GRP Chapter 9

"A slight sting, and then—"

"A slight sting, and then?"

"Indigestion, maybe. Cleared right up."

Samthyeon's face contorted. Garthe let out a refreshed breath and pulled the dagger smoothly free. Blood surged from the red wound, then sealed without a trace. He peeled off the bloodsoaked shirt, tore a tapestry from the wall, and used it to wipe himself off.

A holy relic that had killed three people with a fingertip graze—driven through the heart—and the man looked, if anything, better for it. Samthyeon watched the unhurried tidying and let out a breath.

It held relief.

It held the flat recognition of another failure.

The Slayer of Gods, they called him. Quite a title.

Garthe's eyes were dead as a fish's, smile still in place, cold. The smell of ash came off him—like a fire burned down to nothing but smoke.

'Think you can kill me?'

After taking that hand, Samthyeon had tried to kill Garthe by every method available to him. Garthe's head cut off: nothing. Dropped from height: nothing. Three months without food: nothing. Drowned: nothing. Burned: nothing. Poisoned: nothing. Only after exhausting every approach and watching each one fail did Samthyeon understand why the man had sought him out. Ordinary means could not bring Garthe to death. What was needed was Samthyeon’s ability to forge weapons against beings that defied Providence. Garthe, too, was one such being. But today, again, was a failure.

"You seem to have quite a lot of attachment to living, for a man in your position."

Garthe's mouth curved briefly at that.

"Do I."

He stretched out along the sofa, put the pipe to his lips. The curse seemed to be intensifying. There was nothing more Samthyeon could offer him—neither break the curse nor grant him death. Enduring the pain was Garthe's alone to do. Samthyeon turned away and took hold of the door handle.

"Samthyeon."

Garthe called him back. Samthyeon turned. Garthe lay with eyes closed, holding the unlit pipe. He touched the stem to flame, and the acrid smell filled the room immediately. The man's voice dissolved into it, coming through muffled and slow.

"Tell everyone to stay away."

I might kill someone by accident today. On those words, Samthyeon closed the door behind him.

The candlestick tipped. The candle rolled across the floor. The wick's small flame faded to a thread of smoke and died.

The room went dark.

Garthe breathed out long in the middle of it. This was a cycle when the curse intensified. His nerves, already sharp, turned sharper still, until they were edges.

Fwhsss. Wind through the gap in the window.

Garthe listened to the wind and let the death-cries of the various gods and monsters who had died at his hands come back to him.

'Filthy and greedy thing, who dares to reach for a god's achievement—upon you I bestow the curse of death—'

'I shall lay upon you a curse that steals life itself!'

He laughed, face resting on the back of his hand. Of course. They had given him death, not knowing he already lived under something worse.

Does not die. Does not age. The pain does not disappear. Living on, year after year and century after century, in agony. The long life stretching ahead would be no different. Perhaps forever.

A road with no milestones and no destination. No way to know where he was going, or even whether there was anywhere to go. To arrive at what he wanted was too difficult a thing. Except by blind fortune.

Blind fortune.

He laughed without sound. He’d been thinking of that hack fortune teller’s prophecy. You will soon meet the other half of your soul. Your long waiting and long pain will end—The sort of thing that applied to anyone. Anyone at all.

Thirty years ago, perhaps, he might have believed it. He had lived with something like hope then, just barely—even a vague prophecy would have struck him as the one thread of light he had been waiting for all along. This time it's real. This time I'll really find it. Thrashing in a baseless, complacent faith.

And sometimes—sometimes—a moment came when something that looked like hope appeared right before him. And he would reach out. The result was always the same. Only after the fall did he understand it had never existed. He had fallen that way more times than he could count.

The fall had no bottom anymore. He’d been buried face-first in the mud at the very bottom of underground. Garthe had fallen hundreds, thousands of times, and now there was no more mud left to land in. Even a place heaped with excrement and dregs would be paradise compared to here. In this place where no light reached, there was no longer any illusion left to grasp at.

Garthe stared into the darkness that had swallowed the room. Then moonlight seeped in through the window—the cloud that had been sitting on the sky driven off by an unusually strong wind—and the room brightened to a dim glow.

Clunk.

The window rattled.

Cold air poured in. Garthe turned his head and looked at the open window. There was someone in the long narrow frame of it.

A woman with gleaming silver hair.

A snowing night. In this land where cold that would best any other place in the world howled in every direction, she wore only a single thin tunic.

Eyes accustomed to darkness took in the shape of her with precision. In the dim moonlight: bright silver hair that caught the light in colors like opal. Skin transparent and white as if cast from ice. Lips closed softly, red. Every line that made up her face was as delicate and precise as a work of art.

As a hero, how many extraordinary objects had he seen, how many beauties had he been presented with—beauties who were the finest on the continent might as well have been pebbles on a roadside, for their frequency. But this woman surpassed anything he had seen. To an uncanny degree. Even her hair, shifting in the wind, conjured a fantasy of music's contour written in the air. Her eyes, where they met his through the dark, held moonlight in them somehow, gleaming faintly, drawing the gaze. It was that unrealistic beauty that brought reality back to him.

She was not an ordinary human. Precisely because she was not an ordinary being, she was this beautiful.

The woman crossed the room without a trace of hurry—not at all like a person who had just broken into someone else's space. She picked up the dagger lying near Garthe's feet and raised it to his throat. The whole sequence was so natural that Garthe had the thought: it was as if she were handing him a flower, not a blade.

He tilted his head up to look at her face. No emotion showed at all—a statue made of snow. The statue's mouth opened, slow.

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

Of all the things he'd heard in his life, this ranked among the most absurd. Garthe simply leaned back against the sofa cushion, folded his arms, and looked at her.

After a long pause she spoke again.

"You're keeping spirits locked up somewhere. Aren't you."

"Ah."

A matter he'd half forgotten floated back through his mind. Two thieving wolf spirits, locked in the cellar. This woman appeared to have come for them. A god who climbed walls, and spirits who stole fine ingredients. Like finds like—a perfect match, in its way.

"Take me to them."

Her manner of speaking was as flat as her face. Almost no variation in pitch, each syllable released at fixed intervals, mechanical, without pause. She seemed to have learned human language, but she spoke it as if letting it out of her mouth for the first time. A god could be like that. What a pity. First and last conversation, and this was it.

Garthe rose from the sofa slowly. The woman, who a moment ago had been looking down at him, bent her neck back at a sharp angle to keep looking up. The difference in height between them was clear, and it should have produced some pressure on her—but she did not retreat even a fraction. The blade she'd raised with such confidence did not waver at all.

Garthe took her face in at close range. She looked exactly like a snow statue that had no particular views on anything. The great god apparently hadn’t even held the thought—that a worthless insect of a human might harm her. The arrogance of it. Truly the manner of a god, to whom lording over lesser creatures had been natural from the moment of birth.

He took one step toward her. The sharp metal touched his chest. The tip passed through cloth and made a shallow cut in skin. A red point appeared on the white fabric. In the silence, the gaze of a human and a god met.

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

"How?" He tilted his head, one corner of his mouth lifting. "Not even pointing at the heart."

The dagger's tip was angled at the left side of his chest, but well away from the heart. Even for an ordinary human, if stabbed there, survival was quite possible depending on luck. She was aiming at quite the wrong vital point, and yet her attitude might have belonged to a trained assassin.

The woman complied without protest. The dagger moved toward just below the collarbone.

She had actually moved further from the heart than before.

One of Garthe's eyebrows ticked upward. She seemed to gather from his expression that she'd gone wrong, and her hand moved again—this time to roughly the center of the chest.

"No, not there either—"

Garthe took hold of her wrist unhurriedly. And drove her hand and the blade straight into his own heart.

"Here."

The sharp metal pierced through. The resistance of dense muscle transferred from the dagger to her, wholly, without loss. Blood surged from the wound and soaked her hand thoroughly. Down the white of her hand, red ran in sticky lines.

The woman stared at the dagger buried in his heart. Even now, not a single expression rose to her face. It was precisely as if she were looking at a picture in a book written in a language she didn't know. She had happened to open the book. There was, in it, a picture of a man with a blade in his heart. What was there to feel about that. There is a picture like this here, nothing more. The events of a figure who did not share her world could not leave much impression. Especially in a book she didn’t know.

She wore exactly that expression.

Ah. The dagger is in his heart. Blood running.

She registered what was in front of her and made the simplest possible accounting of it, and she did not appear to be inside the situation at all.