Brotherhood Saga 03: Death (82 page)

“Do we just leave our horses?” Odin asked. “Or
—”

The door opened. A stable boy stepped out.
“Hello,” the young man said, raising his copper-colored eyes and peering at the two of them through his sheen of blonde hair. “Are the two of you staying the night?”

“Two, yes,” Virgin said.

“I’ll take your horses.”

“Thank you,” Odin smiled, offering the boy two copper pieces.

After making sure the young man secured their mounts, they entered the inn and made their way to the bar—were, behind the counter, a pretty young barmaid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen offered a sweet smile and asked what they wanted.

“We
’d like a room to start,” Virgin said, reaching into his money bag to pull out ten copper pieces. “We’ll come down for dinner later in the evening.”

“We can do that,” the barmaid said, sliding the money into her palm before turning and docking the entry on a leather-bound book. “Would you gentlemen like to be summoned when dinner is
served later, or you like to come down on your own?”

“Having a warning would be nice,” Odin said. “If you could, anyway.”

“We can have John our stable hand come to your room once the food is ready.” The barmaid reached up to a rack of keys and trailed her fingers along the numbers above them before pulling a set from its place on the wall. “Here you are, gentlemen. Rest easy knowing you’re now in safe quarters.”

No kidding,
Odin thought, accepting the key as the young woman offered it.

With little more than a second glance, the two of them turned and made their way up the stairs.

Darkness greeted them soon after they settled into the room, prompting Odin to light the tip of a candle with his magicked finger. White light spooled from
the burning wick and cast the room in shadows fit for something related to the darker side—something short, closeted, and resembling something of a rat hunched over in the night.

As Virgin left the room to get the food, Odin
’s eyes strayed to the bag that had been on his companion’s shoulder for the first time in weeks.

It’s there,
his conscience whispered.

The book, his life, his progeny, his reason for existing and his sole intent toward his future—it could be called many things, but something it could not be called was a waste, as he had not discovered and stolen it without intent. It was, as many would have seemed fit to call it, a proper steal: a thing that, though dark and foreboding, had taken a great amount of determination to even
try to think about taking, let alone actually secure and walk out the door with it. That alone was enough to swell his mind with pride at the thought of pulling it out of the pack—to stroke, with his fingers, its blood-stained, leather-bound surface; to finger the gnarled, deckle-edged pages with sweat and tears and snot and likely; to look upon it with eyes that appeared to be searching for sovereignty in a land where men appeared weak and nonexistent. To read the book would have been an art unto itself, for beneath its surface and within its pages lay text that had been constructed from the finest and most practical of hands, but to actually learn and know what it was to bring the dead back to life? What all did that entail, if not sacrifice and torment of the heart, mind and soul?

Read it,
the voice said.
Learn from it.

Fingers straying, hands trembling and body shivering from the very idea of doing just that, Odin pushed the chair away from the single desk in the room, stood, then strode across the brief space between him and the pack before crouching down and fumbling for its drawstrings.

His fingers slipped.

His eyes watered.

His teeth sunk into his lower lip and would have drawn blood had he not been careful.

You can do it. Go on—open it. Open the book and know what it is to summon the dead.

“Can I?” he whispered. “Can I really?”

His voice, so small in the large room, sounded something like a child muttering in the night—when, surprisingly, the monster he had seen in his closet that his parents so vicariously said was not turned out to be true. It would first peek out from behind the doors, its clawed hands retracted and its cold nose sore, then would reach around and sink its nails into the door. They would click, of course, as if playing a drum, and then they would fumble, practically, with the doorknob, of which had not been used to push the door shut, before the door came open and the creature stepped from the shadows. It would then—very, very slowly—step forward, its arms pulled back, its elbows at its ribs, its wrists limp as though gay, and toward the bed, where it would then lean forward and whisper in a very, very soft voice,
Hello,
because true monsters, whether one liked it or not, were the ones that could speak, were the ones that could climb into your head and whisper things of joy and peace and tell you that everything would be just fine when, in truth, nothing was fine, for there was a monster in the room that would begin to eat you from the feet up before swallowing you within its gaping maw.

No longer sure what to do or expect from the very thing he
’d spent months of his life preparing to steal and read from its text, Odin leaned forward, tangled his fingers within the drawstrings, then carefully pulled them apart.

He braced himself for whatever as to come.

Half-expecting a dark energy to surge forward and strike him in the face, Odin closed his eyes and took a deep breath in preparation of being drowned in whatever sin that was to come.

He reached forward.

A bead of sweat ran down his lose. To his lips it fell and into his mouth it went.

His fingers slipped.

His digits trembled.

Beneath his fingertips lingered the
book that would change his life for the better or worst.

Go,
it whispered, its claws at his arms, its breath at his neck.

“I will,” he whispered back.

His hands curled around the book.

His elbows
locked up.

His muscles flexed and, slowly, the book began to rise from the bag.

As it came forward, revealing itself for the first time since he had stolen and stuffed it into the bag, it began to take on a malevolence all the more unreal in the face of such chilling reality. It seemed not bound in leather, blood-stained, deckle-edged or even bound in twine, and it seemed not a thing of evil that should be protected and guarded from hands they should not be in. To him, in his eyes, it seemed like nothing more than a simple book—a thing that should only be read and learned from regardless of whom or what said not to.

Can you do it?
the voice whispered, lingering ever so close to his ear.
Can you, Odin?

I can do this,
he thought.
I know I can.

Cradling the book within his arms as if it were his child, he turned, crossed the di
stance between him and the desk, then seated himself in the single chair that adorned the room.

Carefully, as to not disturb the silence that permeate
d the air, he placed the book on the desk.

Dust flew from its edges.

Odin restrained a cough.

His eyes, still adjusting to the light, dilated until things seemed normal and concise.

Outside, not a soul disturbed the world. Everyone could have been asleep, for all he knew, and Virgin could have been nothing more than an apparition—a person whom did not exist in the least, for there seemed nothing at all in this world that could take this moment from him.

Reaching forward, Odin finge
red the dented corner of the book’s upper-right edge and tried to imagine just who had been the last person to touch it.

Jarden,
he thought.
Or someone else?

Either way, it didn
’t matter—not now, not in this horrible moment.

Odin closed, then opened his eyes.

He took a deep breath.

In one single flourish, he opened the book and revealed to himself the destiny he had forged over the past eight months.

Lenna Arda,
  it said.
The Book of the Dead.

“Lenna Arda,” Odin whispered, shying away when dust floated from the pages and attempted to rise to his face.

What could such a phrase mean—something powerful, dangerous, ancient or, by God or the Gods, forbidden?

Does it matter?

Maybe later, when he asked Virgin just what
all it meant or entailed, light would be shined upon the situation and revealed in whole. However—now, it need not matter, as he had just what he wanted in spite of all the oppression set against him.

“The Book of the Dead,” he whispered.

Upon the surface of the first page was the drawing of what appeared to be smoke rising from a raven’s mouth, likely symbolizing the Sprite or ‘soul’ that every living thing held. Beneath it, sketched in what he could only imagine was blood, was a signature he could not read—which, most likely, had to have been the result of the original author’s penmanship. The knowledge was enough to instill the belief that he had just crossed into forbidden territory and had wandered into a place mortal men should not cross.

I’m not mortal,
he thought.

“I
’m a Halfling.”

After tearing his eyes from the insignia below the Sprite-raven drawing, he turned the page to the table of contents, then scrolled his finger down the list until he found what he was looking for.

Bringing back the sentient dead.

“Father,” Odin whispered.

The door opened.

Odin slammed shut the book so fast he thought the pages would fly from their ancient
binding.

“Is everything all right?” Virgin asked, adjusting the platter upon his hand.

“Nothing,” Odin said.

“Nothing... what?” Virgin frowned.

“Nothing’s wrong. Don’t... don’t worry.”

“All right,” the Halfling said, narrowing his eyes at the book which now lay openly upon the desk. “Are you sure everything
’s fine?”

“I said
—”

“I heard you, Odin. Gods—you
’re more than just a bit rattled.”

“I
’m fine,” he mumbled, lifting the book and throwing himself across the room to shove it back in the bag. “Don’t worry about it.”

Virgin said nothing. He merely set the food on the desk and waited for Odin to serve himself.

The night
dragged on endlessly. Unable to sleep not only from fear, but the reality that he could have been so easily caught within such an intimate moment, he rolled onto his side in an attempt to free himself of Virgin’s arm and looked out the window to find that the snow was once again delivering upon the world a moment of solace. In watching it, he couldn’t help but feel at peace, considering the torrential storm in his mind, and while it did little to calm his raging thoughts, it somehow eased the quiver of flame in his heart and allowed him the time to decipher his emotions.

Would it matter,
he thought,
if he saw?

Virgin was just about as close to the situation as he was. That alone should have made him realize that he was not in the least bit afraid of any repercussions that could
come his way, but here Odin was lying awake at this ungodly hour of the morning, trying to sort out the thoughts in his head and the feelings within his heart.

“You
’re better than this,” he whispered. “You’re better than that.”

To react like he did was to diminish the entirety of his and Virgin
’s relationship—to cast it into the fire and watch it burn like easily-discarded parchment. He couldn’t begin to imagine what Virgin had to have felt when he walked in the room and seen him react like that—sad, maybe, or possibly even heartbroken, but it couldn’t have been anything but just unsure.

You know how he felt,
he thought.

Cheated, Odin would have said, had he the courage to voice it, for all he had done to help steal it, and cheated, he would have said, for knowing that the person he considered to be the closest to in the entire world did not trust him enough to keep a little book open.

Unable to restrain himself any longer, Odin cast the quilt from his shoulders, threw his legs over the side of the bed, then made his way over to the window—where, there, he watched the snow continue to fall.

You’re losing your mind.

Who
wouldn’t
be though in his situation—when, seemingly, he had the entire world at his fingertips? He could bend the earth to his command, raise fires from nothing, draw water from the deepest pinches of ground and make the air implode upon itself to the point where any caught within its radius would fall over dead. He could kill a man just by thinking it—could bend him into a complete U until he screamed for death to be thrust upon him—and could thrust the body into flame so quickly that it would simply explode. Before, he could do almost anything, so long as the laws of nature abided it. But now, with this book, he could bring the dead back to life, if only he believed in himself and learned how to summon the soul with a blood and hair sacrifice.