GRP Chapter 3

There was a man watching that crowd's adulation as though the whole scene were a play put on for his benefit.

He stood in a dark alley set apart from the sunlit plaza, back against the wall, arms crossed. A quiet laugh escaped him.

‘The Thul’Mhoriae. Same as Ryvalle zealots.’

Seeing it this way, he thought he could almost understand how the Ryvalle giant god had felt. Humans who prostrated themselves and begged to be saved, when nobody had asked them to. A stone in the gutter would have been better. Both were irritating, but at least the stone had no mouth.

The giant god had made diligent use of those foolish people. Garthe wanted to sweep them out of his sight. The more dangerous one was him—and yet the people who attached grandiose titles to him, “great hero” and “guardian chosen by the gods,” while looking at someone like that, could produce nothing in him but a laugh.

Garthe reached into his coat and took out a pipe. In his empty hand a small flame flickered up and began to burn red the dry herbs packed into the bowl. He drew the smoke in slowly and exhaled. A harsh smoke seeped into him, deep. The herbs had powerful numbing, sedating, and hallucinogenic properties—and still the terrible pain that seemed to be splitting his body apart from the inside did not ease even slightly. He exhaled. The corner of his mouth moved slightly.

A disease would have been preferable. But no prominent physician, no priest of considerable healing ability, no god with mysterious power had ever managed to cure Garthe. There had been a few occasions where it had eased for a time. No cause was known. No cure existed. It only grew stronger as time passed. There was no other word for it. A curse.

All the mysteries of this world were legacies of the Ancient Divine Age. Whatever the curse was, it would be connected to ancient power. Garthe had subdued monsters and gods. He had tracked down ancient ruins and sacred relics. But none of them held the answer. No one had been able to save him.

Thousands of gods couldn’t save one man. And these people wanted a mortal to save the world. He was willing to swear he’d never seen anything more ridiculous. He pressed at the ache behind his eyes and let a laugh out.

"Oh my—oh me, oh my! Good lord—Mother Goddess!”

With a burst of exclamations, a woman came tumbling into the alley. She appeared to have been caught up in the festival parade and spat out of it. She went down spectacularly and couldn't get up right away. The embarrassment seemed to be part of the problem. Garthe kicked her walking stick lightly from where it had rolled to his feet. It rolled until it reached her hand. Finding it no longer possible to ignore the situation, the woman jumped to her feet.

"Thank you for the help."

"Think nothing of it," Garthe said, his voice easy.

The woman tucked the walking stick under her arm and patted down a robe embroidered all over with various ancient patterns and characters in the ancient divine tongue. Garthe took one look at that robe and tilted his head slightly. In his experience, no one who wore a robe like that—ancient patterns, script from the divine tongue stitched into every hem—had ever said anything worth hearing.

Right on cue, the woman finished adjusting her dress, lowered her eyes to a calm and composed angle, and produced a serene smile. It was the expression people with no particular insight would mistake for "somehow mysterious." She did not look like the same woman who had been flailing about just moments ago, going oh my—oh me, oh my! Good lord—Mother Goddess!

"Do you hear it?"

The nonsense started.

"You don't. This whispering of the wind..."

The woman reached into the air, vaguely, as though stroking a passing breeze. What a scene. Garthe exhaled a thin stream of smoke.

"This wind is the very wind that brought me to you."

What actually happened: a crowd heading to a different plaza spat her out on the way. They had been in full view of each other the whole time. And yet the woman had quite a nerve.

"Shhh—no need to be startled. The truth is... I am a person possessed of a very particular power."

Not one deviation from the script. She was exactly the type commonly found at festivals like this.

"I can see countless things that others cannot see."

She was a con artist working the crowds who’d come in for the festival. Some people called her sort fortune tellers or prophets.

"This morning, when the wind woke me, I thought to myself: for some reason, I have a good feeling about today. I drew my cards and the result was the same. Today, I said, would be a day of extraordinary luck. The moment I saw you, I was certain that feeling was right."

"That doesn't seem quite right, if you ask me."

Garthe answered without interest. She said she'd had an inexplicable good feeling—whatever it was, it wasn't about him.

"In the cool wind that surrounds you, I see something. Yes—perhaps I was brought here precisely to say this! Heavens, such a vivid premonition as this—!"

From time to time people were born who could read memories from the distant ancient past, or foretell the future. Depending on the region they were called temple priests, shamans, prophets, fortune tellers. There were no small number of factions who trusted these remarkable abilities and kept such people close to help decide matters great and small. But in reality, half of them confused their own fantasies with actual future events, and the other half talked their way out of false predictions with nonsense about "countless variables that intervened..."

"You must listen carefully to what I am about to say. You will, in the near future—"

Trouble at home. A great illness. The end of the world. That was the direction this was going. If the disaster didn’t come, they’d say you’d avoided it by preparing. Or that it was lucky the prediction was wrong.

"—you will meet the other half of your soul!"

The woman's cheeks went pink. Garthe looked at her in silence.

'Well. An innovative approach.'

"I can feel a flutter in my heart, a rush of excitement! Yes—she will come to you like the wind, and she will be the fate you have been searching for your whole life! The long suffering of waiting is over!"

She had no idea she was standing in front of a slaughterer. Blushing. A vein rose at his temple and vanished. His jaw muscle jumped. Something thick moved in his neck. The pain had spiked—sudden, hard.

One of his eyes reddened. But the woman didn't notice any of it. From the moment they met until now, he had been leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, wearing an expression that gave nothing away.

The fate she was preaching didn’t reach him. Under the pain—the kind that felt like being unmade piece by piece—his reason was ground to nothing. What remained was anger. Hostility. No particular target. Just whatever was in front of him. The wind that touched him. The noise of people talking. The smell of food from the street. Everything.

There was one more reason he called this particular thing a curse. Curses tended to put in danger not only the person they had been laid on, but everyone around them, didn't they?

Garthe looked at the woman with his reddened eye. Then he narrowed his gaze, the way a smile sits, to cover the killing intent. He flicked ash and walked over. Unhurried.

He stopped in front of her and looked at her throat.

A long moment passed.

"Well, then," he said, "where is this fate of mine? Can you tell me that much? Where I should be going?"

His voice came out rough. Dry.

"For every one who asks, there is one who can answer."

The woman muttered something under her breath—a garbled attempt at the ancient divine tongue, performing the ritual. A breeze moved through the alley. She opened the hand she had been holding the walking stick with. No mysterious phenomena. No flash of light, no stick drifting upward. It just dropped. A dull, unremarkable sound. The stick hit a stone on its way down and rolled off in a different direction.

North. It happened, by coincidence, to be pointing at Garthe's next destination.

Between the four directions, the odds of any one being right were one in four. With odds like that, it wouldn't be unusual for coincidences like this to happen every so often. Her eye for marks was terrible. Her instincts for the job itself weren’t bad. Garthe looked at the walking stick quietly, then ran a hand through his hair and let a short laugh out. He reached into his coat and held out something to the woman. A lump of gold the size of a fist.

The woman's posture changed immediately.

"You're a god, sir! Ask me anything you want to know!"

Proper blasphemy. Garthe stepped past her, resting one hand briefly on her shoulder, and brought his face close. His voice, half-laughing, settled near her ear.

"You really are lucky today."

After Garthe left, the woman opened the eyes she had been keeping half-lowered, stared, and grabbed the gold.

“A jackpot. An absolute jackpot.”

She bit the gold, checked the dent it left. Her eyes went wet at the corners.

The customer really is a god. And gods are always right. What a lucky day.

Mariaeks's days were simple.

"My lady."

"My lady, wake up!"

When her two faithful attendants draw back the curtain—riddled with holes as it is—she rises.

“The color in your face today, my lady—extraordinary!”

"Even just woken, you are like a painting."

She washes her face in water that still has ice floating in it, listening to the day’s compliments—different ones, every day.

"Today we've simmered reindeer meat with medicinal herbs, yak's milk, and wine."

"Good for you and delicious both, I think?"

And she eats the meal her two faithful attendants have made with everything they have.