Vengeance of the Dark King
Book Two of the Bloodsword Trilogy
Mark Murphy
For lo, there shall come a new King, clothed in righteousness and blessed by the gods. And he shall rise up and smite the false prophets, driving the darkness back into the Valley of Shadows, and the people shall shout out his name with voices filled with joy and hope: All Hail the One Who Leads!
--The Prophecies of Ramallah, Ch 4, Verse 14 (Forbidden Version)
***
Uzo gazed at the view screen and shook his head.
“One single, stupid boy,” he muttered. “That overly ambitious child changed everything.”
From the sky, at least, the dense Godswood forest still seemed to be the same beautiful, peaceful place it had been for centuries: a verdant ocean of trees that rolled all the way to the western horizon, its immense green expanse criss-crossed by the silver ribbons of its three great rivers and punctuated by plumes of smoke from its various isolated pockets of human habitation. To the east gleamed the endless sapphire waters of the Great Sea; to the north loomed the massive snow-capped spires of the Zephyr Mountains, a set of jagged peaks vaulting into the sky just beyond the Dragon Lake. The sun was brilliant, a golden coin sailing peacefully across an aquamarine sky.
Uzo, sitting in the flying ship Commander’s Chair clad in full battle armor, took in the view and cracked his knuckles absently. Flying over the Godswood always reminded him of his
sweet Misha, who hailed from these parts, back home tending to her piebald goats and the cackling flock of frizzled chickens as the sun warmed her slim shoulders. His heart ached a little for her.
Home and hearth, hearth and home, the old song went. Wasn’t that it? He had not sung it in so long.
But Uzo knew that appearances could be deceiving. He had to remind himself of that poisonous little fact every time a gap-toothed villager hurled a bottle bomb at one of his centurions, or set fire to a cache of armaments, as had happened in the stubborn little hamlet they had wiped out in the Southern Islands last week.
One silly little boy was all it took, he thought.
But that wasn’t quite all, was it?
One boy and one dragon, he reminded himself, his dark eyes narrowing ever so slightly.
Uzo was not a big believer in musty old prophecies. And teenage boys were not generally something to fear, either—although he had to admit that he had been pretty formidable as a teenager. He would always remember the time he beat Barbigan, the neighborhood bully, to a bloody pulp for terrorizing Umiah, his younger brother, at school. At the end--bloodied, battered and unable to stand--Barbigan had pleaded for his life, even though Uzo had not had any intention of killing him.
So Uzo killed Barbigan anyway, smashing his in feeble brains with a wooden club. After that, no one ever bothered Umiah again. Abject fear, as it turned out, can be a powerful motivator.
That was perfect, Uzo thought, chuckling to himself.
Contrary to popular opinion, Uzo did not particularly enjoy killing people. He only did killed if the circumstances demanded it—as they had with Barbigan. And on this occasion, they did as well. High Priest Harros had been right, of course: The boy had to be stopped. The dragon, quite simply, had to be destroyed. Any faint hopes the villagers had needed to be crushed mercilessly under the heel of Uzo’s steel-toed boots. Uzo was not afraid of teenaged boys or old prophecies. But dragons were another thing entirely. For he had seen firsthand the sort of carnage even one dragon could bring. If the boy and his comrades somehow found a way to breed them, well . . .
The flying ship banked sharply right, past the banks of clouds that always seemed to billow up from the depths of the Mist Valley. The ship’s lurch sent a cascade of cold, stinking broth over the edge of the bowl that the servant girl was holding. One of the shillix larvae plopped onto the floor as well—a wriggling pink thing, soft as a baby’s bottom, with tiny blue eyes and a toothless pucker of a mouth that seemed to always be looking for a bosom to suckle.
“Pick that up!” Uzo bellowed, kicking the helpless larva with his boot.
“Wh-where is it, sire?” the servant girl asked, balancing the bowl deftly on one outstretched palm.
Her voice shocked Uzo. He gazed up at her.
She might have been pretty once—but she was pale and bony now, her lips thin and bloodless. There was nothing much to her at all.
Uzo had not heard a servant girl speak in years. They usually fluttered about the ship like moths, noiseless in their flowing white robes, deftly balancing platas and bowls filled with refreshments for the centurions, or scurrying here and there with papers and tablets and such. On a day-to-day basis, Uzo never even noticed them; they were merely animated furniture, serving their stated purpose aboard the Dark King’s vast airborne vessel dutifully, without questions, opinions or hardly any thought at all.
The perfect woman, he had thought to himself more than once.
“It’s to your right,” he grunted.
She was blind, of course—like all of them. Her sightless eyes roved aimlessly in her bald head like a pair of marbles. But the fat shillix larva was wriggling on the oval Command Room floor, its tiny mouth making a thin mewling sound that sounded like the air being let out of a balloon, and she heard it. The servant girl’s head cocked to one side and she dipped down, graceful and lightning quick, scooping the larva up in one hand while holding the broth-filled bowl perfectly upright in the other.
In an instant, the servant girl was standing at attention once again—silent and motionless, dead eyes staring straight ahead at nothing. Uzo settled back in the Commander’s Chair and waited for the landing blasters to fire. He took another moment to stare at the 360-degree holographic screen as it rotated about his head. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, which pleased him immensely.
No crazy villagers this time, he thought, glancing at the flickering monitors of the ship’s Command Room.
The Command Room, when dormant, was a simple oval space nicely appointed with rich mahogany and burnished steel. It was outfitted with a swivel-mounted command chair in its center, perched on a slightly raised round metal podium. Framed full-length pictures of Uzo, Harros and Kranin hung on one wall; a doorway portal was on the opposite wall, although when it was closed it was difficult to make out where the wall began and the portal ended. Closed down, the room looked like the office of some minor public official in Capitus.
When it was battle-ready (or “Up” in centurion lingo), the Command Room was something else entirely.
At present, the room was Up—and it was filled with clusters of holographic monitors that hovered and wavered like mirages glimmering on the edge of the desert. Uzo’s eyes flicked from one monitor to the next, scanning for threats. The computers did this as well, their automated observations driven by an arcane algorithm known only to the Dark King’s most experienced battle advisers. That was good enough for most people, but not for Uzo. His warrior instincts were as finely honed as the edge of a Valerian sword—and sometimes he would see things that the computers would not.
Uzo wrapped his clawed fingers around one of the fattest of the larvae and speared its heart with his long, pointed thumbnail. He felt the crimson blood run down his hand, warm and sticky.
“This one’s ripe,” he said, to no one in particular. “It’s perfect.”
He stared at the pink, bloody creature for a moment. Its mouth was open, gasping frantically in a perfect little O, and its glittering bead-like eyes bulged with pain.
“Off you go, then,” he said, sinking his teeth into the softest part of the larva, just behind the head. In another year, the shillix would have been a flying insect as large as an eagle, its tiny mouth parts hardened into a beaklike proboscis filled with thousands of razor-sharp teeth—and it could then join its swarming brethren in the Western Wilderness, eating anything that dared to live. Uzo had seen shillix swarms skeletonize an entire herd of cattle in a matter of minutes, descending from the heavens in a boiling cloud of wings, legs and fangs, leaving nothing behind but blood-spattered bones. He had even seen a swarm of shillix eat a centurion right out of his armor, their chitinous forelimbs gripping his helmet and chest-piece and violently tearing them away like so much tissue paper. He could still hear the centurion’s screams if he thought about it (which he tried not to do)—hoarse shrieks of sheer terror, crescendoing as the shillix clustered about his face and hungrily tore out his eyes and tongue. This was followed, ultimately, by a horrific silence as the swarm dutifully worked its way through the rest of him.
“Better to eat them now than for them to eat us later,” Harros had once said. And the old High Priest was right---as he usually was.
The ship was landing in the clearing next to the entrance to the Priestbain Road. Uzo always hated that part of the journey. The Priestbain Road was long and tortuous, meandering along a roadway set in a deep trench dug through the densest thickets of the Godswood Forest. Each step of the way along the Priestbain Road, Uzo knew he was being watched. He could feel the eyes of the priests’ sentries staring down at him from the treetops, their gaze boring into him unseen from the shadowy cascades of vines and dangling, moist clumps of moss. And even though the sentries were ostensibly on his side, the whole ordeal unnerved him. The warrior in him told him that it was simply wrong.
“Never concede the high ground,” was something Urgo, his old regimental Commander, had always said, all those years ago.
But Urgo was dead, of course—baked in his own armor by Xixan, the last fire-breathing dragon from the huge, ancient vermithrax nest on the north shore of Dragon Lake. The damned red-eyed thing had come screaming down out of the sky, right out of the sun, and its flaming white-hot breath had cooked the whole regiment in their tracks. Uzo had been on sentry duty that day and had been posted on the edge of their encampment, over two hundred paces away. Otherwise he would have died along with the rest of them.
You gave up the high ground that day, old man, Uzo thought.
He grabbed another shillix larva and popped it into his mouth whole, feeling the creature’s fat little body rupture between his sharpened teeth like a large pink grape.
Anyhow, all men die, he thought absently, standing up.
He strapped on his helmet, switching on the infrared sensor once just to check it, and pulled on his thermal biogloves. Uzo could hear the vanadium blast shield outside being lowered—clank!clank!clank!—and then the great ship was on the ground at last, its metal undercarriage audibly groaning as it settled onto the forest floor.
Uzo waited. He always waited until the indicator lights had changed before he would switch the monitors off—for Uzo did not like surprises.
A band of rebels had once fired on him from the edge of the treeline at a clearing near the Dead City just after the ship had landed, apparently believing that he had already closed down the Command Room. But they had been wrong—dead wrong, in fact. And he had lit them up, blasting their pitiful little band into oblivion in a matter of seconds with the flick of a single switch.
He had enjoyed imagining the surprised rebels’ eyes widening as the pulse cannons on the ship’s undercarriage opened up, belching great gouts of flame and heat as the trees around them exploded. There had been nothing much left of those poor sots when they picked through the incinerated remains later that afternoon—merely a scorched boot, the cooked foot still inside, some nondescript scraps of clothing, and a couple of unrecognizable bones that had been charred strangely gray, like pieces of driftwood.
A great day, he thought, recalling his triumph.
He glanced at the monitors again, his eyes roving from screen to screen, and sank his teeth into another wriggling shillix larva.
The indicator lights that rimmed the ceiling flickered once, and then again, before shifting from red to solid green.
“Close down,” he barked—and the monitors all vanished at once, leaving him alone in the Command Room with his now-empty glass of Capitus’s finest ale and the framed pictures of himself, Harros and Kranin staring at him reproachfully from the opposite wall.
And the blind servant girl, of course—as still as a statue, so motionless he could not even see her breathing.
“Another night in the bloody Priestbain,” he grumbled out loud.
The airlock equalizer hissed, flooding the room with the humid summer air of the Godswood, and then the doorway opened like the gaping mouth of some great metal viper.
Harros was standing at the foot of the walkway, leaning heavily on a gnarled blackwood cane topped with a ruby orb of impressive size. He was clad in the full High Priest’s regalia—heavy gold-brocaded black robes, with thick gold chains draped about his neck and waist that seemed to pull him down towards the forest floor.
“Greetings, old friend!” Harros said.
Uzo nodded, but said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the treeline.
The old priest was physically unimpressive--a small-statured man, balding, with a thin scrim of gray hair and a pair of glittering silvery eyes that looked like coins set deep inside his skull. The other centurions, seeing the old man’s stooped gait and hooked nose, had nicknamed him “The Buzzard.” And, indeed, Harros looked very much like a dried-up old carrion-bird. That moniker was what Uzo thought of when he saw Harros waiting on him—patiently, a thin smile painted primly across his lips, as if he had all the time in the world.
But Harros was anything but an innocuous old bird. He was, in fact, more zharga than buzzard—a deadly viper lying in wait, not to be crossed.
Harros only resembled a buzzard in the way that he fed upon the dead.
“Walk with me, Uzo,” the old priest said. His voice, by some strange alchemy, was the voice of a man far younger.
Harros made the slightest motion with an arthritic forefinger and the two young priests that accompanied him stepped away, bowing. Four armor-clad centurions, in full battle regalia, took their positions in front of them; four more fell in step behind them.
The door to the flying ship closed behind them with a soft sssssssss.
Harros walked slowly and deliberately through the clearing was they moved toward the huge stone gate at the edge of the forest that led to the Priestbain Road. The old High Priest’s gait was measured, as though the potential consequences of each step had to be carefully considered.
“So what have you heard?” Harros said.
“There are rumblings that the boy lives.”
“Hogwash!” Harros snorted. “I killed him myself. Cut him right through the ribs, just under the heart. No one survives that.”
“So have we recovered his body yet?”
Harros shook his head. The chains around his neck jingled softly.
“It remains . . . missing. You may remember that his body was stolen that night and never recovered. Taken from the scene by a despicable band of rebels posing as health workers.”
“So where are these body thieves? Perhaps they could lead us to the boy’s stinking corpse. We could parade his rotting head about on a stick and teach the rabble a lesson in obedience.”
Harros leaned heavily on his cane as he stepped over a tangled mass of roots at the edge of the forest.
He sighed.
“The body thieves remain missing, as well. Someone orchestrated a jailbreak on that first night, before your centurion brigade arrived from Capitus. The culprits escaped, but we have been hunting them.”
“Any leads, then?”
Harros shook his head.
“I’ve had War Chief Kranin on it, but he’s had no success thus far. It was as though the rebels vanished into thin air.”
“Kranin! But isn’t he the boy’s stepfather?”
Harros leaned upon the mossy rock face of the gate to the Priestbain Road, catching his breath, which came in staggered wheezes now.
Perhaps you’re not quite so dangerous anymore, old man, Uzo thought.
“There’s no . . . love lost between them, Uzo. Kranin and the boy . . . did not exactly see eye to eye. Kranin was a rival with the boy’s father for his mother’s affections. The boy was stridently opposed to their marriage. He didn’t even attend the wedding ceremony. Do you . . . do you see?” the old Priest said, catching his breath.
Uzo nodded.
They stood in front of the gate now—a gate that towered forty paces above them, capped with the jagged spiked crown emblematic of the Dark King. Massive rolled steel bars backed by a heavy cedar-planked door blocked their passage. Stone-faced centurions, four on each side, had flanked the gate, their stark white armor gleaming in the midday sun.
Harros inserted the ruby at the end of his staff into a depression in the stone gate and rotated it a quarter-turn clockwise.
Gears began turning inside the gatehouse. A mob of beady-eyed crows that had been roosting atop the gate took noisily to the sky, wheeling about and cawing. Slowly, laboriously, the gate began to open, revealing the dark, damp gash of the Priestbain Road that ripped through the Godswood like an open wound.
“We should ride through this someday,” Uzo said. “The walk is too long. Perhaps we could bring a carriage.”
“No riders. No carriages. Everyone walks,” Harros said.
“But why?”
Harros pointed up to the trees that lined the road.
“You may recall our sentries?” he asked.
And, sure enough, Uzo could make out the archers hidden among the leaves and branches of the trees that lined the road. Lots of them, in fact. An ordinary observer would never have seen them—but Uzo was no ordinary observer.
“They have their orders. Any carriage is burned. Any rider is shot—even me. It is the only way we can protect ourselves. You remember the old saying?” Harros said.
Uzo nodded. “No one flees the Priests’ Bain and lives,” he said.
“Precisely,” said Harros. He grinned, revealing a mouth filled with tiny, pearl-like teeth.
Harros turned a flat stone over with his staff to uncover a squirming grayish-pink earthworm beneath it. He crushed the worm with the end of his staff, watching it writhe under his gaze for a moment before taking his first few steps down the rock-strewn pathway.
“So I’m curious, Uzo--how do you propose that we squelch these whispers? We can’t have people going around chattering false tales about the One Who Leads. That’s quite a dangerous rumor. It makes the citizens thirst for things that they should have no reason to hope for. Despite your proclamation of martial law, I’ve even seen a poster or two in the Godswood Village, of all places! Right in our own back yard!” Harros said.
“What did the posters say?”
“Simply ‘Jaykriss lives.’ And there’s a picture of the boy with a wry smirk on his face. Not a flattering portrait, I might add.”
“If you can find out who put up the posters, we could torture them. A man will do a great deal of talking if one breaks a few of his fingers.”
Harros rolled his eyes.
“Is that is your solution to everything? What if the people putting the posters up are mere children? What then? Do we earn the trust of the people if we torture their children?”
Uzo grunted.
“We could just kill them all,” he said. “It’s simple and elegant, don’t you think? Wipe out the Godswood Village and we wipe out the rebellion. The rumors stop right here—and everyone in the entire kingdom will learn what it means to spread false tales that subvert the Dark King’s rule. Certain death is a powerful motivator.”
“You would kill everyone?”
Uzo nodded.
“Extermination of the nest is the only way to be sure the vermin are dead,” he said.
“While certain nihilistic aspects of this plan appeal to me, I have to ask you a question: if you kill all of your subjects, who shall we govern? Each other?”
Uzo was silent.
“And if there are no townspeople, who would pay the taxes?”
“Well, I didn’t . . .”
Harros dismissed him with the wave of a hand.
“You think like a warrior, and that’s good. That’s your job, my friend. But leave the political strategy to me. And, for the sake of our King, don’t enact any of your rash, half-baked plans without speaking to me first. The repercussions for error can be harsh.”
The skies seemed to have darkened as their band of twelve approached the Priests’ Bain. It was always this way. Shadows seemed to collect here, pooling beneath the trees and under rocks.
This is the darkest place I have ever seen, Uzo thought. Even darker than the Kingsguard Prison. The Priest’s Bain seems to suck the light out of the sky.
The trail opened up like a funnel in front of the massive stone Priestbain Gate, which was in many ways a mirror image of the gate they had encountered in the clearing at the beginning of the Priestbain Road. This gate was the only entrance into the Priests’ Bain compound, an enclave encircled by a sheer granite wall topped with thousands of iron spikes. The walls next to the gate were decorated with elaborate carvings of intertwined images. Some of the carvings Uzo had always recognized as representations of the Old Gods, worshiped by people from the dim period they simply called the “Time Before.” Others he did not recognize at all. Uzo had never been a very religious man; his system of belief was deeply rooted in the stark, blood-soaked reality of war.
“Life and death, my boy. That is all there is,” Urgo had once said. It was a sentiment Uzo agreed with whole heartily.
But he stared at the Priestbain Wall as they approached. Something was different now. He could not put his finger on it, but the idea unsettled him nonetheless.
And then, with a shock, he realized what it was.
Several of the ancient carvings had had had their faces smashed and ruined, rendering them completely unrecognizable. Old markings, once inlaid with gold and silver, were obliterated. The intricate and ornate images on the Priestbain Wall had taken scores of nameless long-dead men years to complete, but other men—lesser men, Uzo thought—had taken only a few seconds to destroy them.
“What happened to your wall?” Uzo said.
“Time, my boy. That’s what happens to all of us, at least eventually. Time changes things. Rivers shift, glaciers melt, and oceans rise and fall. It is the inexorable nature of the world, “ Harros said, shrugging his shoulders.
“But the carvings of the Old Gods! All of that history!”
Harros shot Uzo a stern glance.
“The Old Gods were false. There is only one God, Uzo. Having the representations of false deities on our walls was a blasphemy. Time had passed those old religions by. Their images had to be . . . erased.”
Uzo gazed at the deep gouges that had been hammered into the granite face of the wall, stunned. While he had not understood the meanings of all of the old carvings, he had always been impressed by their exquisite detail. What sort of devotion would make a man spend years carving something so painstakingly intricate? And there was the mystery of it all—the intrigue of knowing that other men had worshiped other gods, and had other systems of belief that got them through the day. Even if those belief systems had faded into obscurity with the passage of time, they still had some relevance, did they not?
But now it had come to this: wanton destruction, all in the name of faith.
While Uzo had never been fond of organized religion, he could respect the fervor of the True Believer. Strong belief often made a man a better warrior. The next level, religious fanaticism, could inspire even greater things—or far worse ones. Indeed, the most fervent devotees of any religion drank a fragile and often deadly cocktail—an utter willingness to die for the cause admixed with an innate recklessness, the white-hot intensity of the warrior’s religious devotion having burned away all logic and all discipline.
And here, right in front of him, was one such example.
Ever since that day in the Godswood Village when the Thrax had declared that Jaykriss of Godswood would be the King, the Godswood Priests had made one thing abundantly clear: the Old Gods were to be forgotten, their religions rendered into smoke and ash, their myriad beliefs and customs consigned to oblivion. Before, the Old Gods were tolerated, if not venerated. Worship was, at least to some degree, a matter of personal choice. But those days were gone; there was no longer any decision in the matter. Now, there was but one religion: the religion of the Godswood Priests. And there was but one object of their worship: the enigmatic figure they called Dhatzah-il.
It was said that Dhatzah-il had once been a man—but that had been long ago. Now, he had been transformed, metamorphosed into something beyond men: a transcendent being, all-powerful and all-knowing. It no longer mattered what he had once been, or where he came from--for Dhatzah-il was now immortal, eternal, and righteous beyond all reproach.
Indeed, Dhatzah-il had become God.
To the one true God, Dhatzah-il, we pledge our faith, our lives, and our very souls.
This was the prayer the priests called the Prayer of Dawn. Each day, as soon as the first slivers of light stole into the Godswood, the priests in the Priests’ Bain would gather and shout this in unison from the towers and the rooftops, over and over, until their voices cracked and their vocal cords split. They would then continue chanting, rasping the prayer, coarse and dry-tongued, until they could barely speak. And then they would still chant it, again and again, until there was nothing left of their voices but a whisper--and the inexorable, undying will of the righteous, distilled into something pure and holy by the ragged voices of men.
By the end of each visit to the Priests’ Bain, Uzo heard the Prayer of Dawn in his sleep. The incessant chant wormed about in his brain like a parasite—a stubborn invader that he could not remove, relentless and insistent, its grim teeth latched deep into the very meat of his subconscious mind.
Even now I can hear it, Uzo thought grimly. It is already with me and I have not even entered the Priestbain Gate.
The Godswood Priests had long called Dhatzah-il “The God Who Walks.” But most of the world knew Dhatzah-il by yet another name: The Dark King.
The Dark King’s ubiquitous symbol—a spiked crown, the tips gleaming gold in the stray beams of sunlight that filtered through to the forest floor—loomed heavy over the top of the Priestbain Gate, much as it had on its twin, the gate that had opened up for them at the Priestbain Road.
The Priests’ Bain itself was gargantuan—a dark mountain of stone and timber, reaching above the treetops and towards the invisible sky, its smooth surface randomly spangled with myriad windows that gleamed like diamonds. It was ancient, having stood for thousands of years. More than a mere residence for the Godswood Priests, the Priests’ Bain was a symbol, a towering monument to the sheer power of the priesthood. And it was filled with secrets. One could almost hear the whispers that scurried about within its dark walls like so many mice, their sharpened teeth gnawing away at the very souls of men.
Harros approached the gate and inserted the ruby on his staff into it just as he had at the prior gate, rotating it a quarter turn to the right. There was a clanking noise inside and the massive iron gates began to swing open.
“Form up! High Priest Harros at the gate!” shouted a hoarse voice from within the Priest’s Bain walls.
The centurions, clad in spotless white battle armor topped with gleaming gold-domed helmets, had lined up two deep, forming a pathway between the Outer and Inner Baingates. As Uzo and Harros passed, the centurions averted their eyes, casting them downward, and raised their gleaming sword tips above their heads.
“Your centurions have been well-trained, Priest Harros,” Uzo said, chuckling.
“It’s a credit to their trainer,” Harros said, smiling.
Uzo nodded, taking stock of the impassive faces of his men.
A fine crew, he thought, admiring their discipline.
The centurions closed ranks behind Harros and Uzo as the two men passed, moving as one, with machine-like precision.
Body like iron, nerves of pure steel,
Heart of a lion, unable to feel.
That credo was inscribed in the stone archway over the centurion’s training facility in Capitus. To be a centurion was a singular honor—but it was a life of perpetual sacrifice, a life of service to King and country. A centurion could not marry until he retired from service, and could not have a lover until he had served his King selflessly for at least five seasons. Children were forbidden; they might cause a man to hesitate in battle, and a split second of indecision could lead to death in times of war. Nevertheless, several of the older centurions had offspring hidden away in various hamlets and villages throughout the land. Women wanted children, of course. Some men simply could not tell their women no, and as a result they were forced to keep secrets.
Secrets are like poison. He remembered reading that as a child, although he could not remember where it came from.
His thoughts drifted once again to his Misha. He thought of her long, dark hair and her slim, muscular figure, of her brilliant smile and her mysterious onyx eyes. Misha asked nothing of Uzo. She kept no secrets. She was never demanding; she never screamed at him in anger or cried at some imagined slight. She did not browbeat Uzo for all the time he spent away from her, nor did she ask for expensive jewelry or fine clothes like some of the centurion companions. Instead, she simply seemed pleased that Uzo loved her. She lived to serve him. And she was grateful for the attention that came with being associated with such a high-ranking centurion officer as Uzo.
I’ll be back to you soon, love, he thought.
Tend to your chickens.
Uzo and Harros entered the Inner Baingate alone. The cast iron doors slammed shut behind them, deadbolts clicking and locking in a mad clatter of gears.
“He wishes to speak to us tonight, Uzo,” Harros said.
Uzo cocked his head.
“How? Are we to return to Capitus?”
Harros shook his head.
“There is a new device that he is using—a device that throws one’s image over space. The scientists call it the Splinter, because it allows the user to send a piece of himself over great distances. The God Who Walks can now be anywhere he wants to be at any time.”
“Can he see us with this device? Or can we only see him?”
A thin smile crept across Harros’ dry lips.
“Dhatzah-il sees everything, Uzo. Surely you know this.”
“You know what I mean, High Priest. So the Dark King can see what we are doing when we are talking to him.”
“I would not communicate with the King via the Splinter in the nude, if that’s what you mean. It would be considered a measure of disrespect.”
“Well, I can assure you that I have no intention of doing that.”
Walking across the Priestbain yard, they approached the iron-clad wooden door to the Priest’s Bain. Once again, the ornate images of the old gods that had once adorned it had been obliterated, their stern visages battered and gouged beyond all recognition. The twin lanterns that illuminated the doorway flickered with gaslight the way they always had—but the names of the gods the lanterns had once been dedicated to had been crudely scratched away.
Seeing all of this saddened Uzo. This sort of wanton destruction was a tragedy, especially for a pragmatist like him. It was senseless; it accomplished nothing of value. Uzo wondered who had given the order to wipe the old gods off the pages of history—but then, as he shot a glance over at Harros, who was standing beside him, he wondered no more.
The old man’s usually benign, sallow face had ripened into a virulent eggplant hue. Harros ground his teeth together so intently that Uzo thought they might shatter; the old priest’s fists were clenched tight, his knuckles blanched.
“Who did this? Who?”
Scratched in block letters into the metal base of both lanterns was a single crudely written name, gleaming in the flickering torchlight:
JAYKRISS
“WHO DID THIS?” Harros screamed, his voice breaking. His silver eyes were ablaze with fury.
There was no answer. And then, without warning, everything in the Priestbain began to change.
Uzo noticed the stillness first. It was a subtle thing—the way an entire forest would suddenly grow quiet when a wolf was near.
The darkness came next-- insidious and unexpected, like a solar eclipse. Shadows lengthened and coalesced. Uzo felt his pupils dilate; his chest tightened a bit, and he wrapped his thick, battle-scarred fingers around the hilt of his sword.
Better to be ready, Urgo’s long-dead voice said inside his head.
Time crawled to a dead halt. A flock of ravens took flight, making one sweep around the yard before flapping off into the forest—and leaving Uzo and Harros as the only living things left in the now-empty Priestbain Yard. The Yard was now a vacuum, a desert, a tomb; the air was thick with nothingness, the last little bits of life having been completely sucked out of it. Even Harros’ enraged tirade seemed muffled, smothered in an oppressive blanket of gloom that loomed over them like a thundercloud.
“What . . ?” Uzo began.
Suddenly subdued, Harros put a bony index finger to his lips.
“Shhh,” he said, eyes wide.
He pointed to the darkening sky, which boiled ominously overhead.
“He’s coming,” Harros whispered.
“Who’s coming?” Uzo said.
“The God Who Walks. The Dark King. Dhatzah-il. The One in Three and Three in One—all divine, all holy, all-powerful and all-knowing. Dhatzah-il walks in the darkness. The darkness has come to clear the path, to make way for him.”
Harros looked about anxiously.
There was a fluttering rush of wings coming from above them and around them, from everywhere. The darkness grew even deeper, more insistent. Uzo could feel it wrapping around his throat like a snake, constricting tighter and tighter, stealing his every breath.
And then, suddenly, the Yard was pitch black.
“Harros?” Uzo said.
In the viscid, dreamless night that had swallowed them both, two blood-red eyes opened wide. Uzo could see the bulk of an impossibly massive creature looming above them, a being with glittering edges that sparkled like stars. Its mouth was a yawning void, a gaping black hole that stretched into eternity.
“I am here,” the Dark King said. His voice was at once a whisper and a scream; it spoke from someplace deep inside Uzo’s brain. Uzo could feel the Dark King inside him, probing among the various gyri and sulci. It felt as though an incessant mass of invisible tentacles was sifting through each and every memory, fingering his thoughts and ideas, tossing aside his myriad hopes and dreams like so many empty husks.
Misha! he thought.
Vainly, he tried to block her memory, tried to hide her from Him, but it was too late. The Dark King was powerful. He ripped though Uzo’s defenses like they were nothing but smoke, discovering the girl with ease.
Horrifyingly, the grizzled centurion commander could feel the echoes of the Dark King’s unadulterated delight at having discovered Uzo’s one true locus of vulnerability. His brain filled with a thick bubbling sound, like boiling mud.
He’s laughing, Uzo realized with a shock.
He’s laughing at my weakness.
Uzo closed his eyes tight, fighting back tears. He dared not look up. If he had to stare into those crimson eyes again, even for a second, he was certain that they would tear his living soul from his flesh. Instead, he cast his sightless eyes at the invisible ground beneath him, feeling rivulets of cold sweat trickling down the small of his back.
For the first time in forever, Uzo was afraid.
And the Dark King knew it.
1
“Look—thrust, then parry my blow, stand back, then thrust again! Really, Jaykriss, how hard can this be? You used to be better than I was at this,” Marda said.
The vast cavern that the warriors of the Dead City called the Arena was cold, wet and lined with a sticky moss seemed to adhere to any fabric like glue. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like dragon’s teeth; water dripped from some of them, pooling in spots on the limestone floor below and running in small streams into a metal drain in the center of the room. Twin rows of torches had been lit in the center of the room, around the drain, to provide the combatants with light, and sconces along the walls held other torches which flickered with tongues of orange flame as well. Some of the torches flared up periodically as water dripped upon them from the cavern roof. Zamarcus had said that the torches flared like that because the “water” dripping on them was not really just water.
“There’s oil mixed in it,” he said. “Comes from a pool two levels up. It’s what we use to keep the torches lit.”
The cavern walls themselves were suffused with a blue-green glow from the entangled roots of the massive bioluminescent trees that grew overhead, in the Great Hall of the Dead City.
It had been three weeks since Jaykriss had awakened from the dreamless slumber that had captured him for seven moons. He barely remembered the day Harros plunged a dagger between his ribs, slicing him open like a melon. He could recall the hateful flash of Harros’ silver eyes, and his muttered words the old priest spoke in his ear, like a whisper, but the rest was lost someplace—like fragments from a dark dream, a nightmare best forgotten.
The pain was still fresh, however. He remembered the taste of blood on his lips, like rust, and the struggle to breathe as the world slipped away from him.
And then Papa met me at the shore, he thought.
But Jaykriss had come back from the Otherworld. He had come back for Sola—and, perhaps, for something else.
Jaykriss had practiced swordsmanship here every single day since the day after he awoke, but the technique was not coming back to him, not at all. He was not the same. He seemed weak and unfocused, as though something vital had been stolen from him. The first few days, he could barely walk, but that was understandable. Now, however, it had been long enough for the effects of his long sleep to have worn off. The nausea he had experienced at first had dissipated, and he was eating well again. All of the tubes that had kept him alive while he slept had long since been removed.
But still, things were not the same.
Jaykriss wondered if Harros’ blade had been poisoned, of if there had been some sort of dark witchcraft involved. He had heard of such things, of course. They all had.
Everyone thinks you are dead, Jaykriss, Sola had said the day he awoke.
Everyone but us.
Now, when he looked at his reflection in the mirror, he saw something that looked only like a pale imitation of himself. His ribs showed through his skin. His arms and legs were pitifully thin, almost emaciated; his eyes were sunken, and rimmed with dark circles. It was like he had died and come back as a ghozim—something ephemeral, a mere shadow.
And there was the scar—still raised and red after all this time, a thin ribbon of pain around his chest, along the place that Harros had slid the blade that was meant to end his life.
He knew he should not even be breathing. He thanked the gods for their grace. He was grateful for the efforts of Zamarcus, whose scientific expertise had saved his life. And he was appreciative of his friends, who had saved him from certain death by spiriting him away to this place, the Dead City—the one place in the world where the Dark King could not find him.
He was grateful, but he had doubts. They crowded into the darkest recesses of his brain like fish swimming upriver to spawn—insistent, unrelenting, never allowing him to rest for even a moment.
They all see me as the fulfillment of a musty old prophecy, he thought. And I’m as weak as a kitten. I could not even defeat my little sister in battle right now.
He smiled, in spite of his doubts, at the thought of Annya. She would be a feisty one to meet in battle—that much was certain. She had a great deal of their father in her.
I miss seeing her, he thought. And Mama.
Jaykriss felt a tightening in his chest, like a knot being tied.
Marda knocked the Bloodsword aside effortlessly and placed the tip of Icebreaker, his father’s battle saber, over Jaykriss’s heart.
“Are you dreaming of Sola? Is that why you are distracted? Because your girlfriend is currently working on her archery skills in preparation for battle. Meanwhile, the illustrious One Who Leads is asleep on his feet.”
Jaykriss dropped the Bloodsword to the floor and wiped his brow with a dirty sleeve. His arms ached, and the scarred place where Harros had slipped the dagger between his ribs burned white-hot.
“You might recall the small detail of my being comatose for seven moons while you, Sola and the rest had sword and archery practice every single day,” he said.
“Of course I remember that! How could I forget? I was at your bedside every one of those days. We all were.”
He grinned at Jaykriss.
“In fact, if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t all be stuck here in the Dead City, with all of these other freaks of nature.”
“Watch your tongue, boy!” Zarg growled, standing up.
The giant crocodilian had been slumbering in the corner of the Arena in full battle gear, snoring so loudly that the practice swords stacked up in the racks nearby were vibrating.
Zarg lumbered over to Jaykriss and Marda and picked up the Bloodsword, handing it back to Jaykriss by its ruby-tipped hilt. His ochre eyes glittered within his spiked steel helmet.
“The key to this is positioning. Strength has nothing to do with it. It’s all about leverage. See here,” Zarg said.
He picked up a heavy, dull-edged practice sword with his reconstituted left hand—the one that the Queen’s anglerfish had picked completely clean of flesh just a few moons ago--and flipped it over effortlessly, as though it were made of pine instead of steel.
“Come at me, Marda,” he said.
Marda charged him, sword upraised. He swung Icebreaker in a vicious downstroke, but Zarg deflected it with a minimal flick of the wrist.
“How did you do that?” Jaykriss said.
“By using Marda’s own force against him. Let the attacker’s momentum carry them past you, then deflect the blade as they pass. You can get a counterswing in then if you’re quick enough. Again, it’s not about brute strength. It’s about technique.”
“Let’s try it again,” Marda said.
“The results will be the same,” Zarg said.
“I’ve got some moves you’ve never seen,” said Marda.
Zarg feigned a yawn.
“I doubt that,” he said.
Marda charged again—but this time, at the last moment, he dropped his sword and tried to slide it beneath the crocodilian’s battle armor. Zarg deftly stepped to one side and forced Marda to swing wildly. His sword struck only air, and Marda staggered past Zarg like a stampeding buffalo. The giant crocodilian then added insult to injury when he slapped Marda on the rump with the flat edge of his practice sword, sending him sprawling face-first onto the Arena’s mossy floor. He knocked one of the torches over as he fell and it flared for a moment, igniting a small pool of oil-laden water on the cavern floor. Zarg stamped out the flames with his boot, then turned back to Marda. The Stygian commander’s crooked fangs were fixed in a mischievous grin.
“That wasn’t fair!” Marda exclaimed, his face flushed red.
Zarg glanced at Marda.
“Leverage,” he said, his eyes dancing.
“How did we ever beat you?” Jaykriss said, shaking his head.
Zarg snorted, dropping his sword.
“Pah. I let you two win. I don’t fight children—especially not Outlander children. It wasn’t a fair fight.”
But Zarg’s momentary glance at his left hand—a forelimb still pink with newly-grown skin, in stark contrast to the thick black scales that covered the rest of his body--said otherwise.
“You’ve got to feel the Bloodsword, Jaykriss. Link with it. Let it work with you,” said a familiar voice from the shadows.
Startled, Zarg wheeled about, sword upraised—and blinked at the bearded apparition he saw standing before him.
“By the gods, old man! You’ve got to stop doing that!” Zarg bellowed.
Zamarcus stepped forward from the shadows. His white cloak gleamed apple green in bioluminescent glow of the room. The torchlight danced along the rims of his spectacles, making it difficult to see the old man’s eyes—but Jaykriss thought he looked amused.
“Not all of us must enter a room like a hurricane, Zarg. Sometimes, it is better to be a simple summer breeze,” Zamarcus said.
“A Stygian militiaman will never come in like a summer breeze, old man. It is not in our nature.”
“Fair enough,” Zamarcus said, nodding. “It is admittedly difficult to be stealthy when you are over nine paces tall and weigh as much as a cow.”
“A bull,” Zarg said.
“What?”
“Do not compare me to a cud-chewing cow. I am like a bull—powerful and strong.”
“A bull, then. A really large, mean bull, right?”
Zarg grinned.
“Yes. The largest and the meanest.”
Zamarcus turned back to Jaykriss.
“Zarg is right. The battle does not always go to the strongest. Sometimes it goes to the most cunning. And the use of leverage is one aspect of swordplay that one gains from experience—and a good teacher, like Zarg here.”
“Mmph!” the Stygian commander grunted, nodding.
“But there is something else, something I mentioned before. Your sword is yours for a reason. It has been in your family for generations. Your father used it, and his before him. It knows you, Jaykriss. It feels you. And you must feel it.”
“I thought that you were a scientist,” Jaykriss said.
“I am.”
“So this smacks of something else. Witchcraft, perhaps. The old hocus-pocus.”
“It’s neither.”
“So what is it, then?”
Zamarcus took off his spectacles and began cleaning them with the edge of his robe.”
“It’s faith,” he said. “And that is outside of science, or magic, or anything else in our world. There are things in the universe that you cannot see, things you cannot prove or disprove. That’s where faith comes in. Sometimes you simply have to believe that something is true to make it so.”
Jaykriss frowned.
“That sure sounds a lot like magic to me.”
Zamarcus grinned.
“I suppose it is in a way. It sure seems like that when it happens. You know, many of the things that seem like magic have scientific explanations that we just haven’t found yet. But every once in a while, you run into something that simply defies logic. That’s where this sort of thing comes in. Faith is belief in the unknowable—the sort of thing which is the foundation of most religions.”
Zamarcus picked up a rusty iron helmet from the practice armor rack and placed it backwards on Jaykriss’s head.
“I can’t see!” Jaykriss said.
“That’s the point. You’ve got to trust your instincts. Swing, and the sword will follow. Feel its power in your hand. Know where it is in space. You don’t need your eyes to see that,” he said. “Only your heart and soul.”
Jaykriss shook his head.
“It’s as dark as pitch in here,” he said.
“Marda, take our Stygian friend here and go to the observation room. I’ll join you in a moment. Jaykriss has something he must do alone.”
Zamarcus turned an iron knob on the wall. A droning buzz filled the air. The metal plate covering the “drain” in the center of the room began to move.
“What’s that sound?” Marda said.
“Shillix. They live in the drainpipe,” Zamarcus said.
“Blood-sucking little bastards,” Zarg said.
“Zamarcus! You’d let them out?
“What’s going on?” said Jaykriss.
“I’m opening the drainpipe, Jaykriss,” Zamarcus said. “There’s a shillix nest below. It’s time you learned to trust what you already know.”
“But you’ll unleash them! They’ll kill us!” Jaykriss said.
“We won’t be in here. Only you,” Zamarcus said.
Marda’s eyes widened.
“Go,” Zamarcus said, frowning.
“But . . .”
Zamarcus pointed to the door.
“Go now. He needs this.”
“The boy’s not ready,” Zarg said, shaking his head.
“Yes he is,” Zamarcus said. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
He turned the knob another notch. The buzzing sound grew louder, more insistent. Things were banging intermittently on the opposite side of the large metal plate that covered the drain.
“Feel the sword, Jaykriss. Let it be your eyes,” Zamarcus whispered. His hot breath was close to Jaykriss’s ear.
“What is happening?” Jaykriss said.
“You are about to wake up. It’s time, Jaykriss—time to fulfill your destiny.”
He turned the knob another notch. The drainplate edged to one side, revealing a sliver of utter darkness—and suddenly there they were: a frantic flurry of arms and legs and wings, a score of proboscises tipped with razor-sharp mouthparts crowding through the widening gap between the stone floor and the metal plate.
“The shillix are going to try to eat you. You must kill them first,” Zamarcus said.
“What?”
Zamarcus strapped the helmet down tight.
“I can’t see a thing! How can I kill them if I cannot see them?”
“You can hear them, can’t you? Their wings buzzing, mouthparts clicking? Aim for that,” Zamarcus said.
He turned the knob another click to the left. The metal plate began to slowly inch aside.
“Have faith in yourself, Jaykriss!’ Zamarcus said over his shoulder as he ran to the Arena’s metal doorway. He opened it up with a dull ker-chank! and dead-bolted it behind him.
The first shillix had already wriggled through the widening gap in the floor, its chitinous lower body squeezing through as its forelimbs scrabbled furiously against the stone floor.
Zamarcus joined Zarg and Marda in the Arena Observation Room, located above the practice floor.
“Are you crazy, old man?” Marda asked. “He’ll be nothing but a pile of bones once they get ahold of him!”
“No, he won’t. Look at him,” Zamarcus said.
Jaykriss stood right in the center of the Arena, his sword upraised. Twin rows of torches flickered on either side of him, their light reflected in the spider-webbed rivulets of water that flowed across the Arena’s stone floor.
The shillix was as big as an eagle. It circled above Jaykriss’s head, its huge compound eyes darkly reflecting the flickering torchlight. The ravenous insect looked like a giant six-winged mosquito, its segmented thorax a gleaming obsidian, with one exception: the long proboscis that drooped from its head was tipped with a circular array of razor-sharp teeth that moved incessantly, as though they needed a gobbet of soft flesh to gnaw on.
Jaykriss could clearly hear the creature’s wings whirring above him. He whirled about, turning his blinded eyes upward.
Suddenly, the shillix dove downward, its spindly claw-tipped legs spread wide.
“Watch out!” Marda screamed.
There was a flash of steel as Jaykriss swung the Bloodsword through the air.
The glimmering blade sliced through the shillix’s dark torso, cleaving the giant insect neatly in two. Dark red blood splattered across the floor at Jaykriss’s feet as the two halves of the insect’s body tumbled across the floor.
“Bravo!” Marda said.
“There’s more of them,” Zarg said, pointing upward.
Now, three shillix hovered above Jaykriss’s head. Others were trying to squeeze through the ever-widening gap between the drainplate and the floor, their clawed forelimbs straining with the effort.
“Ye gods,” Marda said, shaking his head.
Two of the three circling shillix dove at Jaykriss at once. Jaykriss whirled and deflected one with the flat side of the Bloodsword, knocking it to the ground, then sliced the second in half. The third dove on him then, but it had no chance. Jaykriss whirled and decapitated it with a single stroke.
The battered shillix that Jaykriss had knocked down was nursing a broken wing and could no longer fly. It was crawling along the Arena floor, its left wing limp and useless, in an attempt to take further refuge in the dark drainpipe it had come from. But as it reached the edge of the plate, it was attacked by the other shillix that were trying to escape through the opening in the floor. The wounded insect shrieked as its brethren tore it apart in a matter of seconds, ripping its limbs off and tearing into its convulsing thorax with their razor-sharp mandibles.
“Kill them, Jaykriss! Kill them now, while they are distracted!” Marda said.
But Jaykriss turned his back on the ravenous creatures and walked away.
“What is he doing?” Marda asked.
Jaykriss plucked one of the torches from the floor and dipped it into the water pooling at the edges of the Arena. The torch sputtered and flared up yellow-orange, the flames rising three feet in the air. Black smoke spiraled off of the end of the torch.
And then Jaykriss dropped the torch straight into the water.
The water ignited with a muffled whoomp! and suddenly Jaykriss was invisible, his thin body surrounded by walls of flame.
“Is he crazy? He’ll burn to death!” Marda said.
Zamarcus, grinning, gently patted Marda’s broad, muscular shoulder with a bony hand.
“No, Marda, he’s not crazy. He’s brilliant. He’s figured it all out. Watch.”
***To be continued in Vengeance of The Dark King, Book 2 of The Bloodsword Trilogy***
