All Chapters of The Blood God System: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
10 chapters
Chapter One
The Dog They BuriedThey called my name like a curse."Draven Kane. Murderer of the Kalu Clan. Defiler of their women. Enemy of Voldimore."The elder's voice carried across the execution ground and the crowd took it in the way crowds takethings when they have already decided how to feel.Hundreds of faces. One expression.My chains were pointless and everyone knew it. Three days in a windowless room had stripped myqi and drained my blood essence until there was nothing left worth taking.What knelt in this dirt was just a body. Twenty-seven years old. Waiting.I found Elara without looking for her.Front row. White dress. Hands folded at her waist like she was attending something she hadorganised.Her hazel gold eyes were on me the way someone watches a fire they started. Present. Patient.Already thinking about something else.She wore white. Of everything she could have worn, she wore white.The elder gestured. In Voldimore the betrothed of a condemned man gets final words. Old l
Chapter Two Hollow Fang
He did not run. That was the first thing I noticed and it told me something.A man with anything left runs. This one stepped out of the dark as I closed the distance, medium height, plain cloak, short blade already drawn and held low at his side with the grip of someone who had used it professionally enough that holding it and not holding it felt the same. His face had nothing in it except flat calm. The flat calm of a man who had done this particular job many times and expected to do it again tonight."You should still be dead," he said."Walk me through where I went wrong," I said, still moving toward him.He came without answering and he was fast, faster than I had placed him at first look, the blade angling toward the wound on my chest because the wound was there and visible through my shirt and he was not the kind of man who ignored obvious targets. I had no qi, no cultivation, nothing behind my movement except nine years of muscle memory that turned me at the last moment so the
Chapter Three The Sage With No Eyes
His name was Corren. I took it from his identification seal while he walked ahead of me and kept it without mentioning it, because names are useful things and I was collecting what was useful.He led me through back streets with his injured shoulder pressed carefully against his body and his mouth shut, which was the version of him I preferred. The city was quieter at this hour but not dead. Lanterns in upper windows. Voices leaking through walls. A dog somewhere three streets over arguing with something larger than itself.I had grown up on these streets. Trained in these yards. I had walked through this particular district on patrol seventeen times and I knew which corners had rats and which had eyes. Walking through it now felt wrong in a way I did not have a clean word for. Familiar in the shape of things and wrong in everything underneath, like reading your own name in someone else's handwriting.Corren stopped at a door with no markings. No lantern outside. Nothing that said any
Chapter Four Thank You For Accepting
The door cracked before anyone knocked.One sharp impact against the wood from the outside. Not forced. Not frantic. A demonstration of what was possible. The young woman who had let us in pressed herself against the far wall without making a sound. Corren went completely still in his corner. The Blood Sage did not move at all, both hands still around her cup, white eyes fixed on the door."How many," I said."Two," she said quietly. "Though one of them counts for considerably more than that number suggests.""Can you handle them."She set her cup down."I can handle a great many things," she said. "But these two were not sent for me, and fighting what was not sent for you is a fast way to arrive at the wrong ending." She nodded toward the back of the room where a narrow door sat between two shelves. "There is an alley behind this building that runs north toward the river quarter. Go.""I am not running from a messenger," I said.The door cracked again and this time a thin split opene
Chapter Five Five Out Of Ten
Corren did not want to come and I did not give him a choice."My job was the message," he said, standing in the corner with his good shoulder pressed against the wall. "I delivered it. Whatever this is now, it is not what I signed up for.""Your job is whatever keeps you breathing," I said. "Right now that means staying close to me and being useful when I ask you to be useful. Those are simple rules."He looked at the Blood Sage for something more reasonable. She was already pulling a small travel pack from beneath a shelf and did not look up."He is correct," she said.Corren came.She led us through the back of the building and down a set of stairs I had not noticed when I entered. Stone steps worn smooth by a long time of use, ending at a door set into the base of the wall that opened onto a corridor so narrow we had to move through it one at a time. The smell was old stone and something I could not name. She produced a small glass jar from her pack that gave off just enough light
Chapter Six The Cage You Opened
Drenmoor was the kind of village that did not want to be found.Eight buildings around a well older than any of them. No walls. No gate. The sky to the east wasjust going grey when we came out of the treeline and crossed toward it, and the only movement inthe whole village was smoke from one chimney on the far side.The Blood Sage knocked at that door. Three quick raps.The woman who opened it was somewhere between forty and sixty in a way that felt disordered,like the years had not arrived in the right order.Her hair was mostly grey. Her face had good bones and tired everything else. Her hands on thedoorframe shook with the fine permanent tremor of someone whose body had been asked for morethan it had and had paid the difference in ways that did not grow back.Her eyes went to my right hand before they went to my face.She looked at the sigil between my knuckles and something moved through her expression that shepulled back before it finished arriving, and I noticed the Blood
Chapter Seven below
Below The Threshold The path behind the woodpile ran northeast through low brush and I took it fast with Corren behind me and the Blood Sage moving beside me in the grey morning light. The horse sound from the road had not multiplied yet. Just the one. That was worse in a way I did not explain to either of them, because a single rider moving fast toward a specific location was not a patrol. It was a message arriving ahead of something larger. "How much time," I said to the Blood Sage. "If that rider reports back and Elara has teams staged, an hour. Perhaps less." "Then we move and talk at the same time," I said. We moved. The brush thinned after a quarter mile into older trees, tall and close together, and the ground under them was soft enough to muffle our steps which helped. I was thinking about the sigil. More specifically I was thinking about what Vael had said and running the numbers the way I ran numbers after a fight. Every absorption since the operative had marke
Chapter Eight What She Sent
I stopped walking and held up one hand and the Blood Sage and Corren stopped behind me.Two hundred metres ahead through the trees. Five horses by the sound of it, the particular held-stillbreath of trained mounts whose riders had told them not to move. They had been waiting longenough that the animals had settled into it.That was the first thing that was wrong.A team following us out of Drenmoor would still be moving. These were stationary. They hadknown where we were going before we had left, which meant somewhere between Voldimore andthis forest there was a thread Elara had pulled that I had not found.I thought about running south.Open ground between us and Drenmoor. The rider from the road possibly still nearby. Runningsouth meant visible and exposed and splitting the problem instead of solving it.I did not run south."Stay here," I said."Draven…""Both of you. Stay here."I walked toward the horses.The trees thinned after fifty metres and I saw them and I stopped at t
Chapter Nine The Hand That Built The Frame
We walked for twenty minutes before I said it.Not because I was deciding whether to say it. Because I needed those twenty minutes to be certain Ihad heard it correctly, that the voice inside my chest had said what I thought it had said and I hadnot filled in the gap with the name I feared most simply because I was looking for something topoint at.Twenty minutes of trees and cold morning air and Corren saying nothing and the Blood Sage sayingnothing and both of my arms reminding me steadily that the fight had happened.Then I was certain."Maren," I said.The Blood Sage did not stop walking but something in the quality of her movement changed theway a sound changes when it enters a different room."Say that again," she said."Maren. The clan voice that separated from the others. She said that name clearly enough that Icould not have invented it."The Blood Sage stopped walking.She did not turn around immediately. She stood between the trees with her back to me and Iwatched he
Chapter Ten The Story She Told
We came into Voldimore through the eastern drainage channel the same way we had left it, single file, the Blood Sage's jar giving just enough light, and when we came up through the side street into the grey afternoon the first thing I saw was the flags. Black. Five of them. Hung from the eastern gate posts in the city's official mourning configuration, the kind reserved for guards and soldiers who die in service to Voldimore. I stopped walking. Not because of the flags. Because of the names written beneath them in the city's official grief script, painted on white boards and mounted at eye level so that anyone passing through the gate would read them without having to look. The names were correct. All five of them. I had not known the names of the people I had fought in that forest but I had known their faces and these names belonged to faces I could still place without trying. What was wrong was everything else. City guards. They were listed as city guards, patrol unit,