Hazad dropped to his knees, his huge size made small and insignificant by his terrible wasting. His hair and beard fell out in smoldering clumps, his thick bones shoved through yellowed parchment skin, covered all over in splitting lesions. His once great strength failed him and he toppled, a desiccated husk barely recognizable as a man.
Azuri and Ellonlef both erupted into flaming pillars. They fell dead, stiff as smoking stone, thumping against the floor like charred wood.
Only then did Varis relent. He laughed, a deafening rumble that battered Kian to his knees.
Stunned, Kian reached for his friends. A high keening noise filled his ears, resonating to the depths of his marrow. The sound came from him, a despairing cry of agony. He would die with them. He saw no reason to resist, not when his soul was dead already.
Chapter 34
From every door, soldiers burst into the Golden Hall, weapons poised. Whatever they expected, it was not what they saw. They halted, mouths hanging open, shock written on their faces.
Kian sensed their presence and dismissed them. Dismay and loss savaged him, as he knelt before the smirking hunter, the gleeful destroyer.
But Kian paid no more heed to Varis than he did to the staring soldiers. Kian’s mind rebelled. Ellonlef and Hazad and Azuri, they weren’t dead. They couldn’t be. He clung to that as long as he could, feeling a moment’s peace.
And then everything shattered again.
Varis had not just destroyed all that he loved, he had defiled it.
Kian’s gaze rose, and he found the stares of the gathered soldiers upon him. He looked back, unflinching, searing tears coursing over his stubbled cheeks. What was left of his compassion solidified into a lump of fire-blackened iron.
“Kill him!” Varis ordered.
Kian focused on Varis, feeling his fear and wondering at it. He senses the same powers in me that I sense in him.
Unlike Varis, Kian no longer feared for his life. His continued existence was without meaning. To perish was a blessing. To live without his companions was a curse.
“Kill me yourself, kingslayer,” Kian snarled. He stood up, his knuckles white around the sword hilt. “Destroy me with your own steel, Life Giver."
“Stop him!” Varis shrieked, inching back.
“You know this impostor is not your rightful king,” Kian said to the motionless soldiers. “Your sovereign is King Sharaal, who even now stands at the city gates, drawing those loyal to him, and destroying all traitors. Choose well where you place your loyalties. Choose fittingly and live. Or side with this accursed, hell-spawned demon, and perish.”
The soldiers, all who had believed Varis’s lies, looked uncertainly among themselves, weighing Kian’s words. One man took a faltering step back, then another, and then he was running. With a rattle of armor and the drumming of feet, the rest followed.
“Where are you going?” Varis howled, as the doors boomed shut on the Golden Hall.
“You cannot best me with the Powers of Creation,” Kian said. “Fill your hand with steel, or not, but know that I will carve you either way, boy.”
Varis, his flesh still shining like a god, hastily took up Yagaal’s sword. With steel in his hands, he seemed more confident. “I’ve spent the whole of my life training with masters of the sword, Izutarian.”
“And I’ve spent the whole of my life killing them.”
Kian lunged without warning, caught Varis’s blade against his, steel ringing. With a casual thrust, he buried the dagger he held in his opposite hand into Varis’s ribs, twisted the blade hard enough to crack bone, and kicked the boy away.
Varis staggered back with a pained grunt, his freakish eyes on the black blood pouring from his flesh. Kian felt a stirring over his skin, as if invisible feathers of frost were brushing his skin. At the same time, the Powers of Creation in him pushed back, forcing those invisible feathers away. Beyond the Golden Hall, men suddenly began to cry out, their wails growing weaker by the heartbeat. The wound in Varis’s side began to knit itself together.
He’s stealing their life, just as he did in Krevar, and healing himself with it. There was something to that, but Kian didn’t know what. When Varis attacked, he stopped caring.
The battle degenerated into a wild flurry of slashing blades and ringing steel. The youth was not unskilled, but more than that, in his limbs he carried the unflagging strength of other men. Every advantage of size and skill and ruthlessness Kian possessed was overmatched by Varis.
As Kian’s strength began to wane, Varis seemed to grow even stronger. Then, after a blinding series of attacks and counterattacks, Varis’s sword smashed into Kian’s, and the aged steel Hya had gifted to him shattered like rotten ice, flying shards rattling dully against floor tiles. Kian hurled the hilt. Varis batted it aside and pressed ahead.
Wielding only a dagger, Kian fell back, gasping, sensing the sands that measured his life were running low. He missed a step and stumbled, exposing himself to any number of killing blows, but Varis paused to flash a triumphant smile.
Past decency or any sense of fair play, Kian rammed the dagger into Varis’s groin, pulled back, then plunged the steel under his breastbone, where he left it. His third attack came from a hooking fist delivered to Varis’s cheekbone.
Varis fumbled his sword, black blood pouring from three separate wounds. Kian snatched up the fallen weapon and pressed the attack. He slipped in Varis’s blood and slid across the floor on his knees. Varis’s dagger flashed, and Kian knocked the blade aside. The tip raked his cheek and climbed into his scalp, clipping off a piece of his ear as it went. Blood poured in a hot scarlet wave over his face.
Still on his knees, Kian swung the boy-king’s sword. The tip parted flesh at the base of Varis’s neck, and Kian scrambled up, reversing the attack, and slammed the rounded pommel against Varis’s lips.
Varis fell back with a bubbling squeal, bloody tongue pinched between shattered teeth. His free hand clutched at his throat, a look of utter incredulity blooming on his features. Foul blood squeezed through his fingers. Then it began to pour.
Kian advanced, intending to finish Varis, but the grumble of breaking stone alerted him to some new danger. Before he could look around, a rough, snaky band wrapped about his neck. The smell of green wood assailed his nostrils even as he was lifted and tossed through the air like a child’s toy.
He soared, flailing about for some kind of balance, desperately holding onto Varis’s sword. He crashed down atop the great table centered in the Golden Hall, his bloody face leaving a wide crimson smear across the vellum map. In a floundering scrabble, he toppled off the table’s edge. Breath exploded from his lungs when he smashed through a chair, leaving him to thrash about amid a tangle of broken wood and downy padding.
A gurgling wet hiss and the crash of chairs being thrown aside warned Kian that Varis was coming. Even as he fought to regain his feet, gulping each breath, he searched for a better place to defend himself. To his dismay, he found what had assailed him.
A dark and malignant creation, skinned in a hide of tree bark, had burst from the floor and was writhing from side to side in his direction. Horrified, Kian recognized another root-serpent, covered all over with emerald eyes and hoary bark. This creature was not of the soil of the Qaharadin, but was just as deadly.
Kian threw himself clear as the dread serpent attacked. A splinter of fire gouged through his leg, a cutting blow that sent him flipping him through the air. He bounced and spun across the floor. He rolled to his back, swinging the sword in a desperate stroke. The blade chopped into the striking root-serpent, and the first six feet of it thumped to the floor. The rest of Varis’s creation recoiled, whipping back and forth, splattering stinking sap over Kian and the floor.
As the root-serpent retreated, it wilted and blackened, afflicted by some swift, moldy rot. In moments, the nightmarish creature had become no more than an oozing line sprawled across the floor.
By then Kian had gotten to one knee, and Varis strode around the ta
ble. Black blood covered his chest, but the wound to his neck was no longer there. He looked ready to say something, and Kian instantly plunged the tip of his sword into Varis’s exposed knee.
Screaming, Varis collapsed atop his ruined leg, and his dagger flew from spasming fingers. Kian leaped to his feet and sent his sword into one of Varis’s glowing eyes. Rage and desperation gave him inhuman strength. The wild thrust slammed through Varis’s skull and gouged into the marble tiles under his head. Varis went rigid, then began to thrash.
Kian wrenched the blade free and raised the sword high, intending to cut off Varis’s head. Before he could, the Golden Hall began shaking and groaning, knocking him off balance.
In a burst of flame, the great map table folded in on itself, burning like oil-soaked parchment. In its place a line of blinding light formed into a seam cut in the fabric of the world. It rose from the floor to the height of a tall man.
As Kian watched in stunned silence, that seam flared wide, creating a portal that looked upon a realm of venomous flames and shattered black stone. From that unholy place strode a woman of such stunning beauty and immeasurable power that he collapsed in wonder.
Chapter 35
Kian shook his head against the vision of the woman and tried to stand, but her presence made him weak. She gazed impassively about the Golden Hall. Long silver-white hair cascaded over her shoulders to her ankles, barely concealing her flawless nudity. She faced him at last, offering a smile that melted all resistance in his heart.
“You are stronger than most,” she said, her voice a seductive whisper. “For a season I have watched you, tasted your strength of will upon my lips, savored it like the sweetest of nectars. You were not my first choice, but now I see that you should have been. I will reward your strength, Kian Valara, if you will but let me.”
He had no idea what she was going on about, but the way she said his name, with a mocking familiarity, sparked a deep memory. Someone else had spoken his name in that way.
“What rewards,” he invited, wondering how to defeat this creature, or even if he could.
“Primacy,” she said, her voice eager. “I would make you Overlord, ruler of child-kings, the High Judge of a thousand realms. Do you take what I propose, or do you deny my gift?”
“Tell me what I must do,” Kian mumbled, visions suddenly flashing behind his eyes. He saw a vast empire filled with impossible wealth, pleasures beyond count and imagination. And, too, worshippers singing paeans of honor and glory and praise to him alone. In these visions, there were no gods, no other kings, nothing at all but himself....
But there was something else. If he agreed to her will, there would be a hand over his life, turning him this way and that, as a child moving a doll. I will be but a plaything, and her my master. His rule would be at her behest. Is that so bad, for one who has given so much, and lost more?
He blinked rapidly, struggling not to focus on the tempting promises, but on her. He saw beauty, to be sure, but also something menacing within her.
Her eyes, black through and through, narrowed, as if she had read the thoughts written on his soul. A part of him perished when her lips parted, revealing a mesh of black fangs. When she spoke again, her voice was uncompromising.
“Take what I offer, Kian Valara, and live a long and full life of ease and power. Or deny me, and suffer the blackest deaths, again and again, forever.”
Kian swallowed as new visions, all of horror and pain, shrieked through his mind. He had never known such terror. Against his will, his thoughts slipped again toward accepting everything she had put forward, if only to spare him the torments she threatened.
“My patience has limits. Do you accept what I give?”
She glided toward him, floating above the marble tiles, until she was near enough that he felt a terrible cold pouring off her marvelous flesh. She seemed less substantial than before, somehow transparent. Despite this, the frigid touch of her nearness wafted off her, draining Kian of all hope.
She leaned close enough that he could see the tips of her obsidian teeth digging into befouled black gums. “Answer me,” she grated.
“Who are you?” he stammered.
“Humans,” she said with loathing. “Ever inquisitive about things you could never understand.”
She abruptly swept a hand over him and, by means beyond his ken, lifted and moved him across the floor. She halted him and forced his eyes to look directly upon three wizened figures, materialized from nothing save the very air he breathed.
The figures had nearly transparent gray skin, withered into hanging folds, and sunken pits where eyes had once been. Even as they were, Kian guessed that they were no more human than the woman controlling him.
“To know who I am, you must first know who they were,” she said, pointing to the woman. “There is Hiphkos the Contemplator, the Leviathan."
Kian’s lips moved, trying for words that would not come. None of this could be real.
She inclined her head toward the man next in line. He was striking, even in death, a stern grandfather. “Attandaeus the Blood Hawk, the Watcher Who Judges.”
Next she swept a hand toward a huge, bluff-featured man. “Memokk the Bull, the Vanquisher. They were my creators, my parents, the Three, dead now long ages of men.”
The woman rounded on Kian, beautiful despite the terrible jet fangs lurking behind her lips. Suddenly she shone bright from within, like the sun rising behind a wall of morning fog. But for all her radiance, he saw she was a creature of absolute darkness.
“Are you a … goddess?” Kian asked, his brow slicked with icy sweat.
“Some have named me so,” she said with a mischievous smile that stilled his heart.
“Then….” he rasped, trying to voice what he was afraid to bring into the light. For a season I have felt and watched you. The memory of her words roared within his mind like a storm-tossed sea. He squinted against her dazzling glare. “Then you are….”
Her laughter, cruel and mirthless, cut him off.
For a season he had known he was hunted. Whatever and whoever she was, this creature had hounded him since he had fled Varis’s impossible power at the temple in the Qaharadin Marshes. She had always been there, just beyond the shadows. Had she guided the demon in Fenahk, the one in Bresado? Yes, she must have.
As his understanding grew, he saw a fleeting shape under her luminous beauty. Tentacles pushed against her translucent skin. Before he could cry out, her hand streaked to his chest, her touch was hate and agony.
“You would know who I am, Kian Valara?”
An ugly purple tongue, incredibly long and slick, flicked through her fangs and slid between his lips, forcing his teeth wide, tasting him. That tongue then slithered clear, and he gagged on the reek of corpses.
“I am Peropis, Eater of the Damned, Queen of Demons and Ruler of Geh’shinnom’atar!” Like thunder, her voice rolled through the palace, shaking its foundations, before gradually fading.
In the ensuing hush, she leaned close and whispered, “Will you accept what I give, or will you deny me and suffer for a thousand and a thousand lifetimes?”
Kian quailed in fear. But that fear served as a keen blade, deftly cutting away the fog of confusion born of her presence. His gaze shifted toward his fallen friends, Hazad and Azuri. My brothers. And then he looked on the corpse of a woman he had barely known, yet by the Powers of Creation knew as well as himself. Ellonlef. He would not defile their memory.
“Keep your gifts, demon whore!” Kian roared.
Peropis instantly dropped him to the floor, regarding him with a menace unlike any he had ever known. He almost wished he could take back his defiance, but knew that everlasting pain was better than bowing to such a damned creature as this.
The last of her beauty broke apart, while the true nature of her being ripped completely free. Splits showed in spectral skin, lashing tentacles sprang from her torso, legs, and arms. As she continued to change, his bowels boiled to water. Every muscle in his
body began to shiver, and his skin tried to crawl off that dancing meat.
With a cry, Peropis lurched forward on human legs and a writhing tangle of black appendages. The motion was sickeningly inhuman, a rolling, bouncing gait. Her fingertips ruptured, exposing talons as black as her fangs, and she reached for him, her arms thinning as they lengthened.
“You cannot deny me, fool!” she cried, filling the air with spittle that carried the stench of bodies dragged from swampy graves.
The force of her words smashed into Kian, sending him sliding over cold stone toward the blazing portal that led to her domain, Geh’shinnom’atar, the Thousand Hells. His fingernails clawed frantically at the smooth tiles, dragging him to a halt bare inches from falling into that nightmare realm.
At a deranged shout of protest, Peropis abruptly ceased her attack and wheeled, her twisted, ropey figure swaying.
Varis, snarling like a rabid jackal, pointed his dagger in her direction. “You gave me your gift! It is mine, not another’s. With it, I will destroy you!”
He spoke as if he held the power to do so and, as impossible as it was to believe, Peropis recoiled in fear.
~ ~ ~
As Kian clambered to his feet, Varis turned toward him, his eyes burning like molten silver, his godlike flesh swollen, leaking rivulets of dark blood.
Kian’s gaze widened when he noticed strands of light flooding into Varis from all directions. Some part of Kian reached out and touched that radiance, that power, and recognized it as the essence of stolen life. In that raging stream, he sensed the deaths of hundreds of people, perhaps more.
Kian had half a second to consider Varis’s newest atrocities, before the youth caught him by the shoulders and drove him toward the portal. Kian wrenched himself sideways at the last instant, but his back slammed against the edge of that terrible gateway. He screamed as searing heat melted a groove in the flesh around his spine.
The God King (Book 1) (Heirs of the Fallen) Page 23
