had been broken. She stood at the foot of the first box and looked inside.

A skeleton lay in the box as if it were a glass coffin, arms folded in a pose of final rest. Whoever it had been had once worn fine velvet robes of deep blue, but the color had faded and the fabric fallen to tatters. Additionally the robes looked disheveled, as if the corpse had been searched and not gently. Broken glass littered the floor between that glass box and the next, where she found a similar scene. This time the corpse wore robes of a rich burgundy, tattered as before and also showing signs of ransack.

The corpse in the third glass box had been vandalized to the point that bones were scattered every which way, arms and legs pulled apart and stacked to the side. The dead man’s robes had been completely shredded.

Between the next two boxes, she found something new.

A skeleton. Not a corpse from one of the glass boxes, but somebody else. Still some dried meat on the bones. Not much. She wondered if there were rats down here to take care of such things, but looking around, she supposed not. The place seemed far too clean, almost as if it were immune to the dirt and grime of the outside world.

Maurizan noticed the skeleton on the floor wore no clothing, not even tatters, but there was a cracked leather belt around its waist with a rusty short sword. She looked down at herself. Completely nude except for the belt and the daggers.

Uh-oh
.

She bent, looked closer, and saw the corpse’s skeletal hands clutched a leather satchel. She leaned in, took hold of the satchel’s leather strap between thumb and forefinger, taking special care not to touch any part of the corpse. Maurizan had stabbed grown men with her daggers while looking them in the eyes as the life left their faces, but suddenly the idea of touching any part of the skeleton appalled her. In fact, the eerie cleanliness of this chamber creeped her out much more than did the rest of the ruined fortress.

At least she wasn’t being chased by a giant sea creature anymore.

She had to tug hard to pull the satchel free from the skeleton’s grip. There was a short series of dull snaps as the skeleton’s fingers broke off and clattered across the floor. She pulled the satchel clear of the corpse, fussed with its rusty buckle, then slowly opened it, hoping the contents wouldn’t be something terrible and deadly.

The satchel contained two items.

The first was a scroll case. She’d seen simple wooden ones many times, carrying messages for her mother, but this was something different. It was about eight inches long and carved from something that might have been ivory. All she knew with certainty was that it looked fancy and expensive.

The carving displayed a stormy sea, large waves coming down hard on a small fishing boat. The design of the boat didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen in Helva. Everything about the scroll case was foreign and exotic, even the aquatic wave designs on the silver end caps. She grabbed one of the end caps, made ready to twist it off.

She froze.

What are the odds I can read whatever I find in there? If it’s something magical, I might set it off.

It was a job for a wizard. Not her. She put the scroll case back in the satchel.

The other item was a small square of brass with pieces cut out of it. She had to look hard to figure out the picture it made, a stylized cloud with an angry face on it, lips pursed and lines coming from the lips, as if the cloud were blowing out a candle.

Realization hit her like a bolt from the sky.

It’s a stencil! These things are for ink magic!

Fear, fatigue, every worry vanished with the excitement of what she’d found. She broke out in goose bumps, her body tingling. She’d come for the Prime and had also been given the gill and swimming tattoos. The ruined fortress of the ancient wizards just kept on giving. She giggled wildly as she placed the stencil back in the satchel and then swung the strap over her shoulder.

The next box was the same, glass broken, corpse ransacked.

Maurizan shifted to the final glass box and gasped.

It wasn’t broken, and the man inside was intact.

Not
alive
, but not vandalized either.

He hadn’t been that old, perhaps in his middle fifties. Or maybe wizards had ways to stay younger, longer, Maurizan mused. His hair was white, but his beard was black with only thin streaks of white. Maurizan thought he looked rather wise, fine features and clear complexion, although his skin had gone a waxy gray and had shrunken against his cheeks and hands. Whereas the other skeletons had clearly been collecting dust for centuries, this dead body merely looked a few months old. What peculiar brand of magic had slowed its decay, Maurizan couldn’t guess, nor did she care because it was the objects the dead man held that drew her full attention.

In his clawlike grip, he clutched another scroll case. Unlike the other, this scroll case was jet black, some smooth glossy substance that seemed to drink the light. The end caps were gold without engraving or marking of any kind. In his other hand he held the stencil.

Another tattoo. Right there. Dumo. I can’t believe it
.

She went over every inch of the glass box looking for a way to open it but already knew she wouldn’t find anything. There was a reason the glass had been smashed out of the other boxes—the scavengers or tomb raiders or whatever they were called hadn’t been gentle about their looting.

Maurizan turned one of the daggers around in her hand, holding it by the blade. She lifted it over her head, prepared to bring the hilt down hard on the glass.

Wait. What if I actually took a second here and used my brain?

She lowered the dagger. Something bothered her about the skeleton she’d found on the floor, the dead scavenger from whom she’d taken the satchel. She presumed he would have gone on to loot the final box if not for . . .

What? He couldn’t have just spontaneously dropped dead.

Could he?

She went back to examine the skeleton, still loath to touch any of the grimy bones. She squatted next to it, letting her eyes roam up and down, trying to get a clue of what might have happened.

Three of its ribs on the left side were broken and caved in.

Maurizan’s hand went to her own ribs. She’d thought the beast’s tentacle had cracked one when the thing had given her a hard squeeze, but suspected now it was only a bruise. Still, it ached something fierce, and if the monster had squeezed her a little longer and a little harder, it could have crushed her ribs, no problem.

So once upon a time an explorer came looking for ink magic. A hideous sea creature mortally wounded him, but he escaped and made it this far before giving up the ghost.

She shivered thinking about ghosts.

Okay, let’s just say he died. I’ve got enough problems without adding restless spirits to the mix
.

Satisfied she’d deduced the cause of the scavenger’s demise, she went to the final box and smashed the glass with her dagger hilt.

She spun the blade the right way round in her palm again, going into a fighter’s crouch, daggers up for action.

No ghosts sprang forth to carry her away to the netherworld.

And if they had, then what? You can’t stab a ghost
.

She reached into the box, careful to avoid the jagged glass, and plucked the scroll from the dead wizard’s grip.

The second she did, there was a soft hiss of air, and the wizard’s skin dried to dust, falling away from his bones. His eyes caved in to his sockets, hair falling out.

Maurizan jerked her hand back in surprise and disgust.

The magical lights above shifted to a deep red, and she felt a rumbling in the floor through her feet.

Oh . . . shit
.

The room washed suddenly in red light was even more disturbing, and Maurizan glanced back over her shoulder at the door she’d come through, thinking it was time for a hasty departure.

The stencil!

Without it the scroll might be useless. She reached in again and snatched it quickly, putting both it and the scroll case into the satchel.

The rumbling increased, and at the far end of the room, the wall split in half, opening outward. From the darkness beyond she heard them before she saw them—a clunking, plodding, metallic sound accompanied by odd sporadic hissing bursts.

And then a fraction of a second later, she saw them.

Three enormous men in full plate armor came stomping through the new door in the wall, armor gleaming strangely in the red light, face guards down on their great helms, so tall their heads almost scraped the top of the doorway as they marched through.

Except . . . they weren’t men.

Maurizan tapped into the spirit.

And everything slowed down.

With the calm of the spirit came the cool logical workings of the mind; she took in every detail of the situation in an instant.

The lumbering suits of armor were shaped like men, but they were something else. Where the arms and legs joined the torso, she saw gears and pulleys through the gaps in the plate. Nozzles in the knees and elbows randomly spurted long gouts of steam like hissing teakettles. In one gauntleted hand, each gripped a long sword with a straight blade. The other arm grew into a spiked mace.

The things were quite obviously constructed for a single purpose. To kill people.

To slay intruders like Maurizan.

A portcullis slammed down, blocking the door she’d come through. The walls behind the armored men were slowly swinging closed again.

Maurizan calculated she had about thirty seconds before she was trapped in the room with the killing machines.

She sheathed one of the daggers and bolted toward the clattering armored warriors. That she was tapped into the spirit was the only thing that gave her a chance. She had perfect vision of the melee as it unfolded in slow motion before her. She saw the way they stood, postures, how they lifted their weapons. Every little move telegraphed what the armored men would do next.

In two seconds, Maurizan had charted her path past the knights.

She ran straight for the first knight and dropped a split second before a horizontal slash would have taken her head off. By the time the knight recovered and hacked at her with the back swing, she’d already tucked and tumbled away.

A glance was all she needed to know what she was going to do next. She saw some kind of tube that ran down the interior of the armored leg in the back, looping out at the ankle before plugging back into the heel. At the same time, she leapt to the side as the second knight brought his mace arm down hard, cracking the floor where she’d been a moment before.

The third knight was going to be the tough one. He’d already seen Maurizan’s moves and positioned himself to compensate.

In another few seconds, the wall behind her would close enough to cut off her escape.

The knight must have sensed what she was trying to do. Instead of attacking, he stopped, went into a crouch, legs wide, weapons spread to either side.

Maurizan threw one of the daggers. It tumbled end over end toward the knight. With its weapons spread, the knight was vulnerable. It brought its arms up to block the dagger but too late.