Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

She bled out instead of accepting our help.

The ruins of the Martian city of Olympia remind me of that woman. Beautiful, regal, tough as a bare-fisted brawler, and pissed at the world for breaking her perfect nose. I watched on Luna as the Minotaur made his stand here against Sefi, holding out until the Reaper himself came with the bloody Seventh to wreak a path of hell all the way to the old seat of Bellona and send the Minotaur scurrying like a kicked puppy.

What a sight. What a city. But while the war moved on, Olympia didn’t.

I know her cloud towers fell to become squatter havens west of the city. I can see their humps in the distance. The rest of the old Bellona capital spills against the northwestern lip of the Olympus Mons, and shimmies toward Loch Esmeralda in an hourglass shape. Each war-battered kilometer reflecting the architecture of six centuries of stately Bellona taste. And it is a fine taste, despite her broken skyline.

Only fascists should make cities. Demokrats never have a salient thesis.

Her air traffic is sparse. Cooking fires twirl from broken buildings. Land traffic congests the northern gates. Markets, overgrown grottoes, and old statue parks are filled with bonfires and vagrant tents. People live here, but not well.

I turn back toward my room and look up in awe. Eagle Rest, citadel of the fallen Bellona, yawns up the tallest mountain in the solar system. Libraries, government buildings, dancing halls, and villas ascend the winter mountain, held up by the wings of a dilapidated stone eagle.

What the hell is going on? Why am I here?

The old senses are triggered, and I feel someone inside my room. He’s not trying to hide. I just didn’t see him at first. I thought he was a sofa. One of the biggest men I’ve ever seen lies on a beast skin in front of my fire, roasting walnuts in the coals with his bare hands. If you can call those hands. The right one is huge and twisted like ginger roots.

“Do you see your fate in the bones, Grarnir?” he asks in a low, sibilant voice. He is bald, black-skinned like many tribes of Mars’s North Pole, and incredibly fat. His eyes focus on the coals. I glance to the ajar door. “A man may run, but none has escaped his fate. Yet.”

“Who are you?” I ask.

His eyes scour the room. “I see his fate. A young eagle’s nest was this. To plume his feathers, he went away, and met the man around whom all fray. Now he lies in memory’s cavern, head a blossom, heart judged by Saturn, on a cold stone floor he found an early autumn.” He breaks a piping-hot walnut shell with his fingers and slurps out the meat as if sucking down an oyster. He is a living tattoo. Bright blue runes swirl across his face, down his bare arms in interlocking patterns. Seven ridiculous rings weigh down the fingers of his left hand with rubies and diamonds. There is nothing left of his ears except keloid-rimmed holes in his head. But what he lacks there, he compensates for with arcane eyebrows thick enough for dung beetles to disappear behind. Greased leather bags litter a scarlet scale belt underneath a glossy cloak of raven feathers.

A shaman.

I would see the freaks on occasion in the Block Wars, charging naked and high on God’s Bread toward the enemy, with their engorged pricks out like a lance. They were always surrounded by insane spirit warriors called skuggi. As important to the warbands as the legionary eagle is for a legion. Maybe more so. After all, Grays don’t believe in magic.

If he’s here, skuggi will be outside that door. My prey instinct shrieks inside me. In full kit, I’d take the window. But I’m wearing slippers and bear fur, so I sit beside him as he gestures. I’m smaller next to his mass than a nine-year-old Gray is to me.

“Your fate is not in these bones, Grarnir.” He gestures toward the coals. There’s bones amongst them. Marrow seeps out of fissures as they heat and crack. Human bones. Is that an eye socket? I swallow. They hiss.

“The men that came for you,” he says.

“Syndicate?”

He nods. “Price on your head so big, they lost theirs.” He chuckles. “Freihild and the skuggi castrated them and, once they spoke their truths, fed them to the sky queens to make them strong. They had much fun.” Marrow bubbles and trickles down what looks like a femur. The shaman leans toward it, so close his eyebrows begin to curl. “I have seen your fate in bones, Grarnir. Sometimes gods speak, but you never know which one. Some play more tricks than others.”

“Name’s Ephraim, oldboy.”

The eyes slide in his huge head to look sideways at me. He chuckles again. “Shhhhh. He comes. He likes fear. Show none. Perhaps his wrath will not come undone.”

“Who?”

He submerges his whole left hand in the coals, reaching around as if rummaging through a backpack, and pulls out a steaming walnut. This he rips open and shows me the bronzed meat.

“Unshorn.”

I stand up in sudden panic, almost losing my balance on the untested new leg. It’s got some thrust. “Valdir the Unshorn?”

“Be wise, Grarnir. The Queen’s concubine has much power. Little leash.”

I look for somewhere to hide. I hear boots. Heavy fucking boots. The candles on the wall shiver. A shadow moves in the hall outside the door. Torc rings make an unholy clatter, each taken and melted from the sigils of a fallen Gold. They don’t even bother with Grays.

“Silly man. Your destiny is not out the window,” the shaman says without looking up. “But find out for yourself if you must.”

I glance down at him. No way he’s fast enough to stop me.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Shaman.” I run out the terrace, my gait uneven on the new leg, my fur coat streaming behind me, and hurl myself over the balustrade.