by J. F. Lewis
Kholster’s commentary on the armor. Wylant studied the way Shidarva held her blades. She knew how to use them, but the memory of Kholster’s voice was still clear in Wylant’s mind. I thought it was strange of them to go through all of the trouble of forging that metal, then leaving me wonderful swathes of exposure to facilitate dismemberment. The wings made excellent handholds as well. Dyed feathers on a wire frame. Silly.
Amusing as the memory was, Shidarva had donned the traditional armor worn by the fallen champion of the sacred continent she had sacrificed in order to save the world. Wylant did not know the full story, only that somehow the demons had been close to finding another way through Port Gate at the Great Temple of Shidarva, which stood at the very heart of Alt. The priests had failed to follow the correct order of destruction, as each rune on the border of a Port Gate needed to be eradicated in a specific sequence to permanently sever the link between the gates. Hasimak might have been able to prevent any incursion under normal circumstances, but at that point in the Demon War, his attention had been wholly consumed with maintaining the quarantine barrier at Fort Sunder, and even then he had required the wills and power of multiple elemancers to assist him. Neither demon nor mortal combatants could escape that barrier, but if a second breach had occurred . . . With its connection to the other gates unbroken, the Port Gate at Alt had been a potential second breach. Shidarva had seen a horde of Ghaiattri massing in the Never Dark, at the edge of her domain, preparing to force their way through, and acted. Shidarva had destroyed her own continent to sink the Port Gate far enough from its proper alignment that it became useless. One could travel through it still, but anyone doing so would arrive torn apart and inside out at the bottom of the ocean floor.
“What right do you have to judge my infractions against mortals?” Wylant asked. “Didn’t you sink an entire continent? By comparison, I’m—”
“You find this amusing?” Shidarva’s lips did not move, her voice omnidirectional and shaking with rage. “You mock my sacrifice and compare it to yours, you wanton—”
“You know Hasimak told me you need not have destroyed your continent,” Wylant said. “You could have had them knock the stupid Port Gate over and pull it a few dozen feet out of position.”
“That is a lie!” Shidarva roared.
It was, too, as far as Wylant knew.
“Not that you have any way of knowing. Oh! I know. Why don’t you ask Aldo?” Wylant made a practice swing in the air, with Vax in gladius form. “Or do you not speak ant?”
“I asked him at the time.” Shidarva flew nearer, framed in lightning. Lightning, which, Wylant noted, struck the ground heedless of the mortals it hit. “He said . . .”
“Did he—” A voice came from the shadows, where a tumbled statue of Dienox lay broken at the knees and bent forward across the entrance of the Grand Arena. “—tell you it was a secret?”
“That was during my angry period.” Two-headed Kilke, one head bearing the curled horns of a ram, the other jutting the long horns of a bull, each bedecked in sapphires, stepped free of the shadows. Flowing after him, the darkness became a suit of plate armor, featureless and disconcerting. “You see, he did not know how to do it, and I declined to tell him. His solution worked, but, well, it lacked elegance and waxed toward . . . Excess.”
“You!” Shidarva’s gaze burned with blue fire, her attention locked on the god of secrets and shadows.
“Do you mean me, the letter between T and V, or are you calling for a lady sheep?” A two-handed sword, forged by shadows, so large it appeared to have been made for cutting cattle in half, filled his grip. Standing twelve feet tall, Kilke strode out among the warriors of Dienox’s city. A handful turned to fight, but most ran. A single blow from his blade bisected one armored foe wielding a war hammer, continuing through the hammer as it dropped, and through a man in brigandine behind him. Four other men charged in from the side. Kilke never looked at them, spiked tendrils of black springing from his armor and piercing them each through both eyes, points emerging from the backs of their skulls before vanishing back into the depths of the shadow armor.
“Minapsis,” Shidarva shouted. “Torgrimm! Sedvinia! To me.”
Shidarva’s twin, the goddess of joy and sorrow, rose from the blood of a dead man where the tears of an older man—Wylant presumed it was his father—struck the blood. Wearing no armor and welding no weapon, she crossed the battlefield in a dress of white silk, head bowed, the hot teardrops that fell from her eyes, mixing with the rain and leaving diamonds in her wake.
“They are not coming,” Sedvinia said. “You are our ruler, but you stand alone if you oppose Dienox’s punishment. I apologize, but even if I were to take up my arms and join you, sister—”
“What is this?” Kholster appeared on the arena wall between strokes of lightning, doubled canines bared, snarling at the other gods. “Wylant was granted permission to kill Dienox. We all agreed to it. Dienox refused to fight her.” Kholster’s warpick described an encompassing arc, emphasizing the chaos. “His cowardice brought her wrath upon his followers. This is far less than she could have done to draw him out.”
“Kholster—” Wylant tried to catch his eye, but he looked down. Was he angry?
“Wylant, I apologize for interfering.” She recognized the look as he spoke. Kholster thought she was angry at him for stepping in, when she would have been pleased as an irkanth stumbling across a lame elk if Kholster had killed the cursed god of war himself and any others who got in their way. “You are perfectly capable, I know—”
His fear of—what was the word—disempowering the ones he loved teetered on the edge of insufficient support. Blaming him would not help. It was even sweet, but . . .
“Kholster, you idiot.” Wylant laughed. “You are my husband. I expect your help even when you know I could handle the hunt. We fell in love on the battlefield; do you really think I do not enjoy fighting side by side, spending time with you? If you start to annoy me, or become somehow overly helpful, it is my firm intent to tell you. Won’t you join me?”
A weight fell from him. Wylant had seen the same wildness that rushed through him in the eyes of hunting hounds loosed from the leash or horses given their head. With one short exchange, he transformed. A predatory grin showed in the corners of his eyes, his joyous bark pure and unadulterated. “Love you,” he mouthed, wheeling to face Shidarva.
“Queen of Leeches,” Kholster yelled, his amber pupils glowing brightly, storm clouds and lighting strike reflected in the blackness of his eyes. “If you continue to interfere with my wife’s rightful vengeance, all will not go well for you.”
“You forget yourself, Kholster,” Shidarva spun toward him, her swords twirling madly. “I am the ruler of the gods.”
“And he,” Kilke butted in, both mouths leering gleefully, “is the birth and death of gods.”
Kholster growled.
“Oh—” Kilke’s long-horned head’s lip made a mocking O, which he covered daintily with one hand as the other head spoke. “—did I give away a secret?”
“You may think of me,” Kholster said, “as an Arbiter between the mortal and the divine. The old laws of the gods may have had no teeth, but I shall lend mine.” His lips drew back in disgust. “Get in my wife’s way one more time on this front and I will arvash you and all who stand with you. I so swear!”
“Sedvinia,” Shidarva called, but her sister had faded from sight and abandoned the field. Eyes wide, Shidarva sneered at Kholster. “I will not surrender the throne of the gods without a fight.”
“He does not want your throne,” Kilke’s ram-horned head spat.
“But he will not tolerate your obstructionism,” the other head finished.
“You will note,” Wylant offered, “your sister was the only god who answered your call. Why are you standing in my way, Shidarva? Dienox is a fool! He is a petty, self-important, homicidal mind rapist. Why—?”
Ma’am! Clemency rolled, avoiding the brunt of Dienox’s attack, b
ut Wylant felt the sting of the cut, the warmth of blood on her side.
Longsword? Assuming Dienox would expect her to fly any direction but down, Wylant released her grip on the magic holding her aloft and dropped like a stone, cutting wildly with Vax in the direction she hoped Dienox might be. Only then did the blue of the war god’s ethereal armor become visible. Elsewhere, Kholster shouted at Shidarva to go away, to return to the ruins of her sacred temple and play with the eels.
Again pain lanced through her, this time her shoulder. Clemency struggled to adjust, and Wylant fought the armor for control, attempting a separate maneuver.
“What are you doing, Clem?” Wylant spat between pain-clenched teeth.
Trust us. Vax and Clemency thought as one.
Please, Vax added.
“Coward, am I?” Dienox’s blades hissed through the air, clanging off Vax or Clemency or striking home so quickly Wylant could not track his movements. Each blow came more swiftly than the one before, confidence lending strength and alacrity. “We could have been such good partners!” Pain scratched down her side. “I would have forgiven you anything but this!”
Vax? Twirling so fast she could no longer clearly see, Wylant felt her body jerked in a sequence of parries and counters all twice her normal speed, all in a style matching her own, yet divorced from her mental faculty.
He has to believe it, mother. Vax’s thoughts burned with an emotion Wylant had not known he could possess: Rage. Primal and fathomless, it coated his mental communications with blood. He has to smell blood.
“Anything!” Dienox thrust in time with the final pronouncement. Wylant saw his eyes, frozen in triumph as he saw an imaginary hole in her defense, a fatal flaw exposing her chest. The sword struck Clemency’s breastplate, splitting it open. Heat and cold struck her harder than it ever had. Fire, rain, and hail battered her, the leathers she’d been wearing beneath Clemency no help at all against the warring temperatures. Warm blackness cushioned her fall, wrapping her in a protective cloak of . . . shadow?
“He’s very clever,” Kilke whispered in the dark, “your son.”
Above them, Clemency had turned inside out, thin bands of armor splayed like the detonated cauldron of some unfortunate gnomish apprentice. Only . . . Wylant narrowed her gaze. Clemency showed no sign of true damage, as if she had opened herself to the greatest of extremes. Dienox, roar of triumph on his lips, understood what had happened a heartbeat (his last) after Wylant.
Like limbs of a dying spider, Clemency’s multitudinous bands curled inward. A bone-steel shackle bearing Kholster’s scars engraved upon it, Vax shone pearlescent against the ruddy skin of the war god. Eyes widening, Dienox moved to cut at the shackle, his other hand coming away ensnared in a matching restraint, joined to the first by a rod of bone-steel. He screamed, unable to flee or break his bonds, as the warsuit closed around him.
“You hurt my mother,” Vax’s voice echoed from within his warsuit. “You made her forge me into a weapon, and that hurt me, too. She would have rather been foresworn than do what she did to me. It still haunts her. It makes her cry! AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!”
Unable to look away, unable to even process what she was seeing until the deed neared completion, Wylant stared up at the warsuit, swollen to accept Dienox’s body. Before the eyes of the flame-haired goddess and the core of Dienox’s most devout worshippers, Clemency shrank to more Aern-like proportions. As she diminished, a small hole opened at the base of each armored boot letting the bones of the war god fall one by one, clean and polished, from the storm-tossed sky.
The war god screamed until his ribs lay white and shining in ruination at Wylant’s feet. Worshippers in the streets and forges shivered and wailed as they watched their god die. Some ran to collect the bones, of which all except the skull had now fallen, but most peered skyward at the hovering warsuit and waited. Lines of red crystal ran down in rivulets, extending the pattern from Clemency’s helm to the rest of her, the color darkening to a deep maroon.
“Vax?” Kilke’s midnight embrace released Wylant, the flame brands of her hair flashing intensely, as if displeased to have been dimmed briefly, even to the benefit of their host.
Thunder cracked overhead, clouds scattering as Wylant waved them away thoughtlessly. Kholster stood his ground, watching, waiting, measuring, calculating in the way of all good kholsters. How could he stand there and do nothing? Wylant took to the air, rushing for her son.
“And now,” a voice whispered from within the warsuit, “you have made amends.”
“Please,” a tiny whimpering voice replied, “I was only doing what I was supposed to do. War is all I had left.”
“There are limits,” another voice (was that Vax?) murmured. “You stepped beyond yours.”
Outstretching its gauntlet, the warsuit’s fist opened, the skull of Dienox manifesting within. Rearing back, Clemency hurled the skull to Kholster, who caught it with a nod and a smile, then vanished.
“Father,” the strange voice said, as Wylant drew even with the warsuit, “must see to Dienox’s soul, but I assure you he has expressed his congratulations and his love.”
Vax’s disembodied voice, the one she had heard in her mind since Kholster adjusted his scars, had been a child’s. Deeper now and more solid, she hoped this new voice was coming from proper lips, flesh and muscle, blood and bone metal.
“Vax . . . are you . . . ?” Wylant held out a tentative hand, blinking rapidly when the helm collapsed into a gorget of crystal and bone-steel. Impossible features greeted her: a grin revealing doubled canines less pronounced than an average Aern’s, ears set high in a position more suited to a wolf—their tips blunted—each three-quarters of a hand in length rather than the full hand more typical of his father’s people. Vax had her cheekbones and his father’s chin. Both parents showed in his image, a more attractive combination than either of them alone.
Most striking were the eyes: black sclera and amber pupils with irises the same clear blue as his mother’s. Wearing his strawberry blond hair in the close cut of a Hulsite mercenary, his skin a healthy tan, Vax stepped free of his warsuit, shirtless and barefoot, in a pair of dark gray denim jeans with bone metal buttons and leather lacing up the sides.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Vax!” Wylant embraced him, tears welling up as she felt his strong arms wrap around her. “Are you . . . You look well, but are you?”
“I am unused to a proper body, but—” He pulled free of her, experimenting with his fingers, touching the fingertips on each hand to their resident thumb in the same order, then reversed, and lastly in the opposite order on each hand simultaneously. “—my time controlling Clemency was a great help. She—”
A human God Speaker with burns where her tattoos of Dienox had once been approached. Skin shifting from tan flesh to blued bone-steel, Vax faced the young woman.
“Whom do I now serve?” She prostrated herself before Vax, the new god of war, arms raised, palms slick with ash and blood.
“Do you still wish to serve war?” Vax asked.
“I live to kill.”
“Killing may be needed.” Vax held out his hand to her. “Tell me. Do you believe that to serve me is to kill, to fight, for no reason other than the glory of it?”
“Yes,” she answered, letting him help her up.
Vax waited until she was steady.
“May I share with you a few of my feelings on the topic?”
PART TWO
A DRAGON RISEN
“The reign of Queen Bhaeshal set many precedents. She was the first female elf to rule in her own right, and the first elf of either gender to reign alongside free Aern in a peaceful kingdom without a grudge borne against herself or her people. While her subjects were ambivalent toward their absent king, they hated his brother Dolvek, the story having somehow made its way to Aiannai ears that King Rivvek’s actions would not have been necessary if his brother had not broken faith with the Aern in the first place.
Her elemental focus,
obvious for all to see, served as a constant reminder that the actions of the previous bloodline had not spared her. Peace with the Aern, bought so dearly by Rivvek, bestowed its gifts, meager though they may have been, upon the Queen. I wish I did not hold that fact against her. It is utterly unfair.”
From an unpublished draft of
The First Rulers of the Aiannai by Sargus
CHAPTER 12
RUN FROM THE HILLS
Warleader Tsan ran through the tunnels of the Sri’Zauran Mountains, the head of her deity clutched in her forepaws. Kilke’s horns scraped rhythmically against her crimson scales, his golden hue standing out in contrast, its reflective quality sending shards of light skipping across her abdomen—rills of magic riding the tide of her scales. Fear scent blocked out the more subtle odors that would have marked the main corridors of the underground highways of her new kingdom, overwhelmed only by the rising stink of the dead.
How long have we been running? she thought.
Two days? Three? I haven’t been counting, just reinvigorating your little army as needed. Do you want to keep the crimson scales? One-Headed Kilke thought at her. Or would you prefer a shade more clearly echoing my own coloration?
I would prefer to get out of here alive, Tsan sent back, the acid in her thoughts drawing a bemused chuckle from the deity in her grip.
That much is assured; you ran soon enough, the disembodied head thought. Even with all of the cutbacks and detours we have taken, Uled’s army is no longer gaining. You finally found a route so secret even Warlord Xastix had not known about it, therefore Uled could not have learned this route when he . . . merged . . . with Xastix.
Merged? Tsan saw it all again in her mind’s eye: Warlord Xastix’s flesh unraveled as the thing Uled had become knit itself a new body out of the warlord’s scale, meat, and bone.
Erupted, if you prefer. Kilke’s thoughts tiptoed through her mind as clumsily as a biped’s, feigned ineptitude to ensure she felt his presence and could not accuse him of hiding it. I have to make changes here as well. You and I will escape these tunnels intact even if I have to turn you into a dragon to manage it. Uled could kill and claim the whole of your kingdom and still fail to seize the true prize.