Blood of War (6 page)

His surroundings passed by in a blur as the weight of what Andrus said pressed down on him. Perhaps Kurin had been wrong. Andrus, as he had said, had spent every day with Jurel for months. He had most definitely delved Jurel's mind more in the first week than Kurin had during all their time together traveling.

Did Kurin's opinion count? Kurin was, after all, biased; he had been, by his own admission, searching for the God of War for decades. It had been his life's mission. He would certainly have pounced on any likely candidate to prove he had not wasted those years. Andrus, on the other hand, was a more objective observer. Upon meeting Jurel, he had neither inclination nor disinclination to believe that Jurel was the God of War. He simply had his observations to work with and apparently the conclusion to his observations was that Jurel was a pretender, or an unwitting puppet.

But Jurel knew he had spoken to Gaorla. His father. The God of gods. Gaorla had confirmed that Jurel was the God of War.

Upon further reflection, Jurel thought of something that shook him to his core: every time he had spoken to Gaorla, and even that once he had spoken to Valsa, he had been asleep. Had those meetings been simply the products of an overactive imagination? Could he have dreamed it all? A most disturbing idea came to him then: could those dreams have been planted?

Arriving back at his room, he slammed the door and threw himself on his bed. The sun was low; his room pooled with shadows, edged by ruddy light that did little to alleviate the gloom which suited him just fine. As he lay there, staring into the night that was coalescing on his ceiling, the questions clamored:

Who was he? How could he know? What should he do?

Chapter 5

The three men sat across the table from each other in Goromand's office, silent, each staring into his brandy with furrowed brows like fortune tellers. Between them, on the table, lay a scatter of parchment, some of the pages yellowed with age, with curled edges, and with ink in various stages of decay from somewhat legible to barely visible, while others were crisp, clean, new sheets, a little worse for wear, but with bold black letters.

The old pages, some of them predating the founding of Threimes were from their own archives, four levels below their chairs, some containing the words of prophecy, some containing obscure lore, all of it having to do, one way or another, with the young man Kurin had brought to them this past spring. The others: missives hastily scribbled by one or another of their agents that were spread to the four corners of the kingdom, and comprised the eyes and ears of the Salosian Order. Though some of these were months old, a few were from the last week, and two had arrived that very day.

The network of spies was a good one as such things go, with agents in almost every village and town, almost every noble court, and almost every level of the kingdom's military hierarchy—not including the Soldiers of God; it had been tried on several occasions but it had so far proven impossible to hide an agent from the prelacy—but still information arrived too slowly. Oh there were brothers and sisters who wandered and, versed in arcanum, could Send and Scry, ensuring that the information they had garnered arrived promptly at Goromand's door, but too many of their agents were lay-folk, trusted commoners with no understanding—or in a few cases, knowledge—of arcanum, and that information often took weeks to arrive. Most disturbing when the information was of vital importance.

Such was the case with the missive that, though seemingly just another sheet in the pile, had arrived that morning. It was why they were staring silently into their brandies. Just as the Salosians had an information network in place, so too did the king and the Grand Prelate. Agents from the three camps had butted heads often; several bodies had been found with slit throat in back alleys in the last few months. Getting information sometimes seemed a miracle; getting
this
information, well, it was a toss-up between miraculous and disastrous.

It would seem, according to the writer, that the Soldiers of God had begun to muster. The garrisons at Sharong, Riverfang, and Oceanview were on the march. The Threimes garrison had already been recalled and, joined by a few outskirt detachments, had begun to overflow. There was an encampment outside the city walls to hold the new arrivals. All told, there seemed to be upwards of fifteen thousand Soldiers of God in or around the kingdom's capital with ten or fifteen thousand more expected to converge on the city within weeks. But that missive had been en route for weeks. Who knew what the prelacy had been up to since? And that did not include the Grayson garrison. The latest estimate from there, of somewhere between four and six thousand, may or may not have been accurate; that missive had arrived two months before.

The king had also called a general muster of his forces and no one knew what his intentions were. At the time of the writing, his own garrisons had filled to capacity with some thirty thousand men. Also not including Grayson where estimates ranged from three thousand to five times that number—not a particularly useful guess.

Not one of their agents had yet determined exactly why armies were mustering throughout the kingdom, but to the three sitting at that table, the reason seemed abundantly clear: the Soldiers of God were a hammer; the king's forces, the anvil; and the Salosians? They were the hapless bit of metal on the forge.

The Salosian forces, led by their swordmasters, numbered somewhere around three thousand and though recruits continued to filter in, it was a slow process. Their best case scenario, drawn up by the entirely thorough little Brother Garvus was that if the Soldiers of God and the kingdom military remained stationary until the end of the year, the Salosians might be able to muster as many as four thousand troops. “Three thousand eight hundred ninety-three by autumn at the current rate of increase,” Garvus had reported, priggishly referring to the clipboard he carried with him everywhere. That was
if
everything stayed status quo. Plenty of reason, then, for three senior members of the Salosian Order to be sitting around a cluttered table silently brooding, silently drinking.

“And how is our young charge?” Goromand asked, interrupting the solemn crackle of the small fire that did little to alleviate the gloom of the austere meeting room.

Startled by the sudden sound, Jorge nearly dropped his cup, muttering a curse under his breath as brandy sloshed on his robe.

Kurin sighed. “He's still having problems. Before Jurel so unceremoniously relieved him of his duties,” Kurin smirked wryly, “Andrus was working with him daily, but he still can't conjure so much as a lick of flame, let alone come close to what he achieved at the temple last spring.”

“I don't understand,” Jorge said. “Explain again what happened.”

Kurin's eyes rolled as he let out another sigh, this one much more theatric. “Haven't you heard it enough?”

“No.”

The even glare that Jorge shot at him made him swallow the sharper words that came to his tongue.

“As you well know-” a pointed look which was resoundingly ignored “-when we were at the temple, we met Calen. A smug, insufferable fool if there ever was one. Jurel's adopted father, Daved, said some things which did not go over well with the fat bastard and he was executed-”

“Murdered,” Gormand said quietly.

“Same outcome. Fine, murdered then, on the spot. When that happened, Jurel snapped. His divinity flowed forth and a massacre the likes of which I have never before witnessed ensued.”

His eyes darkened, turned inward at the memory of young Jurel, the God of War, suddenly displaying his power in such a spectacular fashion. He told his two friends again, haltingly, the tale of Jurel's rampage through the temple at Threimes, destroying any that stood in his way. Rivers of blood had flowed that day.

He described how, being faced by a dozen and more priests who threw arcane fire at him, Jurel had stridden through the inferno, unscathed by the blazing balls that would have liquefied any other, to cut down most of the priests with a sword he had conjured that had seemed to be made of lightning.

Then came the escape from the temple and from the city. The night that followed had been long indeed for Kurin; he had been ill and near death from his confinement in the dungeons under the temple. Mikal and Gaven had taken turns to support him lest he collapse to the road, where, he was certain, he never would have risen.

Jurel had gotten them through it all and a long way toward the Abbey and safety before he had fallen unconscious from his exertions. At least Kurin thought it was only his exertions that had caused his collapse.

When he had awakened, days later, there was no trace of the power that had held him in its grip. There had not been since.

“I don't understand fully either,” Kurin said after an uncomfortable silence. He pushed away the terrible memories and looked across to the man he had considered a brother for so many years. “It's there. It's most definitely there. I felt it at Threimes. It was more—much more—than simple arcanum. It was...a feeling. A presence. Something. I can't explain it. But there seems to be some sort of mental block barring him from fully coming into his own.”

“He needs to get past it,” Goromand muttered.

“Thank you, O wise Abbot, for that epiphany,” Kurin replied, his lips twisting sardonically. “Yes, he needs to get past it, but to do so, he must discover what is causing it. Until then, I fear there is nothing to be done.”

“We need him,” Jorge said. “The storm is coming gentlemen, and we need him to be whole. If not...” He took in his two friends, Goromand, the Abbot of the Salosian Order, nominally the master of them all, and Kurin, newly raised to Chaplain, and the man he considered a brother.

They nodded glumly, exchanging dire looks.

Kurin downed the rest of his brandy as the rest of Jorge's unspoken thought was completed in his mind.

There might be upwards of sixty thousand troops massing at Threimes. Though they did not know what the king intended, there were still thirty thousand Soldiers of God. Their target: the heretical Salosian Order, and the Salosian Order might,
might
, be able to muster four thousand men.

Without Jurel, without the God of War, they would be utterly annihilated.

* * *

Bees hummed, flitting from flower to flower, homing in like darts to the center of colorful bull's-eyes to collect their bounty. Birds trilled their tunes of joy and freedom as if they gloated at those bound to the ground, and squirrels skittered and scampered. The arbor was a quiet spot filled with life, gentle and serene. It was the perfect place to think. And more importantly, it was the perfect place to be alone, to get away from the constant bowing and groveling.

He would have thought that becoming a God would have prepared him to deal with the masses of priests that always jolted in surprise when they saw him, always dropped to their knees and lay their foreheads to the stone floors in what they imagined was a fine show of humility. At first, the discomfort had been laughable and he had tittered nervously as he told them to stand up. But as days wore on and his story spread like a wildfire in dry brush through the Abbey, and everyone treated him like fine porcelain, he grew annoyed, then angry. What was worse: no matter how many times he demanded they stop—“A simple hello will be fine,” he had sighed more often than he could remember—they did not listen. They were supposed to listen, right? They believed he was a God, right? They were supposed to follow his commands. Some they did with humble subservience, and most they did not. With humble subservience.

It was enough to drive a man crazy.

It was a comfort then that they had not yet found this spot. He was well hidden with his back to a tree in the overgrown arbor that had not seen another human in who knew how long. It was a minor vengeance that whenever he slipped away, he drove them all mad in their desperate searches for him. Sometimes he could hear them calling to each other,
“Have you seen him?” “No. I don't know where he is.”
but it was distant, on the other side of the wall that bordered the
grove, and each time, he smiled.

When he was not in bed, when Gaven bade him good-bye and bustled off to his duties, or Mikal told him his lessons were over for the day (and as his martial abilities grew, those lessons had become less about learning and more about practicing), he came here. It was his spot, his solace.

He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. It had been a bad day. First, he had upset Goromand. He had refused to allow Andrus to return. The man had wanted him to reconsider; Andrus was difficult, Goromand said, but he knew what he was doing—Jurel decided on the spur of the moment, without knowing exactly why, to hold back what he had overheard in the little used corridor the day before. He then insisted that Jurel pray, to beseech Gaorla for forgiveness for whatever sin had blocked him from his power. He had told the man to do anatomically incorrect things with himself, and possibly with various species of livestock, before storming away.

On top of it all, he could not get images of Daved from his mind. Some days he could get through from waking to sleeping without thinking of him, but the previous night, he had dreamed of his father and the dream had stuck with him, haunted him until he was afraid the memory of the man he had called father for so long would crack his already brittle mind.

It was not supposed to be this way. He was supposed to be tending cattle or checking crops beside Daved, laughing at one of Galbin's jests. He should have wooed, and possibly married Erin, had children, had a life. Instead, he was so far from that home, that life, it seemed a decade had passed, a century, and not just a few months. A million miles instead of a thousand.

“Hello, my boy.”

The familiar voice jolted him. He spun around in his seat. Kurin stood a few feet from him, hip deep in the overgrown bushes, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes.

“How did-?” he asked and the old man chuckled.