Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1) Read online

  Reaper Of Sorrows

  James A. West

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTERS

  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

  11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

  21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30

  Epilogue

  Other Books by James A. West

  Biography

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  REAPER OF SORROWS

  Copyright © 2012 by James A. West

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover art by: James A. West and Julie West

  Published by James A. West

  First edition: August 2012

  Produced in the United States of America

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my fantastic editors, Dawn and Carla.

  As always, I greatly appreciate anyone who reads my work. I hope you enjoy the Scorpion’s adventures!

  To Julie: Your support knows no bounds, and I am eternally grateful.

  Chapter 1

  Guttering torches clutched in crude iron claws flared at Lord Sanouk’s arrival, but did little to brighten the small circular chamber spread beneath a vaulted ceiling. Before the flames grew steady and true in their burning, misty figures detached themselves from undying shadows. They danced near, coiled between his legs, their spectral gray fingers caressing him and the bound girl slung over his shoulder. The whisperings of Gathul’s fleshless servants filled his ears, vile utterings to wither a man’s soul. Sanouk steeled his mind and will against those jeering blasphemies. They were nothing in the face of what was to come.

  In time silence fell, and the vaporous fiends departed for realms mortal flesh never ventured, seeking livelier sport. Unease stayed with Sanouk, quickening his pulse. Treating with a god was no small matter.

  He took a calming breath and grounded the torch that had led him through the twisting warren beneath his fortress, then stepped fully into the sanctum of Gathul. Riding the vault’s walls, the ensconced torches burned brighter still at his advance. Save for the shimmering greenstone altar and the wizened mystic entombed behind a translucent wall of flowing blood, the subterranean room might have been a crypt built for an ancient ruler during the Age of Glory, when gods had shared truths that men had long since forgotten. Whatever the chamber’s original maker intended, by chance or design it had become the gateway to Gathul’s realm.

  “Within this mean place,” Sanouk said to the girl, needing to hear a human voice, even if his own, “I will gain the power to build my own kingdom, and regain my stolen honor.”

  She flinched at his words, her naked flesh wriggling deliciously against his shoulder. She could not speak for the gag stuffed in her mouth. What possible answer could she give, even if able? It was a rancorous thought. Despite sharing his bed, she was like the rest of the villagers, believing he had made a bid for the throne destined for his brother, Prince Nabar. Sanouk was lord and master of Hilan and the northern reaches of his father’s realm of Cerrikoth, but he was also a disavowed outcast, a fallen prince. The respect he garnered from his subjects came only at the threat of punishment.

  “For now, my father and brother can keep their decaying throne,” he went on, defending himself against her unspoken accusations, “and I will make my own. Trust that the day will come when my strength will prevail over theirs, and I will take in truth what I was accused of trying to steal.” Before any future ambitions came to fruition, however, Gathul demanded a price.

  Lord Sanouk flung Aleena off his shoulder. She struck the stone floor and let out a muffled scream. Clad only in corded bindings that cut into her wrists and ankles, she thrashed and kicked, leaving a serpentine curve in the dust coating the floor.

  Sanouk eyed her lolling breasts, marked her flashing doe eyes, and for a moment regretted that Aleena’s sacrifice would deny him further samplings of her nubile flesh. But there were others. Many and more. A grin stretched his thin lips into a bloodless line, and his eyes narrowed in thought. Aleena had a sister a little younger, and her mother, a scullery maid in his own kitchens, was not so old or worn to be without certain charms….

  Pushing that aside, Sanouk spun on his heel and eased past the greenstone altar, its oblong top standing waist-high and carved with a depression the length and width of a large man. He dared not look deeply into the altar’s cloudy green depths. He had before, and found strange figures frolicking within. Illusion, he told himself then, a trick of the stone’s properties. He did not truly believe that, but it was easier to think so.

  With the alter behind him, he halted before the old man trapped within one of a dozen upright niches hollowed out of the bedrock walls. A hundred wounds over Undai’s body wept the crimson flow that sustained his prison. Undying, he wailed mutely and beat at the barrier, to no avail.

  Sanouk could not resist drawing his dagger and slowly raking it across his palm. The keen steel bit deep, severing flesh and tendons. But after the blade passed there was no mark, no wound, no blood. A tingle of excitement crept up his spine at the sure knowledge that as long as Undai remained locked away, no blade could kill him.

  “Thank you, Undai,” he breathed, sheathing the dagger. Of course, the aged conjurer could not hear him, nor could he see his captor’s taunting face hanging mere inches away, for Sanouk had dug out the man’s eyes, leaving wide, unhealing sockets.

  Sanouk studied the other niches, all empty. How many times have they been filled and emptied down through the ages? Undai had found the chamber of Gathul but, drunken fool that he was, he let slip its purpose, and that of the niches, to the wrong pair of ears. In due course, that knowledge had come to Sanouk. After putting Undai to the question, Sanouk discovered the means to gain what he desired but had long since abandoned hope of ever having. And what he wanted was so much more than Undai’s wine-sodden mind had ever conceived for himself.

  When Lord Sanouk turned back to Aleena, she went still under his obsidian stare. “You do not die this day,” he assured her, “for your living flesh will serve me.”

  Where the night before she had looked on him with tentative, virginal passion, now fear and loathing shone in her gaze. Lust stirred Sanouk’s loins, but he tamped it down. There was no time for dithering.

  He moved to the altar and undressed, folding his deep green robes and smallclothes, and setting them aside. Aleena turned her gaze to the floor, as if his nakedness shamed her. Or, perhaps, her desire leaves her troubled? He laughed aloud, his voice pounding through the bone-filled labyrinth beyond the chamber. Aleena curled into a weeping ball.

  On one end of the altar waited a collection of small jars containing purified sands brought from shores of distant seas. Near these sat assorted vials brimming with fragrant oils. Undai, drunkard or not, had been thorough in gathering the materials required for the cleansing rite.

  Lord Sanouk mixed oils together in a filigreed golden bowl, muttering prayers to the dark god he served. Next he slathered the liquid over his skin and gray-shot black hair. He followed this by dusting himself with the various sands, then rubbing the tacky paste over himself until his flesh tingled. Finally, he used a shell-shaped bronze scraper to remove the sticky sludge.

  Purified, Sanouk lifted Aleena from the floor and placed her within the depression in the altar’s top. At the first touch of her warmth, soft suckling noises sounded within the chamber, as the verdant stone molded itself to her body. Howling behind the gag, she writhed a
nd bucked in an effort to escape. Ever her eyes sought his, pleading for clemency.

  Perhaps I could find another? But no, he had delayed too long already. A moon’s turning was all the time the god had granted him between sacrifices. The only other conditions were that he should never sacrifice the innocent, or suffer a willing victim. Failing to meet Gathul’s demands would imperil his own soul and, by extension, destroy his plans.

  After clearing his mind of all distractions, Sanouk arched his back and spread his arms. Arcane words of summoning flowed from his throat, words given him by Undai, just before he had cut out the sorcerer’s tongue. “Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!”

  The incantation filled the chamber with a power far beyond mere spoken words, spread through the catacombs, seeped into the bones of the earth.

  “Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!”

  A stirring cold raised the fine hairs at Sanouk’s neck. The torches brightened from gold to blinding silver, and their leaping flames roared against the curving ceiling like claws of fire. A shadow drawn from the deepest reaches of the underworld oozed into the base of the greenstone altar, obscuring its odd luminosity. The unformed figures trapped within, those Sanouk had tried to deny existed, darted like fish in a pond. As that shifting darkness imbued the stone beneath her, turning its vibrant hue a featureless black, Aleena flailed all the more.

  “Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!”

  The spirit of Gathul flooded over Aleena’s skin, forming a vision of a girl soaked in boiling tar. Her screams cut off as that sludge squeezed around the gag and poured down her throat, yet still she fought.

  Sanouk stared, as enthralled as he had been when Undai had lain in Aleena’s place. He could not guess what it was to have the essence of a god envelope your flesh, its soul taste your soul, and neither did he care to find out.

  All at once, Aleena went still.

  “Yaazapa Gathul! El yettairath dakerr! Yaazapa Gathul!” Sanouk cried a fourth time, belatedly putting an end to the summoning.

  Gathul rose like oiled smoke from Aleena’s flesh. She appeared unscathed, but she stared at nothing, and might have been dead, save that her breasts rose and fell with each shuddering breath.

  The god’s nebulous shape swirled and pulsed as it moved before Sanouk and solidified. Even now, at this second summoning, Sanouk’s heart quailed with a terror so deep as to threaten his sanity. The color of old bruises, the god’s warty hide clung to hanging mounds of loose flesh. Six sagging breasts depended from its torso, capped by horn-like protrusions and tufts of wiry black hair, yet its unbound loins declared Gathul to be grossly male.

  Sanouk flung himself at the god’s clawed feet. “I have brought another offering, master,” he stammered, his fear bringing him not shame but pride. A lesser man would have soiled himself at the mere description of Gathul, and never would such a man dare speak with the deity.

  “Indeed you have, human,” Gathul said, its voice that of a millstone grinding corpses to pulp. Burning red eyes, a score at the least, each sunk into its lumpen face and about its skull, regarded Sanouk. A dribble of reeking muck spilled from the ill-formed rent that served as the god’s mouth. Sanouk jerked back his outstretched arms, lest any of that slaver touch him. “You have leave to make your petition,” Gathul invited, revealing a forest of ragged teeth pitted by corruption.

  Bent double, Sanouk scuttled to the altar. He upended a tiny jar, spilling a honey-thick line of resin over Aleena’s hands bound at her waist, then continued to her neck. When finished, he flung the empty jar away with shaking fingers, and retrieved a blazing torch.

  Where shock at Gathul’s touch had frozen Aleena, she thawed now. The girl wailed at the raging silver fire descending toward her flesh. Her struggles increased, tearing the delicate skin caught under her bindings.

  Sanouk cursed when one of her feet broke free and her legs began scissoring. Gathul’s pestilent flesh rippled with displeasure, and the god made a terrifying chuffing noise at Sanouk’s back. The lord tried to hold Aleena down, but she squirmed like an eel, enough to break free of the altar’s sucking grasp.

  “Fail to meet your obligations, human,” Gathul warned, “and our covenant is broken.”

  Sanouk threw himself on Aleena, terror closing his throat. Should he ever fail to appease the god’s hunger, the cost was his own soul—not locked away, but taken, imprisoned as Gathul’s eternal plaything. Desperate to avoid that, he struck Aleena, once and again. The third blow dazed her, and she went limp. The gag had loosened enough for her tongue to push it away.

  “Please, do not do this thing,” she begged.

  “I must, and I will,” he said, and jabbed the torch into the resin smeared over her belly and breasts.

  Sputtering flames quickly engulfed her. Her shrieks gave him pause only a moment, then he caught her up and spun from the altar, grinding his teeth against the red pain of his own sizzling skin. As he raced toward an open tomb, fire and smoke roiled before his eyes, blinding him. The reek of scorched hair and meat filled his nose. Flames poured down his throat, searing his lungs. He took one more step and threw the girl. Swirls of black smoke and leaping tongues of red-orange fire blocked his sight. Aleena was still screaming, screaming—

  Silence fell, and only the fast-fading echoes of her cries gave evidence that she had ever made a sound. With that abrupt quiet, the fiery pain that had swarmed over Sanouk, an agony that had begun to sink into his flesh with deadly hunger, vanished. Even knowing what to expect, he fell to his knees, a sooty arm held before his awed eyes. His flesh was nearly whole, the last blisters fading as he watched. Like steel before it, fire would never again threaten his life.

  His black eyes darted. Aleena screamed at him in terrible silence, not beautiful any longer, but a charred, undying ruin. Where Undai beat against an immovable wall of running blood, Aleena pounded her blackened fists against a barrier of flame. The agony of immolation was in her, marrow-deep, but she would not perish by fire … and neither would he, as long as she remained trapped within her fiery tomb.

  “You have done well, human,” Gathul mocked. The god paused before adding, “Your offerings have stirred my hungers. It would serve you well to bring the next sacrifice sooner.”

  Sanouk jerked his head around. “But, master, you allotted a moon’s turn between each offering.”

  “I have changed my mind, human, as is my privilege. Do my will, and all will be well with you. Fail, and your suffering will be limitless.”

  Before the last syllable was complete, the god’s hideous form blackened and shrunk to the size of a rat’s eye, then vanished with a blast of lightless energy that threw Sanouk against a rough stone wall.

  For a long time after Gathul departed, Sanouk sat in a stupor, looking on Undai and Aleena, but not really seeing them. Their sacrifices ensured he was invulnerable to steel and flame. With but two sacrifices, he could achieve much uncontended. With a few more, he would become impervious to all manner of deaths, save that wrought by time. All that pleased him, but what if Gathul once more changed their pact? “Do my will, and all will be well with you.”

  For the first time, Sanouk saw clearly the trap in dealing with the god of grief and avarice. Once the sacrifices began, they could not be halted, save by the death of the conjurer. And yet, if he became invulnerable to death by all means except long years, then he would need to make timely offerings the rest of his days. That obligation had never troubled Sanouk, for hapless fools were as numerous as grains of sand. But what if Gathul’s hungers became such that the god required a daily sacrifice … or more? Even fools would notice such a harvesting of their flock.

  Sanouk swallowed back the bile on his tongue, told himself Gathul would never make such impossible demands, for to do so would end the feedings altogether. Why would the god want that?

  Feeling better about the whole affair, confident that he had not erred in treating with Gathul, Sanouk departed the chambe
r to attend to the other intricacies of building his future kingdom.

  Chapter 2

  “Another fine victory for the Scorpion!” Lieutenant Thushar shouted to Rathe. Grinning as if the smell of ashes and death did not touch him, the strong-jawed Prythian tied back his long brown hair with a leather thong, then poured water from a leaky wooden bucket over his broad chest to rinse away blood and dust. Hours had passed since the village’s last defender had fallen, but the lieutenant’s green eyes still glinted with the heat of battle.

  The Scorpion, Captain Rathe Lahkurin, commander of the Ghosts of Ahnok, nodded in acceptance of Thushar’s praise, even as he held back what he thought of the so-called victory. It had been a slaughter of innocents, nothing less, and one of a dozen such massacres in the last year. Such mindless bloodletting had never sat well with him, and less so now.

  “Do not forget the Ghosts of Ahnok!” Sergeant Girod cried, slapping his scarred chest as if he alone had won the village. The other three sergeants chuckled uneasily. Girod, a brutish beast with a face to match his demeanor, the bastard of the head of the king’s council, was a man shunned. He had not risen through the ranks, as had all the other Ghosts, but rather had been placed amongst them. Such was unprecedented, and sparked suspicion that Girod was a spy.

  Shaded by spreading willows, Rathe ignored Girod and wetted his mane of black hair with a dented cook pot. The water was cold and clear and sweet, but did little to lift his mood. Around the broad wellspring’s ancient stone-and-mortar wall, the rest of his subordinates went back to scouring away the residue of battle, leaving it to mingle with the mud squishing between their toes.