Out of the marshes came a shimmering wave, like heat escaping a hot oven. It quickly passed over the desert, stirring dust in its wake. It slammed into the tower with a boom of thunder, shaking its stones.
Eyes stinging from flying grit, Ellonlef wheeled. Beneath her, the tower began to crumble. She ran down the twisting stairs, racing through the tower’s failing heart. She knew that she was about to die, but still she ran.
Chapter 4
Prince Varis remembered the instant agony of blue fire melting the flesh from his bones ... but now he was whole. He fought for breath that refused to fill his lungs. Pain savaged every particle of him, and a rushing black pressure seemed intent on squeezing his body into the size of a thimble.
Through that mind-bending torture, he felt another sensation, that of hands, cold and covered in jellied corruption. They slid longingly over his skin. From the tips of each finger sprouted claws of blazing iron. The bright heat of those fiendish daggers plunged deep into him, roasting his eyes in their sockets, scorching his tongue to a twist of blackened leather. Then the talons ripped into his entrapped spirit. What he thought he knew of misery was lost as, bit by bit, they ripped apart his very soul. His shrieks burst from his throat until only keening hisses remained.
His plummet ended abruptly. One moment he was being torn apart as he fell through a lightlessness void, and the next he smashed against jagged stone. Every bone and organ in his body exploded. And still he was unable to die, but fully able to live and to suffer.
Far above, like a solitary star in the night, hung a point of pristine radiance. He imagined Pa’amadin, the Silent God of All, gazing down upon him with scorn and pity—
Suddenly, shadowed creatures ringed him about, blotting out that condemning light. Their eyes and gaping mouths roiled with flame. No two creatures were the same. Some were small, impish. Others stood tall, if humpbacked and covered in horns and spines. In the ruddy light cast by their burning eyes, their skin was black, reeking of death and sickness. None had the limbs of men, or of any beast Varis had ever seen. The Fallen ... Mahk'lar ... demons!
The imps began to dance about, cursing his name in a language of the vilest hate. Then one brutish figure bent over him. With three of its dozen arms, it lifted him to its chest, as a caring mother would cradle her babe. Varis cried out in gratitude, thinking the horrid creature meant to spare him from further torments.
The Mahk’lar’s drooping lips spread around a mouthful of fangs, and a gurgle of mirth resonated in the demon’s chest. From behind the creature's teeth, a hundred tongues flashed out and burrowed into every opening of Varis’s body. The tongues dug recklessly through his eyes, swarmed up his nose and filled his mouth, forcing their way inside him, eating, devouring all that he was.
A new heaviness assailed him, pressed into his pores, swelling him. Then, like a blood-engorged leech crushed under a boot heel, he burst apart. The demonic host fell on his quivering gobbets of meat, gorging themselves. Through it all, somehow, Varis was still fully alive and aware. When a blessed darkness began to fall over him, he escaped into it….
The darkness faded over long minutes, or maybe lifetimes, and Varis became aware of himself again and scrambled to his feet.
He stood whole and unblemished atop a pillar of rough stone. All around him, as far as he could see, burned a turbulent ocean alight with flames of every color. It was beautiful, but at the same time atrocious. A steady wind drove the inferno and chapped his naked skin, dried his eyes and tongue. But that discomfort, after what he had already suffered, was like the cool kiss of morning fog.
He took a careful step to the edge and looked down into the burning sea. Far below, imps and hulking demons stood upon islands of stone. They did not dance now, nor laugh or ridicule. They writhed and wailed in the heat of the undying furnace, their corrupted shapes melting away, only to be instantly replaced and consumed again.
“The greatest mercy I could offer them,” Peropis said at Varis’s back, “would be but one drop of water.” She laughed. “Or freedom, of course.”
Varis spun, expecting the worst terror yet. Instead, he found a stunning creature. To his eyes she was a woman, but somehow she was not. Pale and flawless, she was more than mere flesh. She stood taller than he, her nakedness cloaked in the tumbling fall of silver-white hair.
With a seductive grin, Peropis stepped toward him. He glimpsed her bare hip, the outer swell of one rounded breast. His already parched tongue withered further. Her utter perfection twisted his mind, as if he were trying to comprehend the number of stars in the heavens, or the grains of sand on every shore over the face of the world. Tears of blood dripped from his bulging eyes, but no matter how hard the muscles in his neck strained, he could not look away from her, the Eater of the Damned.
Peropis’s grin became a broad smile. With a long-fingered hand, she gently wiped away his crimson tears. Then her fingers cupped the back of his neck and gently pulled him near. Her lips on his were cold as ice, but soft. Her tongue slid smoothly past his lips, tasting him, then sank deeper.
Fear and desire warred within Varis.
Desire won out, destroying his reason.
His hands, shaking with anticipation, swept aside her hair, moved down her shoulders, spread over the gentle curves of her hips, then drew her close.
Without a hint of resistance or rebuff, she pressed against him. A shiver rippled across his skin at her touch, and he thought he would go mad with desire. In that moment he was hers ... but not without reservation.
She knelt and drew him down atop her, impervious to the baking heat of the stone beneath her. Varis cried out as he entered her, making them one flesh. When his bloody tears came again, she kissed them away. When he kissed her in return, he tasted his own blood on her tongue. He did not care. He relished the flavor, hungered for it like a starving man. He greedily sought that sweet bouquet, and she offered it up as a flower weeps nectar. His passion soared and raged, and when his release came, it felt as if molten silver were pouring from his loins.
Struggling for breath, he gazed into her eyes. Black through and through, those eyes stared back, shining like wet obsidian. “You have survived my testing, Prince of Aradan,” she said. “You have taken your gift.”
Varis nodded mutely, knowing she did not mean the gift of her body.
“In you is now contained a measure of the Powers of Creation.” Her eyes grew larger then, dragging him into their bottomless depths. He did not try to resist. “The world will be ours,” she whispered, “but first the battle must be joined, for all that the Three gave up and hid away is soon to be released into the world. Go, my prince, and remake all that the Three abandoned.”
Varis nodded again, captivated, yet suddenly uneasy about what she was saying. Before now, she had never mentioned anything about measures of power, nor anything about him sharing the world with her....
His thoughts drifted. Looking into her gaze, he was beginning to lose himself again, and all his questions.
Peropis’s voice came as a dwindling sigh. “So, too, shall my kindred find their long-awaited freedom.”
She drew his head down as if for another kiss, but instead of meeting her lips, he felt as if he were dissolving, being rendered from flesh to liquid, and the distilled essence of him spilled into her eyes.
A rushing sound filled his being, growing steadily louder until it became a roar. The dark pressure returned, propelling him not downward or inward, but up and up and up. When he could not bear it anymore, the crushing weight vanished in an explosion of light—
~ ~ ~
Varis gasped, found himself standing within the confines of the temple. Smoking shards from the Well of Creation were scattered around his feet. Where the basin had once been now roiled with a boiling black fluid. There was no sign of the shimmering veil, no sign of Peropis. Overhead, a perfect circle had been cut through the dome, the edges clean and smooth as glass. The rest of the dome and its supporting walls were crumbling around him.
>
He flinched at a stealthy touch, and looked down to find inky shapes swimming around his legs, caressing him with vaporous fingers. Her kindred, he thought. Mahk’lar—demons—freed into the world.
As he watched, many of those spirits flashed through the temple walls, unhindered by stone. Others flew up and out through the hole in the ceiling, vanishing from sight.
Blinking, he realized that all he saw was in shades of silver and black. More importantly, he sensed a strange power swelling inside him, gaining strength, seeking release. That was her gift, the Powers of Creation long ago forsaken by the Three.
The floor suddenly rolled, knocking him off his feet. He lay on his side, gasping. With his ear pressed to the shattered floor tiles, he heard a steady grinding noise rising from the bowels of the earth. Or is it from the Thousand Hells?
A chunk of masonry fell from the ceiling, striking the side of his head. With a pained curse, he struggled to his feet. Gingerly, he touched the wound on his scalp. The blood on his fingertips was black to his strange sight. More troubling was the skin stretched tight over the bones of his hand. It was as if he had been sick near unto death, and all his color and flesh had been eaten away. He glanced at his nakedness, and was shocked to see how wasted his legs were. But not just his legs. All over, his bones pressed out from under thin, pallid skin.
“What affliction is this?” he rasped. No answer came, but he knew he had to escape the crumbling temple before it fell in atop him.
When he tottered out of the temple, he instantly cowered back from the sunlight lancing through his eyes and into his brain. Through slitted eyelids, he watched black-skinned men in snug yellow robes scrambling through the quaking swamp. Trees swayed back and forth, as if shaken by a giant’s hand, and the forest floor bucked and heaved. As it had looked within the temple, the world outside shone in shades of silver and black, and the sunlight blazed like white fire.
A Geldainian mercenary pointed at him and shouted. Varis sensed danger. Not from the pointing warrior, but from somewhere else.
He found a trio of men who had not seen him emerge from the temple. Two were staring up into the sky, and a third, seemingly unnoticed by the other two, was sprawled on the ground, his arms and legs twitching. At that moment, Varis recognized that the man on the ground was the source of danger, and his name was Kian Valara. He could not guess why the Izutarian would pose a threat, especially in his current state, but the need to destroy the mercenary suddenly filled him, and as it did so, it joined with Peropis’s gift.
Chapter 5
“Gods good and wise, what was that?” Hazad asked, looking at the now empty sky. A bewildered, dreamlike calm had fallen over the swamp.
“Fire, of a sort,” Azuri said, tapping his chin contemplatively.
“Never seen a pillar of blue fire,” Hazad said, awed.
“You have now.”
Kian lay on his back a few feet from his companions. He could hear them plain, but could not speak himself. But he did not want to speak. He wanted to scream to them about the agony inside him, agony inserted into his bones by the trickle of blue fire that had burst from the temple a second before its monstrous relation had erupted into the sky. He made a gurgling noise, but his companions were too distracted to notice.
All at once, his twitching arms and legs went stiff. Then his spine began bending back on itself until only his heels and the back of his head were digging into the mud. A thousand icy needles stabbed into his skull, and it seemed that countless tiny crabs were feasting on his skin.
“What do you think, Kian? Some kind of dark magic, mayhap, like in stories?” Hazad turned toward Kian, and his overawed expression became one of nearly comic shock. “Kian!"
Azuri pushed by Hazad and knelt beside his fallen leader. His gray eyes searched Kian’s face. “Breathe,” he said evenly. “You’re suffocating.”
If it had not been true, and had Kian not felt as if he were dying, he might have laughed at the request. Instead, he was surprised that it worked. Cool wind rushed into his lungs and, as if an elixir had been poured down his throat, all his paralyzing agonies vanished. He went limp and lay gasping.
“Will he live?” Hazad asked nervously, crowding in.
Azuri tried to shove him back, but could not budge the huge man. “Of course he will, you fool. That is unless you trample him.”
Before Kian could get his tongue working enough to ask what had happened, the world heaved and shuddered upward. Trees swayed and creaked, limbs snapped and fell to the forest floor. A few of the Asra a’Shah who had been cautiously returning to the clearing ringing the temple, now began shouting warnings.
“Hazad,” Azuri said calmly, “get that fool of a prince out of the temple.”
Hazad gave a last glance at Kian, then spun around. He moved no farther. “I think he’s already come out on his own.”
“Thinking is half your problem—” Azuri cut off, eyes widening.
Kian lifted his head and saw a man standing in the slanting doorway of the temple, his skin whiter than that which lay under the garments of the three northern-born mercenaries. He was naked and hairless, emaciated to the point of death. There was a gash on his bald scalp, and from it flowed some black substance.
Blood, Kian thought, repulsed and confused and nervous, all at the same time. What manner of man has black blood in his veins?
The fellow standing before the temple also bore a strong resemblance to Prince Varis Kilvar. Stranger than the boy’s transformation, were the swirling patches of oily darkness pouring out of the temple and vanishing into the swamp. Where they passed near an Asra a’Shah, the man screamed in revulsion.
“Help me up,” Kian commanded Azuri.
Varis was staring at the trio, his teeth bared in an expression of hate. His flesh rippled, seemed to swell.
“What’s wrong with his damned eyes?” Kian muttered, trying to understand how the youth could see anything, what with his eyes gone completely white.
“Some kind of sickness?” Azuri said uneasily. The only thing the mercenary found more troubling than untidiness was the possibility of catching some incurable ailment.
Hazad shook his head. “No plague I ever heard of makes a man’s blood turn black.”
“Plague?” Azuri gasped, and began brushing vigorously at the sleeves of his dark green coat.
The conversation was distant to Kian. A part of him said he should uphold his duty and go help the prince, but a mesmerizing and overpowering loathing for Varis suggested that the better choice was to kill him.
What’s wrong with me? He’s just a boy, and hurt at that. The thoughts did nothing to keep Kian from dropping a hand to the hilt of his sword. At the same instant, Varis raised his arms.
Hazad took a cautious step backward. “Is he trying to … to fly.”
“Fly?” Azuri bleated, as if that were some sort of unknown illness.
“We should cut his head off,” Kian said.
“Have you lost your wits?” Hazad blurted. “He’s under your protection, not some enemy—”
All at once, with a booming crackle, cords of blue-white fire sprang from Varis’s hands.
Men froze in horrified astonishment. When the prince laughed, a maniacal, sickly wheeze, the flames erupting from his palms flickered and went out. He then raised a hand before his face, waved it like a man shooing a midge. He grinned like a halfwit, and the ground erupted at his feet. Clots of mud and rotten leaves sprayed skyward, and then a twining root thick as a man’s wrist rose up.
“By Peropis’s black arsehole, what is that?” Hazad gasped.
“I don’t know,” Kian answered hollowly, his mind having gone completely numb.
Varis motioned with his hand, and the curled tip of the root swiveled. It stopped turning when it faced Kian and the others.
“Is that a serpent?” Azuri asked, sounding far away.
“It’s a tree root,” Kian said. Or it used to be.
“Are we just going to stand here l
ike a pack of idiots watching this … this sorcery?” Hazad asked.
No one answered. No one moved.
With a sodden ripping sound, the root began tugging free of the ground. Inch by inch, foot by foot, it climbed upward, fattening as it soared a dozen paces into the air. Knobby growths sprouted along its length, and one by one those growths burst open to release thrashing creepers. In moments, each new shoot had grown as large as the initial root had been. The main stalk was no bigger around than Hazad’s chest.
“I don’t think that’s a root,” Hazad said wonderingly.
“No,” Kian admitted.
“It’s a … root-serpent," Azuri said, as if that explained everything.
By now, all along the length of the root-serpent clusters of slitted, glowing emerald eyes began to open. Those orbs locked not on Hazad or Azuri, but Kian.
He stood unmoving. A new emotion flitted through him. Fear. A stark and paralyzing terror so strong he could taste the sourness of it on his tongue. It began worming through his bowels, putting a quiver into his limbs.
The strange creature continued to grow, ceasing to look like a root at all, but rather a huge, thousand-eyed adder. Its muddy brown skin roughened to a scaly gray-black hide, and its scores of lesser roots waved about like ropey arms.
This cannot be real, Kian thought through a glaze of terror, his eyes flickering toward Varis. The youth was now stooped over, still watching Kian, but rigid with agony. His skin had split in several places, showing knuckles of protruding bone. Dark fluid dribbled from his fresh wounds.
Then, with a dull roar, the temple fell in on itself and sank into a bubbling substance as black as tar. With a voiceless snarl, Varis lurched a few paces away from the collapsed temple and the widening pool of boiling sludge.
The God King (Book 1) (Heirs of the Fallen) Page 3