It was Theroun’s debasement Jornath wanted.
Stepping from his ronin-cat, Theroun walked forward with steady strides. Khorel Jornath’s haughty eyes watched him, a pleased smile twisting his thick lips. He lowered his hand and the rest of the Hakir did also, in a smooth unison like a hive of bees.
An eerie silence held the ranks as Theroun approached.
“I agree to your terms.” Theroun stopped fifteen paces from Khorel Jornath. “Single combat. And all the men and women behind me go free, including those behind the palace gates. But single combat means you take no other minds into yours while we do this, just as I would let no other fighter into the ring with us for a duel of swords. Break your word, and lose your honor.”
Theroun had made an astute guess. Jornath’s eager eyes darkened. Not in rage, but in a quiet thoughtfulness, his head tilting as if regarding Theroun anew. Slowly, his lips curled up in a smile of pure pleasure. The press of a thousand minds lifted from Theroun’s body, the ocean rolling back. Standing tall, Theroun twisted his neck to crack it, then took in a deep breath.
“Then let us begin,” Jornath spoke.
“Let us begin.”
A roaring silence filled Theroun’s ears. The fighters around him were spectrally quiet, though burning filled the city. Red flames scorched the night, casting a diabolical glow over the black company of the Kreth-Hakir and the Menderian army. Through drifting char Theroun watched his opponent. Khorel Jornath did nothing at first, only eyed Theroun with a watchfulness in his gaze. He made no move to draw the two-handed broadsword that rode his back, nor to claim the knives at his belt; only crossed his arms over his herringbone jerkin and stood there, waiting to see what his opponent would try.
Had it been a battle of swords, Theroun would have let the man wait. Watching Jornath’s feet, his posture, his readiness. The first warrior to charge in a duel was often the first to become dismembered. But this was a duel waged inside their minds, a terrain not foreign to Theroun, only utilized in a different way. He knew how to judge a commander’s will from a bloody field, and he could read Jornath’s utterly at-ease posture. Every expression the man had was known, every grip of muscle in his lips and cheek, and at the corners of his subtly-creased eyes. Theroun could read the tense attention of Jornath’s comrades as they watched – feigning indifference but too rigidly eager as they anticipated this duel.
A duel which was clearly off-tactic for the Kreth-Hakir. Jornath was stepping out on a thin blade, going after Theroun in personal vendetta and without the mind-support of his Brethren. But what Theroun didn’t know, was why, and what Theroun also didn’t know was just how this duel was supposed to begin.
Or what would happen once it did.
The heavy waiting would have broken most men by now, but it only pissed Theroun off, making him go still – to a place that knew only the strike. Theroun made no move, matching Jornath and doing him one emptier. A vast nothingness flowed between them. Theroun could almost feel it swirling around him; a place where emotion should have been. Where one man should have hated the other, snarling for his enemy’s death.
Yet Theroun felt nothing. No animosity. No wrath. No brimstone and fire, though it burned on all around them. Here, facing this herringbone-clad commander, all he could see was his own posture before him. His own face, impassive upon the battlefield. His own arms crossed at his chest, a mirror to himself but taller, broader. Theroun’s own empty-ready eyes staring back in a face with thick lips, cutting cheekbones, and heavy eyelids.
Shock snapped Theroun, cracked his ready equilibrium. He’d felt no mental attack, it was only the surprise of seeing his own self in this other commander. In that moment something ripped out from Theroun, lashing like a serpent’s strike. Thrusting the barbed black spear he had previously imagined straight to Khorel Jornath – as if it was a real weapon and not just willful intent.
Jornath flinched. The man’s big face twitched aside and opened in surprise, as if a snake had actually struck at him. The dominance dropped from his lips. A leaning press upon Theroun’s psyche lifted in that moment, something Theroun had not even known was there. As if the weight of a mountain had evaporated from Theroun’s shoulders – the solid strength of Jornath’s own mind.
A subtle trick that Theroun had not known was there until he’d broken it. And now, somehow, the Black Viper of the Aphellian Way had bested Jornath for a second time in as many days, but it didn’t last. Theroun could no more wield the black spear in his mind than he could control a wild snake, and when Khorel Jornath’s expression of dominance returned, it came like a hurricane, his gaze cold as death.
“Kneel, Theroun den’Vekir.”
The force of his command hit Theroun like an avalanche. It wasn’t a mountain, it was the upheaval of the earth. It was a pummeling of sand and stone, river and chasm, oceans and thunder. It was the sound of wreckage and the feel of ruin, of the plates of the earth grinding together and shaking everything into obliteration.
Theroun’s resistance snapped. His black mind-spear was shattered beneath that utterly dominant force. Driven to his knees, one hand slapped the cobbles to keep himself from being plowed down altogether. His jaw snapped closed, teeth hitting each other so hard he clipped a piece from the side of his tongue. The iron tang of blood filled his mouth. Pain blossomed in red streamers from his old injury. Pain devoured him, a ripping agony that had no end, only the horror of the now. Head hanging, eyes tight, spasms ripped through Theroun’s body.
“Fight him, Theroun!” Merra’s roar cut the burning night.
Somewhere in his annihilation, Theroun felt Khorel Jornath take a knee before him. The big man whispered at his ear, “Fight me, Black Viper. Show me you are better than I am. Show me your willful defiance, and I will let your fighters go free.”
Pain was no stranger to Theroun. For years he had lived with it, struggled with it – managed it. Daily, he had kept an arrangement with his war-maimed body, practicing the breathing and stretching that made his hours livable. He used that now, drawing slow breaths, sending it deep into his injured side, using his chest’s bellows to work out the gripping agony. Gradually, he re-learned how to think. He remembered that he was a General among men. He remembered that he had killed over five hundred fighters in combat over the decades. He remembered that he was the Black Viper of the Aphellian Way, ruthless and utterly cold.
And he remembered that if he’d fucked Khorel Jornath twice, he could do it again.
Slowly, Theroun’s spasms came under control. Fighting the weight of Khorel’s enormous attack, Theroun’s head came up. Cold rage filled him. A darkness so vast he couldn’t even begin to see the edges of it. A darkness so terrible that a part of Theroun ran screaming, to see what lived inside himself. A cold uncaring that devoured the hearts of men.
The Scorpion had stung, but the Viper was far from beaten.
A bloody snarl split Theroun’s lips. “No matter how you send me to Halsos’ Hells, I’ll be waiting – for when you get here.”
And then Theroun laughed.
He laughed and laughed, his body bright with a sensation he didn’t understand. It wasn’t pain, more like a terrible pleasure. Something of heinous power searing every limb, it rushed through him, exhilarating; a hot fire like poison in his veins. A liberation that was part of his very core – a man who had nothing left to lose. It filled Theroun, taking him into madness and pushing back the pain, and with it came an image of searing red eyes in the center of his mind, willing him to take it in.
To take it in, and obliterate the world.
“Stop!” Khorel Jornath commanded, his grey eyes wide in horrified surprise. “Cease!”
But his commands had no effect. The bright poison that had taken Theroun was all-consuming, and the pressure of Khorel Jornath’s mind evaporated like mist before a falling star. The burning eyes grew in Theroun’s mind, wild, incalculable in their unimaginable horrors. Theroun doubled over, laughing, mad. And with it came freedom as those burning ey
es rushed up to take him – to swallow him whole.
A boot kicked out, connecting with Theroun’s face. He sprawled to the paving-stones, his vision blacking out. The red eyes were struck from his mind as his body seized. Theroun lost time, flicking through unconsciousness. Some part of him felt the Kreth-Hakir Brethren surge in, clamping manacles about his wrists, manacles that carried the thrusting weight of their combined minds. Pain lanced Theroun’s body, tripled, quadrupled. Agony left him unable to think as he was cuffed and forced up, dragged over the cobbles with his knees scraping.
“Theroun!” Merra’s shout behind him was raw. “Get off him, ye bastards!”
“Take your warriors and go, woman! Now!” Theroun heard Khorel Jornath roar. “Take your lives and go!!”
But Theroun could not even growl a response through his strangling throat. Screams rose inside him as another wave of spasms hit, as he choked them back with clenched teeth. Through the skirling ash he felt the mass of Elsthemi heel away, marked by the strangled roars of cats and the whinnies of horses yanked by hard hands. Theroun heard the groan of the palisade gates crank open, rattling their chains like bones of the damned.
A mass of cats fled out through the gates of Fhekran Palace as Theroun was dragged into the grounds. Cat-musk flowed by Theroun, the rank sweat of men and horses departing the palace like ghosts before the torch. Some sane part of him understood that Khorel Jornath had kept his word. That he’d allowed what was left of the Elsthemi and defected Menderians to go free. That Jornath wielded the Kreth-Hakir to urge the allied forces into departing without any further loss of life, even though they would have fought and died to the last man or woman.
There were no words. There was no resistance. Just the yowls of cats and the jingle of metal as the last of the Elsthemi army fled Lhen Fhekran – leaving only the roar of fire in the night.
CHAPTER 1 – ELOHL
The man with golden Inkings stared out at the dawn and had no remembrance of who he was.
The eastern sky brightened rose and then gold as the sun fought its way higher in the mist-wreathed dawn. A green countryside ripe with grain and early-autumn glory spread out below his vantage upon the high white balcony, to a barrier of purple mountains in the far distance. It was a vantage he remembered like a dream; standing upon a white spire that thrust into the dawn.
A dawn that was his to claim, with an ocean of blue around it.
Blue. Blue washed over his vision, a deep cerulean like mountain lakes penetrated by the first rays of morning. He remembered a woman in that lake-cool color. The soft curve of her throat, the feel of soft white hair whispering over his skin, the scents of tundra and pine. How she sighed his name in the glory of those first rays. Moving with her, breathing with her, knowing this was where he had to be. Everything he had suffered to be here – snowstorms, gales, climbing sheer walls of ice with hands gone frigid and numb.
To be in the white spire with her, creating that bliss with the rising dawn.
The man shivered in the chill wind, and it slipped away. He couldn’t recall it. He couldn’t even remember where he was or what exactly he was doing here, in this white tower rather than that one.
Gazing down at his hands where they rested upon the opalescent stone railing, he noted the golden marks curling over his arms. The backs of his scarred and weathered hands glinted in the lifting light, marked by a flowing language that breathed through his skin like fire. As dawn crept down the ethereal turret behind him, finally filling his eyes with its glory, he felt the marks come to life. Curling and shifting as if liquid sunlight flowed through them, the golden marks were a beautiful mystery.
The man gripped the cool agate of the balcony, flexing his hands. He knew their strength; knew they were capable; knew his body was so much more than it seemed. His gaze traveled over the near distance, seeing a sprawling palace below carven of the same white agate as his balcony. Milky in the dawn, the turrets, domes, and minarets seemed to glow with subtle veins as the light lifted. From this vantage, he could see the palace was carven to resemble a flowing forest, as if tree and river and vine could petrify into stone yet remain fluid. Even the railing he clutched ran with carven vines and milk-white flowers.
His gaze rested upon the verdant grounds. Far below, he marked the glossy late-summer foliage of olive groves: the dusky Olea lithii, the Peace Olive – a dark and succulent fruit. Something they’d had in his city as a boy.
There was something important about olives, something he was supposed to know, but he couldn’t remember it. A small green lizard with a yellow throat and a red stripe down its back raced across the railing. The man was so still that the gecko raced over his fingers and paused upon his knuckles. Looking up, it regarded him with slit golden eyes, unafraid. The man stared down at it, recalling that this lizard was the eloi. The man took a long, slow breath. A single breath to steady himself, before he let it out in a whisper.
“Eloi...”
The lizard scampered away.
A sound came from the room behind him. Beyond the balcony doors with their gossamer veils hemmed in pearls, he heard a groan. Startled, the man spun, hands whipping to his hips. He should have had knives, long knives of keen function and a blade strapped to his back, but there was nothing: only the silk of sleep-trousers he’d donned from the bed when he’d woken naked in an unfamiliar room.
The room behind him was lush – an agate-stone bower with vaulted heights lost to an arching tree pattern. Copper summer braziers of nearly-dead coals smoked near a dark fireplace of the same agate-stone blocks as the rest. Sunlight flooded in the arching windows, gleaming upon lush carpets and gilded chaises. Red and gold silk accented the pale room, with enormous floor-pillows for lounging and tasseled rugs. A cold breakfast was laid out on a gilded white pine table. Crimson and gold ceramic censers choked the air with a hazy perfume – the reason the man had pushed out to the balcony when he’d woken, parched, with a thundering headache and a cottony mouth.
Through the latticed doors, the man’s gaze fixed upon a naked fellow now struggling up from a mess of crimson pillows upon the floor. The room was clearing of its pestilence, and the man on the balcony saw that the fellow in the pillows was fit and lean, average in stature but somehow impressive. Corded sinew and lean muscle stood out upon every inch of him, cut in stark detail as he moved. His brush-cut auburn waves would have been unassuming had the slanting rays of sunlight not illuminated highlights of brilliant gold as he clutched his head, then rubbed his hands down his trimmed beard. His hands had the weathered look of a man who had climbed hard in bad ice – a detail the man on the balcony couldn’t understand how he knew.
The fellow in the pillows coughed, tensing his closed eyelids against the flooding light. He inhaled, making a ferocious scowl as he tasted the air, then curried both hands through his short mane again. With a groan he shifted, only to find his lower body caught up in a crimson silk sheet half-pulled from the bed. The man fought the sheet as if enraged for a moment, then gave up and hung his head over his knees, rubbing the heels of his hands in his eye-sockets.
“Undoer’s hells, that’s bright!” His eyes opened and the man on the balcony saw his companion’s eyes were a stunning color – a copper brown that would have been dull in the shade but which glowed with a golden ring in the sun. “Pull the drapes, will you, Elohl? But leave the balcony doors open. That fucking woman and her threllis! Shaper fuck me, we need to get out of here...”
The man on the balcony frowned. He supposed the man on the floor was addressing him, as there was no one else in the room. He knew then, why he had been fascinated with the eloi lizard; because it was his given name – Elohl.
Elohl drew a breath to speak. “Were you addressing me?”
“Seven fucks of Jeldhaia!” The man’s eyes fired with alarm. Red flashed through those eyes, but it was just a trick of the morning light. Without a trace of the suffering he had evinced earlier, the man rose in a fluid wave and crossed the room. His hands grasped Elohl
’s face before Elohl could move. Holding him, he searched Elohl’s eyes, then his gaze flicked to Elohl’s golden Inkings, shimmering with the rising dawn.
“Shit!” He looked back up. “Elohl! Tell me who I am! Quickly.”
Elohl knit his brows. Struggling through memories, he could recall the man’s face, though it was cast in stark shadow as if from a fire. He remembered the man shouting at him, brandishing a polearm, riding atop a massive cat...
Elohl shook his head. “I know you. Don’t I?”
The man before him gave a vicious growl. With a lithe movement, he reached out and picked up a ceramic censer from a nearby table and hurled it to the stone floor. It shattered, scattering coals into the fireplace, smoke curling up the drafting flue.
“Damn that bitch!”
Elohl thought he saw the man’s eyes flash red again as he stormed the room, seizing censers and hurling them with impressive strength and accuracy into the dark fireplace. They shattered with a popping sound, delicate gold pottery reduced to so much trash.
Returning to Elohl, the man seized Elohl by his short-bearded face, shaking him. “Remember, damn you! Remember who I am! Remember who you are!!” With a quick hand, he delivered Elohl a stunning slap that rang his head and buzzed his ears. A copper river broke upon his tongue as Elohl’s lower lip split. Upon the taste of blood and violence, something roared to life inside Elohl. With a quick up-strike, he threaded his arms between the other man’s and broke them away.
“Unhand me!”
“Please remember!” The man’s eyes were desperate, terrible.
“I don’t know you, fellow,” Elohl growled as he backed away. Cautious, his hands were up and relaxed – ready to fight. “Come at me again and get yourself broken for your trouble.”
The man before him roared. He wasn’t a big man, but somehow in that moment, he was terrifying. Elohl backed off, his heart pounding fast in his chest from alarm as he watched the man’s eyes come to life. Where once there had been placid brown and stunning gold, there now bled a burning heat, a molten red that churned fire. Elohl realized with a shock that the fire in the man’s eyes had been no trick of light.
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