As had been the case whenever the forces of the Dark prepared to attack human settlements, it was Zenk to whom Surok turned to determine the best route for the army of beasts to take if overland travel was required. When the filthy humans waited on the shores this planning was not necessary, obviously. The Silestra ship pilots would just crash into the shallows and the creatures would storm ashore.
But for all his desire to rule the Green Lands, Surok did not know their geography. Even the Silestra, who had over the centuries ventured to various locations on the ten continents, did not really know their way around. That is why he had led the assassins to the distant hiding place on Melsa that Parnasus had sent Cerah. He knew that, for all their cunning, they would have never found her without his help. It had been that act that had started him down the road to the service of Surok. He had fled Melsa after the assassins had failed to murder the witch, and flown Balthus to the Frozen South, where he’d made his way to Surok’s lair.
Even then he knew he was taking a great risk. There was no reason to assume that the demon would not presume he was part of an invading force, or perhaps some crazed lone sorcerer who believed himself equal to the Anger of Pilka. Surok certainly had no love for wizards and coming to him could have easily led to an end far worse than he would have faced had he been captured on Melsa. But to his great surprise, after days of climbing the mountain, he’d been met at the mouth of the cave that led to the lair by two Silestra. “The Master has been expecting you,” one said as they grabbed his arms and dragged him into through the twisting passages and into the ice cave.
It was there that he’d first met the Mouthpiece. The Silestran seemed more fearsome than any he’d yet encountered and when the two escorts had thrown him at the Mouthpiece’s feet, the evil creature had said, “We saw what you did.”
“Wha-what?” he’d stammered.
“All Silestra see what any Silestran sees,” the Mouthpiece had informed him. “Though the four we sent failed, we know that you aided them. Surok believes you can be of further use, and what Surok believes, no Silestran questions.”
This had been exactly what Zenk was hoping for. He had begun to rise, but the Mouthpiece had placed a huge foot on his chest and had pushed him back down. “This Silestran never doubts the will of Surok, but if I had my way I would feast upon what little meat your scrawny carcass would yield. I would do it right now.”
Their relationship hadn’t improved in the ensuing months.
But as the ships had approached the coast, Zenk had seen the Mouthpiece signal him from the deck of the spectral fleet’s flagship, and he’d dutifully flown down, causing Balthus to hover beside the deck.
“We near the place you indicated. When we do, what course shall we take? Surok demands an answer.”
“And gladly I give it,” Zenk replied. “The part of the continent toward which we sail is its southernmost tip. There are no settlements here, as there are in the north where many villages can be found. We will find only, perhaps, a scattered homestead here and again. I suppose killing those farmers will provide you with some entertainment as we move north.”
Although the Silestran never reacted favorably to anything Zenk said, he saw him lick his lips as he’d proposed that.
“We will move in a path directly north. At the pace you normally travel it will lead us in about two days’ time to city of Nedar, and slightly to its west, Lamoor. That is where we should find the enemy army.”
“And the witch,” said Mouthpiece.
“I thought you told me she was being held in the Under Plane,” said Zenk, a little rattled by this news.
“I thought I told you to keep your festering mouth shut unless I instruct you to speak!” the monster roared.
Zenk cowered slightly at the Silestran’s outburst, but recovered enough to say again, “That is where we will find the enemy.”
“We will not move at our usual speed,” said the Mouthpiece, again surprising Zenk. The Army of the Dark had never traveled at anything but a full-out run.
“I see?” the wizard replied uncertainly.
“Surok desires that we scorch the land as we pass over it.”
This was new. Though they had completely depopulated Niliph when they first left the frozen south, killing every human and animal they encountered, they had left the lands themselves unscathed. But Zenk sensed that Surok had taken great pleasure in the destruction of Stygia when they’d left the walled city behind. Apparently the blood of his enemies was not all he coveted now.
“Of course,” Zenk replied at length. “As the Master wishes.” It won’t make any difference, he thought. The stupid boy-general has had more than enough time to position his forces, having fled to Kier two days before we left Ilyria. Zenk still believed the reports from the idiot Stygian warriors to be true.
The Mouthpiece turned and walked away without another word, and as Zenk and Balthus regained altitude, he smiled. He knew that Slurr was unaware of how large Surok’s army was. The demon had intentionally never deployed his full force in any of the skirmishes thus far. Zenk surveyed the dark fleet. It consisted of no fewer than five hundred ships, each brimming with karvats, Silestra and their grey-skinned sons. He knew that the humans and wizards would fight to their last breaths, but it wouldn’t alter the outcome in the least. To his estimate, the Army of the Dark was fully three times the size of the enemy’s force. The very sight of the endless column will be enough to break their spirit, he thought. The humans will fight, but they will do so knowing they are going to die.
Preena Alawar was on her knees scrubbing the floor of a brothel called “The Velvet Caress.” It had been nearly a month since her son Ban had disappeared. When his friend Jeza had brought the news the Ban had been hauled away on a pallet of baskets and loaded into a cargo ship, she’d stared mutely at the boy for several minutes. Even when Jeza had reached out and handed her a fat dirka she’d said nothing. She saw that the boy was growing increasingly uncomfortable at her silence, and felt she should offer some response, but the news was just too devastating.
At length Jeza had nervously said, “He says he’s joining the war. I’ll bet he’ll be a hero.”
Preena had burst into tears at that point, and the boy had turned and run, no longer able to face the devastated woman.
I’ve lost another son, was the only thought Preena could manage.
In the time since she’d received the news, her spirit had only plunged further into desolation. For the first two days after Ban’s departure she’d sat alone in their mean rooms and wept. When she could no longer ignore her hunger, she killed and ate the dirka, but it had had no flavor. She’d done it as a mechanical response to a physiological need. After another day of ceaseless tears, she realized that she needed to either attempt to regain some measure of composure and struggle on with her life, or remain in the tiny apartment and die.
Preena’s had never been a happy life, and she had more than once been completely devastated by the course it had taken. But always when fate seemed determined to crush her into the dirt, she had risen. The loss of Ban had felt to her like the final straw. However, when faced with the decision to succumb or to once again drag herself up and somehow push through the never-ending wall of sorrow that characterized her existence, she chose to spit upon fate, for no other reason than spite. So, she emerged and went to resume her dismal rounds of scullery labor in Tarteel’s seediest quarters.
Now she was scouring the stains of expectorated chokeroot spittle from the rough planks of a whorehouse. Three of the places she’d worked had replaced her during the days she’d spent holed up. That would mean even less copper with which to stave off starvation. But if Preena had learned nothing else since falling from a life of privilege to one of squalor, it was that there were always more filthy floors to scrub. Within a week she’d replaced the three lost positions with four new ones.
The mindless drudgery had become her opiate. She moved her brush from bucket to board with a furor that demons
trated the hatred she felt for her station, but which pleased her employers, when they bothered to notice her at all. Even among the nameless lowly denizens of the cathouses and saloons, Preena was almost invisible; unseen and untouchable.
Not that some of the filth that frequented the dives didn’t try to touch from time to time. But in her squalor, and even now in her emptiness, she never fell that low. More than one man was left howling, clutching his tenderness as she stormed away after a well-placed kick.
Today, however, the work wasn’t enough to keep her mind from going to dark places. She thought not only of Ban, but of the baby that had been ripped from her arms, going on twenty years ago now. When she thought of that dark day, she often wondered why she had taken the trouble to scribble her surname on a scrap of paper and pin it to the inside of the babe’s swaddle. She had no idea what her father’s cruel agent had done with the child. For all she knew he’d thrown him down a well to drown. But if there was any tiny chance that the infant might survive, she felt it was right to send his family name along with him.
She hadn’t had much time with her son. They’d left her alone for no more than five minutes, as the family with whom she’d been placed sent someone to fetch the agent with news of her delivery. In those scant moments she’d found a scrap, pricked her finger with a dirty pin which she’d found on the floor next to the pile of straw on which she’d given birth, and scrawled “Jacasta” on it in her own blood. Then, wrapping the child in the filthy rags that had been left for the purpose, she waited for the inevitable. The man had arrived a short time later, and without a word had torn her son from her grasp and departed at once.
He’d returned the following day to collect her and bring her back to her family on Pydgia.
She’d never stopped mourning her first son, who she’d named only in her own mind. “Callaph” she’d called him; a noble name. For although his father had been lowborn, in the few minutes she’d held him in her arms, he radiated greatness. When Ban had been born years later a tiny fragment of her soul was reborn with him.
But now she had neither child to comfort her.
The crude lounge area of The Velvet Caress was abandoned at this hour of the day. The vile patrons began darkening that door just after dinner time, leaving wives and children behind to indulge their base instincts.
With a deep, wretched sigh, she dropped the brush with a splash in her bucket of nearly depleted suds, and sat with her back against a wall.
I fear I will never look upon either of those two precious faces again, she found herself thinking. Why then do I continue? She let her mind play a grim picture show, in which she crawled once more to her rooms, and there took a broken bottle to her throat, pouring out the lifeblood she no longer needed. She had no more left in her to keep relentless fate at bay.
As she sat, she sensed the room suddenly grow dark. When she looked up she could see sunlight through the windows and door, but somehow it could not push its way inside. An instant later she was startled to feel the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Though it was uncomfortably hot in the brothel, a chill swept over her. As fear bubbled up inside of her, she saw a thin shaft of golden light form and begin to shimmer before her ever-widening eyes. She was petrified, unable to move…until the light began to resolve itself into the shape of woman, at which point her hands flew to her mouth, which gaped open in horror.
“Do not be afraid,” said a voice, distant yet near at the same time, echoing, and as sweet as any she had ever heard.
“I know you, Preena Jacasta,” the voice said. Though already impossibly wide, Preena’s eyes grew even larger.
Without even truly realizing she was doing it, Preena spoke. “Who – who are you? What are you?”
“I am the shade of a mother,” said the voice, nearer now, Preena thought.
“A g-ghost?”
“You may say so,” said the voice. “In life, I was called Jul Passel. I have begged Ma’uzzi to let me come to you.”
“Ma’uzzi? You come from God?”
“Yes. He has permitted this because He has heard your cries,” the spirit said.
“What does Ma’uzzi care for me,” Preena said, no shortage of bitterness in her voice, her choler suddenly overcoming her fear.
“He cares for all of His children,” the voice answered, “but you are special to Him.”
“I? I clean the filth of filthy people!” she said, most definitely angry now. Perhaps when she had been a small child she had believed the fairytales of Ma’uzzi’s love. But a life of utter sadness had killed any faith she might have once entertained. “I am special to no one now.”
“Shh,” said the woman’s voice simply. The absolute purity of it pushed down Preena’s rising ire. “He has let me come to you, something He has never allowed before in all the eons of life on Quadar. No spirit from the Next Plane has ever returned to the Green Lands, except in the high halls of the wizards, and then only those of that race. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
“Maybe,” was all Preena managed. Clearly this spirit, if that is what truly glistened before her, was trying to indicate that this was an occurrence of great moment, but Preena could not bring herself to believe that Ma’uzzi truly existed, let alone cared enough for her to let something that had never happened before do so now. He’d certainly exhibited no such concern up to this point in her wretched life.
“You son lives,” said the woman at once.
“Ban is well?” she asked, immediately focusing upon this tiny sliver of hope.
“Yes, he is. But you misunderstand. Ban is well. And he is with his brother.”
Preena’s mind nearly slipped away at the hearing of those words.
“His… brother?”
“Yes. It is your first son that has moved Ma’uzzi to send me to you. I had the honor of raising him. I found him tossed atop of heap of garbage in the dumping grounds of the Rocks. I brought him home. I nursed him at my breast. I saw him grow to become a good, strong boy.”
Preena wanted to tell the spirit she was lying, but her heart somehow knew that wasn’t the case.
“Alas, I grew ill and departed this plane when he was still young, but I knew when I left him he would become a great man one day.”
Tears now flowed down Preena’s pale cheeks. “I sensed that too in the bare minutes I was allowed to hold him.”
The shimmering light seemed to nod its head. “You knew rightly,” the voice said.
“What did you call him?” Preena asked.
“I found the name you had secreted, but my spirit discerned it must not be revealed. I called him Slurr.”
“Slurr!” shouted Preena. “A lower name I have never heard!” She could not reconcile such a thing with the mighty name she’d given the babe in her heart.
“Exactly,” said the shade. “I hid him behind that name.”
Preena considered this. “It is good,” she said at last. “I believe that they would have found him had you not.”
“Yes,” said Jul. “I understand fully now what I could only sense then. But I must tell you this: he hides no more.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your son stands beside my daughter as the leader of the force that fights for the future of our world.”
“I do not understand,” said Preena, shaking her head slightly.
“My daughter is Cerah, The Chosen one, and your son is the General of the Army of Quadar, and her husband. Her Rock.”
Preena was again struck dumb. Only after several minutes was she able to say, “How can this be?”
“It is the ancient plan of Ma’uzzi, formed before He molded the stars. You and I are both honored to have played a small part in it all, but it is our children to whom it falls to complete His design.”
Preena was again silent for a long time. All of this was completely overwhelming. It seemed so far-fetched, so ridiculous; but when she looked within herself she realized that she could not deny that it was all true. It wa
s a truth with a life of its own, which she could not contradict.
“Why have you come to me now?” she managed to ask at last.
“It is time for you to come out of hiding as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your broken life ends today.” As the voice spoke, the shimmering golden form of Jul Passel began to break apart. As Preena watched the all but a small splinter of the light drifted to the floor, where it formed itself into a pile of golden coins.
“Take this. Buy some proper clothes, then go to the docks. There will be a wizard there named Milenda, waiting with her dragon Groga. She will know you. She will take you to your sons. They are on the threshold of the climax of their young lives. They need their mother now.”
Preena was still unable to move, although these words had long stopped causing her fear. As she sat, her back still against the wall, the final trace of golden light slowly moved toward her. As she watched it touched her chest, then disappeared inside of her.
As it did she involuntarily drew in a gasping breath, as every hint of pain she had ever felt vanished in an explosion of pure and utter ecstasy. In that instant, she knew the truth of Ma’uzzi’s love, which she had so long fought to deny.
“Arise, Preena Jacasta,” the voice said, fading now and distant. “Arise and live.”
And it was gone.
Normal illumination returned to the dirty room as the light once more thrusted its way through the filthy windows, and Preena stood. She bent and scooped up the gold. She looked at it in her hands, felt its considerable weight, then slid it into the pocket of her tattered dress. For a moment, she did nothing.
Then she kicked over her wash bucket, and walked out of the brothel as the brown water spread across the floor.
17
Heartbeats
The flight reached the Two Sisters and the wizards saw the defending force arrayed in the place between them where the city of Reeze once stood. They landed to the south of the encampment, Jessip and Puul waiting there.
A Single Candle (Cerah of Quadar Book 3) Page 26
