Moving through a cluster of low-growing trees, he went toward the sounds, sword and dagger out and ready. The scent of salt and foam spiced the wind pushing against his face. Kneeling, he peered through a leafy break in the branches.
Across a grassy clearing, three sea-wolves were passing an earthenware jug amongst themselves, shouting encouragement to a fourth who was wrestling with someone on the ground. A flush of outrage crossed Leitos’s skin when he saw Belina’s terrified eyes above the thick gag stuffed into her mouth. Her feet were bound, and the brute on top of her was trying to tie her wrists.
The need to help her surged through him, birthed a strange tingling in his fingers and toes. Then that feeling engulfed him. He tried to move, but it seemed as though a sheet of ice had frozen him to the ground.
Belina suddenly twisted and heaved, driving her knee into the Kelren’s groin. He fell aside with a groaning wheeze, and Leitos saw that they had stripped her bare. A roar of drunken laughter went up, as Belina struggled to her knees, then to her feet, and tried to hop away. She did not get far before falling.
Still laughing, the rest of the Kelrens rushed in and applied their boots to her ribs, ending her wriggling flight. The first man she had knocked off came back, delivered a backhand blow to her cheek, and promptly tied her hands. As she lay groaning, he roughly thrust a hand between her legs.
A searing flash of rage melted the icy bonds holding Leitos still. Black hatred crashed over him, as he tore out of the trees in a half crouch. At the same instant, lightning exploded overhead. Before the brilliance faded, he saw a shadow sweeping toward him. As he turned, a heavy fist to the chin rocked his head, and it seemed as if the sun had burst in front of his eyes. Leitos fell sideways, barely retaining the presence of mind to roll away. The sea-wolf came after him. A kick caught Leitos on the fleshy part of his thigh, and the one after found his ribs. While Leitos struggled to separate up from down, the Kelren stomped his head.
Groaning, Leitos abruptly reversed his roll and crashed into the Kelren’s shins, making the brute stumble. Leitos rolled once more, and shoved himself to his feet. Still blinded by starbursts, he slashed his sword wildly and retreated, trying to shake off the dizziness.
The Kelren tossed his head to clear the tangles of filthy hair from his mud-brown eyes. As he raised his axe, his lips parted in a gap-toothed smile. “Look here, lads!” he cried. “Girl’s lover has come to save her from you louts.”
By now the other sea-wolves had turned to see what was happening. One called, “If there’s two of ‘em, like as not there’s more. Cut his throat, so’s we can find the rest. Mayhap they’ve a boat that can take us off this bastard rock.”
Mud-eye sneered. “Think I’ll save ‘im, lads. Pokin’ a boy’s skinny arse is jus’ as fine as pokin’ a girl’s.”
Leitos circled warily, letting the sea-wolf make his threats. As long as he kept yammering, it kept the others off Belina. It also gave Leitos’s head time to clear.
Mud-eye throttled the haft of his axe with thick fingers, and gave his hips a vulgar thrust. “Ever had a man’s love, boy? Mayhap I’ll start with your mouth, then work my way round to your puckered little arsehole. How’d that be?”
Leitos stayed quiet. Stepping cautiously, he flicked his gaze toward Belina. The other Kelrens had turned their backs on her. She was now sitting up, slashing the bindings around her ankles with a sharp rock. The blow to her cheek had split the skin. A fan of blood covered one side of her face, and dripped onto her bare knees. But she was alive and ready to fight.
“Mayhap we ought to make ’im watch us take his little bitch, first, eh?” one of the sea-wolves called. The others agreed with rude laughter.
Tendrils of fury spread through Leitos’s limbs, wrapped him about like wings of ebon frost. His mind grew colder still, and a frigid, unfeeling clarity speared through him. His thoughts raced, while at the same moment, the world slowed around him.
As everything went oddly still, he sensed something unseen reaching for him. Instinctively, he sought to hold it. A flickering stream of images blurred behind his eyes. The sea-wolves and Belina vanished, all went dark, and his vision came to rest on the golden spindle drifting through a field of black. As before, he saw the tangled threads spreading outward from the hook at one end, saw how the spinning whorl twisted those threads into a single beautiful cord, and then wrapped them tightly around the shaft.
He reached for those loose threads, brushed them with his fingertips, and for a moment he seemed to be in a thousand places at once, his being stretched and tugged in all directions. He drew back with a surprised gasp. Delicate, those threads were, but somehow powerful beyond reckoning. They seemed to contain every thought ever conceived, every deed ever done. The spindle, he thought, is the true master here. Upon that delicate axle hung not the world, but all worlds, and even the darkness between the stars. It controlled everything, and made order out of all that sweet chaos. The entirety of what his eyes and emotions showed him was the root of absolute power, and for the briefest instant that power was his to control. And he wanted only to wreak vengeance upon those who sought to defile Belina.
As the golden spindle vanished and the world came back, unimaginable strength flooded him. He became weightless as thistledown. Queer sensations raced across his skin, joined him to the beating heart of the living world. He felt the pounding of distant waves through the stony soul of Witch’s Mole, smelled the sea on the wind—not just the Sea of Sha’uul, but all seas. Some cold and thick with ice, others warm and green. He tasted the dust of many deserts, smelled the slow-decaying loam of forgotten forests. The colors of the motionless world before his eyes bled away, leaving all painted in silver and black hues.
As he searched the frozen scene, those stark hues grew brighter, sharper, casting all in unnatural but beautiful contrasts. Leitos focused on the rigid Kelren before him, and saw wisps of light rising off his skin. Leitos’s hatred rushed through his veins, as did his vitality.
He allowed the natural flow of life and the world to grind forward. “I think I’ll kill you now,” Leitos said to Mud-eye, calm voice soft as silk, sharp as a fresh-stropped blade. An eager smile turned his lips, not at what he was about to do, but at the sheer enormity of life and power coursing through him.
A wave of uncertainty rippled the Kelren’s face, making it uglier than ever. “What’s wrong ...with ... yourrr ... eyessssss?”
Obeying Leitos’s desire, the world slowed again, and the sea-wolf’s words reached him as a dragging hiss. The motion of everything except him ceased. The wind perished, a leaf hung in the air, waiting expectantly to resume its twirling expedition. Bent trees and their thrashing limbs stood firm as stone. The moment stretched long, but Leitos was unhindered.
His sword flashed upward, the now dead-black blade throwing glints of silver as it ripped cleanly through the haft of the Kelren’s axe, through the man’s bearded chin, shattering teeth, gouging a spreading furrow up through his nose and between his eyes, splitting his forehead with a meaty crunch, and exploding out through the top of his skull.
Once more, Leitos loosened his hold on that segment of time. Now the moment accelerated into a blinding blur. Freed winds screamed over the island, leaves and twigs set out again on their erratic flight. Distant waves pounded sand and rock, hurling gobbets of foam.
Laughing deliriously, dagger thrusting, Leitos took one step forward, feeling in his bones the faltering heartbeat of his foe, smelling the sour last gasp passing his mangled lips. Ribs and breastbone shattered under his pounding strike, skin ruptured as the dagger’s narrow crossguard sank deep. Hot blood erupted past splintered bone and pulverized flesh, sprayed like driving rain across Leitos’s face.
Another step, his arm cocked, the dagger buried deep in his enemy’s chest, Leitos lifted the dead man a pace above the ground, and shoved hard. The Kelren’s cleaved head snapped violently forward, as did his arms and legs, and that sack of wasted flesh soared away, arms and legs flapping like b
anners in a gale. The body crashed into the other sea-wolves, bowling them over. They were screaming now, fear crawling over their brutal faces.
Leitos’s laughter dwindled, and his eyes rolled heavily in their sockets. Through his strange vision, he also saw fear on Belina’s face. But she was safe and free, because he had made it so.
She scrambled away in a frantic, clawing scuttle, too terrified to rip the gag out of her mouth. He watched her gather up her shredded clothes, hold those garments to her breasts in a strange display of modesty. Then she ran, tripping and stumbling, until disappearing into the trees.
His laughter came rushing back as he wheeled on the sea-wolves. “I am the storm!” he warned them.
His enemies gaped in horror, and he laughed until he roared, and that roar cracked trees, moved stones from their places in the earth, shifted the whole of Witch’s Mole from her ancient seat in the deep of the sea. When he attacked, peals of thunder rang out, and his black blade savaged all that it touched.
Chapter 23
Booms of thunder crashed against Belina. The ground underfoot bucked and rolled, knocking her into a sprawling slide. The gnawing bite of rocks and dirt scraped her skin, reminding her that she was naked.
When the shaking stopped and the thunder died, she got to her knees. Panicked breaths whistled from her throat, but she could not get enough air, could not escape what had happened.
The sea-wolves had burst from a copse of trees and caught her soon after she left Leitos at Zera’s grave. She had fought before one had knocked her down. Another stuffed a soiled rag so hard into her mouth that her jaw cracked. She heard again their savage laughter, smelled again their bestial odor, that of spoiled meat and wine. Leering faces loomed again before her eyes, their horrid brands writhing like worms under their skin. Then clawing hands were tossing her back and forth, disrobing her. And no matter how she fought or wailed behind the rag in her mouth, cruel fingers pinched and yanked at her breasts, stabbed between her legs, probed between her buttocks—
Belina leaned over, gagging, spewing out the blackness of their defilement, but nothing she could do would clean the taint deep in her, a spreading stain. She gagged again, vomited a stringy drool that burned her lips and chin. Tears burned flaming tracks down her cheeks. Half of that blazing trickle mingled with the blood and dirt and grass caked on one side of her face.
“Stop this!” she scolded herself. Belina tried to calm herself with the knowledge of what happened to her mother and so many other women, those savaged by Alon’mahk’lar until their minds broke. I was mishandled, she thought, but I’m intact.
It was no use. She could not escape the disgust she felt, nor the repugnant sense of violation. Her tears continued to flow, and her insides roiled and ached.
Have to get the stink of them off me! The thought was clear, insistent. She frantically brushed her hands over breasts and belly, but was unable to wipe off the memory of their foul touch. It seemed she had bathed in rancid grease, and if she didn’t get it off, everyone would know how the sea-wolves had touched her, and how they had wanted to touch her. Her father, Nola, the Brothers, and those from her clan. They would all see her shame, they would smell the sourness of cruel lusts. She began scrubbing her skin with handfuls of grass, grinding it in. It did not help.
“No!” She slumped to her side, chest heaving, eyes half-closed and bleary. If Leitos hadn’t come, if he hadn’t....
The thought dribbled away, and for a moment what she had seen before running away masked the horror of what the Kelrens had done to her, and what they would have done to her, if Leitos had not come.
But what had he done? She tried to remember, but everything had happened so fast. Leitos’s skin had paled to white, and his eyes had become swirling black orbs. But there had been something else ... when he attacked the first sea-wolf. Belina tried to slow the images in her mind, but failed. Leitos had seemed to be in one place, then in another, in less than a blink. And his sword—not his usual weapon, but black as night and somehow alive, a part of him seemingly grown from his flesh—had cleaved that first Kelren as easily as if slicing water.
What of the thunder? Try as she might, she couldn’t deny that his blade had struck with claps of thunder.
How?
What of his laughter, the way it had shaken the world.
How?
Too many questions. No answers. But what remained seared into her mind was the way Leitos had looked. Pale as death ... and that other change in him, what her mind shied away from before and still did, because it was impossible.
I imagined it, she thought, sitting up straight. She held fast to that explanation, drew it close, as she hastily dragged on her clothes. It made sense that she would have seen dreadful things after what had happened. Those assurances sounded like lies, but she had to believe them. To do otherwise was to go mad.
Another crash of thundering, inhuman laughter rolled down the hill. Galvanized, she raced down the hillside as the first hammering drops of rain began to fall. She had to get back to the others, tell them that the Kelrens knew they were on Witch’s Mole. At the thought, the sensation of hard, digging fingers flashed over her skin. Kelren faces rose up again behind her eyes, their vile intentions plain.
Her hatred for the sea-wolves began as a curling flame, and quickly exploded into an inferno in her breast, which in turn consumed the stain of humiliation. What Leitos had or hadn’t done, what he had become or hadn’t become, was driven deep into her mind, until only gratitude remained ... gratitude, and a nugget of bitter, cold solace that was at odds with the heat now devouring the last of her mercy. She knew what she had seen in Leitos was real, and that it was a weapon the enemy would never suspect—no one would.
No one could.
~ ~ ~
As the rumbling faded, Adham dragged himself off the floor of the cavern. Like him, everyone was looking about with eyes wide, their legs spread for balance.
“Does that happen often on this island?” Damoc asked.
After ensuring Ba’Sel was not hurt, Ulmek brushed grit off his hands. “In the northern Mountains of Fire, the earth trembles frequently. This far south, rarely.”
“I suggest we get out of here,” Adham said, looking at the ceiling. The others followed his gaze. Where light had filtered through the dripping crack that fed the sanctuary’s pool, now only darkness showed, and the trickle had gone dry. A low groaning drifted through the cavern, making Adham’s teeth throb.
“Gather the supplies and make ready to leave!” Ulmek shouted.
For once, Damoc didn’t question the Brother’s authority. Nor did anyone else protest.
Within moments, the small company had gathered up all the haversacks they had filled earlier. Soon after, with Ulmek waving them along, everyone was heading out of the sanctuary, following the same passage the Brothers of the Crimson Shield had used when the Kelrens had set them on the path to Yato. Ulmek came last, guiding an oblivious and murmuring Ba’Sel along.
A cooling breeze flickered a few torches, and brought with it the sounds and scents of a fierce storm. Before they emerged from the passage, someone shouted a startled greeting up ahead. Thinking of Leitos, Adham pushed through the press until meeting Belina. She stood dripping wet and shivering, one side of her face a bloody mess.
“What happened girl?”
By then, Damoc had caught her chin and turned her head to get a better look at the injury.
Gently but firmly, Belina pushed him away and faced the expectant company. “The Kelrens know we’re here.”
Adham’s heart lurched painfully. “Leitos?”
“He’s....” Belina trailed off, a strange expression passing over her features before becoming a scowl. “The sea-wolves captured me. I fought them, but couldn’t escape. They....” Her words dwindled to a whisper.
For the first time, Adham noted that the girl’s tunic was torn in a few spots. He gave her a closer inspection, and recognized the fear and shame in her eyes for what it was
. When he had been a young warrior, it was common to find women who had been ravished by men and Alon’mahk’lar alike. Damoc saw the same thing, and went to his daughter, wrapped her in a gentle embrace. She struggled, but he refused to release her. Nola came next, adding her support.
“No,” Belina said to a low question from her father. Then, more forcefully, “No! Leitos came before ... before they could do anything.” The flash of hate in her eyes told the truth of her lie, but Adham suspected her virtue was intact, if barely.
“Where is Leitos now?” he asked.
Belina’s eyes flashed once more, but he couldn’t interpret what he saw in them. “He’s alive,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“And he’s fighting alone,” Adham said, struggling for calm. “Tell us where he is.”
“Follow me,” she said, prying loose of Nola and Damoc.
“Hold,” Ulmek said, even as he caught Ba’Sel before he could wander off. “If the sea-wolves have been alerted, we cannot simply run headlong to meet them. There are too many for us to defeat in open battle.”
“Then we split into groups and ambush any that we find,” Adham said. “Better we do it sooner, rather than later.”
“Very well,” Ulmek said, and rapidly divided the company into groups of three and four. “Leave everything but your weapons here. Adham and Belina will go after Leitos. I’ll stay here with Ba’Sel and guard our supplies.” The way he said that last told everyone that staying out of the fight was not his first choice. “The rest of you attack any sea-wolves you find, but only if you’re sure you can defeat them quickly and quietly.”
“We are not craven assassins who strike from the shadows,” Damoc said stiffly.
“You are tonight,” Ulmek retorted. “Unless, that is, you want to lose this war before it has begun.”
After receiving a reluctant nod from the elder, and then the rest of the Yatoans, Ulmek went on. “This is not at all what I planned, but there is nothing for it. Whether your hunts meet with success or not, return here by dawn.”
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen Page 13
