weariness and something it took me a moment of puzzled scrutiny to recognise, it being so unexpected. Hate. He hates this thing.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“The battle with the Wohten. It had been foreseen. The warrior on the white horse, the warrior you warned him against. Your brother was supposed to die. It was why we hadn’t acted against him before, allowing his strength to grow, allowing him to build his alliances. He was useful in that, bringing the Stahlhast together, uniting us. So we let him live, assured in his eventual demise, despite the danger he posed.”
He trailed off into a thin sigh, the hate on his face subsiding into shame. “The arrogance of power is a terrible thing. It blinds you, succours the illusion of control, but there is no controlling this.” He flicked a hand at the stone. “As there is now no controlling your brother. Tell me, what do you imagine he will do when he is named Mestra-Skeltir?”
“Fulfil the divine mission ordained by the Unseen centuries ago. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Ah, yes. The great march to the Golden Sea. You called me a liar, and you were right. It is the role of priests to lie, and our divine mission is perhaps the greatest of lies. Long ago, when the danger posed by this thing was first realised, our forebears faced a quandary. How to bind a fierce and very pragmatic warrior people to something they could never see? A god whose word they could never hear? With lies, of course, lies that promised everything. One day the great lord of the Stahlhast will arise and lead us to claim the southlands for our own, so that all might know the blessings of the Unseen. And it worked. The mere promise of a divine leader and a glorious future sufficed to keep the Skelds in bondage to the Sepulchre for more than a thousand years. But it was a promise never to be fulfilled, until your brother made it real.”
He fixed me with a glare then, hard with judgemental accusation. “You must have known what he would be, or at least suspected. He will soon unleash an ocean of blood, much of it our own. All because you stood in the way of destiny. Why?”
Once again I was tempted to leave, simply walk away and deafen myself to his questions. What right did he have to demand answers? This bitter old man. But I didn’t leave. Liar though he was, I had heard enough truth in his words to keep me standing there, facing his judgement.
“Love,” I said. “I saved him because I love him.”
“Then you are as much his victim as we will be. He has no love for you, for anyone. It is beyond him. Power.” He nodded at the stone and I felt the hornet’s nest pulse for a second, as if sensing his enmity. “The power that rests in this. That is all he wants. Power we have long sought to contain, for that is the true mission of the Stahlhast. Fierce we were and we became fiercer still, spurred on by generations of priests, for we knew that to secure this thing would require strength, cruelty even. Countless slaves have died to make us great, all to ensure no other hand can lay claim to this.”
“The stone is the source of the Divine Blood,” I said, a disorientating ache of incomprehension building in my head. Furthermore, a deep, painful nausea was growing in my belly. It occurred to me that the old man intended to inflict harm upon me after all, that he possessed a gift capable of inflicting illness. But the suspicion was banished by another pulse of power from the stone and I knew he wasn’t making me sick. It was.
“We dug it from the earth generations gone,” I went on, voice thick with rising pain. “Through this has come the guidance of the Unseen . . .”
“Guidance?” His laugh was loud and full of mockery, abruptly silencing my rote recital of dogma. “The Unseen offer no guidance, child. They didn’t choose us as the agents of their ascension. They do not bless us any more than a herdsman blesses the beasts he leads to the slaughter pen.”
“Liar!” I rasped as the pain in my gut redoubled, causing me to stagger. Varij and Eresa came swiftly to my side, she catching me before I could fall. Varij must have possessed some instinctive understanding of the source