Vash quickly did what he was told, although he had to struggle not to groan out loud at the pain in his joints. It was mad that he should be here in the wilds of this uncivilized land, exposed to the gods alone knew what kind of chills and harmful vapors. He should be back in Xis overseeing the kingdom, dispensing wise justice from the Falcon Throne in the autarch’s absence, as befitted his age and years of service… “I live only to serve you, Golden One,” he said when he was on his feet at last.
“Of course you do.” Sulepis, dressed in his full battle armor, looked up and down the beach at the waiting soldiers—several thousand fighting men and nearly an equal number of their supporters, with at least that many more remaining on the ships until they reached Olin’s Southmarch. Vash knew that the northerners could not even comprehend the autarch’s power, the size of his empire, let alone withstand it: the Golden One could easily summon an army ten times bigger than this if he needed it, while still leaving Hierosol under strong siege and his home in Xis impregnably guarded.
The autarch himself knew all this, of course: he had the expansive, grinning face of a man who watched something dear to his heart finally taking shape. “And where is Olin?” he called. “Ah, there. We agreed you would travel with me, so come sit at my feet. This is your country—I am sure there are many local features and quaint customs you can describe for me.”
Olin looked sourly up at Sulepis atop the litter. “Yes, we have many quaint customs here. Speaking of such, may I walk? I find the long weeks on the ship have left me in want of exercise.”
“By all means, but you will have to speak loudly so I can hear you from up here—a metaphor of sorts, eh? A caution against becoming too removed from one’s subjects!” Sulepis laughed, a high-pitched giggle that made some of his bearers tremble, so that the litter actually rocked a little. Vash’s heart climbed into his mouth. The autarch seemed to grow wilder and less predictable by the hour.
The drums thundered and the horns blew. The great army began to move out, armor gleaming in the afternoon sun so that the flashing wave caps seemed to have rolled across the beach and over the land for as far as the eye could see. Vash waited with Olin and his guards, Panhyssir and the other priests, and dozens of other courtiers and functionaries, all doing their best to crowd into the shadow of the autarch’s raised litter.
“I don’t believe I finished talking with you about the fairies,” said the autarch as they reached the coast road and the ranks of men and animals turned and began to travel southwest toward Southmarch. “We were speaking of your unusual family heritage, Olin, weren’t we?”
The northerner was breathing heavily after only a short climb up from the beach, and his face had gone from deathly pale to an angry red flush. He did not answer.
“So, then,” Sulepis said. “The fairies—or the Pariki, as we call them in Xand—were driven out of most of our lands long ago, even the high mountaintops and deep jungles in the south. But when they had roamed our lands in the earliest days the fairy-people had sometimes coupled with the gods themselves. Sometimes fairies coupled with mortals as well, and sometimes those couplings made children. So even long after the gods were gone and the fairies driven out, the heavenly blood survived in certain mortal families, unseen and unsensed sometimes for many generations. But the blood of the gods is a strong, strong thing, and it will always make itself known again.
“In my studies I learned that your northern Pariki, the Qar, had never been completely driven out, and in fact still held much of the northern-most part of the continent. More important, though, I learned that they had shared blood with one of the royal families of Eion, and that what was even more interesting was that the Qar who had done so also claimed direct descent from the god Habbili… the one you call Kupilas, I believe? Yes, Kupilas the Artificer. You can imagine my interest at learning there were mortals living in the north with the blood of Habbili himself flowing in their veins. You know the family I mean, Olin—don’tyou?”
The northerner bunched his hands into fists. “Does it amuse you to mock the curse of the Eddons? The grim trick the gods played on us?”
“Ah, but my dear Olin, that is where you are wrong!” chortled the autarch. Vash had never seen the god-king in such a strange mood, like a perverse child. “It is no curse at all, but the greatest gift imaginable!”
“Still you mock me!” Just the tone of Olin’s voice made the autarch’s Leopards loosen their daggers in their sheaths. Vash was very glad to see they weren’t planning to use muskets in such close quarters. The loudness of guns made him nervous, and he had once seen an undervizier’s head blown off in an accident when the Leopards were trooping. “You have me prisoner, Sulepis—is that not enough? Must you taunt me, too? Just kill me and have done with it.”
Vash had grown used to the way the autarch treated Olin as an amusement, how he took abuse and resistance from the northern king which would have had one of his own subjects tortured to death ages ago, but he was still surprised at the mildness of Sulepis’ reaction.
“It is a gift, Olin, even if you do not know it.”
“This gift, as you call it, likely killed my wife in childbirth. It made me throw my own infant son down a stairway, crippling him for life, and forced me many nights each year to hide myself away from my own family for fear I would hurt them again. In its grip I have even howled at the moon like your Xixian hyena-men! And that same curse that crawls through my veins, and in the veins of my children as well—and if the gods continue to hate us, will someday crawl like a poison through my grandchildren too—now grows stronger in me again with every hour as you drag me back to my home. Gods, it is like a fire inside me! I might have been Ludis Drakava’s captive as well, but at least in Hierosol I was free of it, may heaven curse you! Free of it! Now I can feel it again, burning in my heart and my limbs and my mind!”
It was all Vash could do not to turn and run away. How could anyone speak to the Living God on Earth like that and survive? But again, the autarch seemed barely to hear what Olin had said.
“Of course you can feel it,” Sulepis said. “That does not make it a curse. Your blood feels the call of destiny! You have the ichor of a god inside you but you have always tried to be nothing but an ordinary man, Olin Eddon. I, on the other hand, am not such a fool.”
“What does that mean?”the northern king demanded. “You said there is no such curse in your family, that your ancestors and you are no different than other men.”
“No different in blood, that is true. But there is a way in which I am nothing like any other man, Olin. I can see what none of the rest of you can see. And here is what I saw—your family’s blood gave you a way to bargain with the gods, but you didn’t understand that. You have never used this power… but I will.”
“What nonsense is this? You said yourself you do not have the blood.”
“Neither will you after it has leaked out of you on Midsummer’s Night,” the autarch said, grinning. “But it will help give me power over the gods themselves—in fact, your blood will make me into a god!”
King Olin fell silent then, his footsteps slowing until one of his guards had to take his elbow to make him move faster. The autarch, on the other hand, appeared to be enjoying the conversation: his long-boned face was lively and his eyes flashed like the golden plating on his costly battle armor. Earlier that year Vash had almost lost his head when he had been forced to tell the autarch they could not make his armor suit entirely from gold, that such weight would cripple even a god-king. He had learned then what was now becoming obvious to Olin—you could not reason with Sulepis the Golden One, you could only pray each morning that he would spare you for one more day.