A sudden darkness fell upon him in the glow of bloodstained morning.
He would never see her again.
Never know the face of his son.
Men died by the score and he stood frozen in the grip of this realization. In the back of his mind, Lyrilan’s voice pleaded with him. Don’t do this! All war is failure! His brother would never understand the realities of empire. The necessity of slaughters like this one. The need to face death and spit in its eye.
As the spears of Khyreins surrounded him on all sides and the soldiers protecting him were cut down, he lost all of these thoughts. He was no weak-kneed scholar, no cowardly wailer. He was the Son of Dairon. The Emperor of Uuz.
My son will know that I was a warrior.
He will read it in the scrolls of history.
This is how a warrior dies.
Howling and weeping, he raised his blade and leaped into a thicket of gleaming spears.
Climbing atop the mountainous bulk of the Swamp God, Vireon joined a cadre of Udvorg hammering and slashing at the beast’s slimy flesh. Only here, at the summit of its massive bloat, could he see the source of the terrible chorus that rang through the night. Seven swollen heads, each one tall as a Giant, grown in a tight ring at the center of the throbbing fleshmount. Tufts of hair grew from the desiccated skulls, little more than clumps of swamp weed and tangled moss, but they were much like the heads of dead Men or Giants.
Seven pairs of great blind eyes gleamed night-black and without pupils. Mouths hung slack and dribbling with noxious secretions, the teeth rotted to sharp stubs dark as charcoal. The flesh of each head was dark brown, splotched with green and gray lesions dripping pus. They were the heads of forlorn lepers, singing an ancient song of power. Serpentine tongues red as blood quivered inside their jaws, and the eyes rolled mindlessly. Yet they sang as one, an endless chorus of malformed syllables in a language that must have died long ago. The corruption of ages hung about the monstrosity, nowhere more evident than in these decayed yet living skulls.
Tentacles wound up from below, snatching Giants off the creature’s peak before any reached the ring of heads with mace or sword. Vireon leaped between the Udvorg, slicing at greedy coils, making his way closer to the ring of heads. The mystery of this beast lay within that ring. Perhaps therein lay the secret to killing it.
Leaping over a Giant whose battle axe dug deep into the scabrous flesh, he vaulted from the Udvorg’s shoulders and through the narrow space between two of the heads. He tumbled through scum and clinging vines toward the center of the ring.
Now the seven pairs of dead eyes fell directly upon him. It seemed they were not blind at all; or they saw with some deep sight born of nightmare and sorcery. Gripping his blade in both fists, he stared at the circle of leprous faces, caught at the midpoint of their sonorous wailing. It deafened him.
He shouted against the violence of their song, defying it with his own war cry, and rushed toward one of the idiot faces. He would slice all seven of those skulls from their perches one by one. Yet the strange song changed its pitch, and now the seven heads spoke to him as one. It was not his own language, yet he understood it. Their great spell did not cease, the terrible wailing continued to rise and fall, yet in some way they also spoke beneath the resounding chant. Stilled by words that hit him like iron hammers, Vireon could not bring his sword down upon the nearest of the twisted faces.
“You are not the King of Storms,” said the seven as one. Their mouthings reverberated between his ears, death cries torn from a deep catacomb.
He could not reply. His throat was an empty well.
“Long have we waited…” said the seven-who-were-one. “Since the White Panther plucked us from the smoking ruins of Omu and set us here to guard her border. She said the King of Storms would come to free us one day. We hoped that you were him… yet you are only a Man. Like we used to be.”
I am Vireon! he wanted to shout. The seven did not permit it. In silence, he struggled against the invisible chains weighing down his limbs. He refused to let go of the sword’s grip, though it had grown heavy as a palace gate.
“Where is the King of Storms?” demanded the seven.
Dead! Long dead!
He did not need to speak the words. They-it-understood. There were no more Giants atop the summit now. All had been cast down or devoured. Only Vireon remained on high, caught in the spell of the seven heads. A spider trapped in a web of sorcery. It was Vod the seven heads had expected, not him. Vod the Bringer of Storms, Breaker of the Desert, Slayer of Omagh. His father.
“Nooooooooo!” The great heads wailed. They rolled and convulsed atop fat necks. “There is no end to our suffering then. All hope of warm death and sweet oblivion is gone… dead like the King of Storms. So we must continue to serve Her. We, who were once the Lords of Omu, omnipotent in our glory. We were living Men-Kings! First she took our kingdom, then our souls. Our separate flesh she made as one with the soul of the swamp. Until the King of Storms comes to deliver us, she said. O, faint hope of a distant Age! Yet it was only another of her lies.”
I am Vireon! Vod of the Storms was my father! Still he could not move or speak. The sounds from below, Men and Giants dying, mingled with the horrid screech of the Swamp God’s song. It spoke one last time to him in seven cadaverous voices.
“You are not the King of Storms.”
It heaved a ragged sigh that rose into an awful howl.
A greasy tendril thick as his waist slithered about Vireon. It yanked him from the ring of heads with terrible force, and his blade went flying from numb fingers. Blackness engulfed him as the tendril stuffed him into a gnashing lower maw, a tidbit of raw meat to feed its bottomless hunger.
The stink of the Swamp God’s gullet was intolerable. Fresh blood and ancient filth. He sank through a narrow gorge lined with jagged fangs. The pulsing walls of flesh squeezed and clenched, trying to burst his stony skin. Since it could not break his flesh, it merely swallowed him deeper. He fought to breathe and got only a mouthful of noxious slime. He vomited and grabbed at the slippery chute, sinking his fingers deep into the raw flesh. The danger here was not in being gnashed to ribbons, but in suffocating from lack of air.
The beast pulled him deep into its bowels, some insistent tongue or tendril wrapped about his legs. He lost his handhold on the fleshy walls, nails leaving deep gashes as he descended toward the center of the leviathan’s mass. He kicked and tore and strove to burst through the inner flesh, but it was too thick and too spongy. He was a fly trapped in amber, a solitary mote striving to tear its way out of a living mountain. His heart pounded and he tried again to breathe, unsuccessfully. Then he plummeted, drawing air for a half-second as he fell through steaming vapors into a dark and cavernous space. He splashed into a bubbling reservoir of noxious fluid that was certainly not water. Water would not burn his thick flesh in such a way. He swam mightily upward, pausing only to snap the tendril that gripped his ankles.
He broke the surface but could see nothing in the putrid darkness. Bones drifted against him in the caustic slime, the remains of recent victims. His skin sizzled. Soon his bones would join these others, burned away by this liquid fire. He screamed, and his voice echoed through the fleshy cavity. The belly of the beast.
Splashes sounded the arrival of more Giant victims, already dead by the time their bodies reached this nether region. The Giants possessed great strength and endurance, but they lacked the density of Vireon’s compact body. Fate had distilled his gigantic strength into a human figure, making him quicker and more resilient than a true Giant. Yet even the best qualities of Man and Uduru combined would not be enough to survive this.
“I am the Son of Vod!” he cried into the sloshing dark.
A tremulous groan shook the immense gut, and the fiery fluid dissolved his skin slowly but surely. He swam about blindly searching for a handhold, something, anything to pull himself out of the corrosive lake. There was nothing.
He floundered, choking on the creature’
s bile. Like swallowing the flaming oil of an upturned brazier. He wailed in pain, vomited again, and wondered how long his sturdy skin would last.
I am the Son of Vod.
His potent blood runs in my veins.
I brought the storms back to the Stormlands.
“Father!” he cried. “Father!”
I am the Son of Vod, who was both Man and Giant.
I have his blood. The blood of a sorcerer.
His burning skin shuddered, his eyes closed against the gloom. He screamed again, not in words, but with the guttural sound of a lost soul lingering on the edge of annihilation. Something long buried awoke inside him. A shock of fresh pain, unlike any other, erupted from his heart, spreading through his arms and legs. The pain of the monster’s gastric acid was less than nothing compared to the rending, stretching agony he now endured. His only awareness was of the scream itself, rising like the squeal of a war horn inside the cavernous gut.
He screamed, and the screaming changed him.
His chest swelled, and his shoulders. His legs grew like mighty oaks, lifting him above the lake of death. Inside his expanding skin, bones cracked and popped, lengthened and swelled. His corselet, belt, and sandals split apart, abandoned by his burgeoning mass. He grew tall as an Uduru, muscles flexing with unnatural torment. The echoes of his own howl came back to him, and he continued to rise. He raised his hands and found the roof of the bowel cavern. Still he grew, until his arms burst through that stubborn flesh like battering rams. He bent forward, doubling over, and his back met the ruptured roof of the cavern now, splitting it wide open.
A vision came to him as his body swelled and grew beyond all proportion: his father, beardless and young, standing tall as a mountain, locked in the grip of another leviathan, this one a great Serpent. No, the Father of Serpents, Omagh himself, whom Vod had killed and so changed the world.
Vireon watched the battle in the mirror of his mind as his mounting bulk shattered gristle, sinew, and nameless flesh, growing to match the size of the enveloping leviathan. Young Vod lopped off dozens of the Serpent-Father’s clawed legs with each swipe of his great axe, then wrestled the legless behemoth to the ground. Mountains shivered and the sky burst into a hurricane as Vod tore the Serpent’s head from its vast body. Here was the beast that had cast Old Udurum into ruin and wallowed like a pig in its smoking debris. And here was the Man-Giant who grew to the size of a God and ended Omagh’s ancient life.
Here was Vod the Giant-King.
My father.
My blood.
My inheritance.
Vireon’s fists burst into fresh air. Naked sunlight fell upon his gasping face. Still he grew, and his massive head followed his fists. His shoulders and torso came next, like a brutal infant tearing itself free of a mad womb. The leviathan’s countless tentacles quivered in the spasms of its destruction. The Giants below howled Vireon’s name as he burst through the summit of this hill of rancid flesh. The morning sun stung eyes and glittered upon the slime drenching his raw skin, red as that of a sunburned child. He lifted a great foot from the dying guts of the Swamp God and stomped down upon the seven bloated heads. They cracked like eggshells beneath his foot. The world shook beneath him. Again he stomped upon the putrescent hill of flesh, driving a legion of howling Udvorg away from the monster’s death throes.
Colossal and steaming, Vireon gazed across a carpet of crimson wilderness at the western horizon. He glimpsed a range of steaming volcanoes along the southern edge of the continent. He might even see the black spires of Khyrei if he stared hard enough into the northeast, but matters unfolding at his colossal feet demanded attention.
Far below his sopping head the quagmire seethed with armored Men rushing to kill each other. The black legions flowed from the jungle like a river of darkness, blending with the triple host in a swirling dance of death. A sea of tiny faces gazed up at Vireon, straining against the sun’s glare to admire the whole of his mountainous form.
These tiny Men and Giants.
They needed him.
He stomped the last of the leviathan’s bulk into a dark jelly, then raised his voice in a shout that sundered the heavens. A clap of earsplitting thunder shook the marshland. A vast wall of stormclouds sparkled with looming thunderbolts, and sheets of cold rain fell across the clashing legions. Men and Giants cheered as one about his heels.
“Vireon! Vireon, Son of Vod!”
He reached a massive hand down toward the swamp’s edge and scooped up a hundred Khyrein soldiers. They wailed and pleaded in his fist, some leaping to their deaths to avoid his cruel fingers. His fist tightened, crushing bronze, bone, and flesh into a red paste. It dripped like red clay from between his fingers. Again he bent forward, this time both hands capturing mobs of masked ones and a trio of great lizards. The scaly behemoths were less than flies to him. They died as easily as the shrieking Men.
Now the main force of Giants rushed forth to join the legions of Men. The tide turned quickly from despair to mad triumph. Vireon watched as the Udvorg rushed the red jungle, flattening trees and Khyreins alike. Their greatswords and axes drank deeply of southern blood.
The Khyrein lines broke and the northerners chased them through the jungle. Vireon saw clearly now the twenty black towers marking the border between marsh and jungle. He raised his great knee and took a single step. His bare foot fell upon the nearest tower like a toppled mountain. The edifice crumbled beneath his tread, a toy house built by tiny, soulless children.
After this symbolic destruction, the battle became a rout. Khyreins fled for the relative safety of the towers to north and south. Few of them made it as the northern legions pressed deeper into the wilderness.
A yawning weariness overcame Vireon. As the raging storm washed the slime and blood from his skin, he began to diminish. Lightning flared above a thousand scenes of slaughter, as Men and Giants avenged their fallen brothers. The dying screams of Khyreins were drowned beneath the noise of the tempest.
Soon Vireon stood no taller than his Udvorg cousins in the ruined swamp, surrounded by the twisted and torn remains of northmen, horses, and Giants. He fell to his knees in the bloodshot mire and fought the desire to lie down and sleep amid the ruined bodies. Instead, he raised his head toward the jungle and forced himself to walk forward.
The marshes had been crossed. The way to the black city had been opened.
The Blood of Vod had been tested and found worthy.
In the pouring rain he donned the clothing and armor of a Giant he found headless in the muck. He picked up a fallen greatsword. Through the driving storm, the songs of clashing metal and yowling Giants lingered in his ears. The cool rain soothed his chapped flesh.
A cadre of northern legions was already heading north toward a second watchtower. He wondered who it was that led them. Tyro? Angrid? Dahrima? What had become of his faithful Uduri and her sisters? He last saw her slicing tentacles among the ranks of Udvorg. Could her bones be among those he found inside the leviathan’s belly?
Across the littered field he saw a figure rising from the muck. A Giantess. He ran toward her. A lean face framed by tousled black hair turned to look upon him. Varda raised her black staff and clasped her bleeding forehead. He offered his arm, helped her to stand. She pulled away from him, then grimaced with pain. Her scarlet eyes scanned his Udvorg-sized body. She had no words to account for his new stature, or the miracle of sorcery he had performed. Crystal tears flowed along her cold cheeks.
“Where is Angrid?” he asked.
Her blue face twisted into a mask of anger. “You dare to ask me this? You who convinced him to leave the ice and fight in your mad crusade? You who are neither Man nor Giant?”
He glared at her, trying to understand the words. His head swam, but he refused to fall.
“Where is Angrid?” he asked again, louder. Thunder punctuated his question.
“Dead!” screamed the shamaness. “Torn apart! Devoured!” Her ruby eyes flared with rage and heartbreak.
&nbs
p; Vireon blinked. Rain ran along the blade of his sword, dripping like translucent blood from its tip. What was she saying?
“You saved us!” Varda screamed. “Why could you not save him?”
Vireon stammered; the proper words eluded him. “I… I…” His body diminished yet again, until he stood at his normal human height. Varda towered over him now, her eyes burning redder than the poison jungle. She turned away and stalked toward the demolished tower, where Men were setting up a defensible camp. A blue flame sprang up once more to dance at the head of her staff.
Vireon raised a hand to call her back, but the cry never left his lips.
He fell back into the mire, and his boiling thoughts sank into darkness.
18
The Vital Tongues
The libraries of Yaskatha were sumptuous and extensive, yet Lyrilan spent none of his time exploring them. Instead he stayed cloistered in his borrowed palace chamber with its terrace overlooking the Cryptic Sea. D’zan had set sail nine days ago, his golden galleons joining with the white swanships of Mumbaza.
Lyrilan took little food or wine, despite the protests of Volomses, who left his studies in the halls of parchment and scroll twice a day to visit. The old sage seemed to enjoy his new life in the southern capital; as a scholar of the north he commanded a certain respect in Yaskatha, and the women of the court found him endearing. Undroth, too, seemed less the eternal general and more like a retired lord. He spent most his time with discreet courtesans or exploring the royal vineyards. At times he drank with the veterans of the palace guard, reliving old glories.
Lyrilan took no woman to his bed and spared no time to get acquainted with his new neighbors. Word about the palace, relayed to him by Volomses, was that grief had made him a recluse. He did not care what the powdered and pampered folk of D’zan’s realm believed.
Last night, by the soft light of thirteen candles, he had finished The Third Book of Imvek. The secrets unfolding in his brain had followed him into a restless sleep. He dreamed the abstractions, the metaphysical propositions, the songs in ancient tongues. He walked the winding streets of empires long forgotten, dead cities scattered across the world like patches of moss obscured by smothering wilderness. He spoke with the savants of races who carved mountains into colossal cities long before mankind was a dream in the eye of its mysterious creators. He saw the Gods themselves in his dreams, lurking like shadows about the fires of primeval humanity. The worst of his nightmares brought him face to face with the deepest truths of Imvek’s discoveries.
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