He stared quietly into her eyes for a long moment, yellow flecks in his red irises pulsing with life. “I don’t need you to destroy the world,” he whispered. “But you must submit if you wish life to continue after I am done with it.”
She stared back at him, not saying a word. She had trouble forcing thoughts through her mind, so thick was the darkness around her.
“I will not,” she murmured.
He leaned again, brushing his lips along her jaw. Chills ran down her spine, both fear and her body’s desire.
“Give me a child,” he breathed into her ear. Another thing he had never said to her. Athaym could not conceal the truth of his being from Graelyn, however, and she knew that he did not want a child. It was all about control and disorientation.
“If you want my body, why not take it?” she asked coldly. “I cannot stop you.”
He stepped back sharply. “Because you are Life! I will have your worship.”
She stared at him, and her body trembled for his touch even as her soul shrank away from his shadow. She couldn’t see the corridor around them—there was only Athaym. Soon he would devour all the people of faith, and he would be the center of life in this world. It was hopeless, and against that despair her body ached to create life.
He sensed it in her. Part of her started to surrender. He stepped forward again and placed his fingertips on the small of her back, pulling her close. “Give yourself to me,” he whispered again, and that liquid darkness slithered around her awareness, silencing the other presences in her mind that tried to push their way in.
“No,” she forced the words through her lips, in spite of herself. There was still hope.
He stepped back, and the darkness receded from her. In spite of her rejection, he seemed pleased. “No matter,” he said. “In time you will. Come.”
She receded back into the passive murk of general confusion and allowed herself to be led farther down the tower and brought to an open balcony, one of many through which the tower-mother breathed.
“If you will not give me a child,” he asked, “would you give me your blood?” In his hand, he held a smooth black bloodstone the size of his palm, oval and perfectly polished. “Our essences bound together will bring faithless life to the surface world, another way for people to survive my wrath.”
“No,” she shook her head. “I will give you nothing of myself freely.”
“As you wish,” his voice went cold, losing all pretense of courtesy. “This boon from you, then, I will not ask. I command.”
He held the bloodstone flat in his left palm. Holding his right hand over it, with quick slash of solid darkness, he opened his wrist. Blood dribbled out onto the stone’s surface, a few drops and nothing more. The stone absorbed the fluid and turned a deep shade of purple.
“Hold out your hand,” he commanded, and Graelyn did so, compelled through the pact-bond. A similar quick slash of solidified shadow, and her green blood dripped into it, sinking into the stone’s core. It shifted color, green mixing with midnight purple.
Athaym took the stone away, and Graelyn covered her wrist, squeezing it until the blood stopped. The stone glittered as he moved it in the subterranean light that suffused the troglodyte city, its surface shifting from dark green to purple depending on the angle.
Athaym started and looked away, staring into space. “Ah,” he said lowly, voice tinged with anticipation even though his face showed no hint of a smile. “Your child has gained the favor of two more demon princes. Seredith can wait… Dis is mine.”
A shadow fissure opened and covered him in darkness, and he was gone.
Graelyn stood alone on the balcony, clutching her bleeding wrist. Anxiety crept its way back in as she thought of her daughter Naiadne and other faces she did not recognize.
27 - Smoke and Mirrors
Arda jumped after Anuit from the darkling library through the gateway into Dis just as it closed. She tumbled and fell hard on her palms and knees, sending a jolt through her bones from the ground’s impact. She smarted from the pain but pushed it aside and stood on the firm yellow-green sand.
“Anuit?” she asked. She looked around. The sorceress was nowhere to be found. That didn’t make sense. I was right behind her.
There was nothing here. Just flat puke-yellow sand in all directions, ending in a tedious straight line where the ground met the gray sky. With the vision her seal imparted, she saw strands of the Kairantheum running throughout the land, holding pockets of darkness and fear. Now that she saw it with seal-enhanced eyes, she understood it. The Black Dragon had once ripped out parts of the Kairantheum and used it to bind and shape raw Dark—a shadowy mocking of both the Otherworld and the gods’ essences, trapping only fear and malice.
“Anuit?” Arda asked again, calling out more loudly this time. She spun around, searching in all directions. No answer. No sign of the sorceress.
Wait. There. In the distance.
How did she get so far away?
Arda ran forward, trying to close the gap between them. She called out again, but Anuit didn’t respond.
Wait. There is someone else with her.
Anuit spoke to… to Arda! The paladin’s doppelganger turned swiftly and descended into a fissure, which Arda hadn’t noticed until now. Anuit hurried after her.
“Anuit!” Arda shouted, but the sound from her mouth felt muffled, as if cotton were stuffed between her teeth. Time seemed to slow, and she pushed forward at an agonizing pace.
And then the fissure was gone and only smooth ground remained.
Time returned to its normal flow, and Arda ran swiftly to the spot where her lover had just been standing. She fell to her knees and pounded the sand. Memories of abandoning Aradma in the Underworld, after being blocked by the unyielding stone wall, confronted the paladin. Now Anuit was out of reach too, with…
…Bryona!
Arda lifted her head and howled, lips pulled back to reveal her tiny darkling fangs to the sky.
No! I will not let you take her from me!
She calmed herself. Rage would not help her, and she could feel the very air in this place fuel something in her darkling blood. When she found her center again and slowed her breathing, she heard movement behind her.
Arda stood and whirled, drawing her revolvers in an instant.
A giant toad stood four feet from her, dark round eyes glimmering. Its belly jiggled, sending waves into its throat as it chuckled.
Its form shifted and shrank until it was vaguely humanoid, hunched over with legs still bent toad-like. It still looked at her with toad eyes and a toad smile. It flapped its hands together in an askew applause that clapped and then slurped as moist fingers pulled themselves apart.
clap-slurp, clap-slurp, clap-slurp
“Well done, yessit,” the toad said. “There are very few creatures in Dis that are not demons, and I daresay your performance almost made me pass you by as one of us, yessit. But you’re not one of us, are you?”
Without taking her guns off him, she slowly stepped back. He smelled of urine. “What have you done with Anuit, demon?”
The toad shifted again until his body stood as an upright man, clothed in an impeccable maroon frock coat, black trousers, and finely shaped leather shoes. His now human-looking hands sported pure white gloves, and he reached into an inner pocket and drew out spectacles, placing them on his toad nose in front of his toad eyes. He blinked, never losing the strange, amphibious smile. And the acrid smell grew stronger.
“There, there,” he said. “No need to raise your voice—say, you don’t have food, do you? I’m rather hungry.” He took a step forward.
Arda straightened her aim and tightened her fingers around the triggers.
The toad immediately took a step back and raised his hands open wide. “No need for that,” he said. “I am Qazim, yessit. Who might you be, darkling wanderer?”
“That is not your concern,” she replied coolly. “I am here for my friend, and I will be on my way. I ask a
gain, what did you do with Anuit?”
The well-dressed toad-thing sniffed the air. “Something is different about you, darkling wanderer.” He sniffed again. “I say, have you brought the Light into our realms?” He cocked his bumpy, bulbous head to the side and affixed her with the singular gaze of his left toad eye.
Arda fired two shots.
Qazim’s tongue flicked out twice, almost faster than she could even notice. “Not quite as good as yolisks,” he noted and spit the bullets on the ground. He continued his insipid grinning. “Yessit, yessit, you have brought the Light here! I think my king would like to meet you when he arrives. Yes, both he and the delicious little creature he calls his daughter.”
Arda holstered her weapons and drew her single-edged sword. She channeled the Light, and the blade shone with blue glory. The air seemed to shake in protest around her contact with the element.
“I am Qazim!” the toad-man yelled suddenly. “You will answer my questions, yessit!”
“That name means nothing to me,” Arda replied calmly. She held her sword ready.
The toad-man grew large and bloated until his suit split and shredded. “I am a prince among demons!” he screeched. Again his body became toad-like, losing all semblance of humanity as he continued to grow.
Arda backed away. The toad demon was the size of a house and growing larger still. He opened his mouth wide. He screeched—heerzhAAAaaaaaa—and inhaled. The nub of his tongue quivered in the noise, and a great wind rushed to fill the void in his maw.
Arda stumbled forward and then completely lost her footing, plunging into the blackness of his mouth as he expanded to fill the horizon, devouring both her and the gray sky.
Arda floated in darkness for a time.
The paladin awoke in a narrow stone cell. She lay on her side, still gripping her sword, and her guns remained nestled in the holsters on her hips. The same diffuse lines of the Kairantheum lay beneath the stone walls, which pressed close in front and behind her. She propped herself up and then, with some difficulty, used the walls to shuffle to her feet. Her sword would be useless in here, so she sheathed it.
She looked to either side, and the cell seemed to extend as far as she could see in either direction. If this was a cell, it was unlike any cell she had ever seen. It was more like two giant walls smooshed closely together. She looked up and saw the sky as a narrow slit, far overhead. She couldn’t make out how high the two walls went, only that they ended in the same dull gray that she had tumbled into Dis beneath.
“Fuck me,” she muttered. She had the distinct feeling she wouldn’t be leaving Dis anytime soon. “Why the fuck did we think coming here would be a good idea?”
She was going to die here, and Anuit would be lost to the Dark. Somehow, Bryona was going to convince Anuit to give up her own life. In the end, Anuit would not escape the fate of all sorcerers. It was only a matter of time. Arda had failed Anuit, and she had failed Kaldor.
“Oh, Kaldor,” she whispered aloud. “I should never have come here. The seal…”
The hairs pulled taut on the back of her neck. She looked up, and in the sliver of sky she could see Qazim’s great toad head, as expansive as the sky itself, staring down at her.
“I knew it,” a small voice squeaked in front of her. She looked down and saw another toad-sized toad sitting on one of the wall’s uneven bricks. “You are special! A seal! The Seal of Light! You are the Living Seal!”
“Oh my goodness, yessit,” said another toady voice behind her. A small, squat amphibian hopped on her shoulder. “The Seal of Light. You are Archurion’s heir. Our king will want to know.”
“Yes, he will!” agreed a third voice. Another toad at her feet hopped onto the toe of her boot. More came,
hoppity hoppity hoppity,
and the smell of urine grew strong.
“Come with us,” the toads crooned. “We will take you before the council. The true king will want to use you against the false king, mayhap, yessit. He will want you before the wizard finds you.”
“Two kings?” Arda queried, caught off guard by the plural.
“Yessit, yessit!” they all said in their ribbiting babble. “The Black Dragon and the God of Contracts.”
Klrain and Yamosh, Arda realized. Fuuuckkk… what are we in the middle of?
“Which do you serve?” the paladin asked the demon toad. “And what wizard?”
“Do not speak his name.” The mass of toads started swarming over her, all speaking with Qazim’s voice. “Come with us! You will make a pretty bauble for the troglodyte queen, yessit. Maybe she will give a morsel of you to us to taste, oh yessit, yessit.”
Their soft, moist, urine-smelling bellies flapped over her skin, so many of them that they pressed her to the side, and she started inching down the narrow path between the walls.
The walls…
She started to climb.
The toads stopped and stared, uncomprehending the upward direction.
“Oh no!” the mass of voices undulated. “She’s not supposed to do that, nossit, nossit. Can she do that? Who let her do that?”
She kept climbing.
The great toad face in the sky boomed out in the same voice as the others, only singular and loud. “OoOOooHHhh,” Qazim whined. “Don’t do that. You’re not supposed to go that way, nossit, nossit. The wizard must not find you.”
She ignored the demon prince and continued to climb higher until the swarming mass of tiny toads below on the ground faded from view. The smell of urine lessened somewhat.
She finally crawled to the surface, pulling herself back up onto the puke-yellow sand. The toad face stretched across the sky. “Oh, you will not like doing that, will you, nossit, nossit?”
Qazim’s mouth opened wide again, and this time swarms of hellhounds dropped from his gullet onto the ground. The eyeless beasts of tooth and claw scrabbled towards her.
Arda surged with the Light and jumped. She drew her sword and twirled, cutting through two of the hellhounds before she landed fifty yards away.
The earth shook beneath her feet, and the very air trembled at her calling upon the Light.
“NooOOOooo, don’t do that!” fretted Qazim. “Now they all will know you’re here, and there will be no tasty morsel for poor Qazim, nossit!”
In the distant horizon she saw a silhouette of a dirty-robed man flying towards her. Her attention was taken from him when the pack of hellhounds rushed forward. Then out of the ground erupted a phalanx of shadow knights, gray silhouettes of men without features bearing wickedly ornate halberds. They halted the hellhound advance, giving Arda time to turn and run…
…into the unexpected arms of the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
“Hello, sweet lady,” he said. “Might I inquire as to your name?”
Something happened that had never happened to Arda before.
She swooned.
“Arda,” she replied. Her knees went weak. Her tail flopped limply on the ground. And her blood ran hot through her body. In spite of herself, she giggled. He seemed a human man, the most… delicious… she could ever remember imagining, much less seeing. His skin was the same light, creamy dark as Anuit’s, and his hair just as black, neatly trimmed and dangling over the round tops of his ears. She sighed, wanting nothing more than to stand there and gaze into his rich chocolatey eyes and run her hands underneath the low-cut, loosely wrapped blue cotton shirt and touch his powerful chest with her fingertips.
“I’m Kokhabaal,” he said smoothly. “But you can call me Koki.”
She giggled again. “You’re the… Desdemona’s…”
“Incubus,” he concluded for her. “Ah yes, Desdemona. She was such a nice lady. I miss her terribly.”
“You’re charming me,” she accused dreamily.
“Oh goodness!” he exclaimed. “I hope so! It would make me so delighted to know I might charm a lady such as yourself.”
She sighed and grinned stupidly. Even the smell of him was divine! And his eyes s
eemed so gentle and kind… surely not everything they had been told about demons was true, and she loved Anuit well enough. She ignored the part of her mind that screamed at her to wake up and squelched the instinctive shiver of fear that trembled in her soul.
The incubus looked up over her shoulders, and his brow raised in calm concern. “I think we’d best be leaving,” he said and held an open hand to her.
Arda turned to see the shadow knights and hellhounds tearing each other apart. For a brief moment she saw behind them—closer than before but still distant—the approaching man in dirty, tattered robes. He flew just over the ground, rushing to reach them. On the horizon, Qazim’s wide-stretched face contorted with rage and howled. Millions of cat-sized frogs hopped out of the fissure, rushing around the hellhound fray. They all bore Qazim’s face, but their toad mouths were lined with rows of hellhound teeth. Their faces contorted in rictal rage, but their eyes held a perpetual juxtaposition of mirthful curiosity that unnerved the paladin.
Arda turned back to the incubus. Her trepidation melted away, and the sight of the approaching man and the swarm of demon toads was forgotten. There was something about Koki—even knowing what he was—that touched her on a cellular level. She took his hand. At his touch, her entire body electrified, and he smiled.
Then, in an instant, they were gone from that place.
Arda stood on a tiled veranda, part of a red-bricked villa overlooking an azure lagoon underneath a peach sky. Green palm trees swayed in a gentle breeze. Everything felt clean and relaxed.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Koki grinned. “I’m one of the twelve demon lords,” he stated. “This is my layer in Dis. I make it in my image, and I desire comfort, indulgence. And I want you to feel welcome here.”
Arda did feel welcome there. The sunlight played over the gentle lagoon surf. “This is no hell,” she said dreamily. “This is a paradise.”
When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 116