Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit
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Carol Berg: author's other books
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Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Dzhejms CHejz
Dzhejms CHejz
Elizabeth Berg
Kenneth Copeland
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
Carol Berg
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Annotation
In a land torn apart by civil war, pestilence, and shaky alliances, a man branded a traitor may be the world's only hope...
The rebellious son of a long line of pureblood cartographers and diviners, Valen has spent most of his life trying to escape what society -- and his family -- ordained for him. His own mother has predicted that he will meet his doom in water and blood and ice. And her divination seems fulfilled when a comrade abandons Valen in a rainy wilderness half-dead, addicted to an enchantment that converts pain to pleasure, and possessing only a stolen book of maps.
Offered sanctuary in a nearby monastery, Valen discovers that his book -- rumored to lead men into the realm of angels -- gains him entry into a world of secret societies, doomsayers, monks, princes, and madmen, all seeking to unlock the mystery of the coming dark age. Unfortunately, the key to Navronne's doom is buried in half-forgotten myth--and the secrets of his own past...
Flesh and Spirit
For Pete and the greatest of all fantasy adventures
The cusp of autumn arrives untimely. Dun haze. Tarnished gold. Leaves...glory dulled...whipped from their branches. Wolves gather, howling, gnawing the light. No more the culmination of summer, but harbinger of bitter blue days and ever longer nights. The dance is finished, and my heart aches for the waning season. Hollow. Wanting. Dare I sleep?
--Canticle of the Autumn PART ONE
The Cusp of Autumn
The Cusp of Autumn
Chapter 1
On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die face down in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for the twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself--doom is just the hind end of living, after all--but to see the two who birthed me confounded.
Sadly, as with so many of my devotions, some to greater gods than those friendly imps carved into the arches and drainpipes of palaces, hovels, latrines, and sop-houses, my fervent petition had come to naught. I'd been bloody for two days now, the rain was quickly turning to sleet, and I seemed to have reached the hind end of everything...
"I've no quarrel with ye, Valen, ye know that." The hairy brute stuffed my sweetly chinking leather purse into the folds of his cloak and returned to burrowing in my rucksack. "Ye've been a fine comrade these months. But ye've need of more care than I can give ye, and I've told ye, I can't be hallooing with no monkish folk. If I thought so much as a slavey's hovel lay within thirty quellae, I'd drag ye there."
"And as you're going to abandon me here, well...no use wasting good plunder on maggot fodder," I said bitterly, teeth chattering, lips numb. The cold rain sluiced down the neck of my sodden jaque and collected about my knees in the ruts of the ancient road. My elbows quivered as I tried to hold my chest above the muddy water. This damnable goat track had likely not been used since they hauled in stone and wood to build the ghostly abbey tucked into the misty, folded land below us. "I've watched your back for a twelvemonth, you devil. Not a scratch have you suffered since Arin Fay."
One by one Boreas pulled out the remaining carefully wrapped bundles: the onyx jewel case crammed with chains, bracelets, and jeweled brooches, the gold calyx, two daggers with ruby-encrusted hilts--the finest prizes of our infamy. Just one of the daggers could outfit a man with a decent horse, a sword, a thick wool cloak with no holes in it, and a pleasant trimonth of meat, drink, and fair companionship. I'd paid a pretty price in blood and flesh for collecting this bit of plunder, and--Magrog's demons devour this beast I'd foolishly called friend--I wasn't even to profit from it.
He stuffed my goods into his already bulging sack. "None o' this lot'll do ye no good. Wasn't a monk bred won't steal whatever he lays an eye on. And yer in no fit state to argue with them...or me neither, come to that."
The arrow point embedded deep in my thigh and the fist-sized gouge that had started seeping warm blood on my back again bore ample witness to his verity on the last point. I did need help more than I needed my booty, and a wounded man could do far worse than a monastery. These concessions did nothing to ease my mind, however, as I was not yet at the abbey gates and not at all sure anyone would be traveling this particular road with night coming on and a three-year civil war and a sevenday's deluge to keep folk by their own hearths.
I ought to have been angrier with Boreas. But gods knew I'd have done the same were he the one collapsed in the muck, wailing that fire-eyed Magrog himself could not make him take one more step. And I was certainly in no fit state to forcibly reclaim my belongings.
"Just get me down to the gate," I croaked, another wave of chills washing me closer to the grave. "My share ought to pay you for that at least. And leave me one lune for an offering."
"I daren't. The baldpates'll have me swinging ere I kiss ye farewell. No worry, lad. One of 'em'll pass by here and see to ye. And their Karish god teaches 'em to give alms to them with naught, so you're better off with no silver in your pocket."
He shook his head and shrugged his massive shoulders as if the entire mystery of the holy universe was puzzling him at that moment. Then he pulled one last bundle from my rucksack--a flat, squarish parcel, two handspans on a side, wrapped in multiple layers of oiled cloth--and peeled open one flap.
"Have a care; the rain will ruin that," I said, attempting to draw one knee up high enough that I could slide my foot underneath me. If I could just get back to my feet, find a thick branch to lean on, perhaps I could stagger down the hill a little farther on my own.
"Is it plate?" he asked, shaking the bundle and getting no sound. "Heavy enough, but it don't feel right. I don't remember nothing this shape."
My left boot squelched into place under my hip, jarring the festering wound in my thigh, shooting bolts of white-hot fire up and down my leg. "Aagh! It's a book. More valuable than plate. More valuable than those daggers to the right people. And I can send you to the right people if you'll just get me to a leech."
Boreas shifted backward, just out of my reach. "A book! Ye're twinking me, right?"
He poked his dirty fingers into the corner of the parcel, and then glared down at me dumbfounded. "You donkey's ass! Have ye an arrow planted between yer ears as well? All the rich stuff we had to leave behind and ye hauled out a blighting book?"
He threw the parcel and the empty rucksack to the ground and laid his boot into my backside. My shaking elbows collapsed, and I fell forward into the mudhole. Though I twisted enough to avoid a direct hit, I jarred the broken-off arrow shaft protruding from my thigh. Lifting my face from the muck and spewing mud from my mouth, I bellowed like a speared boar.
Unconcerned, Boreas crouched beside me, rifling my clothes. He tossed aside my bracers and the rag I had used to dry my long-lost bow, stuffed my knife into his own belt, and unwrapped the last bite of sour bread I'd hoarded for more than a day and crammed it into his mouth. Fumbling at the waist of my braies, he pulled out a small bag the size of my palm--a scrap of green wool I'd sewn myself and soaked in tallow until it was stiff. "What's this?"
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