by C A Nicks
Lords Of The Dark Fall - Fabian
C.A. Nicks
Copyright © 2012 C.A. Nicks
Full copyright notice at end of story
Edited by Lisa Greer
First Published 2012
Blurb -
Once immortal, tyrant and ruler of all he surveyed Fabian Lucimanticus of the distant world of Anxur is vanquished in battle and made to take the Dark Fall – an abyss that cycles through time and dimensions. With no idea where in the universe he will land, he endures a thousand years of purgatory, loses his immortality and grows a very unwanted conscience. Now human and alone in a strange time and place, he vows to rise again, find his brother Marcellus, who jumped with him, and regain what he’s lost. But first he needs to find a mage strong enough to magic him home. Instead, he gets Tig, a poor potter trying to survive life in a land ruled by warlords and marauding gangs.
When she finds Fabian, naked and disorientated in the desert, Tig’s first thought is to turn him in to the local warlord to a fate of almost certain death or slavery. Her second thought is that his family might pay a handsome reward for his safe return. But as she grows closer to this confused, displaced warrior, she wonders if she can ever let him go.
Fabian wants only to find his brother, go home, and regain his status and immortality. But his new human conscience and meeting with Tig makes him question everything he ever held dear. Can a tyrant really reform? If he finds a way to return home will he go, knowing he would have to leave Tig behind? 110,000 words. Please note, UK English spelling.
Prologue
Parched dry from the relentless desert sun, Fabian Lucimanticus pushed himself up on trembling arms and opened eyes encrusted with grit and sand to take in the first glimpse of his new home.
A single tree wavering in a haze of heat. A heap of stones and broken fences. Far away, the jagged profile of mountains reaching to an empty sky.
Nothing like his own home, now so far away. A place he might never see again.
Memories of his former life slowly returned to him.
In his mind he saw two great warriors, shorn of their luxurious hair. Bound, yet standing ever proud in defeat. Death or exile? Together they’d waited, already knowing that death would be too swift, too merciful.
As high lord, once king of all, he’d been first to step up to the ledge. First to peer into the chasm they called The Dark Fall that would remove him from his world and deposit him only the gods knew where. His captors pressed forward, eager to witness his ultimate humiliation.
Sages said the Fall was as deep as your sins. If so, then Fabian knew that his would be a long and terrifying journey into the blackest recesses of hell for what had he known in his life but sin? The strongest and the best of them, they said that from the day of his first step, the sword never left his hand. Without it, he felt only half a man.
The drop might last for the blink of an eye, or for all of eternity. His Fall was long enough to examine every moment of his lost life with remorse and regret. On that journey to his just reward, he felt every stab inflicted by his sword, every cut of his knife. The screams of women and children were torn from his own throat.
And tears. In the thousand-year drop, he cried every single one of their tears. Screamed out countless names of the dead.
And now he was in his own personal hell, where he belonged.
Chapter 1
The earth shuddered and shook, as if pounded by the determined march of an army across the plains. Blue lightning sliced through the air, picking out the tree with neat precision. Branches exploded in a burst of white-hot flames. Above him, the heavens darkened and thundered out their displeasure.
A fitting welcome for a fallen warrior.
Fabian's rusty laugh mingled with the cacophony of the storm.
Another streak of lightning, this time so close it singed the hairs on his bare arms. Instinctively, he covered his head with his hands and waited for the earth to stop shaking. A glance at the bleak landscape confirmed his first, grim impression. No gaudy tents filled with ale-sellers and wanton women. No chests overflowing with plunder and tribute. His enemies had stripped him of his armour, his bracelets. His power. Sent him, naked as a newborn, to this strange world, which appeared to consist of nothing but a forbidding barrier of snow-topped mountains and a few crumbling ruins.
A conqueror with nothing to conquer. A warrior with no one to impress. What use was he now?
The shock of the Fall receded, replaced by the throb of flesh that had slammed into sand at dizzying speed. Every muscle, every bone pulsed with pain. No battle injuries had ever felt like this. He flopped back, weak as a babe in arms and raised a weary hand to shade his eyes from the storm feeling a thirst such as he had never known. So dry, that his skin cracked and split as he flexed his arm. His lips flaked when he wet them with a sandy tongue.
Rain. Concentrating what little was left of his senses, he visualised fat clouds dropping a deluge of cool, summer rain. Uselessly, he flapped an arm, remembering, again, that his power-bracelets, which might have commanded the storm, now adorned the deceptively slender wrists of the Imarna queen.
He growled and slammed down his arm, relishing the pain. A woman wearing the bracelets of immortality? The universe itself had groaned at this overturning of the ancient laws.
He forced himself to sit, despite the creak of bones snapping back into place and discovered a new fear. Death. The Harvester of lives who would now take him at will.
Perhaps in the next heated flash of lightning. Or from hunger or thirst.
Not this day, he thought with grim determination. Where had his brother landed? The rifts in the Dark Fall shifted and churned endlessly through millions of dimensions, undoubtedly scattering the pride of Anxur throughout time and space. He too would have been stripped of his immortality.
“Balafir be with you. Wherever you are,” he muttered, invoking the god of war. A god who had little use for a broken warrior.
That wasn’t the sound of thunder. It was the sound of the heavens laughing at a pathetic excuse for a man, now inhabiting this fragile human body.
He groaned in despair. How would this poor flesh last long enough for him to find a way home and reclaim his honour?
It would not. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Swallowed the dry knot of fear closing his throat. A rider, cloaks billowing, rose from the horizon to flow towards him with malevolent grace. The Cariath. Death’s handmaiden, come to throw him over her saddle horn and bear him away like a hunted carcass. Fabian’s fingers twitched, aching for his sword that he might at least die with pride.
He braced for a last fight. Waited for agonising moments as the figure grew larger and nearer. His sensitive nostrils caught the stench of the approaching beast, the lighter scent of the rider, whose hair, not a cloak, streamed behind her like a battle standard caught in the wind.
Flesh. As she approached, he saw flesh, not the skeletal face of the Cariath.
Oh thank the gods. Nothing more than a woman; small by the look of her, sitting atop a heavy-looking horse. He shook off the cloak of hopelessness and sharpened his mind. If she carried food, it might last long enough to get him over the mountains. Where there were people, there would be settlements. All he needed was the strength to move.
The rider pulled the beast up sharply, spattering his face with sand and grit. Backlit by the storm, her features were obscured. Pale hair whipped at her cheeks and, tucked into the crook of her elbow, she held what he imagined to be a weapon. She carried a long sword, sheathed in her saddle pack. Another, shorter sword bumped at her hip. The creature snorted, puffing a thin cloud of steam from its nostrils. Fabian kept very still as the shod hooves trod far too close.
“So what’s this? Naked storm-bathing?”
The voice was pleasant enough. Well modulated, as a woman’s should be, but with a hint of iron that warned him not to underestimate his would-be rescuer. The words were clear and intelligible. So he hadn’t lost the gift of tongues. He mouthed a silent prayer for that.
“Robbed.” He said, groping for a plausible explanation. The weapon in her hands, he saw clearly now, was a crossbow of sorts. The saddle, rudimentary. The beast unrefined. A primitive people, then. Unless she commanded magic. Without his power-bracelets, he had no way of telling.
“You expect me to believe that?” The woman appeared to understand him, even though the words had sounded strange on his tongue. The beast danced closer, moved away.
“Why didn’t they pin you out for the Frey?”
“Water?” he said, swallowing down the burning in his throat. It was as much a question as request, and far too humble a plea for the high lord of Anxur. Whoever said beggars couldn’t choose their destinies, spoke the truth. Too many aching bones to even think of getting on that beast, let alone overpowering this determined woman and taking it from her. Helplessness was not a feeling he relished.
“You think,” the woman said, hovering above him, “I’d give scum like you, water?” More than iron in her voice now; it dripped with such venom he flinched lest the very words should poison him. “After what happened to the Gerrely kin?” She levelled the crossbow. “I should put you out of your misery, like the dog you are.”
“I swear,” he said, catching the scent of the water in the leather bottle strapped to the saddle. “Not my doing. Water. Have mercy.”
“Oh, nice one!” The woman threw back her head and howled into the storm. An unexpected sound tangling with the growling thunder. “I’m surprised you even know the word. What did you do? Get caught with your hand in the money belt? Lose a leadership challenge?”
“Robbed,” he said defiantly. Twice in one lifetime, he lay naked and broken at the feet of a woman. Was this his eternal punishment? The thought percolated his senses along with a growing horror. To endure an endless loop of this humiliation? Anger, white and hot, filled his belly. He would find a way to return home. Justice would be his.
The woman leaned over the saddle, giving him a clear view of wide eyes and mockingly curved lips in a pale, thin face. Her hair fell in a long tail over one shoulder. She wore the dark non-descript clothing of one too poor to afford fine fabrics and precious dyes. Ill-fitting pants tucked into sturdy boots. A shabby coat. No jewellery, but the weapons looked clean and well tended. They might buy him the services of one versed in magic - if such a creature existed in this gods-forsaken place. To locate his brother would be a first step to reclaiming what they’d lost. He prayed Marcellus had landed more softly.
“Don’t see a purse. No cash, no water.”
Again, he said words so unfamiliar they had never figured in his vocabulary, until now.
“Have pity.”
He caught the hesitation. The hint of a blush colouring the woman's cheeks as she took in his nakedness and the tattoos adorning his body.
“Hold up your arm,” she ordered.
He did so with difficulty, deliberately raising the arm he knew to be broken. Playing on his weaknesses? A strategy he’d rarely employed. No warrior would show the enemy their weaker side. But gut instinct told him this woman, despite her macho posturing, wasn’t the enemy. Life, not training, had made her hard. Warriors smelled of determination and detachment. This woman reeked of fear and desperation. Of a desire for revenge, so strong she would watch him die of thirst just to slake that need.
“Turn it this way.” She rotated a finger in the air.
He complied and twisted to present a clear view of one of the initiation marks given to him at the turn of his twelfth year.
She frowned and leaned so close her long straw-coloured hair whispered past his face.
“What is that? Where’s the mark of Crolos?”
Damn, but he could have had her off the beast, if his brain hadn’t been addled by the Fall. Too late, the thought came and went. The woman sat upright, once again, atop her ride, peering down at him like some queen contemplating a dirt-beetle that had the nerve to wander into her sight.
“I don’t have a mark of Crolos, whoever that is. This is Anxur-Jopra. My family demi-god.”
“There is only one true god. See.” She peeled back her sleeve to reveal her own mark. Two fish wrapped around a staff. “The Jura wear the mark of Crolos in defiance of the teachings. Bastard scumbags are laying waste to this entire land.”
“It’s a family mark.” He swallowed, with difficulty, swollen tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. “Anxur-Jopra. Our protector.”
“Huh! Some protector. A mercenary, then?” She spat out the words. “Almost as bad. What’s your name, warrior?”
“You would dare ask my name?”
The woman arched her brows, lips twitching in a hint of a smile. “I’m the one holding the crossbow, so yes, I dare. No name, no water.”
It was said that, in times of crisis, mortal men could move mountains. Pouring everything into one desperate lunge, he sprang at the woman and wrapped a fist around the tail of her coat, using his weight to tip her from the saddle. She landed on him in a tumbling, cursing heap, narrowly missing the rearing beast’s flailing hooves. The crossbow flew from her hand to skitter across the sand. The sickening crack of ribs giving under pressure hardly gave him pause. Later, he would indulge the pain. Right now, he needed transport, something to trade and some serious magic.
“Son of a rabid dog!” The woman’s bunched fist slammed into his nose. She cried out in pain and went for his eyes. Her own were wide and furious. Dark as the storm raging all around them. A startling contrast to the paleness of the hair wrapped and tangled about her face.
He deflected the second blow, pushing her easily into the ground. Even in his injured state, she barely challenged him. In his peripheral vision, he spotted the crossbow bolt protruding from the muscle in his forearm, a trickle of blood pouring from the wound, and he remembered the many times he’d been in this position. A woman beneath him, pinned by his full weight. With or without her consent, he would invariably slake his lust and then walk away without a backward glance.
She might have given me water in return for nothing but my name.
An unfamiliar twinge of conscience made him ease his bulk from the woman’s wildly thrashing body so she could breathe. She took in a long gasp of air and then renewed her attempts to escape him by kneeing him in the balls. Her feeble struggles only excited him more. In a well-practiced manoeuvre, he arched away from her, hard as an iron rod now. This close, he caught the stench of the beast she’d been riding, overlaid with a scent he recognised as fundamentally hers. Light and ethereal, like the first blushing flowers of spring.
He wanted to press his face into her neck and taste her skin. She wanted to kill him, judging by the murderous look in her eyes. Prudently, he slid the short sword from its scabbard and tossed it across the sands.
“I’ll pay,” she ground out between panting breaths. “Don’t take my virtue. Please don’t take my virtue.”
“I don’t want your virtue,” he lied. “I need your beast and your weapons. And directions to the nearest settlement. I must have the services of a mage, urgently.”
“Not Cafino, please. He’s all I have.”
“That is of no concern to me. Tell me, do mages exist in this wretched world?” He pressed down to lever himself from her, momentarily, grinding her knuckles into the gritty sand. Making her cry out.
“Yes, but you can’t go naked. They’ll shoot you on sight.”
Grimly, he pulled the crossbow bolt from his flesh. A gush of bright blood splashed onto his thigh. “Then I need clothing. Where do you live?”
“Farm. Half a day’s ride from here.”
“Which direction?”
“How will you ride? You’re injured.”<
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She had no need to remind him of that. He unfolded abused muscles to stand at his full height and breathed in the energy of the storm as deeply as his cracked ribs would allow. A small flicker of residual magic lingered in the imprints of the bracelets he’d worn since his childhood initiation. When he returned to Anxur, the Imarna would die a thousand painful deaths for the insult they had heaped upon him and his family.
The familiar tingle of age-old magic worked its way into every cell, every muscle and bone. Not enough to heal him completely, but sufficient to get him on the beast and perhaps to a settlement. Or this woman’s farm, where he could steal some clothing. Nakedness was obviously an issue on this world.
The woman rolled, suddenly, stretching out a desperate arm towards the crossbow. Casually, he kicked it out of her reach and wondered what he could use to bind her. Another flash of lightning hit the ground, dangerously close. The woman lay at his feet, gazing up at him with anguished eyes. Waiting for him to kill her? He already knew she wouldn’t relinquish her life without a fight.
“Bastard,” she said on a half sob. “Kill me then, you cowardly excuse for a man. Without Cafino I’ll starve. At least spare me that.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, surprised at the sincerity in his tone. Deftly, he pulled away the blanket from beneath the saddle and wrapped it around his hips in a rudimentary loincloth, a small hiss of pain his only concession to the break in his arm. Years of discipline had taught him that pain dwelled primarily in the mind. It could be controlled, even eliminated when he was at full strength.
“If you leave me here, you’ll kill me just the same. How long do you think I’ll last without weapons, water and food? I can show you the way. Find you clothes…”
Desperation made odd bedfellows of people. He’d noticed that more than once in his colourful life. An Anxur warrior, who no longer felt the urge to kill? No woman had been safe from his charm or his strength, yet this enigmatic creature lay at his feet, his for the taking, and still his baser urges remained firmly within his control.