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

by James A. West

  “Go,” Leitos said.

  Of them all, Ulmek alone fully understood the necessity. “Take my dagger, little brother.” An iron grin stretched his lips. “Don’t bring it back unless it’s bloody.”

  Leitos did as bidden. With his hands filled with short and long steel, he nodded toward the heart of the city. “I’ll draw their attention. The rest of you get to the palace. When I’m finished here, I’ll rejoin you.”

  They stared at him as if trying to etch his features into their memories. He spun away before anyone could protest further, and darted into the street.

  Chapter 13

  Instead of running for the closest cover, Leitos sprinted over the cobbled roadway in full sight of the enemy. Only when the shriek of arrows filled the air, did he take shelter.

  Before he put a building between himself and the watchtower, another broadhead found him, tearing through his snug robes above one hipbone. He slammed against a shadowed wall, and looked over his shoulder to search for his companions. They had vanished. Good.

  He fingered the bloody slice in his robe. Between the wind and pounding rain, he had misjudged the nearness of the falling arrows. A painful lesson, but not his first.

  Once more, he ran into the open, drawing the eyes of the archers from his friends. More arrows flashed out of the storm, and again he found himself hunkered behind a wall. Twice more he broke cover, each time running full out to the next building.

  At the last wall, he peeked around a corner. The watchtower clawed at the sky like a black spike, but he saw no Fauthians in the arrow loops dotting its walls. Doubtless they were situated well back from the openings in an effort to keep their bows dry.

  Overhead, the worst of the storm was already blowing itself out. He had hoped it would last longer, but his short time on the island had taught him that most afternoon storms died as fast as they were born.

  Delaying no longer, he skipped into a dark alley and trotted down its length, boots splashing through puddles. Keeping the last image of the tower in his mind, he judged distances and angles, and made his way from one narrow path to another, until he felt confident that he was far from where the Fauthians expected him to be.

  At the mouth of an alley that let out onto a broad boulevard, he lay down on his belly and inched forward. He had moved far from where he had started, putting the tower behind him, and dappled bands of sunlight burst through the breaking clouds to shine on the tower’s walls. If he waited too long, the archers would creep out of their stronghold and give chase.

  Keeping to the shadows were he could, Leitos rapidly made his way to the tower. When he reached the closed door, he pressed his ear against it. Nothing stirred within. He tried the latch, found it unlocked. Fauthians had ruled uncontended for so long, that they had developed many bad habits.

  He quickly eased the door open, eyes stabbing round the interior for any movement. The way was clear. He slipped in, eased the door closed, and made for the closest pool of darkness to get his bearings.

  A profusion of footprints showed in the dust layering the floor, and also on the wooden stairs leading up through the tower’s hollow center. Bars of golden sunlight slanted through arrow loops on the west side of the tower. Everywhere else, shadows lay thick. If his enemies could use them, so could he.

  It was in this tower that he had heard the screams of a Yatoan woman, and saw for the first time the strange blue light of the Throat of Balaam. Past knowledge told him the ancient wooden treads were sound, if creaky. Leitos began to climb, each footfall more cautious than the previous.

  He froze as a Fauthian’s lean, golden-skinned back came into view. A few aberrant smears of dirt marred his ankle-length white kilt. The man stood looking out of an arrow loop, feathered shaft nocked to bowstring.

  Leitos craned his neck, searching higher up, but saw no one else. They were there, somewhere. Likely each one of those snaky bastards was poised to lob arrows at anyone they saw. They should have been scouring the city by now, but their authority over the Yatoans had relied more on an overawed reverence, than an execution of force.

  Bad habits, Leitos thought again, smiling as he crept closer on his toes. One step, two, and three. His calves quivered from the strain of the measured pace. One hand tightened around the hilt of his sword, and the other around Ulmek’s dagger.

  I need to get another for myself, Leitos thought absently. He had hurled his dagger at the Faceless One, before passing through the portal and finding himself in the howling white storm of Izutar.

  Another step ... slow ... slow ... another....

  Leitos hefted his sword, mind calm. Where the Brothers of the Crimson Shield took swords of their choosing upon admittance into the Order, they all carried common daggers, with blades shaped like spikes. Such a weapon was made for puncturing deep into flesh and allowing for very little blood flow. An assassin’s blade, without question.

  Easing his sword into the scabbard, sweat began to replace drying rainwater on his brow. Try as he might, it became harder to remain detached. Fear did not trouble him, but the desire to slaughter those in league with Peropis raced his heart and quickened his breath.

  Closer ... another step ... another....

  The Fauthian shifted, his profile coming into view. His pulse, steady and slow, showed in a vein running up his slender neck.

  Leitos froze, breath caught in his throat, his own heart thumping hard despite his best efforts to remain at ease. It suddenly seemed as if the colors of the world had been stripped to ugly grays and dull silvers. He closed his eyes, confused. When he opened them, all was as it should be, save that he had a sense of something ... an aura of vitality, extending out from the Fauthian’s skin ... reaching out ... seeking Leitos. It took every last ounce of resistance not to rush headlong at his foe.

  The archer shifted back, scanning.

  As Leitos eased forward, the tread under his back foot groaned, ever so softly. The Fauthian began to spin, the pulse in his neck jumping, his thin lips parting to loose a cry of warning.

  Leitos sprang, silent and swift. His free hand clapped over the man’s mouth, wrenched his head back and to one side. A sharp thrust buried the dagger in the hollow under the Fauthian’s ear. The blade screamed softly as it passed through bone and into his brain. The man grunted, went stiff, then hung limp in Leitos’s arms. He eased the corpse to the floor, and after yanking his blade free, he wiped it on the man’s kilt.

  As he straightened, an arrow thumped into the boards between his feet. Leitos dove for cover. A panicky shout from above filled the tower. Foregoing caution, Leitos hauled out his sword and charged up the stairs.

  Four turns up, he met the yelling archer. The man fumbled an arrow, then lurched back and swung his bow like a club. Leitos swatted aside the attack with his sword, and slammed his foot into the man’s groin. The Fauthian’s scream cut off when Leitos’s dagger filled his mouth. Before his enemy could crumple, Leitos had tugged his blade free, and was rushing up and up. Every step he took seemed to fill him with more strength, more confidence.

  The next Fauthian launched himself at Leitos with a wicked sword as long as Leitos was tall, its thin curving edge glinting. Leitos feinted. The Fauthian made a clumsy chopping motion, stumbled forward, and Leitos brought his sword down on the back of the Fauthian’s neck. The steel bit deep, cutting into the bone and through. Head and body separated, and blood sprayed across Leitos’s face. Laughter bubbled from his own throat, as he kicked the twitching corpse aside.

  Not wasting a moment, he charged the rest of the way up, but met no one else. The stairway ended at a trapdoor set in the floor of the tower’s crown. Caution suggested he should go slow, but a sense of wellbeing flooded his veins, filled his mind with unbreakable confidence.

  Leitos battered his shoulder against the door, expecting a bar to hold it shut. Instead it flew upward. Halfway open, it thudded against something and rebounded. Leitos, now partway through the opening, rammed the small door wide again. It crashed once more
into a stunned Fauthian, driving him backward. Leitos’s sword sang as it split the air between them.

  The Fauthian lurched away, bloody nose squashed flat from meeting the trapdoor. “Mercy!” he squealed nasally, dropping his sword.

  Leitos did not slow, did not hesitate. There were too few of humankind left in the world, and here before him stood one reason for that.

  “Please!” the Fauthian wailed, waving his hands in surrender. He backed up until his skinny arse pressed hard against the sill of an arched opening. “Your reward will be great, if you spare me!”

  A pitiless smile twitched Leitos’s lips. “I believe we’re past mercy and rewards.”

  A brutal slash of Leitos’s sword replaced one of the man’s waving hands with a gushing stump. A less than gentle poke to the belly sent the squalling Fauthian into a plunge out of the tower. A slow pair of heartbeats later, Leitos heard the grisly splat of meat impacting cobblestones.

  Leitos barely noticed.

  Coming out of the tower soon afterward, Leitos spared a quick glance at the crushed Fauthian, and wondered, How many more of them are about? There could also be Alon’mahk’lar in the city, maybe a sea-wolf or two.

  Instead of returning to the palace, he went on the hunt.

  Chapter 14

  Another crash of furniture, punctuated by Ulmek’s curses, drifted out of the adjoining room. As that had been going on for a while, Adham ignored the racket.

  His gaze skipped uneasily over the chamber’s vulgar stone monuments situated around a ring of tapered pillars. The statues were fashioned after creatures born in the Thousand Hells—Mahk’lar, creatures of shadow and hate, the first children of the Three.

  In this place, under the watchful stares of those unpleasant figures, Adham had been forced to watch the Fauthian leader Adu’lin destroy the order of the Brothers of the Crimson Shield. One by one, he led them away and allowed Mahk’lar to possess them. Some had screamed, others had not. But in the end only Ulmek, Sumahn, and Daris had avoided that terrible fate. And Leitos, of course, who had been with Belina at the time, and facing his own troubles with Damoc.

  Adham glanced at the sunlight passing through the circular portal in the chamber’s domed ceiling. At least two hours had passed since Leitos distracted the Fauthian archers, allowing everyone else to reach the palace grounds. Adham thought of what his son had said: “The Faceless One and Peropis are the same, and she’s coming.... Time is short.” He checked the angle of the light, and thought that maybe three hours had had actually passed. Where is that blasted boy?

  Considering the way Leitos had thrown himself into the task, as if he had wanted to get away from the others, and the eagerness that had lit his face as he darted into the street, Adham guessed his son might have decided to take the long way back in order to collect a few trophies. He prayed the boy was safe, but could not escape the idea that something had changed about him. A change that might be dangerous to himself, and to the others.

  Along the way to the palace, Damoc had insisted they retrieve the last of his clan—a score of warriors who Adham and the others had left behind when hounding Adu’lin to the Throat of Balaam. A few Yatoans had succumbed, but only the most seriously injured—men and women, to Adham’s way of thinking, who should never have left the field of battle in the first place.

  Not for the first time, it struck him that the Yatoans were either a very resilient lot, or they had wills forged of the hardest iron. A prolonged study of Damoc hobbling about the chamber heightened Adham’s suspicion that the Yatoans contained within them an unusual resistance to injury.

  Damoc was clopping from one nasty statue to another, looking a challenge into each twisted face. He was moving about rather well for a man who had just that morning taken an arrow in the thigh, another in the shoulder, and had his ankle crushed when Leitos destroyed the Throat. A few days at most, and Damoc would be getting on as if he had only taken a few scratches.

  “I have them!” Ulmek said, coming out of the next room. He held aloft a ball of leather thongs, all hung with teardrop-shaped amulets.

  Damoc paused in his study of a figure that could have been a woman, save for the dozen tentacles waving off her body, and the obscenity of horns and mouths that represented her head. “What are they?”

  Ulmek raised an eyebrow. “They are stones of protection, wards. What else would they be?”

  Damoc came nearer, his crude walking stick thumping against floor tiles. He fingered one. A frown crossed his brow. “You said ‘wards’ ...... but what do they ward against?”

  “Surely you jest?” Ulmek said.

  “It keeps Mahk’lar from possessing the living,” Adham said, stepping closer.

  The elder’s eyes widened. “So it is true—though I suppose I knew that already, after what Adu’lin did to your company. With all that has gone on this day, it slipped my attention.”

  “Speak plain,” Ulmek ordered, drawing the stones out of reach.

  Damoc scrubbed a hand through his dark, close-cropped hair. “Long have my people heard unbelievable tales of Mahk’lar possessing the flesh of anything that breathes.”

  “I assure you, they are not tales,” Ulmek said.

  “Tell us, Elder Damoc,” Adham invited, “how have your people escaped for so long unprotected?”

  Damoc scowled. “Is it not enough that Alon’mahk’lar have ravished our women for generations, forcing them to birth Na’mihn’teghul, and having their souls broken in the process?”

  “What your people have suffered is beyond tragedy,” Adham said, soothing the man’s temper. “But that is not what I meant.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Adham cast a furtive look at Ulmek, but the Brother was focused on the elder. A year ago, out of mistrust for the Brothers of the Crimson Shield, men who were strangers at the time, Adham had told Leitos to keep their secret close on the way to Witch’s Mole. So far, he and the boy had done just that. He wanted to believe they were beyond secrets, after so long amongst the Brothers. He took a deep breath. “Resisting Mahk’lar is a rare gift—”

  “Rare?’ Ulmek blurted. “It is impossible!”

  “You are wrong,” Adham said calmly. “Those washed in the Powers of Creation, and their offspring after them, have no need of such wards.” Before Ulmek could argue, Adham began to explain what he had told Leitos a year earlier. “After Prince Varis Kilvar destroyed the Well of Creation—”

  Damoc began shaking his head in confusion. “Who is this prince, and what is a Well of Creation?”

  With an effort, Adham remained outwardly calm. He had never been one to suffer interruptions. “It’s enough to know that the princeling is dead. The Well of Creation, however, was the gathering place of all the Powers of Creation once wielded by the Three—you know who the Three were, yes? Good.

  “Now then, as a penance for creating the Mahk’lar, creatures who were entirely evil from the beginning, the Three made Geh’shinnom’atar. And therein they imprisoned their first children, including Peropis, herself a Mahk’lar, and sealed the Thousand Hells with the Powers of Creation.” He paused until both Damoc and Ulmek nodded in understanding, then went on.

  “After Prince Varis broke that seal, the Powers of Creation spread into all the world, like ripples across a pond. My father, Kian Valara, always believed the release of those powers caused the Upheaval, or at least played a part.” Speaking of his father so soon after learning of his death pained Adham, but these men needed to know the truth.

  “Gods good and wise,” Damoc breathed. “You mean a boy is at fault for all of—” he spread his arms, eyes roving over the chamber and its stone menagerie of grotesques “—all of this?”

  “Yes,” Adham said.

  “Tell me more about these people who can supposedly resist Mahk’lar,” Ulmek said flatly.

  Adham collected his thoughts. “A random few, Kian included, absorbed some of those powers, which in turn granted him the ability to repel Mahk’lar from taking his body.
And that is not all. For a time, he was able to heal his companions, even bring them back to life, though he lost that talent. He kept his strength, endurance, and long life, which are attributes he passed on to me, his only child, and which I then passed to Leitos. I believe the same holds true for the Yatoans ... seemingly all of them.”

  Ulmek refused to put his skepticism to rest. “You expect me to believe that your father lived two hundred and more years?”

  “I’ve walked this world for over one hundred and sixty-seven years,” Adham said. “Ba’Sel himself was present with my father at that forsaken temple.”

  “He’s never spoken a word of that to me,” Ulmek said, as if that proved Adham was a liar.

  Having gone so far, Adham kept pressing. “How long have you been with Ba’Sel and the Brothers?”

  “Over thirty summers have passed since Ba’Sel took me in,” Ulmek said. “For the last twenty summers, I have served him in commanding the Crimson Shield. If he kept such a secret, I would know it.”

  Adham laughed ruefully. “Thirty years. You must’ve been a child when you met Ba’Sel?”

  “What difference does that...?” Ulmek trailed off, his scowl deepening. After a long moment, he said, “Thirty years ... and he has not aged a day.” He gave himself a shake, glanced back at Adham. “Those who were old when Ba’Sel found me oft spoke of how Ba’Sel had found them in their youth.” Wonder flashed in his dark eyes. “Damn me, I never saw it!”

  “You never let yourself see it,” Adham said.

  Ulmek peered at him. “But you ... you are so old.”

  Adham shrugged irritably at the reminder, although he liked to think he did not look all that aged. “I began to look older than my father after my seventieth year. While I age slower than other men, the years do stack up upon my head, where they did not touch Kian, and all those he touched with the Powers of Creation—my mother, Ellonlef, and his friends Hazad and Azuri.” Adham thought a moment, then said, “I suspect that over time the Powers of Creation must get diluted. If there’s some other reason, no one has learned of it. Constantly fighting for your life has a way of discouraging close study of everything, save survival. Were it otherwise, humankind might have been able to find a way to best the Faceless One—pardon me, Peropis.”