Outside, they then said their goodbyes to Hoda and Karadon. Slippery Slued incited Hoda’s ire when he told Karadon they should get together and reminisce about their “flamingo past”.
Corintus, trying to change the subject, asked Hoda what they were going do next. “More excitements in your immediate future?”
“We’re going back to our camp,” Hoda replied. “Our mission here is now complete. We’ve gone with you as far as we could.”
“Thank you for your help,” Corintus said. “We owe you our lives.”
Aquilina could not bring herself to say goodbye. She ran abruptly the length of the corridor and then down the stairs.
“Please forgive my daughter,” Corintus said.
“There is nothing to forgive,” Hoda said. “She has lost her only friend, and now she is losing us. Please tell her we’re not upset, and I hope the next time we see each other, it will be under happier circumstances.”
“Lead on, Mr. Slued,” Corintus said after Hoda and Karadon had left. “I’ve had my fill of Tirkalanzibar. We’re ready to move on.”
Inside the office, Cahloon sat in a rocking chair and hummed softly while Vily stood in the same position, unmoving. Hearing a soft rustle, she smiled and said, “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever show up.”
“I didn’t want one of them to open the door and surprise us.”
“You know full well they cannot do that,” Cahloon replied, her eyes closed. “Are you ready for this?” She opened her eyes and looked at the young girl standing before her. “What name do you go by, now?”
“Sheheluth.”
Cahloon scoffed. “Poetic. Well then, Sheheluth, are you ready for what’s next? This plan of yours is as crazy as a drunken sailor trying to catch a shark with his bare hands.”
“There are always risks. You know that,” Sheheluth replied. “But you also know how important Vily is, don’t you? We can’t risk losing her, not this early on in the plan.”
Cahloon scoffed once more. “I really wonder about your plan.”
“It’s not my plan, Cahloon,” Sheheluth remonstrated. “Besides, can you think of a better one?”
“Nope,” Cahloon said, standing up.
“We’ve always known there wasn’t much hope in all of this,” Sheheluth said. “It’s as crazy as crazy gets.”
“You could say that.”
They stood there silently for a little while. “Soon, Sharr will release the kôhrosh,” Sheheluth said evenly.
Cahloon stiffened. “Is that so? Then we’re past the initial skirmish. This is getting serious.”
“This is serious, yes.”
“All right,” Cahloon replied. “It has been a good life, and I will be ready when everyone else is.”
Sheheluth nodded. She went over to Vily and took her hand. “I must admit, having her wear the medallion was simply brilliant.”
“Did you suggest it to Aquilina?”
Sheheluth shook her head. “She thought of it on her own.”
“She’s impressive,” Cahloon said.
“And downright scary.”
Both women smiled.
“By the way,” Cahloon said, “where did you find that dog?”
“I’m not sure,” Sheheluth said, frowning. “Maybe I had a dog once?”
“Well, that’s an encouraging sign. A very encouraging sign.”
“Now the hardest part begins,” Sheheluth said as she walked with Vily toward the door. “I’ll be seeing you soon. Be ready.”
“You won’t have to worry. I will be. I do want to pay Sarand a visit.”
“And we will, very soon, if all goes according to plan.”
Before reaching the door, Sheheluth and Vily vanished.
Standing on the wall of Tirkalanzibar, Seamar gazed at the caravans moving through the city’s ten large doors. He had no hope of seeing Hoda again, but he didn’t need it. In the brisk breeze of the day, Seamar smiled and looked forward to his next visit back home when he would behold once more the beautiful eyes of Lamia, his betrothed.
“The reason we fear wolves more than bears is not that wolves kill more of us than bears do; the opposite seems to be true. When you see a bear, you immediately recognize a predator. You see the danger and you run. When you see the silhouette of a wolf, you might be lulled into thinking it's a friendly dog, until the beast approaches, followed by its pack; and then it's too late. We fear wolves more than bears because they are an enemy disguised as a friend. In many ways, Tanniin is to Mycene what a bear is to a wolf; one is stoutly proud and dangerous, whereas the other is deceptively friendly and deadly. Deadly like a pack of hungry wolves.”
–Memoirs of Alkiniöm the Traveler.
I will kill every dog in Mycene, thought Ahiram. Every single one of those four-legged, Pit-begotten, loud-barking creatures in this blasted kingdom.
Hundreds of shepherd dogs filled the night with their ceaseless yapping. Winter was fast approaching, causing dozens of large sheep herds to migrate from the northwestern hills of the kingdom of Mycene to its southern, more temperate coast. Packs of wolves and solitary bears tracked them continuously, keeping the dogs alert and tense.
As if taunting the Silent, the dogs chorused in a loud cacophony of frenzied barking that rose to a deafening crescendo before falling abruptly silent. A lull followed, calm, soothing, where the westerly wind from the nearby sea rustled the leaves, reminding Ahiram of the playful breeze that used to soothe his anger in Master Habael’s tranquil garden.
Five weeks earlier, he had boarded a ship from the northeastern port of Tan-Aneer, Tanniin, bound to Byblos, Finikia. Knowing that he was wanted by the Temple, he used El-Windiir’s artifacts to slip away in the dark of night and landed in Mycene, successfully evading the High Riders. Six weeks prior to leaving, he had faced the urkuun, the terrifying beast that the Temple of Baal unleashed against him. Using the sword and the magical artifacts of El-Windiir that he uncovered at the conclusion of the Games of the Mines, he destroyed his enemy. But victory came at a bitter price. Noraldeen, his light, anchor and moral compass, was killed. She died saving him. As a Silent, Ahiram was prepared to lose his life for the sake of others. However, he was not ready to lose Noraldeen, who had stood by his side during the six years of harsh training in the elite corps.
Six years earlier, while still living in Baher-Ghafé, his sister Hoda had asked him to wait for her in her fishing boat. She told him she would come right back for him. Instead, it was the shrewd dwarf merchant, Kwadil, who found him and sold him into slavery to Commander Tanios, the master of the Silent Corps. Noraldeen filled the void that Hoda’s absence left. She was there for him, supporting him, helping him, steadying his footsteps. She saw past his fiery temper, and her trust in him never wavered. He knew she loved him, loved him deeply, profoundly, with a love as clear as the clearest stream, as tall as the highest tree, as powerful as the greatest storm. A love he had been incapable of reciprocating. She was an eagle soaring in the sky; he was a tiger stalking the deep forests. She was a princess by birth and by character; he was a slave and a hero.
Her death and her absence dimmed the light and darkened Ahiram’s world. Deep within him, beneath his steely determination to persevere, a stormy sea raged, seeking a chance to surge over the high walls of reason and submerge the world into a blinding bloodbath. But deeper than the rage, her death left him feeling broken and destitute, as if he was back in Hoda’s small boat, lost at sea, rudderless and without hope. Still, Ahiram’s mind was not a mere theater where opposing forces competed; a force for destruction, another for conquest, and a third for self-commiseration. These forces were real and tugged at his will, but his will remained steadfast, for it had been shaped by six years of unrelenting training in the ways of the Silent Corps. It had been nourished by strong bonds of friendship with Banimelek, Jedarc, and many of the other Silent. Above all, it was crowned with the promise he had made to Noraldeen before she died: his promise to love her as she had loved him. True, he did
not yet know how this promise would shape the rest of his life, but he knew that yielding to his anger, being a sormoss—an enraged oppressor—meant breaking this promise. He would not be a sormoss, as the mysterious new Silent, Sheheluth, had called him. He would be a Silent for as long as he lived. He would abide by the code, until one day, he could stand tall before Jabbar, his father, Hayat, his mother, and his sister Hoda and tell them with characteristic sincerity that he never betrayed their memory, their honor, or their love.
After a harrowing chase at the end of the Game of Meyroon, Ahiram had fallen into an underground river and nearly drowned. Even though he was unaware of Aquilina’s existence, it was her guiding hand that saved him from death by leading him to an escape tunnel. The underground passage brought him to the tomb of El-Windiir where he found Layaleen, the famed sword of El-Windiir, the founder of Tanniin. Alongside the blade were the pair of bronze shoes, the belt of silver, the mask of gold, and the wings of pure meyroon. He also discovered something else, something quite unexpected. A Letter of Power had fallen into his possession. It appeared as a golden tile, inscribed with the symbol taw. Later, Sheheluth, whose knowledge of magical lore was far beyond her young years, showed him how this Letter was linked to a star, and that stars were not simple luminaries in the abode of the gods, but massive sources of energy with a size and girth beyond human comprehension. They were the physical embodiment of the power of the gods. The Letter allowed him to draw from this power and use it against the urkuun. He was still unsure how it had happened. Did he do it on his own, or was it Sheheluth? Had she used him? Had she helped him? Again, he did not know it was Aquilina acting in Tyrulan that channeled the energy of the star through the Letter of Power to let him destroy his enemy. He, the male Seer of Power, and she, the female Seer of Power, were mysteriously connected, but of this, neither of them had any awareness.
The Temple of Baal was convinced that the Letters of Power were evil. According to Baalite understanding, the Letters would compel the Seer to open the Pit and release the dark lords locked in its depths. The Seer would become their lord and would fuse their power with those of the Letters to rule over the sixty-two kingdoms of the known world without interruption and without end.
“The Seer will rule forever, for the Lords of the Deep will make him immortal,” Sharr, the high priest of Babylon, had lectured in the Temple of Marduc. “He will be a shell, an empty vessel through which their cruelty, their lust for human flesh will be fulfilled. He will suffer more than his victims and will never be able to free himself. The world will pass into darkness until the Lords of the Deep snuff out life and turn the land into a lifeless, scorched desert. The only way to save humankind,” Sharr asserted, “is to destroy the Seer before he gathers all the Letters and learns how to use them.” So determined was Sharr to stop Ahiram that he unleashed the urkuun of the Third Order, the Seducer, to destroy him. Although the attempt had failed, Ahiram was under no illusion that the Temple would leave him alone.
But the Temple was not a monolithic organization. The Adorants were the only priestly order to teach that Seers came in pairs—a man and a woman—and that the woman, not the man, would one day unlock the Pit and turn the world into a dark chaos. Sharr rejected that teaching, arguing that in the absence of a tangible proof, the head of the orders must rely on the Temple’s credible sources, and not one of them mentioned a female Seer. His reasoning swayed the other four orders, and they too ignored Sarand’s warning. She chafed at Sharr’s stubbornness and what she perceived as his unavowed disdain of her convictions. As the head of the Adorants, Sarand wielded a power that rivaled Sharr’s, and she was waiting for the opportune moment to crush him and rule in his stead.
When the Merilian—the medallion Ahiram was wearing as a child—opened a portal to the Arayat, Sharr realized the Seer was hiding in Baher-Ghafé, but Sarand, following the Adorants’ logic, concluded that the female Seer must also be alive. Sarand considered the female Seer to be her true nemesis, the one she was fated to face and defeat. Secretly, she began searching the Spell World for telltale signs of her existence and picked up Aquilina’s trail when the young girl accidentally fell into Tyrulan. Like a predator smelling blood, Sarand followed the cues, and drew dangerously close to the princess of Gordion. Wanting to protect Aquilina at all cost, Ashod misdirected Sarand by mentioning Noraldeen. Not only did Orgond’s daughter collaborate closely with the male seer, but she was half-Empyrean as well. According to Sarand’s source, the female seer would be of Empyrean descent, and since Ashod could not possibly have had access to her source, Sarand was swayed. She directed the urkuun to kill the female Silent, but once the deed was done, a doubt lingered in her mind, a doubt that, perhaps, the princess from Tanniin was not the true female Seer after all. Sarand had then dispatched four khoblyss, creatures of the Pit, to capture Ahiram and pry from his mind the last minutes of the battle so she could ascertain whether the female Seer was indeed dead and buried.
Two other groups were also hot on Ahiram’s trail. Galliöm, the head of the tajéruun—the powerful league of moneymen—had sent his own team to nab Ahiram before the Temple could do so. Also, unbeknownst to both Temple and moneymen, Nebo, a general of the High Riders, had dispatched a group of Sowasian assassins to exact a cruel revenge on Ahiram after he had crippled Olothe, Nebo’s younger brother, during the Games of the Mines.
Since the death of Noraldeen, Ahiram had learned that Hoda survived the destruction of their village at the hands of the High Riders. His only chance of reuniting with her was to find the Black Robes, a clandestine organization that struggled to save lives whenever the Temple destroyed a village on mere suspicion that it harbored the Seer of Power.
Ahiram was unaware that he was being independently chased by a Kerta priest flanked by four khoblyss, a shrewd tajèr and his otherworldly acolytes, and the dreaded Sowasian assassins. The High Riders of Baal had tried to murder him during the last day of the Games, so he knew that the Temple was after him. His immediate goal was to elude the forces of the Temple and reach Byblos in Finikia, his homeland. His Silent training told him his foes would expect him to travel by boat, or on horseback, or to use his wings to fly swiftly. To elude them, he chose to move slowly through the Mycenean countryside, disguised as a shepherd boy. Once in Byblos, he would seek contact with the Black Robes and see if they could lead him to his sister.
Somewhere on the vast plain, stretching from the western orchards where Ahiram was hiding to the mountain ranges of eastern Mycene, a dog broke the lull. He barked, and the barking became, in Ahiram’s imagination, a string of words the canine did not tire repeating: “Wolf, wolf, wolf … wolf, wolf …”
“Hound him, hound him, hound him,” the other dogs seemed to say.
“Wolf, wolf,” the first dog repeated, just in case a straggling dog or a hard-of-hearing older hound had not heard him.
“Hound him, hound him, hound him,” the rest of them insisted.
“The Pit take them all,” Ahiram grumbled. No longer able to sleep, he sat up yawning and stretched. “Why do shepherds have to rely on this unclean animal to protect their herds?” he asked the nearby apple trees. He plucked a ripe fruit, brushed it against his sleeve, washed it with clean water from his water skin, washed it again, then dried it with a clean cloth and nibbled at it. “Why can’t they position rabbit-filled trenches at the edge of the herd every night to satisfy the wolves and keep the sheep safe?” Thinking his idea brilliant, he stood up and lectured the trees, which swayed gently in the wind as though saying, “we know, we know.”
Ahiram took another bite. “The wolves would come to eat the rabbits, but rabbits reproduce faster than wolves can eat them, so there would always be enough rabbits to feed the wolves. Now, the wolves are territorial, so they’d defend the rabbit trenches against other predators. Problem solved. No more nocturnal, noisy, smelly, stubborn, loud-mouthed, clingy, slobbering, stiff-legged, bone-crunching, snout-to-the-ground, importunate, dense, idiotic dogs.”
&nb
sp; The dark cupola above buzzed with thousands of stars like a hive calling the bees home. One of them fell in a silent streak of light and vanished. Three more followed in close succession.
An image of Jabbar, his father, popped in his mind. “Father would have said that Baal has loosened his bow, and tomorrow’s catch of fish will be plentiful.”
As a child in Baher-Ghafé, the logic behind his father’s saying eluded him. That the mysterious streaks in the sky could be misconstrued for fiery arrows was understandable, but the relationship between them and a plentiful catch the following morning was baffling. He recalled having asked Master Habael what he thought of it, and the old man had smiled and patted him on the head—which Ahiram knew meant Habael approved of the question, but did not wish to provide an answer.
“Keep asking questions, Ahiram,” he had told him. “Questions are the mind’s lifeblood, the rugged path to truth.”
Far to the east, on the opposite side of the large plain, a lone wolf howled. Its call, stemming from somewhere within the tall mountain range east of the plain, stilled the night. For one brief moment, the Mycenean skies felt familiar, reminding Ahiram of Taniir-the-Strong Castle. Tanniinites believed dogs to be servants of Baal and had very little sympathy or use for them; thus, the nights in Tanniin were always quiet.
The dogs closest to the wolf went berserk. Ahiram scoffed. “Wolf, wolf, wolf,” he imitated them sarcastically. The rest of the dogs joined the chorus. “Hound him, hound him, hound him,” Ahiram said. “Hound him, hound him,” he repeated for good measure. “What’s wrong with them? They bark as if their lives depended on it.” Realizing what he had just said, he was glad no one was around to hear him spout inanities.
Their livelihood may depend on it, he thought somewhat soberly. But I highly doubt they can repel a pack of hungry wolves with their barking. Blood will be spilled tonight.
The Wretched Race (Epic of Ahiram Book 3) Page 14