Malthumalbaen sighed. "Is that all you think about? Your belly?" He shoved his brother toward the far door. "Don't you know anything about honor, 'bout doing what's right for rightness's sake?"

"Still, a few haresaIf you'd rather not have yours, I'll be happy toa""

"Ock, that's not the point. Mother surely dropped you on your head."

Their argument faded into grumbled snatches as they left the kennels.

Alone, Brant pulled the door closed behind him and sank to a crouch. The cubbies stared at him. Two pairs of eyes reflected the torchlight beyond. Brant noted a pile of spoor in one corner. It was runny and loose.

"Goat's milk is not your mamma's, is it?" Brant whispered.

A growl answered him. He caught a ripple of teeth.

Ignoring the threat, Brant sidled closer, then sank cross-legged into the hay. He would wait them out. Let his scent push through the pall of shite and hound piss.

After a long moment, a snarling nose peeked out of the coat, curious but wary.

"Do you recognize my smell?"

The small cubbie lowered its muzzle to the ground, ears flattened. It was the little she-wolf, braver than her brother. She edged out a whisker at a time in his direction. Her brother shadowed her. Brant saw how the male, more cautious, studied him, first from one side of his sister, then the other. Though he lacked his sister's bravado, he made up with wits and cunning.

Brant had rested a hand in the hay. The little she-wolf, bristling with black fur, stretched her neck to sniff at a nail. Satisfied, she crept farther, circling out a bit, still wary.

Then she lunged and snapped into the meat of his thumb. She stayed latched, growling. Brant could guess she was the one who had wounded Malthumalbaen. Brant simply waited her out.

Finally she let go and pulled back.

"It's all right," he said. "I probably deserve it."

Her hackles slowly lowered. She sank to her belly and wiggled forward again. A small pink tongue licked at the droplets of blood raised by her milk teeth. A whine escaped her, apologetic.

The male slipped from the den and joined his sister, licking at Brant's thumb. Once his finger was clean, the pair were soon sniffing him all around, exploring his nooks and corners.

He watched them, his heart heavy.

After a few moments more, they grew bored with his presence. The male returned to the coat, grabbing it by a sleeve and tugging on it. Such housekeeping plainly angered his sister. She grabbed the other sleeve, fighting with determined growls.

Brant sighed. Maybe he should have left them to the storm. Had it been any true kindness rescuing them? Into what sort of life were they headed? Still, it was life. As long as their hearts beat, the future was never set in stone.

Not theirs, not his.

He pondered the strange storm again. Even he had begun to wonder if he had not merely caught the contagious panic of the animals. Maybe it was just the extra cold spooking the beasts. Still, he remembered the ice in the air, the cold flesh of that hare, dropped in midleap.

No.

Something unnatural had been cloaked in the storm.

But what? And more importantly, why?

The storm had blown itself out of Oldenbrook and now rolled south toward the distant sea. In another day or two it would be gone from these lands. Perhaps it would always remain a mystery. He thought he had sidestepped it, but maybe that had been a delusion. Maybe it still held him in its grip.

Maybe it always had.

Brant clutched the stone at his throat, rolled to him by the dying breath of a rogue god.

How much freedom did any of them have?

SECOND.

CASTLE IN A STORM.

Blood to open the way.

Seed or menses to bless.

Sweat to imbue Tears to swell Saliva to ebb.

Phlegm to manifest Yellow bile to gift And black to take it all away.

a"Litany of Nine Graces.

5.

A GATHERING OF RAVENS.

KATHRYN KNOCKED ON THE DOOR, CONCERNED. SHE HAD NOT heard from Gerrod Rothkild for over a full day. The last she had spoken to him was when Rogger had appeared at her own door, bearing the strange talisman of a rogue god's skull.

Then nothing.

Not word, nor note.

Such silence was unlike Gerrod. Especially now. In the past day, Tashijan had swelled to bursting as retinues from all the god-realms of the First Land had arrived. But more importantly, Tylar ser Noche was due here before evening bells. With such an event pending, Kathryn had spent the morning pacing her hermitage. It had been a year since she had last seen Tylar. Certainly they'd shared messages by raven and scroll, but their duties after the Battle of Myrrwood kept them both too busy for a casual visit.

And casual was certainly beyond either of them.

Even now.

Her hands wrung at her belly. They had once been betrothed, certain to marry, sharing a bed already, first as a dalliance between knights, finally with a deeper stirring of the heart. Then Tylar had been accused of murder and broken vows. Kathryn's own testimony before the adjudicators had gone a long way toward damning him to the slave ships of Trik and the bloody circuses that followed, where he was broken in limb and spirit. But his guilt had been fabricated from the start. He had been a blind piece in a greater game, used to weaken Tashijan and its former warden, Ser Henri.

And the cost had not fallen solely upon Tylar.

Kathryn still remembered the blood in her bed, the lost child, limbs as small as birds' wings, expelled from her body by grief and heartache. It was this final loss that had driven her down here at that time, into self-exile, away from the staring eyes and whispers, betrothed to a murderer.

But Tylar's only crime had been some gray dealings, traffic below the table with some sordid characters from his past, done at first to raise coin for the city's orphanages, where both she and he had been raised. But after a time, a few silver yokes had ended up in Tylar's own pocket. It was a familiar slide. Still, the murder of the cobbler's family was not Tylar's doing, despite the blood on his own sword. It took the death of two godsa"Meeryn, who blessed Tylar as she lay dying, and the naethryn-possessed Chrism, whom Tylar had slaina"to finally clear his name.

All should have been made right.

But it hadn't been.

The pair remained lost to each other, bitter. Anger and guilt had rooted too deeply, becoming as much a part of them as their own bones. If Tylar hadn't started his underhanded dealings with the Gray Traders, soiling his cloakaif I had trusted his professions of innocence to murderaif only I'd told him of our childa And though they had stumbled over words of forgiveness to each other, the words were spoken with the tongue and not the heart.

At least not yet.

But now Tylar was returning.

Kathryn knocked again, needing to consult Gerrod, ever her counselor. Long ago, Gerrod had helped lift her back into her life after she fell down here the first time. She trusted no one more, not even herself.

A coarse bark answered her. "I'm not to be disturbed!"

"Gerrod!" Kathryn called through the door. She leaned close, keeping her voice low. She had come buried in her shadowcloak, shying from others. Even now, Grace flowed through the blessed cloth to hide her among the shadows.

"Kathryna?"

"Yes!"

She heard steps approach, and a latch scraped back. The door swung open. Gerrod pulled it just wide enough for her to enter, but no more.

"Hurry," he urged her.

She thought at first the master's furtiveness was because he had shed his armor's helmet, exposing his pale and tattooed flesh. Gerrod preferred to keep his true face hidden.

He closed the door behind her, leaned an ear against the wood, then stepped away. "Hesharian knows I'm dabbling in something secret. He's already visited twice this morning."

"Does he know about the skull?"

Gerrod shook his head and clanked over with a whir of mekanicals to the far side of his chamber.

Kathryn caught the whiff of burning black bile, which even the sweet scent of myrrh boiling on his braziers could not mask. She also noted the state of his room. Normally Gerrod was fastidious in his upkeep, but the four bronze braziers in the corners of the rooma"in the fanciful shapes of eagle, skreewyrm, wolfkit, and tygera"were blackened with smoke, and piles of ash lay unswept beneath them. At his wide desk, a teetering stack of ancient tomes covered the surface, some open, others facedown, spines bent. In one corner, a stack of scrolls had spilled to the floor, and a candle had burnt to a slagged puddle of wax with a wan flame floating in the middle.

Her friend looked just as wasted, sustained by as weak a fire.

She doubted he had slept at all since acquiring the skull.

"I think Hesharian grows suspicious of my studies," Gerrod said. "The last time he appeared on my doorstep, he came with a strange milky-eyed master named Orquell. The man hails from Ghazal, where he has been studying among the Clerics of Naeth of that volcanic land."

Kathryn was well familiar with the cult of Naeth. Unlike most of Myrillia, the followers shunned any worship of the aethryn, the sundered part of the gods that had fled high and away into the aether, never to be heard from again. The Clerics of Naeth sought communion with the naethryn, the undergods, through strange practices and acts of blood sacrifice. While no one had been able to prove it, if ever there was a ready source of Cabalists, it would be found there. But as the followers rarely left their subterranean lairs, they seemed harmless enough, for now.

"Why did this master come here?" Kathryn asked, suspicious of anyone associated with such clerics.

"Summoned, I hearda"by Hesharian."

Kathryn frowned.

"They've spent some time up in the Warden's Eyrie. Behind closed doors."

Kathryn suddenly remembered. "Dart mentioned such a mana"

Gerrod nodded. "From such meetings, I can fathom why Hesharian has summoned this master from Ghazal."

"Why?"

"Because of Symon ser Jaklar, the warden's best man, turned to stone by Argent's corrupted sword. Hesharian still keeps the man's body in some secret hole. But to lift the curse would surely raise our esteemed master's statusa"at least within the eyes of the Eyrie."

Gerrod finally waved the matter away. "But that is not why you came down here, was it? You came to inquire about the skull." He turned toward the arched opening that led into his alchemical study. The thick ironwood doors were open, and the scent of bile emanated from within.

"You must see this," he said and disappeared through the archway.

Kathryn followed him into his study, where the smell of black bile was riper. The windowless room beyond had been carved into an oval. In the center was a scarred greenwood table with a complicated apparatus of bronze-and-mica-glass tubing above it, attached to the arched stone roof. All around, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with cabinets, shelves, niches, and nooks. At the far end rose Gerrod's repostilum, a mosaic of blessed glass cubes, each die no wider than a thumb, eight hundred in number, containing drops of each of the eight humours from all hundred of the original settled gods, an alchemical storehouse of great wealth.

Gerrod crossed to the center table. "I may have discovered some answers, but each revelation only begat another mystery."

In the center of the table rested the misshapen skull.

Gerrod had painted its surface with black bile, so artfully that it looked carved of the warding Grace. The only spot not covered was a perfect circle on the top of the skull. The jaundiced bone looked pitted there as if eaten by caustic oils.

Kathryn knew it hadn't been oils that ate the bonea"but Grace-rich humours. Positioned directly over the skull was a bronze-and-mica spigot, draining from the apparatus above. The device was used for mixing humours in alchemical experiments.

"Here is the most intriguing discovery." Gerrod reached forward and delicately turned a bronze key. From the tip of the mica tubing, a single drop of humour welled and clung precariously. "I've used a trickle of phlegm to bind blood and tears. Watch this."

The drop fell from the spigot and struck the skull. It rang most peculiarly, as if the bone were some sort of stone bell. The sound echoed for a breath as if trapped within the walls of the study and seeking a means to escape. Kathryn felt its passage almost like a wind. Her cloak trembled from her body, ever so slightly, lifting away, then settling back.

As the echo faded, silence settled over the room, heavier than a moment before.

She stepped away. "What was that?"

Gerrod waved a hand through the air as if wafting something foul away. "The humoursa"blood, tears, even the phlegma"all came from Cassal of High Dome."

"A god of air," Kathryn said. All the gods, while varying in the cast of their humours, could be relatively separated into four aspects: loam, water, fire, and air.

"Exactly," Gerrod said.

"But what made that sound?"

Gerrod nodded. "I don't think made is the right word. I think the sound was already there, trapped in the bones of the skull, bound down into its mineral matrix. It is hard to believe, I know, but you must first understand that our bones are not pure stone, like some might imagine. There is flesh in there, too. If you leach away the minerals, you can reveal the flesh within. And in this skull there remains the desiccated flesh of a rogue god."

Kathryn felt a sick unease.

"I believe the alchemy of air unbound some corrupted Grace still trapped in that flesh. An echo of power."