The Ritual (34 page)

“Thanks?” he repeated, turning his head back to me.

“For the, uh, you know,” I clarified, gesturing at my ears, then my crotch, and laughed at his incredulous stare.

Then he finally saw the humour of it, and his lips curved. “Bitch,” he muttered fondly. “Come here.” He stretched out his arm over the narrow trestle table, and I just managed to push my plate out of the way before he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me across for a deep, lingering kiss.

“Your breakfast,” Shiza’s voice snapped next to us, and I took my time to finish the kiss before I turned my head to her, taking in her hostile glare. It puzzled me a little – Zash had made it clear enough to me at least that he had no intention of taking up with her again while he was with me, and I had no reason to resent her for her prior relationship with him. Yet she acted like a spurned girlfriend, not an occasional lover, and I wondered how long he had been seeing her for.

Not that it mattered. He had pushed her away, and although I could sympathise with her jealousy, her very attitude made me want to rub it in, so I said, “Sorry, sweetheart, he’s mine now.”

Her eyes narrowed again, then she lifted her chin and shrugged. “Plenty of him to go around, surely? There’s two of ‘em, anyway. Not like I’ll know the difference.”

The statement in itself annoyed me, but it was made worse by the way I saw Zash flinch. It was fleeting, and he quickly pulled his face into his classic blank mask, but it was enough to turn my annoyance to anger. “I’m sure you see it that way, but
he’s
mine and I
can
tell the difference,” I said quietly. “So touch him again and I’ll cut your ears off.”

“She means it, Shiza,” Zash said, now looking pleased. “I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Well, whatever,” Shiza said dismissively, though her eyes still flashed daggers at me. “I’ll make do with his brother then.”

“And which one is he?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“You’ve just admitted you can’t tell them apart. How would you know which one is safe and which one will cost you your ears?”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “Whichever one isn’t with you is the safe one, of course.”

At that point I saw movement behind her, and I leaned over to watch Mior enter the common room. He still seemed fuzzy with sleep, but when Shiza turned around to see what I was looking at his eyes widened and he stopped abruptly.

“Sparky, hey,” she said, and I could hear the lazy, deliberate smile in her voice.

And then Shani stepped out from behind Mior. “
Sparky?
” she said in disbelief.

It was the first time ever I had seen Mior embarrassed. He turned red as a beet as he drew Shani forward with an arm around her waist and gestured at his ex-lover.

“Shani, this is, uh, Shizalin,” he stammered. “Shiza, this is Shaniel. She’s my, um… We’re… I’m…” He trailed off when Shani crossed her arms and cocked her head at the woman. I could see that she was curious more than anything else, but she said nothing, just looked.

Shiza, meanwhile, seemed to have frozen on the spot. Then she turned her head, gave me a wide-eyed look and turned back to my sister. “Twins,” she groaned. “Sweet Mennia’s Mercy, you’re her twin! Is that how you can tell them apart? Because you’re a twin yourself?”

Shani raised an eyebrow and pulled her mouth into a disapproving line. “You can’t tell them apart? It’s nothing to do with being twins. Can’t you smell it?” She closed her eyes and rubbed her nose against Mior’s shoulder, inhaling deeply.

Shiza shook her head uncertainly. “Smell what?”

“Magic,” Shani said with a wide grin. “I’d recognise him with my eyes closed.” She wrapped her arm around Mior’s waist, and he kissed her forehead before giving Shiza a sheepish grin.

“So, you were saying?” I said. “About which one of them is safe?” Shiza glared at me, then stalked off without saying anything else.

“What was that about?” Shani asked as she sat down next to me, but I shook my head, unwilling to waste more words on the woman. Deep down I wanted nothing more than to slap the insensitive bitch, but I figured that the innkeeper wouldn’t thank me for assaulting his staff, so I tamped down my anger, vowing to take it out on something defenceless later. I brought my attention back to my food, though my appetite had diminished significantly.

“Want to finish this in our room?” Zash asked, and I nodded, giving my sister an apologetic shrug which she waved off.

Once we were upstairs he closed the door, put his plate aside and took mine out of my hands before pulling me into his arms and kissing me thoroughly. “Thank you,” he said eventually.

“What for, exactly?”

“For knowing the difference. I know we do it on purpose, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “Sometimes it’s not very flattering to know that a woman can’t tell you apart from your brother.”

I kissed him again, then said, “I would never mix you up with Mior, Zash. Haven’t I proven that already? You could never fool me.”

“So you’ve said before. How?”

I hesitated, looking into his eyes. He was wearing one of his inscrutable expressions now, but I figured that in this case the truth was safe enough. Desire wasn’t love, after all. “I’m not attracted to Mior,” I therefore said. “Never have been. He does nothing to me. But you… You turn me on simply by looking at me. I wanted you the moment I first set eyes on you.”

Something flickered in his eyes, something I couldn’t recognise, but then he kissed me again with such passion that my knees turned to water and I had to cling to him simply to remain standing. Still, my treacherous mind couldn’t let go of events, and when he finally drew away again I said, “You and Shiza must go back a long time if she was your first… Can’t imagine that was only last year.”

“I never said she was my first,” he said, tracing kisses along my jaw to my ear. “She was just the one who taught me what my ears could add to the procedure. But we do go back a bit yeah. Probably about five years or so.”

My fingers clawed into his shirt. “Surely she can’t have been your only lover in that time? You didn’t need to refuse her just now.”

It wasn’t something I had wanted to say, but it had just slipped out. I wanted to know,
needed
to know why he had refused her.

He clasped his fingers around my chin and lifted it, not entirely gently. “I’m not the kind of man who needs two women to warm his bed at the same time,” he said with steel in his voice. Then he sighed. “Besides, I seem to have a thing for redheads these days.” With that he kissed me, hard, and pulled me onto the bed with him.

Our breakfast remained on the sideboard, cooling slowly, and it was three measures later before we finally left the inn to scope out burglary targets.

*   *   *   *   *

The next morning I woke up from Zash disentangling himself from me. I tried to hold him back, but he evaded all my efforts and slid out of the bed.

“Where are you going?” I asked when he started to pull on his clothes.

“Mior and I have a personal errand to run,” he said with a smile. “Go back to sleep, Little Firelocks. I’ll see you later.” He brushed my hair aside and kissed me lightly, then tucked the blanket back around me before unlocking the door and leaving the room.

I knew I ought to lock the door again, but we’d been out for half the night and I was comfortable and sleepy. I was still debating whether I could be bothered to get up to do it when the door opened again and Shani walked in.

“Rin, I need to talk to you,” she said before I could even wish her a good morning. She sounded agitated, and locked the door before climbing onto my bed.

I yawned and sat up, raking my hair our of my eyes. “You look like you’ve had shit for breakfast,” I commented, trying my best to wake up fully. “Something the matter?”

“Yes.” She sighed and wrung her hands. “I went to see Pailev yesterday.”

“Pailev?” I said, scratching my neck. “Didn’t think you’d want to get leered at again. How is he?”

“It wasn’t a social visit,” she snapped. “I needed information.” She shifted nervously, then grabbed my hand. “It’s those marks, Rin. They’ve been bugging me ever since I first saw them.”

I blinked at her, still not entirely awake. “Marks?”

“The marks Mior and Zash have on their shoulders.”

“What, their tattoos?” I picked up my tunic from the sideboard and pulled it on while Shani shook her head at me.

“They’re not tattoos, Rin. I’d seen that sigil before, I was sure of it, and Pailev confirmed it for me. Those marks are magical, and it means they’re bound.”

An icy hand clamped around my heart. “How do you mean, they’re bound?”

“Someone has magically bound them to him. From what Pailev explained to me such a binding is mostly passive, in that the subject can generally do whatever they want, but the person who marked them can force them to do what he wants at any time and… and he can hurt them. Distance doesn’t matter.”

“Azerev,” I breathed. “Gods, Shani, it makes sense now, what Siander said. Remember, back in Kenizar?”

“That’s not all though. I asked him about rituals too. Gods, Rin, I don’t know what to do!” She was close to tears now, and I pulled her into my arms to soothe her.

“Easy, Shani. Start at the beginning. What did you ask, what did he say?”

She took a deep breath and freed herself again, taking my hands in hers. “I asked about rituals, said I’d heard someone mention them and they sounded complicated. I tried to pretend I was just asking out of general interest, you know? Anyway, he tutted a bit at first, tried to evade the question. I could see he didn’t really want to talk about it, but that just worried me more, so I insisted.”

I nodded, intent on her every word. “Go on.”

“Right. Apparently rituals are built according to the circumstances, highly individual, but any ritual needs three basic things. A link, a power source and… and a sacrifice.”

If I hadn’t been sitting down already my legs would have given away at that point. “A sacrifice?” I repeated hoarsely, and she nodded.

“The link is to whatever thing or person the ritual needs to affect,” she said. “The power source–”

“Is what we’ve been gathering these past few months,” I finished for her. “Whatever he’s planning, it’s big. Which means that the sacrifice…” I faltered, but Shani burst into tears.

“It’s them, isn’t it? Oh Gods, Rin, he’s going to use them as sacrifice!”

“Wait, wait,” I said, trying to fight down the panic that threatened to rise. “Let’s not jump to conclusions here. Are you sure that Pailev meant a sacrifice as in… as in
that
kind of sacrifice?”

“Do you know any other kind?” Shani wailed. “I asked. He said it had to be something living. For small rituals a rat or a chicken or something will do, but larger ones need bigger lives. Well, more intelligent lives is what he said. So I asked about people, and he said only immoral sorcerers will do that, but yes, for large rituals people would be needed.”

She looked at me but I just stared at the wall, too shocked to speak. Thoughts milled around in my head like a whirlwind, but then all the various loose pieces in my mind slowly began to form a full, chilling picture. “It all makes sense,” I muttered, more to myself than to Shani, but she grabbed my hand again.

“Talk me through it, Rin,” she begged. “I want to see whether you’ve reached the same conclusions.”

I rubbed my fingers over my temple, desperately trying to put everything in order to ensure I didn’t misinterpret anything. “Azerev has bound them to him, has marked them so they couldn’t drop out halfway through, couldn’t suddenly decide that it was too dangerous to continue and just sell what they had gathered already,” I began.

“Do you think it was part of their agreement? That they let him do that?”

I thought about it, then shook my head. “I doubt it. Think of them when we met them, Zash especially. Arrogant, confident, cocky even. I reckon he underestimated Azerev.” I could see it clearly in my mind as well – Zash was always so self-assured. Always in control, always knowing what to do. “He must have taken such a blow to his ego when that happened,” I said, my heart aching for him.

“But how would they know about the sacrifice part?” Shani asked. “Do you think he told them after he bound them?”

“No, that doesn’t make sense. If they knew they were going to die anyway, they would hardly have bothered to go to all that effort to get the items first.”

“Maybe they thought they could find a way out,” Shani suggested.

I dragged a hand through my hair, frustrated. “I don’t know. Maybe, but to me it seems counterproductive to give your shopping list to your hired hands and then say ‘oh, by the way, I’ll be collecting your lives as well when you deliver’. That’s the kind of thing you hold back, so they can’t plan for it.”

“So maybe they don’t know?”

I looked at her with pained eyes. “Shani, this is what they were talking about in the mountains when I overheard them. Don’t you see? ‘It’ll be them or us’, Zash said. That’s why they let us tag along. They intended for us to take their place, to be sacrificed instead of them.”