The Blood God System

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 to see three steps ahead and that was all we needed.

"The old drainage channel below the east wall," she said as we moved. "Sealed officially forty years ago. Unofficially it has been useful several times since then."

"And the exit," I said. "There will be a seal."

"Yes. A blood-mark. Old sorcery, older than the current administration. It reads Kalu specifically. Your bloodline helped build this city in ways the current administration has chosen to forget." She paused. "But you should know that the sorcery is old enough that the contract will read the contact as an absorption event."

"How much corruption."

"Three points."

I thought about what five out of ten meant. About the clan voices and what happens to them at high corruption. Then I thought about the split in the Blood Sage's door.

"Show me the seal," I said.

The drainage channel was low and smelled like the underside of a city that had been standing for three hundred years, and the seal was where she said it would be, a circle of old marks pressed into the stone around the channel exit, and I felt the air change when I got near it the way air changes near things that have been carrying power for a long time.

I pressed my palm flat against the centre of it.

The marks lit up amber and something pulled through my hand going the wrong direction, out instead of in, and then the stone shifted and the channel beyond opened into dark and cold and somewhere beyond the walls of Voldimore.

[BLOOD-MARK CONTACT - KALU ORIGIN]

Corruption: 2 to 5 / 10

"Halfway to silence before you have left the city."

"Feed soon."

I pulled my hand back and looked at it and then went through without looking at the text again.

Outside was flat farmland and a treeline four hundred metres north and the moon still up and the main gate towers visible a quarter mile south. The road cut east through all of it with no cover along it worth mentioning.

"Treeline," I said. "Not the road."

"Road is faster," Corren said.

"Road has a checkpoint at the first mile marker. I ran patrol on it for two years."

He closed his mouth.

We moved north across open ground and went into the trees and the darkness under the canopy was different from stone darkness. Alive in a way that made it feel like it was paying attention.

Two hours of walking. Nobody talked. Corren stayed behind me and the Blood Sage stayed ahead and I watched her and the wound in my chest had settled into a low steady reminder that it was still there.

Forty minutes in, I thought about Elara.

Not deliberately. The way a bruise announces itself when you stop moving. She had been three weeks ahead of my resurrection. Three weeks of preparation, of sending men, of knowing what I would be when I came back. The question I had not yet asked out loud was what exactly she was afraid of, because Elara did not fear things the way other people feared things. She prepared. There was a difference, and I had learned it over nine years, and the fact that she had been preparing told me something about what I had become that I had not yet found the right words for.

I was still turning that over when the floor of the world shifted.

From inside my chest where the clan voices lived, where all forty-one of them existed as something between sound and feeling, there was a change. Not louder. Deeper. Like the floor of a room you thought you knew the dimensions of turning out to be further down than you had measured.

Something spoke from below all of them.

Not one of my forty-one. Not any voice I had ever heard. Something older and further back and it did not speak in the way the others did, not overlapping, not urgent, just one word placed carefully in the silence underneath everything else.

My name.

Not Draven. Not Kane. The name underneath both of those that my mother had used when I was four years old and that existed in no document and no conversation that any living person could have accessed.

I stopped walking.

The Blood Sage turned. I held up one hand and she went still and I listened, and the voice did not come again, and after a long moment I started walking and said nothing about what I had heard because I did not yet have a place to put it.

But I did not stop thinking about it.

Drenmoor was still an hour east and the trees closed in around us and something I did not have a name for sat in the bottom of my chest where the unknown voice had been, patient, like it had put itself there and was in no hurry to leave.