Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2)

by Jordan MacLean

  The horse’s eyes rolled in his head, and he snorted, unable to take comfort even from the boy’s soothing tones, what with the smells of smoke and blood that lingered on him from the glade. Still, the boy patted his shoulder while he rested. It didn’t really matter if the horse understood or not. His promise was less to the horse than to himself.

  Below his vantage point on the hilltop, mid-morning light stretched across the foothill valley below, across a sprinkling of snow and the fading orange of a few late changing trees. In that cool sunlight, the horrors of the glade seemed no more than a nightmare.

  He laughed grimly. Deliver a message. That had been his charge. Get inside the castle, just as they’d practiced in Farras. Hand the message to the Sheriff or Lady Renda. Neither see nor be seen by the Hadrian priests, and get back to Graymonde. Such a task had seemed almost impossible to him at the time, but now, after everything that had happened, would that it had been so simple.

  He had ended up following the sheriff and Lady Renda away from the besieged castle to a glade where they were surrounded by the Hadrian priests and by the ancient dead of his own race. And then, as if that were not enough, the gods of his people had appeared, right there in the glade: Anado of the Hunt and Nekraba…and then the terrifying giant, Mohoro of the Underground. And the other, the strange one he’d never heard of before…

  Xorden. Dhanani god of politics, a concept that until last night had been impossible for him to grasp.

  Stranger still, all of that now seemed almost mundane compared with the spectacular visions his gods had shown him, so real he had felt the ocean breeze on his skin and smelled the spices in the markets. His stomach still churned at the conflict he felt within himself, seeing at once the cities and ports his people had once built contrasted with the proud hardened people they’d become on the plains. He’d felt rage against the Invaders who had taken that luxury from them and pride that the tribes had flourished in spite of them. He was sure he would not completely understand what he had seen or what it meant for quite some time.

  “Tedriadre,” he murmured to himself, summoning first the idea and then the word for it, testing to see if he could still speak in the Old Voice. He could. Because the gods had needed him to understand what he saw, They had granted him this knowledge so that he might understand what They showed him. But when it was over, apparently They had not revoked Their gift. Now he could do what the storykeepers of the tribes could never do, and the knowledge both thrilled him and terrified him.

  He could tell new stories in the Old Voice.

  He could speak it as freely as he spoke Dhanani or Bremondine or Syonese, and with the visions the gods had shown him, he could tell the stories of what happened before the Before Time.

  Tedriadre…

  Along the road to the west and over two more hills lay Graymonde, or what remained of it, where he and Gikka had agreed to meet once he’d finished delivering his message to Castle Brannagh. Along the other road, much nearer and almost within sight, was one of the Hadrian mining towns. The streets were predictably quiet at mid-morning with all the miners already deep in the ground. A haze of smoke hung over the town from the fireplaces that burned in the steeply built wooden houses, houses that looked as if they were meant for a place with much more rain and snow. Beyond the houses and brightly painted shops, barely visible, were the mine entrances themselves. Great gaping maws in the side of the mountain, the mouths of Mohoro, entrances to the underground where Dhanani could never go.

  Where he’d gone more than once.

  Where real Dhanani could never go.

  Chul sighed, frustrated with all the new thoughts that filled his mind for which he’d never had words before, strange new gods with new ideas that made him question everything he’d ever believed. The dual sided sword of battle, with Kadeta’s side that protects life and Pildaro’s that takes it, the strange political realm of Xorden, and Noti’s odd inevitable decay of everything. And the Invaders…his feelings were so jumbled. Gikka would help. She had a way of making things clear.

  His path lay ahead, to Graymonde. So why had he stopped? Why had he not moved on? Why was his attention still drawn toward the shanty town and the mines?

  Hadrians. He shivered.

  At the tavern in Farras, he’d seen only the grim line of the messenger’s mouth beneath his hood, and it had been enough to give him chills. After that, he’d seen them only from far away, their heads and bodies cloaked from even the weak daylight of the Groggy Bear’s Moon, and he’d always obediently turned and taken himself away, stifling his curiosity. So between Gikka’s warnings and Aidan’s stories from the war, he had never risked being caught alone by the Hadrians, nor even catching a good look at one.

  Aidan had tried to describe them to the tribe over the fires, but he’d finally given up, saying no words could capture the horror of seeing one of them in person. To say that they were ugly was not quite right since they were not misshapen or deformed. To say that they were merely pale with colorless hair and eyes evoked images of Mohoro and of His servants, the grave beetles and maggots, but even that did not evoke the proper feeling of revulsion. During the war, a Hadrian scout had come into Lady Renda’s camp unannounced, and the moment Aidan saw his face, he thought he’d simply blacked out from the shock.

  When Aidan had come to himself again, coming up from dark, hateful dreams of savaging the poor Hadrian, several of the Sheriff’s knights were holding him down until he stopped swinging his fists and feet at them. From what he heard, the Hadrian barely escaped with his life, and only because of the knights’ quick thinking. Every part of Aidan’s body, even his voice, had been sore, and he’d stayed to his tent for days afterward, feeling bewildered and humiliated by his lack of self-control, to say nothing of his complete lack of compassion for a fellow human being he had never met. Eventually, after the third or fourth time this happened, the scouts had learned to warn him when they saw a Hadrian approaching.

  Aidan had called it “blood rage,” for lack of a better term, and he’d said there was no feeling like it, a feeling of intense passionate hatred that could never be satisfied. It was as if suddenly a fire in the veins erupted and decreed that this creature must not live. That sort of merciless, mindless hate was absolutely at odds with Aidan’s training. and he had prayed daily for Anado’s forgiveness and guidance for his failing even after he returned to the Plains after the war.

  Now that Chul had seen Hadrians in the clearing and felt that same fire, that same imperative to kill the abomination, he understood everything Aidan had been unable to put into words. Strangely, he could remember the Hadrian priest’s face quite clearly but the memory brought nothing but a distant revulsion. Even so, he did not believe for a moment that this calm in memory would let him remain in control if he saw a Hadrian in the flesh again. If Aidan the healer, the gentle shaman in Anado’s service, could not contain the blood rage no matter how many times he saw Hadrians, Chul knew it was hopeless even to try.

  “Still you linger, Dark Child. Chul Ka-Dree of the Dhanani. What keeps you?”

  The white horse nickered and danced restlessly beneath him. The voice he heard chiding him for staying at this place was not his father’s voice, nor Gikka’s, nor those of the gods from the glade. It was not a memory but a voice he was really hearing.

  “I don’t know,” he said aloud, looking round him.

  “Don’t you?” came the same voice from behind him, now somehow embodied and solid in the cold morning air. He turned to see someone standing in the road not far away. “I think I do.”

  Chul steadied his horse, who had cocked one leg to kick at the stranger, and took that moment to study the person. The cloak was unremarkable but covered the stranger’s face completely. The voice was young, very young, like an adolescent boy or a young woman, and accented in a way he’d never heard before. The build was very slight and apparently male, and the stance, the whole manner, was almost mocking. Small. Cloaked. Mocking.

  Hadrian.
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  His hand went almost reflexively to his knife, and he looked around carefully, studying the brush, watching the roads in all directions. In his confusion and exhaustion after the battle, he’d allowed himself to relax as he’d approached Graymonde, the only home he’d known since he’d left the Kharkara Plains, and he’d stupidly let down his guard. He’d expected Gikka to be here. She would not let anything happen to him, he’d told himself. So the closer he got, the safer he felt. But Gikka might still be two hours’ ride ahead, and here he was, exhausted from battle, standing at the crossroads on a white horse like a beacon.

  After everything he’d been through, he’d let himself be ambushed by Hadrians.

  “How funny,” laughed the other. “You’ve got it all wrong. No, no, you’re not ambushed, although such a thing might have been amusing to watch, were I of a different mind…”

  The horse shied again, and Chul steadied him. When he looked up, the cloaked one was gone. He scanned the brush, scanned the road in every direction. Nothing.

  “Dark Child, you stopped here because I wanted you to stop here.”

  Chul looked around him. Yes, it was the same voice, but this time coming from the brush, the rocks, the sky… Perhaps from his own mind.

  The Hadrian was gone.

  Now was his chance. Without a word, he nudged his horse to gallop away, but the horse bucked his head and skittered in a circle without leaving the center of the road.

  “Yes, I wanted you to stop here,” the voice spoke again at his side, this time with less amusement. “And I always get what I want. Just ask the miners.” The cloaked one was suddenly in front of him, lowering his hood. Chul looked away automatically.

  “No, no, Dark Child.” The hood settled around the other’s shoulders. “Look at Me and know Who it is Who stands before you.”

  Chul fought not to look at the being before him, but found himself unable not to look. As he feared, a Hadrian child on the verge of adolescence stood staring at him with very blue eyes, and he steeled himself. But nothing happened. The child was still repulsive to him, as pale and squirmy as a maggot in a dead javelin dog, as vile as his memory of the priest in the glade, and yet he felt no compulsion to attack. Blue eyes. The child god. The trickster.

  “Limigar,” he said, letting out his held breath. His head was spinning. Was he to see the entire pantheon of Syon before midday? “I…”

  “Oh, bless you, you’ve heard of Me! That’s wonderful! Most Dhanani have not, you know. Not lately, at any rate.” The child laughed. It was a sparkling sweet laugh that Chul could imagine turning vicious without warning. “But you seem scared. Chul Ka-Dree. Don’t be. If I’d meant to scare you…”

  Suddenly the Hadrian child became a giant snarling black wolf the size of Chul’s horse, with blazing blue eyes and blood dripping fangs.

  Chul’s eyes widened only for a moment before his hunting knife was out of its sheath.

  Just as suddenly, the Hadrian child stood before him again, looking just a bit smaller and meeker than before. He smiled beautifully for a Hadrian, his blue eyes twinkling. “But I did not. As I said, I stopped you. Your horse needed to rest, and besides, I wanted to show you what I’ve done as a sort of thank you for your wonderful gift.”

  “What you’ve…done?” He almost added, “What gift?” but thought better of it.

  Limigar pulled the set of wooden rings from his cloak and began fidgeting with them. “Oh, this is so much fun! I’ve not been so entertained in ages. It’s a welcome consolation after all my other offerings were somehow broken.” He let that hang in the air for a moment. “Honestly, had I known the Dhanani had such a gift for puzzles…” The child-god chuckled quietly while he continued to work the puzzle, shifting his coloring and his features, his size, his build, even the cloth of his cloak, until he looked like one of the tribe’s children––except, of course, for the strange blue eyes.

  “But,” Limigar sighed, his attention still on the rings, “well, there’s no helping it, I suppose. I should wonder what Mohoro would think, to have Dhanani following a Hadrian god after His little tantrum.”

  Chul watched the god fumbling with the rings he’d carved himself, rings he’d given to Gikka in Farras. He could not begin to imagine how Limigar had gotten them––had the Hadrians somehow gotten them from her and put them in one of His shrines? Chul thought it unlikely, but if so… He cast a worried glance over the horizon toward Graymonde. Then again, if that were the case, why was this Hadrian god so interested in him?

  He watched uneasily as Limigar made the same mistake over and over in trying to find the answer to the puzzle, and he wondered how long it would be before the god became quite frustrated, perhaps even angry. He found it amusing that he did not expect Limigar to be able to solve it. After all, Limigar might be a god, but he was still Hadrian. The puzzle seemed to make the child-god happy for the moment, to distract Him, and from what little Chul had learned of Limigar, that was good. Distracting the god was…good. But distracting Him from what?

  “Oh, but what dreadful manners. Here I am, playing with my present, when I mean to show you what I’ve done! This is such a treat for Me, you understand, because normally I have no contact with Dhanani at all. By decree from B’radik, We gods of the Invaders, as you call Us, are forbidden to seek among the Dhanani for followers, and so on, and so forth. If you seek Us…well, that’s different, isn’t it? But come, I’ve teased Myself long enough. Let Me show you!”

  The Dhanani child with blue eyes shifted again and suddenly, Chul lost his balance and tumbled to the ground. When he stood, he found himself deep underground, hidden in shadows between the lantern lights that lined the path. All around him, like vermin crawling in carrion, he saw pale men and women digging into the ground, and he tried not to look at them too closely. Thankfully they all faced away from him, their attention completely taken with the rock before them. Almost obsessively so.

  The air felt like it was closing in around him, and he started scrabbling desperately at the rock, trying to climb out toward the small patch of blue sky he could see far above him.

  “Be still. You are under My protection.”

  “Can’t…breathe…” he whispered.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, of course you can breathe,” spoke a soft voice at his side, and he saw Gikka there beside him. Gikka, with her hair loose in the fashion of Invader men, as always, but with bright blue eyes in the darkness. The echo of her voice in the mine was alarming, but the Hadrian miners seemed not to hear it.

  Chul turned away from her coldly. “You are not Gikka.”

  “Of course not. My thought, it was, to give you a comforting presence, is all,” the child-god said, mimicking her accent exactly. “Close your eyes and think of the sky above. Imagine that it’s that air and not this mine air that fills your lungs.”

  He obeyed, closing his eyes, remembering the open sky of the Plains, filling his lungs with the brisk air of the Groggy Bear’s Moon. Instantly he felt better. There was plenty of air, even underground, he told himself, as long as he could see the sky. He opened his eyes slowly, looking out over the Hadrians.

  Somehow, Chul was oriented so that they never faced him, never looked into the corner where he stood. He could feel the barest beginnings of the blood rage waiting to take him over at the first sight of that strange and unnatural shine in their eyes if any of them turned toward him. His heart pounded and he resisted the urge to draw his hunting knife. He stared at the ground knowing that he could not possibly survive against so many Hadrians armed with shovels and axes, not if he lost control.

  “I’m quite proud of Myself,” whispered Limigar, who was again a Hadrian child beside Chul. “Oh, I do hope you’ll be impressed. I’ve not bothered to be clever in a long time, not with this lot. But your present was so special, I wanted to outdo Myself. You can see what I’ve done here, can’t you? Oh, just see if you can’t.”

  Chul watched the minors toiling away at the walls, pulling away great chunks of the roc
k without paying much attention to where they were digging. It seemed odd to Chul that they would be so haphazard and frantic, considering that these were the same mines they’d been working for generations. Odder still, he thought, that they would fill their barrows so high with worthless clods of dirt and leave gold and huge quartz crystals behind.

  “Very good. You’ve noticed. Those barrows must be horribly heavy with all that treasure. Why, they positively groan when they move! Can you hear the grinding of metal on metal?”

  “Treasure? It’s just dirt and rock!”

  Limigar laughed a happy, childish, sparkling laugh. “Treasure is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

  The barrows sparkled and Chul saw great heaping chunks of gold and piles of diamonds, opals, rubies, and other stones even he knew would never be found in the same places together. Great sheets of wealth fell into the barrows that the greedy little maggots wheeled out of the way so they could grab more, and somehow, they always managed to find an empty ore cart or barrow nearby to catch more of the amazing wealth, even while overfull cart after overfull cart filled up the paths behind them. And then, with another laugh from Limigar, to Chul’s eye, it all turned to dirt again.

  “Now…do you see the fuzzy little voles in the cages behind them?”

  Chul nodded, casting a quick glance up at the reassuring patch of sky and drawing a deep breath.

  “But you’ve no idea why they have them down here, do you? Of course you don’t, you’re Dhanani. So I’ll tell you. The voles are here in case the miners hit a pocket of poisonous or, worse, explosive gas. The voles will start squeaking, and the miners will have a chance to run away. They have to drop everything, of course, and run straight away if they want to live. That’s the idea, anyway. The bad thing about voles, though, is that once one of them starts squeaking, they all start.” He laughed. “Funny little mousy creatures. I always wondered what it would be like to be one of them.”