“But you abandoned me.”
The echoing thuds grew louder, and Tyrus dreaded their owner. He had betrayed the worst of the demons, the King of Nine Hells. The shedim called him Mulciber, but the seraphim took away his name and called him Moloch instead.
“He hunts you in the real world too,” Marah said. “You need to come home before it is too late. You belong with me.”
“I don’t have a home.”
“I am your ward, Tyrus. I am your home.”
The mists of the nightmare parted, and Tyrus saw the demon: a nine-foot shadowy figure with black wings and burning eyes. Its large mouth twisted into a fang-filled smile, and a black tongue licked dark gums. Tyrus wanted to fight a swordsman. He had grown weary of fangs and claws.
Marah said, “Tyrus, you need to wake up.”
“I need a worthy opponent.”
“Mulciber is only death.”
“I know.”
A booming voice called, “I found you, my general!”
“You face him alone.”
Tyrus spun, but Marah had vanished. He turned toward Mulciber. Unlike the demoness, Mulciber radiated power, and Tyrus struggled against his own sluggish limbs as though he swam in honey. Mulciber shoulder charged him. A large claw slashed down Tyrus’s face, breaking his jaw. Tyrus thudded headfirst into the rocky ground. He choked on his own blood. A massive foot kicked the air from his lungs, and the fight ended before it began.
“My brothers can’t hide you forever.” Mulciber grabbed Tyrus by the throat and wrenched him into the air. “You think Nisroch can protect you? From me?”
Tyrus sputtered. “Who?”
“I will burn all of creation and sift the ashes for your bones.”
Mulciber’s jaws closed on Tyrus’s face.
Tyrus bolted awake and slid across his perch. The night air had frozen on the rocks, leaving little jagged crystals that sparkled in the moonlight. He checked his face for wounds. The memory of pressure from Mulciber’s teeth faded with each passing heartbeat. The dream felt real, but he never knew how real. He sensed Marah wanted to send a message, but the details drifted away from him. He struggled to remember more.
The real world became a distraction. Tyrus had runes to see in the dark, and the pitch-black night revealed itself as a grayish landscape of empty hills. He was all alone, but his instincts warned against an attack.
He blamed the nightmare. Guilt gnawed at him as well. If he had defied Azmon sooner or planned things better, Ishma would be alive. Angry at himself, he clenched two battle-axes hard enough to make the wooden handles creak. The tendons in his forearms strained, and a bad feeling churned in his guts.
Then he heard the soft crunch of snow. A large boulder blocked his view east, but someone on the other side of it stalked his camp.
“I hear your heartbeat, Tyrus.” The voice was too deep to be human. “And I know you hear me. You’re holding your breath.”
Tyrus bit back a snarl. He had listened to more words in one day than he had heard in four years. The creature sounded big—a demon from the Nine Hells. One of Mulciber’s foot soldiers toyed with him.
“You thought to hide under Nisroch forever?”
Who is Nisroch?
Tyrus flexed his legs. He needed warm muscles to surprise a demon. He licked his lips, shut his eyes, and gauged the distance with his ears. If he concentrated hard enough, he could hear the subtle echo of the voice bouncing off the nearby rocks.
“The Third War begins, Tyrus. The old boundaries mean nothing unless they are guarded with steel and runes.” A trap sprang, and Tyrus heard the sounds of the demon wrenching wood and steel from the ground. The blades clattered down the hill. “Mulciber wants your head. That belongs to him, but your arms and legs are mine. I’ll feast on them while I drag you to the Black Gate. I wonder, can your runes outlast my stomach?”
Dark chuckles drifted up the hill. Tyrus shifted on his haunches and leapt over the boulder. He raised his twin axes, preparing to flex all his strength into the demon’s face. The creature resembled Mulciber, nine feet of black skin and large black wings. Unlike Mulciber, a dozen orange faces pocked the demon’s body. It took a step back with eyes wide and jaw gaping.
Tyrus smashed both axes into its head. Jarred off-balance, Tyrus stumbled as he landed. He lost one axe. The demon’s head howled in pain while a dozen smaller faces shouted threats:
“Filthy, mortal—”
“Gut that bag of meat!”
“Snap his bones!”
“Suck his marrow!”
The demon roared, and all the little faces went silent. It spun from a kneeling position into a swiping slash with its claws. Tyrus pulled back, and the claws hissed past his nose. They exchanged several attacks. The demon was a far more ferocious warrior than One Ear. Tyrus feinted and severed one of the creature’s arms at the wrist. Then he buried his axe deep in the demon’s neck. The creature fell to a knee with a grunt.
Tyrus kicked the hand away from him and retrieved his other blade. “This is for Ishma.”
“For who?”
Tyrus screamed in fury before claiming the demon’s head. The body plopped forward, and black ichor seeped from its neck. The head bounced through the snow, collecting a frost-like beard, but the eyes burned with hatred.
“Mulciber will kill…”
“Tell him to come himself.”
Tyrus squinted at the head and wondered if he should smash it again.
“Nisroch… will kill… first.”
Lightning lit up the horizon, and the flash blinded Tyrus. Through yellow afterimages, he glimpsed angels with white wings darting between clouds. Thunder boomed a few heartbeats later, and more lightning struck along the horizon. In the distance, he heard the howls of purims in pain and other things much worse than the animal men. Tyrus glanced at the demon again, but the eyes darkened. After the storm passed, he heard the lingering keening of purims mourning their dead.
Tyrus cleaned his axes and studied the clouds. He didn’t understand their territories, but angels and demons contested the Lost Lands.
Tyrus asked the clouds, “Who is Nisroch?”
He half expected an angel to land and tell him, but they never offered help when he actually needed it. Instead, he returned to his perch. Demons and angels fought for territory. If the demons won, they would send more monsters for him. Whatever killed him no longer mattered. He vowed to hurt as many of them as he could before he died.
III
Under the cover of night, Emperor Azmon Pathros stalked the battlements of Shinar. He watched dwarves cooking bricks. Miles away, on the Shinari plains, fires glowed under hundreds of dwarven kilns. The barn-like structures worked nonstop to cook barrel-sized bricks for the dwarven wall. They built their own wall around Shinar. Azmon had spent four years watching them work and marveled at their progress. His own engineers would struggle to build but one section of such a wall, yet the dwarves were circumvallating Shinar.
Azmon made a slow circuit of the city, and the dwarven walls confronted him at each turn. Beyond the walls were the campfires of the three armies besieging Shinar. Dwarves, elves, and Gadarans surrounded him.
A salty smell in the chill air promised another storm. Farther west, beyond Mount Teles, snow fell, but warmer winds from the Grigorn Sea drowned Shinar in rain. He hated the weather as much as he hated the siege.
He muttered to himself as he skulked between battlements. Emperor Azmon Pathros, the Prince of the Dawn, the Eternal Youth, Conqueror of the Five Nations, and Supreme Ruler of the Roshan Empire, was surrounded by yellow bricks. And the dwarves never stopped working. Kilns converted clay into barrel-like bricks while an assembly line funneled them to the siege where more dwarves set them in mortar. All night long, the chime of trowels, chisels, and hammers filled the air. He had expected sorcery and siege engines, but he never dreamed anyone would build an investment around Shinar.
“Damn you, Dura.” Azm
on pounded a fist on the rampart. “And damn your dwarves.”
Years ago, he had sortied against the scaffolds. His forces reeled from several defeats and lacked the strength to break the siege. He feared his own wounds as well. His master had punished his failures with a terrible disease, and the wounds continued to torment him four years later. Meanwhile, the elves wasted their spells on his walls. Both walls bore scorch marks. The no-man’s-land between them was filled with black craters and burned equipment.
The metallic jingle of armor pulled Azmon from his memories. He spotted two guardsmen approaching and yanked his hood forward. As the guards neared, he adjusted his golden mask, which covered him from brow to chin. Ornate runes decorated the face, which had slits for eyes and mouth. Assured that the mask was in place, he darted into the shadows of another rampart.
He bumped into two more guards and cursed himself for not paying attention to the hourly bells. He wondered how he had missed eleven bells. The changing guard filled the walls with saluting soldiers.
“Your Excellency.”
“Excellency.”
Azmon waved them away. From the battlements, he studied his own forces, which were on the brink of another civil war. When the Roshan Empire had marched across a continent undefeated, no one objected to serving the Nine Hells, but years spent struggling with the siege had turned his students into malcontents. They wanted to flee. Unfortunately, none of them appreciated the price of displeasing the Father of Lies.
Robes, silks, and bandages covered Azmon’s scars. Mulciber had infected him with the Blight of God. The black poison ate his flesh, torturing as it disfigured. Recovering from the Blight, if it could be called a recovery, had taken three years, and during that time he had ignored the siege. As his strength returned, though, he craved revenge, a craving tempered by fear. He dared not fail Mulciber again.
He leaned against a rampart and scanned the far wall for Dura. Somewhere beyond the fortification, an ancient woman wore a red robe and leaned on her staff. She had fought Azmon across two continents, and he knew—he just knew—she conspired with the elves and dwarves. Instead of fighting him with runes, she built ridiculous walls.
“What more do you want? I’m boxed in. I’m waiting.”
The walls offended him because he had flying monsters. The siege would never work as long as he flew supplies into Shinar. The elves attacked his flyers with spells, but the bone lords defended them. Azmon sneered at the historic alliance: Elves and dwarves, working together for the first time since the Second War of Creation, and all they did was build walls.
He wanted them to break into Shinar.
He had converted the city into a giant trap. While he struggled with his wounds, he also built an army of beasts that shamed anything he had created before. Thousands upon thousands of new monsters filled Shinar. Rather than waste them against the yellow bricks, he wanted to trap Dura in the city and destroy her precious league in one battle. Then he could harvest their bones and create monsters to punish the Father of Lies.
Azmon trembled at the idea of voicing such thoughts, but he wanted to destroy Mulciber. The fiend rewarded decades of service with a hideous plague. Black filth flowed through Azmon’s veins and deformed his flesh. He didn’t recognize his own face anymore. He wanted revenge.
One step at a time, he reminded himself. As his father had said, “An emperor’s greatest weapon is patience.” He pounded his knuckles against a cold rampart. Filthy dwarves.
Azmon descended the walls into the abandoned slums. The city had once been a sprawling hive of over a million people. Known as the Jewel of the West, Shinar had grown because of a vast kingdom feeding it food and a network of aqueducts providing water. The Shinari Kingdom once serviced its capital city, but years of war left it barren.
The Roshan gutted the city to repair their villas. The dwarves loved to launch boulders into Shinar, so piles of rubble cluttered the streets, and a thick blanket of yellow dust covered everything. Azmon made his way deep into the slums, which were filled with pens for bone beasts. From behind iron bars, hundreds of red eyes watched him. He sensed their excitement growing. The beasts knew his mood well.
After ensuring he was alone, he used a skeleton key to unlock a gate. One of the largest monsters, a newly constructed wall breaker, stood before him. At twenty feet, it towered over anything he had created before. The massive shoulders were as wide as a small hut and covered in armored plates and horns. Skull-like nostrils exhaled with such force that they ruffled Azmon’s robes. Hundreds of fangs filled its massive jaws, and black leathery skin covered patches of the limbs. The arms ended in claws as long as Azmon’s legs.
Azmon pulled back his robes and unwound the wrapping on his left hand. The Blight of God had twisted his flesh into a claw similar to the beast’s. Dark skin and leathery scales covered his arm. The bones in his fingers had grown into talons. Azmon kept the deformation wrapped and hidden from the nobles, but alone with the beasts, he flexed it until the knuckles popped.
The Blight offered one blessing: he could control more beasts. Before his affliction, the lords had helped him with the army. He no longer needed them. The beasts whispered in his dreams and harbored dark, hungry thoughts. They suffered an endless craving that no flesh could sate.
Azmon removed his mask. It collected his breath and had left beads of moisture dripping down his cheeks. Black boils covered the left side of his face, as though someone had painted him with burning tar. The song of the beasts, their hunger for blood and violence, the way their claws twitched with the need to render flesh, stirred Azmon’s heartbeat.
As he grew excited, his eyes glowed red.
Dozens of beasts smiled at him—if the fanged maws could be said to smile. He knew what they wanted, and they knew he would give it to them. Anticipation gave the air an electric charge.
“Greetings, my children.”
The wall breaker bellowed. Several blocks away, dozens more answered. Azmon reached out with his senses, traversing the mental links between creator and construct. He thought of the links as a ghostly web connecting him to his creations. His children made the affliction easier to bear. They soothed his pain. Thousands upon thousands of them awaited his commands, and the size of his army made his chest swell. Never mind the dwarves—his army would humble the shedim.
He opened a pen for the smaller beasts. They were man shaped but hunched over and occasionally ran on all fours. With a thought, he unleashed them. They scurried off toward the camps of his soldiers. Moments later, somewhere in the dark, a soldier’s scream was choked short.
“That’s right,” Azmon said. “Bring me more bones.”
At the heart of Shinar stood the palace, King’s Rest. Azmon staggered through it on his way to his quarters. He had pushed himself too far again, but he had no other way to rebuild his strength. The pain from the Blight sent tremors up and down his back.
He stumbled through another corridor lit by oil lamps. The golden light should soothe, but he flinched instead. Above his left eye, a pinch began swelling into a migraine. His clawed hand throbbed as though scalded. He fell against a door and cursed when he landed on his bad hand.
In the first days of the Blight, Azmon had been bedridden. It took months to build enough stamina to sit on the throne and hold court. Afterward, Elmar and his other clerks would carry him to his bed.
The luxury of being able to walk faded with his stamina. He pushed himself too hard. Azmon leaned against a wall and panted. His bedroom was only a few yards away, but clammy sweat drenched the small of his back. Everything felt heavier. He cursed the wretched mask.
From behind a marble column, a shadow came alive as a beast stepped forward. He didn’t remember summoning the creature, but it carried him to his door. They disturbed him when they thought for themselves. Their intelligence—the potential for them to escape his control—compelled him to regret his life. History would remember him as the Demon Emperor of Rosh. Long before he
conquered the Five Nations, Azmon had earned the title Prince of the Dawn for saving Rosh. He had been a Reborn hero, and bards wrote ballads about Azmon and Tyrus defending the empire.
No one wrote songs anymore. The nobles loathed him. They whispered about demons taking the empress away, and Azmon regretted that the most. Ishma deserved better. Her screams still haunted his nightmares, making him wish he had saved her. When the pain became too horrid to bear, he dreamed of flying home to Sornum. He would cross the Grigorn Sea and return to his fortress in Rosh.
Dura would chase him across the ocean, though. He would either win the war or let the shedim drag him to the Nine Hells.
Azmon sent the monster away and stumbled to his bed, shedding mask and robes as he went. The sound of the mask clanking across the marble floor summoned Elmar, his master clerk. A smaller door near the wardrobe opened, and the clerk stepped forth, a short and thin elder with a shiny head.
Elmar avoided eye contact as he collected the robes. “You walked around the entire city again?”
“You know I did. I saw your spies.”
“I took the liberty of summoning Rassan.”
Azmon grimaced and gestured for the mask. Elmar handed it over and moved to the door. After a whisper, Rassan entered with his brush kit. Rassan was Azmon’s most promising student and a young lord of House Hadoram. They had been a power in Rosh once, producing a few emperors before House Pathros took the throne five generations before.
Azmon leaned back in bed. Rassan painted runes onto Azmon’s limbs. Each night, they tried to slow the Blight with sorcery, but the curse persisted.
An hour later, Rassan put away his inkwells and brushes. He looked so much like his late sister, Lilith, that it caught Azmon off guard. The men of House Hadoram stood tall and rugged, with wide shoulders and strong jaws. Rassan shared his sister’s brown hair and sharp nose.
Rassan asked, “Excellency, why not summon demons to destroy the wall?”
Willing to Endure: A Dark Fantasy (The Shedim Rebellion Book 3) Page 2
