Then the figure turned.
Rafe gasped and paddled the boat back from the shore. It had been the movement of something that ived—something that stood on this lonely stretch of shore by choice.
Even as he stared, the figure slowly lifted one hand and beckoned to him. Rafe could only stare. The thing raised its arm higher and made a gesture that was broader but still stiff, as though the creature in the billowing cloak was very old or very weak. There was no question that it was gesturing at him.
“What do you want?” Rafe called. “If you value your life, don’t you meddle with me! I’ll break your pate for a laugh!”
The figure only beckoned to him again. Rafe’s curiosity began to get the better of him. He plied his oar deftly and shot closer. As his boat bobbed beneath him, he examined this apparition, or at least what little he could see of it. The stranger wore a dark, hooded robe, ragged on the edges, which covered his face, and his hands appeared to be bandaged in old, dirty bits of linen so that no skin showed. Again, a shiver of dislike passed through Rafe. The boom of the surf died down for a moment, and he could finally hear the stranger’s voice, or at least a rasp of loud breathing. It was a disturbing sound, but it proved that the creature was no ghost.
“What do you want of me?” he asked again.
Rafe could only see the faint gleam of the stranger’s eyes as he pointed to Rafe’s boat, then slowly extended his bandaged hand toward the castle in the middle of the bay. The meaning was quite clear.
“You want me… to take you there?” He laughed and hoped it sounded braver to the stranger than it did to him. “Are you joking, man? Why should I take you across the water? If you are a spy for the southerners, you can’t be a very good one, with your bandages and your gloomy looks—like something out of a Kerneia parade!”
The man only pointed again.
“I asked you why? Why should I?”
The hooded stranger lowered his hand. After a moment he began to fumble with the knot of his robe. Rafe decided he did not want to see what was under this creature’s cloak and began to back-paddle his boat to put a little more distance between them, but the specter was having trouble getting the robe untied. Rafe stopped and floated, paddle dripping in the air. What was this absurd creature doing?
The stranger finally succeeded in opening the knot of his cloth belt, but instead of stripping off the cloak he only pulled something out of the knot and held it up in the thin but growing dawn light, pushing it in Rafe’s direction as if to hand it to him across the distance. Rafe could only stare. It was a gold piece as big as a bull squid’s eye.
“You’re saying you want to give me that,” he said at last. Even to his own ears, he sounded a bit breathless. “To take you over to the castle. Over there.” He pointed. The cloaked figure did not nod or say anything, but thrust the coin toward him again. “Very well then, if you say so. But, remember—I have a knife!” He reached down and lifted his fish-gutter. “So don’t try anything or you’ll regret it.”
It took no little time to get the stranger into the boat. The man was crippled or at least he moved that way, with limbs that seemed stiff and brittle as icicles, but Rafe managed to get him seated on the bench at last and then took the gold. The man’s bandaged hands were filthy, but the coin itself was shiny, real, and very beautiful. Payment made, the stranger promptly lowered his chin to his chest so that his hood covered his head completely, and then seemed to sleep.
Rafe paddled hard, trying to get back before the sun rose too high above the hills. He would have to find a place to let off this rich madman, then hurry home. Of course, even if his father found out and gave him a whipping, Rafe didn’t much care—he was rich himself now. He could buy Ena not only a necklace but also the grandest dress the lagoon had ever seen, with more shells on it than there were stars in the night sky.
It was strange how the hours crawled past when your freedom had been taken. Qinnitan was realizing that she had been some sort of prisoner for much of her life, first in the Hive, although they had treated her kindly, then in the Seclusion. Finally, after one brief, heady taste of freedom in Hierosol, she had been recaptured by the monster Daikonas Vo. She had then managed to escape even him, but it seemed the gods themselves did not want her to be free, so here she sat, despite all her efforts, bravery, and sacrifice, the doomed prisoner of the world’s most dangerous madman.
She shifted, trying to find a less painful position. With her arms tied behind her back, there was no such thing as comfortable. Around her, the High Priest’s lackeys came and went, paying no more attention to Qinnitan in her cage than if she was a piece of furniture or the remains of a meal.
No, she thought, like a sacrificial animal. The knowledge of her suffering was far less important to them than her place in the upcoming ritual.
But what upcoming ritual? What did the autarch plan for her and for poor Olin, the northern king? She had listened carefully to every word uttered in her vicinity, especially by that bloated old monster Panhyssir, but she still had no real idea what the autarch planned.
Despite her determination to say nothing, she couldn’t help letting out a moan of despair as the priests’ potion began to act. Oh, sweet honey of Nushash, here it came again—that horrible burning crackle running from her head to her tail, like a bolt of slow lightning. In her memory the stuff Panyhyssir called “Sun’s Blood” had become only another indignity of her time in the Seclusion, but now she was forced to experience again how truly vile it made her feel, the terrible thoughts it put into her head. She could feel her mouth force itself open in a silent scream, feel her fingers curling and cramping until she could no longer keep her tattered robe wrapped around her. Qinnitan perceived herself crumpling to the floor as if she observed it from a great distance, then she watched the world turn sideways and disappear into the blackness of her closed lids.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
It was the slow throb of her own blood, the hot red river that, thanks to the priests’ potions, now mimicked the god’s own holy ichor. She could feel it moving sluggishly through her body, filling her as melted silver might fill an intricate mold, until everything that was Qinnitan-shaped had grown turgid and trembling, poured full of the deadly, exalted Sun’s Blood.
And now something in the darkness became aware of her. It did not rise up so much as it uncloaked itself, and that cloak was the darkness in which the thing lived, just as a great whalefish lived in water or a monstrous thunderstorm lived in the sky. It was too big to live—it didn’t make sense!—but at the same time she felt she understood it, almost was it.…
But the more Qinnitan felt of its monstrous, cold interest, the more terrified she became. It drew nearer, and its very presence made her ripple and spread like an oil stain—any closer and she would surely come apart! But it did come closer, and suddenly Qinnitan understood that the god-thing wanted something from her—something she had not felt before. Always, she had sensed its predatory interest as just that, as something hunting, with herself as the hapless prey, trussed and left to the mercies of this merciless thing. Now, she realized with a quite different sort of horror that it didn’t want to devour her, not in any ordinary sense. This impossible thing wanted to use her, to inhabit her so that it could cross the void and return to the land of the waking and the living.