“Antal?” Fi asked.
His lips pulled into a snarl. “There’s another daeyari here.”
The air creaked, boots shifting on snow, grips tightening on crossbows.
“A daeyari?” Fi said. “Who? Where?”
Before Antal could answer, a roar sounded from the village.
Part Four
The daeyari worship no gods that we know of.
Objectively, the beginning of the pact between mortals and daeyari marked a new exchange of knowledge, the end of the old pantheons once worshipped by humankind. Daeyari, with their wider grasp of Planes and the Void between, put stock in no divinities. Why should we?
But, although the daeyari acknowledge no official theology, they do all speak of Veshri, the first immortal. Veshri, the weaver, who created his body out of nothing.
Veshri, who watches from the Void.
—Excerpt from a doctoral thesis, Summer Plane College of History and Antiquities,On the decline of the Great Beast pantheon on the Season-Locked Planes
36
No one invited you
Let Fi stay in that dawn-lit training field outside of Nyskya. Let her worst worries be Boden’s critique of her love life. Let her be back home in bed, wrapped in arms and furs, the cruel world kept at a safe distance a little longer.
But she recognized the roar that went up from the village. It sank into her chest like a Void-deep chill.
Fi emerged from a teleport with a gasp, Antal’s hand clasping hers, boots slipping against snow in disorientation and haste. He’d brought them near the center of town, a pathway between residences. Cold hung sharp in the alley. Frost curling Fi’s breath. She and Antal pressed themselves to the closest wall of snow-chaffed timber to watch and listen.
The roar didn’t come again. Nyskya lay silent.
Too silent.
Like a forest gone quiet in the wake of a predator.
Antal sniffed the air. Here was another side of him Fi rarely saw: the hunter stalking prey. He dropped to a crouch, all tense muscles and swaying tail as he peered around the corner. At his nod, Fi followed.
She didn’t have a daeyari’s phantom footfalls, but she’d spent a decade avoiding sight when needed, careful steps to skirt trade warden patrols. They slunk behind the dark windows of thegeneral store, into a yard hectic with ice-crusted scrap barrels and tarped firewood. Fi crouched behind a fence and peered through the slats.
The village “square” was a generous name for an avenue at the heart of Nyskya, cut a couple of strides wider than other roads in town and kept better shoveled. A staging area for visiting merchants or drunken revelry during the sunless months. Even at this early hour, some residents ought to be trudging the path, off to open shops or check traps. Yet the expanse was empty.
Nearly.
Through the gap in the fence, Fi caught a heart-stopping glimpse of white skin against snow. Black antlers more twisted than wind-wracked pine boughs. A hairless, pantherine body.
Venom pooled in her stomach.
It was here. Verne’s Beast washere.
The derived daeyari was a nightmare in any setting, yet to see the creature stalking Nyskya’s main avenue, to watch its hollow red eyes sweep familiar windows and silent doorsteps, speared panic through Fi’s sternum. Not here. Not now,when all their preparations had been going so well.
“Oyzen,” Antal cursed, snarling at the sight of his deformed kin.
The creature didn’t come alone.
Astrid led the march, a crossbow propped on her shoulder, slow strides entirely too insolent for someone with an immortal Beast at her back. Yet the creature heeled to her like a trained hound: skeletal head hung low, steps measured to her pace.
