Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,119

perform. If we fail to keep the ritual, we wither with time and Qash himself will starve. The curse lies in the schism. QashQul was broken again with the aid of the sorceress Ruwhere. Qul reclaimed her ancient domain, and no descendant of Qash may step there.” He leaned forward. “Our curse is that our sacred sword rests in Qul’s domain. And it is also to her realm that Ruwhere has taken our rightful sacrifices.”

“Ah,” Fool Wolf said, relieved. “And you want me—”

“You will recover our sword,” Hesqel said.

That seemed straightforward enough.

He didn’t believe it.

“I’ll be glad to help,” he replied.

And like that, he was free, dressed in quilted armor and armed with a short, double-edged sword. He was smiling as he left the walls of QashQul behind him. His step felt light, the future replete with possibility. Of course, they’d kept Inah to ensure he would return, which only proved they didn’t know him very well. Oh, he might come back for her, one way or another—he was, after all, fond of her. But given her own powers—which the QashQulites seemed blissfully unaware of—she would probably find her own escape. The point was, he had choices.

The trail went by a clear pool, where he bathed and dallied, watching dragonflies dance in the warm sun. A bit after noon he dressed and—after some hesitation—continued to follow the directions he’d been given. He might as well see what the situation was. Perhaps the sorceress could be bargained with, if she seemed dangerous. Of course, he didn’t have much to negotiate with…

It’s best this way, just you and me, Chugaachik said.

“Best if it was just me,” he said.

You know better than that by now, sweet thing. Don’t you?

Fool Wolf slowed his step. Yes, a sorceress powerful enough to split a god in half bore talking to.

“This god they’re talking about,” he mused. “I’m curious. Let’s have a look at him, under the lake.”

Deep in his mansion of bone, she stirred. His skin felt like flint, his teeth like knives. He smelled blood all around him, practically tasted it.

Then he sank beneath the lake, what his people called the upper skin of the world that most people never saw beyond. The trees and mountains faded to shadow, and the light bled through them. The gods appeared.

He’d seen his first god when he was thirteen. It had been the god of a white juniper tree, a minor spirit, and yet the sight of it had driven him into madness and fever that nearly killed him, for Human Beings were not meant to look directly at gods. Only a few, born to be shamans, could see unmanifested spirits—and unless they became shamans by taking a helping spirit into themselves, they went mad.

His father found him such a spirit, believing her to be that of a lion goddess.

He’d been wrong.

But now, with Chugaachik to open his eyes, he could see beneath the lake and not lose his mind. Usually.

He distinguished the little gods first, those that belonged to things—trees, stones, the pool he had bathed in. Like most gods, their forms were not set; they played at many shapes. He wondered at how few they were; there should have been hundreds, but instead he saw only dozens, and all appeared somehow ill.

Qash was everywhere; he was a god of land, of place. Beneath the lake, these usually had no form either.

But Qash did. He appeared as an obscene, naked older version of the white-skinned men who held Inah, and he sat crouched upon the land, hands shifting aimlessly as if searching for something. His eyes were mirrors of insanity and his drool dripped upward into the streams and pools of his country. Veins erupted from his flesh and went out to connect him to the little gods, to the men in the city—and one sickly yellow quivering string went off ahead, in the direction Fool Wolf was supposed to travel. He could not see where it went; something blocked him there.

Something to bargain with, he thought.

He reached, and with Chugaachik’s power he plucked at one of the strands, pulled a new one from it and tied it to a nearby grapevine.

Then he came back up through the surface of the lake. He sat down, feeling dizzy and ill but that passed after a few moments. He rose, cut the grapevine, and wove it into a small hoop about the diameter of his forearm. Then he continued on.

The ground sloped up sharply into a forest of odd,