CHAPTER ONE

AKANÛL
THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

INFINITIES CROUCHED ON HIS CHEST, STONE-HEAVY AND black as a tomb. Nothingness spiraling forever overhead like a burned-out galaxy reflected in murky water.

Something inexplicable shifted. A thread glimmered, beckoning him to follow its endless coils across the darkness …

He drew in a breath and opened his eyes.

Naked branches scratched jagged lines across a ceiling of clouds and drifting earthmotes. Mist gathered in shoals, dribbling chill gray across the sky.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them, counting: one, two, three …

He waited for the memory of his situation to occur to him like a bolt sliding home.

 … and nothing.

What the Hells? he thought. Why am I sleeping outside? Only an idiot would camp in the open this time of year. Plus my bedroll is too hard.

More importantly, where was he? He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Burning dominions, had he been drinking?

He sat up. The light was pre-dawn dim, but bright enough to see he hadn’t been lying on a bedroll; it was a marble altar, thick with inscribed runes.

Uh-oh. Finding oneself spread out on an altar without the least memory of how one had arrived upon it rarely ended up being good news.

“Hey!” he yelped, pulling his leg toward his chest. Something had bitten him!

A squat, blubbery creature crouched alongside the stone platform, grinning at him with a nest of tiny fangs, its eyes solid masses of scarlet crystal. Its flesh was sickly, like unbaked dough, and red crystal scales and spikes crusted its upper shoulders.

He recoiled, rolling off the opposite side of the altar. He landed on hands and knees, jarring his wrists. A moment later he was on his feet with the altar between him and the creature.

He almost fell again; his legs were like deadweights. His vision narrowed, as if threatening to pinch off. He caught himself on the altar’s edge, saving himself from flopping face first back into the dirt. His legs were asleep; he could barely feel them.

His attacker held a severed human foot in one hand, gnawed bone clearly visible. His gaze jerked down to check the status of his own feet. Still attached … but why wasn’t he wearing boots? A more thorough and somewhat chilly realization shuddered through him.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked the thing weakly, fear and confusion fighting for dominance.

The thing grinned wider, its lips smeared red and its yellowed teeth crusted with gore. It tossed away the severed limb and looked at him speculatively.

He stamped experimentally, holding himself up with his arms on the cold altar. His legs went from numb to a fire of pins and needles.

The creature watched him a few moments more as if wondering what kind of dance he was doing. Then it launched itself, coming right up over the altar like a dog hurdling a low fence.

Muscle memory betrayed him; his smooth and unthinking motion to draw the great sword sheathed on his back was ruined by the fact he didn’t have a sword on his back. He was naked.

Then it was on him, and despite its small size, it bore him to the ground. In rapid succession it tried to bite out his throat, disembowel him, and sever the undefended femoral arteries that ran up his inner thigh. He jerked, shifted, and elbowed just enough each time to avoid each bite and slash, trading each attack for a lesser nip or gouge. But if he didn’t slow down its momentum, and give something back soon, it was going to overwhelm him—

With a desperate spasm, he gathered his legs to his chest, then released a tremendous straight kick.

His heels caught the creature across the jaw. It squealed as it flipped off and away.

At the apex of its trajectory, it almost seemed like time slowed. An illusion he supposed, but he took advantage of the interlude to scrabble to his feet, and steal a glance around.

Granite obelisks encircled the altar at a distance of about ten paces, forming a crude ring. People lay around the periphery of the ring, unmoving in a scatter of dropped weapons, silent and … dead.

Time snapped back to its regular breakneck pace. The creature traced the end of its arc, landed hard, then bounced onto its feet, apparently no worse for wear. It growled as it raised one hand to paw at its mouth, looking for all the world as if it were feeling for a sore tooth.

Good, he thought, I hurt it a little after all. It didn’t immediately rush him again anyway.

Which gave him enough time to snatch a long sword lying in the dirt near a corpse’s limp hand. The blade showed brownish streaks of corrosion and the hilt was mildewed, but the balance was acceptable. The damp weight of it in his hand was the first good thing that had happened to him since he’d opened his eyes.

He pointed it so that the tip lined up with the creature’s chest.

He said, “What’s going on here? In the name of Light and Shadow, what are you?”

The thing growled like a dog struck with foaming sickness, and charged.

He grinned despite the new surge of fear jackknifing through his bloodstream … or because of it. With the fear came a charge of elation that sang along every nerve. He lined up the blade to skewer his attacker on it.

The length of the blade seemed off. He tried to correct, but the creature swatted his sword out of the way. It lurched inside his guard and fastened its wide mouth on his unarmored forearm. He was momentarily distracted by the odd design running the length of his limb, ash gray like tattoos of ghosts—

The thing bit down hard. The pain was spectacular and he screamed.

Something hot ignited behind his eyes, and suddenly glimmers danced across the length of his borrowed sword, one line down each side. On one side they were white like the full moon, and along the other, red like the sun at day’s end. The glows flickered, gone one instant, back the next, suggesting some sort of half-remembered runes or glyphs that should have been clear …

The creature didn’t like the display, and its jaws relaxed. He wrenched his arm free from the thing’s mouth. It mewled when it lost its grip, and blood dribbled from between its teeth. His blood. He was lucky it hadn’t stripped any tendons.

He blinked when the creature shouted, “The Eye is watching! It always watches. It searches!”

“What eye?” he replied with a wit so sparkling he impressed even himself.

The nightmarish thing gazed at him like an avaricious peddler who’d just realized he’d come upon a village of idiots. Then it hurled itself forward again, lashing its clawed arms in mad frenzy. The light show with his sword hadn’t cowed the monster as much as he’d expected—

A claw clipped his temple. A spurt of blood turned everything red.

He slipped and nearly fell, and the beast screamed louder as its claws tore at him in earnest.

He desperately rubbed blood from his eye with his free hand. If I’m not careful, he thought, this minor dretch is going to kill me!

 … dretch? He suddenly realized it was a dretch, a demonic pest and among the very least of its kind. Why he hadn’t immediately recognized it, he didn’t know. Probably because of the odd crystalline encrustations across the thing’s upper torso, and a matching red glint in its eyes.

It didn’t matter. His fingers tightened into a surer grip on the sword hilt.

He angled his shoulders with a twitch and sidestepped a fraction out of the creature’s range. Then he feinted high, stomped on the thing’s foot as it tried to dance away from the blade, and struck its head from its shoulders in a spatter of ichor. The runes flashed with the death blow, then flickered out like lanterns in a windstorm.

The body collapsed. The head bounced a few times before lodging between two stones.

Quiet returned to the shrine. He stood for several heartbeats, marveling. It had felt so … good to dispatch the creature. Almost like drinking a draft of some alchemist’s elixir. Joy thrummed through him like lightning through the clouds.

He moved closer to inspect the body. The eyes on the decapitated head blinked at him.

“Dominions!” he cursed.

The head whispered, “The Elder Elemental Eye watches …”

His exultation billowed away like a cut sail.

The lopped-off thing said nothing else.

Get a hold of yourself, he thought, as his heart pounded in his ears. It’s just a dying beast, and you’ve got a sword.

He inched forward again, ready to plunge the blade straight through it at the first sign of anything suspicious.

But it was finally dead. Amazing it had been able to whisper at all, without any air to inflate its vocal cords. Or, maybe not. What did he know about demonic anatomy?

The head twitched. Before he could leap back or hew it, it slumped, as if transformed into running wax. A gelatinous, melting lump that bubbled and evaporated even as it lost all shape. Then nothing remained but a damp spot.

The headless body evaporated too. He was the only moving thing within the ring of stones.

Memory twitched, but maddeningly refused to come clear. That wasn’t how slain demons normally decayed. Right?

Why, he thought, does it seem like I’m trying to think through molasses?

He frowned and rubbed his head, wincing at the touch. The dretch had tagged him on the temple. That probably explained why everything seemed foggy. He needed to find some healing.

First things first, he thought. If I can remember how I got here, or even where here is, everything else should fall into place.

He went back to the altar and studied the marks chiseled all over its surface. The iconography was … some variety of divine runes? No, he realized; the glyphs represented spirits of the land.

Many of the carved sigils depicted animals: the predatory curve of a hawk wing, the inquisitive point of a fox nose, and the streaming mane of a galloping horse. All the figures were blurred by decades or even centuries of neglect. Dirt and time had nearly erased them.

He ran his fingers across the bend of the horse’s spine, racking his mind. But no. He’d never seen the altar before. He had no memory whatsoever of coming to the place.

Anxiety pressed a dagger-sharp point against his surface calm. Could he have been brought here against his will, unconscious? That seemed the answer that best fit the evidence. He swung his gaze around, trying to see everything at once. He ignored the whisper of dizziness that followed each motion.

The land beyond the ring fell away into the surrounding mist in a way that suggested he was on a hilltop or mountainside. Despite the cloud cover, something in the silence and texture of the air implied daybreak was nigh, not sunset.

He shivered, scanning the wide landscape. Nope, he thought. Never seen it before … He convulsively folded his arms across his chest, careful of his sword.

By all that was holy and sovereign, just what was going on here? Someone had laid him out on some kind of ancient altar, he was alone out in some godsforsaken wilderness, it was a miracle he wasn’t dead of exposure already, he didn’t have any clothes—

“Stop!” he said to the air.

Panic will get you nowhere. Everything will be fine.

“And now you’re talking to yourself. That means you’re probably crazy on top of being forgetful. And cold.”

At least he could remedy the last. Though they couldn’t answer his many questions, the dead wouldn’t be needing their garments anymore either. Besides, he should probably have a look through their pockets to see if anything rang a bell. He moved to the largest gathering of bodies and took stock.

Most of the fallen sported whorls tracing fine lines across skin the color of coffee, or sea foam, or dull silver. They weren’t exactly human, but …

“Genasi,” he said, suddenly recognizing that most of them shared a particular heritage. Genasi were people whose bloodline had long ago mixed with the elements. He’d known a woman once with eyes like distant storm-clouds … but had she been a genasi? No, maybe not …

The memory slipped away like fish in dark water. He returned to his task.

He couldn’t get an accurate count of the dead because several were heaped in a pile. More than ten, but probably less than twenty; to satisfy himself, he’d have to sort them out later to get a precise total.

He also found a few corpses that were definitely not genasi. More demons, apparently.

Multi-limbed, some with arms ending in pincers instead of hands or claws, and some with tentacles. They all sported red incrustations similar to the dretch’s. The comportment of the dead suggested the people and demons died fighting each other in some kind of fever of violence.

A sacrifice gone bad, probably. If so, he was incredibly lucky to have survived it, especially since evidence suggested he’d been the designated guest of honor.

He nudged one of the dead demons with his sword tip. That touch was all it took; the demon evaporated, as did the limp forms of all its fellows. A particularly foul wind ruffled his hair, and when it died down, only the genasi’s bodies remained.

He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about demons and evaporating bodies until he had put together an outfit.

Many of the genasi wore long leather coats, dyed various shades of red, with the insignia of a burning spike blazoned on one shoulder. He didn’t recognize the sign. Not that it mattered. He was so cold he’d wear anything. Luckily, at least in this one respect, he had a wide selection to choose from.

He sorted through the articles showing the least number of cuts and blood splatters. He bent to relieve a man of his boots, then paused. He was reluctant to disturb the deceased. It felt somehow disrespectful.

The breeze picked up, triggering a shivering bout.

He forced his qualms aside. His need outweighed their dignity.

He liberated boots, a long shirt, and a pack stuffed with clean articles, including smallclothes and pants. Everything fit well enough, though the pants were a little short. He didn’t care. He pulled on each piece of clothing in turn, until he was finally warm, and covered.

Maybe he couldn’t remember where he was or who hated him so much that they’d brought him to be sacrificed, but at least his privates were no longer waving in the wind, and that was worth something.

His immediate needs met, he planted his posterior on the edge of the altar as the day brightened. He took several deep breaths, and closed his eyes.

Just think. There has to be an explanation. Even if it’s not one you want to hear.

He cast his mind back, trying to summon up some sort of clue …

And remembered being in the crowded hold of a sailing vessel, lit by the open cargo hatch overhead. He was strangling someone! His hands clutched a long scarf that was looped twice around the neck of a man in priest’s garb. The priest struggled to get air, his mouth gaping like a fish pulled from the net.

The man made one last frantic effort, kicking, twisting, trying anything and everything to get free.

It didn’t make a bit of difference; he’d caught the priest by surprise, and it could only end with the man’s death. But just to be sure, he pulled harder on the free ends of the scarf, grunting with the effort.

The priest’s life whispered away. The man fell to the ground, eyes wide in surprise at finding so unexpected a death. They stared, empty, lifeless … dead.

The memory faded.

He gasped, taking in a huge breath of air as if in sympathy for the man in his memory. He looked at his hands. He could still feel the scarf’s parchment-smooth texture, the man’s panicked fingers as they brushed and clawed at his face, and finally, the way all the tension and volition eased out of the man in a flowing moment …

“Merciful gods,” he whispered. He had strangled a priest!

He struggled to control his accelerated breathing by counting each breath. One, two, three, four—What the Hells had possessed him to …

A new memory prowled forward.

He was in an entirely different place. He didn’t have the strangler’s wrap this time. Instead, he gripped a sword that sported glyphs white as snow on one side of the blade, and red as blood on the other, brighter and entirely more real than the ones that had flickered half formed during his battle with the dretch.

A creature stood before him. It was like a man in shape, save for its head, which bristled with fur striped with predator’s camouflage. Its ears were demonic flaps, and horns leaped askew from its head. It wore man’s clothing, and clutched a black dagger, like a piece of the sky between the stars, in one oddly jointed hand. The creature was laughing at him.

It said, “Demascus. Surprised? Don’t worry, you won’t remember seeing me. You never do. Though, even I have to admit, your sin is almost unforgivable this time. You’re getting so close …”

Demascus’s lips quirked to throw back a smart remark, and the creature moved, more quickly than he had expected by far, more swiftly than he could grasp the reins of time and pull them—

The creature slid its dagger into his stomach.

The memory tattered to nothing and he gasped. He slapped one hand to his belly. He pulled up the borrowed shirt and examined his flesh.

He saw nothing to indicate evidence of such a lethal wound in his ash-pale skin.

It must have happened so long ago that he’d recovered from the injury, though obviously with the aid of some powerful curative. Otherwise some tiny hint of a scar would remain.

And why had the thing called him Demascus …

“By all that’s holy and sovereign, who am I?”