And what an opportunity!
He had first come out of the swamp at night and, guided by the glow of life, made for a firemoss hunter camped nearby. Varis’s appearance had reduced the poor fellow to a gibbering imbecile. Varis had drained the man like a waterskin, until all that was left behind was a leathery husk wrapped tight around jutting bones. All the while, the ‘moss hunter’s team of oxen had chewed their cud with bland indifference.
Varis had sorted through the man’s stores until he found a tunic, trousers, and a long, hooded cloak that looked like lowborn robes when belted. Afterward, he had begun again the long, swift march to Krevar....
Night had grown old by the time Varis stirred. Across the dark heavens, the now familiar streaks of fire flashed overhead. To the east the burning half-face of Hiphkos rose, crowned with an ever growing ring of what looked like stars. Varis suspected that glittering ring was actually the shattered remains of Memokk and Attandaeus.
He laughed at the idea of various priests and lowborn fools running about in a panic believing that the gods they worshipped had just died, when in truth those gods had sacrificed themselves at the dawn of humankind.
I will stand in place of their dead gods, Varis thought, knowing they would accept him. In the face of his power, those fools would eagerly bow to him, thinking to curry favor or, at the least, to stave off punishment.
And I will gladly use those fawning idiots. And when their usefulness expired? Why, then, he would dispose of them. Of course, he would spare some for his amusement, for fools were nothing if not amusing.
Varis stood and looked to the south. In the darkness of night, the aura over Krevar had changed. Now ghostly filaments danced and swayed above the fortress. He could judge the strength of each strand by its brightness. In Krevar, he surmised, there was much pain and suffering. He added to that misery by stealing into himself the vitality of the living.
Before that flood of living energy could recreate itself into new forms of life and destroy him, he poured it into the Qaharadin Marshes, some miles distant. By the time he finished, Krevar’s ethereal glow had faded, and the swamp had grown deeper and wider.
Chapter 10
A rapid banging at her door dragged Ellonlef out of a restless sleep. As she raised her head from the pillow, a servant woman wearing the white and gray livery of House Racote burst into the room. Cast in the light of a firemoss lamp, her features formed a mask of dismay.
“Sister!” she cried, “Lord Marshal Otaker has summoned you. Hurry!”
Ellonlef peered at the woman, for a moment too confused to remember her name. “What is the hour … Alia?”
“Third past midnight, Sister. Please, you must come. It’s terrible.” Her face crumpled, and tears began to stream down her thin cheeks.
“Has someone taken ill—have you?”
“No,” Alia wailed. “Not me. Not yet.”
“Tell me what’s amiss,” Ellonlef ordered, sliding out of bed. She drew on her white robes, then hastily tied back her hair with a leather thong. While she splashed some water on her face from the washbasin, Alia spoke in broken sobs.
“People are dying everywhere! Gods save us, Sister, it’s a plague!”
Ellonlef looked up in alarm.
“You must come, Sister. Please!”
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 torches and firemoss wall lamps. Everywhere Ellonlef looked, death and grief met her eyes. Here and there, guards stood over their brothers-in-arms, men who had perished from what looked like a wasting sickness. The faces of the dead were gray as bathwater, with glazed eyes floating in hollow sockets. Mouths gaped around loose teeth, as if they had been crying out as they died.
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. 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.
“Don’t touch her!” Alia screamed. “Do’'t touch any of them!”
Before Ellonlef could protest, the mother’s face began to go gray, her cheeks thinned and grew hollow.
Alia abruptly released Ellonlef and backed away, a hand held over her mouth. “You touched the girl. Oh, gods! You touched the girl, and I touched you—” Alia cut off and bolted.
Ellonlef’s attention remained on the dying woman, who had pitched over onto her side and lay gasping like a landed fish. Disregarding her own safety, Ellonlef moved to the dying woman’s side and smoothed her long 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. The woman tried to speak, but no words came. Slowly, her lips began drawing back from her teeth in a withering rictus.
Ellonlef did not know how long she knelt by the woman before Lord Marshal Otaker joined her side.
“Sister, come away,” he said, keeping his distance. “This sickness seems to spread by touch, or by the very air we breathe.”
“I have never seen the like,” Ellonlef said, distracted. “This cannot be a catching sickness. Nothing save poison kills so swiftly. But even poison cannot drain away one’s flesh so quickly.”
Otaker hesitated, then gently pulled Ellonlef to her feet. The servant woman was left where she had fallen, along with all the others who had perished.
“I thought you said it was spread by touch?” Ellonlef said, drawing away from him.
“Yes, well, you said otherwise. Besides, even if you are wrong, I was lost already.”
“What do you mean?”
Otaker halted just beyond the doors of his bedchamber. Other than a pair of guards at either end of the short corridor, they were alone. He glanced at her and quickly away, a sheen of unshed tears in his gaze.
Ellonlef’s insides twisted. “Lady Danara ... your children?” She let the unvoiced question hang between them.
Chin trembling, the lord marshal bowed his head.
“Come,” Ellonlef said, opening the chamber door.
They were stopped short by a handful of grieving servants waiting just inside the room. Otaker eased through them, and Ellonlef followed.
She halted as soon as she saw Lady Danara lying on the bed, a wasted gray husk like all the others.
With a choking sob, Otaker stumbled to his wife’s side and took her hand. He looked at her a long time, then raised his face to the ceiling and cursed the gods that had died some days earlier.
Despair sank into Ellonlef, wrecking her usual calm. She fled, shamed by her weakness, but unable to bear seeing so much fresh pain, not after all she had witnessed since the Three had collided and burned in the heavens. She ran on and on, but no matter where she went, sorrow followed at her heels, while still more lay in wait. Men, women, and children lay like cordwood at every turn. In time she fled the keep, only to find worse out of doors.
On she ran, until coming to the market square. There, instead of grief, fear had risen up and taken hold of the townsfolk. Backlit by roaring bonfires, they ran to and fro, dragging corpses behind them. There was no care given to deceased loved ones. Not now, and maybe never again. And standing atop a pile of bricks, Magus Uzzret stoked the frenzy.
“Burn the dead!” he bellowed, his eyes bulging with a desperation bordering on insanity. “Burn them all!”
Soldiers and townsfolk rushed to do his bidding, so lost in terror that they had forgotten that touching the dead might poison their own lives. Bodies were thrown onto roaring fires. Flames danced high, and thick smoke poured from tangled corpses. Dry as seasoned wood, those corpses burst alight like oil-soaked tinder.
Uzzret raised his arms before the flames, the wafting heat rustling his blue robes. He shouted maniacally, and the infernos surged higher.
“Stop!” Ellonlef urged. “This is madness
!”
The magus cut off to glare at her. Spittle flecked his quivering lips. “Would you defy the judgment of the gods?”
Ellonlef was taken aback. Just days gone, he had assured her that only fools sought gods that did not exist. Now he had become a zealot.
As if reading her thoughts, Uzzret shouted, “To my shame, I have disavowed the gods. I now see my folly, and the folly of the world. This plague is a sign as surely as 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 his voice grew.
“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. Now the gods of old have bestirred themselves! They have awoken from their long slumber, weighed our worth on judgment scales, 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, Sister! We must appease our true creators, before it is too late.”
“Pa’amadin, the Creator of All, desires our devotion, not toasted corpses,” Ellonlef offered in a soothing voice, hoping to calm Uzzret.
His dark eyes took on a hard light. He jabbed an accusatory finger at her. “Pa’amadin is but another false god, a device created by corrupt 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 the 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 quickly?
“Seize her!” Uzzret screeched. “Cast her into the fires!”
Ellonlef spun to flee and came face to face with a creature risen straight from the Thousand Hells. When its dead white eyes found her, she choked on a scream.
~ ~ ~
Varis watched with forced calm as the Sister of Najihar recoiled. Between her shock at the sight of him, and hearing the ravings of Magus Uzzret, it was all he could do not to fall into a fit of laughter.
Peropis had painted him a picture of what to expect that was uncannily similar to all the chaos he had encountered since stepping into 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 command to hurl Ellonlef into the flames, came out of the shadows dragging the body of one of their fellows toward a bonfire. Their grim labor sobered the prince. If he did not put a stop to this nonsense soon, the seeds of his future army would burn to ash. Varis strode to the feet of the gaping old magus perched atop a mound of bricks.
“Magus Uzzret,” he said, knowing the man’s name as well as he knew the woman’s, just as he knew all the advisors to every lord marshal across Aradan. “I’m sure the gods, forgotten or not, disdain the empty sacrifice of burning the dead.”
“Then I shall burn the living!” Uzzret declared.
“No, idiot, you will not. Call off this madness, if you ever hope to see these unfortunate souls walk again.”
“On whose authority do you speak?” Uzzret demanded, gaze flickering anxiously across Varis’s face.
Varis had heard in his grandfather’s court that the magus was a blustering imbecile who thought more highly of himself than did his peers. Rumor, in this instance, appeared accurate.
“By the authority of the blood of my Royal House,” Varis said, “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 Desert to bring about the fall of the Suanahad Empire a thousand years gone.”
Both Uzzret and Ellonlef stared.
To hasten their understanding, Varis added, “Though I bear the recent scars given to me by an enemy of 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, clutching his gut as if his bowels had gone to water. Varis desperately hoped the fool would not shit himself. “What ... what has befallen you?”
Varis ignored the question. “Call off the burning. This is no plague, and neither is it a curse of the gods.”
Uzzret hesitated, then did as commanded, and Varis laid down the first paving stone for what would become the road to his accession.
“These deaths are the work of the man who has stolen into himself the Powers of Creation, once held by the Three.”
Their shocked expressions did not change, but he had not expected them to. It could honestly be said that no other living human knew of the Powers of Creation—though he was not so sure about Sister Ellonlef, who was of an order that knew far more than they should about most things.
“Now, before we lose the time needed to mend these wrongs, take me to Lord Marshal Otaker—if he still lives, that is. If not, then take me to whomever is in command of Fortress Krevar.”
“Otaker lives,” Uzzret said, nodding eagerly. “At least, he was alive not long ago.”
Varis waited, his gaze level, until the magus clambered down off his perch. Walking side by side ahead of Varis, Ellonlef and Uzzret kept looking over their shoulders at him. They looked like sheep, stupid and fearful. This time he could not stifle a snort of laughter, and they stopped looking.
Chapter 11
It had taken Ellonlef much urging to get Otaker to leave his dead wife and grieving children, but now he sat behind his writing desk, his eyes red from weeping. He was looking at Prince Varis as if the boy were an apparition.
Ellonlef knew how the lord marshal felt, but something Varis had mentioned earlier troubled her more than his appearance. “Call off this madness,” Varis had said, “if you ever hope to see these unfortunate souls walk again.” Was the youth insane, or something else?
“Your Highness,” Otaker said, “you have come at a grievous time for Krevar. We—”
Varis raised hand for quiet. “It is a grievous time for Aradan and the entire world. The Powers of Creation, forsaken by the Three long ago, are now in the hands of a mortal, and the gate to the Thousand Hells has been broken. This night, the Fallen stalk the face of the world.”
He spoke in such a matter-of-fact tone that it took Ellonlef a moment to fully register what he was saying. Uzzret understood far quicker and moaned low in his throat. “The Fallen … you mean Mahk’lar—demons!”
Varis nodded.
“The Three, the Fallen,” Otaker muttered, shaking his head. “Forgive my disbelief, Your Highness, but you speak the ramblings of the Madi’yin.”
Ellonlef struggled to keep her features calm, but she could not hold her tongue. “How could a man steal these Powers of Creation from living gods?” She had read a few ancient texts that spoke of such powers, but those accounts were considered myth.
Varis turned his lifeless white eyes on her, and again she wondered how he could see anything. “The Three live no longer,” he said. “They destroyed themselves at the dawning of the age of humankind.”
“But the moons—”
“At most,” Varis interrupted, “the moons were the faces of ghosts, but I doubt even that. Either way, the Three are destroyed.”
Uzzret bobbed his head as if he had known as much all along, as if he had forgotten his command to offer up Ellonlef as a burnt sacrifice to a host of nameless gods a short time ago.
Ignoring the magus, Ellonlef said, “Gods cannot die, a
nd even if they could, no man could steal their power.”
“I believed the same,” Varis said. “That’s why I missed the opportunity to avoid this.” He raised his arms, drawing every eye to the ruin of his body. “I saw those unleashed powers free the Mahk’lar from the Thousand Hells. Those same powers nearly destroyed me.”
He began pacing the tiled floor, seeming to gather his thoughts. Uzzret’s eyes followed his every step, as did Ellonlef’s and Otaker’s.
“As I journeyed with my supposed protector across Aradan,” Varis began again, “the man beguiled me with tales of adventure and treasure. Foolishly, I let him persuade me to put aside my errands in favor of funding his hunt for a temple deep in the Qaharadin Marshes. Once we arrived, this mercenary fashioned fire from nothing, and also created corrupt forms of life after drawing away the essence of life from most of his men. Those who survived his wrath fell on their faces and swore fealty. By good fortune, I was able to escape, though not without paying a high price.”
Otaker thought that over. “I regret your misfortune, Your Highness, but I’m missing the reason you came to Krevar.”
Varis jabbed a finger at the doorway. “Your people, Lord Marshal, will not be the last to suffer the cruelty of my betrayer. This man, along with those who follow him, must be destroyed. In order to see that done, I need an army assembled and marched to Ammathor. Krevar has the largest compliment of soldiers out of all the border fortresses."
“Why Ammathor?” Ellonlef asked, thinking none of this made sense.
Varis glared impatiently. “This man thinks to begin his conquest of the world by usurping the Ivory Throne. I must warn Ammathor and my family.”
“This former protector of yours,” Otaker said, “he is one of the House Guard?”
Varis shook his head. “No. The man is Kian Valara, an Izutarian mercenary leading a company of Asra a’Shah hirelings. With so many Tureecian raiders of late, and the constant threat from the Bashye clans, I thought to spare my grandfather, King Simiis, the expense of providing an Honor Guard on my journey. It seems I was most unlucky to find Kian Valara when I did.”
The God King (Book 1) (Heirs of the Fallen) Page 7
