Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen (28 page)

Within the shack, the woman’s shrieks cut off as if they had never been. One by one, so too did the cries of her children. Those abrupt endings were as distant as the racket of shouts and hammering steel coming from the road.

Damoc lay curled on the ground, lighted by the growing fire within the first shanty. Where his head should have been, there was nothing, save a spreading pool of blood.

Belina backed away. Her heel struck something and sent it on a lopsided tumble. It stopped against the burning shack. A horrified scream climbed up her throat when she saw Damoc’s half-slitted eyes regarding her, his mouth partway open, as if to impart some last piece of advice. Falling embers sizzled on his cheek, and more smoldered in his close-cropped hair.

What will I tell Nola?
She thought, even as she screamed. She went on screaming after an Alon’mahk’lar moved into the mouth of the alley. It might have been the same that had killed her father, or it might have been another. In the end, it did not matter.

Belina jerked the haversack off her back, pulled a fat earthenware jar out, and flung it at the demon-born’s feet. One moment, all was cast in shadow and ruddy firelight. In the next, an indigo explosion ripped the demon-born into burning gobbets of flesh and shattered bone, and flattened the two shacks on either side. A blinding purple-black fist slammed into Belina, knocked her tumbling down the alley.

~ ~ ~

A gentle wave washed over Leitos’s face, rolled him like a barrel. He came up a moment later, coughing and swiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Both his hand and his face felt burned by the sun.
How did I
—

Another wave drowned the thought. Leitos bobbed to the surface and began treading water. Nearby, the shattered hull of a burning ship rode low in the water. Flames leaped off broken timbers and chased billowing smoke skyward.
I was on that ship. Me ... Sumahn ... Nola.

A little farther away, two more ships were burning amid dozens that were not. Upon their decks, men ran to and fro. Men and Alon’mahk’lar.

He blinked salty water from his eyes, but could not clear the vision of a demon-born surrounded by purple-black flame, as it tried to escape the burning hatch.

In a rush, everything came back. Stealing onto a ship, slaughtering the watch crew, Sumahn casting a jar of Nectar of Judgment into the hold an instant before an Alon’mahk’lar came roaring out.

Adham had told Leitos that Alon’mahk’lar avoided water, as their bones were heavy as iron.
So why had one been aboard the ship they burned, and why were there more on the other ships?

“Gods good and wise, you’re alive!”

Leitos turned and saw two figures paddling closer. Sumahn and Nola, both grinning like fools. Nola’s bandage had been ripped away by the blast, and her scar looked worse for its wet sheen, but he was glad to see them both.

As his companions came together, he said, “We were betrayed.”

Sumahn’s smiled vanished. “I know. No Alon’mahk’lar would have been on the ship we boarded, or any of the others, if they had not known we were coming.”

“What about the others?” Nola asked, turning toward shore.

For a long time, no one said a word. Fires burned all along the winding road from the harbor up to the southern gates of Zuladah. Distant screams drifted over the water.

“We are not done fighting,” Leitos said, and began swimming. Sumahn and Nola called out, but he kept on until he climbed onto a narrow strand of pebbles and sand at the foot of the breakwater.

He had already retrieved his bundled clothes, before his companions joined him. It was not his robes he wanted, but the sword beneath them. The steel whispered as it cleared the scabbard. Then he was running, with Sumahn and Nola close on his heels.

They reached the top of the rocky breakwater, and rushed along its back. Demon-born swarmed the docks, along with armored men.

“Wait!” The urgency of Sumahn’s call halted Leitos.

“What is it?”

Sumahn looked over the burning shanties. “This fight is already over, little brother.”

“Never,” Nola snarled. “My family—your family—is up there. We must help them.” She tried to charge off, but Sumahn caught her arm and dragged her close. She cursed and fought. Grim-faced, he absorbed her blows until she ceased. Panting, she asked, “Would you have us abandon them?”

Sumahn hesitated. “We have no choice.”

Leitos edged closer to his companions. “We can live as cowards, or fight—”

“And die,” Sumahn interrupted. “Would our deaths make us heroes, little brother?”

Instead of answering, Leitos ran toward the screams and the fires. Sumahn swore behind him, but both he and Nola raced to catch up.

Leitos charged down off the breakwater and onto the road, and there hamstrung the first Alon’mahk’lar he saw. The demon-born went down. He swung around in front of the beast and slashed its neck.

Then he was off again, and soon lost track of his companions. He had no plan, and little thought for the consequences of his attack, save to kill as many enemies as presented themselves. Rage burned in his chest, blinded him to fear. He butchered his way through demon-born and men alike, until blood covered his sword and ran over his skin in crimson rivers.

Halfway up the hill, an Alon’mahk’lar flung a limp woman onto the roadway. In the red firelight, Leitos saw that it was Belina, her face covered in soot and blood.

Leitos surged ahead, avoiding yelling men clad in the armor of the City Watch. The demon-born turned to meet him, and easily deflected his sword stroke with its own massive blade. Leitos feinted and swung, the tip of his sword clipping the creature’s knee. Bellowing, the beast dropped to the broken cobbles. Leitos rammed his steel deep into his foe’s yawning mouth and cut off that cry. He tried to yank his sword free, but the demon-born’s teeth bit down. Leitos began kicking at the beast’s face, at the same time yanking the hilt. Bloody steel screeched past clenching teeth, an inch, then two. He kept tugging, all too aware that more enemies were closing in.

His sword finally tore free, and he whipped the blade in a threatening pattern around his head. Laugher drew his eye to an archer a second before the man fired. The arrow thudded into Leitos’s belly, but he felt only a small, fiery prick. He leaped at the archer before he could put another arrow to bowstring. Leitos’s sword shattered the bow’s upper limb. Following the wild strike, he spun closer and buried his blade into the man’s helmed skull. More soldiers swarmed around them, eager to spill Leitos’s blood.

Another arrow struck his back. Leitos wheeled to face the cowardly foe, but now his sword arm refused to work. He switched hands and charged into the ring of men and demon-born. A third and a fourth prick of fire blossomed in his ribs. He tried to raise the sword, but his hand was empty. He tried to breathe, but it seemed he was sucking in water instead of air.

Something hard crashed against the side of his head, and a splash of blood obliterated the sight of one eye. He reeled drunkenly, as a muffled rushing noise filled his ears. Sneering faces blurred before him. Leitos stumbled, reached out with hooked fingers, wanting to gouge out the eyes of his foes. He never touched the first enemy. Whatever had hit his head fell again, crashing between his neck and shoulder.

He fell and lay gasping, blood thick on his tongue, and defeat screaming in his mind.

Chapter 34

“Come to me.” Soft, comforting, familiar. Almost Zera’s voice, but not.

“Where are you?” Leitos asked, wondering if the golden spindle turning in the darkness before him had grown a voice. It seemed unlikely, yet....

“I am where I have been since my end.”

Leitos blinked at that, now sure the voice was coming from the spindle. But how could a thing created within his mind speak?

Because it was
created
within your mind
, came a laughing response. Again, the voice was almost Zera’s, but harsher than the first.

“Do not believe the deceiver,” said the gentle one.

Leitos did not trust either voice.
A dream, then
.

The gentle one spoke again. “Are the arrows in your flesh a dream?”

Mention of those brought him pain, not too much, but enough to remember that something terrible had happened. Fire replaced the spindle, and faces hovered within those flames. Faces of men. Faces of demon-born. All furious, all taunting.

“Am I dead?”

Kian’s words came to mind.
What is death, but another realm of living? It’s just that in this age, the living and the dead are much closer together than they should be, two sides of the same coin, but without the middle.
Adham had said those ideas were born of the madness that infected all who lived too long after being washed in the Powers of Creation.

You are dead
, came the harsh voice.

“You are not dead,” soothed the other.

Leitos’s laughter was devoid of humor. “Which of you am I to believe?”

No answer.

The flames vanished, and once more the golden spindle turned and turned, the silver hook on one end gathering up the colorful chaos of innumerable threads, twisting them into a single cable, dragging it over the revolving whorl, and winding it along the shaft. When the cord reached the top, it stretched off into the black.

“Come to me.” Gentle.

Come to me
. Harsh.

“To the Thousand Hells with you both,” Leitos snarled, and opened his eyes on sunlight glaring off sand dimpled with footprints and speckled with blood.
His
blood, and also some other dark, foul smelling stuff, all of it swarming with flies. The gruesome mixture was running in trickles down his naked legs, collecting on his toes, and falling ... falling ... falling into the dust around a slender pole sunk into the ground beneath him.

Leitos tried to move his hands, but they were bound against the small of his back. He tried to lift his head, but blinding white pain stabbed into his neck, spread through the rest of his body. His insides felt torn open, broken, a pain so great that his mind could not fully contend with its enormity.

Shuddering, he waited for some measure of the agony to pass. It only grew worse. He tried to catch his breath, but couldn’t. He tried to swallow, and gagged. Something was lodged in his throat.

Teeth gritted against a whimpery cry, he tried to look up again. Bones crackled in his neck, his muscles screamed in a voice of scarlet agony, but he finally managed to raise his head, but only to one side. Something rigid kept him from looking straight ahead or turning. Panting, he rested his ear on one shoulder, blinked against the glare.

Across a hundred paces of pale red sand, people sat watching him. Clad in dusty tunics and dead silent, they were arrayed in a wide crescent. Ten or more rows of them, rising up one behind the other. The last row ended below a curved wall studded with thin poles, and upon those dangled limp pennants. Vultures circled higher still, black scrawls wheeling through sun-washed blue.

He searched for the name of what he was seeing, something his father had spoken of when they were both slaves, after a long day of breaking rock in the mines. Adham had told him such places had once been used for games and contests.
An arena
.

A low moan off to one side.

Leitos rolled his eyes, and saw that Ba’Sel had not escaped, after all. An involuntary groan passed Leitos’s lips. His mentor hung naked ten feet off the ground, skewered by a tapered wooden post topped with a maroon-streaked point of burnished steel. Beyond him hung more men. Yatoans. Those few who had pledged to fight Peropis, those who had trusted in Leitos’s belief that the enslaved of Geldain would rise up against their masters, if only someone showed them they could. Instead, his companions had been pierced, while the folk they had sought to free sat in silent attendance, offering no help.

Leitos’s groan became a fearful sob when he realized that he was on a level with his impaled companions. Of their own volition, his eyes turned upward to find a steel point jabbing toward the sky above him. He closed his eyes. He wanted to go back to the place where the spindle turned, and hide there forever.

That desire eluded him.

Within the void of his mind, he heard another of Adham’s tales, this one about how Alon’mahk’lar took great care in
threading
men, and how it was common for their victims to live on for many grueling days, before death finally stole them away.

When he heard the rattle of harnesses and the creak of axles, Leitos refused to open his eyes. He did not want to know what was coming before him. He heard a soft murmur from the seated denizens of Zuladah, and he couldn’t refuse any longer.

Muranna stood atop the seat of a long wagon, much like those used by gate guards to collect the king’s obligations. She wore regal blue-and-cream silks. A delicate golden crown held her braided hair in place.

Leitos’s gaze fell to the contents of the wagon—another impaled man, but his post had been driven through him in the opposite direction, so that the thick end was buried in his neck, thrusting his head to one side at a severe angle. The man’s mouth opened and closed weakly. No sound came. Neither could he see, for his eyes had been sewn shut. Blood was caked in his long, iron-gray hair. It took a moment longer for Leitos to recognize that the gasping man was his father.