The bullock took her diverted attention as satisfaction. He shouted up to the driver, “Get on with it!”
The driver needed no further encouragement. A snap of the lead got his ponies pulling again. The carriage swept past the blockade and away from the Boils. They were soon trundling into the broader breadth of the city.
“We made it,” Pratik said, sagging in his seat.
Rhaif frowned at him for daring to state such a hope out loud. Instead, he held his breath until the fires faded to a dim glow behind them. Only then did he finally exhale. He even allowed himself a moment of silent celebration. He again pictured his finger tipping a king atop a board and toppling it over. This had been a game he had longed to win for ages.
Finally …
He turned back to the fiery glow.
With Llyra behind him, no one could stop them from here.
* * *
FROM THE BALCONY outside of the archsheriff’s office atop Judgement Hall, Shrive Wryth watched the spread of fires near the town’s port. The distant blasts and booms had drawn him and Laach through the doors, but the sheriff had already returned inside. Laach shouted and bellowed orders. Messengers and guardsmen came and went as the sheriff coordinated with Anvil’s highmayor to respond to the flames before they spread wider.
Wryth remained outside, trying to read meaning in the swirling cinders and flaming embers. Unlike Laach, he refused to assign this conflagration to misfortune and mishap. He divined purpose behind each spiral of flame.
His hands rose to the leather bandolier—his Shriven cryst—strapped across the chest of his gray robe. His fingers ran over the sealed pockets along its length. Most of his brethren’s crysts held nothing but mawkish charms and oversentimental detritus, each pouch intended to venerate and memorialize one’s long path to the holy status of Shriven.
Not so his own cryst.
His fingertips read the symbols burned into the leather. Each of his bless’d pockets hid dark talismans and tokens of black alchymies. He carried pouches of powdered bones from ancient beasts who no longer walked under the Father Above but whose dust was rife with ancient maladies. Other pockets held phials of powerful elixirs leached from the hard creatures who survived the frozen reaches of the far west. Others hid ampoules of poisons sapped from the beasts who crawled, burrowed, and slithered across the burnt wastes of the distant east. But the most treasured of all were the scraps of ancient texts scrolled into pouches, their faded ink indecipherable but hinting at the lost alchymies of the ancients, of the darkest arts hidden before this world’s histories had been written.
Wryth cared little for the here and now, only so much as it served his ends. He sensed this world was but a shadow of another, a place of immeasurable power, and he intended to collect that power for himself. No knowledge would be forbidden to him. No brutality too harsh to acquire it.
Even now, he remembered how bronze had melted to life before his eyes, the miracle fueled by his bloodbaerne sacrifice in the caverns of Chalk. His fingers clenched into fists at what he had lost, at what he must find.
He stared again toward the fires and could guess the culprit behind it. It had to be Llyra hy March. The guildmaster of thieves had vanished with the midday bells, making excuses that seemed feeble now, burned away by the flames in the distance. She had learned something, kept it from him, even from her consort, Archsheriff Laach. Wryth thought he had fathomed the woman’s greed, but clearly he had vastly underestimated her.
A fresh commotion drew him away from the flames and back to the sheriff’s office. Wryth’s eyes narrowed upon Laach. Had he played a role in the woman’s deception? From the purple anger in the man’s face, Wryth guessed not. The bastard was also too dim-witted for such a cunning feint as this.
In the office, a steely-eyed guardsman burst into the chambers and rushed to the sheriff’s desk, breathless but intent. “Archsheriff Laach, I’ve just received word from the dungeons. A prisoner has gone missing, maybe escaped.”
Already standing behind his desk, Laach glared across to the guardsman. He pointed a stiff arm toward the balcony. “A missing prisoner? That’s what you trouble with me right now? When the city is burning?”
The guardsman blathered and hawed, plainly not sure what to say.
Again, Wryth refused to treat this bit of misfortune as insignificant. He strode from the balcony to the office, an ostentatious chamber of imported woods and rich tapestries.
“When did this prisoner escape?” Wryth asked.
The guardsman jerked straighter, having failed to note the Shrive’s presence until now. Apparently, Wryth decided sourly, much was missed in Anvil that was standing in plain sight, a heedlessness that no doubt seeped down from the very top.
Laach waved for the man to answer. “Speak up already.”
The guardsman nodded, bowed to Wryth, then nodded again. “We can’t say for sure when he went missing, Your Holiness. Late in the day, as best we can determine.”
Wryth absorbed this information. So shortly before Llyra hy March made her excuses and vanished. Another blast echoed to them from the city. “And who has gone missing?”
“It was one of the many slaves we stored in the dungeons while you finished your questioning of their masters, the Klashean traders.”
“So, one of the Chaaen?” Wryth said.
“Aye, Your Holiness. I know those Klashers won’t take to us misplacing one of their own. That’s why I rushed up here myself.”
Wryth took this into consideration. He faced the open balcony doors and returned to reading the message written in cinder and ash out there. He had to assume these two misadventures—a burning city and a vanished prisoner—were connected, all tied to that clever rogue Rhaif hy Albar.
But how? Of what use was a Chaaen to such a thief?
He closed his eyes and lifted a hand to touch a sigil burned into one pocket. A fingertip traced the curled outline of the horn’d snaken. Its pouch held the dried tongue severed from Wryth’s first blood sacrifice. He willed the tongue to speak to him with the wisdom and cunning of Lord ?reyk.
As he prayed to his dark god, a calming slowed his heart. The knot in his head—formed by tangled threads of these mysteries—loosened. New patterns came and went until finally a picture formed in his mind’s eye.
A Chaaen leading two robed and cloaked figures.
His eyes snapped open.
Of course …
He dropped his arm and swung toward Laach. “Rally your best swordsmen and archers. Saddle your swiftest horses.”
Laach straightened, glancing toward the smoke and flames. “And go where? To help with the fires?”
“No.” Wryth pointed in the opposite direction. “To Eyr Rigg.”
21
RHAIF CLUTCHED HIS livery’s seat as the carriage carted around yet another tight switchback. They were halfway up the Jagg’d Road toward the ridgeline of Eyr Rigg. From this height, the spread of Anvil glowered under a bank of soot and smoke.
Off in the distance, the Boils continued to smolder, casting occasional flames higher, as if daemons worked bellows to stoke those blazes. The firestorm continued to spread. One of the trading ships, a triple-sailed ore-trawler, was aflame, a bright torch floating on the sea.
Rhaif wondered how many had lost their lives to those fires. He wanted to blame it all on Llyra, but he could not.