Hours later, Anemos showed up cranky and tired from his trip to Brotherhood. Ruyo thanked him profusely and sat him down with a meal. "Useless pagans," he groused. "Come east with me."

"It sounds like I need to go pacify them first. It shouldn't take long." She didn't add that they had a job for her, that she wasn't qualified to do yet.

"More delays. Ugh."

Nusina said, "I should probably come along to see what I can of their secrets."

Ruyo agreed. She set out within the hour, leaving her guards with vegetable-like bread, water, materials, and a first installment of trade goods.

Ruyo rode west. Baris accompanied her back to his cabin, where they rested for the night and said hello to his fiancee. She had been planting a garden and using some divinely made cloth as a threadbare canopy outside the cabin.

Baris told her, "I should make one more trip with Ruyo."

"You've been gone too much, Baris. If the villagers are determined to hurt her, you being there won't change that. You've already said what you have to say to them." She nodded apologetically toward Ruyo. "You can see that, can't you? I need him to stop risking his life right before our wedding, and you proved you can take care of yourself."

Ruyo would've preferred to have the hunter along, but Cydi had a point. Ruyo had been borrowing him too often lately and pulling him away from his other duties, including his obligations to Cydi herself. Ruyo sighed and said, "Yes. I'll be fine."

In the morning, Ruyo rode on from there with only Nusina at her side. "I've found the Brotherhood people honest in their trade dealings, but we're relying on the word of people who just attacked me."

Nusina said, "And relying on very recent bandits to watch your back."

Ruyo smiled. "At least with them, I have confidence in them wanting to get paid."

Brotherhood lay west along the same trade road Ruyo had been riding back and forth since her adventure began. Here the land was more hilly, and the road began bending southward. When she spotted the distant chimney-smoke of the village and smelled cattle, Ruyo began to feel a faint buzzing in her bones. She said so.

Nusina said, "I sense something, too. It's annoying. For reference, try your magic here and in a few spots ahead."

Ruyo cast her simple light spell without trouble, but another few minutes ahead, the trick was harder. "It feels sluggish." Struggling to use the vocabulary of the real mages who'd been teaching her, she added, "This must be their ward. I've never been here before as a magic user. Does, ah, initiation make the ward more noticeable?"

Nusina said, "Probably. I'd compare it to there being a powerful... lodestone is your word, somewhere nearby. You'd only notice that if you're carrying metal. You've never directly wielded magic before."

Ruyo continued riding into town past some cows, and got spotted. Brotherhood had two districts despite numbering less than a thousand people. Nearest the road was the public face of the trading post, inn, and some of the farms and homes. But south of there lived the few dozen monks. An obviously junior young acolyte in a robe startled at the sight of Ruyo, and rushed off to the cluster of cabins surrounding a somber stone temple.

Nusina said, "Have you been to that shrine before?"

Ruyo halted her horse to wait. She tried the light-spell again and found it was still hampered but not blocked entirely. "No, and I've always assumed it was a harmless house of worship. Of what, I was never sure."

A lone monk hurried out from the forest grove near the cabins. He carried a bundle of cloth, and slowed as he approached Ruyo. "Welcome!" he called out.

Even Ruyo's horse snorted skeptically. Ruyo said, "Do you have more thugs to fight me to the death?"

The grey-robed man bowed his head. "I'm sorry, ma'am. May I come closer to speak in peace?"

"What've you got there?"

He unwrapped the bundle to show a steaming loaf of bread. "I would share this with you."

She'd come this far. "Let's talk," she said.

The monk reached up toward Ruyo, offering either half of the loaf, and politely ate first from the one Ruyo didn't take. "I assume you've been told why we did it, and roughly what we want from you."

Ruyo tore into the hot, dark bread. "Excuse me for being on edge. I haven't fully recovered from my wounds, and that was the first woman I ever killed." Though the food was good, her stomach churned.

"I swear to you that you can leave here in peace whenever you like. Just hear us out."

"What do you think, Nusina?"

"Seems sincere."

"I'll listen."

#

Reluctantly she let herself be led to one of the cabins, which was part meeting room and part storehouse. Stairs had been dug into a basement lined with beer casks. In this earthy-smelling building, three monks bowed to Ruyo and joined her around a table.

"We know you, trader," said a silver-haired man with cloudy grey eyes. "I am Matthias, head of our order. The 'Keeper', we say among ourselves."

"As in jail-keeper?"

He nodded. "Is your spirit guardian with you? Nusina, I think?"

"May I appear?" asked Nusina.

"You don't need my permission."

She appeared, flickering weakly. "I'm present and can hear you, though in this place I can't be visible for long. If you mean peace, the goddess will not smite you." She faded out again.

The monks took the threat well. Matthias said, "As you're not of our order, and under the circumstances, I won't ask you to swear secrecy. But I hope you will understand why the secret we'll tell you should not be repeated."

Ruyo folded her arms. "From what I've heard so far, I already understand. You don't want some meddlesome mage trying to free whatever is in your temple."

One of the other monks, said to be a better storyteller, explained. "It's common history that mankind came from elsewhere, an Old World, into this place where there were only ruins, a Lost World. So there was a civilization here that preceded us. We know of it only from ruins and artifacts. One of which you've found in that cave, haven't you?"

"Yes," Ruyo admitted.

"We know little of that age. But there were spirits and stranger things, some of them dangerous. Terrible gods or things that claim to be gods, demanding blood and souls." The monk leaned closer. "One of these is here, pinned in place by luck or, we like to think, a heroic act by a hero of the Lost World."

"And you think I'm somehow qualified to kill it?"

"Yes. We have pity for the awful thing; we'd like to end its suffering and confinement. But more importantly, we don't want it to get loose."

Matthias added, "We have an artifact of our own. Besides the seal that holds the Unspoken One in place, and what methods we've used to strengthen it, we have a treasure gotten at great cost from an unrelated ruin. As you must've noticed, it weakens magic in the area around it. But even that isn't enough; we sense our prisoner slowly gathering strength."

Nusina found it hard even to speak by shaking the air around her. Instead she relayed questions through Ruyo. "What is the Unspoken One? What is its name?"

The other monks looked to Matthias. He sighed. "It wants the world to know its name. With each soul that knows it, we think it gains power. But telling you might help you. What should we do?"

Ruyo listened to her guide, and repeated for her, "Nusina says maybe you should tell her in private. She hasn't got the sort of soul that we have, and she might remember something."

So Ruyo left the cabin and waited. Then she felt like she'd been stabbed and rended by claws the size of cities, burning, bleeding. She shrieked and ran back to the door, yanking its handle and pounding on the wood.

The monks opened it for her and let her in. Nusina was there like a blue candle in a gale. The spirit said, "The light, the burning light!"

Ruyo went to her and pulled her close. "We're here, droplet. It can't hurt you."

Nusina wasted energy to stay tangible a little longer, just so Ruyo could hold her. "It was a god. Kill it before it rises again."

Matthias said, "This is the first time we've had another voice from the Lost World confirm that. Please, spirit. Anything else you can tell us might help."

The spirit hid her eyes deep in her liquid body. "I remember war. It had a grand temple where the sun was brightest, and it was never wrong about anything, or it seemed that way. People carried its banner, marched in its name."

Ruyo said, "So it was some sort of good god, corrupted or betrayed?"

"No, no, no! It wore goodness like a cloak. Not at all like the cloak of stars. There wasn't always even blood when it acted. Sometimes it even did something reasonable, helpful. But never, ever trust it."

"The God of Fire, then?"

"No. Light."

Nusina's ripples slowly calmed.

The monks said, "The first of us were a group of treasure-hunters. When they found this powerful creature bound in a ruin, they thought it was the luckiest day of their lives. They went on a quest to set it free."

"Why?!" Nusina strained to say.

Matthias said, "I think you know the answer."

"Because it was so kind and asked for so little, and knew powerful secrets of your Lost World."

The storyteller monk said, "How did you meet Ruyo, spirit?"

Nusina screeched into Ruyo's mind. "No, no, we are nothing alike!"

Matthias winced, then glared at his colleague. "I think you should see to preparing a meal." The man got up, looking ashamed, and left without a word.

Matthias said, "I'm sorry, Nusina. Even I sensed a little of your reaction to that. Indeed, everything we've heard of you so far suggests that you aren't our enemy. Which makes it all the worse that I have to ask you and your companion another hard question."

Nusina churned and frothed. "You want to know how to kill a god."

"It's our mission, now. Our treasure-hunter founders almost made a terrible mistake. I was going to have Brother Ecumas explain this part, but if he can't be polite about it, never mind." He sighed. "So, the story is that we were on a quest to free the Unspoken One. But then, people started disappearing. The first time it seemed clear that the victim had just wandered off. The second time, the Unspoken One claimed there'd been a terrible accident when one of our founders cast the wrong type of spell near it. The third time, a girl got too curious, went to the ruin, and fell down the stairs. An accident, you see. Just another unrelated isolated incident."

The third monk, a portly bearded man, had been mostly quiet so far. He said, "In other words, the Unspoken One got greedy. We started to understand it was no friendly, well-meaning prisoner. So at that point our founders' goal changed toward ending the Unspoken One instead of freeing it. The best we've done so far is the magic-suppressing field we have here, and our specialized anti-magic techniques."

"This part doesn't surprise me at all," Nusina said.