The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1)(45)

He frowned. “There’s nothing strange about Gujaareh. If we have prosperity and strength, that is only Hananja’s blessing.”

“So you say, priest. Those of us from lands not so blessed see it differently. And the warning smoke is hard to ignore: Gujaareh’s army swollen to greater numbers than ever before, Gujaareen ambassadors weaving secret alliances with the northernmost lands. We notice when our ambassadors die mysterious sudden deaths as soon as they have something to warn us about.”

The Gatherer shook his head again—not in denial this time, she guessed, but in confusion. “I know nothing of these things.” Nor do I care, he did not say, but Sunandi read it in his face. “What have they to do with the Reaper?”

Perhaps everything, she did not say, and hoped he could not see that in her face. “I don’t know for certain. But I know your Prince is behind it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Not the Hetawa?”

“Why would the Hetawa keep a monster as a pet?”

“Why would the Prince?”

She hesitated, then decided to risk trusting him a bit further. “There are rumors. Only rumors, mind you.”

“Of what sort?”

“Of the sort that keep Kisuati children awake at night, priest. We tell them stories about your kind, you know. ‘Be good, or a Gatherer will get you.’ ”

His face twisted in disgust. “That’s a perversion of everything we are.”

“You kill, priest. You do it for mercy and a whole host of other reasons that you claim are good, but at the heart of it you sneak into people’s homes in the dead of night and kill them in their sleep. This is why we think you strange—you do this and you see nothing wrong with it.”

The Gatherer’s expression became stony, and Sunandi caught herself before she might have launched into another denunciation. She dared not attack his beliefs any further. Much as it might disgust her, his rigid orthodoxy was the only thing keeping her alive.

“Why would the Prince allow a Reaper to roam the city?” he asked again, his voice flat.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Centuries ago, when your Inunru founded the Hananjan faith in Kisua, there were none of the rules and rituals you use now to control the magic. No one knew what a rogue Gatherer could do until the first Gatherers did it—and the horrors they inflicted on Kisua are the reason narcomancy was outlawed there. They say a Reaper can breathe death through the very air. They say they devour souls rather than sending them elsewhere. There are stories of them draining the life from dozens, even hundreds at a time without sating themselves…”

He was shaking his head even before she finished. “Impossible. I can carry the dreamblood of two, perhaps three souls within me. It’s taken me twenty years to build up to that.”

“I only repeat the stories, priest. In the early days, the Hananjans in Kisua recorded many examples of what Reapers could do, and the ‘uses’ of their terrible magic. Those records were outlawed along with the rest of dream magic, but the stories are told to this day. We use them to frighten children—but what if someone heard those tales and believed? What if someone with power, who wanted more of it, decided to see for himself whether the tales of Reapers’ magic were true?”

The Gatherer said nothing to this. Sunandi saw that his posture had become even more rigid, his brow furrowed in clear disquiet. Abruptly he stood, startling her, and began pacing back and forth in the narrow breezeway. “That would be insanity. The creature is a walking pestilence, hunger without a soul. No one could control it.” He almost spat the words, speaking so harshly and quickly that the words almost tumbled over each other. “There was no one around to direct its attack. It acted on its own madness.”

It took her a moment to understand what he meant, and then Sunandi caught her breath. “You’ve seen it!”

The Gatherer nodded absently, still pacing. She noticed, with some concern, that his hands shook like those of a sick elder when he wasn’t clenching them in agitation.

“Last night,” he said. “It attacked us in an alleyway after we left Yanya-iyan—” He stopped pacing and looked at her in sudden horror, as if he’d only just remembered something. “Indethe etun’n ut Hananja,” he whispered. Sua, though with an archaic flavor Sunandi had seen only in the oldest poems and tales. May the gaze of Hananja turn outward upon thee. Their version of a blessing, though Sunandi preferred Hananja keep Her gaze to Herself.

But it was the pity in the Gatherer’s eyes that troubled her most. “What is it?”

“The Reaper,” the Gatherer said. He spoke as softly as he had the night before, compassionate even with death in his eyes. “When we encountered it, it had already killed. Your northblooded child—”

Sunandi’s heart shattered.

Through a dim roaring in her ears she heard the rest of his words. “The alley was dark, but I did see the body clearly. Please forgive me. I would have given her peace, seen her safely to Ina-Karekh, if…”

If there had been anything left to Gather.

Sunandi was not aware of screaming at first. It was only when hands caught her wrists that she realized she had lifted them to claw at her scalp. And it was only when something scraped in her throat that she noticed the strangled, anguished cries echoing from Etissero’s walls. Through a haze she saw Etissero at the top of the stairs with a knife in his hand, staring uncertainly at the scene before him. Then the Gatherer’s arms folded about her and she crumpled into them, too lost in anguish to care that she wept on her sworn killer’s shoulder.