The enemy attempted to retreat. Ebad and the other archers made sure that didn’t happen, cutting them down with arrows they had retrieved from the bodies of the dead.
Glancing around her, there were no unoccupied enemies to engage. She looked for who was at the largest disadvantage, two warriors jabbing at a blue-man with spears, and went to help them. When that one had been dispatched, the three of them did the same to help someone else. The next thing she knew, there was nobody left to smite.
They had won.
Sheathing her sword, she went back to check whether or not Siamek was still alive.
~ * ~ * ~
Chapter 111
February: 3,389 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Gita
Gita knew before she even got to the widow-sisters house that the Tribunal could no longer help her. A pool of crimson adorned the threshold. Her hand trembling, she pushed open the door and peered into the dim confines of the house until her eyes made out the outline of a withered shape lying on the floor.
“Zhila!”
She rushed into the room and kneeled next to the old woman’s body. Zhila’s eyes were vacant and her mouth gaped open in a silent scream, as if with her last breath she had shrieked insults at her murderer. Gita pressed her fingers to Zhila’s neck and found nothing. The stench of burnt meat wafted up as Gita touched the gaping hole which had burned a crater into Zhila’s chest.
Gita lifted Zhila’s hand and pressed it against her cheek.
“I am sorry!” she wept. “I should have come straight here!”
Her shoulders shook as she reached up to close Zhila’s cataract-riddled eyes. Zhila had landed awkwardly, thrown backwards by the power of the firestick. Gita crossed her arms across her chest and then straightened her legs until it appeared as if Zhila was merely sleeping and not lying murdered on the floor.
She found Yalda crumpled in the corner. Her prune-like skin was ghastly pale, and she gasped for breath as though each one strove to be her last. Although Gita could find no discernable wound, she could sense Yalda’s life energy fade as she willed herself to follow her sister into the dreamtime; her dear, beloved sister who she had lingered to care for long after both their husbands were dead and in the grave.
Gita was a slight girl, not much bigger than a pre-teen, but a life of hardship had made her strong. She picked up her elderly friend, who had withered away to the weight of a dried leaf over the years, and staggered over to the spare cot the widow-sisters kept against the wall and lay her down as gently as she could.
“Zhila,” Yalda murmured, her eyes already turned into the dreamtime, “Jahveed has come for me. Just as he promised he would.”
“Of course Jahveed has come for you,” Gita said, tenderly touching her wrinkled skin. “He waits for you just but on the other side.”
The fog in Yalda’s brown eyes disappeared.
“Gita?” Yalda whispered, her brown eyes filled with surprise. “You are still alive, child? We thought you were dead. Why did you run from us, before we had reached a verdict?”
“I am guilty,” Gita pressed her hand against Yalda’s cheek. “I am guilty of being Shahla’s friend. I am guilty of missing Jamin. I am guilty of loving Ninsianna’s husband. And when Shahla told me she’d suddenly lost all interest in him I should have been suspicious, for once you’ve loved Mikhail, how could you ever love someone else unless it was all a trick?”
“Oh, Gita,” Yalda cried. Tears slid down her wrinkled cheeks and glistened in the dim light of the room. “We found you not guilty, child. Pareesa and Siamek convinced the villagers to turn their thoughts from Immanu’s revenge, and in the end they found pity for your plight.”
“I am tired of always being pitied,” Gita said.
Yalda’s gnarled hand shook as she raised it to touch Gita’s cheek.
“Is it true? What your father told us. Is it true, that you healed him by forming the Bond of Ki?”
Gita’s lip trembled as she weighed the risk of telling the truth against the safety of telling a lie. She noted the blueness of Yalda’s lips, the way she clutched a small, golden object to her heart. Yalda's eyes focused not on her, but on invisible people in the world beyond the veil. Nothing she could say would keep Yalda here, so she might as well confess the truth.
“Yes,” Gita said. She squeezed Yalda’s hand. “It was the only thing he feared, to die without his wife. So I became his wife, if only for one night, because he thought I was Ninsianna, come to join him at the threshold of death. He did not betray her. All along he thought I was his wife." Gita's eyes welled with tears. "It was my intent to merely comfort him as he passed from this world into the next, but then the goddess showed me how to save him, so I did.”
Yalda lifted a trembling hand to her breast, smeared with dirt and the blood of their enemies.
“I see you have taken on his scar,” Yalda said. “It is proof that your bond is the stronger of the two."
Although Yalda was old, her eyes had always been sharp, and on the threshold of death, there was no truth which could be hidden from her eyes. The knife-scar which adorned Gita’s breast was clearly visible in her nakedness, the gaping hole had appeared when she had breathed in the venom. The crater had disappeared as she had gradually transmuted the poison, leaving only an identical knife-wound to the one which had almost taken down Mikhail.
“Your father told us a story before he died,” Yalda whispered. “He said your mother was a high priestess of Jebel Mar Elyas. He said he tricked her into conceiving you, and when she would not give him the son he wanted, he set her up to have her killed as revenge. He said that when she died she was pregnant by another man, a great leader, a king. He told the Amorites that all they had to do to kill this man was kill her, for he would feel her death-wound, and to torture him, all they had to do was torture her.
Gita remembered how happy her mother had been shortly before she’d been killed. Her Mama had placed her hand upon her belly and told Gita that soon she would have a little brother. The man had been a kind man, and he had made her Mama very, very happy.
“The Amorites came and buried Mama in the earth,” Gita said. “My father cast the first stone, and then they kept using small ones, for they wanted her death to last as long as it could.”
“Your father told me that if you form the Bond of Ki to save a man, if your love is true, not only will you save him, but that Ki will reward you by giving you a child,” Yalda said. “Is it true? Do you carry the winged one’s child?”
Gita startled. She had never considered such a thing. Her hand moved down to cradle her womb, the womb which had begun to ache from three missed monthly cycles. She had, until now, attributed her queasy stomach to stress.
“No,” she lied.
Yalda smiled at her through wrinkled lips, a tender, indulgent kind of smile; the smile of an old woman who had seen it all.
“You must tell him the truth,” Yalda said. “You saved his life. He will not abandon you or your child.”
“He loves Ninsianna,” Gita cried out, her voice filled with anguish and a hundred, million unshed tears. “I stole something from him, and because I did, Ninsianna will leave him! I cannot do that to him! I cannot be the reason his one true love abandons him. She is carrying his rightful heir! Not me!”
The sound of beating wings filled the street just outside the door, and then she heard the sound of someone touching the door latch. She faded into the shadows just as Mikhail came bursting into the room.
“Zhila!”
Her heart filled with tears as he rushed over to Zhila’s body and collapsed unto his knees. His great, brown wings knocked over a vat of beer and the bowl of unbaked bread that Yalda had set out to rise. Mikhail pressed his fingers against Zhila’s neck. Gita covered her mouth to stifle her cry as she saw upon his face that same naked anguish she had seen each night as she had held his hand and listened to him cry out for his poor, kidnapped wife.
“No!!!” he gave an angui
shed howl.
‘No no no no no!’ Gita clamped both hands over her mouth, unable to bear the sight of his grief. She could not bear it! She could feel his grief as if it was her own, and his heartache was her heartache, and it felt as if her heart had been eaten by a lion.
“Tell him, child,” Yalda whispered from her deathbed. “You must tell him what you did.”
Gita chose not to heed her. For as Mikhail threw his head back and howled and keened, she knew his anguish would be nothing compared to the pain of losing Ninsianna if it ever became known what she had done.
There would be no happily ever. She had already seen what would happen when Shahla had leveled a false allegation, so what would they do if the allegation was true? The village tongues would gossip. It would undermine everything he had built upon the myth of rescuing his one perfect love, for how could you have a perfect love if, while one wife was kidnapped, you’d lain down with another woman and begotten her with child?
What would happen once he rescued Ninsianna? Her Chosen cousin would hear of the scandal, and no matter how many times Gita insisted that Mikhail had thought it was her he’d made love to at the entrance of the dreamtime, and not some Un-Chosen girl who lived in the shadows, Ninsianna would not believe him, for she was a jealous creature, and she had still not forgiven him for Shahla’s lies. Ninsianna would leave her husband and break the big Angelic’s heart far more certainly than the knife had done. Having fought so hard to save him, Gita could not bear to watch him suffer through that again.
With a sob, she slipped out the still-open door with her sword, her foot slipping on the pool of blood which adorned the threshold. She glanced to the empty space on the wall where Zhila had kept mounted the spear she had used to catch her husband’s eye. Zhila had not died passively.
She tracked the blood, intent on finishing the job. The trail ended directly in front of her father’s house. Zhila’s spear lay in the middle of a pool of crimson sand, as if somebody had died here, and then somebody else had come and carried away the body. Nobody could lose that much blood and live.
“May you never gain entrance to the dreamtime!” Gita howled as she stabbed the spot where Zhila’s slayer had died. “May you spend all eternity feeling the pain you caused!”
Gita stabbed at the blood until she fell to her knees, too exhausted to even scream. Her tears mingled with the bloody earth, cursing whoever had done this until her voice grew so hoarse she could no longer even form the words.
She glanced into the doorway of her father’s house, that empty house where she had lived her hellish childhood. There was nothing here for her anymore. No family. No lover. No friends. And now, not even the truth. The only thing she could bring back to this village was shame and scandal when she birthed a child with wings.
Naked except for her loincloth and her sword, she grabbed Zhila’s spear and retreated out of the smoldering village.
~ * ~ * ~
Chapter 112
February: 3,389 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Mikhail
With a weary cry of victory, the Assurians finished off the last of the enemy, but Mikhail did not feel victorious, and by the look of her, neither did Pareesa. His young protégé stared at him with large, brown haunted eyes, no longer innocent, no longer his eager little fairy, and rushed over to some enemy bodies to begin rummaging for something, though he had no idea for what. It occurred to him that perhaps he should help her dig, but that uncomfortable echo that something was wrong had stayed with him and it ate at him now even though, deep in his bones, his intuition told him it was too late to do anything about it.
He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling which Ninsianna had tried so hard to teach him to see, but which he could still only feel with the vaguest of mental images. It was his heart which told him which way to go. An empty space. A fading heartbeat. And tears. Oh, so many tears. It was the tears which led him to the widow-sister’s house, and even as he landed, he knew the news was terrible.
Blood…
He pushed open the door and stepped inside, the lingering effects of the Cherubim battle incantations giving him the odd impression that there were three people in the room instead of two. The image faded as the old God of War drew his attention to the body lying on the floor. Look. Look here. This is what you need to see.
“Zhila!!!”
Mikhail burst across the room and fell to his knees, pleading with the goddess to let Zhila be okay. The stench of burnt flesh offended his olfactory senses and confirmed that Zhila had been hit, but he pressed his fingers against her neck anyways, hoping against hope his friend would still be alive. A great, powerful eruption of emotion welled in his chest and made him shudder like a volcano which had just erupted.
“No!!!” he threw back his head and howled.
For a moment, it felt as though someone touched the back of his wings, but when he glanced behind himself, he saw nothing but the wind blow the open door shut. It was then that he heard the whisper, a ghost of a voice which called his name.
“Mikhail?” Yalda called.
He wiped at his tears and made his way to the cot they’d set up for those nights when he did not feel like staggering home to the war zone that had become Immanu and Needa’s dying marriage. She lay in the bed, little more than the empty husk of a frail, old thing, a dying leaf which clung to a tree in autumn, waiting for the wind to carry it away. A lump rose in his throat. He tried to speak and failed, so he took her hand and then he tried to speak again.
“Yalda,” his voice warbled. “Who did this to you?”
Yalda’s hands were large for such a frail old woman, a legacy of a lifetime of kneading bread, so when she unclenched her gnarled old claws and held before him something shiny, it took him a moment to recognize it was a golden key. She gave it to him, and then she lay back as though she had finished a great mission, and now her work was done.
“What is this?” Mikhail asked.
The key was not large, nor was it an ordinary key, but a cruciform key with many different layers of bits, the kind which would be used for opening up a complicated lock. It was plated in solid gold, with an ornate little handle that looked like an eleven-pointed star, and at the top was embedded a jewel. Along its shaft were symbols, but in no language that Mikhail could read.
Yalda trembled, and then she gasped for breath. Even though she bore no sign of injury, he could sense she was not long for this world and had only held on to give to him the key.
“You must summon your Emperor,” Yalda whispered. “And take him to the temple at Jebel Mar Elyas. He will know what to do once you bring him there and give him this key. Him, and that other emperor you oppose, the dragon. You must bring them both there, for only if they work together can they bring the Evil One to his knees.”
She lay back her head, and just for a moment she closed her eyes. Mikhail grabbed her arm and shook her.
“Don’t go,” Mikhail pleaded with her. “Please don’t go! You’re the only family I have left.”
He clenched her hand and bowed his head in prayer, wishing with every ounce of his being that he possessed the gift to heal like it was rumored his sub-species of Seraphim had once possessed, but he was ungifted, and Yalda did not wish to stay. Her husband, her sons, and now her sister had preceded her into the dreamtime, and her one surviving daughter was grown and had moved away. She wished to join her sister, whether or not he needed her to stay.
She looked right past him, as though he wasn't even there.
“It's so beautiful,” Yalda murmured, her eyes already looking into the next world. She nodded as though listening to somebody speak to her, and then said, "yes, Zhila, we promised we would tell him the truth.”
“Tell me what truth?” Mikhail asked, his voice hoarse with grief. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he gripped her hand more tightly, as if that, alone, could encourage her to stay.
“She loves you,” Yalda said, her eyes distant as she looked into the next
world. “You don’t remember what she did for you, but when she healed you, you chose her to walk with you for all eternity.”
“I know,” Mikhail said, wiping his eyes as he choked back a sob. “I’ll get her back as soon as I can get a raid together. I’m going to get her. I promise.”
“Not her,” Yalda said, her voice barely a whisper. “The Other One. She is carrying your…”
Whatever Yalda had been about to say, she never finished it. Her words trailed of, unfinished, as her spirit left her body.
Trembling in a mixture of grief and rage, he fought the urge to hunt down and slaughter the few remaining Sata'anic prisoners. The Cherubim had always been adamant that he must control his rage, for rage opened the door to other things, though they would never tell him what. He remembered what Jingu, the Cherubim queen had said to him one day after he'd grown angry and blacked out after a novitiate had picked on him.
“Let out your grief. It is too big to keep inside of you. Let it out, or someday your rage will destroy us all.”
Cradling Yalda’s body to his chest, he howled an agonizing cry as he felt his heart break in a million pieces. Great sobs wracked his body as he curled into Yalda’s body, his friend who had become a best friend and a grandmother to him, and wept uncontrollably. It was too much! His wife? His home? His village? And now the closest thing he had left to family in the universe were gone as well! Gone! All gone! How much more could a spirit take before it broke? His wings drooped to the ground, shuddering as he wept.
Others in the village heard his cries, but they knew better than to disturb him. They had their own dead and injured to grieve. Several came to the door, but part of his consciousness heard someone shoo them away. For a long time he wept, cradling Yalda's body, alone. For in this life, he forever walked alone.
Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 106