Blood of the Four by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

14

In the middle of the night, Yaris Teeg breathed with its own life. A life of wood and stone and iron nails, the creak and shift of wind and earth upon the structures built by ordinary people. Blane lay in bed and listened to those familiar night sounds, the living voice of Yaris Teeg, so soft that the other nighttime noises seemed loud in comparison. His fellow novices breathed deeply in sleep. Conavar snored, as she did nearly every night. The tiny feet of rats or mice scritch-scratched inside the walls, and balls of dust and grit skittered along the floor, carried by the draft that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Peaceful and quiet, somehow both solid and vulnerable, the darkness enveloped them all.

Blane licked his lips to wet them. The air inside Yaris Teeg never used to seem dry to him, but now he always felt parched. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, still unused to the way light lingered for him now. A fortnight earlier, the room would have been so dark he would barely have been able to make out the beams in the ceiling. Now he could see the grain in the wood, the cobwebs in the corners, and the sparking blue static in the air. For better or worse he could smell the stink of the other novices on their mats and the blankets they slumbered beneath. Tomorrow was wash day, and Blane could not wait.

He’d only tasted magic thus far. Breathed it in, carefully mimicking the things he’d seen Queen Phela doing each time she’d gone down to learn. Every night he threw himself into a series of risks, both in shadowing Phela and the High Order priests who now served her—not to mention the Silent who guarded her—and in touching the magic itself, without anyone there to help him if things went awry.

But what other choice did he have?

It prickled his skin. Dried his mouth all hours of the day. Made him alert, even paranoid. He felt it growing in him as if he had planted a seed inside his flesh and nurtured it, but magic clearly took root faster than any tree or crop.

Blane inhaled, felt it flow, and thought, No wonder they guard it so carefully, this power. And this is only a tiny portion! While they walked the world, the Four would have been capable of anything. Of course. They were gods, or perceived as gods. His doubts still prickling, he was not sure the distinction made any real difference.

He rolled silently off his mat and crept from the bedchamber. In the corridor the shadows whispered, and he turned to see a shape stepping quietly in his wake. It ought to have panicked him, but instead Blane smiled and padded farther down the hall until he reached the stone staircase that led to the cellar and the tunnels beyond. There, two steps down, he turned and waited until the shape appeared.

In the dark, with only a thin veil of light from wall sconces back in the corridor, Gemmy’s eyes gleamed.

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