Page 77 of Sun Warrior

Dead Eye began to climb.

With the agility of a forest creature, he leaped up onto the statue’s massive thigh, then, finding a handhold in the God’s long hair that had been formed from the strange, perfect metal and seemed to be billowing in wind only She could feel, Dead Eye pulled himself up and up, so that he was standing on Her mighty shoulders. There, many feet above the balcony floor, Dead Eye gazed out at the forest. The moon was huge and luminous—the People called it a Hunter’s Moon as it was so bright that even in the City it cast shadows, deep and dark. Far, far in the distance,he thought he glimpsed small yellow tongues of fire. Not the angry red blaze of the forest fire, but tamer cooking and hearth fires.

“How many of them survived?” Dead Eye muttered. “When should I attack?”

Ready the People.

The thought filled his mind with such force that Dead Eye lost his footing. Unbalanced, he began to tumble from the God’s shoulder. Dead Eye reached for something—anything that would save him—and his wrist found the tip of the Reaper’s triple-pointed spear, slashing through his flesh with a white-hot pain that had him gasping, even as his other hand closed around the shaft of the spear, saving him from tumbling down, down to certain death.

Breathing in gulps, Dead Eye regained his footing, meaning to climb down immediately and then wake Dove to help him bandage the gash in his wrist, but his gaze was trapped by the drops of scarlet that pumped from his wrist. His wounded hand rested on the God’s head, and Dead Eye watched, mesmerized, as blood turned to tears, raining down the God’s slick, metal cheeks. Her face was close to his and as big as a man’s body.

“Are you there? Are you alive?” he asked the God.

For the space of a breath in and then out the eyes of the God shifted, turning their sightless metal orbs toward Dead Eye. He held his breath as the answering voice filled his being.

I am Death, but I am alive. Look within. Accept Me and ever after we shall be one.

As Dead Eye’s blood drained down the face of the God, he looked within and accepted the God, and without the world changed.

***

The screams of her Attendant awakened Dove.

“What is it? What has happened?” She sat, reaching automatically beside her for Dead Eye. When her hands touched only empty space and the thick pelts of their pallet, her stomach clenched and she stood, shouting, “Attendants! Come to me!”

“Oh, Mistress, it is horrible! I don’t know what to do!”

Dove recognized Lily’s voice. She outstretched her hands, and Lily grasped them. Dove could feel that the girl’s body was trembling.

“Be calm. Where is our Champion? If something has happened, you must get him immediately,” Dove said.

“But it is our Champion! Oh, Mistress, I think he’s dead!” Lily sobbed.

“Stop this! Of course he isn’t dead. The God would not allow it.” Dove made quite sure her voice remained steady, even though her heart was beating wildly and fear coursed through her veins.If my love is dead, my life is over.Dove pushed the terrible thought from her mind and ordered Lily, “Take me to him immediately!”

“I found him at the feet of the God,” Lily said as she led her Mistress through the chamber to the God’s balcony. “I did as he commanded last night. Ordered the Attendants to help clean and repair the courtyard and made the sleeping People wake and help us. The Champion said he needed solitude—that he would attend to the firepots of the God. That’s why it took so long to find him.” Lily paused to sob again. “There’s so much blood, Mistress. What shall we do without our Champion?”

Dove acted on instinct. Moving with the preternatural grace she’d cultivated from a lifetime of blindness, she used one movement to pull Lily to face her and then Dove slapped the girl across her cheek—hard.

“Don’t youeversay that about our Champion. I am the God’s Oracle. If our Champion was dead, don’t you think I would know it?”

“Y-yes, of course, Mistress. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! It’s just that there is so much blood. It—it covers the God and drips like tears from Her face down Her body to pool with our Champion, and he is cold and still.”

“Then it is a good thing that I cannot see so that I will not be deceived as you have been. Lead me to him!”

“As you command, Mistress.”

Lily took Dove’s elbow and guided her the rest of the way to the God’s balcony. Before she got to Dead Eye’s body, the scent of blood wasso thick it seemed to Dove that the balcony must be awash in it. She almost expected to feel drops forming in the air, to drizzle around them like early spring rain.

“He is there, by—”

“I can find him now.” Dove shook off Lily’s guiding hand and followed the scent of blood and the pulsing energy that always radiated from her lover to find Dead Eye, crumbled on his side, resting against the God’s foot as if in supplication. She knelt and ran her hands all over his body, cataloguing the nasty, weeping slash that gaped from high on his right forearm all the way down to his wrist as the only wound she could feel. She found his pulse. It was shallow and too fast, but it was there. His skin was cold and felt damp with sweat, as well as slick with the massive amount of blood he’d lost. He was breathing in small, shallow gasps. Dove moved quickly and decisively. She pulled the short tunic she’d slept in over her head and, using her teeth to begin the tear, ripped a long strip from the hem and began winding it tightly around her lover’s ravaged arm, speaking to Lily as she worked. “Who else knows he has been injured?”

“No one. The other Attendants are finishing the tasks our Champion set us to. I only came here to begin brewing your morning tea, and to ask if you and he would like to break your fast with boar meat.”

“Do not allow any of the other Attendants within the chamber until I tell you so. And do not tell them the Champion has been wounded.”

“But, Mistress, he—”