Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  Suddenly, another scorpion appeared before them. Skittering up fast, the beast was ridden by a man Khouren knew all too well. That strong-boned, haughty face. That cool confidence and smooth, thick lips. That arrogant demeanor pinned Khouren, and Khorel Jornath’s voice pummeled through his mind.

  If you value your life and those of your friends, stay down.

  Khouren blinked, astounded, as Khorel Jornath and his scorpion faced off with the blind rider. Eleshen was freed from her bind, rolling away as the two massive scorpions began to engage, stabbing at each other, slicing. She panted as she came to Khouren’s side, black blood from the scorpion coating her. Longknives ready, she placed two fingers to Ihbram’s throat, checking his pulse. “He’s alive. Just.”

  “Give him this, quickly!”

  A glass vial went flying through the air. Eleshen’s reflexes were fast, catching it in the chaos. Khouren had only a moment to see the Valenghian High General, Merkhenos del’Ilio, rein in his black charger with a glance at the battle between Khorel Jornath and the blind-eyed priest, before wheeling his horse off to the remains of the allies. Eleshen poured the vial down Ihbram’s throat, and he coughed. But his breathing stabilized and his eyes snapped open, even as he clutched his pierced chest and tried to rise.

  “Lie still!” Eleshen commanded, pushing him back down.

  Khouren could twitch his feet now. He rolled to his side, watching masterful mind-weaves being thrown between the two Kreth-Hakir Priests. Silver waves of incredible power that Khouren could actually see with his true eyes rushed in the space between the scorpions, but neither seemed to be winning. A cadre of three more Kreth-Hakir surged in as the stalemate ensued, but a mean black ronin-cat leaped into their midst, swiping them back, the stern commander upon it none other than the steel-eyed Theroun den’Vekir. Throwing black oilslick weaves at the Kreth-Hakir Brethren, devastating as a viper’s strike, Theroun fought with his mind, sundering the Kreth-Hakir’s unity. A grisly smile rode Theroun’s face as he struck – and with his mean black cat barreling in to finish them, the cadre was bleeding out upon the stones.

  But it wasn’t enough. Even though so many Brethren were dead, there were still more. A sea of Menderians surrounded the allied forces. Like an ocean, they were closing, cutting off the allies from their battlements. Sharp horn-blasts came from General Theroun, General Merra, and the Vhinesse. Cats snarled backward in retreat, horses whirled about, and foot soldiers turned, hightailing it toward the battlements.

  But like a great beast of tooth and fang, Lhaurent’s forces hemmed in the resistance. Sealing them off from safety – into the doom of the melee. Kneeling by Ihbram and Eleshen, certainty flooded Khouren’s gut. They had lost. Even though Khorel Jornath and General Theroun battled back Kreth-Hakir and the blind priest, there were others still turning wave after wave of allies. Thirty men here. Fifty there. Soldiers fighting shoulder-to-shoulder turning on the ones in front, eviscerating them. Breaking any phalanx the beleaguered allies tried to make.

  A group of grey-clad Kingsmen turned upon each other, fighting with bitter, terrible skills. A trio of Cennetians captains in the crimson of the Valor clashed with snarls. Riding upon warhorses, Arlen den’Selthir and the Vhinesse Delennia Oblitenne suddenly wheeled their mounts and came to arms, roaring with a hatred the likes of which Khouren had never seen. Khouren trembled beside his uncle and Eleshen, despair taking him. Ihbram gripped his hand, gasping for air. Khouren gripped Eleshen’s fingers, ready for the end.

  Suddenly, a massive sound rang through the air, like a tremendous war-bell. A shockwave ripped the battle, hammering men and horses to the ground. It hit Khouren with force, slamming him to his knees on the blood-slick stones of the Way. As it did, an incomparable euphoria blossomed through Khouren’s body, opening his heart. Gazing up at the sky, he saw white etheric fire ripple out in an enormous arc like the wave of a volcano’s eruption. Sundering into every man and woman, it blasted through them all. Lighting their eyes with luminous wyrric power. Opening them up, baring their hearts to the sky and their blood to each other. Raising their vibrations with the sound of the struck bell – tuning them all into one incalculable harmony.

  The most beautiful sound Khouren had ever heard was the silence of a hundred thousand men in battle suddenly stopping at once. The most beautiful tympani ever concussed upon his ears was the clatter of weapons hitting stone as knives and daggers, swords and polearms were dropped from astonished fingers. The most beautiful sight he had ever seen was a hundred thousand fighters staring up at the sky, then staring at their kin with open lips, tears bright in their eyes. And the most beautiful thought Khouren ever had was how luminous they all were, stunned into this moment of peace and bliss. A moment where every heart opened as one, and all hearts knew each other – loves and sorrows, losses and joys, annihilations and becomings.

  “Khouren—what?” Eleshen managed to gasp next to Khouren.

  “The Rennkavi has risen!” Khouren rasped, joy flooding him. Taking up her fingers, Khouren kissed them, staring into her beautiful violet eyes. “The Unity has come!”

  “He did it!” Ihbram gasped next to them. “Elohl, that fucking bastard! He fucking did it!”

  Battle ceased. Men waited, staring at the sky and at each other, though the vast inundation of euphoria was now fading. As Khouren watched, they began to stagger to their feet, helping each other with clasped wrists, leaving weapons where they had fallen in the carnage. Gazing around with shocked eyes, a great hush settled over the Aphellian Way, except for the groans of the dying.

  Khouren helped Eleshen up. He had a moment where they found each other’s eyes, before she seized his nape and kissed him, hard. Khouren kissed her back, pouring everything he was into her. Every dream he’d ever had, every love he’d ever lost, every yearning to be complete. His arms wrapped tight around her lovely frame, before she pulled away with a gasp, her violet eyes shining.

  Ihbram had struggled to his feet beside them. Khouren extended a hand, though he did not let go of Eleshen’s waist. Ihbram coughed, spitting bloody phlegm, but even as he pulled back his jerkin to touch where the scorpion had impaled him, Khouren saw the flesh was mostly healed. His brows rose. Ihbram had never healed so fast before, but something had happened when Elohl sent that shockwave of Unification through the world. Something unprecedented, that Khouren could feel suddenly – Ihbram’s wide emerald eyes telling Khouren that he could feel the same thing breathing through the dawn.

  “Can you feel it, Khouren?” Ihbram laughed as he gripped Khouren’s forearm. “Shaper of Life! Can you feel it?!”

  Closing his eyes, Khouren felt out along the morning wind with his wyrria. Through the blowing dust and carnage, he sensed something immense vibrating the world. All around him; humming in his ears, whispering in his thoughts. A tuning of his bones into a flooding harmony that eased his sinews, a vibration that poured through the earth beneath his boots. Khouren adjusted his stance, feeling that strange flow rush up from the ground into his body. Carrying him, sweeping him up – from the bones of the earth itself.

  “Wyrria!” Khouren breathed. “Shaper – it’s everywhere!”

  “Fuck me.” Ihbram clapped a hand upon Khouren’s shoulder, then gave a lively laugh. “The Rennkavi brings peace with the dawn!” He yelled at the top of his lungs.

  As if Ihbram’s pronouncement broke the spell that lay upon the battlefield, a great roar went up through the army. Unified, men and women all around Khouren broke into laughter. Arms were clasped, enemies pulled into embraces. Foes became friend as nations forgot their swords and stripped off helms and vambraces.

  But as Khouren watched the celebrations, he saw a group that were not jubilant. The Kreth-Hakir Brethren had gathered in a tight knot on the south side of the Way, some still upon scorpions, others on foot. The blind-eyed priest sat tall upon his chittering black mount, though it shuddered, seeping a tarry blood from numerous wounds. Across from the forty or so remaining Kreth-Hakir, facing them in a tense s
tandoff, Khorel Jornath sat tall upon his smaller scorpion, Merkhenos del’Ilio upon his left and General Theroun den’Vekir upon his mean black ronin-cat to Jornath’s right, with a few others at Jornath’s back.

  There were no words among the Kreth-Hakir, not that Khouren could feel or see. But it was as if a chasm had opened between the rebels and the hornet’s nest they faced. Khouren felt silver weaves rise. There was a fight coming like a thunderstorm, that even the Rennkavi’s moment of vast unification had not been able to quell.

  Suddenly, a woman strode out of a massive alabaster Monolith upon the southern edge of the Way. Wearing white leathers the color of bleached bones with her hood up, her long fiery hair was done in a complex braid, cascading over one shoulder. Moving with graceful, unhurried steps, she parted the army like a sighing sea. Stepping through death so lightly her feet barely made an imprint in the filth, she moved right into the midst of all that building silver power, positioning herself between the hive-mind and Jornath’s renegades.

  Staring straight at the blind priest, her emerald eyes sliced through all that impending annihilation with a thought. But even as she did, the blind-eyed priest reached for something lashed to his scorpion’s neck – raising up the bare and bloody heart that had come from Dherran den’Lhust’s chest. The woman in white took a quick inhalation, her gaze fixing upon that bloody organ gripped in the man’s fist. He stared down at her, seething with menace and utter dominance.

  As that silver wave rose again, the entire remaining hive of Kreth-Hakir surging with yoked purpose under the blind rider’s command, the woman in white whirled, flicking the fingers of her left hand at Khorel and his renegades. In a flash of light, they were suddenly gone, her with them. And just like that, whatever fight was to be among the Kreth-Hakir was over. The silver wave subsided, though the blind priest’s lips twisted down in a vicious scowl. Turning his chittering black monstrosity away to the south, he abandoned the battlefield, and as one, the remaining Kreth-Hakir melted away with him, lost in the trees of the Visken Bog.

  A great ease swept the battlefield. As if the last of the tension for a fight had gone with the mind-benders, men began to speak again, to jostle each other in camaraderie. Khouren’s heart lightened with them, turning to kiss Eleshen, when suddenly, a dire call hammered his mind. It hit him so hard he staggered, and he felt Ihbram cry out next to him. The imprint in Khouren’s mind wasn’t Hakir silver, but red-gold fire – Fentleith’s burning signature twisting in from a thousand leagues away.

  Sending a thought – an image – right to Khouren’s brain.

  Roushenn Palace, blocks of blue byrunstone exploding to vicious strikes of lightning from his grandfather’s hands. The palace’s halls churning like a maelstrom as Lhaurent moved through it, wielding Leith’s ruby ring and turning the palace into a morass to avoid Fentleith’s wrath.

  “Grandfather!” Khouren gasped. “He’s after Lhaurent!”

  “We have to go, Khouren!” Ihbram gripped his wrist, his eyes screwed up in pain from the force of the sending.

  “You’re weak.” Khouren gripped his hand, pulling it away. “I can make it through those churning halls, I can’t have you slowing me down.”

  “Khouren!” Eleshen stepped to his side, weapons ready. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No!” Khouren reached out, touching her face. “I lost Lenuria to that man, I’ll not lose you, too. Guard Ihbram. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Khouren!!” Eleshen gripped his arms, but he was like smoke on the wind, shifting through her touch. Stepping back, he admired her – all of her vicious, haunting beauty.

  “I’ll return to you. I swear it. Stay with Ihbram.”

  Her pretty lips fell open and rain shone in her violet eyes. But Khouren couldn’t stay to watch those lovely raindrops fall, nor even kiss her lips one final time. Fentleith roared in his mind again and Khouren turned, sprinting toward the Monolith the woman in white leather had emerged from. If he was right, the Rennkavi had unlocked all the doorways of this world. If he was right, this Plinth was open now, ready to accept Khouren and fling him where he needed to go.

  As Khouren crossed the Monolith’s boundary, a tingle like fire-ants raced over his skin. Obsidian sigils came alight in a rippling wave, ready. And the only need in Khouren’s heart as he slapped his palm to the alabaster stone was not for honor or glory or even for retribution.

  It was for redemption.

  In a rush of wind and a hurtling of ether, he was sucked through the Stone, and traveled.

  * * *

  Khouren emerged from the Kingstone inside Roushenn, to a palace gone mad.

  The clockwork mass at the center of the palace heaved and shuddered, gold and bronze gears grinding in cacophony, entire swaths of gears not working at all. A hole the size of a ship had been blasted in the side of the massive dome, the byrunstone liquefied to molten glass. The dome-room buzzed like a hive of hornets, wyrria so thick upon Khouren’s tongue that he could practically lick it from the air. The Kingstone burned hot with white sigils and curling ether, and Khouren stumbled away from it, shielding his eyes.

  Wyrria sluiced him from all around. Thick, he waded through its substance like a fly through molasses, swaths of etheric flame blossoming in the air like a forest fire blown by an invisible wind. The Rennkavi’s Ritual had sundered whatever devices had been holding back wyrria from upwelling through the earth in geysers of terrible glory. And struggling to breathe in the heavy density, Khouren now felt the true power of the earth’s wyrria – the enormity of it – unleashed.

  Hauling in deep breaths, Khouren tried to get his head above water and stop this drowning that suffocated him. He struggled to move, to make his body turn to a path where he could breathe. From somewhere far within the palace, he heard blasts. The foundations of the Kingsmount shuddered. Gears groaned as walls jammed, then ground to a halt with a series of ear-slicing shrieks. Something exploded and metal shrapnel whizzed above Khouren’s head.

  Stumbling into the pit of gears along one submerged walkway, Khouren felt a pulse near the center of the clockworks. A place where wyrria flowed in an easy harmony, rather than the thick syrup up near the Kingstone. As Khouren phased through clanking metal and screaming gears, he knew where he’d been called to – emerging by the small pillar of stone buried deep in the pit. He knew what had to be done. Slicing his thumb on his blade, Khouren set his hand to Leith’s filagreed pyramid – his blood seeping into the filigree, dripping onto the river-stone at its heart.

  Power flooded Khouren in a wave of crimson gold. He rocked but it did not fell him, his hand clamped to the talisman. Suddenly, the air was easier to breathe. The wyrria flooding the chamber was like wind blowing his steps toward his goal now – and Khouren’s steps were fleet as he ran through the blast-hole in the dome, enormous blocks of bluestone thundering down around him as the palace shuddered again. Feeling his grandfather like a burning beacon in his mind, Khouren raced through wall after broken wall, gear after blasted gear, fey blue halls lit bright with molten rock.

  Bodies littered the carnage. Khouren focused on his feet, to not trip on charred and mangled flesh or the exposed gears of wrecked walls. His gut twisted to see the bodies Lhaurent and Fentleith’s fight had left behind. The destruction of Wolf and Dragon wyrria had never been so keen as Khouren surged through a blockade of thirty dead Palace Guardsmen, their cobalt jerkins charred and smoking from their silver buckles.

  The palace shuddered around him. Khouren ran through the destruction, higher and higher through the Tiers, following the fury of his grandfather’s ruin. Through a blasted-out wall, through a vaulted atrium burned into black glass and scorched plants, through palace dressing-rooms with chamber-maids crisped into blackened flesh. Through a kitchen on fire from exploded ovens, pie jam and pastry scorch filling Khouren’s nostrils along with billowing black smoke.

  Until he came to the battle at last.

  Roushenn’s Throne Hall was blasted to pieces. As Khouren watched, a se
ction of marbled floor went sliding out from the far end, racing toward where his grandfather Fentleith held his ground near the high dais. Fentleith leapt it with a roar, trying to get to where Lhaurent stood before his white-wrought throne – and though Lhaurent bled out from a mangled wound on his left shoulder, soaking his white battle-armor, he was far from finished.

  Lhaurent’s Marks were entirely black now, and Khouren no longer felt any power emanating from them. But his cleverness in taming Leith Alodwine’s sacred artifact, the ruby ring of dusky white star-metal, knew no bounds. As Khouren watched, Fentleith cast a swath of lightning, and Lhaurent threw up his remaining hand, Leith’s ruby ring flashing with light as it battered that hot blast away – sending the lighting hammering into the pillars nearby. Byrunstone exploded with a deafening concussion. Spears of glass, melted by the heat, hurtled past Khouren and he phased, letting it shatter against the rear wall. At a gesture from Lhaurent, a whole section of the eastern wall opened up. Guardsmen, maids, porters, and servants flooded in through the breach, rushing Fentleith with their eyes taken over by crimson fire.

  Fentleith roared in anguish from the power of Leith Alodwine released upon the masses of Roushenn. But he could not stop it, and with a terrible cry, sent a sheet of blue-white lightning to scythe down Lhaurent’s pawns. They fell, tumbling like paper dolls aflame, and Khouren’s gut twisted so hard he doubled over, vomiting on his boots.

  Lhaurent’s grey gaze pinned Khouren, noting him. Khouren felt it like a blow from the rear of the hall – demanding his submission not to the Rennkavi now, but to the command of Leith Alodwine, ancient master of Khouren’s line, his talisman in use upon Lhaurent’s hand. Khouren dropped to his knees gasping, as his ancestor’s command, wielded by Lhaurent’s willful wyrria, demanded Khouren to fight against his grandfather Fentleith. To turn on his own flesh and blood and kill the man who had given him life, and love.