The things attacked with savagery. They swept their makeshift weapons around and clubbed at Opar’s soldiers, cracking skulls and impaling flesh. The men tried to fight back, but they were panicking. They’d seen storms tear a city apart, but none of them, not even Opar himself, had ever seen plants and bones attack a person before.
Rithman was good. He called for backup and made certain that his men followed the orders given. He also drove forward on his horse and brought his sword into the conflict. When he saw that little damage was caused by the weapon, he changed tactics and used his shield’s edge to shatter bone and pulp green flesh.
Through it all, the sound of rustling leaves and creeping vines were the only noises that the enemy made. Opar stared on, slack-jawed.
“Where is Opar?” The voice bellowed from within the ranks of the plant-things and Opar flinched. The thought that the things might speak was terrifying.
Instead, a different nightmare came forward. From the waist up, he looked like a man, heavily scarred with dark brown skin. Below that he could not be certain exactly what he was seeing, only that it had four legs and wide feet with heavy claws. Whatever else he could say about the thing was lost in studying the sheer size. As humans went, the torso and arms were massive. As four-legged creatures went, it was larger than his warhorse.
“Opar! Come to me! Surrender and all will be spared!” The voice was loud, to be sure. He trusted the thing calling to him as far as he trusted the servants of the gods. There were more of the He-Kisshi, however, and so he decided not to surrender to this new thing.
Instead he pointed to Rithman and said, “Help me kill that beast.”
Opar was not a coward. He was frightened by things that should not have existed, but that was wisdom in his eyes. Not foolishness.
He climbed aboard his charger and drew his sword. The plant things might not bleed, but what he looked at seemed flesh and blood. That was enough.
While the soldiers did their best against the plants, Opar and Rithman charged the monstrous thing that led them. The two had fought together, trained together and worked together for many years. It was easy for them to circle the beast and keep it off balance.
Whatever it was, it looked to Rithman first and then to Opar. While it was busy with Rithman, Opar risked a slashing attack across the thing’s flank and drew first blood.
He did not expect it to move so quickly, however, and barely managed to parry the return attack with a spear thrust. The beast was powerful enough to nearly unseat him.
While Opar did his best to deflect the spear, Rithman attacked with all that he had, defending his kin and his king. His horse reared up and came down on the side of the odd creature, hooves cutting across the ribcage and leaving bloody marks.
The thing immediately turned all its attention to Rithman, screaming incoherently as it thrust with its spear, and then the lower half of the creature reared up and slashed with thick claws against the neck of the man’s horse. The roan never had a chance to defend itself as its throat was torn away.
The dying horse fell forward and so did Rithman. He did not fall far before being impaled on the spear. Opar’s cousin coughed blood and reached for the weapon thrust through his chest, but did not get far before he collapsed.
The monstrous thing that had killed Rithman screamed again. He was saying words, but his rage made them gibberish.
Opar took his chance and drove the tip of his sword into the thing’s side as it turned toward him. The blade was almost pulled away, but Opar held tight and watched his sword cut a fearsome wound.
The spear took him in the shoulder, driving deep and cutting through muscle before it rammed into bone. Did Opar scream? He didn’t know. His entire world focused on the pain, and he simply could not tell.
The sword dropped from his hand. He watched it fall.
The pain was still too big for him to care. It dwarfed everything else.
All around him in the semidarkness the men he commanded fought on, some fell and others continued their charge against an unholy enemy. Opar grunted as the hellish half-man wrenched the spear from his shoulder and tossed him to the ground as if he were a rotten head of cabbage.
The half-man stared down at him for a moment; fury painted its face into a mask and then slowly he smiled.
“Opar…”
He couldn’t have denied the truth just then even if he’d wanted to. Opar nodded his head once before the man’s sword came down and finished what the spear had started.
Beron
Beron raised the severed head of King Opar over his head and reared up, screaming Ariah’s name. His body rushed with renewed energy and the army of things offered him by the demon lord shivered with the same rush of energy.
A moment later they renewed their attack on Opar’s people, cutting at them savagely. Men died easier than the things that served as his soldiers and Beron grinned in pleasure at that thought.
If Ariah wanted him to kill an army of fools, then he would do so.
Around him the plant-things moved, defying the cold that should have destroyed them. Glistening bones shifted within their forms, and soldiers rushed in against them only to die. Beron felt no pity for the people. They were as insignificant as slaves. They stood between him and his destiny. He would rule over the ruins of this world before he would surrender to others. His god was with him and that was enough.
How seldom the world agrees.
The first of the He-Kisshi dropped from the sky on wings that fluttered and snapped instead of flapping. He did not understand how the monsters could fly, but he recognized them well enough. The Undying were the stuff of nightmares. Of course, these days, so was he.
“You dare defy the gods?” The thing hissed the words and as it spoke the winds died down to let it be heard.
“Fuck your gods! I found a better one!” Beron flipped the spear around in his hand and prepared it for a proper throw.
“Then you are a fool!” The creature landed on the ground and immediately reached for the whip on its belt. Beron, who knew exactly how much damage a whip could cause in the right hands, grew alert.
“Your gods would destroy the world because one man offended them! I will serve a god that would stop them! Your gods have ruined my life!” He screamed the words, barely aware of how angry he was. “Your gods took all that I have and Ariah offers better!”
The He-Kisshi came closer, and despite being larger and better armed, Beron felt fear in the center of his guts.
“I will see you fall before me, Beron of Saramond.”
“I will kill you before you can, or I’ll take you with me.” He spoke as bravely as he could, looking into that dark hood filled with teeth.
“You. Are. NOTHING!” The whip slashed across the air and caught him with a sudden fiery pain across his left nipple and down to the edge of his belly. Many might well have stopped at the agony, but Beron had been tortured and beaten before. Instead he charged forward, and threw his spear.
The weapon had been crafted by Ariah himself, and it ran true and on target.
The He-Kisshi caught the weapon before the tip could penetrate flesh. In all his life Beron had never seen a man move that fast. Of course, the Undying were not men. They were the voice of the gods, the will of the gods personified.
The Undying cast the spear aside and moved forward; its entire body shivered with rage and the mouth opened wide in a violent hiss.
The whip came around a second time and caught Beron on the side of his face, opening a scintillating line of pain from his nose down to his chin, and splitting his mouth open in the process. Teeth shattered beneath torn lips, and Beron roared. He knew he should have been crippled by the new agonies, but he was not. Ariah had blessed him.
As the thing had charged toward him, so he now moved forward, sword in one hand and shield in the other. When he reached the Undying he smashed into the creature with all of his might, the shield pushing the horrific thing b
ackward.
The Undying staggered, screeching its indignity. Beron pursued, his sword hacking downward to strike at flesh.
And the accursed thing caught the blade with its hand. Skin bled and bones were cut, but the weapon came to a stop in that grip.
“Enough!”
One word was all he heard and then the arc of white lightning moved through the He-Kisshi and into his sword too fast for Beron to process properly.
He had been rebuilt as a weapon. He was far tougher than a human being and he knew that. He’d been cut deep in his side, and the whip had opened fresh wounds. Still, the electricity was more than he could hope to prepare for.
Heat fried his flesh and his eyes alike. His hair burned away and the claws on his four feet melted into the ground. The whip had hurt, but this? The lightning coursed through his veins and boiled the blood inside his body. His heart exploded. His lungs collapsed into burnt ruins within his chest.
Beron did not die.
He wanted to die. He would have begged Ariah to take him if he could have formed words, but his torn, shredded lips had been burned away.
“You would follow a new god? You would replace me and mine as the voice of that god? So be it. Let us see if you are truly undying.”
For one moment there was peace, as his life slipped away.
When he opened his eyes, he saw Ariah standing above him. His god was not pleased.
“No, Beron. There will be no death for you. You are my Undying. Go. Kill my enemy.”
An instant later Beron was back in the very same spot as the He-Kisshi began to move away from him, prepared, like as not, to finish off his forces.
Beron gave himself one heartbeat to panic at the thought of never dying, never escaping the pain of combat.
Then he charged forward on his four powerful legs and brought his sword down on the shoulder of the creature that had killed him. His roar echoed across the frozen trees. The scream of the Undying reverberated back as he cut the creature nearly in half.
“Never turn your back on me, He-Kisshi!”
As he watched, the tormented flesh began to seal itself. He did not give the beast time to mend and instead hacked into the head of the thing, cleaving the obscene mouth in two and them stabbing several more times in an effort to blind all of the tiny eyes that surrounded that maw.
As it shivered and bled before him, the head cut in twain, the lightning flickered again and the winds came back full force.
High above he saw the shapes of other winged things moving through the clouds, their shadows painted on the storm by the lightning that swept the heavens.
There were more of them. Many more. He hacked into the creature on the ground before him, finishing the grisly task of cutting it completely in two. When he was done, Beron grabbed the closest piece of the thing and threw it as far as he could. They were Undying? Fine. He would make the task of living one they had to earn.
Three of the obscenities dropped from the clouds.
The plant things that served him, the humans that fought them, all noticed this time when the He-Kisshi came.
“You would kill one of ours?” Again, that indignant tone, as if the notion of being defied was nearly impossible to comprehend.
“I would kill all of you!”
The cowled shape did not carry a whip. Instead it simply moved backward a step or two and left a thick fog in its place. The fog may have started in that spot but it did not stay there. It grew outward at a nearly impossible rate, blinding Beron’s eyes to anything he might have seen.
“Where are you, coward?” Beron grinned and challenged the beast to fight.
“Here.” The response came from behind him and he had long enough to know he was dead before his life ended.
Ariah did not speak this time, but instead made a casual gesture and tossed Beron back into the world.
The He-Kisshi were waiting this time. Two of the creatures stood near each other, a few feet from where he had last died. He saw no corpse and remembered being back in Ariah’s realm. Perhaps he would ask for an advantage at his next death and see if he could be moved elsewhere.
A flick of a wrist and the new Undying sent a whip around his neck. The weighted end of the thing slapped across his windpipe and crushed it.
Before he could die, however, the other one breathed a cloud of white at him that quickly froze his skin and the weapons Ariah had once again provided him with.
He felt his eyes freezing within his skull and then he was dead.
“I grow weary of this, Beron.” Ariah’s voice was not offended so much as bored. The handsome face that looked at him was fraying at the edges and the true face of the demon threatened to show itself to him.
“Can you place me in a different location, Ariah?”
“No. There are rules. The He-Kisshi may not be reborn in new places and neither can you. I moved you once before, but it was exhausting. Do better. Kill them.”
“They can control the elements themselves! Wind, and fog, and lightning. Fire, from what I’ve heard and frost from what I’ve felt.”
“Then kill them faster.”
An instant later he was back in the same place again, and the Undying stood before him.
Before he could speak, or even truly get his bearings, something drove into his spine where his humanoid self and bestial self met. The pain was even larger than he’d have imagined possible and his death was fast.
He had not even finished dying yet when the shape of the He-Kisshi that had killed him moved past in a streak and attacked Ariah.
Whatever the Undying did, it took effort. The body of the thing warped and bent as the very air around it was torn asunder amid a crash of tinder and a flare of lights worthy of a bonfire. Whatever barriers held the worlds apart, the creature tore through them.
The demon lord was powerful, to be sure, but it was also caught off guard by the savage attack of the Undying as it forced its way into Ariah’s realm.
Lightning ripped across the land, burning plants and shattering bones as it moved. The fury was horrifying, and Beron closed his dying eyes lest the light burn them away, but there was no escaping the noise of thunder tearing the skies apart.
And there was no escape from the sound of Ariah’s rage and pain as the creature attacked him.
Beron was not as dead as he’d expected. He heard Ariah scream and heard the Undying howl in pain.
The winds grew furious and the rains that struck his body froze on contact with both him and the ground around him.
The plants that Ariah had created froze, sealed in a sheath of ice. Beron opened his eyes and dared look upon the devastation. Ariah no longer bore any semblance to a human shape. It was a massive form, twisting in on itself as it fought against the Undying. The claws of the thing tore into Ariah’s warped flesh and drew what could possibly be blood again and again, but it suffered greatly in the process. The wings of the thing were burned away when Ariah struck back, and bone showed through its hide in several places. Still it fought, and Beron tried to move but could not. If he were truly Undying, he was more limited than the beast before him.
Interlude: Desmond Harkness
Seven days. They had walked for seven days along the edge of the ruination, looking at the waters as they continued to rise, and staring at the ruins of things that could only be gods.
Bump said, “I’m hungry.”
Desmond nodded. They were both hungry and the waters tasted of the sea, and the rain was cold and wet and miserable. If the man complained any more there was a real chance that he would kill him.
“I know you are hungry. And tired. And sore.”
Bump looked his way with a half-smile on his tired face.
“It’s only fair. Each and every time you whine about your wife, I will whine about something else.”
“I have not been ‘whining about my wife.’”
“Oh, gods, yes, you have.”
“I’
ve been wondering if she is dead.” He shot Bump a withering look.
“We’ll find out when we find out. In the meantime be grateful that we are alive.”
“I’m as grateful as I can be.” Desmond gestured at the world around them.
“Not so. You have your legs and your balls. That’s a blessing.”
“Blessings are offered by gods, you jackass.” Desmond spat the words. “Do you suppose the gods are offering us protection when they’ve set out to have us killed for helping Brogan?”
He thought about mentioning his feet, but knew the man was in the same situation. The soldiers that had captured them a week earlier had driven nails through their heels to slow them down. It had worked to a certain extent, but when the seas came crashing against the mountains he and Bump had made a run for it, and managed to survive.
He had no idea how. The mountains themselves had shook, and a skeleton that was absolutely impossible had shattered the mountains and then attacked something even more horrifying in the ocean before collapsing into the waters.
Through it all they had run, or hobbled as best they could. That was all there was to it. They had fled for all they were worth, sleeping when they could manage and doing their best not to freeze in the horrid weather. Now they walked close to the sea, not because they chose to, but because the land was slowly being swallowed and everything lower than them was already gone.
“See that, do you?” Bump pointed out into the water, his eyes squinting.
They were lucky enough in that now and then a rift in the clouds showed them the waters and offered hope that the end of days was not completely upon them. They even saw seagulls now and then, though none had come close enough for them to hunt, even if they’d had so much as a dagger between them.
Desmond squinted, felt the blisters on his face tighten with the expression and then nodded. “Boat.”
Gates of the Dead Page 14