Elyon (12 page)
The blow she’d taken seemed to jar her general more than anything else.
“Can you walk?” He had an edge to his voice. Who knew it would take a swarm of blood-lusty Shataiki to unnerve a general?
Darsal staggered, wincing. “Of course I can walk.”
Her general’s gaze lingered on her.
His touch was astonishingly light. Those big hands that could crush held her steady with all the care one would give a newborn. His eyes were wild from the chase, lit with terror at the implications of the carnage these beasts could create.
The Throaters were quiet, faces ashen and set like flint in an attempt to conceal their obvious fear. Good. Nothing like a trip to hell to put the fear of Elyon in a cutthroat.
Sucrow stood gaping, awestruck by the sight of his master’s servants. The Dark Priest fell to his knees and uttered a prayer to his god, thanking him for their success thus far. Darsal frowned.
“I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t sacrifice to Teeleh,” she scoffed.
Johnis had won this round. Assuming any deal made with a Shataiki could be considered a win. Johnis had the power and the medallion that controlled the bats. And Marak’s ear.
“She is using him, daughter.”
She bristled at that.
What will she do?
Elyon’s silence made her skin crawl.
Desert greeted them. Stark, silent desert that vanished beneath a shadowy, writhing curtain. Marak ordered the torches lit. The bats howled and shrieked, keeping their distance from the flames.
“We have four days,” Johnis warned Marak in that deep, husky voice that had to belong to the entity Gabil spoke of. “We’ve no time to waste. You’ve brought fresh horses as instructed?”
In answer, horses and riders pounded toward them, kicking up a dust storm. From out of the sands came Cassak and some of his men, leading horses. Ignoring the surprise of the rest of the group, Cassak brought a stallion to Marak and Darsal.
Captain and general traded long, cold looks. What had become of these two, once friends?
Without a word, Marak helped Darsal astride, then leaped behind her.
Shataiki filled the canyon and poured out of it into the sky, a giant black tornado, a whirlwind of leather, fur, fangs, and claws mottled with red, beady eyes.
Johnis, Silvie, and Sucrow mounted their new horses. Johnis held his accursed medallion in one hand and looked to the blackened sky, enthralled, terrified, his eyes stained purple. He was speaking in the foreign language again.
Johnis afraid of the Shataiki?
No, the thing inside of him was.
At this moment Darsal feared him more than Sucrow. Johnis knew no boundaries beyond the thoughts of his heart. Right now he either wasn’t listening to his heart or his heart had turned as black as the hurricane gathering above them.
“Are you ready?” Marak whispered into her shoulder.
Had it really only been a few days since Johnis asked her the same question?
“I’m ready to die, Marak. But this? Never. This is mindless slaughter.” Darsal straightened in the saddle. The acid ball in her stomach knotted further at her epiphany.
Johnis was still reciting whatever wicked spell pleased him as Sucrow lifted his clawlike hands to the sky. Silvie pricked her finger with the silver ceremonial dagger, for reasons Darsal didn’t know. But then, the girl seemed to have developed a fetish for those knives. Cassak kept a baleful watch, ordering his men not to panic, to keep the line.
None of them had ever seen so much as one Shataiki—much less this swarm of two million.
Derias, the Shataiki queen, erupted from the throng of beasts and circled Johnis, shrieking over his head. He spiraled back into the cloud, roaring against his entrapment. His long, cold shadow eased by.
“Have you heard of the mountain called Ba’al Bek?” Johnis asked, his voice still the strange sound of one possessed by a Leedhan.
Ba’al Bek.
Darsal’s eyes narrowed. Why did that sound familiar? Certainly she hadn’t learned it from this earth.
“No.” Marak tensed. The certainty in his voice had dissipated. Sucrow was not the only one capable of sorcery.
The Leedhan . . .
“I will show you the way. We have four days to reach it. But first we require the blood of the ruler of this world.”
Marak’s eyes narrowed. “Qurong’s blood.”
Johnis gave a sharp nod. “Only a little.”
“Why?”
Marak glared at Johnis. Darsal watched him. Her general’s eyes fixed onto Johnis’s purplish-blue ones and seemed half-drugged. Johnis’s mouth curled into a wicked, coy grin.
“I must perform a ceremony preceding the incantation,” Sucrow said. “It can only be done at Ba’al Bek.”
The general didn’t seem to notice. He was seeing something else entirely.
“General Marak.” Darsal cleared her throat, unwilling to touch him in front of the priest. The trance broke.
“You know where this place is?” Marak snapped at Sucrow and Johnis.
“We must make haste,” Johnis said in Shaeda’s voice. “Such is two days beyond Middle, and a day and a half must pass before we reach the esteemed leader.”
T
he eclipsing clouds of Shataiki merged together, blotting out the sun entirely. No moon, no stars, nothing but millions of red dots marking the beasts’ faces. Their unblinking eyes stared down at the band of humans below. Overhead the Shataiki queen raged and thrashed, darting in and out of the throng, barely restrained. Derias snarled and howled against his imprisonment.
The hours passed, and evening came, further pitching the blackness. The cold night air strangled Darsal. How the others still knew where they were going, she had no idea. They were lost out here. At the mercy of savage monsters.
Her unease returned. Marak’s outbursts of affection had ebbed. Another half hour passed. She couldn’t abide both his silence and the Shataiki’s wrath.
“Tell me about Jordan,” she said. His mind had refused to make the connection between his family and the albinos, between not serving Elyon and serving Teeleh. Maybe in drawing the two brothers together she could make him see . . .
The general didn’t respond for a minute. Then he clicked his tongue at the horse and rode forward, a short distance away from the others. Away from Sucrow.
“He was my brother.”
Stubborn Scab. “And . . . ?”
“He’d be a captain by now if the disease hadn’t taken him.”
The general looked ahead, his voice quiet. For a minute he looked like his brother, hidden beneath a shell.
“I wish I’d known him better.”
“Me too.” A half smile crossed Marak’s face. “Stubborn fool.”
THE EXPEDITION PARTY RODE ON TO THE STEADY THRUM OF rushing bat wings, punctuated by Derias’s snarls. Johnis, Silvie, and Sucrow argued occasionally, but even they were mostly silent. Silvie wouldn’t relinquish Sucrow’s dagger. The priest, understandably, wanted it back.
“What was it like?” Marak’s voice rumbled through Darsal’s bones and roused her. She sat up straighter and looked around. He’d ridden out again, separating them from prying ears.
“Drowning. I never asked Jordan. You told me how it happened. But . . . there’s always more with you.”
She summoned the memory back. “Terrifying. Exhilarating. The water’s cold as ice. And deep, impossibly deep. The deeper you go, the warmer the water becomes. Darker. And soon you realize Elyon’s in the water with you.”
She went on, explaining how her lungs burned and how, finally, she’d breathed in the water. Like a fish.
The general listened, emotionless. “Was Jordan out of his mind?” he breathed.
Darsal kept her voice even before speaking of his family’s deaths. That wound was still ragged and festering, hot with blood. “Were you out of your mind when you tried to save them and stay loyal to Qurong? You didn’t have to do that, Marak. Elyon knows it’d have been easier if you hadn’t.”
For a full minute they merely stared at each other. Marak was listening now. And he was so close she could feel his body heat. But in five minutes he might consider killing her again.
Her jaw set. Idly, she fingered Jordan’s pendant, but she didn’t notice until she saw the general staring at it.
“I’m not afraid for myself, Marak.” She didn’t look. Didn’t want to see his reaction to that. He could take it however he liked.
Elyon . . .
Seconds ticked by.
“People die whether albino or not, Darsal.”
She drew a breath. “Then I have already failed.”
TORCHLIGHT DID LITTLE MORE THAN ILLUMINATE THEIR faces in this unnatural darkness. Cassak spoke from horseback to his four scouts, who were flanked by servants carrying the flames. Sucrow was right—Marak no longer considered him a friend, not since Jordan and Rona’s arrests. He hadn’t seen it before, but now, with the growing rift following their executions, he could see plainly.
And now Marak was falling for an albino. Worse, Marak knew Cassak had stolen the amulet right from under his nose and taken it to the priest. He’d taken the copies of the journals, too, but thus far the general hadn’t noticed. More of the priest’s skills.
“Keep the torches in rotation,” he said to the scouts. “And relay from beyond the cloud. Try not to agitate the beasts.” Cassak glimpsed the priest riding up. “You’re dismissed.”
He narrowed his eyes at Sucrow’s approach, staff in hand. He still detested the priest and his cutthroats, and he had no intention of watching Marak send himself down a hole. Maybe this would wake him up and snap him back into the real world, where albinos were the enemy to be destroyed, and loyalty to Qurong was to be held above all else.
Loyalty, integrity, honor. Where were Marak’s in all of this?
“What do you want now?” Cassak snapped. That strange sensation swept over him again, the numbing one that left him dizzy and wondering what he’d just done.
“Patience,” Sucrow answered. Cassak circled him, both irritated and unable to simply leave. He had to do this, had to make Marak see the truth.
“Do you have the copies?”
The war journal. Marak had made a copy and put it in his captain’s care shortly after discovering it. Upon learning their former general’s information, the Desecration hadn’t taken long to concoct. Cassak had helped develop it.
He nodded and gave Sucrow the book, along with his report on Jordan’s death. “Don’t expect anything else.”
Dark humor crossed the priest’s face. “Of course not, Captain.” His staff turned in his hand. Cassak’s throat tickled, making him cough.
“You’re still prepared for the other, are you not?”
Josef and Arya. Sucrow wanted Josef and Arya dead, the entity gone. Why, Cassak could only speculate, but there were reasonable explanations.
“Now it is you who requires patience,” Cassak warned. “The men will be ready. But beyond that I wash my hands of this.”
Sucrow chuckled. His hand moved in a circular motion.
Cassak scratched his neck.
“Still believe yourself loyal to the general, do you?”
“That is not your concern.” Or was it? Lately the priest was making more sense than the general, though Cassak hardly dared admit it.
“Well, understand this then, Captain: the general’s loyalties no longer lie with Qurong. I suggest you make up your mind.”
T
ime was running out to get back to Qurong and on to Ba’al Bek, wherever that was. As far as Darsal could tell, only the Leedhan actually knew.
Darsal couldn’t stand the sight of those beady, red eyes staring at her from all sides any longer. Skirmishes among the bats disrupted the stillness, but all was otherwise well. In a matter of hours, she would be dead. She had not won Marak. She had not stopped Johnis.
Ill at ease, she shifted in the saddle. This place was full of devilry.
The Shataiki ranks began to rustle, the throngs shifting into formation. They were hungry, Johnis had said, ravenous for a kill, their nostrils riddled with the scent of their favored prey.
Marak grated his teeth, irritated at being pulled in two directions.
“Josef, one bat gets out of hand and I’ll have your head. I’ll keep the head and give the body to the bats. Understood?”
Johnis didn’t answer right away; instead he looked up at the swarm he controlled. “Understood.”
They were exhausted but pressed on into the night. Soon all was quiet. Not one wing fluttered. Darsal heard nothing except the blood surging through her veins and her throbbing, pulsing heart.
As one, the Shataiki surrounding them roared and took flight. Screams shook the night. Darsal jumped and strained to see, but all was black. Then the shrieks were overpowered by the sound of Shataiki feeding on flesh. Living or dead, she did not know.
The expedition party fell into a panic. The Scabs rushed around, trying to find the source of the slaughter, shouting in the midst of Shataiki whipping about them. The bats clawed and bit, wings open wide.
Darsal leaped from the saddle and ran, searching for a weapon. A bat caught her by the shoulders and ripped into her back with its claws. She screeched and kicked it in the gut, refusing to fall to a beast almost as big as she was. It knocked her down.
She grabbed a rock and smashed it into the head of one. She glimpsed a green eye among the red but didn’t have time to respond. Two now fell on her, fighting over her body. One had her by the leg, another by the wrist. They ripped at her flesh and clung to her. Blood seeped from her wounds. She smashed a claw into the hard-packed sand.
Bloodlust sent the rest of the bats into a frenzy. The entire mass began to swarm and rage, boiling in a kind of cauldron.
Metal rang out and slashed through the meat of one of the bats on top of her with a sick, sucking sound. The beast roared as it died. The second turned on her rescuer and left her in the dust. Darsal rolled away and jumped to all fours, still in search of a weapon. The Scabs were fighting now, torches lit and swords in hand. Johnis and Silvie were in there . . . somewhere . . . shouting to one another.
A powerful arm snatched her around the waist and ran, fighting Shataiki with one arm. Darsal was pinned against his side, dangling like a toy and being further battered by the melee.
