LUCA FELT a ringing emptiness in his thoughts and a thorough exhaustion in his body as he tried to fall asleep. Somewhere at the edge of consciousness was the unread line of a notification: metamorphosis noted two thousand energy units burned in this short night, as if Luca had run ten miles.
His ability quickly neutralized the biochemical effect that man called fatigue, letting him boil over with energy all night. As he took Herdinia, the emperor was so full of energy that the entire castle no doubt heard his lover’s cries.
Turned on by this passion from the ever unavailable and cold Herdinia, Ma Ju Ro achieved the impossible and broke both his own record and hers. There weren’t enough fingers on both hands to count how many times they reached the peak — the flawless Herdinia couldn’t be sated, and that only aroused Luca even more. They didn’t even talk in their short breaks, instead just lying together and stroking each other.
This had never happened with Keirinia, this fierce blaze of desire, passion and... enough about that. After Keirinia, he’d always gone back to his business or gone to sleep.
With Herdinia, everything was different. Alone with his lover, Luca lost his head and saw only her. That was probably why he failed to notice the notifications not only about the energy he’d burned, but also about the neutralization of a sleep-inducing substance not only in him, but in his close ones protected by his nano-agents.
However strong his superability was, he still needed sleep. In sleep, his Wheel energy would regenerate faster and his mind would clear, and... he couldn’t embarrass his courtiers any longer. Sooner or later rumor would spread, and they wouldn’t take long to turn into whispers that the emperor was some blood-drinker of the night. The rumor mill was a terrible thing.
It wasn’t long until dawn. The castle would soon come alive, and Baron Rasmus would likely want to speak to him in private before the other rulers of the North arrived.
Sleep didn’t come. Hera’s head comfortably rested on his shoulder. She’d asked him to call her that. Her thick blonde hair tickled his chest as it rose and fell rhythmically.
The mirror ceiling above the bed reflected the lovers. Luca grimaced in annoyance as he compared himself to Herdinia. He couldn’t see a single blemish on her body. Velvety skin with a light tan, long eyelashes, slightly plump lips, perfectly even teeth visible in her half-open mouth.
And then him — with his balding head, tiny piggy eyes, short crooked legs, huge paunch and a chin merging into his neck in thick layers of fat. His bread chest, powerful shoulders and strong arms were the only parts of his body that could be praised. Without a doubt, he had to fix it. But what next? Would he live his entire life in this body, ruling the Empire? Or would he wait for his changeling ability cooldown to end and get his own body back? Did he even want to remain the emperor? Right now he had to, especially until the issue of Rezsinius was solved, but what next?
His thoughts returned to Hera. Maybe he should grow out the hair in his bald patches? He suddenly had an insurmountable urge to be handsomer. For her.
In the quiet of the pre-dawn hour, he heard the unmistakable sound of steps creeping up to the door. Ma Ju Ro froze, expecting a cry from the guards at their post, but instead he heard a dull rustling, then quiet again.
Carefully, trying not to wake up Hera, he freed himself and rose from the bed. Slowly walking barefoot on the carpet, he approached the door. It was locked from inside, but could be unlocked from either side.
He heard a key turning in the lock. The emperor froze in place. The chambers were small, and the only place to hide was behind a small table at the foot of the bed. And that would only fit a child. There was no place that Ma Ju Ro could hide his huge frame.
Another rustle from beyond the door, and someone whispering. Then there was a noise in the corridor, a clatter and shouts. A girl’s agonizing cry rang out from a distant room. Kora!
Luca rushed toward the door, switching into battle form as he moved, and at that very moment the door burst open. People in cloaks burst into the bedroom, and Ma Ju Ro suddenly realized what was happening when he saw that their leader was Daven, Baron Rasmus’s son introduced to him the day before.
“Kill him!” the young man shouted.
The four cloaked figures rushed the emperor with daggers. Two of them tried to grab him by the arms, but flew away as he hit them with his morphed elbows. The emperor’s metamorphosis was slowed, and the blades he grew weren’t long enough to kill the traitors.
The spines he grew from his fingers were even worse. Ma Ju Ro struck with them side to side, without a doubt that the hits were deadly, then he jumped at the baron’s son — not to kill, just to wound, but so that he wouldn’t think of doing anything else. He needed to hurry and help Kora and Kane.
Daven kept his coldblooded composure. He dodged the emperor’s punch and struck back. The blade should have pierced through Ma Ju Ro’s leg, but that failed and it went in only an inch before it hit something hard. A bone? the baron’s son just had time to think in shock when a stunning strike from Ma Ju Ro’s fist hit him in the cheekbone. Breaking the bone, the spines tore off half of Daven’s face and the traitor lost consciousness from the shock of the pain.
Luca absorbed the end of the dagger lodged in his leg and fell down; one of the remaining guards tried to crack his skull, and the other knocked him off his feet. Lying on the floor, the emperor staunchly took the hits, realizing with surprise that all four were still alive. They were trying to kill him, but his internal armor was holding up.
“Maj!” Herdinia shouted, waking up.
Instantly getting a grasp of what was happening, she grabbed a half-full jug of local wine from the table and smashed it down on the head of the nearest traitor. Roaring indistinctly, he fell on Luca, who by that time had managed to extend a short hardening monomolecular thread from his hands and was running it through the legs of the attackers. Two collapsed as they lost their limbs. The thread lost its structure and disappeared into dust, but the emperor now had the advantage. He smashed the chest of the one Herdinia stunned and tried to get up.
The legless men screamed continually. The last bearded guard standing on his own two feet backed off, then jerked his head as he felt movement — a naked and furious Herdinia slipped past him. Ma Ju Ro picked up a dagger, extended his arms toward the guard and moved toward him.
“Get dressed, Hera,” the emperor said, keeping his eyes on the traitor.
She ignored him. Instead, she searched the stunned guard, pulled out a knife and cut his throat without a second thought. Then she moved toward the groaning Daven and did the same in the blink of an eye. Rising up, she bared her teeth like a tigress.
“You can die quick if you tell us who’s behind this! Rasmus himself, or the entire North?”
“Help! Here!” the bearded man shouted, breaking through the screams of the legless.
He backed off to one of them, his eyes darting from side to side, seeking a path retreat. Less than a minute had passed since the men burst in, but Kora’s scream had already died out, and there was no time to lose. Luca jumped at the guard with a wild roar, taking the dagger to the chest and stabbing his own into the man’s temple. His head fell to the side, his corpse went limp and began to fall, blood flowed through the beard.
“I’m going to save them! Wait here! Hide!” Ma Ju Ro shouted to Herdinia and flew out of the room.
Running into the dark corridor weakly lit by stifled torches, the emperor’s gaze darted back and forth. Wherever he looked, he saw the corpses of imperial guards and the baron’s watchmen.
Some figures flickered in the distance along the corridor to the right, and the emperor rushed over there. Through the open doorways in the corridor he saw his own guards, killed in their beds as they slept.
As he ran to Kora’s room, he realized he was too late. Kane’s body lay by the threshold, blood bubbling from uncounted wounds. Three dead men lay nearby, and another writhed in agony — Weasel’s life had been costly. If it had cost his l
ife at all. Luca was sure that the agents in his bloodstream were already regenerating the damaged organs. He’d need to work on Kane himself to make sure of it, but right now his sister’s fate was more important.
The emperor walked into the room. The baron himself was there, laughing and watching as his men bound Kora. The girl had had no time to get dressed, and Rasmus was greedily drinking her almost-grown young body in with his eyes.
Luca clenched his fists, took a deep breath and reactivated his battle form. It didn’t last very long even without the Wheel’s penalties, but he should have enough for ten seconds. Feeling an itch where the barbed spines and deadly blades grew through his skin, he jumped on the enemies silently.
The baron’s troops had no time to think. One after another, flooding the room with wild screams, they fell down, trying in vain to close the terrible wounds inflicted by the emperor. Ten seconds later, his battle form ended; metamorphosis retracted and reabsorbed his weapons of death while Ma Ju Ro untied his sister.
He’d killed them all except the baron, who had taken a blow to the face from the emperor’s reinforced forehead and was now writhing with a broken nose.
“Are you alright, Kora?”
The emperor hugged his sister and checked her condition. She was fine; a couple of bruises, a scratch, adrenaline.
“Luca...” Kora whispered. “Where’s Kane?”
“Wait here...” he muttered.
He returned to Weasel’s body and dragged it into the room. There was no pulse. Holding his hand on the man’s neck, Ma Ju Ro realized that all the nano-agents in Weasel’s body had been used up. With a powerful pulse, he injected regenerators into his body and tried to start his heart.
“Luca!” Kora howled in a voice not her own.
He turned and saw that Rasmus had come round and was piercing him with his gaze.
“Where is Daven?” the baron asked. “Where is my son? What have you done to him, Ma Ju Ro?”
“He is beyond help. He attacked me and paid for it. As you will pay, and your...”
The baron reached into his pocket, took something out and aimed it at Ma Ju Ro. Before he knew what was happening, the emperor was thrown to the floor and couldn’t feel his body. To his surprise, his ability wouldn’t even respond. It was if only Luca’Onegut’s mind remained, suspended in time and space.
An image reflected in his eyes; the baron stretching an arm toward him, Kora’s mouth opening in a scream. The scene didn’t disappear, didn’t change. It was all frozen as if someone had stopped time. The same thought kept spinning in his head, each time perceived as if new. What was in his hand?
* * *
At dawn, in Baron Rasmus’s castle yard, the emperor’s lifeless corpse lay right in the dirt and horse shit, and all had gathered to see it.
The wind howled down from the mountains, making the grass rock on the rare patches of untrampled ground. It rustled in the bushes and fluttered in the baron’s flag on the central turret. Stormclouds gathered in the heights, illuminated by the dawn, and those assembled who weren’t staring at Ma Ju Ro raised their heads in wonderment at the beauty of the sky.
The sun flashed between gaps in the clouds, lighting up the castle and flooding the walls with a thick, blood-red, fiery light, pulling from the shadows piles of dead men with glassy eyes staring into the abyss.
The bodies of dead guards, first unshod and undressed, were loaded into carts to be taken to the Wastelands. The creatures there would leave nothing but bones of them by nightfall.
Ma Ju Ro’s people lay next to his massive body, their hands and feet bound; some girl who was apparently a courtesan was chewing the rag in her mouth and striving to crawl to another person who had survived the night’s terrors, a young man, his chest just barely rising and falling. The third — the emperor’s first advisor, called Herdinia — gazed at the crowd like a savage with her surviving eye. They took out her other when they tied her up — the bitch resisted too much.
Rasmus blinked, wiped away his tears. That palace snake was the one that killed her son, cut his throat. The emperor’s slut! The only eyewitness left alive lost both legs and a bucket of blood, but when they took Herdinia, he managed to say a few words: “Daven... She...” The baron didn’t know where he was now, the man had been sent to the healer, though it was as much use as putting a poultice on a wooden leg. He wouldn’t survive.
They’d lost far more people than they expected, but everything went just as the ghost said it would. That night, Rasmus had been standing on the balcony of his castle tower, smoking a pipe and admiring the sickle moon, when he heard a voice nearby.
“Ma Ju Ro has already left for your lands, baron.
Gasping, Rasmus looked around and saw a figure in the thick shadows. The edges of the uninvited guest blurred like scorched air above the ground. At first, the baron didn’t even bother thinking of how the man had gotten onto a balcony the height of nine men while the door was locked.
“Who are you?” the baron asked calmly, maintaining his composure. His trembling voice gave away his fear.
“A friend,” the figure answered gently. “I don’t have much time, so listen carefully...”
The ghostly shadow, realizing that Rasmus feared him, gave an explanation that was hard to believe — that the very spirit of the first Emperor Ma Ju Ro had come to him to call on a son of the Empire to serve his land. It defied the imagination, but it was easier to believe in the spirit of the first emperor than in anything else. For example, that Two-horns himself had come to him as a ghost.
“The emperor is traveling to the North. He will promise you everything you ask for as long as it puts you against the southerners. This will break the Empire in two and start a civil war. Brother against brother, son against father — I did not wish this for my people,” the ghost’s level voice shook. “Ma Ju Ro has rejected his ancestors’ creeds. Kill the defiler and take him to Rezsinius. The reward will be generous...”
Ultimately, the ghost gave him a strange crystal and told him to use it by aiming its peak at the emperor’s body.
“The body will decay before you reach the southerners’ camp. Rezsinius might not believe that the corpse belongs to Ma Ju Ro. The crystal will keep the body in stasis.”
Not knowing what to answer, the baron stood long, never quite knowing when exactly the ghost that was just standing next to him disappeared. The words burned into his soul, and when he received a message that the emperor was traveling to the North, he made his decision.
“Your grace...” the guard captain gently tapped him on the shoulder. “What should we do with the prisoners?”
The baron sighed. No imperial spirit, no squabble for the throne could possibly have been worth the life of his son. They were supposed to be sleeping! His confidence in that is what made him send his son for the emperor — there was no risk, and letting his beloved offspring kill the tyrant by his own hand would have made the boy a hero. So he’d thought. So he’d been mistaken.
But he couldn’t get his son back now, and this plot had to be brought to an end.
“Cage the girl. If the boy doesn’t die, then send him to the mines. Quarter the bitch that killed Daven. Do the same with that bastard Ma Ju Ro.”
“What will we bring to Rezsinius? The head?”
“The head..?”
The baron thought for a moment. The ghost’s crystal used in his time of desperation had collapsed into dust after he’d killed Ma Ju Ro. There was no point in taking the whole body. Not only would its huge weight slow the baron and his people on their way to Rezsinius, but it would probably also rot. He came to a decision.
“We’ll bring only the arms and the head.”
“What if the head rots?”
“Then we’ll still have the arms.”
“The imperial symbol?” the captain asked with understanding. “The golden runic pattern tattooed on his arms?”
“Yes. That should be enough proof. Whatever remains of him and his bitch, take it to the
Wastelands. Let the beasts eat them! I don’t want so much as a memory of them to remain in this world.”
* * *
They managed to cut the tyrant’s arms off at the shoulders, but the legs only at the knees. They failed to cut off the head. No axe or saw could break his skin. The baron’s people whispered that the emperor truly was protected by the Sacred Mother. Only Rasmus himself knew the truth — that it was the action of the mysterious colorless crystal.
Those to be put to death were sent to the Wastelands. Nothing remained of the woman’s body. Even her bones were gnawed and boiled down.
It didn’t work out that way with the man’s corpse. Tooth and nail both broke against the hardened flesh.
A huge desert dragon grabbed the body and carried it into its lair, almost at the very Core. There he tried endlessly to chew up his prey, but only dulled his teeth. Disappointed, the reptile got rid of its useful cargo and went in search of new prey.
Blood of Fate Page 35