THE HEIR OF THE FORGOTTEN GOD

CHAPTER 6:What Aldric Knows

The market was loud and smelled of fish.

Not river fish — salted fish, the barrels of it that came down from the northern coast on trading carts, sharp and pervasive enough to cut through the cold. It mixed with woodsmoke and animal dung and the yeasty warmth coming off a bread stall near the crossing, and the combination was the particular smell of a working town on market day, which was to say alive and slightly unpleasant and completely indifferent to the problems of anyone passing through it.

Aldric moved through the crowd with the ease of someone accustomed to using people as cover. Cassian stayed close. His heel had gone from a warm ache to a specific burning throb with every step, and the market's cobblestones were uneven enough that he was favouring it slightly without meaning to.

"There," Aldric said.

The cobbler's stall was wedged between a seed merchant and a woman selling clay pots, a narrow setup with boots hanging from a horizontal pole and an old man behind the table who looked at feet the way some people looked at horses — professionally, without sentiment. He examined Cassian's left boot for approximately four seconds before naming a price that was two-thirds of Cassian's total remaining coins.

He paid it without negotiating, because the alternative was worse, and sat on the stall's wooden step while the cobbler worked on the heel with a speed that suggested he'd done this specific repair several hundred times. Aldric stood nearby looking at the crowd with the relaxed attention of someone who was watching for things but didn't want that to be obvious.

"The text I mentioned," Aldric said, keeping his voice under the market noise. "It was in the possession of a historian in Dunvaris. The one the Conclave was erasing when I had the misfortune of being in the vicinity." He didn't look at Cassian while he spoke. Eyes on the crowd. "I pulled three books out of his house before they finished with it. Didn't know what I had at the time. Read them later because I had nothing better to do."

"What were they?"

"Two were histories of the Divine Reckoning. Pre-Church histories, written before the official version became the only permitted version. The third was something else — older, written in a script I could only partially read, but it had illustrations." He paused while a woman with a cart pushed between them. "Diagrams, more accurately. Of bloodline markers. Physical signs that appeared in the descendants of divine bloodlines when a dormant inheritance activated."

The cobbler finished the heel and handed the boot back. Cassian put it on. Better. Immediately, noticeably better, and he took a moment just to be grateful for that.

"The mark on my hand," Cassian said.

"Matched one of the diagrams almost exactly. The branching pattern, the way it follows the lifeline before splitting." Aldric finally looked at him. "It was labeled in that older script. I could only read part of it. But the word I could make out — the one that appeared next to that specific diagram — translates roughly as *first.*"

Cassian sat with that for a moment. Around them the market moved and shouted and haggled, completely unaware.

"First as in the first seal," he said.

"That's my assumption." Aldric looked back at the crowd. "The pre-Church histories refer to a divine power that was divided and sealed after the Reckoning. They're vague about the details — whoever wrote them was being careful, or working from incomplete information. But the consistent thread across both texts is that the sealing wasn't done to contain something dangerous." He stopped. Seemed to weigh something. "It was done to hide something valuable. Something the victors of the Divine War didn't want anyone else accessing."

Cassian stood up from the step. His heel held. "Valuable to who?"

"That's the question, isn't it." Aldric turned from the crowd and looked at him directly. In the daylight, fully, he looked less like a man who'd been rough and more like a man who'd been something specific before the roughness — there was a precision to the way he carried himself, even now, that didn't come from stable work or road travel. "The Church's official position is that the Forgotten God was a corrupting force that the Seven contained for the good of humanity. The pre-Church texts suggest the opposite. That he was the only one of the divine powers who refused to participate in what the Seven were planning."

"Planning what?"

"The texts don't say. Or they do and I couldn't read it." Frustration moved briefly across his face. "The third book — the oldest one — had the relevant sections. And the script was beyond me."

They moved away from the cobbler's stall, deeper into the market, putting more bodies between themselves and the road south. Cassian was processing, filing, the way he'd always done with information — quietly, methodically, building the shape of a thing before he tried to name it.

"You said you left Dunvaris because of the Conclave," he said. "Three years ago. Why were you there in the first place?"

A short pause. "Does it matter?"

"You know more about my situation than I do. Seems fair."

Aldric was quiet for long enough that Cassian thought he wasn't going to answer. They passed the bread stall and the yeasty warmth of it was briefly overwhelming after the cold.

"I was King's Guard for six years," Aldric said finally. "Good years, mostly. Then there was an incident. A convoy escort that went wrong — three men under my command died because of a decision I made. The inquiry found the decision defensible. I didn't." He said it with the flatness of someone who had worked very hard to remove the feeling from the fact without fully succeeding. "I resigned. Spent the following year doing things I'm not proud of, trying to find something that felt worth doing. Ended up in Dunvaris chasing a rumor about pre-Church artifacts that a contact said were worth serious money."

"Were they?"

"The contact was wrong about the money. Right about the artifacts." He glanced at Cassian sideways. "I'm not a good man in the way that phrase usually gets used. But I'm a precise one. I don't do things without reason and I don't help people without reason."

"So why are you helping me?"

They stopped at the edge of the market where a low wall overlooked the river crossing. The water was shallow here, iron-grey with cold, moving fast over pale stones.

"Because the Conclave killed that historian," Aldric said. "An old man who'd spent his life reading books. They burned his house and everything in it and the official record says he died of a fever." Something in his voice had gone very quiet and very deliberate. "I've been waiting three years for a reason to put that particular debt somewhere useful." He looked at the river. "You've got a mark on your hand that the Conclave is willing to deploy agents over within hours of it appearing. That seems like a useful place."

Cassian looked at the river too. It ran on regardless, over its pale stones, going wherever rivers went.

"I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I don't know what the seal means or what comes after it or whether there's anyone left alive who can tell me."

"There might be." Aldric reached into his coat and produced something small — a folded piece of paper, old, the creases deep and soft with handling. He held it out. "There's a name in one of those books. A place, actually. An archive in the Ashen Reach, run by a scholar who collects exactly the kind of pre-Church history that gets people killed. If the books I pulled from Dunvaris are right, she's been gathering this material for thirty years." He paused. "If anyone knows what that mark means and what comes after it, it's her."

Cassian took the paper and unfolded it carefully. A name — Vessel of the Seventh Record, Ashenveil — written in Aldric's hand, copied from something older.

"The Ashen Reach is three weeks north," Cassian said.

"On foot and avoiding main roads. Yes."

"With the Conclave behind us."

"Also yes."

Cassian folded the paper and put it inside his jacket, against his chest, next to the pulse that hadn't stopped since the night before last. He thought about the estate. The flagstone floor, cold through his trousers. Lord Drost's controlled, quiet cruelty. Three years of learning how to be invisible. He thought about Maren, who had read his face fast and accurately and hadn't asked him to explain.

He thought about a voice saying *you are the last* in a language older than language.

"Three weeks," he said.

"Give or take." Aldric pushed off the wall. "We should move. Market will thin out by midday and two men standing at the river becomes more visible." He looked at Cassian with something that wasn't quite assessment and wasn't quite respect but was somewhere between the two. "Can you keep pace?"

Cassian thought about the heel. About fourteen copper coins, now reduced to five. About everything he didn't know and the very short list of things he did.

"Yes," he said.

Aldric nodded once and turned north. Cassian followed, the paper pressed against his ribs, the mark on his palm catching the cold morning light as his fist swung at his side.

Behind them, somewhere on the road south, the Conclave was moving.

Ahead of them, three weeks away through unfamiliar country, someone might have answers.

He had been a servant four days ago. He kept needing to remind himself of that, because it seemed important not to forget where this had started — what he'd been, what he'd had, how little that turned out to mean when the floor started glowing.

He kept pace with Aldric. His heel held. The river fell away behind them, and the town with it, and then it was just road and frost and the particular silence of two men moving fast through open country with reasons to keep going.