Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,118

order.”

She has godblood, the spirit caged in his bones murmured. She could survive our games for a long while, my sweet. She might even enjoy them. Remember, she is something of a sister to me.

Inah couldn’t hear her, of course.

“I can take care of myself,” she said.

Fool Wolf grated out a harsh chuckle. “You still don’t understand? If I ever unleash her again, the only thing you can do is run.”

Yes, why not? A chase is always fun.

“I do understand,” she replied. “I would have escaped her—the river was right there. In the river, even she couldn’t harm me. Not using your body.”

“That might have worked,” he admitted. “But then she would have just turned on random people.”

Never random. I have my tastes, as well you know.

“So?” said Inah.

Good girl.

“Then you really don’t understand,” he replied, summoning his will to push Chugaachik down, away, to silence her if for only a little while.

He managed it, but realized he’d missed something Inah was saying.

“What?” he asked.

“I said, will you still feel this way when they take us to be executed?”

“We’ll see,” Fool Wolf replied. “We’ll see how I feel then.”

She was silent for a moment, then laughed lightly.

“You love me, don’t you? That’s why you keep her in.”

“Darken your mouth,” he said. “You don’t even know what that means.”

Men came for them sometime later, young men with pale, almost blue skin, dressed in brown sarongs and shirts batiked with turtles, snakes, and scorpions.

“This would be a good time,” Inah pointed out, in her native tongue. “There are only eight of them.”

He didn’t answer.

Presently, they were brought into the light and hustled into an enormous cedar house roofed in greenish slate. A narrow entrance hall brought them into a large room with high benches rising in tiers on three sides. Seated on the benches were men—he didn’t have time to count them, but there were more than twenty. They were of the same unfortunate paleness as the guards who had escorted them there, and they were all quite young—some looked no older than sixteen. They wore quilted coats that left their arms free, and all were armed, variously, with swords or spears. Some had shields resting against their knees.

One fellow sat alone, directly before them, in a chair with armrests. While the others wore their hair long, in complicated braids, his head was shorn.

He looked down at them for a moment, then spoke, in a language similar enough to that of Nah that Fool Wolf understood it.

“I am Hesqel, the Voice. What is your business in QashQul, other than petty thievery?”

“We have no other business here,” Fool Wolf replied. “We were only trying to procure enough food to be on our way. We would be happy to provide some service for what we took—”

“Your crime isn’t theft,” Hesqel replied. “Your crime is in coming here. Didn’t the Urled tribes tell you this valley is forbidden?”

Fool Wolf decided it was probably best not to point out that the Urled tribes had chased Inah and him into the valley, following another disagreement over property.

“They neglected to tell us that,” he said.

“Well. Normally this would be a clear case, and you would be executed, but at the moment we have need of an outlander, someone unhampered by the curse. And so your offer of service is accepted.”

This isn’t going to be good, Fool Wolf thought.

“Curse?” he asked.

Hesqel’s tone changed a bit, became a bit more like singing.

“In the ancient times, our people were lost in these mountains, starving and freezing. Then we came to this valley and found it fertile. But the gods here were wild, having never known men before. Many sacrifices were made, but all ignored. The goddess in the uplands, Qul, and Qash—the god of the river and its lands—were bitter enemies, and neither would allow the smaller gods to deal with our ancestors. But at last a sacrifice was found that appeased Qash, and through it gave him the power to subjugate Qul, and they became one—QashQul. We—those of us in this room—descend from him, and thus share his need for the same sacrifice that won him to sustain us.”

This could be very, very bad, Fool Wolf thought.

“So the curse is your need for this…sacrifice?”

Hesqel blinked and looked as if the question didn’t make any sense. Low laughter rippled through the benches.

“No,” Hesqel said, now speaking as if to a child. “We are the Sons of Qash, the Undefiled. The sacrifice is part of our nature and is our honor to