Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 38711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38711 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
The priest held a long knife in his gloved hand, curved like a talon, with the same wheel symbol etched on the blade.
That was it.
The wheel didn’t look like it was from any religion Roman knew, but there was something vaguely familiar about it. It invited comparison with the dharmachakra, the wheel of dharma. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all used it. In Hinduism, it was associated with the sun, light, and knowledge. In Buddhism, it represented Buddha’s teachings. The dharmachakra was an auspicious sign. This wheel was anything but. It didn’t look right.
It didn’t feel right, either. The glowing symbol felt oppressive, a weapon such as a buzz saw blade rather than a chariot wheel.
He had seen it somewhere before, but where?
“Did the priest say anything in your dream?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did you hear any voices, anything at all besides Morena?”
“No.”
“Alright. You can let it go.”
Finn relaxed and the ice melted, taking the image with it. “What now?”
“Now we dig deeper.”
“How? Another obryad?”
“No. We’re going to make coffee and then we’re going into my office, where we will look through a bunch of old books until we find something that fits.”
Finn blinked.
“It’s not all blood and flashy magic. A lot of it is scholarship. Get used to it.”
“I see what you mean about the dharmic wheel.” The tiny brown-headed nuthatch hopped back and forth, studying the drawing. “Harmony and symmetry are the point, and this is nothing like that. It’s not a chariot wheel.”
“No, if it were a chariot wheel, there would have been a solid circle to denote the axle, but the spokes intersect in the center.”
“Exactly. It’s not a nautical wheel, either. It’s something vicious.”
Roman rubbed his face. In the chair by the window, Finn stared at the massive tome in his lap, his eyes glazed over. The shepherd puppy had fallen asleep by his feet.
After the mercenaries collected the mage squad he’d hurled into the woods, they had dug in and gone quiet. A couple of hours ago Fedya, the smallest koloversh, brought an update: the client was coming in person.
They needed to figure out what they were dealing with before that client arrived. Forewarned was forearmed. Except he and Finn had been at this for hours now and had come up with nothing. He’d sent a koloversh to Dabrowski as a last resort.
“But does it look familiar to you?” Roman asked.
“That’s the damnedest thing,” Dabrowski said through the bird. “It does. Either I’ve seen it before or read about it. Otherworld alone knows where or when. Your apprentice is wilting.”
Roman glanced at Finn.
The kid sighed. “Do we really have to know all of this?”
“Yes,” Roman and Dabrowski said at the same time.
“But these are other people’s gods.”
“And if we were living in a world with just one god, it wouldn’t be an issue,” Dabrowski said.
“We would have much bigger issues,” Roman said.
“True,” the druid agreed.
“You won’t be serving the God, Finn. You will be serving a god,” Roman said. “The problem with clergy is that we don’t just minister, we seek to convert, and many of us view other religions as rivals.”
The nuthatch hopped around. “Indeed. Lock five priests from different cults into the same room for an hour, and at the end you have an equal chance of either harmony or a theological bloodbath. You won’t know which it is until you open that door. It’s like the Schrödinger Synod. Although synod isn’t exactly the best term…”
Roman had to cut him off before Dabrowski veered off on a tangent.
“The point is, you need to know who you are dealing with and what they are capable of. And religions grow and evolve all the time, so you must keep up. Druids like Piotr here can be monotheists, duotheists, or polytheists. Some reject the concept of a deity altogether, and yet when they gather, they have no problem performing the same rites and rituals, and all of them follow the same fundamental ethics. Chop an oak sapling in front of them and see how united they will get.”
“Why?” Finn asked.
“Because Druidry is both a religion and a way of life,” Dabrowski said. “It is a path, a journey, measured in time rather than distance, which all of us undertake together. Life is fundamentally spiritual, nature is unknowable, and none of us have a monopoly on the truth.”
“But what do you believe?” Finn asked.
“I believe that—”
The dog door flap thudded, and a huge raven flew into the office and landed on Roman’s desk.
Damn it all.
“There you are,” the raven said in his mother’s voice.
The nuthatch cringed. “Hello, Mrs. Tihomirov.”
“Petya. And what are you doing here?”
“Leaving, actually.” Dabrowski hopped off the table and flew off into the house.
Coward.
Roman sighed. “Yes?”
“Yes? That’s all you have to say to me?”
Chernobog, grant me patience...
“I know this is a hard time of the year for you. The whole family is at the house celebrating and you are stuck out here alone like some frozen mushroom. I made your favorite pirogi. I kept waiting and waiting to see if you would reach out. I didn’t want to smother you.”