She frowned. “I trust him with a great many things. But I would not trust her life to any but you and those who guard the creche. And as our newest priest, still after these years, he has yet much to learn.”
“Do not hide behind words, high priestess,” Ayan-Dar said quietly. The other priests and priestesses had, with the quiet dignity of their positions, followed the fleeing disciples and were well out of earshot. Duty awaited them. They would not be going on their own free time, for that was a luxury of the young. “You have never fully trusted him since he returned to us from his quest. You have hidden your feelings well from the others, but you cannot hide them from me.”
T’ier-Kunai spared him an annoyed glance before turning back to watch Keel-Tath, who was still waving at the parade of warriors and robed disciples moving down the trail. “All I have is that one moment when he lay in his chambers after being punished on the Kal’ai-Il, when I felt as if there were two of him. One was as I expected him to be, an accomplished acolyte, soon to be a priest, in great pain. The other was of a tortured soul, mad with rage and anguish. It was as if that one was locked away in a cell and the door had somehow been left ajar for just a moment before being slammed shut.”
“The senior healer said it was due to his head injury.”
The high priestess shook her head. “I do not presume to understand the healer’s craft, but this was something else, a glimpse into his very soul that I cannot and will not dismiss as imagination or some artifact of injury.” She clenched her fists in revulsion and pity at what she had sensed in that tiny purgatory. “It was real, Ayan-Dar, as real as the Great Moon that orbits our world. What concerns me more is that even in the ritual of the Change, when I held his palms and shared blood as the power of the Crystal of Souls swept through us, I saw nothing of that tortured soul. Since then, Ria-Ka’luhr has been nothing less than an exemplary young priest in all things.” She nodded toward Keel-Tath. “And has been nearly inseparable from her.”
“You think he has somehow been…suborned?”
“I think nothing, because I know nothing for certain, other than the reality of that single glimpse. Even though it has been years, I can still recall it as if it just happened. The keepers of the Books of Time have searched for references to such a thing, but have found nothing that satisfies me. And not knowing chills me, old friend.” She blew out a breath. “We will speak no more of this now. Gather up Keel-Tath and take her wherever in this world or among the stars she would like to go.”
CHAPTER TWO
City Of The Dead
“I spoke to the high priestess, and she had words of praise for you, child.”
Keel-Tath bowed her head as Ayan-Dar spoke and brought her left fist to her chest in the tla’a-kane ritual salute. “Thank you, my priest.” Her right hand rested on the handle of her sword, her fingers caressing the tough leatherite wrapping. The weapon was perfectly balanced, perfectly sized for her hand. Like the armor that fit her body like a second skin, when drawn the sword was an extension of her body and will. And with training from both Ayan-Dar and Ria-Ka’luhr, she knew how to use it better than the more junior acolytes.
She looked up at the great warrior who had been her mentor, protector, and surrogate father. “What shall we do while the others are on their free time?” It had been a huge disappointment for her last year, when the other disciples had been given their leave, but Ayan-Dar had held her back, fearing for her life. She understood his intentions, but not being able to go with the others chafed. On the other hand, he and Ria-Ka’luhr had spent the entire time with her, and in the end she was happy she had not gone with the peers.
Ayan-Dar frowned at her. “What shall we do? Have I taught you nothing, child? You are to have your free time, of course.”
For a moment, Keel-Tath stood, mouth agape, as her mind seized on what he’d said. “I…I am to go?”
Grinning, Ayan-Dar leaned down and clapped her on the shoulder. “Yes, child. You are going on your first free time.” He bent down slightly so his face was level with hers. She instantly averted her gaze, looking toward the floor, and bowed her head. “Look at me, Keel-Tath.” He reached out and gently lifted her chin, and she reluctantly looked into the scarred face with its single eye, the other covered by a black leatherite patch. “I know things have been difficult for you, being locked away in the temple, and for that I would beg your forgiveness. The high priestess is right: if you are to understand the world you are to inherit, you must walk the path beyond our walls. I will not lie to you, child: with every beat of my heart since the day you came to us, held out to me by your dying mother, I have feared for your life. I believe that even now the Dark Queen will spare nothing to harm you. But I — both of us — must set aside our fears and step out into the light of understanding. The high priestess has given me permission to escort you this time, although in the years to come I suspect that will not be the case. Then, you will be on your own.”
Tightly gripping the handle of her sword, Keel-Tath said, “I am not afraid, Ayan-Dar. For if you are at my side, what harm could befall me?”
Ayan-Dar grunted. “Do not place overmuch faith in me, child. I am old and tired, and my sword does not fly from its sheath as it once did.”
In the blink of an eye, he had drawn his sword, and held the blade before her surprised eyes.
“There, you see? Slow. Ponderously slow. Now you do it.”
Keel-Tath did not have to think. Her blade sang from its scabbard as her feet shifted smoothly to a combat stance.
Nodding with approval at her skill as he squinted at the sword tip that was a mere hand’s breadth from the sigil on the collar at his throat, Ayan-Dar said, “Again, child, very good. I see that Ria-Ka’luhr has not been lax in his duty as your personal sword master. Your draw is nearly as fast as some of the older acolytes.” He lowered his voice and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “You must be careful not to embarrass them in the coming Challenge like you did last year.”
“I will not leave them time to be embarrassed, my priest.” She returned his grin with one of her own as she sheathed her sword, loving the sound of the blade as it slid home in the scabbard. “They shall beg for mercy!”
“Ah.” Ayan-Dar rolled his eye heavenward as he sheathed his own sword. “Such humility. But never mind the future, child. The time is now, and the question is this: where would you go for your free time?”
That was something about which Keel-Tath had given a great deal of thought. She had never been able to go on her free time, Ayan-Dar keeping her at the temple for her safety. Each time as she slept alone in her barracks she had pondered that question. Every time she had reached the same answer. Of all the places that might exist beyond the walls of the temple or among the stars in the sky, there was only one that would be the destination for her first time away.
“Keel-A’ar.”
His face grim, Ayan-Dar nodded. “As it pleases you, child. But we cannot tarry long, for the eyes of the Dark Queen are fixed upon that place.”
He held out his hand, and she took it, a sudden stab of fear running through her heart, for she realized what was coming. She knew those of the priesthood could travel instantly wherever they wished, merely with a thought. But where they traveled in that instant was said to be infinitely dark and cold. She had always thought her first trip beyond the walls would be on the back of a magthep. Never in her life had she imagined this.
“Whatever you do,” he told her, “you must not let go.”
She took a deep breath, her eyes locked on his, and tightened her grip on his hand.
Then the world around her disappeared.
***
Syr-Nagath stood on the balcony of the keep in the city that had before that morning been the seat of the greatest kingdom on the continent of Uhr-Gol. Warriors were still dragging away the bodies of the last defenders from the room, while porters of water were hard at work cleaning the blood from the floor. She had let her warriors take most of the glory, but it wa
s her right to take whatever blood she wished, and she had killed everyone in the keep by herself. She was covered head to toe in blood and gore, and was idly licking the blood from her lips as she stared out at her latest conquest.
Beyond the keep, the city was quickly returning to life as the vanquished joined with the victors and the dead were fed to the pyres that burned in the fields beyond the shattered walls. Much of her army, which was only one of many, stretched halfway to the horizon. Most of them had not been needed in the actual attack, but served to give pause to the defenders.
The builders were already repairing the walls that had been breached by the great siege engines she had used to take city after city. Even the strongest walls were unable to withstand the machines her builders had created using the blueprints provided by the keepers of the Books of Time. Once the walls were battered down, she unleashed her hordes to satisfy their honor in battle. While it had been a bloody conquest, in truth far more enemy warriors had lived than died, for her goal was not to kill, but to conquer. Where quarter was asked of her warriors, it was freely given. Thus did her armies grow ever larger.
The same did not necessarily apply to her, of course. Some of those who had defended the keep had held their swords aloft in pledge to her, but she had been in a fierce killing mood and had slaughtered them all, warriors and robed ones alike. There had been a time when those who served her had taken her to task for such behavior, abhorred under the teachings of the modern form of the Way that the fools followed. But after cutting the braids of enough of those who spoke out, casting their souls into eternal darkness, the others who might have taken issue with her methods either kept to themselves or committed suicide. It was little consequence to her either way.
Now, Uhr-Gol was all but taken. Several kingdoms remained defiant, but they were a trivial matter that she could leave to her underlings while she set her sights on the final prize: the island continent of Ural-Murir. Already her plans were in motion, for she had warriors aplenty and even builders to spare to create the fleets she needed to carry the war across the great and perilous Western Sea. Those preparations were nearing completion, and it would be but a moon cycle before they were ready to set sail.
She was about to turn away when she felt a stirring in her blood, a rise of excitement from one of her small army of chosen ones. They had all been warriors once, but with the aid of magic so dark and so ancient that the priesthoods would have hunted her down had they known she possessed it, she had taken their very souls in her hands. They were hers to do with as she willed, and through their eyes and ears, their feelings, she sensed what transpired in the world far and wide. One of them, her most prized possession, was a young priest of the Desh-Ka, Ria-Ka’luhr. He was a dagger whose tip was a short thrust away from the heart of that ancient order and the hated child, she of the white hair and crimson talons, who lived among them. More than once over the years that had passed since the child’s birth had Syr-Nagath been sorely tempted to have him kill her, but she had stayed her hand. The child had not yet posed any threat, and the priest was far too valuable to waste without good cause. Part of her design was to destroy the priesthoods, starting with the Desh-Ka, who were the most powerful, and he was in the perfect position to help destroy them when the time came. His exposure as a traitor could not be lightly risked.
Syr-Nagath had also kept eyes and ears open for any sign of the child outside the false safety of the Desh-Ka temple. One of the places that was closely watched was Keel-A’ar, where the child had been born and where Syr-Nagath had burned alive the child’s father, Kunan-Lohr, and the city’s other inhabitants.
The puppet who was commander of the watch over Keel-A’ar was the one she sensed now. The white-haired child had appeared at the gates to that city of the dead.
***
She was old, then young. Young, then old. Time crept and flashed by, and around her was only darkness, darkness that could consume the entire universe. Cold, a bone-chilling freeze worse than the terrible winters of T’lar-Gol, pricked her skin and drove icy spikes through her flesh.
Then she was standing on an open plain under the warm morning sun. She could tell from her shadow that it hadn’t moved, despite the sense that a great deal of time had passed. She still shivered inside from the deep cold of the nothingness. Momentarily disoriented and off-balance, she swayed and would have fallen had Ayan-Dar not still been holding her hand.
As the vertigo passed, she loosened her grip and let go his hand, which he rested on the handle of his sword.
“Behold,” he said softly. “Keel-A’ar, the city of your birth.”
Before them rose the ancient walls of the once-great city. The fused stone that had withstood countless assaults over the course of millennia was now a sickly gray, scarred and pitted, with no builders to repair or maintain it. The battlements had been ravaged by the weapons the Dark Queen had used, and now stood like broken teeth along the top of the wall.
Keel-Tath stared through the main gate, around which the stone had been blackened and glazed from the heat of the fires that had consumed the city and its inhabitants. Her hand clenched around the handle of her sword as she slowly stepped toward the gray, dead earth that lay beyond the threshold. Only she knew it wasn’t earth. It was the ash, packed hard over the years by rain and sun, of the dead. Of what once had been her kin. The Dark Queen had killed everyone in the city and then poisoned the earth within and around it. Nothing grew for half a league beyond the walls. The land was dead and lifeless as the surface of the Great Moon.
Many times had she tried to imagine what the city would look like, but even her most vivid nightmares, which still visited her nearly every night, paled against the reality. The nightmares were born of the terror and agony of the people who had died here, especially her father, whose emotions had pounded through her blood, even as an infant. The emotional bond had been so strong that the healers had been forced to keep her tiny body sedated for days, but the pain and fear had never left her. Even now they were her constant companions, like her shadow cast by the sun.
But the city itself had not been why she wanted to come here. While the deaths of the tens of thousands of citizens had been an unspeakable tragedy, two of those deaths were bound to her heart.
“Where are they?” The words were difficult to force from her lips, and she could feel the warmth of the mourning marks coursing down her cheeks. “My mother and father?”
“There, child.” Ayan-Dar pointed to a sword whose point had been driven into the ground. The living metal, still gleaming as when the blade had first been forged, was fused with the earth, which had been molten and turned to black glass. “The sword belonged to your mother. Ria-Ka’luhr recovered it after she was killed, but we never found your father’s. T’ier-Kunai melded your mother’s blade with the earth where we burned your mother’s body and poured your father’s ashes over hers. For as long as the Desh-Ka exist, this will be a monument to their sacrifice, and none, not even the Dark Queen, would ever dare desecrate it.” He frowned. “At least so long as she still has reason to fear us.”
Keel-Tath came to stand before the sword, a lonely marker in the barren wasteland. As she touched the handle, which was made of crystal and inlaid with gold and other, even more precious metals, she asked softly, “Did you see my father die?”
Closing his eye, Ayan-Dar nodded, and she sensed his shame. “Yes. The high priestess and I were witness to this abomination. And to your father’s death.”
“You watched it, but could do nothing to stop it?”
She felt a sudden wave of anguish from her old mentor, and even before he spoke, she knew the truth
Ayan-Dar knelt beside her, and she could sense the weight of years upon him. “I am so sorry, child. I would have intervened, cast aside my vows to the Desh-Ka and sacrificed my honor to stop the Dark Queen. But I had already disgraced myself before T’ier-Kunai, and could not bring myself to do so again. I do not expect you to understand, or forgive. Our Way is not
one to tread lightly, and there are many burdens we would rather not bear. I have many, far too many, such burdens upon my tired soul. But of all that I bear, standing here, bound by honor to do nothing while this city and your father perished, weighs upon me the most heavily.”
She felt him touch her shoulder lightly, but she pulled away. In that moment, her heart was full of bitterness and loathing for him and T’ier-Kunai, for the Desh-Ka, for the Way itself. “What is the Way, when the mighty Desh-Ka can only stand idly by while a monster such as Syr-Nagath ravages the land and its people?” A wave of anger and hate rose within her, and she saw Ayan-Dar recoil at its intensity. “The day will come,” she told him, “when I will tear the beating heart from the Dark Queen’s breast and feed it to the animals of the forest.” Taking in her hands the blade of the sword that was the monument to her parents, she went on, “This I swear to you, my mother and father.” Turning to look back at the dead city, she said, “And to you, the fallen of Keel-A’ar, and all the others who have suffered the Dark Queen’s evil, I swear this shall be so. I swear.”
“You cannot take vengeance as a member of the priesthood, even as a disciple,” Ayan-Dar said. “No matter how difficult it is, we must stand apart from the events beyond the temple walls and the kazhas that we serve. I wish very much to change that, child. But for now, that is our Way.”
She stood there for a long time, staring through the gate of the dead. “It is not right,” she said at last. “They died on my account, Ayan-Dar. All of them. And the queen hunted down those who called Keel-A’ar home and killed them, didn’t she?”
“Yes. If there are any left alive, they are among the growing numbers of the honorless ones.”
She turned to stare at him. “Honorless? It is the queen who is without honor! Tell me that what she did here was part of the Way, that it was honorable.”
“Syr-Nagath comes from the Ka’i-Nur, child. Their Way is much older and even more brutal than ours. Such things as this,” he looked through the gates, imagining again the raging flames that consumed the city’s population, “are not forbidden to them, or to her. When I was in their temple to learn of the prophecy of your birth, their warriors thought nothing of slaughtering their own keepers of the Books of Time to get to me, something that we would never even contemplate. But we are powerless to interfere.”
Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2) Page 2