The second time had been eight years ago on his solitary springtime journey south with a branded cheek and a hard, sustaining anger. He had fallen asleep to the howling of wolves and awakened in moonlight to the sound of something roaring in the woods. He had heard an answering roar from nearer yet. Peering into a night made strange by the noises and the blue moon, Vargos had again seen something massive move at the forest’s edge and withdraw. He had lain awake, listening, but the roaring had not come again, and nothing else appeared at the limits of his sight as the blue moon swung west after the white one and then set, leaving a sky strewn with stars, and the distant wolves, and the murmuring of a dark stream beside him.
Twice, then, and uncertainty both times.
This time there was no doubt. The fear that went into Vargos lodged like a knife between two ribs. In fog and a damp cold on the Day of the Dead he stood in a stubbled field between the ancient Rhodian high road to Trakesia and the southernmost edgings of the infinitely more ancient forest and fell to his knees at what he saw on the road when the mist parted.
There was a dead man there. The others had already fled, and the dogs. Vargos saw that it was Pharus, the stablemaster from Morax’s. He lay flat on his back, limbs wide outflung like a child’s discarded doll. It could be seen-even from there-that his entrails were spilling out. Blood was spreading all around him. His belly and chest had been ripped apart.
But that wasn’t what drove Vargos to his knees as if felled by a blow. He had seen men die badly before. It was the other thing in the road.
The creature that had done this to the man. The zubir that was-Vargos knew this in that moment as he knew his own name-more than only an emblem, after all, however awesome that might be in itself. His ideas of faith and power crumbled in that cold muddy field.
He had adopted the teachings of the sun god, had worshipped and invoked Jad and Heladikos his son almost from the time he had first come south, forsaking the gods of his tribe and the blood-soaked rituals as he had forsaken his home.
And here now was the presence of Ludan, the Ancient One, the oak god, before him in a swirling away of greyness on the Imperial high road, in one of his known guises. Zubir. The bison. Lord of the forest.
And this was a god who demanded blood. And this was the day of sacrifice. Vargos’s heart was pounding. He saw that his hands were shaking and was not ashamed. Only afraid. A mortal man in a place where he should not have been.
The mist swirled again, fog wrapped the road like a cloak. The obliterating bulk of the bison was lost. And then it was not. It was, somehow, in the field right beside them, enormous and black, an overpowering presence, a rank smell of animal and blood, wet fur and rotting earth, leaving the dead man alone on the empty road, torn apart, his heart exposed to the day this was.
Her hand on the neck of the shuddering mule, Kasia saw the mist part, saw what had come to be in the road, and she went straight through her own fear and beyond in an instant.
In a kind of trance of unfeeling, she watched the fog descend again, and was utterly unsurprised when the zubir materialized in the field beside them. Vargos had fallen to his knees.
How, she thought, how should one be surprised at what a god could do? She realized suddenly that the donkey had stopped trembling and was standing very still, unnaturally so, given the smell and presence of the monstrous creature not ten paces away now. But what could be strange, what could be strange when one had strayed from a known road this far into the world of the powers? A bison stood before them, so big it would have blotted half the road from her sight if the road had not been lost. Three men could sit between the sharp, short curving of its horns. She saw blood on those horns, and streaky, viscous matter dripping slowly from them. She had seen the stablemaster in the road, ripped into meat.