"Gasur was just attacked," the Chief said, "and there have been 16 more women kidnapped from Eshnunna, Qattara, and Nineveh. It is only a matter of time before we are attacked again."
"Then teach our warriors real fighting skills," Jamin said. "Not waste time teaching the sons of potters and bakers."
“Our warriors learn the same skills GOD teaches the armies of heaven!” the Chief said.
“What god?” Jamin asked. “Tell me father … where is this god of his? How come we have never seen him? Or heard of him except in old songs that only the shamans know? Where are his god's temples? And why has this god not simply come down from the heavens to rescue him!”
“The legends say our people were stranded here when a great canoe washed up on this shore,” the Chief said. “It was prophesized that someday his kind would return to our world.”
“So says Ninsianna’s father!!!” Jamin shouted. “If Mikhail did not carry his name pressed into a tablet tied around his neck, he would not even know his own name!”
“He trains us to repel your friends who have been stealing our women and selling them to these lizard demons,” the Chief said. “Your golden disc only supports his claim. Not disproves it.”
"He has been sent here to spy on us and report our weaknesses back to our enemies." Jamin snatched the small woven carpet from the wall and shook it in his father's face. "I shall prove this to you even if I have to follow my mother into the dreamtime to do it. His people are evil!"
The Chief blanched. Was it because the thought of his only surviving child following his wife into the dreamtime bothered him? Or because he had just taken the precious rug? Probably the latter. The Chief had never remarried after his mother's death. In fact, so far as he knew, his father had never even looked at another woman. Jamin clutched the rug in his fist, the last tangible memory they had of his mother.
“Mikhail's training is important even without proof of lizard demons,” Chief Kiyan said softly. “There is a good reason every village up and down the Hiddekel has been repeatedly hit while they’ve only hit Assur once and then left us alone.”
“What import?” Jamin asked. “To march around carrying buckets of water, chanting silly rhyming songs? To stick your hand over your eye and say ‘sir?’ To jump up and down waving your hands for hours on end with his silly exercises? It’s a waste of time!”
"You will train with him," the Chief said stonefaced, "or you will never be chief.”
“I would rather rot in hell!”
His father struck him. Had any other man done it, Jamin would have killed him. Only that remnant of fear every child carries because once upon a time their parents were bigger than them, along with a shred of disbelief, prevented him from reacting. He stood in shocked silence, holding his cheek as though to ask, 'did you really just strike me?'
“There can only be one leader in this village,” Chief Kiyan spoke slow and cold, "and you are not him.”
Jamin spat upon his father. Before he did something even more foolish, such as strike him, he stormed out the door, slamming it so hard the dust shook out of the mud-bricks. He would show his father who was meant to be chief!
He rounded the corner of the village square and ran chest-first into Gita trailing home late from her nightly training, in no hurry to return to her drunken father. The moon cast long shadows from the mud-brick houses into the empty square. Once upon a time he would have greeted her, but she was now one of them.
"Get out of my way!" he hissed.
She was as ill-dressed and scrawny as ever, but in her hand she gripped a spear, the one he had given her. He had taught her to throw that spear after he had found her sobbing behind her father's house one night, her eyes swollen shut from a beating. A freshly crafted bow sat strung across her back, along with a quiver of arrows. The old … and the new. It felt like a betrayal.
He shoved past her, anxious to be away from those perceptive black eyes. Sorcerer's eyes. That was the explanation her father had given when he'd found him, sobbing drunk, and beaten the truth out of him as to why he'd felt compelled to nearly kill his daughter. Merariy had tried to poke out the echo of his dead wife's eyes, the one he had betrayed to the Amorites as a Priestess of Ki. Jamin thought he had gotten away from the girl without exposing his soul when she finally spoke.
"You intend to cast Shahla aside?"
Jamin stiffened. Gita could read him like no other person in the village. He did not turn to meet her prescient gaze.
"I never told her that I loved her," he said carefully. It was true. He had never said those exact words. But he had insinuated he might make someday make her his wife … to keep her quiet. He had blamed his lack of commitment on his father, never dreaming the Chief would turn around and order him to marry her.
"That's not what she says," Gita said.
"She lies."
He took a step to escape that too-perceptive gaze and was stopped by her next words.
"Did you know Shahla was pregnant?" Her voice was filled with surprise. She. She who lurked in the shadows and knew everything.
The shadows lurked closer. First had lost Ninsianna, then his father's trust, then the respect of his people and his friends, and then his own self-esteem as he had made blunder after blunder. Just when he had begun to see a chance to redeem himself, Shahla had mucked it up with her scheming. Which piece of news today had been worse? That Ninsianna carried the winged demon's child? Or that Shahla might be carrying his?
No! It could not be true!
"Did you know she was pregnant?" Jamin towered over her, more than four cubits of muscle which had been honed by years of practice into a weapon. He stepped forward, intending to intimidate her into leaving him alone. "I hear she didn't tell you, either? Don't you find that odd?"
The scrawny young woman held her ground, bold in a way she had never been before with the knowledge she had an army at her back. The faint light of the evening star shone down upon her pale, gaunt face. He lost himself in the twin dark pools of her eyes, so large and black they made the night itself seem like the dawn. It felt as though he was stripped naked.
"Yes, I believe she has not told you," Gita said softly. "I think I know why."
"Why?"
The twin pools blinked. Gita cast her gaze downwards.
"Perhaps you should speak to Shahla?"
He glanced behind him, expecting the brassy young woman to come barging up and shriek accusations at him for not coming to her bed the minute he got back, and was relieved not to see her. He turned to ask Gita another question and realized she had disappeared back into the shadows that were her home.
His mother's rug was still clutched in his hand. Here he had thought things could not get any worse, and once again fate had made a mockery of him.
"How did I get myself into this mess?" he asked the small woven carpet.
The tapestry, of course, did not answer. It was an inanimate object. A symbol of the only thing he had once had in common with his father. His dead mother.
He clutched the relic to his chest as though it were a shield and crept through the shadows, praying he could avoid Shahla until he had a chance to think. Had the winged demon not flown off with his fiancé on what would have been his wedding day, he never would have slept with Shahla in the first place. No matter which direction he turned, it always led him face-to-face with the winged demon.
His father wanted proof the bastard was evil? He would get it!
Chapter 22
Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.09
Haven-3
Angelic Air Force General Abaddon
(aka 'The Destroyer')
Abaddon
"Meet me back here in an hour," General Abaddon ordered the Mantoid Lieutenant who shadowed him as an assistant. "Get yourself a cup of caife and a bite to eat. I hear the roast fianna is especially tasty over there at the 701."
The 701 was the restaurant where politicians and lobbyists cavorted over pricy burgers or banished their legislative
aids whenever they wished to discuss business too risky to contemplate in front of a witness. It was also the closest he could offer his hard-working assistant to a genuine shore leave, his first return to Haven in years generating an endless stream of visitors. Jophiel was a competent general, but she was inflexible when it came to greasing the invisible wheels that made life easier in the military.
Graft she called these things. Abaddon simply called it dealing with reality. He didn't take bribes. That didn't mean he had never passed along a favor to some captain of industry who held access to the weaponry he needed by the short hairs. The mercantilists understood they needed to play nicely with the men with the guns, while the men with the guns understood their power would evaporate without bullets. It was an uneasy … and longstanding … relationship.
"Would you like me to get you something, Sir?" Lieutenant Sikurull asked. "I could get it wrapped to go?"
Abaddon ran his hand down his still-solid abdomen, gauging his hunger. Many hybrids allowed themselves to go to paunch when they reached their 500th year, but Abaddon prided himself on keeping his physique battle-ready. It had been an hour since he'd last eaten, but the meal had been sparse. An hour from now, he might be hungry, or he might not be, depending upon how badly he wanted to throttle Lucifer by the time he left the Halls of Parliament.
"Get me something that won't taste bad if it gets cold," Abaddon told his assistant. "Pick something. You know my tastes."
"Yes, Sir," the Mantoid saluted him. He hurried off to speak to a group of Mantoid females who clustered in front of the restaurant, clicking in the Mantoid native language about what was posted on the menu-board. Lieutenant Sikurull approached his twenty-five year discharge date. He had begun to seriously court any female Mantoid he came across, searching for a potential mate.
Unlike the four hybrid races, who by virtue of their long lives were obligated to serve 500 years in the military, the naturally evolved species only served 25 before they were freed from the Emperor's anti-fraternization laws. With no infertility problems and discharged young enough to still begat offspring, his naturally evolved subordinates had no ridiculous mandates to cast their name into a breeding pool and be cycled around in a genetic lottery to fill the Emperor's ranks like farm animals raised for slaughter.
Abaddon was old enough to retire. He had not done so at first because, with the Emperor gone, he had not trusted Lucifer to fill his shoes and then, once the Emperor had come back and sidelined him, he'd realized he had no place to go. Most retired females looked up lottery-mates they had successfully sired offspring with in the past. No female had any interest in a scarred old goat such as himself, bitter and used to being in command.
Sarvenaz had changed all that…
"Make sure you get their numbers," Abaddon called after Sikurull's retreating back. "You cannot cavort with them for three more months, but that does not mean you cannot call them."
The Lieutenant's green mandibles spread wide in a Mantoid grin, his under wings whirring with gratitude as his green arms came up in a second salute. Abaddon enforced the letter of the Emperor's edict, but he often looked the other way for small infractions when a serviceman approached his retirement date. He hoped the Emperor would someday forgive his breach of the anti-fraternization laws, although in his mind he justified this deceit because he had been eligible to retire 118 years ago.
If Lucifer's trade bill passed, mandatory military service for hybrids would only extend for the first 25 years, putting them on more equal footing with the naturally evolved races. It wasn't quite full Alliance membership, which hybrids were denied because they had been genetically engineered and not evolved, but it would be a step in the right direction.
The Halls of Parliament had arisen out of a dense urban area. The entrance Abaddon approached now was the one where ground-busses and private shuttlecraft deposited the cornucopia of people who made up the Alliance's populace. Unlike the classical architecture of the Eternal Emperor's palace, what had started out as a small domed building had blossomed under Lucifer's reign into an enormous circular one, nearly as large as the Eternal Palace, only it served tens of thousands of people each day instead of just one.
The original domed building where the delegates met still sat at its center. Surrounding the entire complex like a twenty-story wall sat an enormous round building, the outer ring where delegates kept their offices, including Lucifer.
"General Abaddon, Sir," the guards greeted him. "You may go straight through."
Abaddon was glad to not be put through the same wringer he'd been put through to enter the Emperor's palace. The metal detector went off, but he was simply waved through. None dared disarm The Destroyer, the most battle-decorated general in two empires. Fresh faces peered at him with curiosity, little more than kids compared to his advancing age, but all cleared out of his way. It was a respect he had once received at the Eternal Palace, but did no more.
The building had a rightness about it, this place where ordinary people walked through the hallways, trying to capture the ear of their elected officials. Abaddon had no taste for politics, but he understood it. It behooved an elected official to make himself accessible to his electorate, even if that access was illusory.
He stepped inside a lush office where, at the front desk, a pretty Leonid cadet sat dictating letters to a sentient AI. It had been the one security measure he had forced down Lucifer's throat, to surround himself with Alliance military personnel instead of just cold-eyed goons. Abaddon frowned when he saw that Furcas and Pruflas stood on either side of the inner door which accessed Lucifer's office instead of the two who usually accompanied him to the palace. Those cold blue eyes gave even him the chills.
But he wouldn't show that…
"Tell Lucifer I am here to see him," Abaddon ordered, determined to not give the appearance he came to Lucifer hat in hand.
"Right away, General Abaddon," the Leonid cadet's whiskers trembled as she gave him an instinctive sniff and determined his brusqueness was not a threat. She might be young, but even the youngest hybrid could dismember any threat which came through Lucifer's door.
With a salute, she rose from her seat and moved purposefully to the inner office. Abaddon noted the way she instinctively scrunched her shoulders as she passed between the two goons despite the fact she towered over them to avoid brushing against them. She felt the same way about them as he did.
"Tell him to come in," Lucifer's voice called from inside his office. His voice sounded cheerful today, not the weary exhaustion he'd exhibited yesterday.
Abaddon gave the cadet a polite salute of thanks. He wondered how long it would be before Lucifer gave this one a roll in his bed before sending her packing back to her commanding officer. Had he done such a thing, the females would have hated his guts, but for some reason any female who succumbed to Lucifer's significant charms always gushed praises upon him afterwards, as though all it took was one liaison with the alpha-stud to bend them to his will. Every female except for one…
Abaddon shoved the thought out of his mind. It was not common knowledge that the ice princess had once been a mare in Lucifer's stable. Whatever had happened between them, instead of adoring him as other the females did, Supreme Commander-General Jophiel hated Lucifer's guts. Sure, men resented Lucifer, but it was because they were secretly jealous. What man wouldn't want to have it all? Money? Power? And women throwing themselves at his feet. Abaddon was one of the few people who knew the reality was more complex.
He waited until the door shut behind him before laying into Lucifer.
"When the hell are you going to push through this trade deal?!!"
Lucifer rose from his chair in a move the Emperor had made him practice a thousand times, back before he had disappeared. It was the move of prince granting a boon to his retainers.
"Have a seat, General," Lucifer gestured to a comfortable leather wing-chair that sat directly in front of his desk. He stepped towards his bar. "Would you like some humiwa?"
>
His hand lingered over a translucent bottle filled with an iridescent green liquid.
"Just a nip." Abaddon waited while Lucifer poured two glasses of the potent Mantoid liquor into crystal glasses and walked over to him, holding out one glass. "Thank you."
Lucifer moved with cat-like grace into the chair opposite him, his white wings drooping as he let out a sigh. Eerie silver eyes regarded his hawkish grey ones, waiting to hear what he had to say. Abaddon's eyes drifted over to the photograph on the bookshelf behind Lucifer's shoulder, a picture of him as a little boy standing next to his mother. Back then, Lucifer had still looked like her, even though he had inherited Shemijaza's silver eyes, white-blonde hair and wings instead of Asherah's dark ones. Adulthood had squared off his features, but there was still an ethereal quality about the man, as though he was too beautiful to be real.
"When will you to push through this trade deal?" Abaddon asked more politely this time, somewhat mollified by the weary droop of Lucifer's wings. "My wife is miserable cooped up in my room."
"As are mine," Lucifer sighed. "Though I don't know what else to do with them. Never have I met such hostile creatures as these humans my father used to form the basis of his armies."
Abaddon raised one eyebrow with surprise. The alpha-stud had trouble wooing a female? His impression of humans went up another notch.
"My wife likes the apiary," Abaddon suggested. "Perhaps if you brought them there and taught them what it feels like to fly? Sarvenaz likes that."
Lucifer gave him a bemused expression, as though he were a little boy talking about playing with his puppy.
"Perhaps I might try that sometime," Lucifer said. "Although the Prince of Tyre does not have an apiary like your command carrier does. I fear if I bring them down to a planet, they will run off." He toyed with his glass, swirling the potent green liquor, deep in thought. "The last thing I want after 225 years of shooting blanks is to have them run off carrying my offspring."
Something about Lucifer's condescending tone bothered him, but Lucifer was often condescending, interspersed with moments of breathtaking, sometimes genuine warmth. Abaddon had no idea how many human wives Lucifer had taken, adopting the Sata'anic custom of multiple wives. He'd had three offspring on the way when he'd introduced him to Sarvenaz. Given how desperately Lucifer had been trying to fulfill his father's edict to sire an heir, he could not fault the man for being excessive.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 22