chest and down his belly, though it wasn’t there now.
And he remembered the blades. Cutting him. His skin
tearing away—
Cold sweat slicked his skin.
Yeah. That was a memory he could do without.
Chanting. There’d been chanting. And a voice he
ought to know. A voice hedidknow. Whose? The
memory danced away, beyond his reach.
188
SINS OF THE HEART
He kept his gaze locked on the horizon. Lifting his
brows and widening his eyes, he tried to focus. Time
passed, unmeasured, barely marked. And then there
was something there. In the distance. A dark spot. It
shifted and grew, sliding away from the line that demarcated sky and water, moving toward him.
Slowly, the spot took on shape and form. A
longboat, both bow and stern high and curved. There
were neither oars nor oarsmen, only a solitary figure
balanced in the center, dark garbed and cowled,
standing with a long, narrow pole in its hands.
A river.
A boat.
And, of course, a ferryman. There just had to be a
ferryman.
Lokan pressed his palms hard against his thighs and
struggled to his feet, swaying in place as the boat
moved noiselessly toward him, finally gliding up to
beach the bow on the sloping concrete. He could make
out details now: The grain of the wood. The smell, like
a basement that’d had a slow leak for years. The fact
