Wrath of Lions (28 page)

C
HAPTER

13

P
atrick’s legs ached, but still he put one foot in front of the other. He followed at his god’s heels as Ashhur marched north, leading their wandering nation into an unnamed settlement, the last before they rounded back south. Their destination was a hamlet that resided just outside the border of the Forest of Dezerea, nestled in the surrounding hills. There were grazing deer everywhere, and the trees were the tallest Patrick had ever seen. The place was idyllic, especially given that spring now had a firm grip on the land. The air had warmed and the flowers awakened, as had the leaves of the coniferous trees. Summer was still a few weeks away, but its scents filled the air.

They set up camp in a vast gulley, countless people pounding stakes into the ground and erecting their temporary shelters. They had been traveling for weeks since leaving Grassmere, moving away from the Gods’ Road, and Patrick was nearing the end of his rope. The going was rough and painfully slow, and the procession of lost souls that followed him and Ashhur had started swelling immensely now that the deity had stopped leaving anyone behind. The entirety of the many villages and settlements they came across were added to
the growing mass of human flesh. Patrick had to guess there were at least a thousand score traversing the land, maybe twice that, flattening the grasses of eastern Paradise and devouring all the sustenance they could find as they went. The mere sound of all these people performing the duties to keep themselves alive and comfortable was deafening. Patrick’s head was throbbing. All he wanted was to lie down and rest his weary bones, but a giant hand grabbed his shoulder as he drove a tent stake into the ground, and he knew his desire would go unmet.

He turned around and saw Ashhur standing there, towering over him. There was a strange look on the god’s face.

“Come, Patrick,” he said.

“Where?”

“To the settlement.”

“Now? How far is it?”

Ashhur pointed toward a steep, moss-covered hill. “Over that rise.”

“Great,” he said with a sigh.

Ashhur and Patrick left the rest of the flock, climbing the nearby hill atop which the deity assured him more of his children lived. When they arrived, they found a land that had come under recent strife. The trees were scorched, and the tents and crude huts that had served as shelters were trampled and torn. The commune was small, less than a mile wide, but there were no living souls to be seen. The only sign of human presence was a plume of smoke rising from behind a copse of giant evergreens.

They pushed into the forest and discovered a clearing. Patrick’s heart beat more quickly in anticipation. The brightness seemed to fade as they moved forward, partly due to the vast amount of lingering smoke. In the center of the clearing was a huge, smoldering structure. The walls and roof were still standing, though blackened and flaking, and the iron nails that held the building together were hot to the touch. Something inside still burned, sizzling and popping.

Against his better judgment, Patrick kicked the barn’s barred door while Ashhur lingered behind him. The boards were so thoroughly burned that the door seemed to disintegrate, filling the air with dust and ash. He covered his mouth and stepped through the portal, the hiss and sputter much louder now that the barrier had been broken.

What he saw inside made him fall to his knees.

There were at least two hundred corpses in there, most charred, some still cooking. Flesh was melted, bodies fused together, tangles of blackened arms and legs that looked like some hideous demon from the underworld desperately clawing for freedom. Some were piled over each other by the door, others in a scorched mass toward the center. There were floating embers all around, a few glowing, most gray, everything devoid of life. Brittle clumps of blackened debris crunched underfoot with each uneven step he took. His nostrils itched with the scent of burnt flesh.

He fell to his knees, billowing ash all around him. His hand slipped down and his fingertips found a charred rope, and when he glanced around him, trying to keep his eyes from absorbing the countless twisted and screaming faces, he found many more bits of burnt rope. The picture grew clearer.

The people had been herded into this barn against their will. Then the barn had been barred and set aflame from the outside. The inside had been stocked with bales of hay, which had caught fire easily once the flames climbed over and under the barn walls. The barn had been constructed solely for this purpose.
They were burned alive,
he thought.
Some rushed the door, trying to get out, while others huddled in the center, probably praying for their god to save them. They were men, women, and children, and they died screaming, they died screaming, they died…

Patrick heard a screech and turned around to see Barclay, the youth who had taken to spending long, annoying moments with him on the road, squatting in the doorway. Patrick rushed out,
gathered the boy in his arms, and gently held him. Ashhur, who had kept a slight distance, considered him with a tilt of his head. Patrick opened his mouth, but nothing would come out. His god’s glowing golden eyes brightened, and the deity lumbered forward, ducking down to peer into the smoking barn.

Suddenly a thought took root.
Iron nails.
There was very little production of iron in Paradise, certainly not in a crude settlement such as this, yet the doors had been secured with iron nails. Karak’s Army was still in pursuit of them, which left but one possibility. The nearby forest, and the kingdom within, was filled with elves who had so far remained out of the war. Or had they? Patrick thought of the deceased Bessus and Damaspia Gorgoros, slain while they knelt for morning prayers. Perhaps Neldar wasn’t the only kingdom that wanted to see Paradise burn.

A moment later Ashhur retracted his head from the door. His expression had gone blank, and his chiseled jaw hung low. He didn’t scream; he didn’t fly into a fit of rage as he had in Haven; he didn’t run toward the trees to punish the elves who bore responsibility. Instead, what he did was worse. He collapsed to his knees, still facing the barn.

And the god wept.

It was a disconcerting experience, hearing a deity cry. The sound was like the pounding of rain on stone mixed with the trumpeting of a hundred thousand grayhorns. Ashhur’s sobs were the ebb and flow of the tide, the rumble of thunder in a rainstorm, the pull and crack of a great earthquake. His body shook as tears clear as water from a mountain spring cascaded down his godly cheeks. The sound summoned others from the sprawling camp below, and soon the clearing was ringed with a multitude of confused and sickened people, all watching the god who had made their existence possible. His hopelessness was echoed in the uneasy murmurs of the crowd.

Barclay continued to blubber, smearing snot all over the front of Patrick’s tunic, but Patrick didn’t notice. The sight and sound of his
god wailing was the only thing that mattered. For the first time in a long while, Patrick felt truly afraid.

“Fire is an inimitable beast,” the great Isabel DuTaureau had once said. “It is the essence of the heavens, personifying the giver and the taker at once. It can be tamed, but with care, for it is greedy. Just like its brother, snow, a little is wondrous—too much and life ends.”

Patrick had received that bit of wisdom after burning his hand over a cookfire while trying to roast gooey bits of a reduced sugar concoction. The reply was typical of his mother. He had been around nine years old at the time, and he’d run to her in hopes of a soft touch and some soothing words. Instead, she’d delivered a lecture on the philosophic components of fire, before sending him to the temple for the healers to mend his blistered fingers.

Even so, her words were all he could think of as he watched flames lick out of the small circle of stones before him two nights after the discovery of the barn. The paradox was palpable. Fire had made it possible to cook, to keep warm, to make tough wood pliant. Fire made up the sun that rose each morning, allowing plants to grow and forming the unmistakable distinction between day and night. Fire allowed them to send the souls of their deceased to the Golden Forever.

Yet fire was also used to forge steel, which was then crafted into knives, daggers, and swords. It was used to destroy fields of grain in order to starve frightened people, and then to end the lives of those very same individuals. This was a recent usage unique to gods and men…and elves.

Patrick grunted, shifted on his rump, and tossed another log onto the fire. Winterbone was beside him, the dragonglass crystal on its hilt reflecting the flickering flames. He shuddered, the image of the barn once again before him.

“Patrick?” asked Barclay.

He glanced across the flames, to where the youth was reclined on the other side of the pit. Barclay had rarely left his side since the discovery of the barn, which was still hidden in the trees atop the hill just beyond their camp. What had once been an amiable fourteen-year-old on the cusp of manhood had become a quivering child. He hadn’t asked a silly question for two days. Instead he walked with a sulking gait, his lower lip constantly quivering. Not that Patrick minded much. At least he had silence.

On second thought, perhaps silence wasn’t at all what he needed, for silence seemed to invite doubt.

“What is it?” Patrick asked.

“I can’t sleep,” said Barclay, twisting in his bedroll. “I’m scared.”

“We’re all scared,” replied Patrick.

“Not you. You’re not scared of anything. You weren’t even scared of…of…
that
.”

Patrick shook his head. He wanted to tell the boy that
of course
he’d been scared, that all he could think about was running back to Mordeina and curling into a ball while his sisters comforted him.

“Just close your eyes,” he said instead. “What’s the dumbest animal you can think of?”

“Uh…a sheep?”

“Well, picture a huge herd of sheep, and start counting them all. Don’t stop counting either—got it?”

“Really?” said Barclay, his expression blank.

“Just do it,” Patrick said. “Trust me. I’ve done this plenty.”

“Do you use sheep too?”

Patrick cleared his throat.

“Sort of. I more use articles of clothing. Now go to sleep.”

Barclay placed his head back down on his folded surcoat and closed his eyes. The boy’s lips gradually parted and closed as he counted. By the time he hit thirty-nine, he was fast asleep.

“Sweet dreams, boy,” Patrick said softly. “Someone has to have some.”

There would be none for him tonight; that much he knew. Not after the last two days.

He shook his head, trying to force the lingering image of all those burned and screaming corpses from his mind, but it was no use.

“Shit,” Patrick muttered. A chill overtook him as a light breeze caught him unawares. The fire had died down to embers, casting an eerie red pallor over the stones that formed the pit. He picked up Winterbone and used its tip to turn a log, one side of which remained untouched by the greedy flames. As soon as the bark touched the glowing cinders, it began to catch, fingers of red and yellow flame licking along the underbelly until the log was fully aflame, exuding warmth once more.

Fire giveth; fire taketh away.

He cocked his head, listening for the despairing resonance of Ashhur’s weeping. It was still there, though less intense now, a moaning from the far-off clearing at the top of the rise.
Maybe he’ll be done soon. Maybe he’ll wash all his sorrow away.
A wave of hopelessness passed through him. The people of Paradise meant nothing to those who wanted it destroyed. Be it Karak or the elves, it was only a matter of time before bloodshed found this massive traveling enclave and reduced it to stinking piles of rotting meat just like those inside the barn. He grunted, knowing he should find peace in the fact that when the end came, his god would be by his side, but he couldn’t. No amount of preaching about love and forgiveness would spare him the pain of what was to come, and he could in no way bring himself to accept his fate without a fight. Poor lost Nessa had instilled this combative spirit in him. Unyielding faith in an ideal was Bardiya’s realm, not his.

Thoughts of his old giant friend made him curse and jab Winterbone’s tip into the coals with more vigor. It was folly for the great Bardiya Gorgoros to deny his own god, to ignore his brothers and sisters in creation and isolate the wards of House Gorgoros
from the approaching hostilities. The Kerrians were able hunters and gatherers, strong and athletic and
independent
. They were proficient with bows and spears, and regularly held competitions of physical strength—competitions Patrick had joyfully participated in when he was younger. Like Nelder, they had ousted the Wardens from Ker, opting instead to make their own way, using Ashhur’s teachings as their guide. It was a sovereignty their god had only accepted after a lengthy summit with Bessus and Damaspia.
If only the people of Ker would join our fight,
thought Patrick. Their numbers, their skills, might swing the odds back to their favor.