Over long hours of rumination, day gave way to night, and even that was waning by the time Varis stirred. Across the firmament, the now familiar streaks of fire flashed past overhead. To the east, the waning, burning face of Hiphkos rose, crowned with an ever growing ring of what looked like stars, but could not be. It struck him that what he was seeing was actually the ruptured remains of Memokk and Attandaeus. He could not be certain, but he thought that the celestial fires that had initially spread across the face of Hiphkos had grown dimmer.
He laughed at the idea of various priesthoods and their followers, across many lands, running about in a panic believing that the gods they worshipped had just died, when in truth those gods had actually sacrificed themselves at the dawn of mankind. The perceived deaths of the gods would ensure mankind would embrace him and his dominance. Men, for the most part, were but lowly beasts ever-seeking a leader of strength and authority, someone or something stronger than themselves. In the face of his own power, such fools would eagerly bow, thinking to curry favor or, at the least, to stave off due punishment. Like all canny leaders, Varis would use such fawning idiots to further his own ends. When their usefulness expired, he would dispose of them. The rest, he supposed, he would spare for his amusement, for if nothing else, fools provided all manner of entertainment.
Pushing aside these trifles of interest, Varis stood and looked to the south. Ethereal filaments danced and swayed like radiant sea grass above Krevar. He could gauge each strand’s strength by the force of its glow. And in Krevar, he judged, there was much pain and suffering.
With careful study, he found a particular life force, studied it, and concluded that that one strand was the only one he must protect. Then, with reckless abandon, he added to the pain and fear of the rest, draining away the vitality of the living. Before the great wealth of living energy could destroy him, he began pouring it into the Qaharadin Marshes, some miles distant. By the time he finished his work, the swamp had grown deeper and wider.
Chapter 10
A loud rapping drew Ellonlef from a restless sleep. Before she raised her head from the pillow, a woman wearing the white and gray livery of House Racote burst through the door. Cast in the light of a firemoss lantern, her features were a mask of dismay. “Sister!” she cried, “Lord Marshal Otaker has summoned you. Please … please hurry!”
Groggy, Ellonlef sat up. “What is the hour, Alia?”
“The third past midnight, Sister. Please, you must come. It’s terrible.” Her face crumpled and tears began to stream.
“Alia, are you ill?”
“No,” she wailed. “Not … not yet.”
“Tell me what is amiss,” Ellonlef ordered, sliding out of bed. She drew on her white robes, then tied back her dark hair with a leather thong. While she hastily washed the sleep from her eyes, Alia spoke in broken sobs.
“People are … they are dying everywhere. It’s a plague.”
Ellonlef looked up from the washbasin, water dripping off her cheeks.
“You must come, Sister.”
Ellonlef dried her face and followed Alia out of the room. The servant woman hurried down corridor after corridor, all blazing with the light of rush torches and firemoss wall lamps. Everywhere she looked, death and stunned grief met her eyes. Here and there, guards stood over their brothers in arms, men who had perished from what looked like a year-long wasting sickness. The faces of the dead were gray as bathwater, with glazed eyes floating in hollow sockets; mouths gaped, as if they had been crying out even as they perished.
Ellonlef sank to her knees at a child’s side. The girl looked the same as the rest. The mother, another servant woman, was shrieking and clawing at her cheeks in despair. Suddenly, as if she had been slapped, the mother’s cries cut off. Ellonlef made to touch her arm, but Alia caught her wrist and dragged her back.
“Do not touch her!” Alia screamed.
Before Ellonlef could protest, the mother’s face began to gray, and her cheeks thinned and sunk. Alia released Ellonlef and backed away, a hand held over her mouth. Ellonlef’s attention remained on the dying woman, who had fallen to her knees and pitched over on her side to lay gasping like a landed fish. Guards approached from the other end of the corridor, but when they saw the woman, they halted.
Disregarding her own safety, Ellonlef moved to the dying woman’s side. Alia begged her to stay away, and would come no closer herself. Ellonlef took the woman’s head in her lap and smoothed back her black hair. It had been dark and thick moments before, but now was brittle as straw, and broke off at her touch. The woman’s skin was cold as the grave, dry as desert sand. Searching eyes found Ellonlef. She tried to speak but no words came, and her lips pulled back from her teeth in a withering rictus.
Ellonlef did not know how long she held the woman before Lord Marshal Otaker joined her side.
“Sister, please, come away. This sickness seems to spread by … touching a victim, or by the very air we breathe.”
“I have never seen the like,” Ellonlef said, voice hollow. “This cannot be a catching sickness. Nothing save poison kills so swiftly. But even poison cannot drain away one’s vitality in this way.”
Otaker gently pulled Ellonlef to her feet and directed her away. The servant woman, along with all the others who had perished, was left where she had fallen. Those still alive stared with sad surety etched on their features as Ellonlef and Otaker departed. To them, there could be no question that both would soon fall.
They were rounding the corner to Otaker’s chambers before Ellonlef regained her composure. “There is no need to pull me along.”
Otaker released her arm and looked away, a sheen of unshed tears in his gaze. Her insides twisted with sudden insight. “Lady Danara … your children?” She let the unvoiced question hang before them.
The lord marshal bowed his neck, his chin trembling. The strong, proud features she had always known was lost behind a face of abject misery.
“Come,” Ellonlef said, but in her heart the brief flare of hope she had that Danara and her children remained alive had already perished.
Together they hastened to Otaker’s chambers, only to be stopped short by a handful of grieving servants waiting outside the door. Otaker eased through them. When they saw who it was, the women bowed their heads, and the men touched their fists to heart in homage. Ellonlef followed, hard on his heels.
She halted as soon as she caught sight of Lady Danara lying on the bed, a wasted gray husk like all the others. Her heart ached at the mewling sounds she heard emanating from Otaker’s throat. He stumbled to his wife’s side, took her hand, and collapsed to his knees. He looked at her a long time, then raised his face to the ceiling and howled in anguish. The echoes of that despairing cry swept through the keep, and wherever it was heard the listeners felt their blood run cold.
Desolation sank into Ellonlef, playing havoc with her soul. It overwhelmed her. She turned and fled, shamed by her weakness, but unable to bear the pain of so many, not after all she had seen since the Three had collided and burned in the heavens. But no matter where she went, sorrow followed her. Men, women, and children, with no regard for rank or birth, lay like cordwood at every turn. Eventually she fled the keep, only to find worse out of doors.
On she ran, until coming to the market square, where she finally halted. There, instead of grief, the power of fear had taken hold, backlit by leaping, roaring flames. Those not yet stricken ran to and fro with blazing torches raised, eyes wild. Standing atop a pile of crumbled mud bricks, Magus Uzzret urged on the frenzy.
“Burn the dead!” he bellowed, his eyes bulging with a desperation bordering on insanity. “Burn them all!”
Soldiers and townsfolk alike rushed to do his bidding, so lost in terror that they did not conceive that touching the dead might poison their own lives. Bodies were dragged from the shadows and haphazardly thrown onto roaring bonfires. Thick smoke poured from the tangled corpses, which seemed to catch and burn as easily if they had been dipped in oil.
Uzzret raised his arms before the flames, the wafting heat rustling his blue robes. He shouted incoherently, as if urging the inferno higher.
“Tell them to stop!” Ellonlef urged. “This is madness!”
The magus cut off his incoherent ranting to glare down at her. Spittle flecked his quivering lips. “Would you defy the judgment of the gods?”
Ellonlef was taken aback by the rapid change of heart of a man who had so recently proclaimed that there were no gods. He had gone from an unbeliever to a zealot in a matter of hours.
As if reading her thoughts, Uzzret added with disturbing calm, “To my shame, I have disavowed the gods, as has my brotherhood. I see now my folly, and the folly of the world. This sea of death is a sign as surely as is the shaking of the world and the destruction of the Three, and even the fires that rage in the west.
“Too long has the world cavorted at the perverse altars of debauchery and bloodlust, with the Kingdom of Aradan serving as the High Priest. Too long have we been turned from the faces of the true gods, chasing after the desires of our hearts.” The longer he spoke, the faster and higher came his voice.
“We who should have known better! You and I, our orders, have cringed in cowardice, trading our morality for peace, rather than speaking against sacrilege and debauchery. Now, the gods of old have bestirred themselves, have awoken from their long slumber, weighed our worth, and found the world of men wanting. Judgment has come! The fires of their enemies’ burning brighten the heavens by night, and terrible rumblings lay waste to the lands by day.” He leered down at her. “This is only the beginning of the end! We must appease our true creators before it is too late.”
“Pa’amadin, the God of gods, Creator of All, desires our devotion-not toasted corpses,” Ellonlef offered in a soothing voice, hoping to instill a sense of calm into Uzzret.
His dark eyes, mirroring the flames all around, took on a hard light without a whit of compassion. He jabbed an accusatory finger at her. “Pa’amadin is but another false god, a device created by corrupt and shameless hearts. The true gods, be they nameless or their names merely forgotten, demand fire and blood, as in the days of old! You deny that which is undeniable. Even as the waves of catastrophe break around us all, you stand apart from truth. If you will not humble yourself, even as the realm burns in the fires of our own making, then you must burn in those fires … as will all heretics.”
Ellonlef began backing away, telling herself this must be a terrible dream. How could a man lose his mind so swiftly? And not only that, how could he come to such outlandish conclusions?
“Seize her!” Uzzret screeched. “Cast her into the fires!”
Ellonlef spun to flee, but came face to face with a creature risen straight from Geh’shinnom’atar. When its dead white eyes found her, she choked on a scream.
Chapter 11
With veiled amusement, Varis watched the Sister of Najihar recoil. Between her shock at seeing his ravaged features, and hearing the ravings of Magus Uzzret, it was all he could do not to fall into a fit of laughter. Peropis had assured him that she knew the hearts of men, had learned their ways from their beginnings. She had painted a picture of what to expect, and what to utilize, that was uncannily similar to the scenes of chaos he had encountered since passing within the broken walls of Krevar. But jumping so quickly to burning heretics alongside corpses as an appeasement to nameless gods, no less, was more than even Peropis had anticipated.
A pair of guards who had not heard Uzzret’s wild command to hurl Ellonlef into the flames, came from the shadows dragging the body of one of their fellows, intending to burn the corpse. Their grim labor sobered the prince. If he did not put a stop to this nonsense, and soon, the seeds of his future army would, quite literally, go up in smoke.
Varis strode to the feet of the old gaping fool perched atop the hill of broken stone. “Magus Uzzret,” he said, knowing the man’s name as well as the woman’s, just as he knew all the advisors to the lords marshal across all of Aradan. “I’m sure that gods, forgotten or not, disdain such an empty sacrifice as charring the dead. Call off this madness if you ever hope to see these hapless souls walk again.”
“On whose authority do you speak?” Uzzret demanded, voice shaking. By his expression, it was all he could do not to succumb to the same fear filling Ellonlef’s heart.
Varis had the distinct impression that the man was a blustering imbecile who thought more highly of himself than did his peers, an assessment that had never reached his grandfather’s court in Ammathor. Of course, Varis considered, troubles and hardship often brought out a man’s true nature. At a furious shout, Varis was sure the old fool would soil himself. But there was no need for that, no matter how amusing it would be.
Raising himself up to his full height, Varis said, “By the authority of the blood of my Royal House, Magus Uzzret, that which has flowed through the veins of all the heirs of the Ivory Throne since the First King Edaer Kilvar stormed off the Kaliayth to bring about the fall of the Suanahad Empire, a thousand years gone.”
Both Uzzret and Ellonlef stared. To hasten their burgeoning understanding, he added, “Though I bear the recent scars given me by an enemy to all men, I am Prince Varis Kilvar, heir to the Ivory Throne of Aradan, Keeper of the Kaliayth in the West, and Holder of the Golden Plain in the East.”
“My lord,” Uzzret gasped, as recognition finally bloomed in his gaze. “What … what has befallen you?”
Varis did not bother answering. He did not wish to have to repeat himself incessantly, and he knew well that the tale he was about to tell was one created to coerce, not convince. He must act quickly, giving no time for deep consideration. He commanded, “Call off these men, Magus. This is no plague, and neither is it a curse of the gods.”
Uzzret and Ellonlef responded with questioning looks, and Varis laid down the first paving stone that would become the road to his accession.
“These deaths are the work of one man, who has stolen into himself the very powers of creation, once held by the Three. Before we lose anymore of the time needed to mend these wrongs, take me to Lord Marshal Otaker-if he still lives,” he added belatedly, not wishing these two fools to guess that he knew of at least one man, in particular, who still drew breath. Neither could know that he had purposefully spared Otaker, and so they did as he ordered.
Chapter 12
It had taken Ellonlef much urging to get Otaker to leave his dead wife and grieving children, but now he sat behind his writing table, his eyes red from weeping. He stared at Prince Varis as if he were an apparition. As a frequent visitor to the king’s court, he had recognized the youth with little prompting, but it was apparent he was having a difficult time fully accepting what he was seeing.
Ellonlef knew how the lord marshal felt. She tried to ignore the revulsion she felt when she looked at the prince. She had briefly seen him as a child when she passed through Ammathor on her way to Krevar, but he no longer resembled that child. The dark skin given him by his ancestry had been bleached bone-white, and all the flesh beneath that skin had melted away, leaving him gaunt to the point of death. His eyes were whiter still than his skin, and every hair on his body had either fallen out or been burned away. He looked like a resurrected corpse, though without the warm blush of life.
Despite his abominable appearance, things he had mentioned troubled her more. “Call off this madness,” Varis had said in the market square, “if you ever hope to see these hapless souls walk again.” Though unspoken, it seemed that he had claimed the dead would be raised to life. Her conclusion of what he had meant was implausible enough for her to consider that she must have misheard him-except she knew she had not. Also, when the prince had demanded to be taken to Otaker, there had been a brief hesitation before he had added, “if he still lives.” It was as if he had known full well that Otaker was still alive.
“My lord,” Otaker said in a hollow tone, interrupting Ellonlef’s thoughts, “you have come at a grievous time for Krevar. We-”
> Varis quieted Otaker with a raised hand. “I fear it is a ‘grievous time’ for the whole of Aradan and, perhaps, the entire world. The powers of the Three, the gods who created the world and men, have been stolen by a mere mortal, and the gates of Geh’shinnom’atar have been breached and the Fallen freed. This night, the mahk’lar stalk the face of the world.”
He spoke in such a matter-of-fact tone that it took Ellonlef a moment to fully register the import of his words. Uzzret moaned, low in his throat.
“The Three … the Fallen,” Otaker muttered, shaking his head. “Forgive my disbelief, but you speak the ramblings of the Madi’yin.”
Ellonlef struggled to keep her features calm, but she could not still her tongue. “How could a man steal the powers of living gods?” she asked incredulously.
Varis turned his lifeless gaze on her. “Suffice it to say, the Three live no longer. In truth, they destroyed themselves at the dawning of the age of men. The moons that represented their deity are but remnants-ghosts, if you will. And now, even their ghosts have been destroyed.”
Uzzret began bobbing his head, as if he had known as much all along.
“That is impossible,” Ellonlef said, shaken.
“If I had not believed the same,” Varis said, suddenly morose, “then I could have avoided suffering the living nightmare of my own ruination. However impossible, I saw that power unleashed and, too, I saw demons freed that those same energies held trapped within the Thousand Hells-demons that now soar free in the world of living men. That force melted my flesh, ripped through my bones, nearly destroyed me. I watched my supposed protector-a man who beguiled me with false tales of treasure large enough to aid Ammathor hidden within a secret temple-as he went mad with power and fury, and slaughtered those few under his command who were not loyal to him. He scorched them with fires created from nothing. When that did not slake his bloodlust, he fashioned a vile and corrupt form of life from that which was once pure, using it to destroy all the rest who opposed him. By good fortune, I was able to escape-though not without paying a high price, as you can see.”
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