Momentarily stunned beyond the reach of his godlike powers, Varis fumbled his sword and reeled, black blood pouring from three separate wounds. Kian snatched up the fallen weapon and pressed his attack, but slipped in his haste to get at Varis, and slid across the polished floor on his knees.
Dazed but not yet out of the fight, Varis’s dagger flashed into view. He came at a run, blade whirling. Kian just managed to knock the dagger aside, driving it upward, and the tip raked his cheek and climbed into his scalp, clipping off a piece of his ear as it went. Blood poured in a hot scarlet wave over his face, but he felt nothing of pain. Still on his knees, Kian swung his new sword awkwardly but brutally. The edge of that keen blade parted flesh, and he instantly twisted his grip and reversed the attack, slamming the rounded pommel against Varis’s lips.
With a bubbling squeal, Varis fell back, bloody tongue pinched grotesquely through shattered teeth. With his free hand he clutched at his throat, a look of utter incredulity blooming on his features. Foul blood squeezed out through his clenched fingers—then began to pour.
Kian struggled to his feet, intending to finish Varis, but the grumble of breaking stone alerted him to some new danger. Before he could look a rough, snaky band wrapped about his neck. The smell of green wood assailed his nostrils even as he was lifted and tossed through the air like a child’s toy. He soared, flailing for some kind of balance, desperately holding onto Varis’s sword. He crashed down atop the great table centered in the Golden Hall, his bloody face leaving a wide crimson smear across the vellum map. In a floundering scrabble, he toppled off the table’s far edge. The breath exploded from his lungs when he smashed through a chair, leaving him to thrash about amid a tangle of broken wood and rich padding.
A gurgling wet hiss and the crash of chairs being violently thrown aside warned Kian that Varis was coming. Even as he fought to regain his feet, gulping each breath, he searched for a better place from which to defend himself. To his dismay, his wide stare locked on what had assailed him. A dark and malignant creation, skinned in a hide of tree bark, had burst from the floor and was writhing from side to side in his direction. Horrified, Kian recognized the thing for what it was—another root-serpent, covered all over with emerald eyes and hoary bark. This creature was not of the soil of the Qaharadin, but was just as deadly.
Kian threw himself clear as the dread serpent attacked. A splinter of fire gouged through his leg, a cutting blow that sent him flipping him through the air. He bounced and spun across the floor, gasping for breath that would not come. Kian rolled, swinging the sword in a desperate warding gesture. The blade chopped into the striking root-serpent, and a section as long as he was tall thumped to the floor. Varis’s creation recoiled, whipping back and forth, splattering greenish, stinking sap over Kian. As the root-serpent retreated, it wilted and blackened, afflicted by a swift rot. In moments, the nightmarish creature had become no more than an oozing mass sprawled across the floor.
Kian had gotten to one knee when Varis strode into view. Ebon blood covered his chest from the wound in his neck—but the wound was no longer there. He looked ready to say something, and Kian instantly drove the tip of his blade stabbing into Varis’s exposed knee, sinking deep into the joint. He gave the sword a violent twist, as if prying a stone from unyielding ground.
Varis screamed and fell atop his ruined leg, and his dagger flew from spasming fingers. Kian leapt to his feet and sent his sword into one of Varis’s glowing eyes. Rage and desperation gave him inhuman strength, and that wild thrust slammed through Varis’s skull and gouged into the marble tiles under his head. Varis went rigid, then began to thrash.
Kian wrenched the blade free and raised the sword high with the intention of hewing off Varis’s head, but in the next instant all was shaking and groaning, knocking him off balance. In a burst of consuming flame, the great map table folded in on itself, burning like oil-soaked parchment. Within a heartbeat, it had been reduced to a heap of ash. In its place a line of blinding light, like a seam cut into the fabric of reality, rose from the floor to the height of a tall man. As Kian watched in stunned silence, that seam flared wide, creating a portal that looked upon a realm of crimson flame and shattered black stone. From that unholy place strode a woman of such stunning beauty and immeasurable power that he collapsed to his knees in wonder.
Chapter 52
Kian shook his head against the vision and tried to stand, but he was made weak by the sheer enormity of the woman’s presence. She gazed impassively about the Golden Hall. To Kian’s stunned eyes she was a woman, but seemed so much more than mere human flesh. Long silver-white hair cascaded over her shoulders and managed to cloak her obvious and flawless nudity. She faced him at last, offering a smile that melted all resistance in his heart.
“You are stronger than most,” she said, her voice a seductive whisper. “For a season I have felt and watched you, tasted your strength of will upon my lips, savored it like the sweetest of nectars. You were not my first choice, yet now I see that you should have been. I will reward your strength, Kian Valara, if you will but let me.”
He had no idea of what she was speaking, but something in the way she said his name, with a mocking familiarity, sparked a deep memory. Someone else had spoken his name in that way. The longer he thought on who had spoken of him so, the less it mattered, until finally all concern faded … faded… .
He returned her smile, unable to resist the swelling joy in his heart. All that had happened in the last few moments dwindled to nothing, save the coming of the woman before him. “Tell me of this reward,” he invited eagerly, feeling as if he were lost in some blissful dream from which he never wanted to escape.
“I can give you primacy,” she said, her tone harsher than before, and full of a desperate eagerness. “I would make you an overlord, ruler of child-kings, the high judge of subjects from a thousand realms. Do you take what I propose, or do you deny my gift?”
“Tell me what I must do,” Kian mumbled, finding it hard to concentrate for all the visions suddenly flashing behind his eyes. He saw a vast empire filled with impossible wealth, pleasures beyond count and imagination. And, too, worshippers singing paeans of honor and glory and praise to him alone. In these visions, there were no gods, no other kings, nothing at all but himself… .
Yet there was something else. If he agreed to her will, there would be a hand over his life, turning him this way and that, as a child at play moved a doll. I will be but a plaything, and her my master. All that he could and would rule would only be at her behest… .
Cracks began to grow in the shell of his bliss, and more quickly still, fear wriggled in through those rents, sinking into him. He blinked rapidly, trying to focus not on her promise and the visions, but on her being. He saw beauty, to be sure, but also something menacing, unholy.
Her eyes, black through and through, narrowed, as if she had read the thoughts written on his soul and found them wanting. A part of him perished when her lips parted, revealing a mesh of perfectly mated black fangs. When she spoke again, her voice was uncompromising.
“Take what I offer, and live a long and full life of ease and power … or deny me and suffer the blackest ways of death, again and again, forever.”
Kian swallowed, his previous bliss fled as new visions, all of horror and pain, shrieked through his being. He had never known such pure terror. Against his will, his thoughts slipped again toward accepting everything she had put forward, if only to spare him the torments she threatened.
“My patience has limits. Do you accept what I give?”
She glided toward him, floating above the marble tiles, until she was near enough that he felt a terrible cold pouring off her marvelous flesh. She seemed less substantial than before, somehow transparent. Despite this, the frigid touch of her presence wafted off her, draining from Kian all hope.
She leaned close enough that he could see the tips of her obsidian teeth digging into befouled black gums. “Answer me,” she grated.
�
�Who are you?” he stammered, hoping for time enough to clear his mind.
“Humans,” she said with loathing, “ever inquisitive about that which you can only have the most rudimentary understanding.”
She abruptly swept a hand over him and, by means beyond his ken, lifted and moved him across the floor without touching him. She halted him and forced his eyes to look directly upon three wizened figures, materialized from nothing save the very air he breathed. The figures had nearly transparent gray skin, withered into hanging folds, and sunken pits where eyes had once been. Even in their deteriorated states, Kian gleaned that these creatures were no more human that the woman controlling him.
“To know and accept who I am, you must first know who they were,” she said, pointing to the woman. “There is Hiphkos the Contemplator, the Leviathan.”
Kian’s lips moved, trying for words that would not come. None of this could be real, but if not then he had gone irrevocably insane.
She inclined her head toward the man next in line. He was striking, even in death, a stern grandfather. “Attandaeus the Blood Hawk, the Watcher Who Judges.”
Next she swept a hand toward a huge, bluff-featured man. “Memokk the Bull, the Vanquisher. They were my creators—my parents, as it were, the Three, dead long ages of men.”
The woman rounded on Kian, beautiful despite the terrible jet fangs lurking behind her lips. Suddenly she shone bright from within, like the sun seen rising behind a wall of morning fog. But for all her radiance, he saw that she was a creature of absolute darkness.
“You are a goddess?” Kian asked, his brow slicked with icy sweat.
“Some have named me so,” she said with a mischievous smile that stilled his heart.
“Then,” he rasped, trying to understand, to voice aloud what his heart knew but was afraid to bring into the light. For a season I have felt and watched you. The memory of her words roared within his mind like a storm-tossed sea. He squinted against her dazzling glare. “Are you—”
Her laughter, cruel and mirthless, cut him off.
For a season he had known he was hunted. Whatever and whoever she was, this creature had hounded him since he had fled Varis’s impossible power at the temple in the Qaharadin Marshes. She had come to him in the flesh of Fenahk, later as Bresado, and too, wearing the skin of a hedge witch.
As his understanding grew, he saw a fleeting shadow under her luminous, shimmering beauty change into a monstrosity. From within, tentacles pushed against her translucent skin, distending and distorting once perfect flesh. Before he could cry out, her hand streaked to his chest, her touch was hate and agony.
“You would know who I am, Kian Valara?”
An ugly purple tongue, incredibly long and slick, flicked out between her fangs and slid between his lips, probing at his teeth as if for an intimate kiss, then slithered back with a horrid squelching sound. He gagged on the reek of corpses.
“I am Peropis, Eater of the Damned, Queen of Demons and Ruler of Geh’shinnom’atar!” Like thunder, her voice rolled through the palace, quivering its foundations, before gradually fading. In the ensuing hush, she leaned close and whispered, “Will you accept what I would give, or will you deny me and suffer for a thousand and a thousand lifetimes?”
All that Kian was quailed in fear … but his fear served as a keen blade, deftly cutting away the fog of confusion born of her presence. His gaze rolled toward his fallen friends, Hazad and Azuri, his brothers … and the corpse of the woman he had barely known, yet loved with all his heart. He would not despoil their deaths by accepting the accursed gift of this creature, which had given rise to the living weapon that was Varis, who in turn had brought about their deaths. If his destiny was to suffer, then he would gladly do so, even if it meant only that he remained undefiled by human weakness and treachery against the memory of his companions.
“Keep your gifts, demon whore!” Kian roared.
Peropis instantly dropped him to the floor, regarding him with a menace unlike any he had ever known. He almost wished he could take back his defiance, but knew that everlasting pain was better than bowing to such a damned creature as this.
The last of her beauty broke apart, while that which lived under her skin ripped completely free. Splits showed in spectral skin, lashing tentacles sprang from her torso, legs, and arms. As she continued to change, his bowels boiled to water, his tongue withered like a worm dropped on a blistering rock. Every muscle in his body began to shiver, and his skin seemingly tried to crawl off that dancing meat.
With a cry, Peropis lurched forward on her own legs, and also upon a writhing tangle of thrashing black appendages. The motion was sickeningly inhuman, a rolling, bouncing gait. Her fingertips ruptured, exposing talons as black as her fangs, and she reached for him, her arms thinning as they lengthened.
“As you have chosen to deny me, now you will taste my wrath!” she cried, spraying the air with spittle that carried the putrefying stench of bodies dragged from swampy graves.
The force of her words smashed into Kian, sending him sliding over cold stone toward the blazing portal to what could be no less than Peropis’s domain, Geh’shinnom’atar, the Thousand Hells. His fingernails clawed frantically at the smooth tiles, dragging him to a halt bare inches from falling into that nightmare realm.
At a deranged shout of protest, Peropis abruptly ceased her attack and wheeled, her twisted and tentacled figure swaying.
Varis, snarling like a rabid wolf, jabbed his dagger in her direction. “You gave me your gift! It is mine, not another’s. With it, I will destroy you—though not just yet.” He spoke as if he held the power to do so and, as impossible as it was to conceive, Peropis recoiled as if she, too, believed.
Chapter 53
Varis turned toward Kian, eyes burning like molten gold, his godlike flesh swollen, leaking rivulets of dark blood. Kian’s gaze widened as he realized that he could see an ethereal, silver radiance flooding into Varis from all directions. Some hitherto unknown part of Kian reached out and touched that luminance, recognizing it for the very essence of life stolen from the world around him. In that flow, he sensed the deaths of hundreds of people, perhaps more.
Kian had half a heartbeat to consider Varis’s atrocities before the youth slammed into him. With impossible strength, Varis drove him toward the portal. Kian wrenched himself sideways at the last instant, and his back slammed against the searing edge of that terrible gateway. He screamed as an enormous heat melted a groove in the flesh around his spine. He strained with all his failing human strength against Varis, trying to hurl him to one side. Varis, surprised by Kian’s resilience, fought to keep hold, veins bulging in his neck and brow, muscles standing out like cables of unyielding steel from his unnatural skin. For a moment, they were equally matched … but only for a moment.
Varis suddenly drove Kian’s skull against the edge of the portal. The stench of his own seared hair and skin filled Kian’s nostrils, then blood, cool compared to the fiery heat roasting him alive, began to dribble down his neck. Seeing the advantage even as Kian blinked against the fog of a swoon, Varis heaved forward again and again, trying to batter the mercenary’s skull to a pulp.
Kian quickly neared the extent of his strength. He was close to failing, dying. Then another, sharper pain swelled in him. All that he had his companions had struggled to achieve had been a waste. I have failed them … I have failed all.
Without warning, Varis relaxed and stepped back, just enough to ram his dagger into Kian’s middle. Then Varis moved farther away, his features alight with triumph. Regret washed over Kian as he slumped to his knees.
Gazing numbly upon the hilt of the dagger protruding from his belly, Kian was startled to find a blue glow drifting from his wound and his hands, and then from every inch of his skin. Though he was not sure how, he surrendered the powers of creation that he had held back, letting them flow outward. Neither Varis nor Peropis seemed to notice the delicate aurora surrounding Kian, as they gazed upon him with otherworldly eyes
.
As the powers of the gods spread outward from Kian, he grew weaker, becoming again as he was born, a creature of frail flesh. In his heart, though he had never embraced or understood the powers that he held, it felt good and right that he should cast them away.
With that justification alive in his mind Kian steeled himself, jerked the dagger free of his bowels then, with all his waning strength, forced the powers of creation from himself in a single, massive blast, wanting more than anything for it to rip away the same powers from Varis’s flesh. What had been visible to his sight alone burst forth, washing the Golden Hall in a brilliant glow. Blue fire licked around Peropis and Varis, stunning them both, but otherwise leaving them unharmed. Or so it seemed at first.
Varis looked mutely this way and that, as the sky-blue radiance began to fade. “No,” he muttered in disbelief, staring at his hands.
Kian clenched a fist to his belly and sagged to his side, eyes wide with wonder. I did this, my desire for it to be so, he thought, stunned. For the first time since seeing the youth enter the temple in the swamp, Varis looked as he had, a highborn man-child full of pride, ambition, and discontent. No longer was he a god made flesh, nor even a man in appearance, but only a boy again.
“Do something!” Varis wailed at Peropis, sounding like petulant child. “I demand that you give me your full blessing! No more lies, no trickery, give me the gift you promised!”
Peropis spoke in a voice full of menace. “I warned you once to never make demands of me. I give what I will when and of my choosing … and I take what I will when I desire.” Her black gaze rolled toward Kian. To him she said, “It would seem that I, indeed, chose wrong. I give you this final chance to decide your fate. Will you accept?”
“No,” Kian sighed, utterly spent.
Tentacles raised up in an incongruously human gesture of exasperation. “The world of men is filled with mere worms,” Peropis urged. “What worm can stand against a king … a god?”
The God King (Heirs of the Fallen (Book 1)) Page 36
