Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2) (3 page)

The same did not necessarily apply to her, of course. Some of those who had defended the keep had held their swords aloft in pledge to her, but she had been in a fierce killing mood and had slaughtered them all, warriors and robed ones alike. There had been a time when those who served her had taken her to task for such behavior, abhorred under the teachings of the modern form of the Way that the fools followed. But after cutting the braids of enough of those who spoke out, casting their souls into eternal darkness, the others who might have taken issue with her methods either kept to themselves or committed suicide. It was little consequence to her either way.

Now, Uhr-Gol was all but taken. Several kingdoms remained defiant, but they were a trivial matter that she could leave to her underlings while she set her sights on the final prize: the island continent of Ural-Murir. Already her plans were in motion, for she had warriors aplenty and even builders to spare to create the fleets she needed to carry the war across the great and perilous Western Sea. Those preparations were nearing completion, and it would be but a moon cycle before they were ready to set sail.

She was about to turn away when she felt a stirring in her blood, a rise of excitement from one of her small army of chosen ones. They had all been warriors once, but with the aid of magic so dark and so ancient that the priesthoods would have hunted her down had they known she possessed it, she had taken their very souls in her hands. They were hers to do with as she willed, and through their eyes and ears, their feelings, she sensed what transpired in the world far and wide. One of them, her most prized possession, was a young priest of the Desh-Ka, Ria-Ka’luhr. He was a dagger whose tip was a short thrust away from the heart of that ancient order and the hated child, she of the white hair and crimson talons, who lived among them. More than once over the years that had passed since the child’s birth had Syr-Nagath been sorely tempted to have him kill her, but she had stayed her hand. The child had not yet posed any threat, and the priest was far too valuable to waste without good cause. Part of her design was to destroy the priesthoods, starting with the Desh-Ka, who were the most powerful, and he was in the perfect position to help destroy them when the time came. His exposure as a traitor could not be lightly risked.

Syr-Nagath had also kept eyes and ears open for any sign of the child outside the false safety of the Desh-Ka temple. One of the places that was closely watched was Keel-A’ar, where the child had been born and where Syr-Nagath had burned alive the child’s father, Kunan-Lohr, and the city’s other inhabitants.

The puppet who was commander of the watch over Keel-A’ar was the one she sensed now. The white-haired child had appeared at the gates to that city of the dead.

***

She was old, then young. Young, then old. Time crept and flashed by, and around her was only darkness, darkness that could consume the entire universe. Cold, a bone-chilling freeze worse than the terrible winters of T’lar-Gol, pricked her skin and drove icy spikes through her flesh.

Then she was standing on an open plain under the warm morning sun. She could tell from her shadow that it hadn’t moved, despite the sense that a great deal of time had passed. She still shivered inside from the deep cold of the nothingness. Momentarily disoriented and off-balance, she swayed and would have fallen had Ayan-Dar not still been holding her hand.

As the vertigo passed, she loosened her grip and let go his hand, which he rested on the handle of his sword. 

“Behold,” he said softly. “Keel-A’ar, the city of your birth.” 

Before them rose the ancient walls of the once-great city. The fused stone that had withstood countless assaults over the course of millennia was now a sickly gray, scarred and pitted, with no builders to repair or maintain it. The battlements had been ravaged by the weapons the Dark Queen had used, and now stood like broken teeth along the top of the wall. 

Keel-Tath stared through the main gate, around which the stone had been blackened and glazed from the heat of the fires that had consumed the city and its inhabitants. Her hand clenched around the handle of her sword as she slowly stepped toward the gray, dead earth that lay beyond the threshold. Only she knew it wasn’t earth. It was the ash, packed hard over the years by rain and sun, of the dead. Of what once had been her kin. The Dark Queen had killed everyone in the city and then poisoned the earth within and around it. Nothing grew for half a league beyond the walls. The land was dead and lifeless as the surface of the Great Moon.

Many times had she tried to imagine what the city would look like, but even her most vivid nightmares, which still visited her nearly every night, paled against the reality. The nightmares were born of the terror and agony of the people who had died here, especially her father, whose emotions had pounded through her blood, even as an infant. The emotional bond had been so strong that the healers had been forced to keep her tiny body sedated for days, but the pain and fear had never left her. Even now they were her constant companions, like her shadow cast by the sun.

But the city itself had not been why she wanted to come here. While the deaths of the tens of thousands of citizens had been an unspeakable tragedy, two of those deaths were bound to her heart.

“Where are they?” The words were difficult to force from her lips, and she could feel the warmth of the mourning marks coursing down her cheeks. “My mother and father?”

“There, child.” Ayan-Dar pointed to a sword whose point had been driven into the ground. The living metal, still gleaming as when the blade had first been forged, was fused with the earth, which had been molten and turned to black glass. “The sword belonged to your mother. Ria-Ka’luhr recovered it after she was killed, but we never found your father’s. T’ier-Kunai melded your mother’s blade with the earth where we burned your mother’s body and poured your father’s ashes over hers. For as long as the Desh-Ka exist, this will be a monument to their sacrifice, and none, not even the Dark Queen, would ever dare desecrate it.” He frowned. “At least so long as she still has reason to fear us.”

Keel-Tath came to stand before the sword, a lonely marker in the barren wasteland. As she touched the handle, which was made of crystal and inlaid with gold and other, even more precious metals, she asked softly, “Did you see my father die?”

Closing his eye, Ayan-Dar nodded, and she sensed his shame. “Yes. The high priestess and I were witness to this abomination. And to your father’s death.”

“You watched it, but could do nothing to stop it?”

She felt a sudden wave of anguish from her old mentor, and even before he spoke, she knew the truth

Ayan-Dar knelt beside her, and she could sense the weight of years upon him. “I am so sorry, child. I would have intervened, cast aside my vows to the Desh-Ka and sacrificed my honor to stop the Dark Queen. But I had already disgraced myself before T’ier-Kunai, and could not bring myself to do so again. I do not expect you to understand, or forgive. Our Way is not one to tread lightly, and there are many burdens we would rather not bear. I have many, far too many, such burdens upon my tired soul. But of all that I bear, standing here, bound by honor to do nothing while this city and your father perished, weighs upon me the most heavily.”

She felt him touch her shoulder lightly, but she pulled away. In that moment, her heart was full of bitterness and loathing for him and T’ier-Kunai, for the Desh-Ka, for the Way itself. “What is the Way, when the mighty Desh-Ka can only stand idly by while a monster such as Syr-Nagath ravages the land and its people?” A wave of anger and hate rose within her, and she saw Ayan-Dar recoil at its intensity. “The day will come,” she told him, “when I will tear the beating heart from the Dark Queen’s breast and feed it to the animals of the forest.” Taking in her hands the blade of the sword that was the monument to her parents, she went on, “This I swear to you, my mother and father.” Turning to look back at the dead city, she said, “And to you, the fallen of Keel-A’ar, and all the others who have suffered the Dark Queen’s evil, I swear this shall be so. I swear.”

“You cannot take vengeance as a member of the priesthood, even as a disciple,” Ayan-Dar said. “No matter how difficult it is, we must stand apart from the events beyond the temple walls and the
kazhas
that we serve. I wish very much to change that, child. But for now, that is our Way.”

She stood there for a long time, staring through the gate of the dead. “It is not right,” she said at last. “They died on my account, Ayan-Dar. All of them. And the queen hunted down those who called Keel-A’ar home and killed them, didn’t she?”

“Yes. If there are any left alive, they are among the growing numbers of the honorless ones.”

She turned to stare at him. “Honorless? It is the queen who is without honor! Tell me that what she did here was part of the Way, that it was honorable.”

“Syr-Nagath comes from the Ka’i-Nur, child. Their Way is much older and even more brutal than ours. Such things as this,” he looked through the gates, imagining again the raging flames that consumed the city’s population, “are not forbidden to them, or to her. When I was in their temple to learn of the prophecy of your birth, their warriors thought nothing of slaughtering their own keepers of the Books of Time to get to me, something that we would never even contemplate. But we are powerless to interfere.”

Before Keel-Tath could respond, Ayan-Dar turned to the east, where the forest crept to the edge of the lifeless wasteland around Keel-A’ar. A full cohort of mounted riders was thundering toward them, a plume of dust rising from their
magtheps’
clawed feet. Ayan-Dar snorted in derision. “It took them long enough. I wager their leader will lose his head for being so slow to react to our appearance. They would have been better off posting their watch within the city, but so far as I know no one, not even honorless ones, have set foot within its walls since the slaughter. The spirits of the dead are restless here, I wager.” Looking back at Keel-Tath, he said, “We should probably move along, for I doubt T’ier-Kunai would be happy if we slaughtered them all.”

“No.” Keel-Tath moved up beside him and drew her sword. Her blood was on fire, and her body shook with rage. She shifted the sword to her left hand and drew one of the deadly shrekkas, an edged flying weapon, from where it was clipped to her left shoulder. “I would like to pay my respects to Syr-Nagath.”

“As you say, child.” He also unclipped a shrekka, but did not draw his sword. Unlike Keel-Tath, he only had one arm. “The high priestess did say to let you blood your sword if the opportunity presented itself. And so it has.” He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “But I think taking on a full cohort, almost five hundred warriors, on our own is a bit ambitious, is it not?”

She looked into his eye. “Not for you.”

He huffed. “Perhaps in my younger days, child. And that was a very long time ago. But we shall at least give them something to think about.”

The two of them stood there, facing the charging warriors who quickly closed the gap. Keel-Tath’s heart beat faster, fear mixing with the anger that raged in her soul. But she would not run. She would not. Not until she had blooded her sword in battle.

Ayan-Dar grunted, and she felt a wind at her side. Something flashed across the distance to the attacking cavalry, and the head of the warrior who carried the queen’s banner fell from his shoulders. The body toppled from the
magthep
, causing the warriors behind to dance out of its way, lest their own mounts fall.

Twice more did he throw a deadly shrekka, and twice more did enemy warriors fall. Keel-Tath looked up at him in wonder. The enemy warriors had not yet closed to throwing range.

The priest drew his sword. “Shield your eyes!”

Keel-Tath, trusting that the elder warrior could protect her, threw an arm over her eyes as a hail of shrekkas flew from the leading rank of the queen’s warriors.

The weapons disappeared in bright flashes and claps of thunder, caught in a tight web of cyan fire that erupted from the blade of Ayan-Dar’s sword to form a shield. Keel-Tath peeked out just enough to see what was happening, and was rocked by the explosions as the metal of the weapons disintegrated.

The cyan web vanished to reveal the first rank of warriors. The
magtheps
and their riders, blinded by the flashes and disoriented, stumbled. The cohort’s orderly formation and fearsome charge was blunted and thrown into utter confusion. Braying
magtheps
and screaming riders in the first ranks tumbled to the ground, some of them trampled by the warriors coming up behind.

“Now, child!” 

With a howling war cry, Keel-Tath followed Ayan-Dar right into the center of the maelstrom. Remembering that she still held her shrekka, she hurled it at a nearby rider who was coming to her senses. The weapon slashed through the enemy warrior’s throat, and she fell from her mount as a gout of arterial blood spurted from the wound. 

She turned to see Ayan-Dar, and stood for a moment, transfixed, as he whirled around her like a sword-bearing tornado. His blade was barely visible, so fast did it move in his old but powerful hand, hacking and stabbing their enemies.

A warrior on a
magthep
charged her. She feinted to one side, then deftly whirled to the other as the warrior’s blade flashed down. Her own blade cut through his upper thigh, and with a scream he fell from his mount.

Another warrior lunged at her, and she parried his blade. He was far larger and more powerful, and quickly drove her back, separating her from Ayan-Dar. Glancing behind her, she saw other warriors, on foot now, moving in. 

The big warrior made a sweeping overhand cut aimed at her head. She knocked it to the side with her left gauntlet, then made a lightning swift lunge with her sword, driving it into his abdomen just below his breastplate. She shoved the gasping warrior backward, twisting her sword free with both hands as he fell. 

Looking around, she saw that she was completely surrounded. Gathering her courage, she charged the nearest warriors.