It occurred to Pareesa how peaceful Azin looked, her body laid out straight, eyes closed, arms crossed upon her chest. Somebody had attended to her before the shaman had gotten here, and likely already whispered the death-prayers.
Immanu stood and moved over to the next body, a man this time, one of the warriors from the wedge. He pressed his fingers to the man's pulse.
"This one is still alive," Immanu told the junior archers. "Bring him inside, but I don't know if he'll make it."
The junior archers dragged the man towards the gate. Immanu stood up and ran his fingers through his wild, salt-and-pepper hair.
"Is Ninsianna okay?" Pareesa asked.
“She is alive, but injured," Immanu said. He stared off in the direction Mikhail had gone.
Another roar came from off in the distance. Screams. A howl that sounded more like a wolf baying at the moon than anything human.
"They should not have targeted his wife," Immanu looked worried, but not surprised. "You'd think they'd have learned their lesson from the last time they tried to come at him sideways."
Ice ran through Pareesa's veins. She felt no mercy for their enemies. Whatever they got, they deserved.
"I will go check to make sure he is alright," Pareesa's eyes drifted out into the darkened plain, into the direction where occasionally a death-scream could still be heard. She turned back and realized Immanu had already moved on to check on the next person.
The roar filtered from close to the river this time, somewhere a half-league south of the village. Yes. She should go check on him. Perhaps he didn't realize his wife was still alive? She followed the sound in morbid horror, the first hint of light brightening the sky where soon the dawn would begin. At first she had to climb over many bodies, but as she moved closer to the sound, it became easier to follow the trail of the dead, bodies hacked apart unlike anything she had ever seen before.
The roars ceased, as did the screams of the dead. The only sound was a whacking noise which sounded like someone threshing grain. Whack. Whack. Whack. She recognized the visage of black wings pounding against the darker night.
A hand came out of the shadows to restrain her.
Pareesa shrieked. She whirled, ready to smite whoever came at her, and gave a nervous laugh as she recognized Gita.
"Do not approach him," Gita's black eyes glowed blacker against her pale face. "Do not approach until he has finished what he started.”
The whacking sound continued, blended with a low growl like a lion gnawing on the haunches of a dead gazelle. Whack. Whack. Whack. The sound of a predator crunching apart the bones before devouring its prey.
This was Mikhail? Hacking apart the bodies of the dead?
“But … he’s … he’s … “ Pareesa stammered. Defiling the dead was most uncharacteristic of Mikhail.
“That is not Mikhail,” Gita squeezed Pareesa's hand. “He-who’s-not is in control of him right now, not the blue-eyed Cherubim god. If we approach, Mikhail may not be able to prevent HIM from killing us."
"But we have to stop him!" A sob clutched at Pareesa's chest at the sight of her mentor become everything he had warned her she must never become. "This is not who he is!"
The killing field stank like the place they had taken down the herd of gazelles, hacked intestines mixed with the stench of blood. The sky had grown light enough that they were visible silhouetted against the lighter grey. The black-winged visage looked up and made eye contact with them, its eyes not blue as Mikhail's were whenever he went into battle, but pure black, so dark that not even whites showed in those eyes.
A thrum of power vibrated through her. For a moment Pareesa could not breathe. She could feel the compulsion of those horrific black eyes inviting her to come throw her body against his sword.
His cheekbones were gaunt and stern, no emotion in those eyes but death. Her eyes played tricks upon her. Just for a moment, it was not feathers she saw, but dark leathery appendages like the wings of an enormous bat, paired with the tail of a scorpion. Jutting out of his head were four horns like a ram, and at the end of each wing strut jutted long, barbed spikes glistening with the blood of his enemies.
This creature didn't need a sword … he was a sword.
Pareesa blinked. Only Mikhail stared at her now. He tilted his head, as though taking her measure. Pareesa was suddenly acutely aware they were only a hop-flight away, a distance she had seen him close many times faster than she could move to get out of the way. Mikhail's nostrils flared. Without any further acknowledgement, he turned back to finish hacking apart the bodies of the enemies he had smote.
"Do you think Ninsianna knows she is not the only vessel for a god?" Gita asked.
Pareesa watched the way the creature in front of them moved, beautiful in its brutality, but so very different from Mikhail.
"Do you think he knows?" Pareesa asked.
"No," Gita whispered.
He-who's-not-Mikhail hacked the bodies as though he wished to dissipate them back into the primordial chaos it was whispered the Guardian of the Universe controlled.
"How do we stop him?" Pareesa asked. "If it were me, he would find a way to make me stop. This is not the man he wants to be."
They both stared at him, no solution coming to mind to solve the problem. This was Death they were staring at. The Dark Lord! Lord Chaos! He-who's-not! The Guardian of the universe! What was she supposed to do? Walk up and hope she could talk some sense into him?
A mockingbird's song cut through the air, heralding the brightening light as the morning star heaved above the horizon ahead of the brightening dawn and cast its light down upon the killing field. It was a strange juxtaposition, that joyful song and the brutality of carnage that lay before them. He-who's-not-Mikhail paused and tilted his head to listen to that song as though it pleased him. Just for a moment, Pareesa could swear that stern, pitiless visage softened.
"Do you know what set him off?" Gita asked. Her black eyes bore no judgment, only concern.
"I spoke to Immanu," Pareesa said. "He said someone tried to hurt Ninsianna. She's okay, but my guess is that's what set him off."
Gita wore an expression that contained no mercy for the enemy dead. She nodded, as though Pareesa had confirmed something she had already suspected.
"Now they will learn not to target his wife," Gita shrugged. She turned back to look at the dark-winged horror which hacked apart their enemies. "Until Mikhail has expended his anger, he won't be able to stop the Dark Lord from annihilating anything that comes near him.”
Their hands gripped together like sisters, the two women watched him finish in morbid horror until finally the whacks of his sword grew slower and further apart. He moved amongst the bodies now, stabbing at one periodically, as if the fact they were all cut into pieces wasn't proof enough they were dead, until at last he sank to his knees and began to sob. The two women looked at one another.
Pareesa moved towards him.
“Not yet,” Gita yanked back her hand. “HE has not left yet. Let HIM feel Mikhail grieve."
"You can still see him?" Pareesa asked. She had only caught a glimpse, but it was enough to know that what gripped him was not her teacher.
"I see … darkness," Gita said. "But I don't think it is evil. It is just … I don't know. Hungry?"
"We must console him," Pareesa said. "Like we did before. After he killed the lion."
Gita's own black eyes were haunted. "Whatever this is, it is an ancient wound, older than what just happened to Ninsianna. I think the Dark Lord helps him because even HE is capable of feeling pity."
"What tragedy would move Death to take pity?" Pareesa asked. Her mind leaped to dozens of horrible scenarios. None were adequate to explain what would compel the pitiless, bat-winged visage which had stared out of Mikhail's eyes to feel compassion.
"Perhaps there is a good reason Mikhail does not remember his past?” Gita said.
Mikhail's wings drooped to the ground as he bent over his sword and wept. Pareesa cried along w
ith him, moved by the sorrowful sight of her proud leader in the grips of such misery. Gita cried too, as though simply by watching him grieve they could understand the missing pieces of memory Mikhail himself did not wish to remember. At last he stopped crying and hugged his sword to his chest as though it were a child, his red-rimmed eyes now blue instead of the black they had turned when the Dark Lord seized him for a vessel.
They were the eyes of a mortal…
“Mama?” It was not with the voice of a man he spoke now, but the frightened plea of a little boy. His dark wings trembled, not the proud appendages he usually carried high above his back, but a sad, droopy cape that dragged on the bloody ground behind him
"Come … I think it will be alright to help him now,” Gita tugged her forward. "I cannot see the visage anymore."
Pareesa could no longer feel that strange compulsion which had called to her to run into his sword, though the urge which had replaced it, to run into his arms and reassure him Ninsianna would be okay, was perhaps suspect as well?
“Mikhail,” Pareesa stopped well out of sword range. “Mikhail … it’s me … Pareesa. We’re safe now. The attackers are gone. Are you okay?”
She studied his body language, mindful of how fast he could move when he perceived somebody to be a threat, and noted the lack of his usual wariness, the situational awareness he had tried so hard to train into his men. It was as though she looked at a younger version of him, what Mikhail had been like before the Cherubim had turned him into a weapon.
“Mama,” Mikhail's eyes focused on some event in his past, his face appearing younger because that unreadable mask he wore to hide his emotions had been ripped away, leaving only the wounded creature which had dwelled there all along. “Ní féidir liom a bhraitheann tú níos mó. Ní féidir liom a bhraitheann tú.”
“What's he saying?” Gita asked. “I only understood Mama.”
“I don’t speak his native language,” Pareesa said. “Only a few words. I think he said he couldn’t feel her.”
“His mother?” Gita asked. “What do you know about her?”
“He has no memory of his mother,” Pareesa said, “only his grandmother and his father, and even those are only fragments."
"Something bad happened to them," Gita's own gaze was filled with sorrow. "Something horrific. Whatever they tried to do to Ninsianna must have caused him to leap back to an old memory in time."
The thought leaped between their minds, unsaid, as she and Gita's eyes met. They had both seen this coming. The longer he lived amongst their people, trying to fit in, trying to break down the walls they had criticized him for building around his emotions, both had seen his control slip the more they tried to make him act as though he was a human.
Well, now they knew. He was human. He was a human man with a big, dark ugly wound. They had forced him to pull down his defenses, without the benefit of the memories he had built up in intervening years to help him come to grips with whatever had happened to him as a boy. Mikhail had nothing left to anchor himself when something bad happened to dredge up those memories, and nobody but Ninsianna to help him come to grips with it.
Pareesa took a breath and gathered her wits, no longer shocked, but Mikhail's trusted lieutenant. He'd said that if he did not trust her, he would never let her get close enough to clonk him over the head with a stick during training. It was time to put that trust to the test.
“I see an arrow sticking out of one wing,” Pareesa pointed, “right behind his neck. We must tend to it."
"We should get him out of here, first, before he regains his faculties," Gita gestured to the hacked bodies. "Then we can get him cleaned up and home to his wife."
"Help me get him up?" Pareesa asked.
"He does not like any woman touching him except for Ninsianna," Gita met her gaze. "Except for some reason he does not mind you."
There was no accusation of impropriety in those black eyes, only a stated fact. For some reason, Pareesa had never set off the same warning bells the other women in Assur did, the ones that made her mentor flare his wings and pull back if someone touched him as though it burned. If anything, he seemed to find her amusing. Hopefully she could draw upon that small modicum of trust to get him home?
“Mikhail,” Pareesa bent and reached towards him as though she were trying to win the trust of a strange dog. “It’s Pareesa, your friend. Can I come close to you now?
“Mama,” Mikhail whispered to whatever vision still haunted his past. “Ní féidir liom a bhraitheann tú níos mó.”
Pareesa moved closer, palms up in a universal symbol of no threat. “Can you give me your hand? We’ve got to get you down to the river so we can clean you up.”
“Ní féidir liom a bhraitheann tú,” he whispered so quietly it was barely audible.
“Gita … come help me!” Pareesa gestured.
Gita hesitated, then touched the large hand which gripped the hilt of his sword as though it were a walking stick. Pareesa coaxed him to let go of the weapon. His hands slid into theirs as though he were a little boy being led on a walk by both of his parents.
"C'mon, Mikhail," Pareesa tugged. "You've got to stand up on your own because you're too darned big for me to carry."
He obediently stood up, towering over them even though, within his own mind, he still relived some memory which must have been horrific. Pareesa and Gita checked for injuries, an examination made difficult by the blood and gore which splattered every inch of his body.
"I see lots of cuts," Gita said. "But I think his only major injury is the arrow in his wing."
“You get his sword,” Pareesa said. “I’ll lead him down to the river to wash off the blood. I think it's best if you carry his sword in case that thing comes back."
Gita nodded, her black eyes owlish against the brightening sky. Blood seeped from various cuts and she looked like goat dung, but then again the girl had always reminded Pareesa of some nocturnal animal. She picked up the sword and held it flat in front of her using both hands as though she carried a sacred relic to a festival for She-who-is.
Mikhail allowed them to lead him into the frigid river, child-like as they dug up a bit of soap root and scrubbed the blood from his clothing, his hair, and his wings. Wherever his mind had gone, it was not here.
"Do you think he's mind-damaged?" Pareesa gave voice to the terrible thought. "Like Shahla?"
Gita's large, black eyes stared at him as though she could see right through him.
"Sometimes, when you witness something really bad happen," Gita said, "things happen that can make you relive the moment. But then it goes away. You push it back until the next time something happens to dig the memory up. I think that's what happened when they hurt Ninsianna."
Pareesa opened her mouth to ask what kind of wound could cause that reaction and saw the tears welling in Gita's eyes. How much did she know about the peculiar young woman? Really? How much did any of them know? Until Gita had showed up in training one day, it had been as though the girl was invisible? It occurred to her that perhaps Gita was speaking from first-hand experience?
The sun finally inched above the horizon. They scrubbed the blood from their own clothing and hair, shivering in the icy river. Mikhail shivered as they led him back towards the village, his wings two soggy, drenched appendages he didn't even have the wherewithal to flap to shake the water out of them. Pareesa looked up with pity at the five-cubit-tall Angelic who they led like a little boy.
"Perhaps it is a kindness that he can’t remember his past?" Pareesa said.
Gita nodded. "Let’s take him home the roundabout way through the north gate. He already has enough problems getting the warriors to trust him without them seeing him like this.”
Pareesa's cheek twitched with anger. Gita was right. Much as she would trust Mikhail with her life, that bastard Jamin had done such a good job of sowing doubt that it was all he could do to get the men to train. His chasing off the enemy would be viewed as heroic, no matter how animalistically
he had roared while doing so, but if the other villagers knew Ninsianna wasn't the only one capable of channeling a full-fledged god, and a dark one at that, the warriors might not view him quite so benevolently. The ability to harness power, that of the Cherubim god, was viewed far less suspisciously than the ability to be power, especially one you could not control.
She wanted to ask him what to do, but Mikhail's eyes were still fixated in that horrific past. As his lieutenant, it was up to her to make this decision for him. Mikhail had become their rallying point. They needed him to be strong, whether or not he really was, because without him, the Ubaid would fall apart into squabbling villages.
“We must keep what we saw to ourselves," Pareesa said. "Warrior's honor?”
Gita's eyes were almost as dark as the fathomless black eyes which had gazed out at her when Mikhail had been seized by He-who's-not and chosen not to kill her.
“Warrior's honor,” Gita held out her bow-stringing fingers to lock and pull her fingers in a gesture of secret sisterhood.
They went via a circuitous route, telling the sentries at the north gate they had found him with an injury to his head, and led him back to Immanu’s house. Thankfully nobody was home yet. As much as Pareesa adored Ninsianna, she knew her friend would not be thrilled to see her husband reduced to such a pitiful state, nor did she feel like betraying the fact her mentor was so deeply, irrevocably damaged.
“Let's get him some dry clothes,” Pareesa suggested.
“I don’t know which room is theirs,” Gita eyed her uncle's house as though she had never been inside of it before. “My family and Immanu’s aren’t exactly … close.”
“You stay with him,” Pareesa said. “I’ll get it.” She ran up the narrow steps, then came back down with a change of clothes and a blanket.
“Let’s get his wet things off,” Gita said. “At least his shirt. I’m not … he’s just going to have to deal with his own pants.”
Working together, they fumbled with the strange round fastenings of his foreign shirt and the strings that held tight the foot coverings he called boots, pretending they weren’t ogling his muscular chest and avoiding the temptation to let their fingers linger on what was not theirs to touch. They then coaxed him to get off his own wet pants, discreetly looking the other way (okay … maybe she peeked just a little) as he did as they asked.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 77