“Don’t you have a nice comfortable bed to sleep in tonight?” she said. “Courtesy of the innkeeper and his wife?” Serovek could sleep in the saddle as easily as she did, but his men would expect him awake and alert when dawn came. Staying up all night with her here in the stables did no one any good.
Her heartbeat stuttered mid beat when he said, “I’ll be sleeping here tonight. I’ll feel better with two of us keeping an eye on him.” He waved a hand at Megiddo’s bier.
Indignation swamped her. Anhuset lunged to her feet to loom over the margrave and glare. “You don’t trust me.” The idea that, despite his assurances, he might not have faith in her ability to protect Megiddo stung. Badly.
He stared up at her, face bland and guarded, as if he had expected such a reaction from her at his news. “I trust you implicitly. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the monk.” The haunted look briefly touched him before flitting away. “I owe him my presence, my assurances that he isn’t forgotten or shunted aside as his brother did to him.”
Her outrage bled out of her like water from a sieve. She regarded him, sitting in the straw, looking for all the world like a man without a care. Until one looked deeper into the blue of his eyes and saw the shadow of melancholy there. “You said no one was keeping tally.”
The lines at the corners of his eyes furrowed deeper with his half smile. “I did, didn’t I?” He flicked a piece of chaff at her. “If you must know, there’s a running wager going on at this moment as to whether or not I’m swiving you or will be swiving you here in the stables.”
He’d danced away from the tangle of emotion the subject of Megiddo seemed to inspire and found steady ground in the irreverent teasing which so often drove her mad. This time Anhuset welcomed it.
“Is that so? And the odds?”
“Four to one in my favor.”
“Wait. There are six of you all together.”
“I want to live to see morning,” he declared. “I abstained from the wager.”
“Such faith your men have in your prowess.” Anhuset recalled the two tavern maids attached to him as he made his way to the stables. That faith wasn’t exactly misplaced. “Who wagered against you?”
“Ogran. He said if I had any sense, I’d spend my evening charming the prettiest alewives instead of chatting it up with a dead monk.”
Knowing what she did about Ogran in their short time on the road, Anhuset easily pictured him saying such a thing. She also heard what he didn’t say but certainly thought when she'd caught him staring at her. Why would the renowned Beladine Stallion want to spend his evenings with an ugly, sharp-toothed, eel-skinned Kai woman?
“I may not remember telling you I wouldn’t forgive you for having me stab you, but I do remember you boasting that if you survived the galla, I’d share your bed when you returned.”
Every speck of humor fled Serovek’s expression, and the blue eyes went black in an instant. He didn’t change position, but every muscle, relaxed just the moment before, fairly quivered with tension now. “I recall that boast as well.” He almost growled the words.
Anhuset crouched in front of him, allowing him to see her gaze touch on various parts of his body, lingering on his wide shoulders and trim waist, the muscled thighs and especially the impressive erection now ridging the laced placket of his trousers. Beladine stallion indeed. “I don’t indulge when I’m on guard duty,” she said in her most no-nonsense tones. “Nor am I a reward for your victory over the galla, though you have my greatest admiration for your bravery. Maybe one day instead, I’ll have you in my bed.”
He didn’t miss a blink, and the smile he turned on her was meant to slay. In that moment, Anhuset was very glad she was Kai and could focus on the strangeness of his looks instead of their seductiveness.
“You once said I wouldn’t survive you,” he teased. “While you were saying hello to my bits with your hand.”
She abandoned her crouch to take a seat in a spot that was a less tempting distance than the one next to him. “Keep that in mind should I ever extend the invitation.” She closed her eyes against the sight of him across from her and tried not to imagine him naked. “Since you plan to stay here and pester me, margrave, you might as well try to sleep and leave me in peace. Besides, I want to dim this lamp before I go blind.”
He caught the extra blanket she tossed him, gave her a salute and turned on his side away from her. “Goodnight, firefly woman,” he muttered before pulling the blanket over his head.
Anhuset shook her head. Silly nickname. Uttered in tones of affection. She dare not dwell on that too long.
She lowered the lamp’s flame a second time, sighing with relief at the returning darkness. Serovek stayed quiet, and she listened to the slowing rhythm of his breathing as he fell deeper into sleep, his ready willingness to embrace slumber wordless proof that he did indeed trust her. They still had hours before dawn, so she took the time to explore the stable’s interior before making a quick reconnoiter of the stableyard and the grounds immediately around the now dark and quiet tavern.
A rustling reached her ears, and she stilled in the shadows, lowering her eyelids to hide her eyeshine as two figures slunk around one corner of the tavern. They skirted the open space of the stableyard with its revealing shards of moonlight reflecting on the ground and kept to the darkness thrown by the inn and two outbuildings before stopping not far from the stables. They didn’t draw closer, only stared as if noting the placement of the doors and high windows shuttered for the night.
Their efforts at concealment were for naught. Anhuset got a good look at the two. Ragged men with the hard-edged mien of the scavenger about them, they wore knives on their belts and tucked into their boots. One was bearded, the other beardless, and both in desperate need of a bath. They used hand signals to communicate with each other, and while she wasn’t familiar with that particular language, she didn’t have to be fluent to understand the gist of the exchange.
The one without the beard tried to coax his companion into entering the stable. The other man shook his head, hands making slashing motions in the air as he argued against the idea. The slap of palm to palm for emphasis, an exchange of shoves, and the two came to an agreement before stealing away toward the town’s main road.
Now that was interesting. Either she’d just come across two horse thieves looking to help themselves to someone’s mount and trying to figure out the problem of her presence inside, or they’d seen Serovek’s party arrive and assumed whatever required an escort of six heavily armed soldiers was likely valuable and prized in the left-hand marketplace.
Fortunately for the thieves, they chose not to try their luck tonight. Anhuset would have dealt with them as nuisances. Serovek would have seen their thievery as insult. Hers would have been the more merciful punishment.
She scanned the area a final time before returning to the stable's interior. No thieves lurked in the corners, and every horse was accounted for. However, things were not as she’d left them. The animals nickered and tossed their heads, agitated. Their eyes rolled as she passed.
Her pulse surged when she came upon the stall where she’d left Serovek with Megiddo. The blue sparks of sorcery flickering earlier under the blanket covering Megiddo now encased the entire bier in a halo of luminescence. It spilled onto the ground, spreading in a pool that surrounded Serovek. The margrave lay on his back, face contorted into an expression of agony, jaw clenched. He breathed hard through his nose, and his eyes squeezed shut as if refusing to gaze upon some horror that faced him in the most terrifying of dreams.
He muttered a string of words, all of them nonsensical. Anhuset reached for him, intent on bodily dragging him away from the bier and out of the stall where the magic pulsed and swelled. She froze in mid-crouch, every hair on her nape standing on end, as laughter—insane, unnatural, and otherworldly—echoed throughout the stable.
Chapter Five
A Kai under a blue sun.
Demons danced in the
maelstrom of Serovek's nightmare. He stood in a whirling darkness, hemmed in by a miasma of smoke that shrieked and gibbered. If evil had a voice, it sounded like this. Icy horror spilled over him. He knew that sound. It had filled his ears as he, a monk, a chieftain's son, an exiled nobleman, and a Kai king battled their way through the ruined streets of Haradis to reach the chamber whelping galla like a diseased womb. This wasn't the chamber from which they spilled; it was the womb itself.
Something slithered against his shoulder while something else flitted along his fingertips—thin, sharp, like the edge of a razor. He recoiled, jerking to one side even as he pulled away. A mad gibber abused his ear, and the smoke spun and whipped around him, tattered veils caught in a hard wind. Within the gloom, he spotted pinpoints of crimson and cerulean light that flickered and darted to and fro. Eyes, he thought. They were eyes, and they watched him with the predatory stare of the ravenous.
Laughter rebounded off invisible walls, echoing back and back until one peal faded only to be replaced by another. Serovek gasped at the unearthly, inhuman scream above the mad cacophony. An awful, agonized shriek of despair, it built and built until he thought its reverberation might shatter his skull into a thousand pieces.
Instead of running from the ghastly clamor, he raced toward it. Desperation roiled in his gut to reach the source of torment and stop it. He batted away unseen hands tipped in claws as pointed as any Kai's. Sinuous tethers wrapped around his legs and grasped his arms as he hurtled in the direction of the ungodly screaming. The hovering feral eyes followed, watching him with a palpable hunger.
He plowed through shield walls of shadow thick as the morning mists that purled over High Salure before the sun burned them way. The sun didn't reach this unclean place to immolate its disease and never would. Mantle after mantle of convulsing darkness tore beneath his hands as he struggled to reach the voice of penultimate suffering. He stumbled, almost falling, when something firmer than shadow glanced off his side, leaving a burning sensation along the ladder of his ribs.
The tortured voice was louder now, closer, and where he'd heard only guttural screaming before, Serovek now made out words along with sobbing. Pleas for mercy, for surcease from the pain. Prayers not to many gods, but to one. Another tide of horror cascaded over him. He recognized the god's name and the voice of the man whose beseeching cries fell on a deity's deaf or uncaring ears.
“Megiddo!” he bellowed into the heavy gloom, and the gloom spasmed at the name before taking up the call in a venomous chant.
“Megiddo! Megiddo! Megiddo!”
The screaming halted just as Serovek burst through a drape of darkness into a pallid twilight. What greeted made him want to shriek as well. Megiddo hung before him, impaled at numerous points on a scaffolding of short spikes, a corona of blue light shimmering around him. He didn't bleed, but his skin bore the look of earth trapped in drought, fractured and fissured to reveal more of the cerulean luminescence.
Shadows spiraled around him, fluid and quick, revealing monstrous visages with gaping maws and glowing eyes that glittered with a twisted kind of glee. They capered through and around the scaffolding, a construction of polished blackness that reminded Serovek of obsidian and reflected the light spilling from Megiddo's eidolon. The shadows wrenched the structure one way and then the other, creating a torsion that wracked the captive monk's body in every direction until the snap of bone echoed amid the victorious squalls of cavorting galla. The monk groaned, the sound animalistic in its torture.
Serovek lunged for Megiddo, sprinting toward the scaffolding. But for every step he took, the distance between them tripled. And the galla laughed and laughed. He reached for his sword, enchanted by Kai sorcery, to hack through the foul creatures, but there was nothing at his hip to unsheathe and wield.
The galla didn't cease with their attentions. Unsatisfied with breaking bones, they turned to the fissures marking Megiddo's body. Serovek cursed them all, bellowing his rage and his torment as they peeled the monk like a grape, consuming his suffering as if it were a pleasure elixir. His wails filled the gloaming, and the blue light pouring from his exposed insides coruscated in a column that pulsed around him.
The galla ebbed away for a moment, not in fear but in anticipation, as if they knew what would happen next. The light around Megiddo contracted, knitting itself together in delicate filaments under the hands of an unseen weaver until it bound him in a tight shroud that flashed once, twice, brilliant and bright before fading back to a dull glow, leaving the monk hanging as before but whole again, his eidolon unbroken, his skin no longer flensed away. He raised his head slowly, as if the weight of all the world rested on it, and stared at Serovek with glowing blue eyes made abyssal by despair. “You shouldn't be here,” he whispered in thready voice. “You can't help me. Save yourself. Go.”
As if his warning sounded an alert, the hul-galla surrounding him suddenly turned its attention on Serovek, a malevolent scrutiny comprised of a thousand baleful stares. Serovek quashed the instinctive urge to run. There was nowhere to run, and he dared not turn his back on the horde. Megiddo begged him to leave, and in that moment Serovek wanted desperately to obey, but his nightmare held him in its grip, in this gods-forsaken place with a man whose spirit he couldn't help and whose torment clawed its way into Serovek's own soul.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker of more light, white instead of blue. A meandering seam no wider than a strand of hair but bright as the sun. And clean. An antithesis to everything in this accursed domain. He sensed it down to his bones. It drew him like a lodestone, like Anhuset's rare and sultry laughter. The hul-galla set up a screeching to make his head throb. As one writhing, smoky mass, they surged toward the thread of brightness.
“Get out,” Megiddo commanded in a voice no longer thin but forceful, adamant. “Get out before they do!” He threw his head back against the scaffolding, driving one of the short spikes through the newly healed flesh of his neck, and roared.
The sound trumpeted above the hul-galla's screeching, a blast that buffeted them aside and away from the shining seam. The monk howled a second time, uttering words Serovek didn't know but that lifted him off his feet and flung him backwards, into the heart of the shadow, through it, to the edge of his nightmare where a voice waited to yank him across to the other side of consciousness.
“Wake up, margrave, before I punch you awake!”
Serovek hurtled out of sleep, Megiddo's tortured screams still ringing in his ears. He awakened to the sight of Anhuset's grim expression and her narrowed yellow eyes blazing brighter than a lamp. He clutched her arms, breathing as if he'd tried to outrun his horse on foot. “Megiddo,” he gasped, gaze sliding to the bier on which the monk's soulless body rested, enveloped in a shimmering blue corona.
The light pulsed in shallow rhythm as if mimicking a racing heartbeat. Unsettled neighing from the horses in their stalls and the hard crack of hooves against wood rails filled the stables. Anhuset stared at Serovek, silent and unflinching as his fingers burrowed into her muscular arms while he tried to rid his mind of the echoes of galla laughter and Megiddo's suffering. Cerulean luminescence played off her angular features, sculpting her high cheekbones into more pronounced relief and sharpening her jaw. A Kai under a blue sun. Beautiful. Deadly. Not human.
“A man caught between worlds strives to reach you in this one.” Her yellow eyes flared with a greenish tinge under the spectral haze. “Are you truly here with me?” At his nod, she pried his fingers off her arm, slid her hand up his forearm and pulled him to his feet. “Wake fully, Lord Pangion, and plant your spirit in the world where you now stand.”
Her command snuffed out the last of the echoes but not the memory of the monk crucified on a scaffold of black bones. He stared at Anhuset, concentrating on her features. “Can you hear them at all? The galla? I dreamed them, but I swear it was more than a dream.”
“I believe you.” She left him to rummage through one of her packs, returning with a small hand mi
rror. “Take a look,” she said, handing it to him.
He held the mirror up and swallowed back a gasp as horror flooded his veins. The blue luminescence hadn't confined itself to a corona surrounding Megiddo's bier. Serovek stared at his reflection with eyes flooded in the same shimmering hue. His natural eye color was blue as well, but of a more natural shade. His dead wife had once likened his irises to the deep of a cold ocean. Now they glowed with the ethereal strangeness of a Wraith king's power, like the simulacrum vuhana he'd ridden into battle against the galla. As he continued to stare, the light faded, his sclera becoming white again, even as his irises darkened, losing their definition to pupils dilated from the dimness of the stables and the last vestiges of his nightmare. “Gods,” he breathed, before thrusting the mirror at Anhuset.
Her claws scraped across the glass as she took it from him. Her eyes glowed as well as she regarded him, but from the nature of her heritage instead of sorcery. “How long has this been happening?”
Serovek shrugged. “This is the first time I've seen it.”
“But is it the first time you've looked?”
“No.”
This was the worst nightmare he'd had about the galla or Megiddo so far, but not the only one. Each time he'd awakened, the shuddering aftermath left him bathed in a cold sweat. He'd suffered through battle sickness when he was younger, less inured then to the savagery of war. This wasn't battle sickness. No one's eyes glowed ethereal blue when they fought their own inner demons.
Anhuset put away the mirror, switching it for a flask. “You look like you need a drink. If this doesn't chase away the echoes, nothing will.”
The Ippos King: Wraith Kings Book Three Page 9