Ravenmarked (The Taurin Chronicles) (53 page)
Amy Rose Davis is an independent fantasy author. She lives with her husband, Bryce, and their four beautiful children in Oregon. She likes coffee, chocolate, bean burritos, margaritas, whiskey, dogs, cats, the color green, new pencils, her girlfriends, and the music of Celtic Thunder, Third Day, and Alison Krauss. She is as likely to watch
300
as
Becoming Jane
.
Ravenmarked
is Amy’s first novel. Amy’s novellas,
Silver Thaw
and
Servant of Dreams
, are both available in e-bookstores everywhere.
Connect with Amy online:
Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/amyjrosedavis
Summer
Niko stood with goblet in hand examining the illuminated script of an ancient book on Lord Darrick’s desk. He swirled the water.
A lord who reads ancient scripture but puts men to work in his mines and gives them whores for entertainment… A dichotomy indeed.
He pulled his purple church robes tighter around him. Even the summers were cold to his southern blood.
The sooner I solve this, the sooner I can be rid of it.
The door opened and Niko turned. Lord Darrick entered with a polite nod. “You must be Niko.”
“Bishop Niko, yes,” Niko said. He would not have people assuming he was still a lowly brother, worthy only of being called by his first name, now that he’d been raised to the purple. He set down his goblet, folded his hands, and bowed. “Lord Darrick. My superiors say you have some trouble they believe I might be able to help you with.”
“I do.” He gestured to a seat and then sat down behind his own desk. He poured wine from a carafe and leaned back in his chair. “What do you know of the legend of the Syree?”
Niko frowned as he sat down across from Darrick. “I know they are supposed to be daughters of pagan gods of sky and sea—that the Shigani say they resulted when the sky and sea mated. They live on the seas and lure men to the depths with their haunting songs.” He shrugged. “A foolish legend of a pagan people.”
Darrick nodded, slow. His hazel eyes examined Niko with a cautious edge. “A foolish legend. Hmm.”
Niko covered his frown with his goblet and sipped. Darrick was a friend of the king—a close friend, one who had helped the king’s cause twenty years before and who then had earned great wealth for the crown and himself by mining silver and farming the vale. Easily the most powerful lord in the realm, Darrick was still, even in his late forties, unmarried and without an heir. Niko wondered if he planned to live forever.
As wily as this one is, he might manage it.
“Do you have reason to believe it isn’t a legend, Lord Darrick?”
Darrick stood. “Come with me.”
Niko rose and followed Darrick from the room. The tall, slender lord of the north walked with the confidence of a man who knew his skill with a blade.
They call this one the Scourge of the North,
Niko reminded himself. Darrick’s conquest of the vale and the mountain was the stuff of legend. After the king vanquished his own enemies, he gifted Darrick with the lands of the north, and Darrick took all men who swore fealty to him away from the king’s court and cut a swath of destruction northward. He conquered minor lords and made them choose between the gallows or fealty to him. He gained the allegiance of peasants who killed their overlords in his name. Darrick soon had a firm grip on everything from the western taiga to the eastern border of the country, from the mountains in the north to the edge of the king’s forest in the south, and the vast holdings had made him richer than even the king.
Darrick led Niko across the estate to a stone prison keep where a guard stepped aside for them and another guard escorted them down steps into a dungeon. “Have I offended you, Lord Darrick?” Niko asked, only half joking.
Darrick grinned, his teeth flashing in dim torchlight. “No, of course not, bishop. I want you to meet someone.”
“A criminal?”
“Once. Now just one of my men. Or he was before the madness overtook him. We keep him here because… Well, you’ll see.”
They at last stopped at a thick oak door, and the guard opened it for Darrick and Niko. Niko followed Darrick in and blinked to let his eyes adjust to the even dimmer light of the cell. A ragged, crusty shell of a man looked up from beneath a shaggy head of white hair. “Job, it’s Darrick. I brought someone who needs to talk to you.”
Job blinked pale blue eyes from where he sat against the far wall of the cell. His knees were pulled up tight against his chest. The cell was as clean as could be expected, with fresh rushes on the floor, but Niko still held a kerchief up to his nose. The chamber pot hadn’t been emptied yet for the day, and Job’s clothes were tattered and soiled.
Job snorted a laugh. “Talk. Talking won’t solve anything. The music is coming down the mountain whether you want it or not. She’s coming. She’ll take you all and make you hers.” Job put his face down on his arms. “She’ll take you all. She wants your praises.” His voice rasped. “She’ll be a god.”
Niko’s blood chilled. He crouched low. “There are no gods but the One God of the church.”
“God, demon—call her what you will. She’ll take you.”
“Who?”
Job looked up again. For a moment, sanity returned to his eyes. “The Syree.”
Niko shook his head. “The Syree is a myth.”
“No, truth. She glows. Golden, with fire. Men reach for her and scream when she takes them.” A smile edged in ecstasy crawled across his mouth. “They die smiling. Bleeding and shrieking and crunching and smiling.”
Niko straightened. “Yet you lived.”
Darrick tapped Niko’s shoulder, and they backed toward the door. “This man is the only one left from a contingent I sent up the mountain in the early spring. I sent my captain of the guard, Yeshu, a Shigani, and two dozen of my best soldiers with wagons and supplies to restock the mining settlement on the mountain. No one came back. When this one wandered back down the mountain babbling this story, I sent another man up to the base camp. He went just a bit beyond and found Yeshu’s body, and he said he heard strange voices in the wind. He came back down at a full run. Killed the horse he was riding.”
Niko nodded. Job had begun a slow, self-comforting sway against the wall of the cell. “This man… He was with the group that went up in the spring?” Niko asked.
“Yes. There was an avalanche. It buried the whole mining settlement. When Job is lucid, he talks about how the sound of the avalanche cut off the sound of the Syree. He ran to escape. When he’s not lucid, he screams and rants and begs her to free him.” Darrick paused. “We caught him on a good day.”
Niko frowned. “Your Shigani escaped the avalanche? How?”
“We don’t know. It looked like he was trying to get down the mountain when he died. Stabbed himself, we think.” He paused. “He had a woman here—a serving girl named Lara. She’s expecting his child any day now. She wants to know why he would have killed himself when he was so looking forward to their child’s birth.”
Niko held the kerchief back up to his nose. “Not his wife?”
“The Shigani don’t marry. Yeshu told me that when he first asked for her. She knew he wouldn’t marry her, and she consented to be his concubine.”
Pagans. Beastly practices.
Niko sniffed. “I would speak with the one who found Yeshu.”