The Blood God System

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 opened in the wood from the top hinge to midway down and the young woman in the corner made a small sound and Corren took one step backward and the Blood Sage said my name once, quietly, and then the front door came open.

The man who walked through it was not large. That was the first thing I noticed and I noticed it because large was what I had prepared for. What entered instead was average in every measurement. Average height, average build, plain dark travelling clothes, hands visible and empty at his sides. And the only thing about him that was not average was what happened to the room when he entered it.

A weight. A pressure that settled over everything the way pressure settles before weather that has already decided where it is going.

His eyes found me immediately and did not move to anyone else in the room.

"Draven Kane," he said, and it came out conversational, the way you say a name you have been reading about and are now matching to a face. "You look considerably better than expected for a man who was dead this morning."

"Give it time," I said.

He smiled at that, a real one, not performed, and came at me without any further conversation.

He was fast. Faster than Corren associate had been, faster than most Crimson Knights I had sparred with in the years before everything ended, and the first exchange went badly for me. He was inside my guard before Hollow Fang had fully answered, two short precise impacts to my ribs with the edge of his palm that were not punches but something trained and specific, and I felt one of those ribs decide it had opinions about the situation.

I backed into a shelf. Something glass fell and shattered. The Blood Sage made a sound of quiet displeasure from her chair.

He pressed and I let him come, reading his weight, reading the angle of his next step, and when he reached for my collar I drove Hollow Fang into his forearm, bone points connecting, drawing, and he pulled back fast and efficient before the contact could hold. A thread of warmth, small, not enough to matter, but enough to confirm he was not empty.

He looked at the marks on his forearm. Then at my hand as the bone points receded. Then at me.

"There it is," he said, and he sounded satisfied in a way that had nothing casual about it. "He wanted to see it working. Now he has."

"Who," I said.

The operative rolled his sleeve down over the wound with no particular urgency.

"He also wanted me to tell you something," he said, the way someone reads from a list, item two of several. "He says thank you for accepting."

The room went completely quiet.

"The contract," I said.

"The contract," he confirmed. And he turned and walked back toward the door he had come through, unhurried, not checking behind him, and at the threshold he stopped without turning around.

"He is not your enemy, Draven Kane," he said. "He is your architect. There is a difference. You will understand it eventually."

He stepped through the door and was gone and the split in the wood was the only evidence he had been there at all.

I stood in the middle of the Blood Sage ruined shelf and looked at the back of my right hand. Between my knuckles, where nothing had been before, a small geometric mark sat in the skin like something had been pressed from the inside and left its shape there. I looked at it for a long time. Then I looked at the Blood Sage.

She was looking at it too.

[UNKNOWN SIGIL - DORSAL RIGHT HAND]

"This was not placed from outside."

"It was written through the contract you signed."

"He has partial access."

"You accepted without reading everything."

[Origin: SHIKAKIRO] [Function: UNKNOWN]

"Find out what it does before he uses it."

"You knew there was a clause," I said without turning around.

"I suspected," the Blood Sage said. "The system is very old. Old things are rarely simple."

"What does it do."

"I do not know. But someone outside Voldimore might." She paused. "We leave before morning."

I looked at the mark on my hand and then at the window and the city beyond it. The city that had executed me. The city that had left me in the dirt. The city that Shikakiro had apparently been moving pieces inside of for long enough that his operative could walk into a Blood Sage house in the back quarter and walk back out without breaking a sweat.

"Before morning," I said.