NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

Five Shadows

Five separate sets of footsteps retreating from that rooftop, spread across at least three different positions. I had clocked one when I turned into the alley, I had assumed the others were pigeons.

Pigeons don't coordinate their exits.

I kept walking with the same pace, in the same direction. The worst thing you can do when you realize you are being watched is let them know you know, the second worst thing is run.

I did neither. Instead I counted, Phaedros — Varek's man, was neutralized and bleeding quietly in my rented room. The woman in gray was Sarreth. That left three unaccounted for, and three unknowns in a single night meant the situation had moved well past coincidence into something that required a rethink.

I turned onto the harbor road and walked straight to the all-night tea house at the end of the dock.

The tea house was called Thalassa's Mouth. It was regularly visited by harbourmen and sailors and people who had nowhere better to be. I liked it, nowhere better to be described me precisely.

Axios was behind the counter. He was sixty, and had the particular quality of a man who had seen everything twice and stopped being surprised by any of it. 

He set a cup in front of me before I sat down. "You look like you've had an interesting evening," he said.

"Phaedros came."

"And?"

"He's alive, he'll need a physician in the morning and a new line of work by the end of the week." I wrapped both hands around the cup. "Who else has been asking about me, Axios. In the last month, anyone."

The old man was quiet for a moment. "Two men, about three weeks ago," he said. "Dressed well, asked if anyone matching your description had passed through. I said no."

"What crest?"

"None visible, but one of them had a ring." Axios touched his own right hand, third finger. “A serpent eating its own tail. Silver."

I set the cup down.

The Ouroboros seal, the sign of the Eidyn Church's inner order — the Ekklesia Apokryfa. 

The hidden clergy, the ones who burned texts and made scholars disappear and had been quietly erasing every copy of the Sevenfold Prophecy for thirty years.

"Three factions in one night," I said.

"Should I be concerned?" Axios asked.

"For yourself? No. For me?" I picked the cup back up. "I've been concerned for six years, I'm used to it."

Axios leaned on the counter, his voice dropped. "Kyros whatever you are walking into, and I don't want to know what it is, you are the only person in eight months who has tipped me decently and not tried to steal my good cups. I would prefer you don't get killed."

I looked at him."That is genuinely the kindest thing anyone has said to me this year," I told him.

He snorted. "That says a great deal about your year."

"It says everything about my year." I drained the cup and stood. "I'll be gone before morning. The room is paid through the month, do with it what you want. And Axios."

"What?"

"If men with Ouroboros rings come asking again. You still haven't seen me."

He picked up my empty cup and turned back to his counter.

"What man?" he said.

I didn't go back to my room, everything I owned that mattered fit inside the coat I was already wearing — the letter, my penknife, a small oilskin packet of documents in a false lining, and a map I had been annotating for three years in ink so small most people would need a glass to read it. The rest — the books, the spare clothes, the ceramic cup I'd bought in Selinon. 

I took the eastern road out of Vethara at the second harbor bell, moving through the city's outer districts while the docks were still loud enough to cover footsteps. 

By the time I cleared the city walls, I was reasonably certain I had shed four of the five shadows. The fifth — whoever they were, was either very good or gone. I decided to assume very good and kept moving.

The road to Kalephis was three weeks north by foot, two weeks by horse, ten days if I found a river barge going the right direction and the captain didn't ask questions I didn't want to answer.

I had Varek's letter, getting into Kalephis wouldn't be the problem.

Getting out was the part I hadn't fully resolved yet.

I found a barge at the Vethara river junction two hours before dawn. The captain was a woman named Thessaly — wide, weathered, suspicious of everyone on principle, which meant she was suspicious of me the same amount she was suspicious of her own cargo and no more. That was good enough.

"North to Kalephis?" she said, looking at me.

"As far as the Iphikara junction, I'll walk the rest."

"Cost you four drachma."

"Three, I'm not heavy and I don't eat much."

She looked me up and down. "Three and a half," she said. "And you sleep on deck."

"Done."

She took my coin without counting it and jerked her head toward the barge, I stepped aboard. The wood creaked under my feet.

I sat against the forward rail with my coat pulled close and Varek's letter in my hand and read it again. 

Varek had sent this letter knowing it was a death warrant, he had pressed his seal into black wax which in Kaleth Imperial tradition meant the recipient was already considered a corpse. A formality of summoning, the kind of letter you sent when you wanted a record of having given someone a chance before they died.

He thought I was already dead, he just wanted it to happen where he could watch.

I folded the letter and put it away.

From the river bank, somewhere in the reeds, something moved. A bird startled upward, wings loud in the dark. I watched the bank for a long moment.

Nothing else moved.

I leaned my head back against the rail and closed my eyes. I hadn't slept properly in six years, not since the night my kingdom burned and I learned that the world was a place that would take everything from you and then send men to collect what was left. But resting, thinking.

Moira the Plague Weaver. First of seven, the woman who had killed every man who touched her for a century, who bloomed black roses over the bodies of her suitors and was described in the texts I'd spent six years collecting as ancient, cold, and entirely beyond the reach of human connection.

Every text said the same thing: don't touch her, don't go near her. Don't look at her directly if you valued your lungs.

Every text was also written by men who had never met her.

I had one advantage none of her previous suitors had possessed. I knew what I was walking into, I had read the fragments of the pre-Pantheon texts that the Ekklesia Apokryfa hadn't managed to burn — the ones that described the Hollowed Vessel, the ancient blessing running in my bloodline like a current under still water. The blessing the Pantheon had destroyed my family for carrying.

The blessing that might, if the fragments were right, let me survive her touch.

Might, that was the word that kept me honest.

The barge moved north. Somewhere behind me, Vethara shrank into the distance and the three factions who had come for me tonight were already regrouping, recalculating, sending new messages to their masters.

Let them send messages, by the time their masters replied, I would be inside Kalephis, and Varek would be realizing, too late, that the dead man he'd summoned had arrived with his own agenda.

The vuoage sailed east, the stars shifted overhead and in the darkness of the barge's forward deck, I finally thought about what I had been keeping caged since the moment I read Varek's letter.

This was it. Six years of waiting, six years of being no one, owning nothing, running from everything. It ended now.

Because the door was open and the only thing worse than walking through it was spending another six years pretending I didn't see it.

I opened my eyes.

The river stretched ahead, and there standing on the bow of the barge about four feet away, silent as breath, was the woman in gray.

She hadn't been there a moment ago, she had just appeared now.

"You're better than I thought," I said. 

"And you are exactly what the prophecy describes," she said. She reached into her coat and held something out toward me. A small, flat object wrapped in dark cloth.

"Sarreth didn't send me to warn you off," she said quietly. "That was a test, to see if you'd run."

"And since I didn't?"

"Since you didn't," she said, "my actual orders begin now."

She pressed the wrapped object into my hand. "Don't open that until you're inside Kalephis," she said. "And Nekros — whatever Varek has told you this marriage will be." She paused.

"It's going to be something else entirely."