Adran saw her blush but did not remark on it. He glanced around at the forest. “Princess, it is late, and we are still in the woods. The horses are growing restless. Perhaps we should be on our way?”
“What? Yes, yes, of course. Please, continue. I want to be home as soon as possible.”
He nodded, relieved. This was the longest conversation they had had, or, indeed, that Karni had ever had with any charioteer.
Adran took up the reins again, giving the guards the signal that they were resuming their journey.
The familiar trundling motion of the chariot began to lull Karni again, but she knew she would not sleep again. She was still ravenously hungry. And there was something just out of reach inside her memory, some recollection of something to do with Shvate and her future sons. A warning? A threat? A prophecy?
Or all of the above.
She contemplated these strange thoughts as the forest sped by and night drew in closer around the chariot.
They raced back toward Hastinaga.
Jarsun
1
The intruder came from no direction and all directions.
He was spotted by a corpse-burner near the east gate, by a sentry at the north gate, by a pair of bickering lovers in a field outside the west gate, and a drunk out-of-work mercenary leaning against a pillar vomiting by the south gate.
There were other sightings too, several dozen in all, at different places: some at the city walls, mostly outside the city.
Animals sensed his coming and reacted. The war elephants in the great enclosures behind the city, thousands upon thousands of enormous beasts, battle veterans all, stirred uneasily, raising their trunks and lowing in alarm, alerting their mahouts and masters. The chariot horses whinnied and shied away from shadows. The milch cows mooed, white-eyed with panic. Dogs began barking and would not stop even when ordered by their masters. Babies cried for no reason.
Animals and children unfortunate enough to be birthed that night were either stillborn, though they had been alive and kicking only moments earlier, or expired shortly after birth of inexplicable causes. Strange winds sprang up, blowing dust dervishes into the houses of sleeping priests. Cows gave curdled milk. Chickens laid malformed eggs. A calf was born with two heads. Birds rose in great flocks from the trees where they slept at night and dashed themselves against stone cliffs, dying by the thousands. Food spoiled while it was cooking.
Hundreds of citizens fell ill, and those who were already ill and had been on the road to recovery relapsed and died. An ancient woman, said to be close to two hundred years of age, cried out the names of 107 urrkh demons before collapsing into a comatose sleep from which she never woke. Pundits and astrologers saw the star patterns alter before their very eyes, and could not explain the change of constellations. Other eldritch phenomena proliferated as well—marvels and portents that defied explanation.
This was only the beginning.
A darkness greater than night had descended on the City of Elephants and Snakes.
2
The devil walked the streets of Hastinaga.
Like all demons and gods, he was a shape shifter. He could assume any form or shape he desired. He chose to assume several, all at once, each ansh serving a different purpose, intent on individual missions.
He entered the house of a sleeping priest, stood in the simple bedchamber, and watched the elderly guru and his wife sleeping deeply. The city outside the house was restless and filled with strange sounds. The cries of elephants, horses, dogs, and cows filled the night, but in the mage’s unostentatious residence, all was quiet. The old couple slumbered peacefully on their simple cots, unaware of the terror that walked the streets—or the monster that stood within reach.
The fiend reduced himself to a mist, his solid flesh melting away suddenly as if burned by acid. In moments, only fumes remained. They settled over the mage’s bed, a cloud that enveloped both priest and wife. With each breath they took, they inhaled the noxious fumes. Both stirred restlessly in their sleep, their bodies sensing something amiss, but breath was life, and they could hardly cease breathing.
In moments, the entire cloud had been absorbed into their lungs, and from there, into their blood. It altered the very substance of their bodies, leaving them exactly the same in outward appearance, but changing them completely on the inside. They went to sleep as two individuals; by the time they woke next morning, they would be completely different people, with very different minds and missions. Yet to the world at large, they would appear no different.
The devil reduced himself to lumps of raw meat that lay in the street. Stray dogs caught the scent of it and slunk down to consume it. They wolfed it down hungrily, but even before it reached their bellies, they knew something was wrong. After eating, the dogs sniffed at each other uneasily, neither growling nor making any other sounds. In unnatural silence, they slunk away to dark corners, the backs of houses, the roofs or pits where they lay in troubled sleep, feverish and racked with chills, their fur sprouting hideous boils. They did not die, but they did not live either. They became . . . something else. Something Other.
Carrion birds swooped down to consume the flakes of meat that lay on the street; their fate was no better than that of the dogs. They slept on tree branches, heads tucked under their wings, racked by strange ailments. Their eyes glittered with manic light. Other birds of their own species avoided them, crying out loudly to alert their fellows of these diseased few.
One ansh of the stranger reduced himself to tiny spores that resembled those produced by flowering plants in bloom, and traveled on a breeze that blew through the city; the minuscule spores were inhaled by people as they slept.
Another ansh turned into a mist that rose up and condensed as moisture, which descended to fall into the water troughs of elephants, horses, camels . . .
In various ways, insidious and subtle, the stranger’s many divisions transformed themselves into rain, smoke, clouds, mist, fog, even food, and were inhaled, drunk, or eaten by people and animals in all the different parts of the city. Some of the victims were regular citizens, some rich nobles and merchants, others were midwives, the wives of priests, ladies of the court, but many were soldiers, charioteers, mahouts, archers, war marshals, generals . . .
Through that long dark night, the evil that walked on two feet insinuated himself into the bodies and minds of the people of Krushan in a horrific number of ways.
Many other strange and unnatural things occurred that night across Hastinaga. Dark shapes moved through the night, terrible acts were committed, awful things were done that could never be undone; all night the city was racked by a series of supernatural disturbances. All night the terror held sway. Those who sensed the presence of evil locked their doors, barred their windows, and stayed indoors with their loved ones. Those foolish or ignorant enough to challenge the devil that walked the streets were quickly dispatched to the netherworld of Shima, their bodies discovered the next day, horribly mutilated, faces frozen in an awful rictus of agony. All night the terror walked through the capital city of the Burnt Empire and worked its urrkh evil.
All this was only the prelude.
The real terror was yet to come.
Geldry
Geldry tossed and turned restlessly in her bed. It was a hot summer night, and beads of sweat lay on her neck and face. She wiped them off with the back of her hand, accidentally jostling her eyeband. One side of the band shifted, allowing some light to shine into her left eye.
Without meaning to, she opened the eye to see where the light could be coming from at this late hour. It was moonlight shining directly onto her face from the sky above the open balcony. Her side of the large bed was closest to the verandah, and from her position she could see the night sky glittering with stars.
The moon was full and red, larger, brighter, and redder than she had ever seen it before. What did they call that kind of moon—a blood moon? Yes, that was it. She had heard the phrase often but had never seen a blood moo
n so large. It loomed like a living thing in the night sky, hanging over her verandah and painting the entire bedchamber crimson. It called to her, powerfully compelling. She felt like throwing off the bedcovers and walking out. But she could tell by Adri’s breathing that he was deeply asleep; soon, he would begin to snore lightly. She reached up to pull the eyeband back over her eye, thinking she would return to sleep, but paused.
She turned her head slowly, far enough that she could see Adri. He was turned away from her, facing into the bedchamber. The moonlight only touched his back and his curled feet. Not that it would disturb him anyway: unlike some blind persons who could sense light and shapes, Adri was completely, totally unsighted. He could raise his eyes to stare up at the sun and see nothing. And now that he was in that breathing pattern, he would sleep deeply through till morning.
She exhaled soundlessly, releasing the breath through slightly parted lips to avoid making the sound that usually accompanied a sigh. She had learned to do that in the first months after her marriage. Back when she had first come to live with Adri, she would sigh often, and each time he would turn his head and ask, “Are you well, Geldry?” And so she had learned to sigh without making any sound, to cry noiselessly, to laugh silently, to live in darkness.
She reached up, touching the displaced eyeband. She had taken to wearing it since just before her wedding rituals. It had been entirely her decision, even though Jilana, Vrath, Shvate, even Adri himself had all tried to talk her out of doing it. At the time, she had been naive, adolescent, proud, idealistic; she had thought it unjust to be the wife of a blind prince and be able to see when he was deprived of sight. A good wife should share the circumstances of her husband, be they as they may. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health . . . in sight as well as blindness. The last was a logical corollary. How unfair of a wife to be able to enjoy the sights and sounds, colors, and lights of the world when her husband was deprived of those pleasures. She had vowed to wear the eyeband for the rest of her life, to share her husband’s circumstances and enjoy only that which he was able to enjoy.
But she had been only sixteen when she made the vow, and the rest of one’s life is a long, long time. Now, several years later, she was no longer an adolescent, nowhere near as proud and idealistic, and anything but naive.
She had accepted her life with Adri, limitations and all. She was even content, in a manner of speaking. She was the daughter-in-law of the richest family in the known world, after all. A princess of the great Burnt Empire. Tying a band over her eyes to feign blindness was not as great a disability as many people thought: unlike Adri, she could see lights, shapes, silhouettes, even through the eyeband. She could tell the difference between day and night, morning and noon. And, if she wished, she could always remove the band and simply see with her own eyes. She had taken to doing that more often lately, not always on purpose: she would wake at night and find that the band had been pushed off, either deliberately or accidentally, while she was sleeping. At such times, if Adri was still sleeping, she often left the band off till morning, always making sure to slip it on the next morning before waking up to meet the new day. At first she had felt guilty at being able to enjoy the sighted world, even for these few stolen moments, when Adri could never see anything, ever.
But as the years had passed and the reality of her situation had finally sunk into her bones, she had begun to feel resentful of that guilt. What was wrong with being able to enjoy a gift she had been born with? Even the most devoted of wives was entitled to some time off, wasn’t she? Even the most dedicated workers deserved a little downtime from their day jobs. What harm was there in enjoying a few moments of sighted pleasure? She would never dream of doing it in public, or even in the presence of anyone else, most of all Adri himself. But alone in the privacy of her bedchamber late at night, where nobody could see her or know what she did, surely there was no harm in it.
She never told Adri about these stolen glimpses. She had almost told him once, when they had been in one of their rare tender moments of togetherness, but at the last instant, she had stopped herself. She decided that it was something best kept to herself.
Besides, she resented the idea that she might be expected to ask his permission to enjoy the natural pleasures of sight. It enraged her when she met someone for the first time and they expressed sympathy for her condition, assuming, as some often did, that the Krushan had insisted on her blinding her eyes in order to serve as their daughter-in-law. What nonsense! No one told Geldry what to do! She had chosen to blind her eyes of her own accord. It was her decision and hers alone. Such people would always say, Of course, of course, and nod sympathetically, as if they knew the truth and were only commiserating with her. So infuriating!
Why was it so difficult for people to believe that a woman would choose to live sightless in order to share her husband’s condition? It was not as if she had plucked out her eyes, rendering herself permanently and totally blind. The very thought of such a thing made her squirm uncomfortably. Imagine actually putting out her own eyes! That was grotesque, monstrous. Surely not even Adri would want her to disfigure herself.
But Mother Jilana might.
The old lady was so upright and ironclad about everything, so full of Krushan pride—“Krushan this” and “Krushan that” all day long—as if the Krushan had created the whole world and built everything in it with their own hands. Geldry was a princess in her own right, and her homeland was a place to be proud of too: Geldran was a great nation, Geera a great city. Sure, they weren’t Hastinaga, but in their own way, they were looked up to and admired by many nations in that part of the world.
Life was much tougher in the northwest. There was no time or resources to build great palaces and monuments to ancestors on such a scale as Hastinaga had. The City of Elephants and Snakes was truly awe-inspiring, but the Krushan had access to many more resources and governed far, far more people and kingdoms than Geldran or any other nation. Though no nation could compete with the might of the Burnt Empire, she was nonetheless proud to be a Geldran, and her name, Geldry, proclaimed that she was the first of her people, the First Spear of Geera. Yet Mother Jilana looked down at her over her long hooked nose as if she were a goat-eating, mule-riding mountain girl who knew nothing about royal etiquette and politics. It made her so mad sometimes, she wanted to scream.
But what really infuriated her was the fact that she couldn’t talk to Adri about these things. That was something that was completely untenable. Adri worshipped the ground his grandmother walked on. The same went for Prince Regent Vrath. He wouldn’t hear a whisper of criticism about either of them. Even when Jilana was being a big bee, buzzing and stinging Geldry’s ego, Adri would refuse to discuss her. This attitude extended to almost all things Krushan, with one exception: his mother. On that one topic he was sensitive in a different way. He wanted to talk about her—even tolerated criticism of her—but only up to a point. If Geldry went so far as to call Princess Ember a “bad mother” or anything else that could be construed as an outright insult, he would grow very quiet, then walk away. Offended.
He, on the other hand, could speak poorly of Ember for hours, endlessly asking the same old questions, all of which amounted to just one really: Why? Why? Why? Why had she turned her back on him when he needed her most? Why wouldn’t she show him any affection? Why was she still so cold and distant, even now? Why did he feel as if it was his fault that he had been born blind?
She was so tired of hearing about Ember, and of comforting Adri when he broke down and cried, as he almost always did during these confessional sessions.
She was tired of Adri. Of this life, their marriage, her minuscule role in the vast enterprise of the Burnt Empire.
Tired of being relegated to an insignificant decorative role: the dutiful wife of one of two princes in the line of succession, the one that was least likely to ascend the throne.
Tired of Adri’s continuing descent into inactivity. When they had married, he had seemed so s
trong, confident, capable despite his sightlessness. The story of his exploits in the Battle of the Rebels had thrilled and inspired her. A blind prince winning a battle! Fighting and killing enemies despite his inability to see! She had imagined him leading the Krushan armies to victory across a hundred foreign kingdoms, crushing the enemies of Hastinaga, and silencing all those who dared to assume that a blind prince could not fight.
But as the years passed, the Adri she had married seemed to slip away, to shrink into a shadow of his former self. His confidence had ebbed, his strength diminished, his capacity reduced to the point where he could barely function some days. While his brother Shvate did everything that she had thought Adri himself would do: lead the Krushan armies to victory after victory, conquering the unconquerable Reygar, then going on to equally spectacular victories in Virdhh, Serapi, Anga, Trigarta, Kanunga, and a number of smaller territories.
Shvate had returned to Hastinaga with enormous wagon trains loaded with treasure, enough wealth to build a whole new empire, and to add insult and injury, he had offered all that bounty to his brother Adri. Geldry knew very well why he had done that: to show that he was the superior one. He had claimed he was offering it to Adri as a sign of respect but she took it as an insult nonetheless. Shvate was reminding Adri that he had done what Adri could never do: conquer a half dozen enemy nations and bring back five thousand wagonloads of treasure. He was asserting his superiority over his disabled shut-in brother.
Even so, Geldry’s mind had leaped at the thought of so much wealth. She had swallowed the insult and been willing to accept the gift. She had already begun imagining what she could do with so much wealth at her command. This would be her personal treasure after all, unlike the burgeoning coffers of Hastinaga, which remained just out of reach to her so long as she was only the wife of a prince-in-waiting. With that much wealth, she could support her brother, Kune, in his campaign against their enemies, pay off their father’s debts, rebuild the palace at Geldran that had been destroyed in the last rebellion, and fund a hundred good causes in her home nation. She had smiled at that moment, thinking that this was it, her moment of glory, when her years of patience and self-enforced blindness would come finally to fruition, when she would come into her own, a rich powerful benefactress dispensing gold to whom she pleased, when she pleased. She had even pictured herself riding in a great white carriage in the hills of Geera, overseeing the building of great monuments to her ancestors, using her wealth to benefit her people—and punish her enemies.
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