Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (54 page)

Andre came down the aisle that Matthias had walked on. Matthias’s throat was dry. He hadn’t heard the door open. He hadn’t realized he was concentrating that hard. But it made sense.

“Smell something odd?” he asked as Andre walked.

Andre stopped, sniffed, and shook his head. “Candle wax, a bit too much polish. Nothing else.”

Matthias frowned. Were his senses that much more finely tuned than Andre’s? It seemed strange to him. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I could ask you that,” Andre said. “I have never seen anyone worship here by sitting on the floor.”

Matthias again resisted the urge to stand. Andre made him nervous. His piety seemed so pure compared to Matthias’s scholarly approach to religion. His ignorance was equally irritating, and his recent friendship with the Rocaan even more so.

“Come here,” Matthias said again.

Andre came closer. His shoes squeaked on the polished floor. Matthias’s feet were cold. His entire body was cold. Andre crouched beside him.

“What did you do?” he asked.

Matthias bit back an angry retort. “Nothing. I found this. Touch it.”

Andre extended one finger and pushed on the carpet. It made a slight squishy sound. He glanced at Matthias as if confused, then brought the finger to his own nose and sniffed. “Blood,” he whispered. “In the sanctuary?”

Matthias nodded. “We need to find out what has happened. I want you to assemble the staff as well as all the Auds and Danites who are assigned to this place. I will speak to the Rocaan and gather the Elders. Between us we should find out who saw anything, if anyone did, and who is missing, if anyone is.”

Andre wiped his finger on a dry spot on the carpet, as if he couldn’t stand the feel of blood against his skin. Matthias watched him, then asked, “Did you see anything?”

Andre started as if he hadn’t expected Matthias to speak again. “No,” he said. “Except you. I just got here.”

Matthias nodded. Someone had to have seen something. Someone had to know what caused the blood. Perhaps an Aud was injured. Perhaps someone had driven an enemy from the building.

“Do you think the Fey did this?” Andre asked.

Matthias looked at him, not willing to hear that thought, but now that it was out, it chilled him. “I hope not,” he said.

“It could be a miracle,” Andre said hopefully.

Matthias smiled. “There have been no miracles for hundreds of years.”

“Life is a miracle,” Andre said primly.

“Perhaps,” Matthias said, “but I prefer to think of it as business as usual.”

Andre shot him a look that Matthias had never seen before. Something cool and calculating lurked behind the man’s eyes. “It is a miracle,” he repeated, but for the first time since he had known Andre, Matthias didn’t believe him.

Matthias stood up. His perceptions were probably off, thanks to the desecration of the sanctuary. The Rocaan would be heartbroken, and Matthias wasn’t sure the old man could handle more upset. He seemed not only distant, but a bit crazy these days, as if he heard the word of God when no one else did. The Rocaan’s actions worried Matthias. Porciluna hadn’t mentioned a meeting of the Elders recently, but Matthias kept expecting him to. With this new crisis it became even more important for the Elders to be unified.

“Get an Aud in here,” Matthias said. “Don’t let anyone touch that spot.”

Andre nodded. He stood too, and for a moment Matthias considered telling him about the bone. But then he decided that the detail could wait. The Rocaan would need to know first.

Matthias retraced his steps down the aisle. Andre went out the Danite door toward the back, the one the Rocaan always used when he conducted the ceremony himself. Matthias took one more glance at the sanctuary. The blood smell was stronger than it had been before. He didn’t know what had happened there, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to guess.

He didn’t like the idea of anything going wrong in the Tabernacle itself.

When he reached the doors, he stopped to grab his sandals. His feet were icy cold, his toenails blue. He suspected the reaction was as much from fear as from the chill in the room. He had lied to Andre: the incident was probably Fey related. He had spent some time studying the incident in the dungeon tunnels with Lord Powell and Stephen. There had been blood there, too, and bones.

Just like the invasion. In the barracks, the morning of the attack, a guard had discovered bones littering the floor, and another body beside them. A few other sites had found bones, some very close to the palace. Monte, head of the guards, had guessed that they were somehow connected to the Fey, but whether the bones belonged to dead Fey who had been completely destroyed by the holy water, or whether the bones were human, no one could say.

Bones and blood. Bones and a body. His grip tightened on the prize in his pocket. Something had happened there, and someone had cleaned it up. He was determined to discover who.

He ran a finger along the carvings on the door, touching the sword held aloft by the doomed Roca. The Roca was in profile, his features grim. His eyes, though, did not look human because the wood did not have real expression. What did the Roca know that they had forgotten? What gave Him all the power, the ability to be remembered, to be Beloved by God?

Matthias leaned his head on the door. For the first time in his adult life, he wished that he had real faith, not knowledge. Because, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to understand that only faith would get him through.

FORTY-SEVEN

Solanda cocked her head. The voice mewed again. She sat on the side of the road and washed her face with her right paw. The sound didn’t come from the forest; she heard the voice inside her head. She sighed. Shape-Shifters often had spillover magick from the other disciplines, but she had never experienced it before.

The trees seemed impossibly tall. The sunlight filtering through them had a sparkly quality. Birds chirped behind her, but the birds near her were silent. She didn’t mind. She hadn’t been hunting. She had been heading to the Shadowlands.

The voice had been bothering her since she’d left Jahn. At first she thought she was being followed. Then she realized that the voice was saying nothing, just making small whimpering sounds. Panicked sounds. It called to her, warning her that she was missing something important.

She dug her paw into the corner of her eye and rubbed hard, getting the dirt out. She didn’t have to return to Shadowlands right away. Rugar always let her follow her own whims. He already knew about the Doppelgänger appointments; he didn’t need her for more than errands anyway. And this latest errand was done. If this voice turned out to be a simple trick on the part of the Mysteries, she would come back as quickly as she could.

Better to get this voice out of her head.

She stood up and looked both ways before she continued down the path.

The way to the Shadowlands was along the river. But the voice urged her to go north, away from the river into the forest. The path had originally been an Islander travel route, rarely used now because of the Fey’s stronghold there. Few Islanders had lived in these parts in the first place, and most were gone by the time the Fey had arrived.

The farther north she went, the more the path narrowed with disuse, although footprints were carved into the dirt—probably formed with the mud that had been so thick from the rains. She passed a small wooden building—not a cabin, but something that she would have thought a lookout station if the Islanders had been military people. The wood was worn and weathered, and the roof was falling off. Obviously it hadn’t been used since the Fey had arrived. She wondered what it was originally for. The path forked there, and she was about to follow the better-traveled portion when she glanced at the other fork. No. She needed to see what had been abandoned first.

The unused part of the path slanted downhill, and its smoothness eased her aching pads. She had walked too far without resting or eating. The quiet of this place almost made her turn Fey, but then she remembered the story of Aio, the Shape-Shifter who had got too comfortable and was slaughtered shortly after returning to two-legged form. It was a cautionary tale Domestics told Shape-Shifter children, but it had saved Solanda many times.

She would heed that memory now.

She moved into a patch of birch trees, their white bark welcome contrast to the green of the forest around them. The path had grown even narrower, and blades of grass pushed up through the dirt. No one had come that way in a long time.

The path descended another small hill, and she found herself in a clearing. The grass had grown tall, and brambles thick as weeds threaded through the trees. A cabin stood in the center of the clearing, its door open, its furniture broken and scattered on the lawn. Other Fey had been there before her and had probably taken all useful items into the Shadowlands.

She found a path under the brambles, glad for her feline shape, and a cat’s ability to make itself twice as small as it should be. She winced as her stomach brushed against thorns on the ground. She pushed with her hind feet and dug her claws into the dirt ahead of her until she made it into the clearing. Then she stopped, picked the thorns out of her belly with her teeth, and washed her face again before surveying the ground around her.

Scattered pieces of wood and broken pottery hid in the tall grass. Wooden nails were embedded into the ground, many point up, and she had to avoid them to keep from injuring her paws. She sniffed the destruction, looking for the voice that had led her there.

Then she saw the skeletons.

They were in the middle of the clearing, and the grass had grown around them. The woman’s was sprawled a few feet from the man’s. Her clothing was tattered and hung on the bones, rotted and chewed by bugs. A few strands of hair still remained underneath her skull, which was forced back as if she had been screaming when she died.

The man was crumpled, his bones scattered as if an animal had got to them. But she knew no animal had. The marks on the bones came from Foot Soldiers indelicately lifting skin, muscle and blood from a dying being. Sloppy work. She would have to report it to Rugar.

Islander skeletons: she could tell from the inelasticity of the rib cages, the firmness of the bones.

And they had been dead a long time. Not a fresh kill. Probably dating from the First Battle for Jahn. Some of the units had not fought in Jahn—which would explain how they knew about such an empty place to put the Shadowlands at all.

The voice in her head was silent: she was supposed to be there. But the skeletons told her little more than the obvious, that an Islander couple had lived there and the Fey had killed them. She left them to disintegrate in the tall grass and made her way to the cabin itself.

The steps remained, but they were covered with dirt and animal tracks. She stopped to investigate. Beneath the dirt was a black stain. The blood had been so heavy at one time that it had seeped into the wood. No amount of rain would wash that stain away.

She climbed to the top, slowly, uncertain of what she would find. The inside of the cabin was dark and smelled of dust. Mice had left tracks in the dirt on the porch, and the tracks mingled with those of various birds. A much larger catlike animal had left pad prints twice the size of hers along the porch’s edge—it had disdained the steps and leaped to the porch from the ground. All the tracks led inside and then out again. Apparently nothing left to steal.

But she sniffed the air again for good measure. With all that activity, the last thing she wanted to do was startle some huge animal that ate cats. The cautionary Shapeshifter tales also warned of Shifters who had got themselves in a bad situation, without time to change to a more conducive form.