Videssians reverenced Phos. They prayed to the good god. They all believed Phos would triumph in the end, that he would confine Skotos to the eternal ice, and that good would reign in the world. Rhavas, again taught from childhood, had always believed the same thing. He'd believed it without thought, as anyone would believe a childhood lesson.
Now, rather than simply believing it, he thought about it. What was the evidence? "Phos' holy scriptures, of course," he said out loud, as if someone—perhaps his horse—had denied it.
That was all very well . . . until you measured the holy scriptures against what you saw in the world. Sin was as rampant as it had ever been—probably more so. Civil war consumed the Empire of Videssos. The Khamorth were loose inside the Empire. They wandered where they pleased and did what they would. Magic and prayer had proved powerless to stop them.
"And Phos turns a deaf ear to my petitions. Not one of them does he hear," Rhavas told the steppe pony. "Or it could be that he hears, but has not the power to respond. Yet I can curse, and when I do, the curse strikes home."
He remembered Toxaras' body lying in the snow. He remembered the ground shaking under his feet and the walls of Skopentzana falling to the ground. He remembered plainsmen tumbling from their horses, plainsmen falling dead in the forest. And he remembered Ingegerd crumpling to the farmhouse floor, Ingegerd whom he'd . . . loved? Ingegerd whom he'd given most excellent good reason to hate him. Ingegerd who'd done her best to kill him.
No, ride where he would, he couldn't get away from what he'd done. He took it with him, everywhere and always. The memories would never go away. What they meant, to him, to the Empire, and to the wider world . . . he was still working on that. He suspected he would be for a long time, if, in a world gone mad, he had a long time left to work on it.
Meanwhile, he rode south and west. As long as he was out in the open, he feared little. For better or for worse—for better and for worse—his curses would protect him from the barbarians as long as he saw them before they came into bowshot. Only when the track went through forest did he worry. There assailants could strike from ambush before he knew they were near.
But he came through safe whenever he passed through such places. Little by little, he decided the Khamorth did not haunt them. The nomads were plainsmen; forests had to seem strange and crowded and dangerous to them. Rhavas started to relax when he went through woods. A second, slower, realization made him wary again. The Khamorth might not prowl forests, but there were bound to be Videssian brigands on the loose as well, and tall trees and deep shadows would not bother them at all.
He camped for the night in the lee of a stone fence, the best shelter he could find. If he did not make a fire, he might draw wolves; if he did, he might draw men. Deciding men were more dangerous, he let darkness cloak him. Only after nightfall did he think of himself as under the dominion of Skotos' realm.
He ate smoked meat and coarsely ground flour moistened with snow that melted in his mouth. Ingegerd was the one who'd thought to plunder the Khamorth ponies' saddlebags. She'd taught him any number of things—a good many of which, perhaps, he would have been better off not learning.
"It's done," he said. The sound of his own voice startled him. But for arguments with himself, he'd spoken little since setting from the farmhouse where Ingegerd still lay. But he repeated, "It's done," and then added, "It can't be changed now. Nothing can be changed now. I go on from here."
Wrapping himself in all the clothes and blankets he had, he lay down in the snow. But for the horses close by, it might have been Skotos' helclass="underline" a dark and frozen wasteland. If he froze to death here, would the world to come seem much different? Or would something like this be all there was, now and forever?
His shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was almost afraid to fall asleep, for fear he might not wake.
But wake he did. He started to praise Phos for letting him come through the long, cold night. However familiar the words were, they stuck in his throat. They might have been frozen there. What had the good god done for him, for Skopentzana, for Videssos? Nothing he could see. No, the disarray around him had to be Skotos' work.
Should I praise the dark god, then? he wondered. He shied away from the thought, as one of the steppe ponies might have shied from a scorpion. But once the notion lodged in his mind, it refused to leave.
After a breakfast like his supper, he rode away. Again, he would sooner have left behind the idea of praising Skotos. Again, he carried it with him whether he wanted to or not. If I do come down to Videssos the city, how much will I be fleeing by then?
But what choice did he have? If he didn't try to go on to the capital, what was he to do? The only other thing that occurred to him was to throw himself off a cliff. Then he would be free of the world, and the world would be free of him.
He shook his head. He had too much pride for that—too much pride, and too much fear of what would happen if he faced the Bridge of the Separator with all his recent sins still freshly seared on his soul. No, the only thing for him to do was to go on.
And by the time he got to Videssos the city, he might have a thing or two—or maybe more than a thing or two—to say to the proud and clever theologians who never thought to stick their noses outside the walls of the imperial capital. They had seen the world from one perspective—had seen it that way, in fact, for hundreds of years. He had a different viewpoint, one he thought held more truth.
They would not want to hear him. He was sure of that. Those arrogant little manikins were so sure they had all the answers. But if he showed them the truth, if he rubbed their noses in the truth, how could they deny it? They'd known he was a master theologian when they shipped him off to Skopentzana. He'd needed no seasoning in that, only in his knowledge of how to administer a temple. Well, he had that knowledge now, and more besides.
"Yes, and more besides," he told the steppe pony he rode. The pony paid no attention to him. But the priests and prelates in Videssos the city would. They would have to. Even the ecumenical patriarch would have to. Oh, yes. Even he.
Two days later, Rhavas rode into the town of Kybistra. He'd cursed one band of Khamorth raiders who tried to attack him. He'd done it man by man. When the first nomad tumbled from the saddle, the rest must have thought he'd had a seizure, or something of the sort. They'd kept coming. Losing a second man hadn't halted them, either. But when the third died as soon as Rhavas aimed a forefinger at him, the rest wheeled their horses and galloped away faster than they'd come after him. He'd felled a fourth man as they fled, more for the sport of it than for any other reason, and let the others make good their escape.
Kybistra was larger than Tzamandos. Here in the provinces, it counted for a city, though it was hardly more than an anthill when set beside the capital. Guards on the brown stone walls called a challenge to Rhavas as he rode up: anyone on a steppe pony made them nervous. But he was only one man, and he answered them in Videssian distinguished from their own only by the accents of Videssos the city—he didn't sound as if he'd been raised in the back of beyond. The gate crew swung the valves wide, then closed them again after he rode into the town.
One of the men from that crew gave him directions to an inn; after his unpleasant time in Tzamandos, he didn't want to lodge with another priest in a temple. The place wasn't far. In Videssos the city, it would have had some branches from a grape vine hung above the door. Here, a sign painter had daubed a bunch of purple grapes on a board. No vines grew anywhere close to Kybistra; winters here were far too savage, summers far too short.