Under A Colder Sun (Khale the Wanderer Book 1) (16 page)

She held her sword firm as smoke crept across the apparition’s body, burning through dead flesh and turning rotten bone into cinders.

Leste jerked the blade free, letting the remains collapse to the ground.

The skull came loose to roll away into the rat-infested dark. The corpse bucked and thrashed, the mouth opened, croaking dryly, unable to conjure its murderous wail anymore.

A few moments more and only ashes were left.

Khale stood at her side. He used his blade to scratch the ashes into an intricate sign. “That will bind it. We don’t want it coming after us again. Even the ashes of a fire hold the essence of what came before.”

“What was it?”

“A blood-banshee; some call them Maunds. Conjured by the Autarch from one of his victims, I should think. He will know we are here now.”

Leste nodded, getting her breath back.

“How did you make your sword’s blade wreak and smoke?” Khale asked.

Leste looked at him. “I don’t know.”

“You’re no mage. I would have known long ago.”

“I don’t know how it happened.”

Khale rumbled in his throat, “Perhaps not.”

The world is rotting, Leste, and things are no longer as well hidden as they once were, and those of us once bound are being set free.

She didn’t repeat Kereth’s words to Khale, nor the dream of the shore where Voyane the Blood-Creator had spoken to her. She tried not to think of the scar on her hand. What they all might mean frightened her deeply. She did not want to think on such things. Now was not the time. They pushed through the city towards the one building that retained some of its former splendour: the palace of the Autarch.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The gates of the palace stood open for them. Khale’s two-handed sword was ready and Leste kept her own drawn. He could see her eyes occasionally flicking to it, wondering if it would begin to bleed again by the look of things.

Something passing strange is happening to her
, he thought.

There was a great rustling in the dark halls ahead and the time for musing was over.

Out of the Neprokhodymh pits, there poured a horde of the dead.
Murtuvae
raised from their crypts. Dozens upon dozens of creatures clad in wasted armour, wielding crumbling sword and shield.

Khale swept his sword back and forth through them, knowing that these creatures were not meant to overcome them, merely to slow them. The blades of the resurrected were held together by rust and rot. Their shields and armour split like old parchment as he carved a path through them. But as he felled them like ears of corn, more came from catacomb doors and side corridors to stand within the crushing reach of his blade.

And Khale knew as he waded on, waist-deep in carcass and death, that this was his life eternal: an unrelenting tide of horror that no-one but he could comprehend. The scream of the universe was his own, and the blood of Creation was on his hands. This was the work and design for which he was made and, usually, he found it good.

But this time, it was not to be enough.

These dead men were not worthy of his mettle. His taste for blood was not even piqued by the walking relics as they fell. Khale swung his sword all the harder, sending corpses tumbling into their fellows, crashing to the ground to be crushed into splinters and grit underfoot. He could see a set of great doors standing not far beyond the sea of staggering corpses.

She was on the other side.

Milanda.

He hacked and hacked away at the stiff torsos pressing against him. The extinct creatures crackled and snapped under every stab and thrust. A thick yellow dust rose up, composed of spices and dried essences, which rained down upon the ground as aged spines gave way and broken remains scattered around him, becoming great heaps of dried limb and bone.

Khale looked to Leste and saw that she was close to being overwhelmed by the weight of rotting bodies. There was little he could do to help her. Her swiftness was no strength when there was no room for her to manoeuvre, and there were too many of the crowding horrors between them. He could not wait for her.

He had to go on—for Milanda.

Khale pushed his way through and left her behind to drown in the dead.

*

Khale shattered the door that led into the palace library with a single blow, and felled the three mage-priests attending before the withered men could raise a cry between them. In the carven chair set behind the dais was the hunched, wizened form of the great Autarch, and upon the dais itself was a form covered over by black velvet cloth.

He took the steps up to the dais in a few broad strides and looked upon the Autarch. The Autarch did not return his gaze, for the eyes there were truly as empty as the hollow body the skull rested upon. Nothing stirred inside but hungry worms: the boneless fingers of death.

Khale tore back the black velvet from the altar, and there was Milanda – unbound but with her clothing torn and body bruised. The eyes that peered up at Khale were neither young nor as untouched by the world’s poison as they once had been. They brimmed with an archaic malice accrued over centuries of unlife. Khale knew such eyes well. He met them as the gaze of an equal.

“Autarch.”

Milanda’s lips spread in a smile that was hideously old for such a young mouth, and she stretched languidly. There was no trace of her left. He could see that. She was gone from the body that now spoke.
“It’s ... warm and wet in here ... no longer old and dry ... this body is so warm and so strong ... free of age and pain ... so much blood and life left ... years ahead ... to go ... to come ... I like this ... indeed ... very much ...”

Her fingertips caressed the fine hairs of her pubis and Khale saw the dried traces of her maiden-blood there.

A flicker of dark anger passed behind his eyes at the sight.

Khale’s eyes met those of Milanda, and he searched them still, knowing it was futile and that only the Autarch resided there now.

“All comes to dust, except for me,” he said. “Everyone dies and goes away, except for me. I am the end of the world. I will see it and share it with no other soul. This is why each dawn I die, because the last day comes closer as each morn that comes before it passes away.”

“Fair words ... from a foul form, Khale,”
said the Autarch’s voice.
“Did she die ... not knowing ... you were such a poet—”

The Autarch’s words ended in a choking fit.

Something was wrong; the body twisted violently on the dais.

Milanda’s fair eyes raged and her mouth spat blood.

“This is ... not what was ... agreed. This one is ... not pure,”
the Autarch’s voice cried,
“Alosse promised me ... virginity ... no ... she has been despoiled ...”

“She cannot be”, said Khale.

Then Milanda’s body trembled, and he saw it: the skin of her abdomen undulating, writhing with the motion of a life that was not her own.

This was not the work of the Autarch.

Milanda’s mouth opened, and the Autarch screamed through it as skin and flesh haemorrhaged.

Khale had seen this before. A remnant of the old world he’d thought buried with its blighted iron cities: the seed of Chuma.

The night she was lost to us
, he thought,
it must have happened then.

Blood ran from Milanda’s lips. Her eyes opened wide. It was the Autarch staring through them, rather than the girl he had brought here, but Khale struck the blow for her.

He felt the soft shell of the newborn larvae give when he drove the point of his blade home. He felt its death throes. How its first and last cries drowned inside Milanda’s flesh. The insect-spawn was dead, as was the Autarch, as was she.

There was no light left in her eyes.

“Out, out are the lights,” he whispered, “out all.”

He heard someone enter.

“Khale! You bastard, no!”

It was Leste. He knew that she saw him standing over Milanda, his sword piercing the Princess, and he could see all of her fears coming together as a terrible coldness behind her eyes. She broke into a run, sword drawn and high, ready to fall upon him. She would die in the fight, and she knew that, but she could not let this death pass—not this one. She had to do this, he knew, so Khale flung out his hand and Leste was swept into the air as if caught by a violent blow.

“No!”
she screamed.

“Yes,” he quietly replied.

Leste turned in her flight across the library and saw the approaching mirror, its frame appearing as a fluted maw and its shadowglass surface was black as endless night.

“I will kill you for this, Khale. I will find you and I will kill you.”

These were the last words of Leste Alen as she passed through the mirror and was lost to the Dark.

Khale looked one last time into Milanda’s eyes, at where his sword pierced her, where the lifeblood had run out.

The emptiness of existence, the void of life, bit down on the soul he thought had abandoned him long ago. Hope was too small and human a word for what now died in his breast. He had seen something in Milanda—something worth preserving.

It was dead now.

All that remained was rapine’s wound.

He touched the lines on his face where the witch he raped so many centuries ago had marked him. He saw her eyes before him now. He saw her face. He heard her cries.

Alosse had done this, and the Autarch had done this, but he had also done this: played his part in recreating the horror that made him as he was. He heard the words of the witch, but they were not the curse she once laid upon him.

Some things cannot be forgiven.

And so, something happened that had not happened for many centuries.

Khale the Wanderer wept.

It was a single tear, no more, and it fell onto Milanda’s breast.

What came next began as a tremor, and he found his fingers winding tighter and tighter about the hilt of his sword as it grew into a mighty rumbling. A quaking violence reached out to touch everything around him. Dust fell. Stone shattered. The grinding of his teeth was the grinding of falling masonry as the Autarch’s palace began to collapse. The breath in his nostrils was a thunder that even the Gods in Shadow feared.

And his scream, when it came, was a sundering of all things true.

“Juuu-Laaar!”

It went on, on and on, rolling out as a cataclysmic tide, churning through Neprokhodymh, razing the city to the ground, leaving only dust and a terrible silence in its wake.

Nothing moved in the wreckage for a very long time.

Of those who survived the collapse and might have lived, he cut their heads from their bodies without a second thought. He was Khale. He did not weep. He did not feel. He did not scream. To those who had made these things become a part of him once more, he could only give them pain and death. All who lived in Neprokhodymh died that day, and Khale left its ruins as dawn began to colour the sky.

*

Khale returned alone across the wastes, through the mountains and across the plains to Colm. He came in sight of it and saw what he had expected to see.

The city, fallen.

He had expected no less of the Lords Barneth and Farness. Without a leader, good or bad, its people had been slaughtered. His ears rang with death cries from days not long past. The violated corpses of women and children littered the streets within the fallen walls. Men in armour, and out of it, were scattered in pieces, or pieced together as crude totem poles that wept congealing blood. The armies of Barneth and Farness had come together like two great hands and crushed Colm between them.

All for this,
he thought,
as always
.

Nothing had been left alive. All of the people were dead.

Though something wasn’t right about it.

There should have been birds picking bones clean, and signs of vermin and maggots at their work, but there were none. Something more than a simple slaughter had happened here, but for now he did not care.

Khale took the rotting head of the Autarch—the one token he had claimed after sacking Neprokhodymh—from the bag tied at his waist. He dug around in the ruins of houses until he found a piece of splintered iron and mounted the flaking skull there, in one of Colm’s broken streets. In mourning, in remembrance—he wasn’t sure which.

He looked at it.

“Victory,” he said.

Then, he walked away.

Epilogue

Leste scratched the last notch into the stone wall with raw, bloodied fingers. The piece of rusted iron she had used for the task fell from her trembling hand. Turning her head, she looked over her masterwork: the epitaph she was leaving to mark her time spent in this world. Rows upon rows tallying the days were etched into the mildewed walls. She lost count some time ago, but she kept going nevertheless. All she had left were the days that came and went. Her family was gone, her city was gone, and so was her honour, all because of him.

“You will die, or become lost to me.”

Yrena’s words haunted her, day and night.

She had heard no word, but she knew that she had failed in her heart. And through the days and nights that passed so slowly, she remembered him, and she hated him. She held onto her promise to kill him. It was all she had left. Everything she once had was forsaken and lost.

She did not know how she was still alive, or who her captors were. Occasionally, she heard thin, high screams from beyond the pit’s seal-stone above her head. They fed her on stale water, sour meat, and black bread each day. Streaks of white showed in her ragged auburn hair, and she knew she would be long in dying here. But her hate would not die so easily. It was dearer to her than the memory of her love for Yrena.

There was an aching and itching in her fingertips from the cuts made by the iron. Clothed only in her own filth, she saw her surroundings by what little light filtered in through a solitary crack high above her head where the pit wall met the pit’s seal-stone. She had tried to reach it, tried to climb, but the stones here were slick with moss and lichen. She fell every time. Sometimes, Leste wished that she had died at Khale’s hand.