Belina’s gaze shifted to Leitos, sleeping on the narrow deck with the others who had rowed for most of the day after leaving Witch’s Mole. He murmured in his sleep, shifted about, went still.
“Do you think his plan will work?” Belina asked Adham.
Framed by hanging iron gray hair, the old Izutarian’s features were indistinct in the gloom, but she could see his jaw flexing. After a time, he said, “When I was a boy, I heard tales of Alon’mahk’lar hordes destroying whole armies of my people. They were all well-trained, all sure of the mission, and all fought with the assurance that they had made good plans and had a righteous cause. Yet they perished, or were led off in chains. There are also stories of a few warriors standing against great hosts, and somehow prevailing.” His teeth flashed in the dark. “I learned long ago not to put much faith in plans. Be they well considered or foolhardy, they can all fail. The best we can do is fight until our last breath passes our lips, and the last drop of blood flows from our veins.”
That was a bit too grim for Belina’s taste. “But what Leitos suggested, it’s a good plan, isn’t it?”
“As far as plans go, I believe it’s sound.”
“You have reservations?”
Adham inhaled deeply, gusted the breath out. Pitching his voice low, he said, “It’s a good idea, girl, but full of the blind hope that others think as we do, seek what we want, and so will take up arms to gain back what has been stolen from their forefathers.”
“You don’t think all men and women want to be free of chains?”
“Most probably do,” Adham said, “but, then, most are too weak and cowardly to sacrifice for those things. Of course, they would never admit that fear and weakness holds them back. Instead, they cloak their reluctance in reasoned excuses, and in time those excuses become unbending conviction. Seems to me that Peropis’s greatest victory was convincing much of humankind that they are better off in chains.”
“How can you believe that?”
Adham laughed humorlessly. “I saw it with my own eyes, girl. In the mines, men I had once fought beside gradually convinced themselves that their chains were not so heavy, and that the scraps of food we ate filled our bellies. And, soon enough, most came to believe that they deserved the bite of the lash. Though they knew the truth, they came to accept the lies our demon-born slavemasters told us. So many men I have known came to hate themselves and their leaders for standing against the Faceless One.”
“How can something like that happen?”
“You might want to search the actions of your own people to find the answer,” Adham said dryly, and Belina knew he spoke the truth. The Yatoans, while most were never chained with iron had, until recently, worn chains of a different sort. The best evidence of that truth was how few of her people had sided with Leitos and sailed from Yato. It seemed that most of her people had never truly broken loose of their bonds.
“What if Leitos is wrong?” Belina asked.
“If the beginning of our bloody little adventure goes well, enough will join us,” Adham assured her. “Later there will be more, those who draw courage from our numbers.”
“Will it be enough?”
Adham shrugged. “Only the Silent God of All knows the answer to that, but Pa’amadin, as ever, is reluctant to reveal anything to us humans.”
Quiet fell between them, and Belina looked again to the shoreline, now close enough to see waves beating themselves into rumbling white froth against the rocks. Leitos mumbled again, and she wondered what dreams troubled him.
~ ~ ~
Islands of rough black rock glided over a burning sea, and upon these crude lumps Leitos saw countless men and women writhing in a crazed dance of undying agony. Some were naked, others skinned, but most had little or no flesh covering their bones.
Leitos stood alone on his floating refuge. Leaping curtains of fire raged all around, burning tongues of ugly green, yellow, and black that fed on themselves and licked higher and higher, as if to set the stars afire. But here were no stars, no moon, no sky at all. This place was a vast and burning tomb, and he knew the only name it could bear—Geh’shinnom’atar, the Thousand Hells.
A smoldering hand slapped onto the edge of Leitos’s refuge, followed by another, and then Daris was climbing up onto the drifting isle. Leitos wanted to help his friend, but could not move. Greasy soot and weeping blisters covered the Brother’s skull in place of hair. Foul blood leaked from his cleaved neck, and where it ran, trails of fire crisped his raw flesh. When Daris clambered to his feet, Leitos saw that the wound in his belly had become a smoking ruin, black and hollow. Within that dark pit winked the glint of bone.
“Why?” Daris croaked.
Leitos shook his head, took an involuntary step backward. He wanted nothing to do with this creature before him. It was not Daris, couldn’t be. A nightmare, he told himself, and tried to wake up.
Behind Daris, another hand rose out of the burning sea. Fingers curled like claws around a knob of dark stone, and then a Kelren face showed itself. The man’s skull was split in two, but his eyes were alive, so dreadfully alive. More hands appeared, more faces. One by one, they crawled onto the isle, some whole, others barely held together by strips of meat and sinew.
Leitos edged farther back. “What do you want?”
Daris lurched closer. “Join us, little brother. Join us, and end your useless war.”
“No,” Leitos said.
“Suffering is our fate, little brother. The fate we deserve.”
“That’s not true,” Leitos said, but couldn’t think of a single instance to support his claim.
Soon, everyone Leitos had ever killed joined Daris, a small swaying army lurching closer, all grinning, all reaching.
Leitos drew his sword. Beneath the blade’s surface, inky smoke swirled, and he heard muted screams and curses within the dark steel. He almost flung it away, but just managed to tame his disgust. Despoiled as the sword was, he had no other weapon.
“Put aside your quest, little brother,” Daris crooned. “End this foolish battle, and join us here, where you belong.”
“I’m sorry,” Leitos said, not sure if he meant that for Daris’s first death, or his second. He set his feet and drove the sword through Daris’s chest. Where that profane steel met dead flesh, threads of silver lanced out, washing over Leitos and dissolving his friend. Leitos quickly slashed through his risen enemies, until all had vanished in dazzling bursts of light.
“Do you love her?” Zera asked.
Leitos spun, and the fiery realm was replaced by a lifeless city. Night reigned here, but he recognized the place as one of the bone-towns he and Zera had passed through on their way to Zuladah. The sword in his hand was still black, the blade alive with the trapped souls of its forging. “Who do you mean?” he asked cautiously.
“The girl ... my little sister.”
“Belina?”
Her green eyes flared, casting her skin in a hideous light. “So you do.”
Leitos scowled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I have two sisters, Leitos—Nola and Belina. It tells me much that you named only one of them.”
“She is pleasant enough, I suppose,” Leitos said, smiling wistfully at all the threats Belina had made against him when they first met. “But I do not and cannot love her.” He stopped short of saying that Zera was his only love. “War leaves little room for love.”
“Too true,” Zera said. “Remember that, and you might survive. Forget, and you’ll die.”
“I won’t forget,” Leitos said, and winced at the unexpected stab of regret in his heart.
“That is good,” Zera said. When Leitos did not respond, she went on. “You did well on Witch’s Mole, but you have only begun to take hold of the powers you will need to face Peropis.”
“I don’t know what I did.”
“How could you understand, as the Powers of Creation were never meant for the hands of men? However, you must find a way to claim som
e measure of those powers.”
The deeds he had done that night had drifted deeper into his mind, but he remembered one thing clearly. “I saw a golden spindle, and upon it was woven the threads of ... life?” He was not sure how accurate that was, but it felt right.
Zera considered that. “Can you find that spindle again?”
Leitos concentrated, not really believing he could, but then he found himself and Zera drifting upon a black sea, and before them revolved the golden spindle, with the chaos of countless tangled threads slowly passing through the silver hook on one end to become an ordered cord that wound up the shaft and stretched off into eternity.
“What is it?” Leitos asked.
For a long time, Zera said nothing. “What you see is what your mind created in order to accept what it otherwise could not.”
“More riddles?” Leitos asked, thinking of what Kian had told him about being dead, and all that about the coin that no longer had two definite sides.
“To humankind, the Powers of Creation will always be a riddle. But you, Leitos,” she said, brushing a hand through the threads, “are more than a mere man. What you see is an image of life and time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“These loose threads are lives and what could be. They are wild, unpredictable. Once they join, they form into the cord of what has been. Take hold of a thread, Leitos, and follow it to the cord.”
He looked over them all. Some stretched long, others were shorter. Some lost their radiance as he watched, grew dim and gray, as though wilting, then dissolved. “Which one?”
Zera pointed. “Perhaps that one?”
Leitos hesitated, then reached out to gently run his finger along it and—
—and suddenly all was a madness of images racing through his mind. Before those chaotic scenes could overwhelm him, he traced the thread through the hook and reached the cord. He was not with Zera anymore. Now he stood in a warm room lit by dozens of candles. A screaming woman lay upon a rumpled bed, her hair dark with sweat. She was propped on her elbows, and her knees were drawn up. Between her legs an old woman sat on a stool, murmuring reassuring commands. Adham stood near a door, his gray eyes bright. His hair was darker than Leitos had ever seen it, and only a hint of his long years showed in the lines on his face. Leitos looked back at the woman, at her features, and understanding flared in the center of his skull—
—“Keri, my mother,” he breathed, and was startled to find himself once more drifting on dark tides with Zera and the golden spindle. He searched her eyes. “That was my mother ... on the day of my birth?”
“It was.”
He studied the thread again, how it wove itself into the thickness of the cord, but this time he did not touch it. “This is my life?” It seemed strange that such a fragile thing could represent his existence.
“It is what your life may be,” Zera said, pointing at the thread. She traced it to the cord stretching over the whorl. “And this is what your life has been.”
It was so wondrous, so confusing, but....
“How can any of this help me to claim the Powers of Creation?” Leitos asked. “How can it help me defeat Peropis?”
“These threads represent all life, Leitos, and in all life, great and small, resides some measure the Powers of Creation, most often so little as to be meaningless beyond the existence that it grants the living.”
“Then why doesn’t Peropis claim it for herself?”
“In time she will, unless you stop her.”
“How?”
“You must take these powers into yourself, as much as you can bear to hold.”
“And then what?”
Zera gave him a reassuring smile. “When the time is right, you will know what to do.”
Leitos kept his doubts close. “Does Peropis know you are here, helping me?”
“She is a goddess, but she is not omnipotent. And besides, she is busy.”
“With what?”
“Planning your doom.”
Leitos closed his eyes and shuddered at those words. When he opened his eyes, Zera and the golden spindle had vanished. The darkness remained, but it was not complete. Stars glittered overhead, the smell of the sea filled his nose, and the distant boom of crashing waves lurked just below the creaking of oars.
He felt someone’s gaze on him. Belina sat nearby, studying him in that disconcerting way she had. That expression was better than the fear had seen on her face the night he saved her from the sea-wolves. He gave her a faint smile, and looked away.
Zera’s voice drifted out of the residue of slumber. Do you love her?
I can’t, he thought in answer. Not with war upon us.
Laughter bubbled through his mind, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t Zera’s laughter. Why, that is no answer at all.
Chapter 26
“Leave it,” Leitos suggested.
Belina stopped short of wiping sweat from her brow. “Why?”
“It’ll cool you. Besides, by midday the desert will dry you out so much you’ll wish you had the sweat back.”
She lowered her hand and, with a look of dismay, surveyed the arid landscape of rock, sand, and prickly scrub. The rest of the Yatoans wore similar expressions.
“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it,” Leitos said, pleased to be in a place free of crawling bugs and constant damp. He might have been born in the frozen wastes of Izutar, but knowledge of his homelands began and ended with the short time he had spent battling his possessed grandfather. Yato, for all its lushness and green murk, did not suit him. Witch’s Mole had been a good home, but he preferred Geldain’s long views of high plateaus, broken sandstone hills, and sweltering plains paved in sand and gravel. It was a deadly land for those who did not know the secrets he had learned while still a slave, but he counted it as his true home.
“I could never love this place,” Belina said. She sipped from a waterskin, then grimaced. “This is awful.”
Leitos knew well the gritty taste she meant. There were many hidden water sources in the desert, but all they had been able to find came from digging deep into a dry wash, and waiting for silty water to seep into the hole. He laughed quietly. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”
She gave him a stern look, and he was glad for it. Seeing her frown reminded him of the way she looked at him after she and Nola drubbed him senseless, dragged him to her clan’s camp, and tossed him into a pigsty. Things between them, it seemed, were getting back to normal. As normal as they could be, on the eve of war.
“Is that a good idea?” Nola said, peering at a column of dark smoke rising off the sandy verge between sea and land, where they had put ashore. Ulmek and Adham were stealthy shapes darting between cover, making their way back to the rest of the company. “Someone might see it.”
“Doubtless they will,” Sumahn answered. As was his habit of late, he remained close enough to brush shoulders with Nola. She did not seem to mind and, surprisingly, neither did Damoc.
It pleased Leitos that she was there for the young warrior, and he for her. Hopefully her sway over Sumahn was long-lasting. If not, Leitos imagined the death of Daris would provoke Sumahn to do something rash. But even with Nola at his side, he was more solemn than he had been, and given to brooding silences.
“Then why do it?” Nola asked, her remaining eye a brilliant green under an arched brow. The expression tugged at the healing scar running up the other side of her face, but the dark band of cloth swaddling her head concealed the empty socket where her other eye had been.
“Why indeed?” Damoc growled, gaze flicking here and there, as if he expected Alon’mahk’lar to burst from the ground at his feet.
“It will attract any of our enemies who are close,” Sumahn said.
“Why draw their attention at all?”
“Alon’mahk’lar and their human pets patrol all of Geldain. It’s better to draw them to the boats, while we escape in another direction.”
Damoc looke
d unconvinced. “Couldn’t we just sneak along, and avoid searching eyes altogether?”
“Smugglers are common this close to Zuladah. Better for us if Alon’mahk’lar find the boats and believe they are dealing with those attempting to escape obligations to the king.”
“Obligations?” Damoc murmured, at the same time Belina said, “King?”
“The obligations are levies paid in wares and supplies to the king,” Sumahn said, “who is actually a chosen servant of the Faceless One.”
“Don’t you mean Peropis?” Nola said, gently poking an elbow into his ribs.
Sumahn shot Leitos a hard look. “You could have let us believe the Faceless One still lived. But, no, you had to go and complicate everything by revealing that a demon-goddess was behind the whole mess.”
“Forgive me,” Leitos said with mock humility, and Sumahn’s rigid mask cracked a bit, then broke entirely. He laughed out loud, and Leitos laughed with him.
“Gods good and wise, are you trying to get us caught?” Damoc demanded, ducking behind a boulder, as if that would keep any passing Alon’mahk’lar from seeing him.
Leitos and Sumahn laughed harder, and even Nola joined them, though she winced when her smile grew too large.
By the time the mirth faded, Leitos was wiping tears from his eyes, wondering what he had found so funny. Belina gazed at him as if he were daft, and Leitos almost fell into another fit of hilarity. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to lose control again, she came back to the grim matter at hand—a rather unfortunate choice, to Leitos’s mind.
“Why would Peropis need human servants?”
Leitos explained, “We humans have an inborn fear of Alon’mahk’lar, and Peropis rightly worries that such fear could lead to a unification of humankind, and eventual rebellion. As it stands, Peropis uses willing humans to rule their fellows. Of course, those rulers don’t actually rule anything. In their way, they are slaves like everyone else.”
“I think that is too kind,” Sumahn said. “Like the sea-wolves, they bowed to Peropis, and help Alon’mahk’lar keep their boots on the throats of humankind.”
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen Page 15