The God King hotf-1 Read online

  Ellonlef blinked at him, dumbfounded. “Why would you say that?”

  Otaker gave her a wan smile. “Because you are a beautiful and capable woman. I would hate for you to grow old and not take the pleasure of having a special man at your beck and call.”

  Ellonlef stared at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “I’ll have to ask Lady Danara if she feels the same as you do.”

  Instead of being worried about such disclosure, Otaker merely shrugged. “She does. My wife noticed long before I did. If not for this morning, I would have no idea just how-” he cut off abruptly, lips tight, spun on his heel, and left her there. The first soldier he saw, Otaker began bawling orders, sending the poor young man running for his life.

  Although she allowed herself a moment of secret pleasure at his clumsy attempt to compliment her, Ellonlef quickly dismissed the entire conversation, pushed up the white sleeves of her robes, tied back the waves of her dark hair, and set to work.

  Straight away, she saw at least a dozen people cradling broken limbs. She called for a runner to replenish her dwindling supply of splints, strong wine, and swatarin, a potent herb used to induce deep sleep-or if you were one of the Madi’yin, the begging brothers, to bring on visions. While she waited for the splints, she doled out measures of both wine and swatarin. All became a blur of setting bones, cauterizing and bandaging gashes, pouring boiled wine into wounds oozing corruption, and removing those limbs beyond help.

  While each procedure seemed to take hours, the day itself fled faster than she would have thought possible. One after another, the wounded kept coming. She stopped counting after she had seen to two dozen. As dusk fell, the numbers began to dwindle, but were still steady. An hour before midnight, they ceased coming at all. By then, Ellonlef’s robes were smeared with blood and dust and she was weary to the bone, but she had a final task ahead of her before she retired.

  She strode from the now mostly quiet market, moving to the place where the Sister’s Tower had stood, a firemoss lamp held in her hand lighting the way. The water-soaked luminescent moss, stuffed in the glass sphere, gave off a comforting, pale amber glow. Despite the light, if she had not known where she was going, she would have become lost without any of the usual landmarks to guide her. Moreover, the dense, gritty fog still pervaded the air, obscuring clear sight of anything.

  When Ellonlef came to the farthermost scatter of rubble where the Sister’s Tower had stood, she halted, gazing about in stunned wonderment. The remains of the tower lay before her like the carcass of some giant whale washed up on the shore by an angry sea. In the darkness, one might have guessed the fortress wall was still intact, if only a third its normal height, but she knew that it had been reduced to a ragged heap. The Isle of Rida experienced tremors on occasion, but she had never seen or imagined so much destruction. Even seeing it with her own eyes, she had trouble grasping the magnitude of what had befallen Krevar.

  Moving to one side, she scanned about, calculating the best place to begin her hunt. Searching by daylight would have served her better, but many days would pass before she was afforded the luxury of using a day to her own purposes.

  Before digging in the rubble, she walked back and forth, holding the lamp high by its woven hemp handle. Her guess proved accurate, for soon after she began searching she found the crushed wicker chair she had been sitting in before the first tremor had shaken the tower. Moving closer to the chair, she tried not imagine that she would have looked the same, crushed into a nearly unrecognizable pulp, had she not escaped.

  As easy as the chair was to find, she searched over an hour for what she sought without luck. She was thinking that perhaps some passerby had found it already, when a man cleared his throat. Standing atop the heap of shattered stones, she turned to see Magus Uzzret regarding her from the safety of flat ground.

  “Looking for this?” he asked, holding up her tattered journal.

  Ellonlef scrambled down off the debris and moved to within arm’s reach of him. “Yes,” she answered guardedly. She had never written anything damning in the book, but an uninformed reader might come to a very different conclusion upon skimming her honest assessments of the people she lived amongst.

  Uzzret handed it over without a word, then looked eastward. “Nothing will ever be the same,” he muttered, voicing her earlier thoughts.

  Holding the journal in her hand, Ellonlef could not judge whether or not Uzzret had read her words, but it was not a stretch to believe that he had. “No, it will not,” Ellonlef agreed, running a palm over the journal’s battered leather cover.

  “As you know, the Magi Order is enlightened enough not to hold with the existence of gods,” he said in tones mingled with conceit for his order’s wisdom, and pity for all the wretched fools who disagreed. “Yet we recognize that others do. The destruction of the Three is and will continue to be a colossal blow to the minds of common folk.”

  Ellonlef looked up. “The faces of the Three may be destroyed,” she said, “but that does not mean the Three are dead. As well, the Creator of All, Pa’amadin, will heal both the lands and the hearts of men. He will guide his children, even if the Three cannot.”

  “Your blind faith is astonishing,” Uzzret said, incredulous. “Can you not see that it is as my order insists, and that no gods exist? We are but beasts, though some few of us are beasts with considering minds.” The old magus stroked his small white beard, his dark eyes studying her.

  Ellonlef imagined snatching hold of that ridiculous tuft and yanking it out by the roots. She was instantly mortified by the thought, knowing it was beneath both her and her order. “In that, you are wrong.”

  “Perhaps … perhaps not,” he countered smoothly. “Perhaps, as you say, Pa’amadin-a god of notable indifference, among other questionable attributes-will indeed rescue the world. Though it would appear that, as usual, he has abandoned men and the world. How can you put your faith in a being that can so readily turn away from his creation-hide his face, as it were?”

  “Perhaps,” she said tiredly, “we can speak of this later.” To her mind, it was not a surrender to his argument. There simply was no reason to waste her breath trying to convince him of the ultimate goodness of Pa’amadin, or that of any of the gods. They could argue back and forth for many long years and never reach an agreement, so to try was a fool’s errand.

  “To be sure,” Uzzret said with a self-satisfied smirk, obviously feeling he had won the argument. He walked away, leaving her alone.

  Ellonlef sat down on a block of sandstone. She stayed there until the ruined face of Hiphkos rose over the eastern horizon. As what was left of the Goddess of Wisdom climbed into the sky, Ellonlef wished she had not remained out of doors. Instead of a cool, comforting blue, Hiphkos’s light shown down upon the world through a face of boiling fire and ash. Of Memokk and Attandaeus, there was no sign they had ever existed, unless it was the scattered aura slowly expanding like a band of stars away from Hiphkos.

  “All is changed,” Ellonlef said, fearing that what had happened the day before was only a beginning of an end to all things.

  As if to mark the moment, a fiery cascade of falling stars slashed the night. The tears of Pa’amadin, Ellonlef thought, wondering if the god she held in the highest esteem actually wept, or was merely sending further signs of his wrath, portents of some greater destruction yet to come. Unable to bear the sight any longer, she looked away.

  Chapter 8

  “You look terrible,” Hazad said when Kian came into view, escorted by Ishin, the leader of the Asra a’Shah.

  “So I don’t get a welcome kiss?” Kian said with a weary grin, clasping the big man’s hand. To be back among friends filled his heart with an indescribable gladness. There had been times on his long march when he felt he was the only living man striding the torn face of the world.

  Hazad vacated the rock he was using as a seat and pushed Kian down in his place near a smoldering bonfire. The smoky fire was not meant to ward against cold, but rath
er to drive off the swarms of stinging insects. The stone was not shaped for comfortable sitting, and the fire’s acrid smoke burned the eyes, but Kian welcomed anything that resembled comfort after trudging for days through the swamp. Where the company had cut a trail on the way to Varis’s temple, the quaking had changed the face of the marshes completely. Bogs had appeared where there had been none, and where they had been, wide mudflats studded with slabs of jagged bedrock now dominated. He did not want to think on the countless fallen trees he’d had to scramble over, or go under, or skirt around, all without even the meanest provisions. Kian was absolutely certain that the last few days had been the most trying of his life.

  Azuri shoved a plump skin into Kian’s hand. “It’s-”

  Kian gulped what he thought was fresh water, but liquid fire filled his throat.

  “-jagdah,” Azuri finished with a sardonic smirk.

  “Damn me!” Kian rasped, coughing. He made to hurl the skin away, but Hazad snatched it out of his hand.

  Leveling a fierce scowl at him, Hazad said, “Are you mad? Men have been killed for lesser offences than tossing out perfectly good spirits.” To quench his affront, he took a long pull.

  “Water would have been better,” Kian said. “I’ve been running through this damned swamp for three days now, living off black water, slime, and grubs.”

  “Grubs?” Hazad said in revulsion, and promptly dribbled more jagdah into his throat.

  “Perhaps you should have found a horse,” Azuri suggested.

  “A horse!” Kian laughed darkly. “How could I have, when the lot of you cowards rode away with them?”

  Azuri rolled his eyes. Several of the Asra a’Shah, who suffered no slight to their honor even in jest, began muttering amongst themselves. Kian ignored them; he was too exhausted to worry over hurt feelings.

  “Here,” Ishin said in his thick Geldainian accent. He handed over a fresh waterskin and a wooden bowl filled with a thin broth and floating globs of pale meat.

  Kian rinsed out his mouth with water, then ravenously tucked into the stew. At the first bite, he flung the bowl aside and began retching. Ishin glared, the whites of his eyes prominent against his near-black skin.

  Azuri flicked an invisible speck of dust from his immaculate sleeve-how the man stayed clean in a swamp was beyond Kian. “Now you know why I gave you the jagdah first. It has the blessed capacity to kill the taste of anything you eat afterward.”

  Gasping, wondering if he had been poisoned, Kian wiped his lips with a shaky hand. With a Geldainian curse, Ishin snatched the bowl off the muddy ground and strode to the far side of the fire, and there began conversing with a group of his fellows, gesticulating with the empty bowl for emphasis. Two frowned and nodded in agreement to whatever he was saying, but the others laughed at Ishin’s expense and offered Kian sympathetic glances. Apparently, even Ishin’s brethren considered his cooking undesirable.

  Hazad took a third pull of jagdah, then sighed with delight. “You should have been here last night,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m certain Ishin broiled up a pile of sheep flop and drowned it in a gravy of dog vomit.”

  “Enough!” Kian cried, wrenching the skin of spirits from the big man. After two searing gulps, the liquid fire of his homelands did as promised, searing away all taste of the stew, and likely all meals he would eat in the next year.

  After catching his breath, Kian asked, “Is there nothing else to eat besides-”

  “Snake-fish stew?” Azuri said mildly.

  Kian’s throat spasmed in revolt. He closed his eyes, willed his guts to settle. “Anything but that, yes,” he said when he could.

  Hazad handed him a none too clean cheesecloth bag. “Salted meat. It should do.”

  Kian stared at him with disgust, but rather than berate Hazad for holding out, he untied the bag, pulled out a thick slab of dried beef and stuffed it into his mouth. To make a point, he ate the entire contents, studiously ignoring Hazad’s fretting.

  “That, my friend,” Kian said when he finished, “was most excellent!”

  “I hope you enjoyed it,” Azuri said dryly, “because that was the last of anything palatable. As we are days from any settlement and any chance for refit, it is starve or suffer Ishin’s fare.”

  Kian considered that for a time, mentally forming a map of Aradan and getting his bearings. “Fortress El’hadar is nearest, though I would rather not go to that accursed place.”

  “We have no choice,” Hazad said with no small regret. Few men willingly ventured to El’hadar, what with its Black Keep and the half-mad lord marshal who ruled it. “El’hadar is maybe three days ahead, and right on the edge of the marshes. Yuzzika is easily a fortnight south and east from here.”

  “Then El’hadar it is,” Kian said, unconsciously counting heads of the men around the fire.

  Azuri guessed what he was doing. “Since first night, you are the only man to have returned. We sent out search parties, but they found nothing. With you, there are now twenty-four men.”

  Kian sighed heavily. Not counting himself, Hazad, Azuri, and the prince, the company had left Ammathor with sixty Asra a’Shah. He had never lost so many under his command. Fury bloomed in his heart, but he had no enemy to attack, unless he drew his sword and began hacking away at fallen trees, or the earth itself.

  Letting his head droop, he scrubbed fingers through his matted hair. Of course, there was an enemy, a young man that Kian had done his best to avoid thinking about since fleeing from the temple that Varis had led them to. Even now, he decided morning would be soon enough to broach that subject.

  “Do we, at the least, have enough bedding to go around?” Kian asked.

  Hazad nodded. “Come, and let father Hazad tuck you in.”

  “As long as you do not try to swaddle my bottom,” Kian snarled.

  Chuckling, Hazad led him a little way from the bonfire to a cleared area filled with a dozen crude, open-walled tents. Within the tents were raised beds made of branches that had been lashed together with vines. Insects were always a problem in the marshes, but the firemoss hunters’ trick of raising your bed ensured that most of the bugs that scurried about on the ground after dark stayed on the ground.

  “You sleep on the right,” Hazad said. “The left is mine.”

  Kian stifled a groan. Hazad had the unfortunate habit of rolling about in the night and groping anyone he was sharing a tent with. He snored as well, loud and unceasingly.

  Kian was too exhausted to care. “Wake me for the last watch.”

  “No.” Hazad said, shaking his head. “Sleep. You need it.”

  Kian was not about to argue.

  After shaking out his blankets to ensure no spiders, ants, or worse had made a nest, Kian unbuckled his swordbelt and set it near to hand, then flopped down on the makeshift bed with a relieved grunt. He had caught only snatches of sleep since he ordered the retreat, and the prospect of getting close to a full night of uninterrupted rest made him sigh in gratitude. He started to drift off as soon as his eyes closed, the low chatter of those men not on watch acting like a lullaby.

  From seemingly a mile away Ishin said, “Fenahk?” His voice carried the barest touch of alarm. “Your watch is not over for another turn of the glass. Unless you have something to report, get back on the line.”

  Kian found himself unconsciously waiting for a response. Of all the men he had ever hired, the Asra a’Shah were the most duty-bound he had met. They simply did not shirk responsibility, and not one of them would have come in from their turn at watch unless something was wrong. The horses became restive, stamping their hooves and snorting.

  “Fenahk, are you … well?”

  Kian’s eyes flared open at Hazad’s harsh, if quiet, curse. He sat up to find everyone staring at the saffron-robed figure standing just at the edge of the firelight. At first, Kian could not see what all the fuss was about, then Fenahk took a halting step closer to the fire, and Kian’s insides twisted. He knew Fenahk, as he knew all the me
n under his command, and this was not that man. Like all the Geldainians, Fenahk was not so large as an Izutarian, but rather a short, slender fellow. This man’s bulk rivaled Hazad’s. Yet there was more. It was as if something huge and malformed had donned Fenahk’s skin like a coat, and that too-small garment was threadbare and coming apart.

  “Kiaaan,” Fenahk croaked in a voice that in no way resembled that of a man.

  “Everyone, stay where you are,” Azuri warned in his eerily calm manner.

  Ishin seemed not to hear or see what everyone else did. He angrily strode forward. “Get back to your post!” he ordered.

  Fenahk’s eyes, black through and through, locked on the approaching mercenary. Kian was sure those orbs had not been so large when Fenahk had stepped into the firelight. Ishin halted abruptly, uncertainty flickering across his features. He stood but four paces from Fenahk. Whatever he saw at that short distance caused him to slowly reach for the hilt of the scimitar strapped across his back. All at once, everything was in motion.

  Sword in hand, Kian leapt to his feet. Hazad ran toward Ishin. Azuri produced a gleaming dagger. Most of the Asra a’Shah dragged their great scimitars free, while the rest hastily strung their bows. Fenahk rushed forward far more quickly than his previously shambling gait had suggested was possible. Ishin was the first to die.

  With a demonic roar, Fenahk’s mouth gaped wide, shredding his cheeks and revealing a bloody, slavered maw full of slanting ebon teeth. Ishin screamed when that mouth snapped closed over his neck and shoulder. There came a gruesome crunching noise as those teeth sank deep and ground together. Ishin’s shrieks drowned out all other sound. Fenahk shook Ishin back and forth like dog worrying a rat, then cast him aside. The Asra a’Shah rolled limply in death, torn nearly in half.

  As the Geldainians closed, the thing that had been Fenahk spread wide its arms. The saffron robe, and the flesh beneath those robes, tore apart in a spray of gore. The creature did not so much grow in size, as burst forth from weak constraints. Old flesh fell away to expose a creature of thick and twisted bones, freakish slabs of muscle, and blood-red skin covered in needle-like spines. The demonic beast straightened to its full height of at least twelve feet, and bellowed with a sound like a falling mountain.