by Noelle Mack
As one, Teron and the other soldiers followed him, and the pounding of the hooves behind him shook the ground. The sound sent an undeniable surge of power through him. He wanted to annihilate the barbarians.
But as they approached Xoreztown, Kalief saw smoke pouring from within the walls. The acrid odor burned his nostrils. The village would be lost. “The One’s balls,” Kalief swore.
He ached to bury his sword in throat after barbarian throat, in gut after gut. Battle lust licking through his veins, Kalief kicked his stallion, but his outrider galloped past him. It was the man’s job to draw out any enemy, and his horse was the swiftest among the king’s herd. Kalief should have let him pass.
But bloodlust had replaced sense. Kalief urged his stallion into a faster gallop. He was tired of letting others take his risks.
With bone-jarring effort, his horse approached the outrider’s. Kalief shot a grin to the young soldier, who stared at him with astonishment.
“Yeehaa!” he shouted to his horse, but the stallion’s muscle-bound form was bred for combat, not speed, and the outrider’s horse began to pass them.
Then the outrider’s horse exploded from beneath him. Crouched over his stallion’s neck, Kalief saw hooves churn through the air as the brave horse tried to gallop even as its legs twisted over each other amid blood and foam. An arrow protruded through the horse’s neck, and another through his rider’s chest. The outrider, just a boy, still wore an astonished expression.
Having more sense than he himself, Kalief’s men surrounded him, protecting him from enemy arrows. Locking his gaze on Xoreztown’s front gate, Kalief once again urged his horse.
As he and his men neared the gate, barbarians on their scrappy dun ponies poured into the surrounding sand and fields. Yanking his sword from his scabbard, Kalief targeted a bearded barbarian and kicked.
His horse knew exactly what to do, and Kalief released the reins to swing. “Heyah!” he bellowed, lopping off a barbarian’s arm at the shoulder. He jerked his sword back and locked another barbarian into his gaze. His stallion rushed toward the pony, and Kalief swung again with another mighty yell. His opponent’s bearded head flew to the ground.
All around him Kalief heard the sounds of his soldiers chopping body parts from the barbarians, who seemed to buzz around his men like angry bees. As his horse locked onto a third man, Kalief raised his sword. Blood dripped from it to his unarmored thigh. Hope surged through him—maybe this time, they’d win the battle. With a vicious battle cry, he swung for the man’s neck, but the barbarian’s rangy pony ducked away at the last moment.
As Kalief’s horse lunged left, compensating for the shifted balance from the futile swing, he heard. “Keyyyyieee!” Kalief didn’t understand the word cried in the ancient language.
But the meaning became clear as the barbarians each turned their ponies west and began to flee as one.
“Follow them!” Kalief cried to his own men. His horse needed no urging. Wheeling on its hind legs, it sprang toward the barbarian herd.
As the sand-colored ponies ran, their dark dorsal stripes confused Kalief’s eye. His archers seemed to have a similar problem. Arrows flew too long or too short, too far wide. One hit a pony’s hindquarter, but it glanced off harmlessly.
And then the enemy horses disappeared altogether into the sand. Kalief stared at his men, wondering if the entire battle was a figment of his imagination.
“I hate when they do that,” Teron said, heaving from exertion. “What black wizardry do they use?”
“Maybe Anhara can tell us,” Kalief answered. “But they’re getting bold, and that worries me.”
“And close,” his second said. “They’re getting close. Shall I give the order to ride back to Xoreztown, see what’s left of the folk?”
Kalief nodded, and they walked back in silence, men and horse alike catching their breath.
Devastation. That’s what Kalief saw upon entering the Xoreztown gate. Every building had been set aflame, but not before the people of the town had nailed a barbarian to the gate. His eyes had been burned out.
“Barbarian skin’s unnatural,” he heard one young soldier say to another. “It’s not dark like it should be, but it isn’t white like a slave’s either.”
“Amber skinned,” his friend replied. “That’s what my mother calls it.”
“People of Xoreztown!” Kalief called in a loud voice. “It’s safe to come out!”
“The barbarians are gone!” Teron added after conferring with another outrider.
But no one came forward.
Every building Kalief examined was destroyed, and his horse stepped around the body of a man with a barbarian arrow through his chest. A well-made bed and chest of drawers lay half out of a house. The sheets of the bed were soaked in what looked like blood. Kalief peered into the doorway and saw a woman with her head hacked from her body, her skirt ripped and legs spread.
“They’ve burned the town larder, sire,” Teron noted. “There’s no food.”
“But the people,” Kalief said. “Where are they?”
“Sire!” a soldier called. “Over here! In the infirmary!” Terror laced the man’s voice.
When his horse turned the corner toward the soldier’s voice, Kalief saw another solider puking into the dust, hanging onto his horse for support.
Hundreds of Xoreztown folk had been shot here. They lay crumpled upon each other in a gruesome heap. Men, children, women were filled with arrows. Blackened blood oozed from throats and eyes and chests. So many people lay piled atop each other that Kalief couldn’t tell where one ended and another began.
“Sire,” Teron said. “Look at this.”
Kalief nudged his horse toward the infirmary door. “What is it?”
“All the vaccines are gone, sire. But most of the other medical equipment is still here.”
As king, Kalief’s duty included protecting the people of his land, peasant and nobility alike. This thought burned through his mind as he paced the heights of his gray parapet. He was a failure.
Kalief’s stomach constricted while his mind raced in circles for a solution. He’d been searching for an answer for months, maybe a year. And he’d come up with nothing. His soldiers couldn’t catch the barbarians, couldn’t stop them. Not even Anhara with her scrying bowl could see how they faded into the sand.
And the barbarians were striking increasingly closer.
Kalief needed to try something different, something unexpected.
“What are you thinking about, my lord?” Her voice was light and sweet. It should have been the perfect antidote to the black morass in which he found himself.
Kalief only shook his head in reply.
“My lord?” she asked again.
Kalief noted that her eyebrows were perfectly arched, two thin crescents, a shade darker than her auburn hair. Lady Teanne lightly ran her fingers over his hand, tracing the length of it, to ensure that his thoughts ran in her direction.
“About the land,” he finally said to his fiancé. “I’m thinking about my people and the villages and the land.”
“My serious king,” she said, taking his dark hand in hers. The pink of her gown perfectly offset the dark color of her skin. She held his hand above her head and spun so that her frothy skirt flared out around her calves.
Lady Teanne had gorgeous calves, but Kalief just shrugged his agreement.
Irrepressible, Teanne laughed. She spun again, letting the sunlight glint off the metallic buckles of her shoes.
“Look at this beautiful day,” she commanded, leaning her breasts against his arms. “The fields are full. The sun’s bright, and you have a young, willing fiancé.” She danced around him in graceful little steps. “I’m right here in your arms.”
Despite himself, he felt a smile start.
“See?” she said, tossing her head back in a movement he knew was meant to show off her elegant throat. It worked. Her throat was kissable. “You smile.”
“You’re indeed love
ly, my Lady Teanne.”
She nodded at the compliment, a playful look in her blue eyes, so shockingly pale against her dark complexion. “I can get you to do more than smile, you know,” she said. Her husky voice suggested smoky taverns and hot mouths, clever fingers and yielding bodies.
When she moved in close to him and surreptitiously caressed his cock, she grinned at his look of surprise. He was as hard as the gray walls around them.
“Success!” she cried.
Hungering for more than play, he pulled her toward him roughly, lips and tongue seeking hers. He wouldn’t call Lady Teanne’s kisses maidenly, but that suited him fine. One taste of her, and all else would be forgotten.
At least for a few moments, he could overlook the horrors he’d seen, ignore the horrors he didn’t know how to prevent.
The gentle caress of her lips against his took a new flavor, became hungrier, and she had his full attention.
Kalief groaned in pleasure when his lady wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him tighter, forbade him to leave.
He let her twine her tongue around his. She led the dance and he followed, glad for her strength and the healing in her touch. She pressed against him, her hardened nipples gliding across the breadth of his chest.
Finally Kalief tried to take the matter into his own hands. He slid his palms up from her waist, but Teanne was still in charge. Without breaking the kiss, she twisted so he had no choice but to caress her breast.
And he felt like she’d come from the Above. If only he could climb inside of her, deeply and completely. If only he could become her. Then the cries of orphaned and mutilated children would leave his mind. His eyes would no longer see charred fields and razed buildings.
Her world held no room for such atrocities.
Teanne’s perfect breasts nearly spilled from the low cut gown. Without removing her dress, his tongue found a nipple, his lips easily capturing it. She pressed toward him, sending a jolt of desire jagging through him.
As dark as he felt, she wanted him.
Then Lady Teanne broke away, took a step back and smoothed down her skirt. “My lord,” she said, suddenly demure. “I know we aren’t yet wed, but our betrothal’s solid…” She paused, then looked at him from under her lashes. “If it pleases you, my lord…” Lady Teanne slowly lifted her skirt, first showing ankles, then calves, then—by the One God in the Above—she showed her well-honed thighs. They gleamed in the sun.
“It pleases me very much,” Kalief said in a voice he hardly recognized. He stepped toward her, intent on finishing what she’d started.
With a teasing glint in her eye, Lady Teanne stepped back toward the wall, and Kalief gasped.
A yellow serpent slithered toward his betrothed.
And then it was gone.
“What?” asked Lady Teanne.
Kalief simply shook his head. Was he losing his mind?
She looked over her shoulder for the source of Kalief’s distress and gasped herself. “What’s that thing in the sky?”
Kalief blinked. How’d he missed the fiery ball adding light to the already blazing sun? Then he knew. “The Supplicant,” he muttered, feeling hope pulse through his heart for the first time in months, maybe years.
“What did you call it?” she asked.
But he could only stare in silence.
“It’s like…” Teanne fumbled for words. “It’s like the burning eye of the One God peering down on us.” She straightened her skirt, perhaps not wanting to be found behaving in such a wanton manner under the One God’s eye.
Kalief shook his head. “It’s a comet.”
“Comet? I’ve never heard that word.”
“The priests believe it’s a harbinger.”
“Of what?”
“War. Pestilence. Plague.” The Supplicant, he thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words again.
The land hadn’t seen a Supplicant in generations. Scripture told that when the One God’s eye inspected them and found them wanting, a Supplicant had come of age.
And she could save them.
Despite the augmented sun beating its warmth down upon them, Lady Teanne wrapped her arms around herself, shivering.
A hissing, slithering sound came from the parapet. The yellow snake had returned, gliding across the gray slate parapets in a way Kalief had never seen a snake slip. It molded its form against the square brick blocks, fitting within the parapet’s sharp angles.
The snake smiled at Kalief and said, “She’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“What are you talking about?” Teanne asked, following Kalief’s eyes but apparently seeing nothing.
Kalief ignored his fiancé and stared at the serpent. It had sprouted feathers, feathers that shifted colors like the inside of abalone shells. First the feathers were white, then orange, then pink as a sunset. The snake lifted an eyebrow at Kalief and winked. “She thinks you’ve lost your mind.”
“Who?” Kalief asked, feeling like an owl.
Then he grew aware of Teanne’s voice. It sounded muffled, like myriad doors separated her from him. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Let me show you something.” The words fell from the feathered serpent’s mouth like raindrops in the desert. Like the sand, Kalief ached for them, craved the growth they would bring.
“Show me,” he breathed, wondering if he’d gone mad. Teanne’s voice was silent now, and the sky had deepened to an unreal indigo.
“I think I will,” the serpent said.
The clouds, the trees, his castle—all were obscured by the violent indigo of a stormy sky.
But a woman with fine, milky skin appeared before him, in an unfamiliar temple. He’d never seen skin so white. Some of the lords in his court plundered the service class for women so pale, but not him. Chocolate-colored Teanne made his mouth water.
“Cogitate less, observe more,” the coatl hissed.
Kalief saw feathered and winged snakes carved into the stone above the woman’s head, into the divan on which she lay.
He knew of no people, no land, who worshipped the feathered serpent, but still…this place felt holy. Godly power reverberated throughout her temple, originating from the woman.
A diadem made of entwined snakes held back her shocking hair—hair so strange in color that he didn’t have a name for it. It was the color of spilled blood or oak leaves in autumn.
Scripture said the Supplicant had hair of flame.
The priestess—whoever heard of a priestess, especially a Supplicant priestess?—turned her gray eyes toward him, appraising him coolly. No matter he was king of all Marotiri, and she was no older than he. No matter that her skin was white and his was the color of the highest-ranking nobility: this snake goddess assessed him.
Despite everything, she somehow managed to outrank him.
“You may approach,” she said. The woman with the white skin did not call him sire.
Too curious to insist on protocol, he walked toward her.
“What is your heart’s wish?” she asked. “What’s brought you to me?”
APHRODISIA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10022
Copyright © 2007 by Noelle Mack
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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ISBN: 0-7582-2670-5
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