Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [75]
And now Marysa’s gentle groans came down to him occasionally above the noise of the breeze.
In his hand he held up the heart of a pig. Blood dripped along his arm under his sleeve as he silently incanted an Ovinists’ mantra, the words forming in a hushed murmur on his lips.
I curse that man, he thought. Because he won’t promote me to the position I deserve, yet instead of solving Brother Ghuda’s death he’s wasting his time with that wife of his.
Yet all the time he pretends to be my friend.
In his semitrance, Tryst’s thoughts drifted, took control of things again. How had he got to be here, outside this house, in the middle of the night, so full of rage and jealousy?
As he reflected, memories came back to him, the ones of his youth, back when the summers seemed endless. The cottage just south of the city where his parents lived. His father, that colossal bearded man, a priest of Bohr, and an alcoholic, who abused both Tryst and his mother. His mother herself, small and fragile and beautiful, so undeserving of the hell his father brought home with him. Tryst loved her, wanted to protect her with every instinct of his being.
But to his father she meant nothing, because Bohr had become everything, a god Tryst could never see, and perhaps that was the reason why Tryst had become an Ovinist.
Because he excelled at his lessons, it was his mother who fought for him to stay at school as long as possible, even as his father’s drinking habits and bouts of violence worsened. She invested in him a sense of motivation, of freedom to get on in life, not to be held back by conditions. Perhaps some of her own fears laced her words. When she died of some mysterious illness, it destroyed his optimism. Strangely, it broke his father too, and Tryst didn’t expect that. So now that it turned out Tryst couldn’t expect any more promotions in the Inquisition, he thought back to those days constantly, relived those moments of helplessness again and again.
His mother had told him he was so clever he could achieve anything, and now Jeryd was stopping Tryst from achieving.
Tryst slid an ornamental dagger from his sleeve. He cut a slice of the pig’s heart, then took a bite to show his devotion to his new god—the one that had helped process his bad memories.
But he still could not do much about the problem of Jeryd.
Seething, he walked home, contemplating ways to hurt the investigator.
CHAPTER 15
VERAIN PULLED UP THE HOOD OF HER FULIGIN CAPE TO ESCAPE THE COLD wind that channeled through the passageways of Villjamur as if it was chasing her, haunting her like a relentless ghost.
As she continued on her way, old men leered at her from hidden doorways, called out to her with degrading suggestions. Some were so drunk they were falling against the walls yet even then they were requesting sexual favors. She had half a mind to use a relic to castrate them—at least that ought to cut short their fantasies. She merely flashed a short sword by their faces as she passed, but their voices continued to pursue her long after she had gone. Otherwise there were only the cats infesting the alleyways, but she actually appreciated their company.
She felt so isolated now. She was going to betray her lover.
For that’s how Dartun would see it, there was no hiding from the truth. He would scarcely care if she left him for another man. He scarcely ever had sex with her, certainly never bought her gifts. It wasn’t as though she wanted much, just some vague show of affection—was that too much to ask? But that wasn’t the reason she was about to betray him.
Over the past year, she had seen him become obsessed with his projects, even down to little things that kept him from interacting with others for days. Somehow he had retreated into his mind, and become totally self-obsessed with his plans to step across the threshold of the world. He was going to tamper with the very nature of reality by opening a gate to another realm and