On his daily patrol of the city, Malden started finding the carcasses of animals lying before the Godstone. He knew better than to forbid it-even though the city desperately needed the meat. The common people of Ness, it seemed, would rather starve than risk the eternal punishment of their god. The looming altar had been ritually desecrated back when the Burgraves decided to outlaw the priesthood of Sadu, but it seemed the stone had been rededicated to the Bloodgod. For the first time in centuries it was being used for its original purpose.
The old religion had never died. It had slept for a while, but now was waking up again, and bringing with it all the old madness. Sadu called out for blood, and the people were afraid enough to answer that demand.
He went to Cutbill to ask for advice. “This morning,” Malden said, when he was seated comfortably by the ex-guildmaster’s fire, “a deputation came to me. Five men who said they wished to be ordained as priests of the Bloodgod.”
“Interesting. They think you have the power to bless them now?”
Malden raised his hands in bafflement. “They treated me like a prophet, with much deference. And it’s not as if anyone else has that right. There hasn’t been a true priest of Sadu in how long? A century?”
“Longer than that,” Cutbill told him. “Royal decree outlawed that priesthood three hundred years ago, and the Burgrave of Ness reinforced the ban a few dozen years later. And for good reason.”
Malden nodded. The priests of Sadu had once performed human sacrifices to appease their god. Some of them had not been above kidnapping and murder to make sure of a steady flow of blood-since volunteers had always been hard to come by. It had not been unheard of for one of Sadu’s priests to work as an assassin, taking money from clients and blood from victims. That was the priesthood Prestwicke tried to revive. The men who had come to Malden wanted a slightly more orthodox office to be set up, but still, they wanted the right to sacrifice animals and even humans at the Godstone. “I made them swear they wouldn’t kill anyone. But that wasn’t what they were really after. They said they would need some kind of official position in order to convince the people they truly were agents of the Bloodgod.”
“Official position? So they wanted more than just your blessing. They wanted to be part of your government.”
“They wanted me to put them in charge of distributing foodstuffs.”
“Ah. So they wanted to be the ones to eat first.”
“Everyone’s hungry. I told them as much-that I couldn’t afford preferential treatment for any of my citizens. They seemed offended. I told them I thought the whole point of Sadu-the only reason the poor still worship Him-was that every man was equal in His sight. That we all had to die and be judged, and that no social station made a man less blameworthy than his neighbor. That made them leave in a huff. But they warned me as they went. With or without my sanction, the priesthood will be renewed. And the sacrifices will start again.”
“You can hardly complain about their faith now,” Cutbill told him without sympathy. “Since it was that belief that raised you to the heights of fame in the first place.”
The former guildmaster had a point, of course. Yet it was enough to make Malden wish he’d forced the priest of the Lady to stay in Ness. The Book of the Lady forbade blood sacrifice in no uncertain terms. The laws of Skrae were founded on that book and the practice had been eliminated everywhere in the kingdom. Yet now those laws were ignored-statutes decreed by a dead king, issued from a fortress far away, impossible now to enforce. Malden knew that in the absence of such laws it was just a matter of time before he found one of his citizens at the base of the Godstone, throat slit in just the right manner. The priest of the Lady might at least have preached to the people about why human sacrifice was wrong. Now it felt as if no one remained who held that particular view-no one except himself.
If he was going to fight religion, he decided, he would need help from the occult. As soon as his duties allowed it, he headed down to the Isle of Horses. Coruth had promised him all kinds of assistance, but since the siege began, the witch hadn’t so much as showed herself in the city. He borrowed a boat at the Ditchside Stair in Eastpool (the Lord Mayor didn’t have to pay a security deposit) and rowed himself over to the forbidding island just as the sun hit the top of the wall.
Climbing up onto the withered grass on the isle’s shore, he braced himself for another attack by phantom horses. It didn’t come. There was a light burning in Coruth’s shack but no one approached him or welcomed him. He started walking slowly toward the door, expecting some nasty surprise, when he heard a shriek from within.
It sounded like Cythera. He broke into a run.
Coruth met him at the door. She shoved it open with one skeletal hand and beckoned him to follow her. “You’re late,” she said, as if they’d had an appointment.
Malden had no time to wonder what she meant. He was too busy being horrified. Cythera lay on a pallet in the front room, naked save for a sheet that covered only one leg. It looked like she’d thrown it off her in the convulsions of some terrifying dream. Her skin was pale and clammy and slick with some foul-smelling unguent. Her eyes were wide-open, but when she blinked he saw that arcane symbols had been painted on her eyelids.
“The Guardian of the Gate!” she screamed. “He sees right through me! He judges me!”
Malden was about to demand what was going on, then stopped himself. He knew. This was Cythera’s initiation. The ceremony that would transform her into a witch. He knew there were rules about such things-ironclad laws that no man dared break. If he spoke at the wrong time, the consequences could be dire.
Coruth stared at him with one bloodshot eye. The old witch looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. Normally she stood tall and erect, but now she was as stooped and grotesque as-well, as a witch in an old woodblock illustration. Had she sprouted a wart on her nose and clutched a broom, she might have been a caricature of her profession.
“Here,” she said, and shoved a dagger at him. He took it, for the same reason he’d kept silent so far. The weapon was a thin-bladed knife wholly without ornament, and seemed unfit for ceremonial purposes. Its point looked very sharp.
“What do I do with it?” Malden asked.
“Put the point here,” Coruth said, tapping a point just left of Cythera’s sternum. “If I give you the signal, drive it straight into her heart.”
“I can’t do that,” Malden said. “Not-Not to her.”
“Worried about losing your swiving partner?” Coruth said, and her mouth curled into a wicked smile. “All good things should come to an end, boy. Only true evil is eternal. It’s got no bottom.”
Malden didn’t know what to make of that. “My love for her is true.”
“Every boy in the history of fucking has said as much. And they were all honest, at least at the moment they said it. You think I don’t understand love? You think I never had a leman? I had to give all that up to become a witch, and I did it, because Skrae needed me. Cythera will make the same sacrifice, because the times require it.”
“Surely there’s another way-she could renounce magic and-”
“Stop your blathering, boy. Time is tight. Put the point where I showed you.”
“I can’t kill her!”
“Unless she’s a bigger fool than I think, you won’t have to,” Coruth told him. “Now do as you’re told! Much more than you know depends on it.”
Malden bit his lips for a moment, but in the end he did as he was asked. He made sure to touch the point so lightly to Cythera’s skin that she would barely feel it.
Not that she was likely to feel much. Her eyes were unfocused and her pupils changed size rapidly as he watched. Cythera was looking at things invisible, perhaps things very, very far away.