The Blood God System

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 I

had heard it correctly, that the voice inside my chest had said what I thought it had said and I had

not filled in the gap with the name I feared most simply because I was looking for something to

point at.

Twenty minutes of trees and cold morning air and Corren saying nothing and the Blood Sage saying

nothing 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 the

way 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 I

could 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 I

watched her and she put one hand against the nearest trunk and kept it there and in the eleven years

I would eventually spend knowing her I never saw her do that again.

When she turned her white eyes were on me directly.

"How well did you know her," she said.

"She was our clan healer," I said. "She had access to everything. Every household, every elder,

every conversation that happened when someone was sick enough to need her there."A healer. I said it out loud and heard what it meant for the first time.

A healer has access to everything because nobody watches what a healer does. Nobody questions

why she is present. Nobody locks the room when she arrives because the room is the point of her

arriving.

"How long have you known," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"I did not know," she said. "I suspected a name. Not hers. I was wrong about the name and right

about everything else."

"Tell me everything else," I said.

She looked at Corren. He had stopped three paces back and was watching both of us with the

expression of a man who has learned that the correct posture in moments like this is absolute

stillness.

"He stays," I said. "He has already heard enough to get himself killed. More will not change that."

Corren looked like he had opinions about this framing but kept them to himself.

The Blood Sage walked to a tree that had fallen and sat on it and put her hands in her lap and began.

"The evidence that convicted you was not gathered," she said. "It was built. Someone spent months

constructing a record of events that did not happen. Witness accounts, physical evidence,

documents with your seal on them." She paused. "That kind of construction requires two things.

Time inside the Kalu Clan private records, and access to your personal seal."

"Maren had both," I said.

"A healer would," she said. "And she would have had them without raising any questions at any

point during the process because there is no suspicious version of a healer being present in private

spaces."

I sat down on the fallen tree beside her because my legs had decided this was the moment.

"She brought it to Elara," I said."She brought it to Elara," she confirmed. "She did not sell the clan to Shikakiro directly. She is not

that kind of instrument. She is the kind of instrument that builds the mechanism and places it in the

hands of someone who will use it without understanding what they are holding."

The forest was very quiet.

"Elara did not know," I said.

It came out flat. Not a question and not a conclusion. Something between them.

"Elara believed every piece of what she was given," the Blood Sage said carefully. "Whether that

makes her innocent or simply useful depends on questions I cannot answer and you probably should

not answer yet."

I thought about the white dress. The folded hands. The hazel gold eyes watching me across the

execution ground with nothing behind them.

Nothing behind them.

I had read that as coldness. As the face of someone who had decided and was comfortable with the

decision. But there was another version of that face. The face of someone who believed completely

in what they had been told and had organised their feelings around it so thoroughly that there was

nothing left to show.

Elara had not betrayed me.

She had been handed a weapon and pointed at me by someone who knew exactly where to aim her.

I stood up.

"Where is Maren now," I said.

"She has been operating inside Voldimore since the execution," the Blood Sage said. "Close to

Elara network. Close enough to monitor what happens, to manage the information Elara receives, to

ensure that nothing reaches her that would cause her to question what she was told." She met my

eyes. "She was at the execution, Draven. She was in the crowd."

I had seen her there.I had seen her and thought nothing of it because she was Kalu and the Kalu were my people and it

had not occurred to me that the crowd included the one who had built the stage.

Corren made a sound.

Not words. Just a sound that meant he had connected something.

"What," I said.

He looked uncomfortable in the specific way people look when they have information they did not

plan to volunteer.

"There is a woman," he said slowly. "Who has visited Lady Elara household four times in the past

two months. I did not know who she was. I assumed she was a contact. Someone Elara was using."

He stopped. "She had a healer bag."

The three of us sat with that.

"She is still managing Elara," I said. "Elara thinks she is a contact. Maren is making sure Elara stays

pointed in the right direction."

"Yes," the Blood Sage said.

"Which means Elara does not know what I am," I said. "Not really. She knows the executed man

came back. She knows he killed five hunters. But everything else she believes about what I am and

what the system is and what Shikakiro wants, she believes because Maren has been curating it."

The Blood Sage was very still.

"If Elara knew the truth," I said, "she would not be a weapon pointed at me anymore."

"Draven…"

"She would be a problem for Maren," I said. "And a problem for Shikakiro. And possibly someone

who knows things about the past two months of Maren movements that I do not know and cannot

get any other way."

The Blood Sage looked at me for a long time.

"You want to go back to Voldimore," she said."I want to go back to Voldimore," I said.

"What about Solen."

"Solen can tell me about the sigil. Elara can tell me about Maren. The sigil is a problem I can

manage for now. Maren is a problem that is getting more embedded in Elara network every day I

spend walking northeast through trees."

Corren raised his hand slightly, an almost comical gesture in the middle of a forest, like a man in a

meeting who is not sure he should be speaking.

"What," I said.

"The tracker," he said. "From the fight. They were riding back toward Voldimore."

"I know," I said. "To report to Elara."

"Yes," he said. "Except."

He stopped.

"Except what," I said.

"The route they took when they turned around," he said. "I was watching from the trees. The route

back to the palace district goes west. They went south first."

The forest went very quiet in a particular way.

"There is nothing south of that position except the lower merchant quarter," the Blood Sage said,

and her voice had changed.

"And the address Maren has been operating from," Corren said. "Which I know because I delivered

a message there once and did not know what it meant at the time."

I looked at the Blood Sage.

She looked at me.

"The tracker reported to Maren first," I said.

"Yes," the Blood Sage said."Which means Maren knows what happened in that forest."

"Yes."

"And Elara does not."

The Blood Sage did not answer because the answer was already in the air between us.

Maren knew. Elara was still operating on the version of Draven Kane that Maren had given her.

And somewhere in the lower merchant quarter of Voldimore, a woman who had watched me grow

up and healed my cuts and attended forty-one funerals that she had arranged was sitting with a

ledger account of five hunters and deciding what to do about the fact that I was still alive and

moving and considerably more than she had planned for.

I started walking.

Back the way we had come.

South.

[Corruption: 7 / 10]

[Clan Frequency: Moderate — dropping]

"You are going back to the city that killed you."

"With seven out of ten corruption."

"And a sigil you do not understand."

"And a target who has been three steps ahead of everyone in this story since before it

started."

"Good."

"This is the version of you I have been waiting for."

I read the last line twice.

The system had pushed me and pressured me and warned me and told me not to engage and told me

to move and told me to feed and told me to hold the line.

This was the first time it had sounded like it was looking forward to something.

That should have concerned me more than it did.Behind me the Blood Sage and Corren were following without being asked and the trees were

thinning ahead and Voldimore was south and Maren was south and the answer to the question that

had sat under everything since I had woken face down in the dirt was south.

Not who betrayed me.

I had always known someone had.

The question that actually mattered was whether the person who had been handed a weapon and

pointed at me had known what they were holding.

Whether Elara had looked at the frame Maren built and chosen to believe it.

Or whether she had simply believed.

The difference between those two things was the difference between an enemy and something

considerably more complicated, and I had been walking away from the answer for eight chapters of

my own survival.

No more.

I walked south and the morning opened up around me and somewhere ahead Voldimore was

waking up to a day that did not yet know I was coming back to it.