The Wretched Race (Epic of Ahiram Book 3)

by Michael Joseph Murano

  Listen to me, Ahiram, I—

  Later, Sheheluth.

  Ahiram—

  I said later. Now get out of my head.

  He stepped away and found himself standing before Jin. Time is distorted here. Must be part of Ebaan’s magic.

  “There you are,” she said, flustered. “I can’t seem to start a fire. This place is really bizarre.”

  “And I couldn’t find the stream.”

  Why are you lying?

  Later, Sheheluth.

  A look of confusion furrowed Jin’s forehead. “What do you mean?”

  “My waterskin is empty.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s full to the brim.”

  “Huh … look at that, I must not have realized it was already full when Jinomus gave it to me. Here,” he said, throwing the skin to Jin, “catch. I’ll start a fire.”

  Jin extended her arms to catch the incoming object, but it went right through her as if she were a ghost. It fell behind her in a soft thud.

  Ahiram began whistling “Ode to Warm Chicken,” one of Jedarc’s favorite tunes about a Silent and his chicken dinner, and watched as the sticks he’d been piling kept vanishing.

  “That was clever,” Jin said softly. “How did you do that? The water is from Metranos, so there is nothing in the skin that would cause it to go through me like that.”

  Ahiram smiled. That’s because you do not know about the Letter of Power I tied to the waterskin on my way back. “How about we start from the beginning, Jin. Or should I call you Ebaan?”

  Jin smiled, and as she did her features became hazy, as if a fog were progressively enveloping her. She grew taller, thinner, her round eyes elongated, and her black pupils became blue sapphire. The nose sunk into the face and disappeared, leaving behind an open shadow. The forehead grew until it merged with the bald scalp into a pointed cone. The ears grew long and thin. The neck was an open wound where Ahiram could see throbbing veins. The legs were so emaciated that they seemed to be made of thin gray rubber, and the arms resembled serpents whose heads had been replaced with iron claws, for that was the shape of the fingers.

  “Not a pretty sight,” Ebaan said, bowing. “Very few souls have seen me as I am,” he added. “Where is my heart?” he asked, running his hands all over his body. “Where did it … ah, there you are,” he cooed, “I thought I’d lost you, love. You’re right here.” His hand was on his lower back. “Strange, isn’t it, when you think you have lost your own heart. This must be a foreign concept to you, but once you see Metranos’ palace, you’ll understand. Organs do travel here, and it is easy to lose sight of them.”

  Ahiram managed to keep his cool. Next to the béghôm, sylveeds, and the urkuun, Ebaan’s appearance, as horrid as it was, did not frighten him.

  Then, Ebaan smiled, and Ahiram wished he had not.

  Ebaan’s smile was wide and open, and would have normally showed his teeth, but instead, it now opened to nothing, or rather, to a dark hollow where nothing existed, where there was no life or death, just a formless void that had gone beyond the howling ache of departed loved ones. It was an emptiness that lacked nothing, needed nothing, and hoped for nothing. It was a self-absorbed emptiness swallowing Ebaan inside-out without pain, without sorrow, without haste. The urkuun, the sylveeds, the béghôm were substantial; they were a distorted and cruel form of existence, but they existed, they hoped, they toiled. This miasmic hollow was not even a destroyed existence or a dead existence. It was an existence that had curled up on itself and collapsed into a tight knot of frigid emptiness. It was what despair looked like when it gave into itself, the terminal point of death when death grows cold and stops mowing the living. It was a freezing fire without the light of flames. Next to it, the eyes of a blind man were full of light, a decaying corpse was a symphony of life, a destroyed city was a place of renewal, and all the monsters of the Arayat were a mere deformation of life. This thing, however, was the end of all things. This was a shard of the Pit of Fire, a glimpse into eternal abyss, and it was feeding off the soul of a man, turning him into a destroyer.

  Overwhelmed, Ahiram thought to flee, but an image flashed in his mind: the bloodied hand of Noraldeen reaching for his face, her smile waning as she was about to give up her spirit. “Love me as I have loved you,” she had said. And she had made him promise that he would. Nora had managed to see past his anger, past his dark brooding temper. For her sake, he did not run away or avert his eyes.

  Ebaan’s form shifted instantly to that of a resplendent young prince with long jet-black hair framing a comely face. He was dressed in a white frilly shirt over burgundy pants and red leather boots that reached mid-calf. He wore a cream vest with gold buttons and a yellow silk scarf. As the sun crested over the hilltops, it seemed to shine only for him. It cradled Ebaan in a brilliant halo, giving him an air of regalia and majesty.

  “Prince Ebaan the Third, hailing from Ophir. At your service.”

  “Ahiram, son of Jabbar.”

  “Well then, Ahiram, son of Jabbar, how did you manage to trick me?”

  Ahiram smiled. “You are the host, Your Highness. Shouldn’t you do me the honor of telling me the reasons for this unexpected invitation?”

  The prince laughed, a joyful, crystalline laugh.

  Ah, the power of illusion, Ahiram thought. How easy it would be to let go of the real Ebaan and believe in this version of him.

  I told you he’s dangerous. Kill him! Kill him now!

  “Very well, then. But before I do so, answer me this: How did you know I was not Jin?”

  The Silent carefully weighed his options and decided that his best course of action would be to state the plain truth. “Three things betrayed you. First, knowing how ruthless Dariöm was, I couldn’t understand why he kept Jin alive. He didn’t need her to bring me to you, nor did he need her for anything else. She was deadweight, which is why I kept you chained while freeing myself. If my suspicion was correct, and Dariöm wanted me to escape with you, then his henchmen would not kill Jin—you that is.”

  “I see your logic but it was a gamble, don’t you think? She may have been the real Jin and you would have placed her in harm’s way.”

  “If this was the only fact, then I would agree with you, but it wasn’t. Her voice betrayed you. The Jin I heard speaking while with the shepherds consistently emphasized the second syllable, as do the two other she-dwarfs and Farveen. You don’t. You stress the syllables the way most folks who speak the common tongue do.”

  “It could have been done under duress.”

  Ahiram nodded. “I suspected you but I needed proof, and you supplied it when I carried you out of Dariöm’s house.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “You forgot that Jin is a she-dwarf.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Muscle placement. The dwarfish constitution is different from ours. Their muscles, calves, hips, and biceps, to name just a few, do not fit in place the same way as ours. I’m a trained fighter so I pay close attention to muscular structure. The muscles of the Jin I carried when I had the poison in me had a very different structure than the Jin I carried from that house. So when Farveen told me you could assume different forms, I became convinced that you were Jin. I needed confirmation, so I filled this waterskin with water from Metranos, your water, shall we say, and I added an ingredient that is foreign to you and to this place. You saw the result.”

  The prince smiled and Ahiram flinched, afraid to see once more the dark hollow within him. But Ebaan’s disguise was more than skin deep; perfectly formed white teeth appeared inside his mouth, and the Silent relaxed a bit. “Impressive,” Ebaan said softly. He picked up the waterskin. “Huh … interesting.” He tossed it back and Ahiram, who caught it. “This is a new trick I shall want to learn. But let’s talk business. Did you figure out why I wanted you to come here?”

  “I had not until I saw you under your true … physique. If I had to guess, I’d say you brought me here to kill you.”

&n
bsp; And that’s what you will do.

  Stay away, Sheheluth. Don’t interfere.

  Kill him!

  Ebaan laughed and Ahiram felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach, for standing in the sun, seemingly happy and relaxed, Ebaan looked like Jedarc. He even laughed like him.

  “You are one impressive Silent, my friend. Do tell, how did you guess?”

  “You would not have exposed your real self if it were not important. You wanted me to see you as you really are, which you told me, is something very few people have seen.”

  “True. Please continue.”

  “Your condition is deteriorating, correct?”

  “Yes, it is. It is. Can you tell?”

  “No. Just a guess. If you continue to deteriorate, you will be absorbed by the darkness I saw within you, correct?” Ebaan did not answer. “But instead, you would like to die because then you could escape this fate, and no one has the power or the magic to kill you, not even the Temple. You must have heard of my battle with the urkuun—”

  “I saw it,” Ebaan cut in, “but never mind that. Please continue.”

  “So you hope the power that killed the urkuun could also kill you, is that not so?”

  Ebaan nodded. “Could it?”

  Ahiram shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “An honest answer from an honest man.” The prince’s tone was at once threatening and hopeful. “Assuming it could kill me, would you do it?”

  That’s not a question. That’s a threat, thought Ahiram. If I don’t try, he will kill me.

  He’s asking for it! Just do it!

  Huh, thought the Silent, Sheheluth can’t hear me when I don’t direct my thoughts to her. He glanced at Shadow sprawled on the ground a short distance away behind Ebaan. Since when do you do what your worst enemy asks of you, particularly when it sounds too good to be true? Be quiet now, Sheheluth, or so help me, when we meet again, I will drill some Silent discipline down that wicked spine of yours.

  Wicked spine, she grumbled, you should listen …

  Slowly, Ahiram bent down and picked a rock, then as quick as a flash, spun around and threw it. Shadow scampered away. And stay away now!

  Ebaan’s eyes locked on Shadow. He extended an arm, palm raised. A green flash blasted out from it. Ahiram heard Shadow yelp, then nothing. “Pesky dog.” He brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his immaculate clothes. “Don’t worry. I just scared him away. So now, will you kill me?”

  “If I don’t, what will you do? Kill me?”

  “There is no need for that, my dear child,” said the prince soothingly. “Your recklessness will see the end of you soon enough. You think you’re smart but there’s one little detail that escapes you and it will be the death of you, the quiet death of a young child blowing out a candle.”

  What does he mean, I wonder? What little detail?

  They locked eyes like two bulls locking horns. Neither wavered or was cowed by the will of the other. They stood like two impassioned army commanders watching their soldiers slaughter each other while they gave curt orders.

  Why here? Thought Ahiram. Why bring me all the way here when he could have asked me to kill him anywhere else? “I won’t kill you if it can be helped,” said Ahiram at last. “Not if there’s another way.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Life. Hope. Joy.”

  Ebaan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “I am well over six hundred years old. I was young when I was condemned to die. I can no longer remember how old I must have been, or why I was condemned. All that remains is the certitude that the punishment was well deserved. Death, I mean. Death was a just punishment for my deeds, at least that’s what I remember, or perhaps I created this fake memory after the first two hundred years? I cannot tell anymore. What I do know is that instead of being hanged, I ended up in the hands of a priest of Baal who then sent me to the Arayat to feed their precious fields. In the Arayat—you must have heard about the Spell World—you lose a drop of blood every month. It is not precise, but it is close enough, which means that your life and the nightmarish pain you feel will last a good fifty years. Thankfully, most curse feeders—that is what they call us—die long before they run out of blood, but in my case, something odd happened. A cursestorm struck the field I was tethered to, and I found myself free to move. Apparently, the Arayat had adopted me. It could no longer see the difference between the Spell World and me, so I managed to escape back into this world and brought the Arayat with me, which is why Metranos is a space where no one comes in or out without my leave. Metranos,” he said opening his arms wide, “and I are one.”

  “What did you do then?” Ahiram was still struggling to understand Ebaan’s true motives.

  “You would think that years of suffering would uproot vice from you, but no, vice has a way of sticking to your heart like molasses. So when I came to Metranos, I had in mind three goals: become rich, exact revenge on those who condemned me, and the third, I can no longer remember. I have a feeling I satisfied the third, but I … ah yes, I remember now: die of pleasure. Since I’m still alive, so to speak, I have not truly satisfied the third goal.”

  “Did you reach your other two goals?”

  “I am rich beyond your wildest imagination. That I am. As for revenge, I found that those who condemned me were already dead, and I was so busy getting rich, it no longer mattered.”

  “Is being rich all that matters?”

  “You mean to say that something else should matter more than wealth? Loooove perhaps?” he added with an ironic slur. “Long ago, in Metranos, I met a beautiful woman, a slave like me, who was also tethered to the Arayat. I freed her and I gave her my heart … then she betrayed me. She tried to kill me, so I chained her back to the Arayat and I made sure she stayed alive. I see her every week. I don’t know why, but I do. I left my silly ideas about love in the Spell World, with her, and kept my riches.”

  “So what changed?”

  “You. That’s what changed.”

  Ahiram was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “Evidently, you have no idea what you did when you defeated the béghôm and the urkuun. You thought you defeated two creatures, but they were both Arayatian creatures. Understand, Ahiram, what I am saying: They are not just two creatures from the Spell World. They were spawns of spells and curses, very powerful spells and curses, but spawns nonetheless. They have no existence apart from the Spell World. If the Arayat were to disappear tomorrow, they would vanish. Nothing would be left of them. Do you understand?”

  “I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “Why would you? Unless you have been in that place, unless the Arayat sucked your blood and conjoined you to its fate, how would you?”

  “Wait.” Ahiram was beginning to understand. “Do you mean that—”

  “Of course I do. You did not just kill those creatures; you wounded the Arayat. Twice.”

  “But how? How could I have?”

  Ebaan skirted the question. “You cut through the mighty Arayat, the spell nursery of the world, the source of the Temple’s power.” He laughed. “Sharr ought to be truly upset now. He must want you dead, or worse. I would be careful if I were you.”

  “So, by wounding the Arayat, as you say, I wounded you?”

  “Twice.”

  He ran a finger down his nose and then across his lips. Ahiram inhaled sharply. That’s why he showed himself as he truly is. The wound along his nose and that hollowness inside him, I did that.

  “Those are mighty wounds.” Ebaan smiled. “This power of yours is foreign to the Arayat; it is of a different nature, one the Arayat will find difficult to defend against.”

  Ahiram kept his cool. “But if I did this to you, then why not kill me?”

  “And kill the only chance I have to escape the Pit?” Ebaan replied. “I don’t think you truly understand what it means to be a part of the Arayat. This sick, twisted Spell World sources its power from the Pit. The Pit.” His eyes grew lar
ge as a haunted look cast a shadow over his youthful face. “I have seen the Pit once. Just a flash, a mere second, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy. I am tied to the Arayat like a boat to a wretched shore by a rusty anchor I cannot break. Why do you think I kept myself alive all these years? I would welcome death any day over the Pit, but I cannot die. The curses that run through my blood protect me from death. I live, yet I am not alive. I live in dread of a fate worse than death. I can leave Metranos for ten days at a time, but I cannot go very far, mind you. I wish I could go to the shore, board a vessel and cross the mighty sea. But I cannot. I cannot. Chains I cannot break shackle me to the Arayat, to Metranos. Then you come along and cut through the Arayat like a child running a stick through wet sand on a beach, and you want me to kill you?” Ebaan shook his head. “You’re my bridge away from the Pit, you understand?” Seeing Ahiram’s confusion, Ebaan shook his head. “Of course not. How could you?”

  He doesn’t want me to kill him. He wants me to free him. Something is not right. Ahiram pointed to the medallion stuck in his arm. “See this medallion? I don’t know how to remove it. Every time I touch it, it hurts, and the pain is increasing. If I can’t do something as simple as this, what makes you believe I can kill you?”

  Ebaan dismissed the argument. “Removing this medallion is not simple. Besides, even if you don’t understand the magic behind the medallions, it doesn’t make you are any less able to throw this waterskin right through me. So, will you kill me?”

  “I will do everything in my power to save you from the Pit, but I would rather not kill you if I can manage it.”

  “Ah. Magnanimity. How beautiful.” Ebaan smiled. “Someone else would have negotiated. You could have asked me to remove the medallion, to cover you with gold, to share my secrets, or show you how the Arayat works. You could have asked any of these things, instead, you want to save me. How very charming. Let me show you around Metranos. I am certain that you will change your mind.” In one quick step, Ebaan drew closer to Ahiram, and stood mere inches away from him. “Let me show you the kind of monster I am. By the end of this tour, I assure you, you will have no qualms with killing me.”