Fires of Mastery (The Tale of Azaran Book 3)

by Zackery Arbela

  Saerec! Lord of Heaven!

  You bring order to this world!

  The darkness flees from your illumination!

  Saerec ! Shaper of Fate!

  Your sons place their trust in you!

  For you make all paths straight!

  Saerec! Father of the Righteous!

  Teach us the truth of all things!

  Your servant awaits your command!

  Until all broken things are mended!

  Until the corrupt is made pure!

  Until the end of all things...

  The heat was becoming unbearable even for Azaran. Breathing was becoming difficult, every inhalation an exercise in endurance. He stumbled his way through smoky corridors, the runes lit up so bright that any who saw him might have thought a lantern had grown legs and was going for a walk. He stumbled over bodies strewn across the floor, skidded on pools of blood hardening from the heat. He was thirsty, he was tired, he would have cut his way through an army for a single breath of clean air...

  Up ahead. Light...an opening. He stumbled on, coughing, weaving through an open set of doors. Cold air wafted across his face for a moment...or was it an illusion? He looked up and saw tall stone pillars, and above it a sky full of light...no, fire. He was in the throne room, and flames were burning the ceiling.

  The cold, calming breeze was gone and he flinched as a wall of heat slammed into his body. Chunks of burning wood dropped down, as the wooden supports holding the ceiling in place weakened from the flames.

  An illusion, something cooked up by a heat addled mind. But the throne room wasn't far from the main entrance to the palace...if he could endure just a while longer, Azaran knew he would make it outside. What happened after that was another matter entirely, but he would deal with that battle when it came...

  Movement. He looked over to the shattered remains of the throne. A man walked out from a side door nearby, the Kings private entrance. In the shimmering heat and smoke it took Azaran a moment to recognize him.

  "Segovac!" he called out, half shouting, half coughing the name. His friend was alive and in the Palace looking for him.

  Segovac looked over. He shouted something back, seemingly unaffected by the harsh conditions.

  "Hurry!" Azaran shouted. "This is place is about to fall." He waved at his friend to come over. "For your life!"

  Segovac moved across the throne room, seemingly at an agonizingly slow pace. Embers drifted down from above like burning rain. A burning plank dropped to the floor ahead of Segovac. He stopped for a moment, looked up, then at Azaran. A sad smile crossed his face.

  A giant slab of wood fell from above along with several chunks of broken stone. Azaran stepped back, protecting his face with his arm as a shower of sparks followed.

  He looked again. The smoke cleared. Segovac still stood there, untouched and unafraid.

  "Stay there!" Azaran shouted. "I am coming for you...."

  But Segovac shook his head. He closed his eyes, hands pressed together in a sign of prayer. And for a brief moment he radiated a light that outshone the fire...

  Stone and burning timbers fell from above, filling much of the throne room. Azaran fell away, cursed as pieces of rock the size of fists bounced off his back. He ignored the pain and turned back. "Segovac!"

  But Segovac was gone. A great burning pile of rubble filled the throne room, covering the broken throne and the spot where Segovac had stood, looking almost like a pyre.

  Azaran took a step forward. But then the flames blazed higher, rising above him almost as though they were living beings, driving him back. One of the great stone pillars that held up the roof cracked, half of it tumbling down to the floor before the pile, blocking his path. More rubble fell from above and he was forced back, step by step, then running for his life. He all but dove out out the door, as the roar of breaking stone and burning wood followed after, the howl of an ever-hungry demon. He looked back and saw only red-hued smoke filling what had one been the heart of the Palace, burning heaps of wood and stone visible through the murk like mountains in Hell.

  Segovac was dead, his remains burned somewhere inside. His soul gone to join his god. Gone from this life. The only friend Azaran ever knew...

  Gone. Taken and gone...

  Gone...

  Azaran didn't remember much after that. Somehow he escaped the Palace, emerging through the broken doors into the wide courtyard beyond. A glance back showed flames engulfing the Pyramid. A giant hole in the side marked where the ceiling had caved in.

  There were bodies in the courtyard. Men, women and children...though he was hardly in a state of mind to tell the difference. Those still among the living fought one another, more beasts than man. Sword flashed red, men snarled wordless curses at on another. Several saw Azaran emerge from the Palace and charged at him, fresh meat for the killing. He barely broke his stride, the gray sword striking once, twice...men dropping down in its wake. He kept walking past their dying bodies. No one else got in his path.

  He reached the gate house, stepping around the shattered doors. A crashing sound turned him around, just in time to see the top of the pyramid fall into the rest of the building, the Palace collapsing from within, great cyclopean blocks falling away like pebbles hurled by a child. A great cloud of smoke and dust rose up.

  He turned away and did not look back.

  Then he was in the city. Rage burned in him, but its power seemed drained away by a great emptiness composed only of loss. Terrible loss, an ache, a sense that something good was gone from the world never to be seen again this side of the grave.

  Grief. The silent passenger whispered to him. It is called grief.

  Azaran did not answer. He moved on, feet going where they would, moving through streets that were consumed by madness, by a city that now fed on itself. The citizens of Kedaj rioted and fought. Neighbors attacked each others houses. Tear Drinkers maddened by withdrawal tore into gangs of criminals and looters out for everything they could steal. Rebels and royalists, the distinctions were lost, both sides reduced to madness by the events of the night. The young, the old, the weak were caught in the middle, torn to pieces by men they had called countrymen only a day before.

  He saw terrible things that night. Many of them ended at the point of his sword. Murders, rapes, violations of every kind...the city that so long had teetered on the edge of breakdown finally went over the edge. Fires burned along whole streets, taking one building after another. Men were tortured before their families for the sake of their valuables...others were tormented for the sport of it. The power that had kept the darkness at bay was gone. The evil that always lurked on the edges of the human soul was freed from its fetters and civilization was torn to shreds.

  Azaran passed through these things. He saw them, but from a sense of detachment. He stepped past bloody streets, the gutters running red, past severed limbs and spiked heads. Past men laughing maniacally as they sat next to the remains of their families. Passed by and passed on. He saw but did not see. Didn't care to understand anymore.

  Then he was at the city gates. People were fleeing through them, clutching what few possessions they were able to save from the burning. He stepped over a dead soldier, the man's eyes open in a permanent state of surprise from the sword in his guts. Next to him was another dead man, finely dressed, one of the nobility. One hand clutched a spear shoved in his guts, the other had a set of reins wrapped about it. A horse tugged against the reins, snorting wildly with frustration.

  Azaran took the reins with his left hand, With his right he sliced the gray blade through the dead noble wrist. The reins came free as the severed hand fell away. Azaran mounted the horse. Several men passing through the gates looked wistfully on the beast, but the bloody sword in his hand was reason enough to stay away.

  He looked to the east. Faint light on horizon, the first signs of dawn. He rode away from the city, headed towards the horizon. Headed...where? It was a question to which he had no answer.

  The light grew.
A wind came in from the west, bearing with it the smell of smoke from the city. Terrible destruction, but he could not look back. The city receded in the distance. He saw a road headed north, and beyond it a ridge. Perhaps he could follow that, until the road ended. Find a quite place where he could sit down and weep...though he did not know how to do that. Something warm ran down his cheek. He wiped it away, thinking it was blood. But it was a tear. Azaran could not remember shedding one in the past.

  He reached the road. Ahead on the other side was the ridge, perhaps a hundred yard away. Standing on the top was another man on horseback. In the dim light before dawn, he would have been little more than a dark blur to an ordinary set of eyes. But Azaran could see the bald head and thin face. Could see the lines of runes branded across the lean torso.

  "Nerazag." He said the name as curse.

  Nerazag stared at him. A smirk crossed his face. He turned his horse around and disappeared down the far side of the ridge.

  Hate filled Azaran, driving away all thought. He pushed the horse into a gallop, crossing the road and riding up the ridge. He reached the top, the sword in hand. But Nerazag was nowhere to be found.

  Azaran looked around frantically, desperately. Tracks, hoof prints headed down the other side of the ridge. Beyond was a wide expanse of ruined farm land and then in the distance what looked like a village. The tracks headed that way.

  He urged the horse on, following the tracks. He reached the village, long abandoned by whatever peasants once called it home. The tracks passed through them and kept going, headed towards the horizon. Headed east.

  Azaran followed them, chasing after Nerazag.

  Chapter Ten

  Day turned into night, and back into day again.

  Azaran followed the tracks, passing through ruined fields and empty houses. Kedaj vanished in the distance, turning into a brown smudge on the western horizon, then nothing at all. He rode until the horse protested, stopping finally by a small stream that dribbled down from nearby hills, letting the beast drink and then eat whatever bits of grazing could be found. Come the dawn he continued on, following a set of hoof prints that went seemingly without rest.

  The wind was his only companion, the sole conversation the hoof beats and occasional grunt from the horse. But Azaran did not ride alone. Even as the sun beat down on his head, memories old and new beat against the inside of his skull.

  Two old men, one dying at the end of his sword, the other killed before his eyes.

  Glowing brands burned into his chest...whips digging into his back...

  A women vomiting up blood, looking at him with eyes devoid of regret...

  The fire consuming his friend. That last part was seen again and again. Segovac was dead and Azaran was to blame. He knew that as he knew the air in his lungs. The man should have never left Eburrea, his oath be damned. Should have stayed among his own, where he was needed. Azaran could have forced him to remain behind. But he did not...he secretly welcomed the company. The only friend he ever really had...and now the man was dead and Azaran knew it was his fault.

  Though not entirely.

  Nerazag. The man played a part in this. Azaran knew in his bones that the man had played a role in this, that wheels were set in motion the moment that damned message arrived in Bellovac. Azaran had brought his friend to this cursed place...and Nerazag had wielded the knife. And for that he would die. It was the only thing Azaran had left. For this alone he kept riding to the east.

  Sometimes he came close. He would glimpse the man on the horizon, standing at the top of some ridge or hillock, outlines against the sky. He would wait until Azaran came close, then move on. And when Azaran reached the place his quarry had been, there would be those tracks, headed away into the distance with no sign of the man. He would stop for a night, lay down his head to catch a moments rest, then in the distance hear that hateful voice calling his name. He would press onward, driven by a need for vengeance, to balance the scales...to escape his guilt.

  The last remnants of civilization passed. The eastern part of Kedaj's territory was thinly populated to begin with and the last twenty years had drained away most of the inhabitants. He rode past long-abandoned farmsteads, barren fields that grew little more than weeds and this point, separated by increasingly large spaces of empty land. The terrain became more rolling, trees diminished in number as giant bluffs rose above him, the sides scarred by wind, small thorny bushes clinging to their faces. Beyond was a range of low, sere hills that came ever closer, Nerazag's tracks headed right towards them. The wind blew through the gorges at times, creating strange echoes and sounds that sounded much lie animals in pain.

  One morning, he rode between a pair of high bluffs, both with solid stone faces. On the northernmost side, someone had carved an image of some god in the living rock, a tall imperious-looking fellow with rams horns twirling out from his head, his legs and feet those of a goat. On the southern face was cut out some kind of basin that reached deep into the stone. Lines of text in some language he did not know ran above it, the symbols faded and worn by time and wind. He looked inside and recoiled at a pile of skulls gathering dust at the bottom. Human, but far too small. Surrounding them were small ribs, tiny fingers and limbs that appear to have been smashed deliberately.

  "Sacrifices." Nerazag's voice drifted towards him from the east.

  Azaran turned around. There was his quarry, his enemy, standing not more than twenty feet away, alone and unmounted, seemingly come from nowhere.

  "This was a holy place." Nerazag waved a hand at the images of the gods. "The people that used to live around here prayed to yonder fellow cut on the wall. Mostly for rain - this place is barely one step up from a desert. When the rains failed to come, they would offer the god the most precious thing they had...their own sons. Boys would be placed in the basin, their arms and legs broken with iron rods, left to die of exposure. Many times the crows didn't even wait until they were dead before coming down for a meal. Did it have an effect on the rain...the evidence suggests not. But that is the way of savages, reason giving way to mindless superstition."

  "Maybe the god of this place wants another offering." Azaran drew his sword. "I'll place your head in that hole and this land will drown in a flood."

  Nerazag laughed. "Is that what you believe, Azaran? Have you gone completely native?"

  "I'll let you ponder the question," Azaran answered, "as I cut you down, you son of a bitch! You die now!"

  He took a step forward, sword raised for the attack. He then paused, his ears catching the sounds of movement. Pebbles clattered down the faces of both bluffs as a dozen men appeared on top of them. They wore the robes of desert tribesmen, but beneath them Azaran could see black armor made of woven metal bands hugging their bodies, supple as cloth and stronger than the finest tempered steel. He knew the swords slung over their backs would have the same gray blades as his, that the heads under the turbans would be shaved bald, that under the black armor were lines of glowing runes branded into their bodies. Every one of them held a recurve bow made of some dark metal, with arrows of the same substance fitted to the string. Memories came unbidden, of him holding such a weapon, twenty times more powerful than its strongest wooden counterpart, of loosing shaft after shaft at enemies on many battlefields.

  Men like him. His brothers of the Green Banner. Waiting for the order to cut him down.

  "As you can see," said Nerazag, "I am not alone."

  Azaran glared back. "Doesn't matter," he said. He tensed, readying to rush Nerazag, to take him down no matter the cost...

  One of the warriors drew back and loosed an arrow. The shaft whistled through the air and buried itself in the ground mere inches from Azaran's right foot, penetrating the hardpacked stony ground right up to the fletching. Azaran skipped back, losing his balance for a moment. If the arrow had struck his body, it would have passed right through and hit the bluff behind. One such hit would cripple even him. A dozen would go beyond the power of the runes to heal...

/>   "Hold!" Nerazag raised a hand. "Osa'shaq, nock arrows, but do not shoot!"

  The warriors did as commanded, dark shafts pulled from quivers hanging off their hips. Nerazag kept his eyes on Azaran. "That eager to die?"

  "To kill you," Azaran answered, "I would die ten times over."

  "Why? What crime have I committed that merits such hate?" Nerazag seemed amused at his anger.

  "You're a murderer," Azaran retorted.

  "And you are not? How many men have you killed, Azaran, since they pulled you from the sea? I won't even mention those who died in your former life, they don't really count..."

  "Everything you touch, you corrupt!" Azaran accused. "Tereg, Eburrea, Kedaj...all places that tore themselves apart because of you!"

  "Hardly because of me!" Nerazag answered, laughing as if it was the greatest joke. "I am but a man, Azaran, not a god or demon or some other figment of the imagination! All I did was bring gifts to certain personages at the behest of our Master. I was nothing more than a messenger, really. What the savages did with them afterward was entirely their business...and being savages, they used them in ways both destructive and amusing. One shouldn't place fire in the hands of children, but if you do, then you may as well stand back and enjoy the results..."

  "You killed Segovac!" Azaran shouted. Tears ran down his face. The men on the bluffs saw this and were contemptuous at such a sign of weakness. "My friend is dead and you are to blame."

  "No, Azaran," said Nerazag. "You are! I did not ask him to cross the Middle Sea! I did not bring him to Kedaj. That was you..."

  "I did not ask him!" Azaran said.

  "But you did not stop him," Nerazag answered. "Which is the same thing in the end. I don't know what oaths were sworn or what promises were made and in the end it does not matter. You allowed him to follow. I will admit to using him afterward for my own purposes, when a coin falls into my hand I will spend it as needed. But when I left he remained hale and hearty. If he died afterward, look to your own weakness for blame."