Emissary Read online

  Emissary

  Melissa McShane

  Published by Night Harbor Publishing at Smashwords

  Copyright 2015 Melissa McShane

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Glossary and Pronunciation Guide

  The Pantheon

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Zerafine had only a moment’s warning before the ghost was upon her. A shout, a flicker of movement, and it enveloped her like a chilly whirlwind. Seicorum pebbles the size of large, rough marbles pelted her from all directions, stinging where they struck the bare skin of her hands and face, sheering away where they brushed her red robe. It was fortunate for everyone on the road that the ghost wasn’t powerful enough to make more of the strange ore that gave a kind of physical form to its insubstantial body, but even more fortunate for them that Zerafine was there to draw its attention. Gerrard shouted something made unintelligible by the roar of the unearthly wind, but she pulled the heavy crimson hood over her head and all sounds faded to a hum. She felt surprise, but no fear; it was nothing she hadn’t faced hundreds of times before.

  From within the shielding folds of her hood she closed her eyes and drew three deep, cleansing breaths, felt her shoulders relax and her center of balance shift downward. She opened her heart’s eye and saw the ghost in its true form, not as a violent hail of stone, but as a collection of memories emerging like shattered glass that now glowed with the white-blue light of a discorporate spirit. She called out to one, and it unfolded before her—

  an infant, swaddled close and breathing a milk-scented sigh of contentment—

  and golden symbols rose up within Zerafine and danced behind her eyelids; she chose one that spoke of home and hearth and traced it with her heart’s eye. Then she spoke to the ghost in quiet tones like water over stone, reminding it of that soft bundle, of children running, of motherhood in all its stages, and as she spoke more memories came whirling in to connect to the first.

  She pieced together the woman’s life, soothing her, reminding her of who she had been. Mitela, her name was, and her final memories were of fire and agony so profound that her spirit lost the way to Atenas’s court of judgment. Zerafine’s efforts would help her find it. More symbols, this time ones of release and relief from pain. She chose two and drew them in her mind: the crossed sticks of Ormus, god of travel, for safe journey; and the triple arch, for the gates to Atenas’s realm.

  With a final gust of wind, Mitela’s ghost vanished. Seicorum ore rained down around Zerafine like hailstones, no longer propelled by the whirlwind of the ghost’s desperate need to create a new body. She tried to stand, and stumbled before she realized she was already standing. Gerrard’s huge hand wrapped around her upper arm, supporting her. “Steady on,” he said, his voice muffled as if he were speaking from a great distance.

  With the ghost’s cold presence gone, Zerafine felt suddenly very warm. She swept her hood back with her free hand and shook her dark hair loose of its folds. She dashed away the tears she never remembered crying during a consolation. The afternoon sun beat down on her unprotected head, but a warm breeze stirred the air enough to cool her sweat-damp forehead.

  All traffic on the dusty road had stopped. Two women had their hands full trying to control a horse that screamed and arched its back against its harness. Almost all the pedestrians had backed off the road into the tall summer-scorched grass, well away from Zerafine, though they appeared too fascinated to actually flee. Three men and one woman stood nearby, as still as trees rooted to the spot. One of the men balanced a rusty metal box, about three feet long and one foot deep, on his shoulder. Its outer door hung open, revealing the inner mesh too fine to allow seicorum to pass through. A ghost trap. And four hunters. They wouldn’t be happy at being deprived of their catch, but Zerafine wasn’t very happy either.

  “I would love to hear your excuse,” she said, her words acid-etched, “for driving a ghost into the middle of a populated area with no better way of controlling it than an antique ghost trap and—I’m just guessing here—blind greed.”

  The woman’s eyes went narrow, and she opened her mouth to say something that Zerafine knew would be too offensive for the god’s curse to ignore, but the oldest of the men, dark-haired and with lines creasing the corners of his eyes and mouth, stepped hard on her foot and her words came out a cry of pain instead. “Forgive us, thelis,” he said, removing his wide-brimmed hat. “It got away from us in the woods and we’ve been tracking it for over a mile. We were somewhat lost, ourselves, and didn’t know we were on the highway until we were...on the highway....”

  Zerafine glared at him. “That would no doubt have been a great comfort to anyone it attacked.” The man cringed. She turned her glare on each of the others in turn, fury building in her like a bonfire; all, even the woman, turned away rather than meet her gaze. Ghost hunters, she thought. Atenas preserve me.

  With ritual slowness, she raised her hood until it settled above her forehead, leaving her face uncovered. “Get out of my sight,” she said, “and may Atenas have mercy on you.” It was not a blessing.

  The four turned and ran for it, the tall man staggering under the awkward burden of the ghost trap. Zerafine maintained a stony mask as she watched them flee into the shelter of the twisted olive trees beyond the dry grass, but inside she sighed. She saw them more often these days, toting those metal boxes, capturing ghosts so they could harvest their seicorum, then letting them loose far from civilization. Lucrative, if it didn’t kill you first. She despised their kind, but where else were the people to turn when the theloi of Atenas weren’t around to provide a more permanent solution?

  The small crowd of travelers still hadn’t moved. They seemed enthralled by the spectacle Zerafine had just enacted. She sighed again, this time out loud, and stepped to one side so Gerrard could collect the seicorum that lay around her feet. It would bring them a decent pile of coin to help support them in the coming days, but Zerafine, moved by inspiration, whispered “Give each of them a nugget” to Gerrard. He made an irritated face, but obediently went to each bystander to give away their windfall. Atenas, god of Death, could use all the goodwill Zerafine could manufacture, and they had plenty of seicorum already.

  Gerrard still had five or six seicorum pebbles when he’d finished distributing the rest. He reclaimed his longstaff, which he had probably dropped when the ghost appeared, and they continued down the road, her sandals and his boots scuffing up tiny puffs of dust with each step. None of the bystanders moved. No one wanted to walk the road with a thelis of Atenas. His theloi were sometimes respected, always feared, but never loved and certainly not desired as traveling companions. After forty feet or so Zerafine and Gerrard had the wide, dusty highway to themselves.

  “Will we make Portena by nightfall?” Zerafine asked. Behind them, she could hear the movement of two dozen people trying not to catch up to them.

  “I hope so,” Gerrard said. He held his longstaff ready in his left hand,
though Zerafine doubted they’d meet anyone he’d need to use it against. “Portena’s legendary for its maze of streets and almost as well-known for the crime rate in its lower city. We might have trouble finding the shrine after dark.”

  “Just let me know when I can lie down and sleep, that’s all I ask.”

  “Don’t tell me that consolation exhausted you? Little thing like that?” He took his helmet off and scratched his head, blond hair turned dark with sweat.

  Zerafine pushed her hood back again and gathered her dark brown hair into a horse’s tail high on her head. “No, just the little thing of having walked for six days in the brutal heat of Ailausor, sleeping rough and unable to bathe like a civilized person. We’re so close to our destination, I feel impatient.” She tied off her hair with a long piece of leather cord and, bending her head, made it twitch exactly like a horse tail sweeping away flies. The breeze it generated felt wonderful on her bare neck.

  “My people believe bathing weakens you,” Gerrard said. “But my people are well known to be uncivilized.”

  “Your people don’t believe in drinking coffee. That’s a fair definition of uncivilized.”

  Their solitary occupation of the road didn’t last long. After about a mile they began to overtake other traffic, oxcarts taking up most of the road, riders and pedestrians jostling for what space the carts left. The stink of unwashed bodies and animal waste filled Zerafine’s nostrils, occasionally wafted away by a hot breeze. She wasn’t used to being so closely surrounded by strangers, though her robe and Gerrard’s tall presence at her side kept the other travelers from approaching too closely. The dust kicked up by all the travelers and their livestock became nearly unbearable, and Zerafine had to pull her cowl over her nose and mouth despite how much hotter this made her. Gerrard, his head nearly a foot higher than hers, had no such problem. Zerafine eyed the twisted olive trees that lined the road, just far enough from the verge so as not to afford any shade to those moving along it, with a rueful sigh. Only a few more hours, and their journey would be over.

  They reached the city before sunset. The famous wall of Portena stood thirty feet high and was nearly that thick, the biggest manmade construction Zerafine had ever seen. It curved out of sight in both directions, its huge tan limestone blocks, each wider than Gerrard was tall, taking on a pinkish cast in the light of the setting sun. Above the wall, in the distance, Zerafine saw two of the five hills of the city-state, green and lush in defiance of the summer sun, white buildings flashing in the late afternoon light. Just the sight of them made Zerafine feel weary.

  She saw no one atop the wall, watching the gate. Instead, two tiny booths flanked both sides of the road about fifty feet in front of the wall, each one containing a guard who seemed too large for his post. The guards waved the oxcarts to one side, but allowed everyone else through without comment, though the young guard on the right stiffened and wouldn’t meet Zerafine’s eyes when she glanced his way. The gate was more like a tunnel, blessedly cool and dim, and Zerafine breathed a sigh of contentment, then coughed on the dust lingering in the air.

  Beyond the gate, booths and stalls occupied every possible space, leaving barely enough room for the road to meander its way through, sprouting tiny streets and paths as it went. Though evening was closing in, the market was still full of people buying, selling, bartering, making a noise like geese chattering on their way north for the summer. Zerafine tried not to gawk like a provincial, but it was hard for her not to be a little overwhelmed at the size of the oldest city in the known world. Still, she saw far too many unoccupied booths. Portena had suffered greatly from plague fifty years ago, and it had yet to return to its pre-disaster population.

  Though Zerafine was eager to get to the shrine and, after that, to a bed, she couldn’t help slowing to watch the dozens, maybe hundreds of transactions being made. Whole streets were devoted to just one kind of merchandise: in one place, thousands of shoes sat out for inspection; on a different street, all kinds of brass and copper pots lay on the ground or hung from booths. The smaller, lighter ones turned in the evening breeze and sang out, bell-like, above the honks and clamor of human conversation.

  “Wait—that’s wrong,” Gerrard said. He didn’t point, but took Zerafine’s chin and gently turned her head so she was looking in the right direction. Ahead, at an empty stall whose signage proclaimed that fine brass pots had once been available for sale, a young woman stood with her head bowed as if inspecting the merchandise that wasn’t there. Her fingers dipped into a purse hanging by her side--

  “She shouldn’t carry her purse in the open like that, you mean?”

  “No, look at her...or actually—” But in that moment Zerafine figured it out. The woman’s hand raised as if to give coins to a nonexistent shopkeeper, and pale light filtered through her arm. Now she realized the woman was entirely translucent, just solid-seeming enough not to draw attention to herself. Her body was becoming increasingly filmy, though, and Zerafine shook free of Gerrard’s hand and ran across the street, dodging the thinning crowd. The woman turned and began to walk away, but Zerafine caught up with her, reached to take her by the shoulder, and felt her hand slip through—nothing. No cold, no dust, nothing. The woman had vanished.

  “Do not go running off like that in this city,” Gerrard growled behind her. “She wasn’t a ghost, was she.”

  Zerafine shook her head. “She was not,” she said, “but I couldn’t tell you what she was. Maybe you and I both had the same bad pork at dinner. Maybe she was some kind of illusion.”

  “I know that’s not what you believe.”

  Zerafine sighed. “I don’t have enough information to know what I believe. Anything else will have to wait until we speak to the Council. Did you get directions to the shrine?”

  Gerrard made a sour face. “You don’t get directions in Portena, you get a direction-finder.” He led the way toward a large booth, walled on three sides, that was still doing a brisk business when many of the other shopkeepers were beginning to close for the night. A board hung in the front, with prices chalked on it. Boys and girls lounged around it, laughing and talking, but the noise petered out as one by one they registered who their new clients were. Gerrard dug in his pouch for a brass coin. “Shrine of Atenas,” he said. “Another if you get us there before nightfall.”

  The young guides shared glances of fear and cupidity. One disappeared inside and returned with a much older woman, her face creased and brown with sun. Her lean hand plucked the coin from Gerrard’s and spun it in the air. “Nacalia,” she said, her voice as brown as her face, “take these good people where they aim to go.” A girl leaped up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged and lit a small lantern from the coals in a brazier by the door. She seemed motivated more by excitement than fear, Zerafine thought, and she nimbly threaded her way through the crowd that parted more quickly for the red-hooded thelis.

  As dusk fell, Zerafine saw acolytes of Kandra lighting much larger lamps all along the wide road, so she guessed the girl’s tiny lamp was more symbolic than utilitarian. They soon passed out of the marketplace and into an area where houses loomed over the street, wooden structures four and five stories tall. Their dark windows flickered with dim lights; no large fires for the inhabitants of these rickety structures.

  Nacalia turned around and jogged backward for a few steps. “This way, thelis,” she said. She turned off the main road to the left and led them along a narrower road lined with more of the tall houses, which leaned just enough to give the illusion that they were walking through a manmade forest with branches interlocking to block out the sun or, in this case, the half-moon that rose over the city. Gradually the buildings gave way to single-story homes built of concrete or stone—limestone, perhaps?—sharing a single wall fronting the street, their slate or tin roofs bumping up against each other. Through iron gates, spaced well apart and marked on each doorpost with gods’ symbols, Zerafine glimpsed small courtyards, white marble benches, a fountain or two. From here
she could see another of the five hills of Portena, its top still gleaming gold from the last light of the setting sun.

  “That’s Telerion Hide,” Nacalia called out over her shoulder, pointing back in the direction of the warren of homes, “and this is just a nest of the new-come’s houses. That hill’s Rodennos, and the other’s Talarannos—” she pointed as she trotted ahead. Zerafine thought Nacalia the tour guide was determined to earn her bonus, both in speed and in the quality of the trip.

  Nacalia now led the way through a maze of narrow streets in which Zerafine would have become hopelessly lost—was hopelessly lost, as she’d been trying to keep track of the turns Nacalia made. But in only a few minutes they emerged onto another broad street, not as wide as the main road, but wide enough that Gerrard, who disliked narrow places, breathed out heavily as though he’d been holding his breath the whole time.

  This neighborhood was identical with the last except that the homes were larger, the courtyards bigger, the stone finer. The road led past these homes and terminated at a building that looked very much like all the rest, except that it was faced with black marble and did not bear the symbols every other front door was marked with. Death had no symbol, for it was everywhere.

  Gerrard dug into his pouch again and came up with another brass siclo. Nacalia took it eagerly, but instead of pelting off in the direction they’d come, said, “I never met a thelis of Atenas before. Thought you was all ten feet tall and gug-ugly.”

  Zerafine laughed. “I’m so grateful you don’t think I’m gug-ugly,” she said.

  “Not even. Nor even ten feet tall. He might be.” Nacalia seemed a little disappointed. Gerrard straightened to his full six-foot-four height.

  On a whim, Zerafine asked, “How much of that do you get to keep?”

  Nacalia considered the coin in her somewhat grubby hand. “Maybe 20 soldi.” That would mean Nacalia got around a third of the total sum. She added, with a sly look upward through her lashes, “Plus half the tips.” Zerafine raised her eyebrow at Gerrard, who went fishing for another siclo. Nacalia’s eyes went wide when she saw it. “Thanks so much, master guardsman!”