Khouren was motionless in the churning hallway, eyes wide at the spectacle.
Of all the things his Rennkavi had planned for this day, it hadn’t included this.
And here it was, his grandfather facing off with the Kets al’Roch, freed from its ancient oubliette for the first time in ten years. Of the House of Alodwine, only Khouren had ever seen this creature of his great-great-grandfather’s malevolent planning. Seen its ruthless glory, felt its slashing knives as it parted bone from flesh ten years ago, the first time it had ever been freed. Freed to slip silently from room to room, prowling the Hinterhaft, winding its deadly way through slipping walls in the middle of the night, slashing those talons like flashing knives across the necks of Alrashemni Kingsmen. One, after another, after another, until a pile of thousands of corpses had decorated the Hinterhaft’s blue halls, dragged there by mercenaries hired just for that reason, to clean up after the creature.
Unaffected by the aerial poison, the antidote taken so long ago just as his grandfather had once done, Khouren watched it all with horrible clarity. A demon of legend, of myth. Alive and seething. Screeching unholy hell in the face of Khouren’s defiant grandfather, angry that it had been pierced by a weapon and was pinned to the wall. With a tremendous wrench, it finally broke the sword, freeing itself from the wall and hauling the blade from its own chest, hurling it aside with a deafening roar.
And his grandfather roared back, furious, his brown-gold eyes flashing red fire in the light of the still-shifting halls. “Back, spawn of the Undoer! Or I will do worse than pin you!” Fentleith Alodwine raised one longknife, pointing directly at the beast. Khouren’s grandfather did not cower, he did not shrink from the demon. He stood tall, imposing as the ancient Kings of Khehem and snarled in its face, matching its livid rage.
It swiped at him. With a snarling roar like a lupine dragon, Fentleith slashed back. His blade found finger joints, parting talons from the beast. It roared. He roared back. Thunder concussed in the yet-spinning halls of Roushenn. Pressure built in Khouren’s ears, the pressure of a thousand summer storms, his grandfather’s masterpiece. The creature swiped again, fast strikes, lunging.
And with a clap of thunder that shook the walls, Fentleith Alodwine engaged. He spun in, ruthless, fast. Khouren had never in all his years seen such speed as his grandfather in battle. All he could do was watch from a still spot in the spinning walls. Dodging rotating walls, they battled. A flash of lightning split the dim hall as his grandfather unleashed his unholy gifts. A shriek lanced Khouren’s ears as the creature was struck by that bolt. Thunder broke whatever mirrors were left, glass skittering past. Longknives flashed in the moving torchlight. A sickening, ripping sound came as the creature snarled, out of sight beyond a wall.
And the scream of a man.
Khouren’s gut dropped. His heart wrenched. He saw his grandfather stagger around the side of a sliding column, blood seeping from his middle, ducking just as the creature swiped again. He pierced for its eyes with one longknife. The knife hit home, but Fentleith Alodwine paid the price. The creature sank fangs into his shoulder, ripping at the joint. He bellowed, stabbing its long bony muzzle with his free blade. Lightning ripped the corridor, lanced the beast. It screamed, spasming, charring at the neck, Fentleith’s dire mark.
But Khouren’s grandfather staggered back as he was released, dropping to his knees. Khouren could see the mortal wound he’d taken now. Not the shoulder, but a deep, livid gash across the belly, spilling his guts through his cobalt jerkin, rich red by the light of a revolving torch in its bracket.
Khouren could stand by no longer. He rushed forward, careening through the spinning walls, to his grandfather’s side. But there was the beast, wickedly fast, is razor-talons coming for Khouren’s neck. He began to spin, knives up to parry, but it was too late. The creature’s talon was deflected by his knife, but the other massive hand of talons slapped Khouren down hard, pinning him beneath the creature’s weight as it tried to crush him into the stones. Khouren was no hero. He was a blade in the night. He was a ghost behind the walls. He’d not been born a fighter, not like this. The creature had him. Its massive jaws descended, opened wide in a bite meant to take his head.
“Khouren!” His grandfather’s scream of dismay was heartbreaking.
Out of fear, Khouren did the only thing he could think of. He dropped through the floor. But just at the last moment, he threw his arms around the beast’s hand, drawing it with him as he went. Falling, he landed hard on his back in a dark cellar-passage below. But he’d made his mark. The creature was screaming in the hall above, shrieking, trapped by its own mistake, its taloned hand scrabbling helplessly, trapped in the ceiling above Khouren’s head. An explosion came from the hall above. The blaze of lightning that accompanied it was enough to send light through cracks in the stone above Khouren’s head.
And then everything went silent. Khouren launched to the wall. Hauling himself up it and through the floor above, he emerged back in the passage. It was ruined. Walls had been blown off their hinges. Metal gears and clockworks that moved them were jammed, broken. The Kets al’Roch had been blasted backward, severed from its trapped appendage, shattering the wall behind it. And now it lay in a tangled lump of hide and protruding bones, its pool of black, tarry blood spreading out over the stones of the floor. Khouren’s grandfather lay slumped, one hand clutching his middle. His breath was a rasp, in a way Khouren had never heard it. Khouren approached, trembling. Closer now, he could see by the light of a shattered torch the way slick ropes of intestine protruded from between Fentleith’s fingers, a spreading pool of tacky blood beneath his grandfather’s torn form.
“Grandfather?” Khouren’s voice was low, careful. Even now, a stray flash of rage could kill him. Even when his grandfather lay dying.
“Khouren?” Fentleith looked up, his brows knit in pain, his gold-brown eyes flashing no red. He grit his teeth, sucking air slowly through them. But even so, a low keen of pain issued out. Khouren hastened to his grandfather’s side, dropping to his knees, hand flashing out to feel at his grandfather’s abdomen.
“We need a pressure bandage. Here.” He whipped back his leather hood, unwinding the charcoal black silk of his shouf, a gift, originally, from Fentleith.
“No.” His grandfather stilled Khouren’s motion with a light, faltering touch. “It cut too deep. Just one claw, but enough. You can’t staunch this… I can’t…” Suddenly, his grandfather’s eyes rolled up. Eyelids closing, eyelashes flickering, his entire body twitched in the spasm that comes before death. His head lolled back over Khouren’s arm.
“No!” Desperation raced through Khouren. His grandfather was dying. After all these years, after all they had been through. After all this. Fentleith Alodwine, Scion of Khehem, was going to die. This wasn’t the way. This wasn’t what they’d held fast for, all these years. Not to simply have him die and leave them untethered.
Khouren couldn’t lose him now. Without thinking, he wrapped his shouf tight around Fentleith’s middle, trapping in the torn bowels. Taking a knee, he hauled the slighter man up over his shoulders, the weight as nothing. Khouren could have carried a bear had he needed to, especially with all the fire and determination flooding his veins right now.
But as he stood, his gaze caught on a man standing through one of the broken hallways. Standing very still in his impeccable grey silk robes, imperious, his cold grey eyes flat upon Khouren. Khouren shivered, feeling the judgment of his Rennkavi. But before the man could say anything, before he could arrest Khouren’s intent with any command, Khouren turned, stepping through the nearest wall with his grandfather slung across his shoulders.
It was a fair distance to the heart of Roushenn. Sliding through walls, trotting briskly through larders, jogging fast through long expanses of fey blue Hinterhaft, Khouren needed no compass to navigate the bowels of the ancient fortress. A fortress that was his by right, his by lineage, or so the House of Alodwine had discovered when they had traveled out f
rom Khehem nearly a thousand years ago. And so many years of his four-hundred span had been spent wandering these halls, hadn’t they? Discovering its secrets, realizing the extent of his great-great-grandfather’s madness. Or genius. It was hard to say which. Only a mad mind, a brilliantly corrupted mind teeming with thoughts of betrayal could have made a palace such as this. A stronghold of oubliettes, moving walls, mazelike passages.
Hidden horrors. Like the oubliette chamber of the Kets al’Roch.
Khouren set his jaw, determined, feeling the weary beats of his grandfather’s heart slowing, blood pouring liberally down over Khouren’s shoulder, down his spine, soaking his black garb. But here was the larder next to the six-foot-thick stone at the center of Roushenn. Here was the Clockwork Room, the massive central chamber at the heart of the palace, gears larger than a man humming, churning in their deafening clatter and precise timing. Khouren raced through it all, straight through the chugging gears, the man across his shoulders just as permeable as Khouren, so long as their skin touched.
And there, at last, it was. The madness of his great-great-grandfather made plain. Here, in the very center of the clockworks, at the heart of it all, there was hardly room to stand. No doors led here. No passages would take you through the deadly gears to get to this spot. It was a secret Khouren knew about, because he alone had found it, wandering one night through all the chugging, clanking machinery.
And he’d only ever told his grandfather about this.
Standing in the center, he eyed the small ornament atop its waist-high byrunstone plinth. A pyramid made of filigreed white stone, the ornament was no larger than his palm at the base, no bigger than an apple or a pear. Its filigree was luminous in the dim, chugging space. A pattern of scepters signifying the right to rule, the conflict of authority and leadership. Within, suspended in the air inside the pyramid, was a flat, plain river stone, etched crudely upon the surface as if done by knife blade. A wolf and dragon circled each other in the stone’s etching, fighting in perfect balance, surrounded by a wreath of flame.
The Werus et Khehem. The eternal conflict of the Wolf and Dragon within the Unburnt Circle. Symbol of Khouren’s House. Symbol of the ancient Kings of Khehem.
“Leith Alodwine, hear my prayer.” Khouren whispered, staring at the talisman. “Whatever magic you gave to this place, help us now. Fentleith, your grandson, he needs you. If anything of you yet lives in this place you built… let it restore my own grandfather now.”
Kneeling, Khouren lifted his grandfather’s bloody hand. And set it to the filigreed stone.
Fentleith came awake in a gasp of breath, spasming atop Khouren’s shoulders the moment his palm was set to the pyramid. A scream ripped from his throat. A horrible agony, a sound of beasts tearing out each other’s flesh and yet fighting on, fighting to the death. Machinery slowed suddenly, lurching around them to a low roar, then surged once more, chugging around them, buffering the scream.
There was no time for whatever additional help the magic of the filigreed stone could give, not if the Rennkavi had heard that scream. Khouren lifted his grandfather’s palm from the talisman, thanking whatever gods there were. Turning quickly, he hefted his grandfather more securely, then fled back through the chugging machinery. Fentleith still spasmed atop his shoulders, curling and uncurling, screaming blood-wracked pain through his teeth. Bronze cogs flashed by as Khouren ran, silver wheels, steel pistons. He fled through the ancient clockworks, his heart in his throat. Slipping through a wall, and another, and another, he ran until he was safely away from the center of Roushenn, in a blind oubliette filled with books and ancient scrolls crumbling now to dust.
Breathing hard, he struck a spark from his flint into an ancient torch in a bracket upon the wall. It caught with a crackling blaze, casting the tiny octagonal room in shifting shadows. Khouren sank to the dust-choked floor, sliding his grandfather gently from his shoulders. Fentleith was breathing hard, sweat-streaked, pale. His hands clutched spastically at his middle, over the bloodsoaked shouf.
“Let me see, let me see…” Khouren crooned gently, pulling Fentleith’s hands away, lifting the edge of the fabric. And there, even as he watched, he saw flesh knitting. Bowels working themselves back inside, muscles slipping together and sealing closed. “Shaper and Undoer…!” Khouren breathed, relief flooding him.
“This never would have happened if you’d heeded me.”
Khouren’s gaze snapped to his grandfather’s face. The man was stern, his dark brows set in a hard line in the flickering torchlight, his brown-gold eyes furious. Ever-young. He looked just as Khouren first knew him as a child, even after four hundred years. Just a touch of lines at his eyes and mouth, but tonight these were set hard, livid.
“I did what I had to.” Khouren murmured.
“Bullshit. You gave that man what he wanted. Again. You led the Kets al’Roch right to us! It doesn’t live in that part of the palace, Khouren. You and I both know that. You were the bait, just like ten years ago, leading that thing through the gauntlet of walls Lhaurent created, just like running a bull through a chute! Until it finds something to slaughter. And you. Poisoning the air to make men fodder for the beast! Yet again, Lhaurent has his bloodshed, all in the name of peace. But this time, the blood shed was mine.”
“I never meant to risk your life!” Khouren pleaded, desperate. “You weren’t supposed to go with them! The Kets al’Roch was only a failsafe, only to be used if the Dhenra made it out of the coronation hall alive!”
“I am sworn to protect her life.” His grandfather’s eyes flashed red, dangerous.
“You are sworn to the Rennkavi! The Uniter!” Khouren hissed back. “By your own words, by your own hand!! You are sworn to the one who wears the Goldenmarks, lest fire take you, just as I am! And that man is here, in these very halls! Our Rennkavi is the Castellan, grandfather, though you accept it not.”
“I will never accept him.” Fentleith spat it at Khouren, a drumming, scathing fury in his eyes. “A man who annihilates thousands is no Uniter of mine! And you are responsible for all those deaths! The blood of the Alrashemni is upon your hands, Khouren! For your part in unleashing the beast, in giving Lhaurent the tools to plan it all on behalf of the Khehemni Lothren. Your hands.”
Slowly, Khouren sat back, a cold emptiness in his heart. “And does a King do any less upon the battlefield? To secure a better future for his nation?”
Fentleith Alodwine struggled up to his elbows, then his bloody hands, fury in his gaze. And though he flinched from pain and one hand yet clutched his abdomen, his eyes burned red into Khouren’s very soul. “Take me back to the stables. I will follow the ones I serve, and you will follow yours. I disown you, Khouren. Right here, right now. I disown you and any scions you may ever have. You are no grandson of mine, following that beast of a man. And though you saved my life today, I owe you no debt, because it was you who put the Ghenje pieces into play. Giving that man my grandfather’s ring to resonate the palace walls. Showing him the Clockworks. Allowing him to summon the Puzzle from its resting place, and start the machine that controls the walls. Causing unholy hell today. And now… this…!”
Fentleith gave a heavy sigh, his brows knitted in pain and a deep, unfathomable sorrow. He closed his eyes, hitching a hard breath.
“This…?” A curl of fear took Khouren, not understanding his grandfather’s words.
“I feel him.” Fentleith’s sigh was but a breath in the flickering dark, his hand lifting to rub his chest. “I feel Leith! A part of him now in me… his magic, his wyrria. His conflict. Undoer, Khouren! What did you do to me, setting my hand to my grandfather’s talisman, letting it drink my blood?!”
“I didn’t know…!” Khouren’s eyes were too wide, his breath racing, fear driving deep into his heart. His beloved, mild-tempered grandfather. Now had absorbed the wyrria of a madman. A mad conqueror.
Leith Alodwine. The Last Scion of Khehem.
“I feel him stirring within me…” Fentleith murmured
, eyes still closed, stricken. “Hot like forge-sparks. Chill like dragon breath. And I feel the palace stirring too… far under the earth… deep under Lintesh.” His eyes snapped open, burning like coals. “Only a part of Roushenn woke to Lhaurent slipping on that ring thirty years ago. Now the entirety of the mechanism beneath the city wakes to me, Khouren! To my blood, stronger than any Khehemni lineage that Lhaurent possesses. It wakes to me. But Lhaurent has the ring. He has my grandfather’s ring. He controls it all. Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”
Khouren sat back, his breath stilling. “I’ve given him the city at last. All of Lintesh is awake… for my Rennkavi to command.”
But Fentleith’s eyes were sad upon him, sad and dead of love for his grandson. “You’ve given an awakening tyrant a fortress none can ever breach. And now you will live to see what he does with it. Let me out of here, Khouren. I go to the West Stables.”
Khouren blanched, feeling the dismissal of his grandfather’s dire words. That was it, then. They were through. He had been disowned and now there was no going back. Tonight, they parted ways forever. And someday, one of them would pay the price for it.
“I love you, grandfather.” Khouren murmured.
“Take me to the stables, Khouren.” Fentleith Alodwine staggered to his feet, stumbled and caught the wall, not looking at his grandson. Slowly, Khouren stood, stepping to his side, feeling the cool, empty space between them. Lightly, gingerly, he took his grandfather’s bare fingers. But there was no love there, not anymore. Not like there had been when he was a boy, his mother dead and entombed in her bier at the heart of Roushenn, a child of only seven sobbing over her stone effigy. His grandfather Fentleith taking him quietly by the hand, wrapping him close in a bittersweet, loving embrace.
Khouren swallowed hard. He’d made his choice. Following the Rennkavi was more important than a grandfather’s love. He stepped forward through the wall, leading a man he no longer knew through the wall behind him.
Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Sword and Highland Magic Page 56
