GRP Chapter 3

There was, set apart from all of this, a man watching the crowd as though it were a theater performance.

Deep in a dark alley far removed from the sunlit square. Back against the wall, arms folded, the man let out a low, quiet laugh. He was Garthe—the great hero whom all of Thul'Mhoriae praised.

'Didn't expect to see the same things Ryvalle's fanatics get up to here in Thul'Mhoriae as well....'

Seeing this almost made him understand the Giant God of Ryvalle's perspective. Humans prostrating themselves without being asked, begging to be saved. The stones rolling underfoot were preferable. Both were irritating, but at least the stones had no mouths.

The giant god had made clever use of his foolish followers. Garthe wanted to sweep them out of his sight. By that reckoning, he was the more dangerous of the two—and watching these same people attach grand titles to someone like himself, "great hero," "guardian chosen by the gods," all he could do was laugh.

Garthe drew the pipe from his coat and put it to his lips. A small flame snapped up from his bare hand and began to burn the dry poison herb packed in the bowl to a dim red. He drew the smoke in slowly and breathed it out. The acrid fumes seeped deep into his body. The herb carried strong anesthetic, sedative, and hallucinogenic properties—and still did absolutely nothing for the terrible pain carving him apart from the inside. Garthe smiled faintly, his brow pressing down in the middle.

If it had been an illness, he'd have preferred that. But distinguished physicians, priests with extraordinary healing ability, even gods of wondrous power—none of them had been able to cure him. There had been a handful of temporary remissions. No cause had been identified. No treatment existed. It only grew stronger with time. There was no word adequate to describe it but curse.

Every mystery in this world was a legacy of the Ancient Divine Age. Whatever the curse was, it must be connected to that ancient power. He had gone out subjugating monsters and gods, hunting down ancient ruins and relics. But no place had held the answer. Not a single person had been able to save him.

In a world where thousands of omnipotent gods couldn't save one human being, the humans of Thul'Mhoriae expected a mere mortal hero to save the entire world. He would swear he'd never witnessed anything more laughable. He pressed the corner of his eye and laughed.

"Oh my—oh my, oh my! My goodness! O' Mother Goddess!"

A woman came tumbling into the alley with great commotion. She appeared to have been swept up in the festival procession and flung out the other end. She had fallen dramatically and couldn't get up easily. Embarrassed, it seemed. Garthe gave a light kick to the staff that had rolled to his feet. It went rolling back and reached her hand. Cornered into facing the situation, she scrambled to her feet.

"Thank you for your help."

Garthe returned a cool "Don't mention it." The woman tucked the staff under her arm and brushed off her robe, which was embroidered all over with various ancient symbols and ancient divine script. Garthe tilted his head to one side when he noticed it. In his experience, people who wore robes like that never said anything worth hearing.

Sure enough, once she had tidied herself, the woman lowered her eyes and produced a quiet, serene smile. The kind of expression that an ordinary person might mistake for somehow mysteriously otherworldly. She looked nothing like the person who had just been shrieking "Oh my—oh my, oh my! My goodness! O' Mother Goddess!" only moments before.

"Do you hear it?"

And the nonsense began.

"This whisper in the wind..."

She reached out into the empty air in a dreamy, searching gesture, as if caressing something passing through it. Well, here we go. Garthe exhaled smoke with a faint pfft.

"This wind is what brought me to you."

What had actually brought her was the crowd that had surged off to watch the play in the other square, jostling her along until they'd spat her out. Both of them had been there and seen the same thing—and still she managed to say it with remarkable shamelessness.

"Shh— no need to be startled. The truth is... I am someone gifted with very special powers."

Just as expected. She was the kind of person who appeared at every festival like this.

"I can see a great many things invisible to other eyes."

A traveling con artist, working the newcomers flooding into the capital. Some people called them fortune tellers or prophets.

"This morning, when the wind woke me, I thought: I have a good feeling about today, for no reason I can name. I cast the divination and it told me the same thing. That today would bring extraordinary luck. The moment I saw you, I knew the feeling had been right."

"I doubt that."

Garthe answered without much interest. Whatever good feeling had arrived without apparent cause, it almost certainly had nothing to do with him.

"I can see something in the cool wind surrounding you. Yes— perhaps I was sent to this very spot to say it! Good heavens, such a vivid vision!"

Every so often, people were born who could read fragments of ancient memory from afar, or speak prophecy of what was to come. Each region had a different name for them—oracle, shaman, prophet, fortune teller. Some groups trusted their strange gifts enough to keep them close and let them weigh in on matters large and small. In practice, though, half of them were people confusing their own dreams with the future, and the other half were people who smoothed over failed prophecies with "so many variables intervened..."

"You would do well to listen carefully to what I'm about to say. You, in the near future, will..."

There would be ill fortune waiting at home, a great sickness coming, the end of the world approaching— that was the predictable pattern. Prophesying bad luck was safe because if the misfortune didn't arrive, the explanation was always ready: you prepared in advance, so you were able to escape it— or better still, thank the gods the prophecy turned out to be wrong.

"You will meet the other half of your soul!"

The woman's cheeks flushed pink. Garthe looked at her without expression. A new kind of con artist.

"A racing heart, a rush of pure excitement—I can feel it! Yes, she will arrive like the wind, the one you have spent your whole life searching for! Your long, painful wait is over!"

She was squealing and going bashful in front of someone who had killed considerable numbers of people, apparently without the slightest awareness of the fact. A vein rose briefly at Garthe's temple and disappeared. The muscle along his jaw worked hard. Thick veins pressed out along his neck. The pain had sharpened without warning.

As he endured it, one of his eyes turned red. But the woman noticed none of this. From the moment they'd faced each other until now, he'd stood with arms folded, wearing an ambiguous smile that revealed nothing.

The "destiny" she was preaching reached him as sound and nothing more. His reason was being ground down along with the agony tearing through every part of his body. What remained was only rage and hostility. The emotion had no clear object. Just whatever was in front of him—the wind that touched him—the loud sound of people's voices—the smell of food drifting from the street.

Everything. All of it.

There was one more reason this relentless pain deserved to be called a curse. Curses, as a rule, endangered not only the one they afflicted, but everything in their vicinity as well.

Garthe looked at the woman through his reddened eye. He narrowed his gaze to conceal the killing intent, and smiled. He knocked the ash from his pipe and walked toward her with long, deliberate steps.

He came to a stop directly in front of her. He looked at her slender throat.

A long moment passed. Then he spoke.

"All right, then. So where would my destiny be... can you tell me that? Where I should go?"

His voice had gone dry, ground rougher than before.

"If there is one who asks, there must also be one who answers."

The woman mumbled over her staff in a rambling imitation of ancient divine speech. When the wind shifted, she opened the hand gripping the staff. There was no flash of light, no mystical hovering in the air—the staff simply fell to the ground with an anticlimactic tap. It struck a stone on the way down and rolled in a new direction. North. Which happened to already be Garthe's next destination.

One of four directions. One-in-four odds — which meant a coincidence like this came up often enough. Her eye for marks was terrible, but her instincts were reasonably good. Garthe watched the staff for a moment, then pushed his hair back and laughed. He reached into his coat and handed the woman something. A gold nugget the size of a fist.

The woman reversed herself without delay.

"You are a god, sir! Ask me anything—anything at all!"

That was proper blasphemy. Garthe passed her by, resting his hand briefly on her shoulder as he leaned his face close. A voice edged with a smile settled near her ear.

"You really are lucky."

After Garthe left, the woman opened her half-lowered eyes wide and took the gold in both hands.

"Incredible.... What a customer!"

She bit the gold and checked the dent it left. Her eyes grew wet.

A customer is, a god. And gods are always right. It really had been a lucky day.

Mariaeks's daily routine was simple.

"My lady."

"My lady, time to wake!"

When the two faithful attendants pulled aside the curtain full of holes, she woke.

"You're so lovely today as well!"

"Even freshly woken, you look like a painting."

She listened to praises that changed slightly from day to day and washed with ice-cold water.

"Today we tried cooking reindeer meat together with herbs, yak milk, and wine."

"It should be good for you and taste good too, shouldn't it?"

And she ate the meal prepared with great devotion by the two faithful attendants.