“Shepherd.”

He rolled over onto his back and groaned. Every muscle screamed as if he’d not moved in weeks. Sleep-sand gummed his eyes shut. A slant of light so bright and constant it had to be the sun glared through their lids, but it bore no warmth.

That voice, teasingly familiar, came again. “Shepherd, you are called.”

Called to what? To service, to death, to the Hells? He suffered the first, yearned for the second, didn’t fear the third. For a flicker too short to savor but long enough to miss, he thought he might be dead. He’d watched everyone else on the Raven Rose fall to feed Mordyth Ral, the Gods Bane, before blacking out. Surely if anything could kill him, the Sword would be it.

But no. He felt the par-ichor, the Primal Blood, burning fresh in his veins. Some spark too stubborn to be extinguished had kept him from dying. The stink of death wiggled in his nose. Stale piss and emptied bowels, mostly his own. Being leached of life stole all restraint.

What am I?

Scratching—in the hardwood decking near his head. Squabbling crows cawed angry. Something sharp pecked his hand. It struck again and dug under his thumbnail. He caught the feathered fiend with a quick snap of his wrist. Its frantic struggle ended with a clench that crunched bone.

He twisted off the crow’s head and sucked its body dry before casting it aside. The rusty saltiness stung his dried and cracked lips. Meagre nourishment, but he felt better for it, all the same. He realized the ship listed to port. A gentle creak and the hum of wind through the rigging indicated it was still airborne. He rubbed the gum from his eyes and fought to rise and find his footing. The effort left his head spinning with a spell of vertigo. His stomach roiled in sympathy.

“By the Blood,” he growled, teeth clenched and frame shaking like age had caught him at last. A trembling hand caught the gunwale. His vision cleared.

Nothing worse than what he’d expected. Bodies littered the Raven Rose’s quarterdeck, grenlich, priest sorcerer, slave—Mordyth Ral had made no distinction. The crows had been busy, plucking eyeballs and pecking lips. The point to which the bodies had mortified, given the cool nights this time of year, suggested Sarenepra had only been two days before.

Who am I?

The sun, sullen and red, sank in the west, harried by distant storm clouds. He looked over the gunwale. Verdant land unfolded below. Orchards, vineyards, crop parcels already left brown and stubbly by the fall harvest. The ship had drifted northeast into Sturvia’s Eskenar region.

“Shepherd.”

Her impatience couldn’t be missed. It grated on him, made his shoulders tighten and hands clench like there was killing that needed doing. But of course, there was. She’d not be calling him if there wasn’t. Everything a Shepherd did served Death. He’d lost count of how many he’d killed, for her, for the All-Father, for the glory and need of the Dominion. Unruly flocks, after all, did need to be culled from time to time.

I am Uthnar.

He staggered toward the calling glass. Quartz hematite, cut and polished, formed a heavy oval frame as tall as he. The mineral anchored the enchantment. It reminded him of working stone in days long past. Bells spent with hammer and chisel, chipping away the bits that didn’t matter to find the shape hidden within.

What a man crafts by his own hand makes him immortal.

Had he said that once? He couldn’t be sure. It came from a lifetime ago, maybe more. He’d lost so much of who he was, what he had been, before the Primal Blood had remade him. What a man did branded him for eternity, that much he did know.

The surface of the calling glass swirled with fitful mists. He touched the frame. The mist cleared to reveal a slip of a woman who barely looked out of her teens. An illusion—Wethemanaus Regia had already been the All-Father’s Most Hallowed Hand when Uthnar first made the Blood Pledge to her decades ago.

Her Keshauk features always left him thinking of the yellow metals. Eyes of liquid gold glared at him from a face of copper, framed by hair of burnished bronze that had been bound in cane rows that reached to her ankles. She scorned what she called the “puritan drapery” of her lessers. Her corseted green tunic was cut with a plunging neck and flared cuffs heavy with embroidery. Black leather trousers tucked into knee boots clung tighter than sweat.

“You’re alive,” she said. Her flat tone gave no indication of the fact he’d had the frequent pleasure of peeling off those leather trousers.

“Somewhat,” he said, conscious of the stinky mess that tarred his own trousers. At least the calling glass didn’t pass along smell.

Wethemanaus didn’t waste further thought on niceties. “We are aboard the Fury, holding off the Cape of Ash with the Devastator. The Repentance is lost with all hands.”

The Devastator—the newest monstrosity wrought by the Dominion’s artificers. Wethemanaus had ordered its early launch to honor Kun-Xang, but it had been two days behind the delegation to Sarenepra. Uthnar felt too drained to greet the news of their losses with more than a shrug.

Her attention didn’t waver. “We also lost Kun-Xang.”

That did provoke a flicker of interest and feeling, though Uthnar couldn’t find a name for the lick of emotion that vanished as quickly as it had come. “Indeed.”

“We reclaimed his bones, though not his skull,” Wethemanaus said.

That made another attempt at Xang’s resurrection impossible. But even now, fresh from a defeat that might cost her the position of Most Hallowed if not her life, Wethemanaus carried herself with the haughty confidence of an empress. Uthnar knew she had little choice—any sign of doubt or dismay would surely doom her. The All-Father may not be able to punish her failure, but her fellow priests were another matter. No Hallowed Hand ruled with impunity. Always, rivals plotted and conspired. Uthnar had killed more than a few who had dared step too far.

“The Rose is adrift, somewhere over the Eskenar.” He glanced past the calling glass to the bodies on the ship’s deck. “I’m the only one left.”

She gave him an affectionate smile and teased her lip with a long nail, filed sharp and painted vermillion. “But you will address that, won’t you?”

Uthnar’s attention focused on the puckered slope where her pinky finger had once been. Two little fingers—that was all the All Father demanded of his priest sorcerers when they swore to the Covenant. That and their souls. One could argue it was a bargain price indeed, considering the more extreme devotional sacrifices the priesthood demanded from the people. For his part, Uthnar had given enough flesh in battle to make two of him. But his scars never lasted. Not the ones that could be seen, anyway.

“What do you command, Most Hallowed?” he asked.

“Rouse the crew and bring the Rose south before it’s seen,” she said. “Scouts have been—”

“If the Rose is over the Eskenar, it’s already been seen,” said a man’s voice, hoarse with age. Another face crowded the calling glass—a wizened scarecrow with a snow-white mane and the swarthy features of a Carinzian. Estoff Tiega, Speaker of the Savant Council of Vysus, who presumed to consider himself Wethemanaus’s equal.

“The Rose should attack the nearest city of import,” Tiega said. “Build on the destruction of Viglias to sow terror and suspicion across the Kingdoms. That will leave the Sword Bearer and his allies with no place to hide.”

“An attack may also create such chaos they will easily vanish,” Wethemanaus told Tiega. “We have but a brief window of opportunity before they flee to Sevrenia.”

“How do we know they haven’t already?” Uthnar asked.

“Nothing can cross over the mountains without our knowledge,” Wethemanaus said. “But if we play too bold a hand, they are bound to flee to the only haven they have. So long as they remain in the Kingdoms, we have a chance to hem them in, but only if we are subtle.”

“Their only haven, say you.” Tiega’s bluish lips twisted into a sneer. “What about that dragon, that dolusk Earthborn—from where did they come? The old stories about Gostemere must be true.”

“We will get to the root of that,” Wethemanaus said.

“How?” Tiega asked. “I demand to know your plan.”

Wethemanaus took half a step back to face Tiega, eyes burning with ire. “You ‘demand’? You forget yourself, Speaker.”

Uthnar turned his gaze as the tension rose between the two sorcerers, but still watched from the corner of his eye. Lessers could lose their heads for witnessing discord between their betters. A shepherd held too rare a station to suffer that fate, but always better to be cautious.

"Your station gives you the right to question me, in private,” Wethemanaus continued. “Defy me again before a lesser, Estoff, and you and your lackeys will be blood-eagled on deck for the amusement of all.”

Tiega held his ground for a spell, before turning sharp on his heel and stomping off. Uthnar knew Wethemanaus had only let Tiega lead the ritual to rebirth Kun-Xang in Sarenepra to curb his whining and avoid open conflict between the east and west. Few outside the Keshauk priesthood’s inner circle were privy to how much Wethemanaus and her predecessors owed to Tiega’s chapter far off in Vysus. The chapter had toiled for centuries to retrieve Xang’s scattered remains under a cloak of secrecy. Vysus stood as an independent center of trade between the Four Kingdoms and the Teishlian Empire. The Holy Clerisy tolerated the Sorcerer Brotherhood in Vysus because lords on both sides found peace far more profitable than war.

Wethemanaus had often told Uthnar that would change quick should the Clerisy ever learn that Vysus’s sorcerers were not just an isolated sect. It served her purposes, and the need of the All-Father, for the Clerisy to remain in the dark for as long as possible. Even if that meant tolerating, for now, the upstart ambition and arrogance of Estoff Tiega.

“Uthnar,” Wethemanaus said.

His head snapped up. “Yes, Most Hallowed.”

“You have your orders. I will have a courier dispatched to you with the means to deal with that dragon.”

Her image vanished from the glass in a swirl of mist. Uthnar turned away and considered the labor ahead with a weary eye. He needed more nourishment than the juices of a crow could provide, but the Rose needed tending first.

The ship listed because one of its arches had fallen out of alignment. Three arches rose from the decks in lieu of masts. Each arch was a complete oval, fused to the ship’s keel, that reached thirty yards into the sky from where he stood. The arches and the keel were made of lodestone transmuted to repel the earth’s pull. Each arch was cut with a channel as deep and wide as his waist, in which barrel-sized plugs of plain iron slid around, controlled by a lesser demon tethered to the task. The movement of those plugs shifted the magnetic fields of the arches, to steer the ship in place of a rudder and alter its degree of lift. Beyond that, the ship rode the winds much like any sea-faring vessel. Lateral masts fanned out from port and starboard to hold her black canvas sails.

Because of the Sword’s hunger or the attacks of that Sevrendine herald during the battle, the Rose had lost one of her control demons—another would have to be summoned and bound to the task to realign that errant arch. Three men, three in particular—that would be enough to get the ship righted and on course. Once Uthnar had regained his strength, he’d reanimate the rest.

Uthnar fetched a skin of water before finding Captain Naasikon sprawled on the poop deck, face down. That had saved one of his eyes from the crows. One would do. Uthnar rolled the liegeman’s body over, mindful of the barbed hooks with which Skevarians liked to festoon their leather armor. A corpse this fresh should remember who he’d been, what he’d been, but dying as he had to feed the Sword might have consequences.

It took the tip of a dagger and a few chipped teeth to get Naasikon’s clenched jaw to yield. Uthnar sliced the tips of two of his own fingers and shoved them down the captain’s throat. If this didn’t work, he’d have to get through that armor to reach Naasikon’s heart.

Moments passed. Nothing happened. Then Naasikon’s body twitched. The amber fire of the Primal Blood flickered in his heavy-lidded eye. Uthnar yanked his fingers out before the captain could bite down on them.

Naasikon choked on a dry, hacking cough. Uthnar took the waterskin and let it trickle into his throat. The risen dead didn’t need water, nor could they digest any other nourishment beyond the Blood. But it was hard to speak with a tongue and throat left to parch like brittle leather.

As he had countless times before with other risen dead, Uthnar watched the awareness return. A flood of confusion marched across Naasikon’s coal-black face—atrophied senses trying to process sensations that now felt alien. There wasn’t any fear. There never was. The risen dead had already faced Death and plumbed the mystery. They had nothing left to fear. Nor did they have the will for it, existing now only to serve the shepherd who had sired them.

As always, Uthnar felt the thrill, the power. Taker and giver of life, Wethemanaus would say. A convenient lie he didn’t dispute. They both knew he’d given nothing at all. Shepherds only raised abomination that might persist for a fortnight or two depending on the climate. Not even the power of Primal Blood could counter rot and ruin for longer. Part of Uthnar savored the thrill, another part recoiled from the horror of it. He didn’t give life. He defiled it.

At last, Naasikon’s amber gaze focused on Uthnar. It flickered with recognition, intelligence. “Shepherd.” The word grated like the lid of a sarcophagus sliding back.

“Captain,” Uthnar said with a nod. “We have work to do.”

Next Chapter: The Sword Bearer and His Prisoner