by Grace Draven
“I’ll do what I can.” Gaeres swatted a galla trying to climb the back of his vuhana. “But make it quick.”
Brishen raced into the palace with the Serovek, Andras, and Megiddo. He halted in the throne room long enough to flinch at the sight before him.
The great statues of Kai kings and queens that once lined the walls lay toppled, littering the floor with rubble. Tattered remains of banners and royal crests that had always hung from the high ceiling, clung to the twisted metal brackets of burnt-out torches. Blood, dried to brown stains, spattered the walls in a grisly mural. There were no bodies, only bones half hidden by bits of clothing.
This had once been both pleasure hall and battlefield, in which the great noble houses engaged in political machinations and pursued life’s earthly delights under the gazes of successive Kai kings and queens. It was a charnel house now.
He turned his fury at the devastation on the galla scuttling down the walls towards them. The kings battled their way to the lower floors where demons filled every space with a wet, oily presence. The floors made for treacherous crossing, coated in a slippery film Brishen chose not to ponder. The air hung damp and rancid in the stairwells and corridors. Despite his eidolon’s immunity to the residual foulness of demon-kin, he still tasted their presence on his tongue.
Twice, he was lifted and thrown against a wall by an upsurge of galla as the breach vomited them forth like sickness from a plague sufferer’s mouth. Serovek’s curses rang harsh and loud in the cloying darkness.
“I’m going to soak in a horse trough full of boiling water and lye when this is over,” he vowed. “Thank the gods we’re harnessed.”
“Where’s the damn breach?” Andras shouted as he body-slammed a cluster of galla against a wall before slicing through the entire lot with one clean stroke.
Brishen scanned the wide corridor that led off one of the many staircases and split into four more hallways. All of them were obscured by the oily bloom of galla bubbling up from the depths, but one pulsed darker than the others. It led to the palace’s buttery and storerooms where perishables were once housed. He pointed to the spot. “There.”
They cut through the ever thickening mob of galla in their fight to reach the rupture. Sharp nails and teeth scraped across Brishen’s mail and brigandine, and numerous fingers spidered up and down his legs, jabbing and scratching. Once, Andras lost his footing, sending both him and Brishen tumbled down a short flight of stairs before crashing into the splintered remains of a door.
“Good work, lads,” Serovek crowed and jerked both men to their feet. “You’ve found the breach.”
The wound between worlds, and cause of so much misery and death, pulsed in a chamber tucked away in the palace’s lowest level. The walls literally breathed with the cacophony of endless screaming hurtling from the black. Secmis, in her obsessive search for ever greater power and dominance, had split open the barrier between this world and a void that imprisoned every horror imagined by humans and Kai alike. Brishen likened it to a disembowelment more than a birthing. The breach spewed out galla the same way a gutted warrior spilled his blood and intestines into the dirt.
Demons poured from the wound and immediately launched into an attack, punching, scratching, biting. Brishen echoed Serovek’s gratitude that they wore armor. No matter the Elsod’s assurances that Wraith Kings were impervious to damage inflicted by the galla, he was glad his armor shielded him from their vile touch.
Megiddo, Andras, and Serovek formed a half circle around him as he faced the breach. The ancient spell of a long-dead Kai sorcerer spilled from his lips. Power coiled in his belly, burned away the sludge of demon touch and surged through his limbs in sizzling bolts. Light filled the room, searing away darkness. Had he the vision of a Kai instead of a spirit, he’d be blinded. Galla screamed, and the howl of a sucking wind accompanied their cries.
The breach buckled under the spell’s onslaught, warping as if crushed by an invisible fist. The galla emerging from its depths tried to escape, skeletal hands clawing the air, the floors and walls. Anything to anchor themselves in place as the rupture narrowed.
A chorus of shouts and cries that weren’t galla almost made Brishen stumble with the incantation. The sight that greeted him when he turned his head would have frozen his blood had it ran in his transformed veins. Galla arms, skeletal and insectile, stretched out of the breach to snatch at Megiddo’s legs. They yanked him off his feet. He scrabbled for purchase on the slick floor, still clutching his sword.
Andras clasped his forearm and held on, sliding as the galla dragged their captive toward the breach’s maw. Serovek joined the struggle, wrapping an arm around Andras’s torso and lowering his elbow below the knee to lock himself in place. Galla swarmed around him, leveling blows on his head and shoulders.
Megiddo cut away at the clawing galla with his sword to free himself, but for every arm and skeletal hand cut, four more took its place.
Brishen shook with the urge to help, but he dare not interrupt the invocation. Ancient and unpredictable, it would either collapse and burn out if halted or create a nightmare scenario of backlash and split the breach even wider. He watched helplessly as Andras and Serovek struggled to save the monk as the breach collapsed further inward. Multi-jointed fingers rode higher up Megiddo’s legs until they dug into his hips and torso before reaching for Andras.
In a moment frozen in time, Megiddo halted his struggle and stared at Brishen. Seconds became centuries. Those blue eidolon eyes, still oddly human, blazed until they were almost white. Horror filled the monk’s face before a hardened resolve replaced it. “Farewell,” he mouthed.
Brishen’s “No!” thundered inside his head, while the incantation poured from his mouth unabated.
Megiddo twisted, raised his sword arm higher and brought it down hard. A shock of blue light flashed as the blade severed galla limbs and Andras’s hand where he clutched Megiddo’s forearm. The injured Wraith King’s cry ricocheted off the walls. He fell backwards, knocking Serovek down. Wisps of blue smoke spilled from the stump where his hand had been as if bleeding ethereal blood. Serovek shoved him off and leapt to his feet.
The galla claimed their victim in a swarm of claws and teeth, along with the trophy of Andras’s hand. Before the maw of the breach swallowed him whole, Megiddo flung the sword across the floor where Serovek caught it and beheaded a demon. Brishen swayed on his feet as power poured out of him like water through a sieve.
“Get him out of there!” Andras roared, even as he fought off galla one-handed.
Too late. Too late. The breach had thinned to nothing more than a sliver of black ribbon, the shrieking echo of banished galla the only thing emerging from it. That closed, disappearing altogether with a convulsive ripple of air.
Brishen crashed to his knees, dizzy and sick. For all that he was spirit made solid and unaffected by the weaknesses of the flesh, his eidolon still suffered the aftereffects of the spell.
Serovek’s hand on his shoulder made him look up. “It’s done,” he said.
Brishen shook head. “Not yet.” The image of Megiddo’s face in those last moments filled his vision, and he couldn’t hold back the choking gasp of grief. His mother, twisted, warp bitch that she was, had thrown her people—the entire world even—to a pack of ravenous, ethereal wolves. As a Kai and her son, he’d accepted the burden of righting the wrongs she committed, correcting an apocalyptic mistake. He’d closed the breach, but it had been a human—a courageous, quiet monk—who’d given the ultimate sacrifice and saved a nation of people not his own.
“We could have saved him,” Andras snarled. He glared at Brishen, his eyes blazing above his face shield. Hostile, haunted, disgusted—every emotion Brishen experienced himself.
“No, we couldn’t. They would have pulled you in too, along with Serovek, before I could close the breach. Megiddo knew it. Otherwise you’d still have your hand.”
Andras held up his arm. Revenant smoke curled around his wrist. “We’ve consig
ned him to a horror beyond even unclean death. Cowards all,” he said. “We are all cowards.” He sliced through a galla that hurtled in from the stairwell.
He didn’t utter a sound when Serovek shoved him hard enough against the wall to knock him off his feet. “You might want to rethink that notion, exile.” The two swords Serovek held pulsed with light, one his, the other Megiddo’s. He used both to cut away at galla still filling the chamber. “Our purpose was, and is, to close the breach and send those accursed demons back to where they spawned. The monk sacrificed himself for all of us. Honor that brave deed by going home and recounting it to the daughter you fight for.”
He sheathed his sword for a moment and offered Andras a hand up. The Gauri lord stared at him for a long moment before accepting, and Serovek hauled him to his feet.
Brishen leaned heavily against one of the walls, making half-hearted swings at the galla snapping at him. “I know it’s no consolation,” he told the Gauri lord, “but I will carry his loss the remainder of my life.” He didn’t lie. Megiddo’s expression was etched in his mind as deep and fiery as the wards he’d burned into the ground.
Andras’s eyes flared for a moment before dimming. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s no consolation whatsoever.” He turned away and strode out of the room, his steps on the stairs hardly a whisper of sound. A procession of galla dogged his heels.
“Those who survive the battle often suffer guilt,” Serovek said. “He’ll come to terms with Megiddo’s fate over time, as we all will.”
“It won’t matter if he does. His rancor doesn’t change the fact I had to close the breach no matter the cost.” Brishen gazed at the human who once saved his life and called him friend. “You understand I wouldn’t have altered anything had that been you instead of Megiddo?”
Serovek chuckled and batted away a demon with the back of his hand. ‘I’d hope not. I didn’t much relish the idea of being skewered, resurrected and thrown on a sham horse so I can chase demons all over the place. You ruining the entire plan because you had a fit of the vapors about sacrificing me wouldn’t endear you to me.”
The weight of Megiddo’s horrific end didn’t lessen inside him, but Brishen cracked a smile at Serovek’s jesting. His amusement faded as fast as it appeared. ““If I thought it might free him, I’d kill his body.” The three were connected—eidolon, sword and body. But if the body perished before the eidolon, the spirit was doomed to wander, and in Megiddo’s case, remain trapped in an eternity of unimaginable suffering.
“Andras or I should have taken his head instead of holding him,” Serovek groused. “He’d be free then. Dead but free.”
They followed Andras out of the palace, Brishen pausing for a final view of the throne room thick with confused, screeching galla. The thrones were still in place, undamaged. A vision of Secmis seated in hers, a ghastly spider in the center of her web, made him shudder. He turned his back and walked away.
The kings gathered in front of the dead, Andras looking at no one, Gaeres’s features drawn with shock at the news of Megiddo. Thinned of power, Brishen sensed the dead’s restlessness, the return of their anger at being yoked to the commands of a Wraith King. Time grew short along with his power. Soon, they’d shrug off his control, and if the galla were not banished, set the horde free once more to join their brethren who currently plagued them like fleas on a dog.
“How will we create the outer circle without the monk?” Gaeres asked.
“I remember the spell he had me repeat, and the runes to be drawn. I’ll be the one to give its power, just like the smaller circle,” Brishen said. A power that was now a lantern’s light inside him instead of the bonfire he first carried into this battle.
He swung onto the back of his vuhana and called to the dead. “Herd them toward the palace and hold them.” The dead screeched and whooped, and as one body, shoved and pulled the captive galla farther into the city. Brishen sought out Andras who finally stared back with a withering expression. “Slash and cut until there are none left standing. They’ll return to their spawning ground. With no breach to escape, they’ll stay there.” he said. He raised his sword in salute. “We fight for the fallen.”
“We fight for Megiddo,” Andras said.
Brishen gave a brief bow. “We fight for Megiddo.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunlight gilded the edges of the closed shutters, painting gold threads across Ildiko’s hands where they rested in her lap. It was mid afternoon, a time when humans went about their daily work, and the Kai slept. She had adopted the Kai’s nocturnal schedule when she married Brishen, but sometimes she stayed awake long enough to sit on the balcony off her room and welcome the sun’s rise. By this time, she was usually sound asleep, spooned against Brishen’s warm body.
Not today. Nor, indeed, for many days. Sleep had eluded her for hours in her lonely bed, and she finally gave up the battle. The floor lay icy under her feet as she slipped on a robe and wrapped in a heavy blanket for extra warmth. She was tempted to stoke the nearly dead coals in the hearth but changed her mind. An infant and her nursemaid slept in the room with her, and Ildiko didn’t want to disturb either with her rustlings. Instead, she padded to her favorite chair by the shuttered window and listened to the stirrings of the day patrols that watched over Saggara while everyone else slept.
The redoubt was still overcrowded and strained beyond its limits in providing sanctuary to the displaced and the homeless, but the crowd slowly thinned. Scouts had ridden out daily to reconnoiter the surrounding territories and the Absu in both directions. None had seen or heard the galla, and all scouts returned accounted for. The Kai were relaxing, some of the more adventurous ones packing their possessions to return to their holts and villages, believing the newly crowned king had succeeded in banishing the hul galla from their land and world.
Ildiko wanted with all her soul to believe it as well. Seventeen days earlier Brishen had wielded an ancient necromancer’s magic to become like the dead and lead an army of revenants into battle. Except for reports from the traumatized Kai who finally arrived at Saggara, she’d heard nothing more.
The reports themselves were both epic and incredulous, a battle between demons and the dead witnessed from the banks of the Absu by more than a thousand of Kai fleeing Escariel. They had recognized Brishen as a Kai by his armor and described how five generals in various harness had plunged into the sea of galla, with the screaming dead encircling them. Cold sweat trickled down Ildiko’s back whenever she listened to the eyewitness accounts. Even when each person she spoke with assured her the Wraith Kings had succeeded in containing the horde, she still quaked inside. The hardest task remained: driving the horde back to Haradis and closing the breach. There would be no reports or witnesses emerging from the ravaged city, nothing to assuage her terror and worry that, despite the power and protection of his transformation, Brishen might not survive. The thought tormented her relentlessly, and today wasn’t the first time she’d abandoned her bed thanks to her tortured thoughts.
The intermittent sounds of snuffling and smacking made her smile. The infant Queen Regnant slept in a hastily constructed baby bed, unaware of the dangers she had survived and the ones that still faced her now. A nursemaid Sinhue had brought to relieve Kirgipa’s tireless care slept on a mattress next to the bed.
Ildiko had insisted on them staying in her chamber with her. Outside her door, a pair of soldiers stood guard. The baby’s arrival meant a shift in Brishen’s and her circumstances, one that affected every level of government and power base in Saggara. New alliances would form, allegiances broken between one set of parties and reforged between others. For the child’s safety, Ildiko had ordered those who knew her identity not to reveal it. She wholeheartedly agreed with Necos’s belief that there were those residing in Saggara who’d benefit from an infanticide.
Kirgipa protested vehemently when Ildiko relieved her of her duty. “Please, my lady. I’ve been a devoted nursemaid. Why am I being punished?” Her you
ng features twisted in anguish.
Ildiko captured her hand, fingers sliding along the smooth curve of Kirgipa’s claws. “I’m not punishing you, Kirgipa. And when this is settled, you and your loyal guards will be generously rewarded for what you’ve done and your role reinstated if you wish, but to have you remain as the queen’s nursemaid for now will raise inconvenient questions. The Kai will think it the oddity of a human woman to suddenly adopt an ‘orphan’ Kai baby as her own.” Especially a human queen considered barren by her Kai subjects. “But they’ll simply shrug, toss me pitying looks and prattle amongst themselves how Brishen Khaskem managed to shackle himself to such a wife.” She smiled when she uttered the last, imagining the tut-tutting that would take place beyond her hearing.
“But I was a royal nursemaid,” Kirgipa argued. “Won’t they think it reasonable that I continue the role for your orphan?”
Sinhue, who stood beside her, scowled and thumped her on the arm. “Kirgipa! Remember your place and accept Her Highness’s decision.”
The young woman went ashen and stuttered an apology.
Ildiko waved it away. “No, she has a point.” She waited until Kirgipa lifted her bowed head to meet her gaze. “Your argument is sound, but new nursemaids with no ties to the Khaskem family won’t elicit any interest. I’d rather have no questions than a dangerous few. If you wish, you and Sinhue may choose the candidates for me to review.” A new thought occurred to her, one she was sure would trounce any more protests Kirgipa had. “I know you wish to hunt for your sister. Atalan is probably out there somewhere in the redoubt. Necos has said he’d find her for you. Why not accompany him?”
Kirgipa had embraced both ideas with fervor. Ildiko heard days later they had located Atalan among the survivors. She met with Mesumenes to arrange a position for both women in the manor itself. She’d do much more when Brishen returned. This family had suffered great hardship and loss in its service to the Khaskem dynasty, including insuring the line would continue. Brishen owed them much. Ildiko believed she owed them everything. Kirgipa had saved her marriage with the safe transport of Harkuf’s only surviving heir to Saggara.