The God King (Book 1) (Heirs of the Fallen) Page 2

  “A fair toss,” Hazad said, the rumbling he had heard apparently forgotten. “But I could’ve done better.”

  “Then do so,” Kian invited.

  Hazad’s eyes flew wide in mock astonishment, as he slapped his palms around the leather belt holding up his trousers. “Seems I’ve misplaced my dagger.”

  “Use mine,” Azuri said with a wry grin. He drew a blade as beautiful as it was sharp from the sheath hanging from his belt. The dagger suited his coldly handsome features. In bearing and dress, Azuri was more of a foppish lordling than a hardened mercenary, but Kian had seen many a drunken lout back down from the fair-haired Izutarian after taking a closer look into his gray eyes. Those poor fools who misjudged Azuri had suffered. Greatly.

  Hazad was unfazed by Azuri’s troubling stare. “My throw would snap your pathetic little knife,” he boasted. “Besides, I’d hate to mar the blade with sap, and leave you carrying around tarnished steel.”

  As he tucked the weapon back into its sheath, Azuri said to Kian, “Rest assured that yours was a marvelous throw. As for this cur, it’s more likely that he would make a eunuch of himself with a dagger, than toss it in the right direction.”

  A wide grin split Hazad’s beard. Without a word, he hawked and spat. Azuri cried in outrage and leaped backward, nearly losing his footing in the swamp’s prevalent mud and moldering leaves. “You son of a poxy whore!”

  Hazad answered with a mocking laugh. He was the only man Kian had ever seen who could put Azuri out of sorts. He was also the only man who could do so without fear of dying. “Could be my mother was a working girl, but that beats being the child of a swineherd.”

  “By the gods good and wise, you will not speak so of my mother,” Azuri snarled. “No one in my lineage has ever been involved in the herding of animals, let alone swine.”

  “Of course not,” Hazad drawled, rolling his eyes. “What was it you told me? Ah, yes, I remember now. You were born upon the snowy sheets of a king's bed.”

  Azuri’s lips writhed. “I’ve never claimed noble birth, to you or anyone else. However….”

  As the two began squabbling in earnest, Kian could not suppress a smile. Different as they looked from one another, they were as close as brothers, him included.

  The three of them had found each other after the kingdom of Falseth had crushed Izutar in war. Defeat had led to the enslavement of countless Izutarians, and since most ice-born folk believed that dying free was better than languishing in chains, legions of starving Izutarian children had been sent off into the world to fend for themselves. Kian and his companions had ended up braving the wild streets of Marso, a Falsethian seaport half a thousand leagues from the icy steppes and forested mountains of Izutar.

  Back then, stealing food and keeping clear of slavers had been their greatest concerns. With the help of good sharp steel and Kian’s guidance, their fortunes had eventually changed. Becoming mercenaries, however, was not an endeavor that garnered fame and glory, but it had served them well enough. Especially in Aradan, where new rebellions against the King's City of Ammathor, and even the Ivory Throne itself, rose up almost daily.

  Another benefit for Kian and his friends was the constant danger from nomadic Bashye clans and Tureecian raiders up from the south, both of which preyed on rich merchants who bought the swords of deadly men to guard them. Indeed, Aradan had her troubles, but those troubles ensured that Kian and his companions stayed awash in gold.

  Leaving Hazad and Azuri to their quarrel, Kian retrieved his dagger. After wiping sap off the blade, he armed sweat from his brow. The sun had been up less than two hours, but already the Qaharadin Marshes sweltered. Insects droned everywhere, seeking feasts of sweat or blood. With equal abandon, snakes and lizards slithered among high boughs or underfoot. Unnamed beasts screamed and howled in the steamy green depths of the swamp. Birds called and flitted in colorful flashes, but of the sixty-man company of golden-robed Asra a’Shah warriors that Kian had hired for this mission, he saw not a one. Like the folk of Aradan, the men of Geldain were more accustomed to sand and sun than dripping marshes. Despite that, they blended effortlessly into this foreign landscape.

  Swatting a host of midges away from his face, Kian turned to study the stone temple. Not for the first time, he wondered how Varis had found it. Kian had searched the area himself, but never saw a thing. Of course, even sitting in a clearing, the temple was hard to see. Its pitted surface was covered in creepers and witchmoss. Invading vines had crumbled its stones, giving it the look of a humpbacked beast stricken with leprosy. Around its edges, where the shadows lay thickest, he detected a faint blue light. He was pretty sure that shimmering glow hadn’t been there a few minutes ago, but guessed it was some trick of the sunlight trickling through the dense boughs overhead.

  What is keeping that highborn brat? Kian wondered, growing uneasy. He turned back to Hazad and Azuri. “Tell me what you saw in the temple,” he commanded, interrupting their argument.

  Hazad started first. “Same as you. Rotten stone, moss, spiders. As to anything temple-ish, there was nothing, save maybe that crusty old tub Varis was so interested in. Far as I could tell, it would barely serve as a privy pot.”

  Kian put the question to Azuri, who repeated the assessment, though it seemed to pain him to agree with Hazad.

  “If none of us saw anything of worth,” Kian said, “then what’s keeping Varis? He’s been in there at least an hour.”

  “Who knows?” Hazad said. “But the boy is a strange one, even among Aradaner highborn. All he speaks of, when he lowers himself to talk to any of us, are the lost glories of Aradan, and what could have been if the right men had sat the Ivory Throne. I guess that old book he’s always reading has filled his head full of nonsense. More a scholar than a prince, he is. Worse than a magus, or even a Sister of Najihar. No one should read so much. Bad for the eyes.”

  Azuri shook his head. “Pa’amadin grant that your willful ignorance remains your curse alone.” Before Hazad could respond, Azuri said, “As for Prince Varis, you have a point. The boy seems to have more interest in forgotten kings, than becoming a king himself.”

  “The princeling is far down the line of succession,” Kian countered. “King Simiis may not be long for the world, old as he is, but Varis’s father, Prince Sharaal, is hale, as are Varis’s brothers. There’s no reason the boy should worry about sitting the Ivory Throne for a good long while, if ever. And since he was able to leave the King’s City so easily, I’d say no one is worried about him ever sitting the throne.”

  “It’s never foolish to prepare for the throne when you are of royal blood,” Azuri said. “The days are dark in Aradan, and growing darker. Who can say who will stand and who will fall, lowborn or high?”

  Kian brushed back his sweat-drenched hair. “Highborn plots are of no matter to us, unless we can use them to our advantage. For now, our only task is to see the princeling safe back to Ammathor, where we will collect our due.”

  Hazad nodded in agreement, but Azuri pressed on. “We tasted war with our mothers’ milk, and as boys we feasted on the meat of suffering and want. As I recall, neither flavor was sweet. For all I care, every Aradaner to the last can rot in the Thousand Hells, but I will guard against getting caught too deeply in their rivalries. If that means worrying over the dealings of highborn in order to know when best to leave this realm, so be it.”

  “Agreed,” Hazad said, earning a dismissive snort from Azuri.

  Studying the temple, Kian said, “If the prince wants to stay here for a while longer, then we’ll let him. But we need to make sure he hasn’t broken his fool neck wandering around in there.”

  Hazad nodded. “A dead prince is an unpaying prince, I always say.”

  Azuri threw his hands up in exasperation. “When?”

  “When what?” Hazad asked.

  “When have you ever said that?”

  “Just now. You must’ve heard me, or why ask?”

  Azuri ground his teeth together. “When,
before this very second, have you ever said such a stupid thing?”

  “What’s stupid about it?” Hazad asked, blinking in bewilderment. “Unless you know something I don’t, a dead prince cannot pay, can he?”

  “Walk with me,” Kian interrupted, shaking his head.

  Staring daggers at each other, Hazad and Azuri joined Kian on the way to the temple. They were twenty paces from the tumbledown entrance when the earth shuddered underfoot with a low, almost inaudible groan. The trio halted, legs spread for balance.

  “I told you it was an earthquake,” Hazad announced, looking smug and nervous at the same time.

  When the shaking ceased, hidden Asra a’Shah called out to one another. Birds that had been sheltering in the boughs of tall trees took to the sky in a discordant thunder of beating wings.

  “Well,” Hazad said to Azuri, “what do you have to say for yourself now?”

  Azuri’s face darkened. “Is it not enough that you were right?”

  “No, not nearly enough. I’d like to hear you say it. That, and how troubled your heart is to know that you have, once again, slandered my good name.”

  “Very well,” Azuri said, drawing himself up to his full height, which was still a few inches shorter than Hazad. “Besides looking like a bloated hog, you apparently have the mystical perception of such foul creatures, at least enough to know the difference between earthquakes and bubbling bog gas. Now, perhaps you should put those senses to good use, and find us a bushel of truffles.”

  Hazad shook his head sadly. “You are the most hateful, black-hearted fiend I’ve ever had the misfortune of talking to. I should—”

  “Enough!” Kian snapped, his eyes fixed on the temple. The shimmers of pale blue light he had dismissed earlier were escaping the structure’s numerous cracks.

  Before he could point that out, a stronger tremor hit, and the deep growl of grinding stone filled the forest. Another jolt knocked the men to their bellies. Peering through a fluttering screen of falling leaves, Kian saw that the temple’s domed roof was sagging inward, ready to collapse. There, too, glowed that eerie light, and it seemed to be getting brighter by the second.

  “To the prince!” Kian bellowed.

  Before anyone could react, he was up and running, each stride precarious on ground that was no longer firm. He had not taken four strides when the light flared within the temple, and a gusting blast of frigid air sent him soaring back the way he had come. Before he hit the ground, a strand of crackling azure fire, no thicker than his little finger, licked out of the crumbling temple and crawled over his body. A tingling, frosty heat sank through his skin and wormed into his marrow, and Kian began screaming.

  Chapter 3

  Atop the Sister’s Tower, rising a hundred feet above Fortress Krevar’s wall walks, Sister Ellonlef sat rigid in a wicker chair, her eyes wide. Until that first jolting rattle had shaken the earth, she had been writing in her journal and enjoying the fading cool of the previous night.

  Her enjoyment, and the glum thoughts of the day’s coming heat, were now the last things on her mind. She knew an earthquake when she felt one.

  A small tremor, nothing more, she consoled herself, even as she inspected the tower’s floor and walls for any signs of damage. There were none, and the tremors had ceased as quickly as they had come. She took a shaky breath and settled back into her chair. Now, where was I?

  Her fingers brushed the journal in her lap, and her gaze traced the precise lines of script she had previously written. Over the last nine years, she had climbed the tower’s spiraling stairs every morning before the sun rose over the Kaliayth Desert. Once at its top, she collected her thoughts and prepared for the coming day. Over those years, she had come to understand that Aradan was suffering a slow death brought on by the internal squabbling of the king and his lords, and the greatest evidence of that was Krevar itself.

  Fortress Krevar had once been well-supplied to help defend against Tureecian raiding parties surging up out of the south, but now the stronghold lay all but forgotten at the edge of the desert, and mostly left to fend for itself. Such anonymity might have been welcome in places that could sustain life, but Krevar was built on the verge of the Kaliayth Desert and the Qaharadin Marshes, where even day-to-day survival was a brutal taskmaster that molded its inhabitants into a hard and bitter folk.

  Normally, those were the observations she chronicled. But not today. Today, it seemed, was a day of omens, and the trembling of the earth was the least of them. Against her will, she looked out of the western window to the sky beyond.

  The moons had drawn together in the heavens, forming what looked like a monstrous eye. The greatest of the Three, the face of the goddess Hiphkos, shone pale blue. Before her hung the middling moon, Memokk, which blazed with an amber light. Least among the Three, Attandaeus, was a crimson sphere that formed the pupil. That eye glared down on the world with undeniable malevolence. Before sunrise, the moons combined light had cast a greenish-red glow of putrefaction over the land. Now, with the sunlight gradually reaching the day’s full strength, the evil stare had become nearly transparent.

  Trying to avoid grim thoughts, Ellonlef looked back at her journal. Soon she would deliver the leather-bound volume to King Simiis of Aradan. She would give a second copy to the Mother of the Najihar Order on the tiny island-city of Rida, which lay twelve leagues off Aradan’s eastern shore. From her current perch, home was nearly two hundred leagues distant. It might as well have been a thousand. A year left, she mused, and her term of service and study would conclude.

  She traded her journal and ink-stained scribing reed for a cup of warm tea. Taking a sip, she guessed that Lord Marshal Otaker would be looking for her by now.

  Ellonlef stood up and walked to the window overlooking the verge of land that separated the desert from the hazy green line marking the edge of the Qaharadin Marshes. That narrow slip of terrain was a dreadful place of reeking bogs and quicksand, scrubby brush with long thorns, stinging insects beyond count, and all manner of creeping death. It was said to be much worse within the marshes.

  More than once she had accompanied Lord Marshal Otaker along Aradan’s western border from Krevar to Yuzikka to El’hadar and back, but never had she journeyed into the swamps. One day soon she would, and become the first of her order to do so. That particular trek would come just before she returned home, likely in late winter, when it was not so blindingly hot. Though common folk believed Sisters of Najihar were trained mainly to study, give counsel, and serve as healers, the truth was that they were adept in everything from history to warfare to personal combat. A Sister of Najihar could take care of herself in nearly all situations, and her order rarely produced fools. Ellonlef did not count herself a fool, and surely not enough of one to go blindly into the Qaharadin.

  A breeze, dry as crypt bones, with just a hint of the day’s coming heat, rustled the pages of her journal. She lifted her face to the desert’s breath, eyes lidded. Through her long lashes, she noticed the moons again, and felt a tickle of dismay wriggle up her spine and latch onto the back of her skull. She raised a trembling hand to her lips, and a cry of shock fought in vain to get past her clenched teeth.

  The menacing eye formed by the Three was rapidly changing. Memokk was sinking into the breadth of Hiphkos, and the edges of the amber moon had a red-and-black aura. All across its face jagged lines were spreading like cracks in an eggshell. By heartbeats, Attandaeus fell into Memokk and Hiphkos.

  Behind Krevar’s outer wall, other folk began to notice what Ellonlef was seeing. At first, only a few frightened voices rang out, then more, as the folk of Krevar became aware that something terrible was happening. As the faces of the Three joined into a mass of what could be nothing less than fire and ash, men’s shouts and women’s screams mingled into a horrible song.

  “This cannot be,” Ellonlef said, her voice harsh with disbelief.

  Then, far to the north and out in the marshes, a filament of blue light lanced skyward. Almost as soon a
s seen, it vanished. Before she could wonder over that, a violent quaking struck the land, much stronger than the one earlier. Out on the desert, a rapidly spreading crack raced south toward the fortress. As it widened and lengthened, the shuddering of the earth increased, and dust churned into a rising wall. The crack slashed across a road, swallowing a shrieking crofter, his vegetable cart, and team of lowing oxen.

  As the world broke with a snarl of rupturing stone, Ellonlef dropped her hands to the windowsill and held on for dear life. The grinding roar filled her body, made her teeth ache, her eyes water. Like a blow from a titan’s axe, the gaping crack in the earth reached the fortress. It passed under the northern wall, and then zigzagged through the enclosed town.

  Terrorized folk began running, but many tumbled into the widening gash. A heartbeat later, Krevar’s northern wall folded in on itself. Sandstone blocks the size of houses shattered and crumbled, falling down and down. Dust billowed upward, quickly obscuring the destruction. The Sister’s tower shivered like a dying animal and began listing sideways. Ellonlef screamed, but her voice was lost under the weight of the earth’s stony cry.

  A year! she thought wildly. Just a year left—

  The tower’s sliding, toppling motion came to a jarring halt. Ellonlef sailed through the air and slammed against a wall. A foot to one side, and she would have flown out of a window and plummeted to her death.

  Although the tower’s pitch was not severe, Ellonlef clawed her way up the wall like a lizard scuttling up the side of a cliff, ripping her nails in a frantic bid to gain her feet. Once standing, she rushed to the doorway, longing more than anything to see the stairs waiting beyond.

  She had just reached the door, when a tingle of warning raced over her skin. She wanted nothing more than to escape the tower before it collapsed and buried her alive, but she had to know what was coming.