GRP Chapter 9

"A slight sting, and then..."

"A sting, and then?"

"Did the blockage finally clear?"

Samthyeon's face twisted. Garthe exhaled a refreshed breath and drew the dagger out in one clean pull. Blood welled in surges from the wound—and then sealed over without a trace, as though it had never been. Garthe stripped off his blood-soaked shirt, tore a handsome tapestry from the wall, and used it to wipe himself clean.

To have stabbed a holy relic—one whose mere graze had once claimed lives—directly into one's own heart, and to look, of all things, refreshed afterward. Samthyeon watched the calm, unhurried cleanup and exhaled slowly. The breath was born partly from relief, and it contained, also, the disappointment of having failed yet again.

'He carries that impressive epithet — The Slayer of Gods.'

Garthe smiled coldly, eyes dulled like a dead fish's. His body carried the smell of ash—like a bonfire that's all burned out, only smoke remaining.

'Can you kill me?'

After taking that hand, Samthyeon had tried to kill Garthe by every method he could devise. Garthe did not die when his throat was cut, nor when he fell from a great height, nor after three months without food, nor when he drowned, nor when he burned, nor when he took poison. Only after every approach had been tried, and every one had failed, did Samthyeon understand why Garthe had come to him. Ordinary means could not bring Garthe to death. What was needed was his particular ability—the ability to forge weapons against things that defied divine providence. Because Garthe himself was something that defied divine providence. But today, again, it was a failure.

"It seems you have more attachment to life than I expected, my lord."

Garthe's expression shifted briefly—something close to a smile. "Is that so?"

He stretched out along the chaise longue and brought the pipe to his lips. The pain appeared to be intensifying. There was nothing more Samthyeon could give him. He had neither broken the curse nor managed to kill him. Enduring the pain was Garthe's alone to do. Samthyeon turned and took hold of the door handle.

"Samthyeon."

Garthe called out as Samthyeon moved to leave. Samthyeon turned and looked at him. With eyes closed, Garthe held a flame to the pipe. The acrid smell occupied the room in an instant. His voice rang through it—faint, as if dissolving into the smoke.

"Tell everyone to stay away."

Today I might accidentally kill someone. With those words as his last, Samthyeon closed the door behind him and left.

The candlestick broke. The candle rolled across the floor. The faint flame on the wick died, leaving nothing but a thread of smoke. The room went dark. Garthe breathed out slowly inside it. The curse's periodic intensification had come—the kind that visited only occasionally, but came down harder each time. His nerves, already blade-edged, had sharpened further still.

Whiiiii. Wind breathed through the gap in the window.

Listening to it, Garthe recalled the death screams of the gods and monsters who had perished under his hands.

'You filthy, greedy wretch who covets the works of gods—upon you, a curse of death...'

'I shall lay upon you a curse that takes even your life!'

He rested his forehead against the back of his hand and let a laugh come out, quiet and without warmth. By then, Garthe had already been under the most agonizing curse that existed. The thing they imagined to be the most terrible fate a human could face— 'death' —was made laughable by what he actually carried. He could not die. He could not age. The pain could not leave. He would suffer alive for years, for centuries. The long life ahead would be the same. Perhaps forever.

A journey wandering without signposts. Not knowing where the destination was, or even whether a destination existed at all. Arriving where one wanted to go was too difficult a thing. Unless an unexpected stroke of luck found you.

Unexpected luck.

A dry laugh escaped him. It was the fraud fortune-teller's idiotic prophecy that had surfaced in his mind. You will meet the other half of your soul. The long waiting and suffering—they will end. The kind of thing that would apply to anyone, phrased just plausibly enough.

Decades ago, perhaps he might have believed it. There had been a time when he carried something called expectation within him, and even a vague prophecy would have felt like a thread of hope he'd been waiting for all along. This time it would be real. This time he would truly find it. Flailing in groundless, easy faith.

Occasionally there came a moment of putting hope's light right before one's eyes. And then one reached out. The result was always the same. Only after the fall did he understand it had been an illusion. Something experienced countless times, long ago.

The fall had no bottom. He'd ended up buried in the deep mire, far underground. Hundreds, thousands of falls, and now there was no mire left to fall into. Even a place gathering every filth and refuse in the world would be paradise compared to here. In this place where not even light entered, there were no more illusions left to grasp.

Garthe stared into the darkness. At that moment, moonlight seeped in through the window and the room grew faintly bright. The especially strong wind had apparently driven the clouds away. Clunk—the window rattled sharply.

Then cold air swept inside. Garthe turned his head toward the open window. At the long narrow casement, there was someone. A woman with gleaming silver hair. A snowing night. In a land where cold struck harder than anywhere else on the continent, she wore only a single thin tunic.

Eyes long accustomed to darkness read her precisely. Silver hair that shone in shifting colors like opal even in the faint moonlight. Skin translucent and pale as sculpted ice. Red lips, gently closed. Every line of her features delicate and fine as a work of art.

As a hero, he had encountered rare things and beautiful people more times than he could count. If anything was more common than pebbles on the road, it was the continent's greatest beauties—and that was barely an exaggeration. But this woman was more beautiful than anything Garthe had seen. To the point of feeling wrong. Even the hair moving in the wind conjured the illusion of tracing a musical phrase. The eyes that met his glowed faintly in the darkness as if holding moonlight, pulling the gaze toward them.

It was that surreal beauty that woke him to reality. She was not an ordinary human. Because she was not an ordinary being, she was this beautiful.

The woman climbed through the window without urgency—not a trace of hurry on someone who had just broken into a stranger's room—and crossed a few steps inside. Then she picked up the dagger lying at Garthe's feet and held it to his throat. The whole process was so natural that Garthe thought she might be handing him a flower rather than a blade.

Garthe raised his gaze to look at her face. Nothing showed—not a trace of expression. She looked like a sculpture made of snow. The sculpture's mouth opened slowly.

"Stay still. I won't hurt you."

Among the most absurd things he'd heard in his life, this ranked near the top.

Garthe leaned back against the sofa and folded his arms, and simply looked at her. After a long silence, the woman spoke again.

"You've been keeping the spirits confined?"

"Aah…"

An issue he'd briefly forgotten drifted through his mind. The two thieving spirits locked in the cellar. She had apparently come for them. A spirit that stole precious ingredients, and a god who climbed strangers' walls. It was almost poetic. Nature always sorts the refuse into the same pile—as they say: birds of a feather, filth and all.

"Take me to them."

Her voice was as rigid as her face. Almost no variation in pitch, the syllables falling at even intervals with no natural pause between them. She had clearly learned human language, but spoke it as though putting it outside herself for the very first time—each word precisely placed, none of it broken in. She's a god—that would explain it. That their first and last conversation would be like this was a pity, and nothing more.

Garthe rose slowly from the sofa. The woman who had been looking down at him a moment ago now had to tilt her head sharply back, at an angle where it might break. The difference in scale was stark enough to press down like weight—yet she didn't step back even slightly. The dagger she held with such assurance didn't waver at all.

Garthe studied her pure and transcendent features. The great god did not appear to spare a single thought for the possibility that a worthless worm-like human could harm her. That arrogance. Fitting, for a 'god' for whom ruling over lesser creatures from birth had always been simply the natural order.

Garthe stepped closer. Sharp metal touched his chest. The tip passed through fabric and scored a scratch across skin. A red dot bloomed on the white shirt. In the stillness, the gaze of one human and one god became entangled.

"Come any closer and I'll kill you."

Garthe tilted his head and smiled. "How do you plan to kill me, aimed where you are—nowhere near the heart?"

The blade was pointed at the left side of his chest, but well away from the heart. Even an ordinary person stabbed there might survive with enough luck. She was holding the posture of an assassin and aiming at entirely the wrong spot.

The woman took the correction. The dagger shifted toward a point below the collarbone—further from the heart than before. Garthe's eyebrow moved upward, slightly. She appeared to catch from that expression that she'd gone even more wrong, and her hand moved again. Now roughly at the center of his chest.

"No, no—that's not it either."

Garthe reached out calmly and took hold of her wrist. Then, in one unhurried motion, guided the dagger to his heart himself.

"Here."

Sharp metal pierced through. The resistance of firm muscle transmitted cleanly from the blade to her hand. Blood poured in surges from the wound and soaked the woman's hand thoroughly. Red blood ran viscous over her pale fingers and dripped.

The woman stared at the dagger in his heart. No expression came to her face—not even now. She looked like someone who had opened a book they didn't know and found, on a random page, a drawing of a man with a blade through his heart. What would one feel at that. Nothing—the world of the book is unknown, the figure in it a stranger. The events of someone who does not share your world cannot leave much impression. Less so in a book you don't know.

She wore exactly that expression. A dagger is in the heart. Blood flows. Simply registering what she saw, she did not appear to be part of the situation at all.