Let her have what she wishes, Leitos thought, too weak now to look any longer at his enemy, and the enemy of all humankind. There would be no heroic battles, no songs of glory, but death alone. And after, the unending horror of the Thousand Hells.
Come to me.
Let me die.
You are the last hope of the world of men.
A dry chuckle raked Leitos’s throat, bringing with it the urge to cough. He resisted, fearing the torment that would follow. You sound like Belina.
She was right.
She was wrong. I am nothing. Not a man of shadow and steel, not a savior. I am a corpse too stubborn to accept the gift of death.
Silence for a time, then, Peropis has come to you often wearing the face of the woman you loved ... the woman you killed, because she knew Zera was the one person who could persuade you. She also showed you Geh’shinnom’atar.
Leitos recalled the meeting. He had been asleep in the bottom of a Yatoan longboat, and would have counted it a dream, but for the clarity of it.
Peropis told you something of great importance.
Leitos stifled a bitter laugh. She told me many things. All of them lies, apparently.
She told you to gather the Powers of Creation into yourself, and you have done so, whether you know it or not. That is what she seeks, what she needs, but cannot freely take.
She wore Zera’s face to deceive me? Well, the mask is off. I see her for who she is, and if you are right, then she has failed.
Your love for the woman, Zera, blinded you to a truth you would have otherwise seen—that you were being tricked to embrace powers never meant for the hands of men. Now it does not matter what face Peropis wears, for she will take what she wants form you. As well, she did not lie, not wholly.
Leitos groaned as he slid a finger’s breath farther onto the spike. It was all he could do not to scream. When the grinding descent stopped, he found breathing more difficult than ever. His heart thumped against the shaft running through him. If he slid another few inches, he would suffocate. That would not be so bad a way to go, but he could not muster the courage needed to make it happen. None of this matters anymore, he thought to the woman in his head.
She seemed not to hear him. Peropis also told you that you are more than a mere man.
If the nattering voice was not his last thread of distraction against soul-rending agony, he would have blocked her from his mind. Then what am I?
You represent the life Peropis needs to become in order to escape the Thousand Hells.
There are others who could serve her needs, Leitos thought in answer.
No one who is of Kian Valara’s bloodline. The powers that were within him and Prince Varis Kilvar were the purest forms of the Powers of Creation. Varis’s ambition and treachery enraged Peropis so much that she destroyed him. Kian’s will was unbending, but more importantly he knew Peropis, and what she was capable of. And so Peropis has waited for another to be born of Kian’s loins, one who is strong enough, one she could coax into filling themselves with the Powers of Creation in order to later steal away those powers for herself. You are the last Valara, her last chance of becoming a being of flesh and spirit, a being that can finally escape her eternal prison. As well, and more importantly, you are yourself a Na’mihn’teghul, the mingling of humankind and Mahk’lar, flesh and spirit.
Me, a changeling? You are mad, he thought to the woman in his head, as a gurgle of disbelieving laughter squeezed past his gritted teeth.
Peropis heard his outburst and began to turn. At the same instant, a conversation he’d had with Belina bubbled to the surface of his mind. She had been asking him about the night the sea-wolves had nearly raped her atop Witch’s Mole. She had asked him if he remembered what happened to him. He had denied anything happening, but she had appeared not to believe him. What did Belina seen?
When Peropis faced him, her study penetrating, Leitos dropped his gaze. If I was a changeling, he thought, I would have known. Everyone would have.
Before your father took you and your mother to E’ru, Keri was caught by an Alon’mahk’lar patrol. They did what they always do to human women, but she escaped her bonds and fled.
Then how is it that her mind was not shattered? Belina had told him that all the women of Yato lost their minds after suffering the abuses of demon-born.
Your mother was an uncommonly strong woman. She did not break, nor did she ever tell your father. And when you were born, she loved you as her own.
Peropis was striding closer.
Leitos closed his eyes so he to avoid seeing her approach, and his father hanging lifeless and bled-out behind her.
Father, forgive me, he thought, recanting his earlier hatred for Adham. The man had been willing to sacrifice all to set Leitos free from the mines. And if that effort had ultimately been wasted, it was more than the watching denizens of Zuladah, who outnumbered their enemies a thousand times over, were willing to even consider doing. For Leitos, or for themselves.
Peropis’s footsteps came closer, light on the sand.
So like you, Zera, I am Na’mihn’teghul? Leitos thought, not really believing it, but also beyond caring. He also knew the speaker in his mind was not Zera, but in these, his last moments, was it so wrong to entertain the idea that the woman he had loved was with him?
I am not Zera. She is dead.
With his last feeble wish denied, he thought, Then who are you?
It does not matter. Not now. What does matter is what you hold within your being and within your soul.
I hold nothing. Of that, he was sure, otherwise he could get himself free and destroy his enemies.
I am within you. An image of an egg-shaped, topaz stone flashed into Leitos’s mind, and around him the wrecked throne room of the Throat of Balaam.
Who are you? he thought again.
Come to me, Leitos, before Peropis can take from you the power she needs to unmake the world of men. Come to me, before it is too late.
Where are you?
You know where I am. Come to me.
Thinking maybe he did know, he opened himself to a vast and lightless sea.
Chapter 37
The golden spindle turned and turned before him within a sea of darkness. The silver hook on one end gathered countless threads, twisted them into a cord that passed over the spinning whorl to wrap about the shaft, before stretching away into nothingness. Zera drifted at his side, ethereal and more beautiful than he remembered. He reluctantly accepted that she was not Zera after all.
“To mend what was broken,” she said, “you must return to the remake the moment of failure, and turn the fate of humankind and of the world from disaster.”
That brought to mind what Kian had said about his two-sided coin. “My grandfather said something similar, but my father said those words were nothing but madness.”
“It took Kian nearly two hundred years to begin to understand the truth, but his understanding was infinitesimal, at best.”
“What truth?”
“His two-sided coin is your golden spindle, yet what you see is a more accurate picture of the workings of the Powers of Creation, and all the life and lives those powers touch.” A wry quirk turned her lips. “Are you ready, Leitos?”
“For what?”
“To fix that which was broken at the beginning.”
“How?”
“Follow the cord to me, Leitos,” she said, but was no longer with him.
Leitos hovered in lightless silence, watching the golden spindle winding the threads of life into a cord. He was thinking he could stay here forever, free of pain, free of trouble, when a resonant boom tolled, and great silvery rents showed around him in the darkness. The golden spindle began wobbling, and a vision of Kian’s crumbling sanctuary filled Leitos’s mind. Peropis has found me.
Follow the cord, the woman had said.
He hesitated, recalling how he had seen his own birth the last time he grasped the thread of his life.
More booms s
hook the emptiness, and the spindle wobbled more erratically. The chaos of threads awaiting their moment within that ordering silver hook began to gray and wither.
Not threads. Lives.
Peropis was coming for him, and if needs be, she would destroy every living thing in the world to reach him, for he was her last hope to escape the eternity of Geh’shinnom’atar.
Leitos stretched out his hand, and the golden spindle seemed to shrink—or have I grown larger?—until it fit within his palm. The whirling shaft stabbed and tore at his flesh. The only way to right what was broken was to grasp the cord. The woman had told him that. And it was the woman he must believe.
With as light a touch as possible, he caught hold of the cord, and sought the first moment that sprang to mind—when the center separating two sides of the same coin became one.
~ ~ ~
The air steamed, smelled of rot and moldering leaves. Midges droned in thick clouds. Blinking in confusion, Leitos gazed into the green gloom. His first thought was that he had somehow come back to Yato, but this place was much hotter, and bogs of stagnant black water lay everywhere. Some of that murky water was seeping into his boots. Creatures shrieked and hooted in the distance, their calls not at all familiar.
He opened his clenched fist, and was surprised to see blood covering the palm. The golden spindle made those cuts. Then he wondered, Where am I, and why am I here?
To fix what was broken, a ghostly voice whispered.
When Leitos saw a saffron-robed man hunkered down behind a giant fern, his short hair a weave of tight curls, his skin as dark as Ba’Sel’s, Leitos understood.
“Where is Kian and the prince?” Leitos asked, splashing toward the Asra’ a’Shah mercenary. “And Ba’Sel,” he added belatedly, recalling that his mentor had been at the temple when the Well of Creation was destroyed.
He halted when the warrior bounded to his feet, an arrow nocked to his drawn bowstring. Leitos’s hands came up. “You cannot let the prince go into the temple.”
“Who are you?” the man demanded, his accent so like Ba’Sel’s, but thicker.
“There is no time for this,” Leitos said, stepping forward. “We must stop the prince.”
“How do you know of Prince Varis, boy, or of Ba’Sel?”
“Because he trained me,” Leitos laughed, thinking too late that would only confuse the warrior.
The limbs of the bow creaked, as the Asra A’Shah drew the bowstring farther back. “Hold!”
“What are you going on about, Fenahk!” a gruff voice called. A moment later, a gigantic man came into view. A wild tangle of black beard braids hung down the front of his studded jerkin. He went still when he spied Leitos. “Gods good and wise,” he breathed.
“Has your reflection in the water unmanned you?” another man said, his tone dry as dust. “Gods know it would frighten blind hags and starving dogs.” He stopped next to the big man, mild disdain turning his lips. He held a throwing dagger in his hand. Tall and fair-haired, the second fellow was almost pretty, Leitos thought, until the man turned his flat gray eyes on him. In them he saw the threat of the gravest danger.
Leitos knew them from his father’s descriptions. “Hazad, Azuri, where is my grand—ah, Kian?”
“Kian?” Hazad gasped. “That’s who he reminds me of. The lad looks just like him.”
“Don’t be daft,” Azuri said, taking a measure of Leitos.
“Not now,” Hazad said, “as he was when we were younger.”
Azuri’s eyes narrowed. “As much as it pains me to admit, you have the way of it. Who are you, boy, a bastard Kian never told us about?”
“And by Peropis’s black teats,” Hazad put in, “how did you get here?”
Leitos had not anticipated the need for explanations, but there was no time for them. “If the prince goes into the temple, we will all die—all the world will perish.”
Hazad and Azuri shared a hooded look. The Asra a’Shah slowly lowered his bow, but appeared ready to raise it again, on the instant.
“He’s delirious,” Azuri said.
Hazad nodded sagely. “Drank some bad water, he did.”
“What are you two going on about?”
Leitos recognized the voice of his grandfather, but when he looked for him to appear through a wall of wriggling brush, a dazzling burst of light turned everything the color of an autumn sky. A moment later, a column of roaring blue flames shot heavenward, burning a wide hole through hanging boughs. A heartbeat later, a wall of shrieking wind blasted through the forest, and Leitos knew he was too late.
~ ~ ~
Before him the golden spindle flailed wildly, and the cord extending from the long end of its shaft thrummed like a plucked lute string. Wide fissures showed in the darkness around it, not silver as they had been, but burning with the hideous fires of the Thousand Hells.
Kian’s voice came to him. Remake the coin, Leitos, to what it was before I—
Before you what?
The answer filled him abruptly, clear and perfectly formed. Leitos caught hold of the cord again, and followed it along its endless length. Countless images blurred in his mind’s eye, but he knew what he sought. And when he found it, he—
~ ~ ~
—stepped from an alley into a street teeming with people. A burly man jerked back from him. “Gods be damned, boy, where did you ... how did you—” He bit off the words and pushed his way deeper into the throng, casting fearful glances over his shoulder.
Leitos watched him go, wondering if he had simply appeared in this place, and if so, glad he had not appeared in front of a charging horse or wagon. And then he stopped thinking about what could have been.
Hawkers cried their wares in all directions, and ragged urchins ran underfoot. He might have been in Zuladah, save that there was nothing about this place that spoke of lives resigned to misery.
A red-haired woman slid next to him, the girdle of bronze medallions tight about her loins tinkling merrily. She smiled as if she knew him, and wrapped a bare arm through his and squeezed tight. The swatch of emerald satin she wore did almost nothing to contain her breasts. If anything, it seemed that her garments were supposed to give her the appearance of being naked, without truly being so.
“You look lost,” she purred.
“Is this the Chalice?” Leitos stammered.
She giggled and pushed her free hand under his robes. “Where else would it be?” She eyed him sternly. “You Izutarians really shouldn’t indulge in so much jagdah.”
Leitos extracted himself from her hold before she could disrobe him in the street. Where would Kian be? He had mentioned a place ... somewhere he had been when he made the wrong decision....
“The Green Eye Tavern,” Leitos blurted. “Do you know where it is?”
The woman squashed her breasts against his arm, and tried to get a hand under his robes again. “Why go there, when you can have me at the Fool’s Rose?”
“Answer me,” Leitos demanded, fighting her off. If his time at the temple proved anything, it was that he had little time to reach the tavern where Kian had met Varis. The place where he agreed to Prince Varis’s terms.
The woman pouted. “For a copper.”
“What?”
“I don’t give away anything without earning a bit of coin, boy.”
Leitos understood two things at once. The woman was a whore—something his father had told him of—and that a copper was the manner in which you paid whores.
“Very well,” he said, making a great show of digging inside his robes for what he did not have, nor had ever seen. “Two coppers, if you’re quick about it,” he added, thinking greed might ensure her cooperation.
Instead of answering, she caught his chin and turned his head. A hundred strides down the street, hanging above a sea of bobbing heads, hung a wooden sign painted with a frowning green eye.
Leitos was running toward it before the woman realized he meant to. Her curses chased him into the crowd, but she did not follow.
He kept on until he reached the tavern’s stoop, a wooden walkway covered in dirt and a thousand wine stains, many still wet. Men in colorful garb, their heads shaved, save for side-locks held in place by metal rings or cloth bands, and women wearing next to nothing, sat in chairs outside the open doorway. Still others milled about holding tankards. Leitos had to squeeze through them to get a peek inside.
Inside the Green Eye, pungent smoke hung thick, and only a few candles struggled to push back the gloom. But there were enough to see Kian, Hazad, and Azuri sitting at a table nearby. Hazad lifted a tankard and guzzled the contents all at once. Azuri snorted in disgust, while Kian surveyed their surroundings. Only Prince Varis was absent.
After shoving his way back outside, Leitos peered around, wondering which way the prince would come from. He poked a man in the ribs who was sitting in a chair with a woman on his lap. “I seem to have lost my way. Where is the king’s palace from here?”
The man squinted his red-shot eyes, but never stopped fondling the naked breast of the woman straddling him. “Wha’s a dribbling little cock like you want with the king’s palace?” The man laughed uproariously, and the woman leaned away from the spittle flying off his lips.
Leitos waited, suddenly aware that his hand was wrapped around the hilt of his dagger. Struggling to retain his outward calm, he released the weapon.
“Oh, very well, boy. Palace is tha’ way,” the man said, nodding off to the north, and promptly popped the woman’s nipple between his slobbery lips.
Leitos set out, but halted after a few paces. If he went too far, he might miss Varis. If Kian and the others are waiting, the prince has to be close....
The thought died when he saw a slender youth coming his way. His was whip-thin, like a snake, and beneath the voluminous hood of his robe, his face was pretty as a girl’s. This, too, was a description Leitos recalled. But is he the prince?
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen Page 22