Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen

by James A. West

  Zera lowered her voice. “Few understand that Peropis intends to use that gathered power to remake the Well of Creation, and bend all its immense energies to her will. In harnessing those combined powers for her own use, she will become stronger than even her parents were. This time, the Well of Creation will not be a capstone used to imprison her kindred within the Thousand Hells, but instead humankind—the beloved of Pa’amadin. Peropis will also gain true freedom as a being of flesh and spirit. She will confine humankind, torture them relentlessly, and finally have her revenge against the Silent God and Creator of All.”

  “How am I supposed to stop her?”

  Zera jabbed a finger at Kian. “Go to him. If anyone can tell you what to do, it is him.”

  Leitos favored his grandfather with a long look, and did as bidden.

  Chapter 6

  When the ghostly figure of Kian made a low, pleading sound in his throat, Leitos knelt at his feet.

  “We’ve never met,” he said. “Not truly. I am Leitos, son of your son, Adham.”

  Kian blinked, and Leitos saw that the rich blue of his eyes had drained away, leaving them as gray as his flesh. His mouth worked silently, then he reached out. Leitos fought against flinching away, and let his grandfather drop a once powerful hand on his shoulder. A strange thrill tickled through him, and a strong voice filled his mind.

  Oh, but we have met, you and I, Kian said inside him. You were but a babe then, squalling and spitting, and soiling yourself a dozen times a day. Despite all that, it was a joyous time. Come, I will show you.

  Leitos tried to resist an odd pulling sensation, but it seemed as if he were unraveling, stretching out. He began to shudder uncontrollably, and everything before his eyes spun and lengthened—

  All at once, he found himself drifting in a dark emptiness, and before him hovered an immense spindle of gold. Set toward one end of a long shaft was the whorl, its surface covered with flowing designs. That great disk seemed to turn slowly, but Leitos sensed that it was actually spinning rapidly. A chaos of vivid threads came together at a delicate hook on one end of the shaft. The spindle twisted those tangled threads into a cord, which then passed over the whorl, and wrapped around the longer end of the shaft to the very tip. From there, the cord stretched away into what Leitos could only name eternity.

  He glanced back at the unwoven threads, which seemed to sprout from the darkness. Some grew longer and joined others in confused knots, while other threads abruptly lost their vibrancy and melted into the emptiness.

  And then he was being pulled toward that welter of threads. The spindle and the darkness through which it turned vanished. All became a turbulent vortex of swirling hues, and he spun with them. Spinning. Spinning....

  When his surroundings solidified, he found himself with Kian, who now looked as he had outside the tower. Tall, strong, dark of hair and blue of eye. Leitos also saw that he was no longer in the tower, nor was he in that other place with the great golden spindle. He stood beside Kian in a wide meadow laid out like a carpet over the floor of a broad valley. In the distance, an evergreen forest crawled up the flanks of snowcapped mountains. The sun shone clear and bright. He searched for Zera, but she was gone.

  “What is this place?” Leitos asked.

  Some of Kian’s rugged gruffness fell away. “These are my homelands, as they were before I ever met Varis Kilvar in the Green Eye Tavern. Longer still before I ever took up a sword to make my way in the world. It’s the summer before the Falsethians crushed my people. This is Izutar.”

  Leitos kicked the tip of his boot against solid ground. When he lifted his foot, the grass was flattened in the shape of his footprint. The fragrance of wildflowers sweetened the air. A fly lit upon his hand, and its crawling tickled his skin. Nothing about his surroundings seemed like an illusion. “How did I get here?”

  Kian smiled, and Leitos could not help but think there was something of a changeling wolf in that expression. “The Powers of Creation offer all sorts of abilities. A pity that I did not learn that lesson sooner—or, at least, accept the truth. I suppose after I returned life to Ellonlef—twice, as it happens—and then to Hazad and Azuri, I knew something of those powers. But knowing and accepting are two different things.”

  Leitos shook his head. “I do not understand.”

  “If I had believed what I had become sooner, perhaps I could have kept the world safe from the Faceless One—Peropis. Or not,” Kian said, shrugging his shoulders. “Hard to say, as the Powers of Creation were never meant for the hands of men. It’s simply too vast and powerful for our minds. Had I known, or accepted—whatever the case may be—might be I’d have ended up believing that I was a living god, just like Varis did. Hard to say,” he said again, “what might have been.”

  Leitos’s thoughts spun. “You created this place?”

  “The Three created this and all realms,” Kian countered. “I simply choose to live within this single moment.”

  “Where are the people?”

  “Wherever I want them to be.” Kian gestured to a low rise. Suddenly the jingle and rattle of harnesses filled the air, rising from a long caravan of wagons. When Leitos blinked, the caravan was gone.

  “I can create people,” Kian said, “but they are only ghosts. Other than that, all I can tell you for sure is that the Powers of Creation allow me to make a home of this blink of time dredged from my memories. For a while, boy, some few of the dead can go where they will.”

  “The dead?” Leitos spluttered.

  Kian gave him another wolfish grin and laughed, a deep rich sound. “Aye, the dead. You, me, anyone who absorbed the Powers of Creation. We are all of us dead, after a fashion.”

  “No,” Leitos said. “I cannot be dead. I was born, and I have lived—I still live. I tasted the lash in the Faceless One’s mines. I ... I have loved the living.”

  “Easy, boy,” Kian said. “Let me put it another way. What is death, but another realm of living? It’s just that since the breaking of the Well of Creation, the living and the dead are much closer together than they should be, like two sides of the same coin without a middle. But if Peropis has her way, all that will change.”

  Kian scanned about. Between one blink and the next, a stone chair appeared where there had not been one before. He sat down with a pleased sigh, and extended a hand for Leitos to do the same. When Leitos turned, he found a matching chair close by.

  “Sit, boy. It will not bite your backside.”

  Leitos hesitated, then lowered himself to the edge of the seat. A dream, it must be, he told himself, denying the comforting warmth of the sun and the fresh air filling his chest. The dream extended to chirping birds flitting through the air.

  “If we are dead,” Leitos said, not believing it for a moment, “then are you sure this is not Paradise?”

  Kian rubbed his chin, his big hand rasping over dark stubble. “Never really thought about it like that, but I suppose it could be—at least in part. And why not? Pa’amadin may be silent and all, but he is generous in his way. What better gift than to bless his chosen with the desires of their heart?”

  “What if their desires are evil?” Leitos asked.

  “I expect the Creator of All wouldn’t hold with evil sorts, otherwise he wouldn’t have condemned the first children of the Three—the Mahk’lar—who were twisted by evil from the start.” He gave Leitos a lingering look. “Maybe you can ask him someday, if you succeed against the true Bane of Creation. But that is not why I brought you here.”

  “Do you know how to defeat Peropis?” Leitos asked, jumping straight to the heart of the matter.

  Kian frowned, lifted a golden goblet from an ornate table made of solid ivory. Leitos narrowed his eyes against the glint of gems around the goblet’s rim. Neither the table nor the goblet had been there a second earlier. Kian drank deeply, and a line of deep red liquid dribbled over his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and smacked his lips. “I can tell you, boy, wine never tasted so good.”
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  Leitos leaped to his feet. His grandfather might have all the time in the world to sip wine and look at the flowers, but Leitos did not have that luxury. “Enough of this! Tell me how I can destroy the Faceless One, or Peropis, or whatever else that demon-whore calls herself!”

  Unperturbed, Kian shrugged his wide shoulders. “As far as I know, she cannot be destroyed by the likes of us. However, what she desires most can be denied her—but only by someone like you, who has died and yet lives by the Powers of Creation.”

  “No more riddles,” Leitos warned.

  At that moment, a deep rumble shook the world. The fluffy white clouds overhead rolled back on themselves, leaving behind a sky the color of old blood.

  Kian jerked upright. “She’s found us. I should’ve known better than to bring you here, what with her so close. You must go. Quickly, now.”

  “Tell me what I must do!”

  Another boom shook Kian’s creation. Scattering birds fell out of the air and plopped dead and stiff on the ground. Beneath Leitos’s feet and all around, the swaying grass curled, blackened, and began to smoke. Far away, the mountains began to rip themselves apart. Roiling black clouds, laced with bands of molten red, leaped from crushed peaks.

  Kian’s eyes went bright and hard, and that wolfish grin played mirthlessly across his lips. “I said you were dead, as are all who were touched by the Powers of Creation. And that is true—that’s why we seem to live without aging—but we are also alive, and can still die as other men do. I cannot explain it better, other than to say that the breaking of the Well of Creation changed everything, somehow joined together the realm of the dead with the realm of the living. The two sides of the coin I spoke of became one, yet are still separated by the barest width. Knowing that, understanding it, is the key to stopping Peropis.”

  “Knowing that life and death are the same, but not, is a key? I do not understand!”

  “You must remake the coin, Leitos, as it was before.”

  “Before what?”

  Kian set his feet. The booming had grown louder. The skies opened up, releasing a deluge of crimson rain. Leitos felt nothing, but his grandfather paled, and his flesh began melting off his bones. “Remake the coin, Leitos, to what it was before I—”

  Chapter 7

  “—Before you what?” Leitos shouted, but he was no longer with Kian. His cry echoed hollowly, and then firm hands clutched his shoulders and lifted him off the floor.

  “What happened?” Zera demanded. “What did you do?”

  Around them, the azure light had gone to the same corrupted blood-red as Kian’s haven, and it sounded as if the stones of the tower were grinding themselves to powder. Peropis had not only reached into that other place, but here as well. Life and death ...... two sides of the same coin ... and yet I saw no coin, only a golden spindle. He wished he had mentioned that to his grandfather, but if there was a way back, he did not know how to do it.

  Dust filled the air, and the distant rumble of falling masonry buried all other sounds. Nearby, Kian had become a heap of ash.

  “Peropis found us!” Leitos called, eyes locking on the rip hovering in the air, which somehow connected two places half a world apart. It had grown smaller, and was still visibly shrinking. In seconds, it would close.

  “Did he tell you how to destroy Peropis?”

  Leitos shook his head helplessly. “He said I had to remake the coin.”

  Zera’s face went slack. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She gave herself a shake. “If I were Peropis, I would sweep across the Sea of Drakarra and take the last few of humankind’s strongholds.” She flinched as more rubble crashed down. “If I were you, I would gather those I could and reclaim Geldain, and make that land a refuge for humankind, a realm from which you can launch a war.”

  “How?”

  “To hold Geldain, you must conquer Kula-Tak. Peropis has a seat of power there, a place like this—any trueborn Geldainian will know where I mean.”

  “It would take an army that we do not have,” Leitos protested.

  “Build an army and stop Peropis, or die,” Zera said sharply. “Now you must leave.” She bustled him forward. “You must also learn what Kian meant, or Peropis will succeed in erasing all evidence of humanity.”

  “Come with me!” Leitos pleaded, as crushed rock and mortar began tumbling down in a steady hail.

  “I will find you again. Go now. Once you are on the other side, be sure to destroy the keys!”

  Before he could protest, she hurled him into the crackling rip between the stands. He felt stretched out to the thickness of a hair, then thinner and longer, until he feared he would snap—

  —he slapped hard against a smooth dark surface, like lumpy black glass. Leitos heaved himself up, looking wildly about. Zera had not followed. The tear in the space behind him gradually sealed itself, and was gone. The shaking of that other place had not followed him here, but evidence of past destruction greeted his eye. Yawning cracks showed in the broad floor of the boundless cavern, and from these oozed curtains of rank smoke. He had returned to the Faceless One’s throne room in the Throat of Balaam. He had come back to Yato.

  The obsidian throne itself lay in a thousand broken shards. Within the area where the throne had risen from the floor, he found three ugly metal stands that he had not seen before, each topped with dull stones. Topaz, amber, ruby. Keys, Zera had named them. She had also told him to destroy them.

  One after the other, the yellow stone first, then the red, he smashed them against the floor. As the shattered pieces scattered into the gloom, the last of their light died. When he wrapped his fingers around the pale blue stone, a thrumming tingle coursed through his limbs. Every muscle in his body went rigid. He wanted to pull back, to drop the stone, but his fingers clutched it convulsively. A strangled hiss passed his lips, and a fathomless blue light filled his mind ...... and was gone.

  Leitos stood gasping, looking at the now dim stone in his hand. He abruptly broke it against the ground, and turned his attention to his surroundings. There was no sign of any Alon’mahk’lar or Mahk’lar, or of the Faceless One—

  He arrested the thought. The Faceless One had been an illusion, a living mask used by Peropis. She was and had always been humankind’s true enemy. Best if he and everyone else abandoned the lie of the Faceless One.

  He set out, steeling his heart against what he would find outside the Throat of Balaam, which might well have suffered the same destruction as the throne room.

  He could not so easily prepare himself for the chance that everyone he cared for—Adham, Belina, Ulmek and the rest—might be dead.

  Chapter 8

  The moaning was close. Belina knew the voice, but struggled to find a name. Nola, my sister. She blinked, wondering how long she had been sprawled on her back, looking up at passing clouds. It seemed a fine day, save for the smell of death and crushed rock.

  She listened to her sister’s weak cries, and she wanted to go to her, but was unable to move or think clearly. A crushing weight pinned her to the ground, and her head ached. The world she saw did not seem any more real than a dream. Behind her eyes, a images began repeating over and over, and she drifted away....

  ~ ~ ~

  Mahk’lar-possessed Kelrens closed in. The light of the Throat of Balaam was bright around her, Nola, and their father Damoc. Belina fired an arrow into a sea-wolf’s face and the steel broadhead smashed through his bared teeth. She reached for another shaft, but her quiver hung empty.

  Fear closed her throat to a pinhole. Furious faces beyond count pressed close, all with spit-flecked lips peeled back from gnashing teeth. Iron hands struck and clawed at her, bruised her, ripped her clothes. Steel flashed, and with frantic desperation she deflected the blows with her sword. An unseen fist pummeled her temple and she dropped, dazed.

  Suddenly two Brothers of the Crimson Shield were there, Sumahn and Daris, hacking and slashing into the backs of the enemy. Damo
c flew into the fray, bashing his splintered bow against the face of any sea-wolf that came too close, fighting madly to drive back the surge of foes from his daughters.

  Belina struggled to her feet and swung her blade, chopping off a reaching hand. At her side, Nola screamed and reeled backward, her face awash in blood.

  The Kelrens pushed forward, oblivious to their own fallen and wounded, intent only on destroying their human prey. Daggers and swords stabbed and slashed, cold steel rang against cold steel.

  Rough fingers tangled in Belina’s hair, yanked her head back, and a large knife rose above her eyes. She reversed the grip on her sword and rammed it through the guts of the abomination that held her. She might well have slapped him, for all the good it did.

  Her enemy’s steel sparkled with a cold light as it swooped down toward her neck. She knew death had found her. But instead of the icy burn of sharp steel cleaving her throat, a shrieking blast of light and wind ripped through her and the demon-possessed Kelren holding her. Cold fire filled her veins, and the howling sea-wolf went still as stone. All of them did. Their bones seemed to shrink and contort, the skin covering them becoming clinging husks. As the light grew brighter, heat swept in, and all at once they flew apart and scattered like dry leaves before a stiff wind.

  Then all became a swirling maelstrom.

  Blinded and weightless, Belina soared through the air, tumbling end over end. Rock exploded around her, the grinding of its destruction filling her skull. Her mad journey ended when she struck something unyielding, and a blessed nothing fell like a blanket over her mind....

  ~ ~ ~

  ....And now I’m here, unable to move, unable to think right, unable to help my dying sister.

  Belina blinked at the flood of tears filling her eyes. Not just for Nola, but also for Leitos, the young man she had envisioned so often while growing up, a man steeped in shadow and pain, a warrior of steel, a bringer of death. Where is he? He’s the key to everything. If—