It was not the First Heir. Only the Duke’s son. She let out a sudden sigh of relief. The boy was dead, eyes bulging, lips foaming, his hand still clutching his cup of mango lassi.
The First Heir screamed. Bui held the struggling boy in his arms.
Hanu sniffed at the cup of lassi and scrunched his nose. “The Black Fungus,” he said. He turned his face away with a look of disgust. “The serving girl! Find her!”
Two of the other Demon Guard dashed back into another darkened hall towards the kitchen.
“We were lucky,” said Hanu. “The First Heir could have drunk from that cup instead. You didn’t, did you?”
The boy shook his head and broke down in tears.
“Lucky,” said Hanu. “So lucky.”
The palace shook with thundering footsteps. The rest of the Demon Guards were coming. So would the Queen and the God-Emperor. And the court officials. Duke Buranchiti would come with them, and suddenly Maja realized that the danger had not passed, that a price would need to be paid for their lapse in security and that luck was no longer on their side.
Maja and Hanu paddled the rest of the day, switching off when the other tired. She fell asleep to the rocking of the sea, but never deeply enough to dream before Hanu would wake her and ask her to paddle. She had no sense of time, no idea of how long they had been paddling, and no sense of how far they were from the Duke’s soldiers, or how close they might be to Land’s End.
Twice they paddled back to the shore to drink their fill of cold water from small streams feeding into the sea and to forage for fruit. They had suffered on their open sea voyage. Here at least they could eat and drink and recover their energy.
But despite the distance they covered, Maja turned often to look at the waters behind them and the impenetrable forest. She never saw Khirtan. She saw no sign that he continued his pursuit, but she sensed him. She could feel the heat of his breath, hear the clatter of his tools, smell the coppery tang of blood. Khirtan would not stop. She needed to find a place of safety.
Eventually the sun dropped behind the island and darkness descended, the sea turning silver then black. Hanu wanted to return to shore to find a place to spend the night. He said something about the creatures of the night sea, but Maja insisted on paddling, and slowly pushed them southwards. Eventually she relented and they eased into a hidden bay, grounding their canoe on the muddy shore. Shadows clung between the trees of the forests. An ochre fungus hung in web-like sheets from the branches and vines. In several spots, birds and monkeys had become entangled in the fungus, their bodies decomposing, rotting where they were trapped. Here the travelers did not venture into the trees to look for fruit or even much-needed water. They lay in the bottom of the boat and slept, or, at least, tried to. But Maja could not. The noises of the night jungle – the sudden cracking of wood, the screams of unseen beasts, the heavy, ragged breathing of animals that came to smell the visitors on the shore – all of these things kept Maja from any kind of deep sleep. More than a half dozen times she was yanked from troubled, unremembered dreams and sat up quickly, hands on her swords. Once, she also found Hanu awake, his hook quivering towards the dark forest.
When dawn came, they left without venturing ashore and continued south. The morning was cool, almost cold with the sun hidden by a wall of distant clouds. Maja shivered against the breeze. She hoped another storm would not swallow them. If it did, they would need to bring the canoe ashore again, and she feared that Khirtan and the soldiers would catch up. She had already surrendered too much time by pulling ashore the night before. She did not want them to make up further time.
“How far behind us do you think they are?” asked Hanu.
“The jungle’s thick. It will take them days to catch up.”
“But what if they found a boat?”
“You worry too much.” Maja stared at Sri beneath the cover of his robes. If it was not for the steady rise and fall of the saffron cloth, she never would have guessed that a living creature slept beneath there. She wondered if he slept or whether he just hid beneath the blood-stained fabric.
“Worrying about my life is not a bad thing. Comes down to it, I’ll take us back out to the deep sea. Not going to let him catch me again.”
Hanu paused mid-stroke. Maja turned to follow his gaze.
“Land’s End,” said Hanu. “We’ve returned.”
They had just rounded a rocky outcropping on the shore and a small promontory made itself visible. A headland jutted from the island, cliffs rising up at least a hundred feet. The walls were jagged black stone, dotted with plants and painted white with bird guano where seabirds nested. A medley of rope ladders and rough hewn steps climbed from the sea. Two sailboats and a canoe were tied at the bottom of the cliffs.
At the top of the headland a temple compound squatted.
“Finally,” said Maja. “I’m exhausted. It will be good to bed down comfortably for a night.”
“Provided they take us,” said Hanu.
“How could they not?” But even as the words slipped out of her mouth, she felt as if she told a lie. She stared up the cliff walls. When the Fallen saw who climbed the steps, ladders, and ropes, would they greet her with open arms or bare blades?
21
MAJA HAD CLIMBED about a third of the way up the cliff when she saw the first head. A single head, fully helmeted in steel, face hidden, eyes shadowed in darkness, stared over the top of the cliff. Maja, the last of the climbers, paused, wrapping a thick rope several times around her arm. Her breath rode high in her chest, and her knees felt weak. Even without looking past her feet to the sea crashing and hissing against the cliff, the horizon tilted. She closed her eyes. That made things worse. She looked up again.
The figure at the top of the cliff was gone.
Neither Sri nor Hanu had seen the watcher.
She breathed a sigh of relief, and set herself to the task of ascending the next section. The steps ended and a rope-and-wood ladder rose for five feet before giving way to a narrow ledge that ran to the right. Sri perched at the top of the ladder and Hanu slid halfway across the ledge, chest pressed closed to the wall, his hook scraping and singing against stone.
When Maja reached the top of the ladder, Hanu cursed.
She looked upwards.
A half dozen helmeted heads stared over the lip of the cliff.
She recognized the helmets in all their grotesqueness. These were not the simple unadorned helmets of the Duke’s men or the God-Emperor’s troops. These helmets had been carved into the visages of snarling demons – wild eyed, faces contorted in roars, snarling with fangs. The bright paints had dulled and chipped away revealing dull steel. Time had worn away any gild. These were the helmet masks of the Demon Guard. The masks that she and Hanu had worn while on duty in the palace. The masks that once set them apart.
She had expected the watchers to challenge the trio but not a single shout rolled out from the cliff above.
Hanu paused on a webbing of knotted rope to glance over his shoulder past Sri and Maja. “Long way down.”
Maja resisted the temptation to look. The climbing was bad enough. Her hands were sweaty and as hard as she gripped the ladder rungs and as tightly as she pressed against the wall, she feared a strong wind would rip her from cliff face and she would fall to the water and stones below.
“But might be safer down there,” he continued.
“They don’t look too friendly,” said Sri, the first words he had spoken in hours. “Thought you said you knew these people. Thought you said they were going to protect us.”
“We know them,” said Maja. “Whether they’ll protect us, that’s a whole other thing.”
“Find out soon enough,” said Hanu.
They continued climbing. The heat of the sun scorched Maja’s neck and legs. Sweat dripped down the inside of her armor. The blisters on her palms and fingers burned with each grasp of the ladder or a stone outcropping. The salt of the sea gave way to the scent of boiled rice and charred wo
od. Metal suddenly clanged from above.
Hanu stopped at a small landing about twenty feet below the lip of the cliff and waited until Sri and Maja caught up. Her hands trembled as she clutched a rope bolted into the wall. She refused to let go.
She looked up. The blue sky. Distant albatross. No battered demons.
“You think they know it’s us?” asked Hanu.
He looked weary. His eyes were drawn and his hair haggard. His skin was coated in a sheen of sweat. She wondered if he had finally run out of spore. He looked well enough to at least make it to the cliff top.
Sri’s face was streaked with dried dirt and blood. His robes were stained dark in uneven splotches. The ends had tattered. She could see more of the holy script tattooed on his skin. He must have had it all over his body.
Maja noticed the fine sandals he wore. They had been hidden before. Usually monks wore hemp sandals or went barefoot, but Sri wore white leather sandals, expensive and reserved for the courtiers that milled around the halls of the God-Emperor. She wondered if he were the son of one of the other distant lords. But he was old enough that she should have known who he was.
“I’ll go first for this last stretch,” said Maja.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” said Hanu. “When they hack off your head, at least have the courtesy to fall far from the cliff. Don’t want you taking me with you.”
“You’re a bastard. And not funny at all.”
“I’m serious, Maja. Don’t fall on me.”
The last stretch was a free hanging rope ladder. It could easily be pulled up thereby trapping whoever climbed the cliff on that ledge, and making where they stopped a perfect killing zone. She took it as a good sign that stones had not been dropped on their heads or hot oil poured over the ledge.
She took a slow, deep breath, grabbed the rungs of the ladder, and climbed the last remaining portion of the wall.
A semi-circle of masked men and women pointed spears at Maja. She imagined them slowly stepping forward and driving her backwards until she had nowhere else to step and tumbled off the cliff. The thought of falling made the ground sway but she steadied herself.
Even with their faces hidden, she recognized her old companions, and they recognized her. Most of them suddenly relaxed their grips and let the tips of the spear lower. Bui, on the other hand, tightened his fists so hard that his body trembled.
“Maja.” Her breath stopped at the sound of Wayan’s voice. He limped towards her, his body bent. He turned the spear butt to the ground and grasping it with both hands, pulled himself with shuffling steps towards Maja. She blinked back tears, and even as she did so, she could not tell whether the tears came at the reunion so long delayed or from the memory of how Wayan once stood so tall and straight and was now reduced to scuttling like a crab.
He fumbled with his helmet mask and pried it loose with one hand. Deep lines cut either side of his mouth and more wrinkles nested around his eyes. His skin had turned ashen, no longer luxuriously dark. His lips, once bright red and full, were a thin pale line behind a sparse beard, partially gray. He had aged more than the five years they had been apart.
The worst was his eyes. They looked as if they belonged in a corpse. No longer sparkling like the night sea, orbs like dull stones stared out from behind heavy lids. Maja’s stomach tightened.
But despite how much he suffered, Wayan smiled, and for a few seconds she was transported back to those heady days before the fall, that moment in the cool hall outside of the garden when the two lovers met and embraced, whispered promises to each other before their world fell apart. With that smile, she saw his old self hidden in the shell of weariness and suffering.
He shuffled forward, scuttling, and he was again a broken stranger.
One by one, the other former Demon Guards pulled their helmets from their heads, all but Bui. Even with his mask on, Maja saw the scarred flesh of his face, the hint of the massive disfigurement at the hands of the torturer. From his bloodshot, weeping eyes, she realized that more than just his face had been scarred.
Maja was filled with mixed feelings of joy and sorrow as she looked over each of the Fallen. Gima, the left side of her face, fire-scarred flesh, scowled. Arimanu, with ears and tongue removed, allowed a wide smile to break across his face. Ji tottered on a wooden foot and a wooden leg, her hair streaked with a wide swath of white. And Giant Trilli whose fingers and manhood had been severed and tossed to slathering dogs had not turned his spear from Maja.
Wayan stepped past the others, his arms open. “Maja, Hanu, welcome back.”
These were Maja’s fellow Demon Guards, the Fallen, those cast out of the palace and from the blessed eye of the God-Emperor for failing in their duty. Together again.
That night, they gathered around a fire pit near the edge of the cliff. Before them a blanket of the stars stretched to the end of sight. From the darkness below, the sea crashed and hissed against the stone cliffs. The Fallen did not need the fire, the night being hot and sticky, but they gathered to it for the light and the camaraderie and to keep the twilight mosquitoes at bay.
Earlier that day, after their welcome by Wayan, Maja, Hanu, and Sri had eaten bowls of fragrant rice and strips of grilled chicken and drank deeply from cold spring water. Maja had bathed and then been shown a hammock, where despite the excitement of the arrival and her desire to visit with long lost friends, Maja fell into deep slumber.
Maja had woken to the setting of the sun, the long shadows of the former temple stretching across courtyard to the edge of the cliffs, and the laughter of the Fallen.
She had been reluctant to pull herself from the hammock. She thought that she might have been able to sleep through the night. She was exhausted. Her body ached. Her thoughts blurry on first waking.
But after a while the voices were too much, and she realized that Hanu and Sri had already risen and joined the others around the fire as they ate an evening meal.
She sat cross-legged on one of the straws mats that had been arranged in a semicircle facing both the fire and the sea. She could have sat close to Wayan. She wanted to talk to him. There had been so much left unsaid. They had lost so much time and she felt that she owed him some sort of explanation or at least a recounting of how she had spent her days these past years, but she knew the words would ring empty to him, and even to herself. She had no real excuse for why she had left him after they had fled the Eye of the East. She had left him and found nothing in all that time. She had wandered and found herself with Hanu and the pirates and she had found no greater meaning or solace with them. She had only passed the time, the only constant being the fiery sun rising from the dark sea. Whether she had fought for just cause or coin, the blood she spilled was the same, regardless of the virtue or guilt of the person she slew. Every day the tides rose and fell across the sands leaving what the sea had stolen scattered on the beaches. She had left the man that she had loved and had found nothing to replace him.
But even so she should have sat down next to Wayan. She should have allowed herself to be close to him, to allow them to hear each other’s breaths again, to smell his musky scent, to hear his words, and maybe even to let fingers stray to touch familiar skin.
Instead, she lowered herself in the empty space between Hanu and Sri, sheltering herself from the others, the ones that she hoped would protect them if the monster Khirtan came again in their midst.
Hanu was finishing up telling the story of how earlier in the month they had stolen a shipment of dream spore from a Jongian trader.
“And that is why you run to us?” asked Gima, her fire-scarred face hidden in the shadows. She sat close to the fire, poking a length of twisted grasses into the heat, seeing how close she could bring them before they caught. Maja thought Gima would have shunned the flames.
Hanu turned to Maja. “You tell them why we’re here. You explain it.” He chuckled. “Hell, explain it to me.”
She surveyed the faces around the fire, completely skipping over Wayan. “The b
oy needs protection. The Duke, Khirtan comes after him. They’re going to kill him.”
The expressions on their faces hardly changed but Maja sensed the darkness suddenly grow. The darkness that came with the mention of the torturer’s name.
Finally Wayan spoke.
“This boy?” asked Wayan. “Who is he?”
She shook her head. “Adi was there. He told me to protect the boy.”
Adi’s name was whispered on lips around the fire.
“What have you brought down on us?” asked Bui, his lips hidden behind the snarling demon-faced helmet.
“I would not give him up to Khirtan. Then he murdered the others.” She recounted the slaughter in the village, the slaughter of the pirates on the beach, the betrayal of Garu, and the Captain’s sacrifice.
“Still the boy means nothing to us,” growled Bui. “You bring us trouble.” He slammed a fist onto the ground. “We should throw them from the cliffs.”
“Who is this boy?” asked Wayan. He leaned forward to try to see Sri’s face in the shadows.
“A monk,” said Maja. But even as she spoke, she knew the boy was more than a simple monk. She knew that she had been hiding from what was plain before her eyes.
“Yes, that’s how he’s dressed. But he’s not a monk.” Wayan waved a finger at Sri. “Who are you, boy? What’s your name?”
Sri slowly turned his gaze at the former Demon Guards gathered around him. He brushed the dust from his palms and stood. As small as he was, he towered over the seated warriors. He unfastened the shoulder of his monk’s robes and let them fall to the ground. He was dressed only in a white loin cloth. On his skin, Maja recognized the lost script, the tattooed words, and then she saw the holy symbol of the sun, the forbidden image, a tattoo she had only seen on two other people in all of the world: the God-Emperor and the Holy Son. The others gasped. Hanu scrambled backwards, curses slipping out of his lips.
“I am Srirampaharit, blood of the God-Emperor, the second Holy Son, the one hidden from the eyes of the world, and now that my elder brother is dead, I am the heir to the Sun Throne.” Laughter tumbled from his pale lips. “And it seems that I have stumbled upon my own special Demon Guard, and I order you, I command you, to protect me with your lives. You may have failed my father but you are still bound by your vows to protect the blood of the Empire. You have not been released. And tomorrow, when the sun rises from the sea, we will head north and return to my father.”
The Rise of the Fallen (The Rotting Empire Book 1) Page 14
