Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen (11 page)

Ba’Sel looked over the greatest port city in all of Geldain. Beyond the quays, as ever teeming with fishermen and sailors, the city’s seaside wall rose a hundred paces above turquoise waves. Mighty turret towers jutted higher still, and marched down its length. Near on a thousand years earlier, Emperor u’Hadn had raised the walls to defend the Onyx Palace. They still stood firm, their massive sandstone blocks pale gold in the early dawn light. No army had ever broken Kula-Tak, and it appeared that not even the terrible shaking wrought by the death of the Three had been able to so much as leave a mark upon the city’s defenses.

“Perhaps all of Geldain escaped the destruction,” Ba’Sel said hopefully, fingering the scab on his cheek. He had taken the wound the night Sister Ellonlef had been captured. It itched terribly, but he counted it a bargain to have escaped that attack, and the north, with his life.

The same could not be said for the rest of the warriors who had pledged their swords for the gold promised by the Izutarian mercenary, Kian Valara. Sixty Asra a’Shah had crossed the Sea of Drakarra to seek fortune in Aradan, but less than a score had returned home.

Ba’Sel hoped Kian had found the Sister of Najihar, and that she had not been transformed the way Fenahk had been. The memory of his cousin coming out of the swamp, his skin stretched too tight over the straining demon within, made Ba’Sel’s guts lurch. He pushed aside the image.

As the rest of the men clambered off the moored ship and down the gangplank, each of them walking as if the Sea of Drakarra still rolled beneath their feet, Nazeen said, “We’ll need horses and supplies. I’ve an uncle in the Sleeper’s Quarter who—”

“We’ll journey to Hashala for what we need,” Ba’Sel interrupted, in his mind seeing the Onyx Palace sitting atop the highest of four terraced hills at the heart of the city. Before the skies had caught on fire, the palace had been a landmark to seek out, a place of majesty and mystique that lured many a pilgrim into its shadow. When he considered it now, he thought of another dark building, the Black Keep El’hadar, a place of death and curses lurking at the verge between the Qaharadin Marshes and the Kaliayth Desert. Other than the elusive history of their construction, and seemingly built of the same dark materials, the two structures were nothing alike. But the similarities were enough for Ba’Sel to avoid seeing either again in his lifetime.

“A long way to walk,” Nazeen said, as the men gathered round.

Ba’Sel smiled thinly. “We are Asra a’Shah, but first and always we are Na’hani, the sand-runners of Eponta. And so we shall run.”

And so they ran a handful of days down the Emperor’s Highroad to Hashala, before turning east toward the searing desert of Eponta, with its granite peaks and cinder cones brooding over tabletop plateaus and sweeping dunes white as snow. Over those many leagues, Ba’Sel found himself recanting his earlier expectations that Geldain had come away unscathed.

It turned out that Hashala, a walled town that served traders who had no wish to suffer the bustle and squalor of Kula-Tak, had been devastated by a terrible earthquake. Uneven mounds of rubble marked where the town’s mudbrick wall had stood. Within the town, only the sturdiest houses remained erect, and those stood with cracked foundations, leaning walls, and fallen roofs. Stone cairns marking the buried dead outnumbered the living who had built them. Supplies were scarce, for most folk had fled—not to Kula-Tak, as Ba’Sel would’ve expected, but into the sun-blasted barrens that stretched between towns and cities along the Highroad, oft called the Spine of Geldain, and some even beyond to the Mountains of Fire, or anywhere else they thought safety might await them.

“They go where fire does not fall from the sky, and places where murderous spirits do not roam about,” a ragged horse trader had told them, eyes darting as if he could see specters creeping out from behind every rock or bush.

Mahk’lar was what the man meant, but Ba’Sel did not say so. There was too much trouble and despair as it was, without mentioning horrors loosed from Geh’shinnom’atar.

“Why not the king’s city?” Nazeen asked.

“Kula-Tak isn’t safe,” the trader imparted in a conspiratorial whisper, “no matter how much King Daju and his councilors say otherwise. I’ve kin who lived there, and they barely escaped with their lives. They told of darkness coming out of the ground, out of wells, out of the very walls of the Onyx Palace, rising like oiled smoke and stealing the flesh of the living, and making that flesh into other
things
,” he finished with a shiver.

Neither Ba’Sel nor his men argued the point, for they had seen the same. By the trader’s slow nod, he took their silence as confirmation. “With you buying the last of my stock, I’ll be on my way soon enough. Should have left before now. These lands are no longer safe.”

“Is anywhere safe?” Nazeen asked quietly, but the horse trader had no answer.

While Ba’Sel and his company did not see any Mahk’lar on the dusty roads to Eponta, there was enough destruction along the way to worry about their homelands. Evidence of the Tears of Pa’amadin, so named by Sister Ellonlef, had turned huge swaths of the desert into planes of greenish glass, or cratered its surface with unnavigable pits, forcing the warriors far afield.

A fortnight later than it should have taken, they reached their arid homelands, and discovered that many of the granite mountains of Eponta had been reduced to broken hills. The long-slumbering cinder cones now spewed molten rock. And the once pristine dunes lolled sullenly under thick blankets of choking gray ash.

Ba’Sel’s unease grew over every bitter mile of every bitter league they spent tromping under a blood-hazed sun, or drinking acrid water from once sweet springs. He kept his worries at bay by imagining taking a wife, and together raising good tall sons who would till soil and reap crops, instead of the blood and souls of men, as he had done most of his life.

He kept that dream alive until they came to Salgo, the village of his birth, and that of half the men with him. What hopefulness remained in any of them died on that day.

The village stood unharmed, but the folk who walked its few dusty streets, or sat around the village well, were folk no more. When they saw the newcomers, they attacked.

The last sight Ba’Sel had of home was his mother, naked and sprinting toward him, eyes glistening black orbs. As she came, the rich sable skin between her pendulous breasts ruptured, and the ribs underneath broke apart to disgorge a howling abomination that should never have been seen by the eyes of living men. She came, shrieking his name in a sacrilegious tongue, gobbets of rancid black meat falling from the tear in her chest to splatter at her clawed feet.

Ba’Sel and the others survived by running. That same fear kept him and his men running over the face of Geldain for many years, but it never kept them safe for long. His men died, one at a time, some taken by wandering Mahk’lar, others slaughtered by desperate bandits, and later by a new race, the Alon’mahk’lar, those who served an enigmatic being called the Faceless One who had risen up across the Sea of Drakarra. In the end, long years finished off all the rest.

But not Ba’Sel. He lingered, ageless and afraid of being alone.

Before Nazeen died in a wind-carved cave in the flank of a sandstone cliff, he suggested, “Perhaps something happened at that temple in the marshes? Perhaps it changed you?”

“Why me, and not you?” Ba’Sel countered. He held Nazeen’s withered hand in his own, which was still as strong as it had been the day Prince Varis emerged pale and ghastly from that forsaken temple, and began conjuring strange fires to turn Ba’Sel’s friends and kin to ash.

Nazeen, his last and oldest friend from the days before the Upheaval, shrugged weakly under a dirt-stiffened blanket. “Who can name the reasons the Silent God of All favors some, and not others?”

When Ba’Sel buried his friend in the lee of the same cliff that had sheltered them both, fear, his old acquaintance, turned to hate. And when, some years later, while wandering aimlessly over the northern edge of Eponta, he stumbled across what was the first of many slave mines, his hate became reckless. He attacked and killed the Alon’mahk’lar slavemasters standing guard.

After the slaughter, his mindless fury fled at the sight of the slaves, their once pale skin roasted raw under the blistering sun.

“We are Izutarians, stranger,” one slave said in answer to Ba’Sel’s question, and then introduced himself as Garsta.

“I knew an Izutarian many years gone,” Ba’Sel mused. “We rode together before....” He trailed off, knowing how unbelievable it would sound to these chained men, none of them with years enough etched on their faces to have been born before the Upheaval. “His name was Kian Valara. A good man. A—” Be’Sel cut off at Garsta’s shocked expression.

“You know the King of the North?” Garsta gasped.

“What kings I knew have all been tumbled into crypts, or their bones left for buzzards and jackals. Those who rule now, have given their souls to the Faceless One and his minions.”

“Not Kian,” Garsta insisted. “He fights still, and with him his wife, Sister Ellonlef, and the Lords Azuri and Hazad. Without them, Izutar would have fallen years ago.”

“He must be very old,” Ba’Sel said slowly.

“No older than you, friend.”

“And you don’t think that strange?” Ba’Sel questioned, more hesitant than before.

“It’s the gift of Pa’amadin,” Garsta said matter-of-factly. His fellows nodded fervent agreement.

“The Silent God of All is not known for interfering with the lives of men,” Ba’Sel said.

“Believe what you will,” Garsta answered. “But I tell you, Kian Valara lives, and he has joined the clans of Izutar together to make war against the Faceless One and his armies.”

“And yet here you stand, half a world from home.”

“The war does not go well for us,” Garsta admitted. “Be that as it may, we will never lay down our swords and spears. Lesser men willingly give themselves over to the Faceless One’s chains, but Izutar will never submit to that hell-spawned tyrant and his demon-born hordes. Until our last breath and last drop of blood, we will fight,” he finished, a wild savagery lighting his eyes.

“A noble purpose,” Ba’Sel said soothingly. “But as I said, you’re far from home.

Garsta looked around, eyes narrowed. “I know we sailed a goodly while, but where are we?”

“Geldain, across the Sea of Drakarra.”

If this shocked the Izutarian, it did not show. “I cannot repay the favor I ask, but if you could lead us to Kula-Tak, there are those who can get us home.”

“Kula-Tak is the stronghold of the enemy in these lands,” Ba’Sel said.

“All the world is the stronghold of the Faceless One,” Garsta said. “Yet every fortress has cracks and weaknesses that cunning vermin can sneak through.”

Ba’Sel eventually agreed to the man’s request, and when he left him and his companions outside the city, he vowed to help any other slaves he happened across. An easy bargain to make, as he never expected to see another Izutarian. But over the intervening years, one slave mine became many, and then more, until you could scarcely miss finding one.

Knowing he would need aid, Ba’Sel searched the wildest realms of Geldain for other fugitives. With the old ways dead and buried under the dust of a lost age, Ba’Sel abandoned the name Asra a’Shah, and created a new order. In time, the Brothers of the Crimson Shield became known as men who fought from the shadows, men who did not fear the Faceless One, or his demon-born terrors.

Again and again over the years, Ba’Sel heard the name Kian Valara, the King of the North, and he kept his word to help where and when he could. Over four lifetimes of men, he and his warriors trod the face of a broken world.
Four lifetimes—

~ ~ ~

“—of men, I have trod the face of a broken world,” Ba’Sel whispered, snared briefly in the murky fog hovering between mislaid years and the present. His eyes shone wet and hot in the deepening gloom. He didn’t remember the sun setting, but it had. So, too, had the puddle of water evaporated.

“Mother?” he pleaded. “Nazeen? Ishin?” he cast about, searching dark corners, and found their faces peering at him, expressionless, dead. All dead. Everyone he knew, gone. And yet he lingered still. Ageless. Afraid. Alone.

Hide.

Ba’Sel flinched violently. No one was with him. Had the warning come from his own mind? “H-hello?”

Hide.

“Who’s there?” He pressed himself into a tight ball, head buried under his arms.

A thudding boom came from across the room. Ba’Sel saw a flickering light outlining the edge of a door he had previously missed.
Or did I come through it?
Must have, and now someone has followed
.

“Go away,” he whimpered. “Gods good and wise, leave me in peace.”

Boom!
The noise reverberated and rebounded off itself, pounded into Ba’Sel’s skull.
Boom! ... Boom! ... Boom!

Slow, deliberate blows. Jagged cracks showed in the door.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

A long, splintered length of wood flew inward, bounced over the floor. Ba’Sel could not stifle a scream.

Boom! ... Boom! ... Boom!

Now there was another noise. A growling voice, deep, guttural. The words savaged his wits like the flashing teeth of wolves. He knew what spoke, knew the face it wore.