The Ruin of Kings

by Jenn Lyons

  “No thanks, I already have a—” I started to say, I already have a goddess. I couldn’t spit out the words.

  She noticed the pause and her eyes narrowed. “Yes, Taja is your patron. But despite our origins, worshiping the Death Goddess is not a requirement for admission into our order. I seek a soldier, not a priest or fanatic. The Goddess of Luck will not object to your training at our hands.”

  I closed my eyes and shuddered. “I don’t give a fuck what Taja wants with me.”

  When I opened my eyes again, Khaemezra stared at me with open contempt.

  “Fool,” she whispered. She’d used much the same tone with Relos Var.

  Blood warmed my cheeks. “You don’t understand what I’ve been through—”

  “What is it about the idiot men in your family that you are all such fools? Stubborn. Mule-headed! If one of the Sisters chooses to give you her grace, do you think you can walk away from a goddess? That you can say ‘Bah, a bad thing has happened to me, fie on my goddess forever’? Taja walks with you as much now as she ever did. She protects you and comforts you, and if you will not see it, that is not her doing.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Exactly what I’d expect a priestess to say. Easy words when you don’t sit here gaeshed, with the dried blood from flayed skin still staining your back. She . . . She . . .” I realized I shouldn’t say the words, but the damage hurt. What happened to me still hurt. Khaemezra may have healed the damage to my body, but the damage to my emotions, my soul, still festered, hot and raw.

  I leaned forward and finished the sentence. “She betrayed me.”

  Khaemezra’s nostrils flared. “You’re mistaken.”

  “The Quuros navy had found me.” I gestured toward the hull of the ship. “I’d spent months huddled in the rowing galley downstairs, praying the slave masters didn’t remember I was there, and then the navy arrived, looking for me. And what happened? They couldn’t see me. The one time in my life I didn’t want to be invisible. I watched as that navy captain looked right through me, even though I was exactly who he was looking for—the only yellow-haired bastard in the room. That was the moment I realized that my goddess didn’t want me rescued.”

  “Of course not. Going back to Quur would have been a disaster.”

  “A disaster?” I tried to keep my voice a careful neutral.

  Khaemezra glanced at me, narrowing her eyes, and I knew I’d failed. She saw the anger as clearly as if I’d lost my temper outright. “Return to Quur and you die.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Oh child. You think so?”

  “I do. I had a plan. It would have worked. Instead, people I love are probably dead.”

  “Yes. Some are. Far more would be dead if you had stayed. I know that. I know that far better than you.”

  I looked at her.

  “What was it you said, not five minutes ago? About how you convinced Juval not to kill you outright? The dead keep no secrets from the Pale Lady.”

  “Yes, but I was lying to Juval. The lady’s priests weren’t looking for me—my grandfather hadn’t been an active priest of Thaena since before I was born.”

  “He’s not the only one who speaks to her.” She paused, as if deciding to change tactics. “I am well familiar with Darzin D’Mon, the one you call ‘Pretty Boy.’ Do you know why?”

  Without waiting for my answer, she continued. “He once sought access to our order. He once sought to be part of the Black Brotherhood, to seek solace from his imagined pains and injustices in the embrace of the Lady of Death. She refused him as an unworthy suitor and, like an unworthy suitor who would force himself on a lady who does not love him, he obsesses over her. He glories in murder, each one an offering to a goddess who does not seek them, each innocent life a rotted rose left before Thaena’s gate. Had you been able to go through with your grand plan, he would have added another flower to his macabre bouquet.”

  “You still don’t know that.”

  “Oh, I do.” She shook her head. “At least once a week, sometimes more, your ‘Pretty Boy’ goes to the Winding Sheet in Velvet Town. As someone who grew up in that part of the Capital, I trust you are familiar with that particular brothel and its reputation?”

  My mouth tasted like ash. “I know what they sell.”

  “Once a week, ‘Pretty Boy’ makes a special request, one difficult to fulfill, so it requires the services of a priest of Caless to make sure that the young men provided are exotic: gold-haired and blue-eyed. Just like you. Temporary, but the illusion need not last for more than a few hours. Would you like to know what ‘Pretty Boy’ does with his pretty boys? How many mangled flowers he has left on the lady’s doorstep?”

  I looked away. “No.” Damn me though, I imagined well enough. The catamites and whores of the Winding Sheet aren’t rented, but purchased.

  One does not rent something whose purpose is to be destroyed.

  I shuddered.

  Khaemezra stood up. “Please think on my words. We are not your enemy, and you are in dire need of friends. Sooner or later, you will have to trust someone.”

  After she left, I sat there with my fist wrapped around the Stone of Shackles and thought about my options. I had no way to tell what had happened to my real family, if Ola still lived. I had no way to tell what had been done to those I loved while I traveled in chains to Kishna-Farriga, or what might still happen while I was under the Black Brotherhood’s control. Training, Khaemezra had said. Maybe they would train me. Maybe not.

  More than anything, I wondered how much of what I had just been told was truth, and how much was lie, and if I had any way to know the difference.

  10: DEMON IN THE STREETS

  (Talon’s story)

  The sights, smells, and sounds of the City assaulted Kihrin the moment he and his father left the shaded comfort of the Shattered Veil. The late afternoon sun was a red ball of fire in the summer sky, heating the white stone streets of Velvet Town to an oven’s warmth.

  Those streets were empty. The afternoon was too hot for whores and drinking. Anyone with sense was sequestered in whatever shade they could find. Wispy clouds teased the teal sky, but it would be months before those clouds exploded into the monsoon season’s fury. Until then, the Capital City roasted in its own juices.

  Kihrin enjoyed the heat himself, and he preferred to travel when few people were about: early morning before the dawn or late afternoon when everyone napped. In the first case, it meant less chance of witnesses to Kihrin’s burglaries, and in the second case, the empty streets made navigating with Surdyeh easier.

  Surdyeh was quiet as they turned down Peddler’s Lane, a shortcut to Simillion’s Crossing,* where their patron Landril kept his penthouse and his mistresses.

  Kihrin knew something was bothering his father, but he could only guess at the cause. Surdyeh did hate it when he thought Kihrin was spending time in velvet-girl cribs. He always made a point of reminding Kihrin that the girls at the Shattered Veil Club weren’t there of their own free will. Surdyeh would then follow that by stating—with a significant look in Kihrin’s direction—that any man who exploited such circumstances for his own pleasure was no man at all.

  Surdyeh was a hypocrite. His father had no problem taking Ola’s metal or performing in front of the men who came to the brothel. He passed judgment on every customer without giving any consideration to the fact the velvet girls and boys needed that business to earn their freedom. And Ola was even worse: for all her talk about how she had been a slave herself once, she still bought slaves and she still whored them out to anyone willing to put enough metal in her pockets.

  And Butterbelly had wondered why Kihrin wanted to get out.

  Kihrin scowled as he remembered his father’s taunt, that Ola spoiled him like a prince. Kihrin couldn’t be Ogenra. It wasn’t possible. He knew it wasn’t possible because he didn’t look Quuros, which meant he didn’t look like Quuros royalty either. He knew it wasn’t possible too because someone—a fr
iend, or enemy of his “royal” family—would have come looking for him.

  Mostly, it wasn’t possible because if Ola had had the slightest inkling he originated from a Royal House, she’d have turned him in for the reward years ago. She may have helped raise him; she may have taught him everything he ever knew about tricking a gull; she may have been his introduction to the Shadowdancers; she may have been his closest thing to a mother—but he would never underestimate her greed. Ola Nathera’s number one priority in life was Ola Nathera, and anyone who failed to remember that deserved everything they got.

  He wished he were Ogenra though, if just for Morea’s sake.

  Kihrin cringed when he thought of Morea. He hadn’t wanted their conversation to turn out like that. He’d meant to be suave, to be charming. Instead, he’d turned on her at the first sign her interest was in any way ulterior. He’d lashed out at her when he liked her. He really liked her.

  She hated him now and he deserved it.

  He snapped back to awareness as he felt his father release his arm. He turned to see what was wrong. Had a pickpocket been foolish enough to try something? As he turned, he continued walking—and slammed into a wall.

  A wall? In the middle of Peddler’s Lane?

  Kihrin heard shocked gasps from the few pedestrians still on the streets. His eyes focused on the white wall suddenly before him. Its stone bricks were rounded from age and tinged with green moss. Kihrin stared, not understanding how a wall had materialized in the middle of his shortcut. The wall stank too: seaweed and sulfur and old, stale sex.

  A purple vein throbbed over the surface of a brick, pulsing where the rock burrowed in to form a small round recess. Then the stone rippled.

  He inhaled sharply and looked up. He wasn’t looking at a wall; he was looking at a stomach.

  A demon’s stomach.

  The demon was enormous, twice as tall as Kihrin himself. Along his stomach (and the demon was clearly a “he”),* the demon’s flesh was white. This turned to a sickly yellow-green along his massive bulging legs. His arms were bright red, slick and shining as if the creature had just plunged them to their pits in a vat of blood. The demon’s face featured a wide grinning mouth that stretched from ear to pointed ear. The eyes were black voids with no whites, and it lacked a nose. The creature’s hair was long, glowing white, but the ends had also turned scarlet as if they too had fallen into gore. A thick purplish-green tail, much like a crocodile’s but longer and more flexible, thumped and twitched on the cobblestones with a mind of its own.

  But more importantly than any of that, Kihrin recognized him.

  It was the demon from the Kazivar House burglary.

  “PAPPA, RUN!” Kihrin shoved his father into an open doorway.

  The demon looked down at the teenager and grinned. His white teeth were sharp and jagged and there were far too many of them: they jutted from the demon’s mouth like maggots escaping a wound.

  ***HAIL TO THEE, LAWBREAKER.***

  “Oh Taja . . .” Kihrin prayed under his breath. He slid his knives into his hands even though he was certain they would be useless.* There was no question Pretty Boy had sent this demon after him, no question the demon had found him, and no question Kihrin was about to die. That thing looked big enough to bite off his head.

  ***HAIL TO THEE, THIEF OF SOULS.***

  Kihrin decided his only chance was to run for it. He feinted right, dodged left, ran, and kept running. And for a few seconds, he thought he might make it, but then he felt a sharp slap against his ankles. He looked down to see the demon’s purple-green tail wrap around his feet and lift him into the air.

  He did what anyone would do when lifted into the air by a rampaging demon about to tear them apart on a public street: Kihrin screamed his head off.

  ***HAIL TO THEE, PRINCE OF SWORDS.***

  “Let me go! Let me go! FUCK! Let me go!” Kihrin tried cutting the tail with his knife, but as he suspected, he might as well have been trying to chip stone with a silk handkerchief.

  The demon lifted his whole body as easily as Kihrin might have lifted a kitten by its scruff, and held Kihrin high in the air. This left Kihrin close to the demon’s face, and far too close to that enormous maw. It was all too similar to a pose he might have struck before popping a grape in his mouth.

  Just as Kihrin decided that he had nothing to lose by sticking a shiv in the demon’s eye, the creature grabbed both his arms, holding them outstretched and helpless.

  The demon laughed, a sound that would haunt Kihrin’s nightmares for months afterward. He dangled close enough to the beast’s mouth to see it was not empty, but filled with a writhing red tongue and white, crawling grubs. The stench was beyond description, a combination of blood, offal, and rotted sexual fluids that made Kihrin fight to keep from retching. The demon shook Kihrin by the feet.

  Kihrin’s tsali stone slid out from under his cloak and caught on his chin. The stone felt cold.

  ***LONG DID I SEARCH FOR THE LION, BUT NOW I HAVE FOUND THE HAWK.***

  The demon’s mouth drew close, and Kihrin closed his eyes rather than see what was about to happen. He tensed in expectation of his death.

  There are some who would claim what came instead was more horrible. It was certainly more lingering.

  He felt the demon’s tongue move against his face, touch his cheek, the necklace, the indigo stone. As the demon did this, thoughts flowed into Kihrin’s mind.

  ***I OFFER THIS TO THEE, MY KING: A SMALL TASTE OF HORROR TO WHET THY APPETITE FOR THE FEAST OF SUFFERING.****

  The mental images grew more intense: Kihrin with his old teacher Mouse, with Morea, with any number of girls and boys from the Veil velvet house. Kihrin saw himself doing things to them—terrible, nonconsensual things. The demon showed Kihrin image after image of himself as a cruel, sadistic monster of a man, a demon clothed in human skin who delighted in the pain and terror of those around him. He fed on it the way crocodiles feed on anyone foolish enough to come too close to the river. The demon dove deep into Kihrin’s mind and pulled up the memories of everyone he’d ever known and loved, and then had Kihrin tear them apart—or murder, torture, or rape them. Even in the Copper Quarter, even for a boy who had grown up in Velvet Town, sins still existed beyond his experience or comprehension. The demon emptied one atrocity after another into the boy’s head until he had seen them all.

  Kihrin screamed and screamed.

  He had no way to gauge how long he hung there while the demon poured horrors into his mind, a seemingly unending orgy of filth and perversion.

  Too long, by any account.

  When Kihrin’s voice tore and collapsed into gasping sobs, the pressure on his mind vanished, and he heard footsteps running toward him. He looked down the street. Fear warred with relief as he saw the Watchmen running toward them, swords drawn.

  The demon threw back his head and roared, the sound of a lion accompanied by a thousand screaming cats. The demon let go of Kihrin’s arms and let the boy dangle upside down from his tail. Then the demon picked up Surdyeh’s harp.

  “No—!” Kihrin’s throat was rough and broken; the protest barely more than a whisper.

  The demon grinned and swung the harp, case and all, down on the first Watchman to come within reach. Rather than braining the soldier, the man’s head broke through strings and case fabric while the wooden frame trapped his arms. Had the demon let go of the harp at that point, the man would have spent the next five minutes freeing himself from the tangle of wood and string, but the demon did not let go. Rather, in one smooth, fluid motion, the monster pulled the struggling man closer. The demon opened that impossibly wide mouth wider still.

  Kihrin flinched and looked away as the demon bit off the man’s head with no more difficulty than Kihrin might bite into a mango. The dead man’s blood splashed over Kihrin even as the body fell to the city street.

  “Xaltorath. Your presence here is unwelcome,” a loud voice proclaimed.

  Kihrin thought that was a profoundly unnecessa
ry statement of the obvious. He turned his head to see who would die next.

  His perspective was skewed because he was upside down, but Kihrin didn’t think the man was a member of the Watch. The newcomer was older, in his forties, with peppery hair and beard. A bear of a man, he was almost as wide as he was tall—and all of that shoulder, sinew, and hard muscle. He looked none too happy to see a demon prowling the City streets.

  That made two of them.

  Kihrin had never paid much attention when Surdyeh had lectured him about Quuros military ranks, but the man wore armor. The shiny metal cuirass on his chest glittered and flashed in the orange light of the sun. Behind him, a veritable legion of City Guard and military soldiers hung back to let the newcomer take point.

  Xaltorath snarled and whirled on the man, while Kihrin swung from his tail like a lantern in monsoon season.

  ***IMPUDENT MORTAL, YOU DARE TO CHALLENGE MY RIGHTS? I AM XALTORATH. I AM THE RAGE OF BATTLE, THE SIN OF LUST. I AM THE MOAN ON THE LIPS OF THE DAMNED.***

  The demon’s mental “voice” raised to a cacophonous howl as he grew, literally grew, larger and more menacing.* Fresh, wet blood ran down the sides of his mouth, painting his white torso crimson.

  “Go on. Keep talking.” The soldier glanced at Kihrin only long enough to frown and note his presence before he returned his attention to the demon.

  Unexpectedly, the demon’s fury abated, although his grin was worse. ***I KNOW YOU.***

  “Yes,” the soldier agreed. “We’ve met before. You hid behind a child then too. Will you do so now as well?”

  ***THIS BOY MEANS NOTHING TO YOU, BUT SHE WAS EVERYTHING.*** The demon chuckled. ***HER SCREAMS WERE SWEET TO MY EARS.***

  The soldier’s knuckles whitened around the pommel of his sword, but his voice stayed even. “Why this young man? Tired of hurting little girls?”

  ***HIS TERROR TASTES AS SWEET AS THE HONEY FROM YOUR DAUGHTER’S THIGHS.***