Azariah reached out to Ezekai, who drew his sword and offered the hilt. Taking the blade, Azariah aimed its sharpened point directly at Lazu’s throat.
“Three Laws,” he said. “Offer Ashhur your love for his grace and forgiveness for your multitudinous sins.”
Lazu stared at him for a long while, a simple mind debating simple concepts.
“Aye, Ashhur, thanks for all you’ve done,” he said.
Azariah pressed the tip closer.
“Offer Karak your thanks for his judgment and guidance in maintaining order amid chaos.”
Again, the bound man debated.
“All right,” he said at last. “Thank you, Karak, for showing us all how great your judgment is.”
There were ten layers of sarcasm across each syllable, but Azariah would allow it...for now. All that was left was the third and final law.
“Offer me your thanks. Let me hear your gratitude to your king for guiding your soul to Paradise.”
This time there was no hesitation. Lazu reared back, grinned, and spat an enormous blob of blood and saliva directly onto Azariah’s face.
“Piss off, angel!” he screamed. “Long live Gregory! Long live the boy king!”
Azariah wiped off the filth, clenched his teeth hard enough to crack them, and then cut Lazu’s head from his shoulders. He received no satisfaction as the head rolled across the street. His only emotion was of a deep desire to burn the entirety of Dezrel to the ground and declare himself King of Ash. It was a frustrated, childish reaction, and thankfully it passed quickly.
“Burn the body,” he told Ezekai as he handed the fallen back his blade. He turned to the crowd, which was still locked into a tight circle due to the undead soldiers. Controlling the undead had gotten ever easier, so much so that now he sometimes forgot about their presence. With a thought he had them scatter back to their patrols.
“Go,” he told the crowd. “And remember what you saw. The Three Laws must be given their due.”
Azariah flew to his tower for a welcome reprieve from the sinful rabble. His frustrations were bubbling over, helped none by the recent reports of Mordan refugees successfully escaping into Ker. Every day, it seemed, his plans to save humanity slipped further and further into the realms of the impossible. A break from it all was what he desperately needed, but instead of finding solitude in his tower, he discovered a waiting guest.
“Tarlak Eschaton?” he asked, his entire body freezing in place at the shock of seeing the yellow-garbed wizard standing in the center of his private sanctum. The wizard looked up from staring at the ground and smiled. He was obviously struggling for some reason, with his hands trembling and sweat coating his brow.
“No, not...not only,” he said, a statement that made no sense. Fire swelled inside Azariah’s palm as he prepared a spell, but he paused when Tarlak’s image flickered. Parts of his robe turned translucent.
A projection, Azariah realized. If it was Tarlak, it wasn’t him in the flesh.
“Not only?” the fallen asked. “Do you not come before me alone?”
“Alone?” The wizard took a single, unsteady step forward. His knee wobbled. “Not alone. Never alone. He stole me from me, angel. He stole me. Stole my body. I want to make him pay.”
“Stop spouting nonsense,” Azariah said. “Why are you here?”
Tarlak laughed so hard he doubled over and clutched his fists together. It was as if he were being stabbed from within.
“I’m here...I’m here because I can be,” he said. He looked up, madness and rage sparkling in those tear-filled eyes. “Because I know something he doesn’t want me to know.”
Something bizarre was happening here, but damned if Azariah could figure it out. His behavior was too erratic, too strange to be an act. The founder of the Eschaton Mercenaries obviously suffered under some strange malady or distress, but what? What did he mean, not alone? And how in the Abyss did the wizard survive his time at the Council of Mages in the first place? Azariah had believed the troublesome man dealt with and out of the picture. Yet again humanity failed him, and in its most skilled, over-specialized act: killing someone.
“Whatever this farce us, I want no part of it,” Azariah said. “Take your games and leave, wizard, before you try my patience. Besides...you look unwell.”
Tarlak jammed his fingers into the sides of his skull with such force it looked like he was trying to claw out his own brain.
“NO!” he shrieked. “I won’t lose – I won’t lose control. Not yet. Not until you listen. Gregory, Aubrienna, I know where they are. I know where they’re hidden. Tarlak, he couldn’t hide it, not from me, not this place where I live.”
Another seeming bit of nonsense from a wizard that looked to have lost his mind. Azariah kept wondering what the catch was. Did the wizard hope to confuse him? Perhaps lead him astray as part of some ploy?
“The boy king and the Godslayer’s daughter both travel at his side,” Azariah said. “I’ve seen it with my scrying magic.”
“The images you see are lies,” Tarlak said. “Meant to fool you. Don’t...don’t look for them. Look to the rebuilt Citadel. You’ll see them there. Hiding. Cowering. Praying you don’t notice.” He suddenly stood up perfectly straight, and looked around as if bewildered. His voice changed slightly, adopting a softer tone. “Where...?”
The scream that tore out of him was bone-chilling. Azariah retreated a step and prepared fire on his fingertips. If this wasn’t a trick, then something was deeply wrong with the man. The wizard crumpled to his knees and tore at his hair, his scream stretching on and on until at last he had no air left in his lungs. The scream seemed to have purged him momentarily of his confusion, and he staggered back to his feet with a most devious grin.
“I have to go,” Tarlak said. “Can’t let him know. Surprise. It won’t be fun if...if it isn’t a surprise. Don’t disappoint me, angel.”
As suddenly as he appeared, the wizard flickered away into nothing. Azariah stared at the space the image had occupied, his mind racing. He’d always assumed Harruq and his gang would keep the two children alongside them. Where else might they be safer in all of Dezrel? But if there was a place they’d believe the two sheltered from harm, it would be in the care of Ashhur’s paladins. The fallen shrugged. What was the harm in checking? Scrying spells were far from the most taxing of arcane magics.
Azariah retrieved a chair from beside a bookshelf and set it in the center of the room. Once seated, he closed his eyes, lifted his hands, and began the necessary words of magic. His mind drifted, pulled toward its destination through sheer focus. He imagined the rebuilt Citadel in his mind’s eye, and so he witnessed it as it was in the real world. For a brief moment he felt resistance, and his inner sight dimmed while simultaneously flooding over with a deep fog. The rebuilt Citadel had been warded against scrying magic, but Azariah himself had overseen the construction. He knew exactly how those worked, and how to bypass them with a simple thought.
His sight cleared, and he witnessed the Citadel once more in the warm daylight. Azariah hovered beyond like a bird in flight, and with a mental command he soared inside through one of the windows. He zipped and twirled, racing up and down steps, checking rooms, caring not for the young paladins who lingered about.
His first discovery was the paladin Lathaar, whom Azariah had believed still marched alongside Harruq and Aurelia. If someone so powerful had retreated to the Citadel...
Sure enough, two floors down, he found them. Aubrienna and Gregory bounced atop one of the beds, laughing as they alternating shouting out numbers.
“Five!” shouted Aubrienna.
“Six!” shouted Gregory, and he flung a pillow her way.
Azariah opened his eyes, banishing the image.
“Seven,” he whispered. He hurried to the tower door, flung it open, and addressed the fallen stationed there.
“Fetch me Ezekai,” he commanded. His smile spread ear to ear. “Our army must prep
are for flight. We have a king to capture.”
Tarlak stumbled across the grass. Where...where was he? One moment, he’d been in his tent. The next, he swore he stood in some strange hollow tower surrounded by windows and bookshelves. But that couldn’t be right. He was in a field now, a stubby plot of land fenced in by the family of farmers who lived nearby. It wasn’t tent fabric or tower stone above him, but a clear blue sky.
You’re cracking, Tarlak, the damn ever-present voice of Cecil mocked. And I’m slipping through those cracks.
“Like shit you are,” he muttered. “You’re not even real.”
He paused to grab one of the thick fenceposts. Sweat soaked his body. It felt like he’d run a mile, based on how his heart hammered in his chest. The first pangs of panic simmered in his mind, and he fought them down. He had to focus on the task at hand. First off, where was he? He looked around, truly taking in his surroundings. There, not far to his left, was the human army. Their campfires dotted the sky with smoke.
“See, not so hard to get your bearings, is it?” Tarlak asked aloud. He tried very, very hard not to wonder why he was a good ten-minute walk away from the camp. He was stressed, that’s all, stressed and perhaps sleepwalking.
You’ll believe anything if it means not believing in me.
“I’d sell my soul to Karak and Ashhur both if it meant sparing me from your smug, idiot voice,” he muttered. A bad habit, talking to himself, but what else was he to do? Ignoring Cecil Towerborn’s voice had proven ineffective. Pretending it wasn’t there didn’t work, either. What options were left? If he was going to work out a solution, he first needed to understand the problem. What exactly was Cecil? A lingering shadow within the mind? A delusion made up over guilt of using the body?
Stealing the body, Cecil shouted within his skull. Stealing it. Don’t mince words, you damn coward.
Vertigo overwhelmed Tarlak, and before he knew it he was on his knees. Screaming, he realized. He was screaming. He didn’t remember starting. He didn’t feel like stopping, either.
“Get out of my head,” he hollered to the sky. “Get out, get out, get out!”
Something rolled him onto his back. No, not something. Someone. Himself. His hands and legs were thrashing of their own accord.
Or his accord...
“No!” Tarlak shrieked. He clamored back to his feet despite the world shifting beneath him as if he were in the midst of an earthquake. “No, gods damn it, not like this. Not to you!”
He ran as if wolves nipped at his heels. He ran as if fires swirled around his every step. Laughter chased him, far more terrifying than any wolf or fire. At first his destination was the army encampment, but it soon became an act solely about itself. Running, because he chose to run. His arms and legs, moving as he demanded of them. This body, this stubborn collection of meat and bone, would follow his commands even if it killed him.
He ran and ran until the world around him blurred. His heart pounded with such force that he felt the veins in his neck pulse. His lungs burned. Every shred of his energy flowed into his legs, yet it didn’t matter. He couldn’t outrun the laughter, the one thing in all the world he needed to escape. How does one outrun their own mind? How did one escape the bone cage attached to their shoulders?
Time lost meaning. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, but his run halted as if he’d slammed into a stone wall. Tarlak staggered backward, completely unaware of his surroundings. He thought he’d hit the ground, but didn’t. Arms held him. Very big, very strong half-orc arms.
“Tar?” Harruq asked. They were still in the field he’d ‘awoken’ in. “Hey, are you all right?”
Tarlak glanced to the grass. He’d been running in a small circle for long enough to carve a groove into the earth with his boots.
“No,” Tarlak said, finally giving in and laughed along with the phantom Cecil. “No, Harruq, I very much don’t think I am.”
13
“You know, you’re starting to make me a little nervous,” Tarlak said as everyone gathered around.
“You collapsed in a field after running in circles for hours,” Aurelia said. “We’re all worried.”
“You’re worried?” Tarlak pulled on the ropes that tied him down to the chair they’d borrowed from one of the nearby farmers. They’d positioned him behind a barn, so rest of the army, which was currently pitching tents, digging trenches, and preparing campfires, couldn’t see him. “I haven’t been tied down like this since one very experimental trip to Mordeina’s more colorful parts, and it wasn’t an incident I’d like to repeat.”
“Do you ever cease joking?” Qurrah muttered, giving Tarlak a sour look as he bent over one of the nine stones he’d set up in a circle around the chair.
“I’m as serious as often as you are jovial, Qurrah. It’s how we counter-balance one another.”
“Then may the heavens forgive me for being any part of that balance.”
Tarlak tried to remain calm. He’d gone through far worse, hadn’t he? Sure, it was weird that Qurrah restrained him and didn’t bother to explain the process he planned to enact, but that was just Qurrah being Qurrah...wasn’t it? The ropes were to keep him still if he endured another seizure. Nothing nefarious. Nothing weird.
Harruq and Aurelia stood nearby, both watching with concern on their faces. Qurrah scrawled and carved on the runes, while Tessanna relaxed on a blanket just beyond the stones, humming softly to herself, her gaze locked on the clouds that rolled across the sky. Tarlak envied her calm indifference.
I envy her peace of mind, Cecil’s voice grumbled in his head. But don’t worry. I’ll have that soon enough.
You’d have to be goddamn insane to envy her mind, Tarlak thought with grim amusement. He bit his tongue, hoping the lingering presence of Cecil felt the pain as keenly as he himself did. At least it momentarily shut him up, allowing him to hear Harruq and Qurrah talking.
“I’d appreciate if you’d share what you knew,” Harruq said. “You’re scaring Tarlak half to death.”
Qurrah stood upright and stretched. “An apt punishment for frightening all of us. But if it will make all of you feel better, that is the last of the stones, which means I am ready to explain the situation.”
“Good, explain away,” Tarlak said. “But I don’t see what’s so difficult to explain, nor why it involves me being tied to a chair. I killed Cecil Towerborn, froze his corpse to keep it from rotting, and then projected my consciousness into it right as Roand the Flame used one of his personal contraptions disintegrate me. I’m guessing the body...I don’t know, remembers a bit of its former owner and I need some time to acclimate to it? Nothing to worry about, right?”
“Wrong,” Qurrah said. He paced around the circle, snapping his fingers above each stone in turn. Violet runes shimmered to life, one after another, and the sight of their pulsing power put a deeply-seeded fear into Tarlak’s gut.
“Wrong not to worry?” Tarlak said, trying to laugh the half-orc’s concern off.
“Wrong in your understanding of the premise,” Qurrah said. He finished the circle and joined Harruq and Aurelia in standing before him. The frailer half-orc’s brown eyes seemed to see right through Tarlak’s face and deep into his mind. To call it ‘unnerving’ was putting it mildly. “You’ve been hearing voices, haven’t you? Perhaps seeing Cecil lurking about?”
Tarlak cleared his throat. He’d not told Qurrah any of that upon awaking, only given a cursory explanation of his momentary confusions of identity.
Yes, Tarlak, tell them. Tell them I’m with you at all times.
“Perhaps,” Tarlak said. “He...he keeps insisting I stole his body.”
“To be blunt, it’s because you did. As for your flawed premise, you did indeed freeze his body, but I suspect you froze it too well. Cecil never died. You plunged your soul into a living, occupied body, Tarlak. That you’ve maintained control as long as you have is astounding.”
“What? That’s.
..that’s insane.” He glanced between Qurrah and Tessanna. “You two! You’re both skilled at this sort of thing, the mastery of souls and death and other creepy shit. Just...yank his soul out of me. You can do that, right?”
“You’re intertwined,” Tessanna said, rolling from her back onto her stomach so she could rest her chin on her hands and peer at him curiously. “Like roots of two trees locked together in one plot of land.”
“We yank out Cecil, we yank you out as well,” Qurrah said. “Which means you need to be disentangled first.”
The violet runes on the stones flared brighter when the half-orc lifted his arms. The magic pulsing over them was intense enough that Tarlak felt it like a heat on his skin. His hands shook, and he found himself stammering.
“Why surprise me? Why—why—wait, what are planning? Why was I not warned?”
“He hears everything you hear, sees everything you see,” Qurrah said. “Forgive me, wizard, but to warn you would mean warning him. Two souls cannot occupy a single body, not without tearing each other apart. You’ll need to be stronger than him. Your mental will is far superior, of that I am certain, but this is his body, and his advantageous battlefield. Give him no quarter.”
Sparkling purple light collected on Qurrah’s pale hands. Tarlak struggled against the ropes, suddenly overcome with a fear far beyond any normal threat. He would rather face a thousand armies with magic leaping off his palms. He’d rather stare down an angry, returned Thulos. Anything was better than sitting here helpless. Anything was better than the mystery Qurrah presented.
The King of the Fallen Page 14
