“Do you, Assia? Truly love me?”
“So much.… It frightens me.…”
She lifted herself from the bed and approached him carefully, uncertainly, as though to inspect him. “How did you ever find me?”
He smiled. “Oh, so much has changed.”
“Thameron.” She lifted her arms, pressed her hands to his chest, felt his face, and pushed her fingers through his hair.
Immediately he felt the spirit of her—the loneliness, the heaviness and the darkness in her—the fears, and the illness, the great illness.… Her spirit, once full, and now desolate, empty.
“Assia. What has become of you?”
Tears shined like diamonds on her eyelashes, broke free and coursed down her cheeks. “Oh, gods, it’s really you!” she sobbed. She threw herself upon him, hugged him and embraced him. “It’s really you, Thameron, it’s really you!”
He held her tightly; she was trembling powerfully. From beyond her door came the sounds of the drinkers in the tavern. And as he held her to him, pressed his hands upon her, Thameron felt warmth grow in his palms. He felt the designs of the warmth—his old scars, his wounds, the signs of his betrayal—
The door was pushed open. It pounded into the wall behind it.
Assia gasped and stepped away from Thameron.
“What the hell is going on in here?”
“Urwus! Go away! Go away!”
Thameron turned to face their intruder. The warmth in his hands became richer.
“And which one are you?” Urwus demanded. He rocked unsteadily in his boots, drunk and very angry. He showed his teeth and, without looking, moved one leg to find the door and kick it closed behind him.
The flame in the oil lamp quivered and sent shadows hurrying.
“Answer me!”
Assia’s voice betrayed her fear. “Urwus, leave him alone, he’s a friend!”
“Not my friend!” the soldier grunted. “I know all about your friends!” Sneering, chin up, he confronted Thameron. “Now tell me who you are and whatever it is you think you’re doing here! Answer me!”
His hands burned. Burned.
Thameron told Urwus, almost whispering the words, “Get away from here and leave us alone.”
Urwus shook his head and moved his right hand behind his back. He produced a long, shining knife. “I’m not going—”
“Urwus, no!” Assia screamed.
Outside, the sounds in the tavern quieted, and someone pounded on the door.
“I think,” Urwus sniffed, “you’re the one who’s going to be going away, my friend. Now, I’ll let you walk past me, very slowly, and I’ll let you go out the—”
“Leave him alone!” Assia sobbed. “He’s my friend!”
“Shut up, Assia!”
His hands burned. His eyes began to brighten in the darkness.
Assia moved behind Thameron and put her hands to his shoulders. “Thameron, I won’t let him hurt you. I won’t. Urwus is—”
“Urwus is going to get this cockeater out of here,” the soldier growled, “now!” He played the knife in front of the sorcerer’s face. “Just get away from her,” he ordered with beery breath, “and I’ll be very—”
Thameron hissed.
There was a scuffling sound on the outside window ledge behind Assia. Urwus, distracted by it, looked past Thameron.
Thameron glided away from him and held out an arm to Assia, warning her back.
The pounding continued on the door. “Urwus! Who’s in there?”
Urwus glanced at Thameron and found that he’d moved. “What—”
The window shutters broke from their hinges and flew inward. A long black shadow leaped into the room. It flew over the bed, landed on the floor, and bounded up.
A dog? What was it?
Urwus howled as this shadow lunged at him and pushed him back into the door. The knife came out of his hand and clattered somewhere on the floor.
Assia screamed.
Urwus sobbed above the vicious grunts of the shadow. What was it? He was caught in the jaws of it, being thrown back and forth against the door. Wild quick claws opened his chest and face and scratched long grooves in the door planks. Fanning showers and hissing jets of blood sprayed across the room.
“Urwus!” The pounding on the other side of the door. “Urwus!”
Assia hugged Thameron frantically. “What is that?”
Saying nothing, the sorcerer continued to hold her behind him with one arm.
Now it was finished. Urwus slumped to the floor. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, the vicious shadow with yellow eyes crouched at the door, facing Thameron. The light revealed what remained of Urwus—a mangled arm, a savaged chest running with sheets of deep red, a widening pool of blood mixed with ripped flesh that poured across the floor like a soup.
The shadow bared long white teeth, red and wet, and growled liquidly.
Thameron hissed at it and made a sign with his right hand.
The shadow leaned forward, then jumped onto the bed and bounded out the window, vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared.
Assia caught the smell of it, now. Its odor was rank…the odor of decay, of death, as of things long buried and rotted.
“Urwus!” The hammering continued at the door, and the rattling of the latch. Then—screams, as those outside discovered the blood seeping beneath the door.
Assia sobbed.
Thameron turned and looked at her with his bright eyes. His hands were shaking. He said to Assia, “Come with me now.”
She was breathless. “Thameron what did you do to that dog?”
“It’s just a dog,” he warned her. “Now come with me.”
“Thameron.…”
“Out the window,” he told her.
Now they were trying to kick down the door.
She made a sound.
“It’s gone,” he promised her. But when she refused to move, or was still too frightened to move, Thameron reached across the bed, pressed a hand to the window sill, looked out into the street, and said again, “Please, Assia. Whatever else has happened…I’ve come back for you.”
She moved to him then, took his hand and stepped up onto the bed, kneeled on the window ledge, crawled through the window, and dropped into the street below.
Behind them, the door of the room was forced open, clogged though it was with Urwus’s corpse. New screams came.
But no one noticed the pair of shadows that slipped out the open window.
* * * *
In his dream, Eromedeus saw a shadowy figure, as old as eternity, with the face of a boy, dressed in darkness, hungry and full of pain. He surmised that it might be King Nutatharis, returned to harass him—or any one of a thousand or a hundred thousand or a thousand thousand enemies who had pursued him down the river of time. But then again—no, not Nutatharis. It was some god or demon, and it called to him.
Called to him from the South.
Eromedeus heard the figure in his dream whisper to him. He was frightened by it, and—frightened—he awoke from his dream nauseous.
Around him was darkness, the darkness of his cave at night. From outside he heard thunder, the storm that had been building when he had fallen asleep. Yet still, awake as he was, he felt the presence, felt it pulsing in the darkness.…
He stood, throwing aside the rough blankets and rugs on which he slept. He did not light any lights but walked forward, went to the opening of his cave and looked out. The sky was black, thunderclouds swept high above him, lightning danced against the purple. Then the rain began to fall.
“Who is there?” Eromedeus called.
Yet he knew no one was there. Only his imagination. But the shadow, the shadow in his dream.…
He remained afraid as he listened to the rain begin to fall in great sheets. The dream was still with him, powerful. Eromedeus stood at the mouth of his cave, looked down the slope of the mountainside, saw in the distance the wide forests, the black hills and—very far away, through
the flying rain—pinpoints of light in the middle of a sea of black. Lasura.
He realized that his dream was a portent.
He understood that his dream had been a visitation from the future, and that his wandering would soon end.
Eromedeus covered his face with his hands. Night winds blew on him, sweeping rain entered the cave and splashed him.
In his dream, he and the shadow, together, had stood upon this mountain and stared down at the world of humanity—two of them, outside that world and yet associated with it, in the same manner that feelings, emotions, and intuitions are entities associated with the living organism. Eromedeus himself—an ancient question, soon to be resolved—and this other one—an eternal haunting spirit, returned now to test mankind, to doom mankind or tempt mankind and yet be a part of humanity’s rebirth.…
The End of Days.…
Lightning hissed, thunder clapped, and Eromedeus stumbled as he pressed a wet hand onto the rocky wall of his cave opening and called out into the night, “Are you there? Where are you? Show yourself!”
Only the storm, and the silence between the explosions of the storm, and his own heartbeat, rapid, and his choked breath.
He had lived since the Dawn, and yet he was still a man, an undying man, not some animated spirit, not some force. He knew himself to be the fulcrum between two forces; he had wandered for thousands upon thousands of years as those forces built, as humanity grew and changed; he had lived as mankind filled cities, leveled fields and mountains—
The fulcrum.
One embodying all evil would free him, and one embodying all good would free him. This would occur at the End of Days.
When humanity died.
Eromedeus screamed.
He threw himself outside, running into the storm. He did not want to live through the end and be reborn in the new beginning, to suffer this unlife forever. He ran in mud and pushed his way past trees that grew on the mountainside, he flailed his fists at the high storm clouds. He screamed in agony, furious with all storms and all gods, all time and all of humanity, and as he ran upon the mountainside, he tripped on a great knotted root or some stone pushed up by the earth, and he fell to the ground, slid on the wet earth.
Eromedeus sobbed. Rain came down on him, lightning lit him, thunder spoke. He groveled there, on the wet earth, his face dirtied with soil and mud.
“The world is at war; but it is not a war of soldiers. It is a war of hearts that we witness and are joined in, a battlefield of thoughts and great purposes, a striving to gain a balance and hold it.…”
And now it had come. The great moment, coming, the End of Days, coming, when the cycle of Heaven and Time and Purpose would coincide with the cycles of Earth and Life, when Spirit and Humanity and the Hell of inhumanity all touched, merged, held together—Eternity’s spirit fusing with human time for a moment—
All things in a balance.
And himself the fulcrum.…
He sat up, there in the mud, on the warm wet mountainside in the night, and Eromedeus stared down into the forest and the land and saw the distant small lights of the city.
Himself, the fulcrum between the forces of purpose—the one embodying all fear and evil and the one embodying all hope and good.
They were down there, somewhere in the world, following their paths and moving to meet him, moving to put humanity to its test, to place humanity in the crucible.
The End of Days.…
* * * *
Out from the deep winds of Time comes the Voice of a destiny. O humanity born in a storm and wandering in a storm, why do you turn from the future and return to your past?
O prophets and wanderers, lovers and kings, men and women of all kinds!
O humanity, O lost, born in a storm and wandering in a storm!
These things that come, they come with cause.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
And still the flames burned atop the walls of the Holy City, still the cries of the people lifted to heaven, to the Wide Plain of Clouds, with their prayers for their dead ghen sa ko-ghen. The corpse of the emperor was by this time washed and cleansed, scented with oils and roots, dressed in garments of silk and leather, silver and gold; and the corpse had been placed in a bronze coffin, the bronze coffin set inside a gold sarcophagus, and the gold sarcophagus moved with all dignity to a bireme in the harbor, where eight vessels guarded it.
In the renovated palace in Erusabad, the sons and the ministers and friends of the great ghen prepared for departure to the capital at Ilbukar and the magnificent funeral to be attended there. All that remained, in accord with custom (and to ensure that the government in Erusabad would run smoothly while its officials attended the ceremonies in the capital), was the reading of Huagrim’s testament: the disposal of his earthly possessions.
bin-Sutus was chosen by lot to read the document, which had arrived only that afternoon from the capital. In a small room of the palace, he sat at a cedar wood table and faced Agors ghen-mu, Nihim ghen-mu, and the other official aihman-sas and deputies of the dead king. bin-Sutus unrolled the testament, which had been taken down by a scribe on a length of animal leather, just as had Huagrim’s grandfather’s own will been written on animal skin. But Huagrim’s testament had been written by a scribe schooled in one of the cities of the West so that the ghen’s final words were painted in quick brush strokes—odd ideographs—rather than in the cruder pictographs the people of the plains had used:
* * * *
Here is the Testament of Huagrim ko-Ghen of All Salukadia as he is facing the Gods of Heaven on the Wide Plain of Clouds. Let it be known to all Men that Huagrim ko-Ghen commands this to be done with his Empire and his Goods: To his first-born son Agors, who with his sire is a man of vision, the Empire of Salukadia; to his son Nihim, who has chosen to devote his life to things other than the Empire and the ways of his sires, who were horsemen and conquerors and leaders of generals, I leave all of Nature, which he worships; to my men of Council who have served me honestly and well, and with pride—the aihman-sas bin-Sutus, bin-Dusu, bin-Hasses, Utto-sengar, Doru-bin-Sahar, Abru-o-binar, Ansu-o-Kem, Wen-sa-go-Illu, abin-Urdu, and each of their ministers—I leave a chest of gold and jewelry, which will be found in the treasury in Ilbukar, as well as tracts of land and houses, indicated on the maps at the bottom of this Testament, and to each a funeral house when he is called by the gods from the Light of Day to the Home of Night; and to the soldiers and horsemen of my army, who have served me honestly and have honored my name and the shades of my sires with their services, I commend allotments of gold according to their ranks, and good clothes, boots, and weapons to be given to the Officers of my Army, as indicated on the bottom of this testament. May the Gods protect my Spirit and deliver me swiftly unto the Shades of my Sires. This has been done by Huagrim ko-Ghen of All Salukadia, on the thirteenth day of the Month of the Bull in the Fifteenth Year of his reign.
* * * *
bin-Sutus set down the leather scroll. “That is all he has written, all that he has ordered to be done,” he announced in a heavy voice. He unfurled the bottom part of the skin and showed it to the others at the table. Each man glanced at it.
Nihim, who was sitting across from bin-Sutus, stared at the old man; but bin-Sutus would not meet his gaze.
Agors, seated beside his brother, showed a wide grin to everyone in the room. But he did not gloat. That was unnecessary; anything he might say or do could only detract from the words of his dead father, and the late ghen’s words had said everything, succinctly and boldly. Agors was the next ghen, and all of these aihman-sas and deputies had received nothing—only jewels and houses, no power—and even his brother had received less than nothing. Salukadia was undivided, and all of it—from the Ursalion Sea to the Sea-at-the-East where his great-grandfather had been born—was his.
His alone.
None of the men at that table looked at Agors. These chiefs were dressed in elaborate finery, and they carried the weapons they had worn as riding men in fo
llowing the late ghen in his conquests—but none placed his vision on Agors.
Huagrim’s elder son pushed back his chair and stood. bin-Sutus watched him. Agors smiled coldly at the aihman; the old man’s stare was ice.
Then Agors left the chamber, striding loudly into the outer hallway.
And one by one, the deputies and aihman-sas, as well, stood and bowed to bin-Sutus, bowed to Nihim ghen-mu, and exited.
Until only Nihim and bin-Sutus remained, sitting opposite one another.
In silence.
bin-Sutus rolled up the testament and tied it with its horse leather cords. “We must leave in the morning,” he said quietly, “for Ilbukar.”
Nihim gave him a deep look. “Why did he shame me, bin-Sutus?”
The old man slowly shook his head.
“He said nothing to you,” the son asked, “ever, of his intention to…disgrace me, to shame his men of council, and to elevate Agors to the crown and the wolf-brand?”
“He said nothing to me. And every man here was stunned. He kept his own counsel, Nihim, I am sure of it. Every chief here expected some worthy reward for his services; and every one of us expected the empire to be halved between you and Agors.”
“But why would he shame me?”
“Perhaps,” bin-Sutus speculated, “he does not shame you, but shames Agors.” To Nihim’s disgusted look: “I am sincere. He has raised Agors to become ghen, but there is no land left to conquer, there are no plains left to ride, no mountains to level. Agors inherits the throne and the crown and the wolf-brand, but he can do little with them. What can your brother do to compare with what his father and foresires did? Perhaps your father did this, not to shame you—I believe he respected you, Nihim-mu—but to remind Agors that he inherits a complete empire, not a partial one. Don’t you think that if your father had halved the empire and given a portion to you, Agors sooner or later would have made war upon you, his own blood, to own all of Salukadia? Perhaps there is more wisdom than you think in your father’s testament.”
“Perhaps,” Nihim allowed, still hurt and his voice betraying it. “But I do not trust Agors’s spirit, and he is not a reflective man. It will not speak to him, this deeper meaning in our father’s decision. Don’t you think, rather, bin-Sutus, that the energy Agors might have applied to winning half the empire from me he can now apply to expanding his empire by attacking the western lands?”
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