The Lure of Fools

by Jason James King

  “This is it, isn’t it?” The woman smiled and took hold of the shard.

  Maely hoped it would burn the woman, or repel her or something, but she was completely unaffected. “If I snap this off, you’ll wither like all the others, won’t you?”

  Maely was so terrified that she couldn’t have answered if she wanted to.

  The woman leaned in at the same time she drew the leather band taut around the back of Maely’s neck.

  “Wait,” the soldier said.

  The woman stopped pulling and glanced at her companion.

  “Let me have some fun with her first.”

  The woman rolled her eyes and let go of the shard. She opened her mouth to say something when an explosion of wind threw her to the side. The two men released Maely and ran to their leader. When they knelt to help her stand, three balls of red light appeared and began circling them. A heartbeat later, a column of fire ten feet tall erupted into existence. It completely engulfed the three, and was so hot that Maely’s skin burned from her proximity to the pyre. It quickly burnt out, leaving behind three charred skeletons where the men and woman had been.

  “Reka, silly human girl hurt?”

  Maely turned to find a Vorakk she knew very well standing a dozen paces away.

  “Karak!”

  Maely made to run to him, intent on giving the lizard man a hug, but fell to the ground. Karak was there in half a breath, lifting her from the ground to carry her over one scaly shoulder.

  Normally, Maely would’ve been irritated at being hauled about like a sack of potatoes, but she was so grateful to see the Vorakk shaman, and to be safe, that she kissed the back of his scaly neck to which he responded with a gentle pat on her back.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Karak find fey girl, aek.”

  Karak leapt into an impressively fast sprint.

  “Kairah? Is Jek here too?”

  “Ssk!”

  Hope like a warm summer’s breeze engulfed Maely. “He’s alive?”

  “Ssk! But sick, aka.”

  “Sick?” Maely’s warmth gave way to a wave of cold. “How? Is he okay?”

  “No time for to talk, aek!”

  Karak bounded over a fallen statue of an Allosian woman holding a shield, and Maely held onto his neck and shoulders as they drove further into the white city.

  The world of purple clouds surrounding Jove in this strange place was now pockmarked by dozens of black patches. The energy that was Apeiron was not infinite after all. No, like all things, it could have an end.

  “I am the end,” Jove growled. “I am death!”

  He released the pent-up power he’d ingested in a concussive explosion that shook reality and repelled the white orbs of light attacking him. Free of their incessant assault, he scrambled up and fixed his gaze on the silver-haired doll inside the glass sphere below him. He licked his lips, and the familiar lustful thrill of anticipated violence energized him. Jove glanced up at the balls of light. They rode out the wave of power, and then rallied. They streaked back toward him like angry falling stars. Jove grinned and leapt over the edge of the floating rock, diving for the hole he’d bored into the silver-haired doll’s protective shield.

  Falling took too long, and so Jove sucked in more Apeiron and propelled himself forward. It reminded him of swimming, which reminded him of hiding in bushes and watching for bathing beauties. They often came alone to the lake outside his village, and those were the ones that never left.

  He rocketed through the hole in the glass sphere, but slowed to hover upon reaching the center of its interior where his prize floated. She was absolutely, without a doubt, the most beautiful doll Jove had ever laid eyes on. He giggled as her long, silver hair fluttered about them. It was so shiny–like metal. Jove tried to touch it, but the hair sharply jetted away from his hand, as though it were itself alive, aware, and afraid.

  The rejection enraged Jove, and he shot out a hand and snatched a fist full of her hair. It burned his hand, but the fire of his anger was hotter. Jove roughly jerked the doll’s head toward him. She glowed with a really quite beautiful soft white aura. Jove’s rage gave way to cruel lust, and he roughly pressed his lips against hers, forcing her mouth open to slip in his tongue.

  The doll screamed. Not with her mouth for she couldn’t talk, but with her mind. It exploded out from her in all directions, rippling the air and echoing into infinity.

  The glass sphere surrounding them shattered.

  Raelen groaned and rolled onto his right side, the one that wasn’t burned from Jenoc’s bolt of green lightning. He was mostly certain it hadn’t done more than blacken the flesh around his ribs, but he couldn’t be sure without a healing talis. But, Divine Mother, did it hurt!

  All around him Jenoc’s army savaged the Vorakk. In stark contrast to the fleeing Allosians, the lizard people fought bravely, not giving any ground even when it meant their death. They had shamans among them, but many attacked with clubs and claws instead of the balls of energy that was Vorakk magic. The shamans lasted longer than their comrades, but the futility of their resistance was quickly becoming apparent. They were being overwhelmed.

  “Raelen!”

  He looked up to find Maely held in the arms of a Vorakk shaman. The lizard man bounded over to him.

  “Reka?” it hissed.

  “He’s the prince of Aiested,” Maely said.

  The Vorakk glanced to the side, shifted Maely to one shoulder and extended an open claw palm up. A red ball of light coalesced floating above the Vorakk’s hand and then streaked away. Raelen followed its trajectory as it slammed into one of Jenoc’s charging monsters. Upon impact, the life leech exploded into flames and changed course to run away screaming.

  “No can stay here, aek.”

  Raelen stood. “I need to find Jenoc.” He turned in the direction he’d seen the Allosian monster fly away.

  “Need to find fey girl, stop Eater, aek!”

  “Jenoc’s the Eater!” Maely said, her tone sounding both surprised and excited.

  Raelen turned back to face the two. “You speak of the Allosian woman, Kairah?”

  “Ssk.”

  Raelen guessed that for an affirmation. “She can help us stop her brother?”

  “Uska, help stop Eater.”

  “Here,” Raelen reached for the leather band around Maely’s neck. He carefully lifted it up and over the girl’s head.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I fear I am unable to destroy him on my own, even with the shard protecting me. I’m going to need help.” He motioned at the flare kris banded to Maely’s tiny waist by a crude leather cord. “It’s useless while wearing the shard.”

  Maely glanced down at the flare kris, then met his eyes and nodded.

  Raelen offered Karak the emerald shard he’d taken back from the girl.

  “Reka?”

  “It’ll protect you from the touch of the Eaters.”

  The shaman took the bundled shard with his free hand, examined it and hissed. He glanced at Maely and then looped the leather band over his head. Next, he reached out a hand and conjured another ball of light.

  “Tak!”

  “What is it?” Raelen asked.

  The Vorakk, apparently named Karak, flashed a smile that revealed an unnerving number of sharp teeth. “Daka, spirits still come.”

  Raelen didn’t know what that meant. Perhaps Karak had been concerned the emerald shard would interfere with his strange Vorakk magic the way it interfered with talises? Raelen was about to ask him when the whole world shuddered.

  The very air all around them rippled with translucent waves of force. Raelen’s skin tingled, and something inside of him shook. It was as if the solidness of his very core quivered, and the world both without and within loosened.

  Then the scream came. It was so loud, shrill, and desperate it seemed to silence all other sound. Raelen shared a look with Maely and Karak.

  When the tremble in reality ceased and normal
sound returned, Raelen asked, “What in the name of the goddess was that?”

  The scream was so loud Jekaran dropped the sword and covered his ears. But that didn’t help; the scream was more than sound. It resonated with all his senses at once: hearing it with his ears, feeling it shake the inside of his body, and sensing it drill into his mind.

  Most of all though, the scream brought a profound, gut twisting sensation of dread. His heart beat faster, and the thrill of crisis washed over him. Jekaran looked at the others. They too were futility covering their ears.

  The shuddering wave of dissonance subsided.

  Was that Kairah? What was happening to her? He’d never experienced such a terrible expression of suffering before. It lit the fire of his anger, and Jekaran leaned down to grab his sword but froze when he saw the white flower in the center of the garden. A moment before, it had been straight and glowing white. Now it drooped, and its aura was gone. A petal fell loose and rocked on the air until it alighted on the lawn where it curled.

  “I have to find Kairah!”

  “She left nigh unto four days ago,” Irvis said.

  “Where did she go?”

  “She said something about seeing an Allosian oracle,” Graelle supplied.

  “That doesn’t help me.”

  Jekaran held up the sword and examined the round well shard set in its silver cross guard. Before, the sword had exhibited a supernatural ability to perceive its surroundings, and could even sense things that were hundreds of miles off. Now that Jekaran had absorbed the sword’s consciousness and power, could he do the same?

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, and a secondary awareness blossomed in his mind. It was just like the time the sword had let him see in the total dark of Gymal’s tent when he’d first tried to steal it back from the weaselly little lord.

  He’s my kin. And more noble than I’d given him credit for.

  His psychic sense expanded out from him in all directions, and showed him the garden in which they all stood, then the apartment, then the entire tower and all its halls and rooms. The sense raced out from him, covering the streets of Allose, and rolling on until he found her. She was imprisoned in a nearby tower, in pain and fading? And there was something else…

  Jekaran opened his eyes and fixed them on Hort. “Something’s out there, in the streets–an army.”

  “Aiestal?” Gymal asked.

  “No, they’re not human.” Jekaran shook his head. “I don’t know what they are, but they’re destroying everything in their path.”

  “Now we know why the peacekeepers left,” a young woman who was holding onto Mulladin said.

  Keesa, her name was Keesa. Jekaran had a faint memory of watching her nearly seduce the big man, but it was fuzzy and dreamlike. There was also something more mundanely familiar about her face.

  “Stay here and hide. I have to go to Kairah. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “We can escape! We have displacement talises”―Gymal began―“they just don’t work in here.”

  Hort scoffed.

  Gymal shot the big mercenary a scowl. “I meant we can leave this tower and get out of Allose.”

  “I don’t care how you do it, just stay safe.” Jekaran took a step toward the exit, but Irvis caught his arm. He looked back at the chubby monk and found him proffering a silver ring to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Take it to Kairah.” Irvis glanced at the wilting flower. “I fear she is going to need it.”

  Jekaran nodded, and pocketed the ring.

  “I’m going with you, brother Ulan!” Hort stepped up beside him.

  “So am I!” Mulladin stepped up on Jekaran’s other side.

  “Is that a weapon talis?” Jekaran pointed at the slender black scepter gripped tight in Hort’s fist.

  The big mercenary grinned. “A void scepter.”

  Jekaran didn’t know what that meant. “Whatever’s out there will be coming. I need you two to protect the others.”

  The young woman at Mulladin’s side snorted, an expression that reminded Jekaran of Ez for some reason.

  “Jek,” Mulladin pled, and for a moment he sounded like the boy-man he once had been.

  Jekaran smiled. “Thank you, my friend, for finding my lost soul.”

  Mulladin threw his big arms around Jekaran and whispered in his ear. “I saw him, Jek. I saw Ez’s spirit. He helped me during my fight with Loeadon.”

  Tears spilled down Jekaran’s cheeks, and he pulled away from Mullidan. He couldn’t find his voice, so he just smiled his thanks. Then he whirled, and charged out of the atrium, sword held low at his side.

  Not a sword; a key.

  The sudden impression made Jekaran falter and he slowed to a stop in the corridor outside Kairah’s apartment.

  Where had that come from?

  If the thought hadn’t come in the tone of his own voice, he would’ve thought it a comment from the sword. He looked at the weapon. How was it a key? He shrugged off the oddity and leapt back into a run. Mysteries and magic could wait. Kairah needed him.

  The taste of the doll’s power was infinitely more delicious than even pure Apeiron. Jove shuddered with pleasure as the hot energy streamed into him, painful at first but warming his core, tingling his skin, and sating his hunger. He was paralyzed in an orgasmic-like seizure. This is what he’d been seeking his entire miserable life. The sheer pleasure transcended all other sensations, and Jove reveled in the same ecstasy he’d felt the first time he’d killed in the heat of passion.

  What was that girl’s name? A part of him continued to wonder.

  A set of large paws gripped Jove by the shoulders and tore him away from his doll. He screamed. It was like being tossed from a warm spot in front of the hearth into a frozen river at midnight. In the weightlessness of this strange realm, he twirled head over heels until he could draw in enough Apeiron to slow and right himself. The purple energy he once thought so succulent was nothing now that he’d tasted the fiery essence of the silver-haired doll. It was a cold three-day-old stew whereas the doll’s power was an entire feast of piping hot venison!

  Jove growled and faced his opponent; a white bear with bright blue eyes. It was translucent in an ethereal way, as though it were a ghost. Other balls of white light surrounded him, each resolving into bear-like humanoids with fur that was an assortment of blacks, browns, and grays.

  Something was different about his assailants. Jove could sense a change. Not just in them, but in everything around and inside them. He was different too. Drinking in the silver-haired doll’s power had changed him somehow. He threw out a hand, a bolt of green lightning arcing at the white bear in front of him. It dodged, and the other bear creatures flew at him. He targeted an even larger, brown bear-man closing on his right and released another emerald bolt that struck the creature square in the chest. The brown bear-man roared in pain and its appearance fuzzed. It faltered for a heartbeat but then resumed its aerial charge. Jove struck at it again and this time when the green spear of electricity connected, the bear glowed white, and then exploded into millions of tiny pieces. That halted the advance of the other bear spirits and they all floated in place, watching their comrade disintegrate into star-like particles.

  Jove drew his hand back, staring at it in wide-eyed wonder. He’d changed again–evolved. He could kill not only the bodies of living things, but their souls as well. He could devour all things! He could wipe the smallest particles of life from existence itself–send them to a soulless grave. Now he absolutely and truly had become death!

  Jove cackled and began striking out at the bear-spirits. Each time one of his bolts of emerald lightning hit its mark, the target would glow white like a super nova and explode into tiny stars. This didn’t make the others retreat however, for they came at him from all angles. These bear-spirits were determined to bar his way to the silver-haired doll, but they couldn’t stop him. Not anymore. He would have his doll–both body and soul.

  The scream belo
nged to the goddess Rasheera. Of that Kairah was certain. She hugged herself and curled up on the finely woven rug at the center of the chamber. The room had been some sort of receiving hall, but since had become the luxurious prison of Shivara’s victims. Kairah was not alone here, at least not physically.

  The chamber was a twisted museum of sorts, the art on display being Allosian women with overpainted faces, brightly colored bows and other trinkets woven into intricate hair fashions, and wearing fine ball gowns or other themed fashions. They were alive, if one could call their catatonic state life, standing or sitting in different places, never moving; their blank faces and empty eyes staring unceasingly at nothing.

  What had Shivara done to them? They were little more than empty shells, dressed and decorated by Shivara herself as though they were a collection of life-sized dolls. The woman Kairah had thought was an oracle had recruited these women because of their oracular gifts, under the pretense of training them. Her lifelong requirement of no contact with family and friends, sold as a means for facilitating intense training, had been a way for Shivara to avoid suspicion and cover her crimes. She’d employed each of the dead-eyed women in turn to use the Zikkurat in her attempt to commune with the being who’d tasked Shivara with slaying Rasheera. Boulos, she called him.

  But that was not the extent of Shivara’s monstrous crimes. She kept these women to use as conduits for absorbing Apeiron, a buffer between herself and the Mother Shard. Direct contact with an Aeose by a Moriora vessel corrupted and destroyed the Apeira well, but pulling the power through an intermediary let Shivara continue to spell-cast, and hide for a thousand years in Allose itself. The woman bragged of her unsurpassed discipline in pacing her feeding. Apparently drawing on too much life essence too quickly exponentially increased the appetite resulting in corruption and madness–the fate that had befallen Shivara’s co-conspirators in the plot to assonate the goddess.