A hasty search showed Leitos other men who stood out in the crowd, despite the filthy rags they wore. They were arranged in a loose arc behind the youth. The rigidness of their movements, the fierce watchfulness of their eyes, spoke of soldiers. Or guards.
Leitos’s gaze swung back to the youth, certainty in his heart. This was Prince Varis Kilvar, the middling highborn whelp whose ambitions had set into motion the nightmare of the Upheaval, and all the misery that had followed.
Leitos’s dagger came out, and he held it close to his hip. He took two strides before drawing up short. The snaky youth’s gaze passed him over as he brushed by. Leitos began to turn, thinking to bury his blade into the base of the prince’s skull, but suddenly knew there was no reason. This place, this moment, was not where anything had been broken. No more than the temple had been.
Leitos slowly sheathed his dagger and closed his eyes, and—
~ ~ ~
—found that raging sheets of fire had burned away every scrap of darkness. Somewhere behind him, lost amid roiling flames, he knew the spindle was tumbling on its axis, yanking the fraying cord back and forth. With a desperate grab, Leitos caught the cord and pulled himself along. As he went, it grew thinner ... thinner ... until it was no wider than a few threads. Three threads, he thought, and sank into them a short distance from where they began, or ceased to be, and there he—
~ ~ ~
—found himself under a bright sun. Dancing lazily in a soft breeze, tall green grass and blooming flowers surrounded him. There was a scent in the air, an indescribable freshness, as if it had never been so much as breathed. It had been, at least a little, for birds swooped high and low, and bees lit upon swaying blossoms. In the distance, halfway up a hill, a herd of animals grazed.
Closer by, a clear stream ran chuckling over rocks. Beside the stream, three people stood holding hands around the pearlescent shape of a woman. They turned toward him, their lips parted in astonishment. They wore simple robes. Blue for the woman, crimson and amber for the men. In their faces, Leitos saw Peropis’s flawlessness ... yet magnified a thousand and a thousand times over.
By no choice of his own, he dropped down and pressed his face to the ground. Tears dripped from his eyes, falling like dew upon the sweet grass under his nose, and he knew they were tears of gladness.
“Rise and look upon us.” The voice was sweet, soothing, and he knew it straight away. Come to me, she said within his mind, and was gone.
After much struggle, he obeyed. When his gaze fell on them, he began to tremble, but he did not look away.
The woman could have been Peropis’s twin, save that her hair was a rich black instead of silver-white, and there was no menace in her clear blue eyes. The red-robed man beside her was stern of face, dark of hair, and his eyes were a clear hazel, like Belina’s. The man in amber stood tall and bluff-featured, and his short hair shone bright as spun gold. His eyes were as emeralds, so like Zera’s and Nola’s.
Instinctively, Leitos knew they were gods, the children of Pa’amadin. The Three. Hiphkos the Contemplator, the Leviathan. Attandaeus the Blood Hawk, the Watcher Who Judges. Memokk the Bull, the Vanquisher.
“Has our father sent you?” Attandaeus asked doubtfully.
Leitos tried to answer, but made a croaking noise instead. He cleared his throat, and chanced a second attempt. “No,” he managed, and pointed at Hiphkos. “She did.”
The two men looked at their sister. “What is the meaning of this?” asked Memokk.
“I would know the same,” Hiphkos said, puzzled.
Leitos had no true answer, and let his gaze wander to the shimmering figure of the woman the Three had been standing around. That figure had not yet moved. “If you intend to name your daughter Peropis,” he said slowly, “you should end her now.”
“End her?” Memokk said, looking uncertain.
Leitos swallowed, and made it clear as he knew how. “Kill her, or she and all the children you create afterward will become abominations in the eyes of your father. If you go forward in making her, she will be the reason for your deaths, and—” he hesitated, spread his hands as if to encompass the whole of the world “—she will become the Bane of all Creation.”
Before they could demand it, he told them of his life, and the lives of those he had loved. They listened patiently, as he described the golden spindle. They seemed taken aback when he mentioned what little he knew of the Powers of Creation, and how at some point in the future, they would give up those powers as a final act of contrition. He spoke of Mahk’lar, Alon’mahk’lar, and even Na’mihn’teghul, though he did not mention that he himself was such a creature, a demon-born. In truth, he still was not sure he believed it. And by no measure was he ready to accept it. When they asked questions, he answered as best he could. In time, silence fell among them.
At length, Hiphkos said, “We must speak with our father.”
Leitos could not help but chuckle. “I wish you luck in getting answers from the Silent God of All.”
The Three looked among themselves as if he were daft, then they were gone, leaving him to wonder at their vanishing, and later to consider that he was alone with the being that might still become Peropis, if they did not believe him.
While he waited, the sun climbed high, and then began its westward descent. He drank from the stream and found it sweet and unspoiled. Occasionally he looked at the shimmering figure of Peropis, and wondered if his dagger would harm her. Here, the idea of killing was loathsome, so instead he sat in the grass, then lay on his back and watched the passing of high thin clouds.
In time, his thoughts turned to his father and Ba’Sel, Belina and Nola, Ulmek and Sumahn, and all the others who had come with him from Yato. He struggled to block the visions of his father’s death, and the memory of his impaled companions. Thinking of that, he felt ghost pains running through the center of him. Are any of the others alive? he thought, and then, Would I want them to be, in that place, with Peropis and all her demon-born?
No, was only one answer, and he realized he never wanted to go back. If it came to it, perhaps he could trap himself here, as Kian had trapped himself in his own sweet memory. How long he could hide from Peropis was anyone’s guess, but any amount of time would be better than returning to that impaling spike.
But it would only be better for him, not his friends. He knew he would have to return to those he left behind. What he would be able do for them was uncertain, but at least he could suffer and die with them, rather than abandon them. A grim choice, but one he was willing to make.
Leitos’s eyes were drooping, and a blush had colored the sky, before the Three returned. At Hiphkos’s beckoning, he came before them once more.
“We have spoken with our father. Among other things, he found it amusing that you would name him the ‘Silent God.’ Be that as it may, although we do not understand how the things you told us can be true, we believe the possibility exists that those terrible things could come to pass.”
Leitos waited, but she said no more. He asked, “What do you intend?”
Hiphkos seemed to struggle with some inner turmoil. “It is too late to kill the spirit of our daughter.”
Leitos’s heart fell. “Then this has all been for nothing.”
Attandaeus held up a restraining finger. “We cannot kill her, but there is another way.” Like Hiphkos, he seemed hesitant to speak aloud what troubled him.
“Tell me,” Leitos invited, displaying far more patience than he felt.
“This other option has consequences,” Memokk warned. As had his siblings, the Bull went still, a frown creasing his brow.
Leitos waited. His entire existence had been marked by costs and misfortunes of one sort or another, most of them damaging to his person, as well as to his soul. Surely another could not hurt.
Hiphkos’s brothers looked to her. “We cannot kill our daughter,” she said again, “but we can ... unmake her.”
That doesn’t sound so bad. “When do you begin?” Leitos asked, for t
heir sakes tempering his eagerness. To them, Peropis was as yet unborn and uncorrupted. They had not lived in fear of her, had not suffered the torturous nightmare of her rule.
“Should we do this deed,” Attandaeus said slowly, “there will be a steep price.”
“You said as much before.”
As the Three looked among themselves again, a tendril of worry began crawling through Leitos’s insides.
Hiphkos broke the silence. “To be rid of Peropis, we must unmake her. And to do that would unmake everything she would ever touch in the future.”
Leitos nodded. “I understand why that would trouble you, but ... you are the Three. You can create again.”
“We can and we will, of course, for that is the purpose our father has placed in our hearts.” She smiled and waved a hand toward the coming night’s first faint stars. “Between the darkness of the stars, unborn worlds await our will.”
While the thought was wondrous, Leitos had no cares for other worlds. “Then why delay? Be rid of Peropis.”
Attandaeus stepped closer. “We delay, Leitos, because you, and all you have known, are things Peropis would eventually touch, if we give her life. To unmake our daughter is to unmake you ... and all that you know.”
Leitos felt as if he were floating, until his backside collided with the ground. He sat quietly while the Three looked on him. The enormity of what they had said grew larger by the moment. On the face of it, unmaking him was not his greatest concern, but rather that all those he had loved would also cease to be.... But then, neither would they know pain and loss.
“Is there any chance that I will be born again, one day?”
“There is no way to know,” Hiphkos said, joining her brother’s side. Memokk came next, completing a loose arc around him.
“Once you are gone,” Attandaeus said, “even the memory of you will vanish from us.”
Leitos shook his head. “Then how do you know you won’t make the same mistake? How do you know that the moment Peropis and I are gone, you won’t turn right around and remake her?”
“Because of what you have told us, we have chosen to relinquish the power needed to create beings of spirit alone, those like us and ... Peropis, she who was to be our first of many daughters.”
That eased his mind, but he still had to decide if he could agree to removing all that he knew, even himself, from existence. Is no life at all better than a life spent under Peropis’s rule?
While he considered, the Three moved to the glimmering figure of his adversary. They formed three points of a triangle around Peropis. When they joined hands, he asked, “Do I have a choice?”
Hiphkos smiled wanly. “Do you really want one?”
Leitos swallowed. “Yes. Of course.”
“Then tell us your will, Leitos Valara,” the Three intoned. “Shall we unmake our daughter, or no?”
In his mind, he saw Belina twining yellowed blades of grass into a thin braid. Where had that been?
And then he remembered the night Ba’Sel had fled, when it still seemed possible that a few ragged warriors could free the folk of Zuladah and raise an army to defeat Peropis.
Considering it now, he saw that there had never been a chance for creatures of flesh to defeat foes who could pass freely from the world of the dead back into the world of the living. An army such as that could simply die and come back, unceasingly. Over time, they would whittle away humankind, until none remained.
He had only one answer for the Three, but could not speak it aloud. With his eyes and throat burning, he nodded to them, and they turned their attention to the half-made form of Peropis. They said nothing, but Peropis’s pearlescent shape began to fade to dark gray.
Leitos watched and waited, and in his mind he saw Belina smiling at him. And as the world before his eyes took on the same shade of gray as Peropis, he wondered why his last thoughts were for Belina, and not Zera.
Epilogue
The three mercenaries drew rein a league north of Krevar. Distance could not diminish the greatest fortress of Aradan. Each of its four walls measured a mile in length, and stood over a hundred feet above the dusty floor of the Kaliayth Desert. Off to the west, a hazed green line marked the edge of the Qaharadin Marshes.
Hazad gulped a mouthful of jagdah, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “We’ve had some fine adventures, but I’m not so sure about this one.”
Azuri looked up from cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a dagger. “Afraid of a woman, are you?”
Hazad snorted. “She is no mere woman.”
“Coward,” Azuri drawled.
Kian suppressed a smile. As often as the two squabbled, and as different as they looked from one another, they were as close as brothers. The three of them had been together since they were all starving urchins scuttling through the treacherous streets of Marso. A long time ago, that had been, but it seemed like yesterday.
“There’s still time to turn back,” Hazad said to Kian.
Kian gazed at a particular tower rising another hundred feet above the northern wall. Under the early morning sunlight, the Sister’s Tower looked like a pillar of gold, and brought to mind his favorite refrain. “Gold speaks with a powerful voice—too powerful by far to pass up on such an easy task as guarding this woman on her way to the Isle of Rida.”
“Yes, well,” Hazad grumped, “you said much the same last summer, when you almost got us into the service of that crazed princeling.”
Kian winced inwardly at that. A plague of doomsayers had been running all across Aradan then, and most prominent among them were the Madi’yin, the begging brothers who partook huge quantities of swatarin to induce apocalyptic visions of the future. There had been nothing new in the priests’ behavior, but their dire prophecies had seemed to be coming to pass after the three moons joined together in the night sky, forming a strange and baleful eye that cast a pestilent light over the world.
For many weeks, the Three had remained locked together during their nightly journey, and fear had slowly bred panic. So much so, that even highborn had started believing the end was nigh. In Aradan, the most prominent among them had been Prince Varis Kilvar. The foppish princeling had gathered about him a score of high priests, and determined that he and they must venture across the realm to spread word of the impending doom.
“Lowborn are as dumb animals,” Varis had told Kian at their clandestine meeting in the Chalice, his eyes fever-bright with conviction. “It has fallen on me alone to show them their foolishness, and teach them how to spare themselves from the consequences of their blind idiocy.”
As far as Kian was concerned highborn, no matter their upbringing, were often just as witless and easily deceived as lowborn. For himself, gold spoke louder than caution, and if the puffed-up fool of a boy wanted to enrich a mercenary to appease his own deluded vanities, who was Kian Valara to argue?
But then, a few days before Kian was to join Prince Varis on his grand quest, the Three had begun drawing apart, all without any of the begging brothers’ terrible visions coming to pass.
As is often the way of such things, the Madi’yin claimed that some few of their order had misread the signs, and began searching for different truths. The common folk went back to their labors, and to secretly looking for the next calamitous threat to upset their lives.
Prince Varis Kilvar, though, had a harder time letting go of what must have become to him a virtuous and predestined purpose.
For two days and two nights, he strode from one end of Edaer’s Wall to the other, raving ceaselessly at the sentries, who listened only because they had no choice in the matter. Varis told them that while they had escaped one doom, surely worse disasters must soon befall the world of men. And to appease the unknown makers of the next catastrophe he, Prince Varis Kilvar, had determined that all men must make sacrifices.
Neither the manner of those sacrifices, nor their benefit, was ever disclosed, for at dusk of what would have been the third night of Varis’s ranting, he quit
e suddenly fell into despondency. The guards on duty that evening later claimed the prince had sat himself upon the edge of a parapet, and began softly lamenting that no one was listening to him, and that no one cared enough about their own demise to take the necessary measures to right the uncertain and most assuredly bleak future.
Had he been at the boy’s side, Kian could have told Varis that his misery was unfounded, because he had met plenty of fever-eyed folk who were eager to join the prince’s mad crusade. So ready, in truth, that at his command they would eagerly slaughter every last denier of the truth, if that was what it took to appease the mysterious forces behind the impending, if unknown, cataclysm.
But that evenfall Kian hadn’t been at Prince Varis Kilvar’s side. Instead, he had been carousing with Hazad and Azuri in the Chalice which, admittedly, was a festering privy pit at the edge of Ammathor, a place where the only things more prevalent than wine were whores and urchins, a place where men died appalling deaths every day with the sound of laughter in their ears. Yes, it was a den of debauchery, but at least in the Chalice, misery was real enough to see and touch. That could not be said of the invisible misfortunes created out of nothing by deluded minds.
And so, as darkness fell over the King’s City and Edaer’s Wall, Prince Varis Kilvar had sacrificed himself for the uncaring many.
More than once since then, Kian had wondered if Varis regretted his choice, as he hurtled through three hundred feet of open air before slamming into the ground below. In a way, Kian hoped not. The princeling’s beliefs might have been unfounded, perhaps even insane, but to lose your beliefs at the end of your existence, when there was no chance of turning back, was no small matter.
Of course, the better option was to accept that you had misled yourself and others before it was too late. In regard to Prince Varis, Kian supposed he would never know what answers the princeling had found, if any, before he met his crushing end.
Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen Page 23