It really was Eidon’s will.
As Katahn’s last word died away, an excited murmur danced across the crowd. A puff of warm air ruffled the whiskers on Abramm’s jaw, carrying with it the undeniable tang of rain. In the distance, thunder growled again. The heavens would open soon, ending all of this. But not yet.
Beltha’adi stepped back and addressed the guards standing near the box. “Move that piece of dung out of the ring and-“
“No?” Abramm cut in, bringing Beltha’adi’s head around in surprise. “My people will see to him.”
The dark eyes fastened upon him, speculating, still amused. “You have ever been a bold one, Pretender. But very well. It matters little to me, since in the end you will all be dead anyway.”
Abramm turned to the Dorsaddi standing in the archway behind him and was surprised to find Shemm standing among them. Mephid and Japheth were already hurrying out to Meridon’s side.
Once they had carried him away, Beltha’adi faced Abramm again, grinning ferociously. “So you send your second in to face me first, eh?” he said as he brought the elbana around to point directly at Abramm’s chest. An odd way for the Great Pretender to respond to a challenge.”
“I’m surprised you think so, seeing as during all the months I challenged you, you had no trouble sending your seconds to face me.” He brought up his own weapons, sword and dagger, and moved to the right, turning Beltha’adi’s advance into a circle.
“I had other, more important matters to attend to,” Beltha’adi said.
As did I.”
“Like the acquisition of that new decoration you wear?”
“That was one of them, yes.”
`And you think now it will give you victory over me.”
“I think that the power behind it will give me victory over you.”
“The power of the dying god? Well, let us see, then.”
The Broho attacked in a barrage of two-handed strokes that made up for their lack of variation by their savage speed. Abramm backstepped furiously, parrying every stroke handily, but was pressed twenty feet before he finally managed to tie up his adversary’s blade and step in close to lunge with the dagger.
Its point tore the fabric of the Broho’s tunic as he spun away, and they returned to circling. Again Beltha’adi launched a savage series of strokes, but Abramm was ready this time, choosing the moment, catching the elbana on his dagger as he stepped out of the line of attack and slashed at the Broho’s open face with his sword.
He was aiming for the eye, hit the brow instead, only a tiny cut, but Beltha’adi lurched back with a curse. It wasn’t from pain, but from the indignity of being the first one blooded-him who had expected not to be blooded at all.
They circled again. “You’re good, Pretender,” Beltha’adi grated, “but you’re only flesh. And flesh isn’t good enough to stand against a god.”
Abramm kept his gaze fixed on Beltha’adi’s. “No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”
For the first time he saw something like uneasiness in the Supreme Commander’s eyes, just a flicker, as of a thought formed and quickly squelched.
The long blade came at Abramm again in alternating diagonal sweeps. He blocked them with relative ease, despite the speed at which they came, wondering that the man still seemed to be playing with him. Again he fell into the rhythm, calculated his move, stepped out of the attack line and lunged, his sword driving for the unprotected armpit.
This time the move was expected. The elbana slid off the dagger to block, then whipped back from the offside in a counterattack. Abramm lurched back almost out of reach, the tip of the blade slicing his chest.
Beltha’adi followed him, lunging and slashing, and Abramm blocked him stroke for stroke, falling into that strange, misty-edged world where time both fled in an instant and came to a standstill, where he anticipated his opponent’s moves before they happened and pain and fatigue held no sway. He had been here many times before and knew it always resulted in his best performance, knew in some back corner of his mind that he was performing well right now. No. Far more than well, better, perhaps than ever in his life. Nor had he ever felt stronger. It was as if fire burned in his veins, igniting his flesh with a power and precision he had never known before.
And when finally the Supreme Commander broke off to resume circling him, blade held out and ready, he saw that the uneasiness had returned to the other’s eyes. It dawned on him, then, that perhaps this power in him was not a normal product of training and concentration and determination, was perhaps not his own at all.
“You are tired, Pretender,” the Broho said, circling, his dark eyes boring into Abramm’s. “Your arms are trembling. Your parries are weakening. You will not last much longer….”
It was hard to concentrate on the words, hard to make them mean anything. And when finally Abramm managed it, they did not make sense. For he was not tired, nor did his arms tremble, and his parries were coming more swiftly and decisively than ever.
It was a distraction. He realized that the moment the elbana came back from a feint and cut into the side of his thigh, seeking to hamstring him, but he turned away in time.
He saw the Broho master swallow, saw the crease now etched between his eyes, lined with the blood from the cut on his brow as it mingled with rivulets of sweat. Other cuts marked the dark tunic, each of them glistening wetly. Abramm could hardly recall having made them, but in that moment, he realized he was winning.
The Esurhite was speaking again, his words coming breathlessly-something about a painful death. Abramm ignored him, falling back into the golden haze, seeing first the eyes, then the movements-peripherally, and yet focusing on each individually. It was as if his consciousness had expandedhe knew everything at once, so that no move, no trick could get by him. He lunged and swung and blocked and parried; he dodged and rolled and leaped and circled. And all the while the fire coursed through his veins, filling him with light and life and a glorious, exultant strength.
He wondered, finally, if perhaps he was dying and didn’t know it. A brief glance down revealed his tunic reduced to blood-soaked tatters, yet still he felt no pain.
His Light will be my strength….
Lord Eidon, if you are indeed taking me, please, let me bring him with me.
Beltha’adi sidestepped, looped free of Abramm’s blade, and stepped back, circling, watching him warily. His eyes betrayed real concern … and something else. Something smug and knowing. A flicker, the barest flicker, a sense of something coming up behind, and Abramm turned just as the veren swooped upon him, his blade driving deep into its breast and the fire flooding out of him like a dam-burst.
The creature screamed as white light blasted the world away, its momentum carrying it hard into Abramm, bowling him to the ground and ripping his sword from his grasp as it plowed over him and was gone. Half-blinded, dagger still in hand, he scrambled to his feet, expecting to be attacked in this moment of weakness.
But the veren lay sprawled just past him on the sand, and beyond it the invincible Supreme Commander stood transfixed by surprise, staring gapemouthed at the corpse. Slowly his eyes came up to meet Abramm’s, and astonishment turned to fear. He shouted for his Broho to attack, but not one of the five beneath the statue moved. He shouted again, but still none responded. The five round-eyed faces gaped back at him, at the veren, and at Abramm, who, looking up, saw that his audience was no longer purely human. The men were still there, watching in silence, none moving more than the Broho. But hovering above them, slithering around them, dancing between them, were a myriad of amorphous shapes in a myriad of colorsred, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, and every shade between. They quivered and pulsed and jittered, even sidled among the clouds overhead. Many of them hovered around the great idol, passing in and out of the eyes, the mouth, the belly, wrapping around it, reaching out and slithering back. There were more wrapped around each Broho and priest, some inside their bodies. One man glowed transparent with yellow light, another with re
d, their eyes flaring like bright coals.
They writhed and they whispered and they reached out to him. He heard their rasping, muttering voices, smelled the roasted-grain scent of their presence, felt the cold essence and the hatred-the utter and thorough black hatred for him and the Light he carried within him. If they could destroy him, they would do so in an instant, but the Light kept them back.
Rhu’ema.
He had never before seen one, but he knew that was what they were.
And he knew exactly what he was to do. As he started toward Beltha’adi, the latter let his sword drop, then threw back his shoulders and drew a deep breath. A veil of purple fire burst from his lips, riding the back of a deep, hoarse bellow. It slammed into Abramm with enough force to stagger him backward-but met a barrier of white light that absorbed it like water did flame.
He kept walking, and the Broho drew another breath, sent out a coil of black mist and then a jagged snake of red lightning. None got through the wall of white fire. Abramm drew up before the man, saw the fear in his eyes, the knowledge of imminent death and then denial fulminating into rage. Beltha’adi fairly glowed with the power of the creature within him, purple fire blazing in his eyes, out his nose and mouth, and through every rent in his flesh. The elbana lifted lazily, then swooped down. Abramm caught it with his dagger, drove it back and up, and grabbed its hilt with his free hand. As Beltha’adi released a hand to try to push him, Abramm tore the elbana away and slashed back with the dagger. He saw a shorter blade, pulled from a hidden sheath, coming at him low, but he ignored it, driving his own weapon deep into the Esurhite’s chest.
The Light came upon him again, blasting up his arm and into the blade, into the body of the man impaled upon it. Purple fire flowed out of Beltha’adi’s eyes and into the sky. Gasping and limp, the Supreme Commander of the Army of the Black Moon slid off the blade and slumped to the sand. A moment he knelt there in front of Abramm, looking gray and old and strangely puzzled. Then he toppled sideways to the ground-his mouth open, his eyes glazed and empty-and did not move again.
The power bled out of Abramm like water from a punctured drinking sack. His vision of the massed rhu’ema faded, and as it did he became aware of his body. Pain and weakness shuddered through him, and he staggered backward a few steps, dizzy and so sharply pain-sick he came to a stop and doubled over. His flesh seemed a roil of agony, and there was one place, a well of fire low in his side, he thought might be especially serious.
His knees were about to give way when he remembered where he was, what he was about. With hundreds of eyes watching him, and a battle in the making, he couldn’t just collapse. Not yet, anyway. But for a moment he couldn’t make himself straighten, either.
A few deep breaths, a gasped prayer, a resolute amassing of his will, and he wrenched himself upright.
He had killed Beltha’adi at the center of the arena and now stood between the corpse and the archway through which he’d originally entered, the Dorsaddi comfortingly at his back. The nobles in their box had risen to their feet and were staring at their fallen leader in undisguised horror. All but one.
Katahn met his gaze and nodded gravely, a gesture of salute. And morethere was undeniably something of awe in his look.
Abramm scanned the dumbstruck crowd, which even yet did not appear to have grasped the reality that their invincible leader was dead. Even the priests on guard by the idol stood stunned and motionless. And though the idol’s stone grin had not changed, it somehow did not appear as pleased as it had earlier. Indeed, he could just make out the creatures he knew still swirled around it, could almost sense their outrage and the panicked frenzy of their activity.
It was time for the Dorsaddi to attack, while the enemy was still in shock. They should be rushing the field now, pouring out of the Wadi Juba, bellowing their war cries. But glancing over his shoulder, Abramm saw they were in shock themselves. Shemm still stood in the archway, Japheth and Mephid beside him, gaping as stupidly at the Supreme Commander’s corpse as were the priests, almost as if they expected it to reanimate.
Perhaps they did.
Abramm jerked back around with an awful premonition. Beltha’adi lay unmoving, but the sense of energy around the idol had increased, and the clouds overhead were definitely darkening. Small flashes of color whirled around the great, laughing head. The priests began to chant, their mouths moving like puppets, their voices rising and falling in rhythm, gaining tempo and volume. He felt the power building, like a distant swarm of bees, setting his nape hairs on end.
The clouds boiled closer, flickering with a roil of inner light-red, blue, and purple. The air grew cold and heavy. Fear eeled into his soul, and though he lifted the dagger he still held and stepped toward his fallen foe, he knew without Eidon’s power he could do nothing.
And Eidon’s power, it seemed, was not forthcoming.
The mists dropped even closer, swallowing the rims of the cliffs, almost black save for the lights at their midst. Tension crackled in the thick air, and the idol flashed with scarlet light. A loud crack resounded across the sand as a gout of mingled color shot from the idol’s ugly grin into the open mouth of the dead Supreme Commander.
The sound of bees mounted, a loud droning that momentarily resolved into voices screaming their triumph. Abramm shuddered, imagining the lights that must be out in that dark sea of startled faces. His heart was pounding double time, his knees quivered, and still the Light did not return to him.
On the sand before him, the corpse twitched, and the crowd gasped.
The corpse twitched again, then heaved a great, gasping breath and sat up. Red fire blazed in its eyes and out of its mouth and nose, danced with less intensity in the multifarious wounds, which were already closing. The fiery gaze came round to focus on Abramm, grinning in a red leer that was the image of the statue not twenty feet away.
And still Abramm was left with only flesh. He backed a step, trying to hold down panic and confusion. Surely Eidon would not have done all he had done only to abandon him now.
“I told you flesh was not enough to stand against a god.” The mouth moved, but as with the priests, it seemed to be worked by an invisible puppeteer. The voice seemed to come from the clouds and the ground and the stands, echoing and bouncing around him. “Nor is the power of the worthless god you serve.”
The thing lurched unnaturally to its feet, stepped stiffly toward him. He saw its chest swell as it drew breath to attack—
And two feathered arrows buried themselves in its heart, one from either side, both blazing with white Terstan fire.
The creature lurched onward another step, then halted, arms spread, mouth open. A great bellow tore out of it as the red light was suffused with white, and the thing fell to its knees. The arrows blazed whiter and whiter, the power spreading out from each shaft, flowing over the body, driving out the red, and finally flashing in a blaze of such blinding intensity Abramm had to turn away.
When he opened his eyes again, fighting to focus past the starbursts clouding his vision, he found nothing left of the Supreme Commander but a black, smoking smudge on the sand.
Across the arena, he picked out Katahn-Beltha’adi’s own heir-standing with a longbow in the noble’s box. Shemm stood armed likewise in the archway, the two of them in line with each other, the smoking hole between them.
Abramm lifted the bloody dagger, drawing their attention to himself. “Let all here know,” he cried, “that there is a god in Esurh? And he will not be mocked!”
At his back, the Dorsaddi burst into a savage collective scream and raced en masse across the canyon floor after their enemies.
Then, almost as if they were generated by the passion of the Dorsaddi attack, the winds swooped down the wadi.
C H A P T E R
43
The carnage was swift and shocking, for the Esurhites owed much in Dorsaddi eyes and were granted no quarter. It was a tide of death to all in gray tunics, leaving them cleaved and bloodied on the benches and the san
dy arena and up the Wadi Mudra to the main Esurhite camp on the arriza. Others died downstream and in the temple and the treasury and the chieftain’s palace. As the clouds withdrew to their normal altitude, Abramm saw men fighting on the rim and knew that the flanking force Shemm had sent out was doing its job.
Abramm himself had grown alarmingly weak, and the wound in his side pained him so deeply it was hard to think of anything else. He had fallen to his knees-he did not remember when-and was having difficulty making himself get up again when Katahn found him.
Abramm peered at him in bleary surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“I can’t very well go back with the Brogai, can I?”
“The Dorsaddi may kill you.”
“I’ll leave that to Sheleft’Ai.” He hauled Abramm to his feet. “Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
They headed back toward the Wadi Juba, the wind whipping steadily stronger against their backs. The torches had long since been uprooted and blown away, and now other things rolled and skittered by-barrels, palm fronds, saddle blankets, tenting. Sand pelted their cheeks and stung their eyes, and their hair was torn from the knots on their necks to lash about their faces. Then, as the first spattering squall of rain dwindled away, a violent gust slammed into them, and a thunderous boom shook the ground. Struggling upright, they turned to find the statue of Khrell shattered to rubble on the amphitheater’s tiered benches.
Dorsaddi raced by them, heading for shelter, many supporting wounded comrades. They shouted things as they went past, but their words were lost in the wind. Finally, though, one came to take Abramm from the other side, and with his aid they quickly reached one of the openings along the wadi floor.
A sizable crowd had already gathered in the vaulted chamber beyond, and once again all eyes turned Abramm’s way. There was a moment of awkwardness-on their parts as they realized they’d run past the Pretender in their haste to escape the storm, and on his because he didn’t like admitting he’d needed their help. Now, without the wind to contend with, he shook off the arm of the new man, and suddenly Shemm stood before him. He eyed Abramm with concern and Katahn with distrust, though it was clear he recognized him from their encounter in the amphitheater.
Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) Page 47