Eidolon (24 page)

“I wondered when you’d show yourself,” he said in a bored voice.

Secmis flung a skeletal arm at Ildiko who huddled even closer behind Anhuset. The baby squawked at her tightening grip. “Give the baby to me!  She is blood of my blood.”

Another cry rose from the ghostly throng, and Ildiko swore she recognized the voice of Tiye, the baby’s dead mother. “No!  Brishen, I beg you!  Don’t!”

Brishen’s attention never wavered from his mother. Secmis’s demands gave way to cajoling. “You have proven yourself far beyond my expectations, excelled beyond your father and spineless brother. A worthy ruler of Bast-Haradis.”  She pulsed with dark light, a creature born of maledictions and the suffering of others. “Give me the child, so I may live once more,” she whined. A sour hint of bile surged into Ildiko’s throat at the hungry desperation in the plea. “I will rise as queen again, rule by your side and raise you above the throne of Bast-Haradis, over all kingdoms of the world until there is one king and one queen. Our children will be spoken of in legends.”

If Ildiko’s stomach wasn’t already empty, she’d have retched right there. The Kai, on their knees, recoiled, many abandoning their subordinate posture to rise and gape in disgust at the scene before them.

Brishen’s upper lip curled as if he smelled something rank. “What manner of legends, dearest mother mine?  Abominations?  Monsters worse than the
galla
?  You would possess an innocent child, crush her soul and turn her body into your vessel.”  The loathing of decades painted his words, thick and curdled. “Is there nothing you won’t defile or debase in your quest for power?”

“I will make you a god,” she boasted.

More dark light spilled out of her at his contemptuous laugh. “You would devour me.”  His eye blazed bright. “I saw you murder my sister,” he snarled. “I released her spirit and took her mortem light before you could use either for whatever foul purpose you had in store.”

Secmis shrieked and lunged at him, ghostly hands curved as if she’d rend him apart with her claws. He opened his arms wide and caught her in an embrace.

It was the hold of a lover—if that lover were vengeful, murderous and eaten with hate. Brishen’s hands pressed into Secmis’s back, crushing her against him until she arched like a bow. Stars died in her shadow as she writhed in his unrelenting grip and wailed her fury.

Cracks split Brishen’s armor, small fissures opening in his chain mail and brigandine. Ethereal blue light burned hot through the breaks. They spread, splitting the skin of his hands and face until he resembled parched earth gasping under drought, his form held together only by the bondage of an internal sun. The cold light snaked out of him to pierce Secmis whose screams pitched and dipped, furious at first and then agonized and drawn out as Brishen first broke her soul on an invisible wrack and then tore it apart.  His splintered face remained implacable.

 Ildiko had often wondered how her thoughtful, infinitely loving husband could be the child of parents like Djedor and Secmis. At the sight of his expression, merciless and indifferent to his captive’s agony, she wondered no longer. In those moments, when he shredded Secmis’s soul as easily as
galla
shredded flesh, Brishen Khaskem was truly his mother’s son.

   Searing light pulsed around his body, and Ildiko flinched away from the brightness. When she could see once more, he stood before her, solitary and no longer fissured. His eye, a cerulean blue, burned almost white now. His gaze swept the shocked and silent crowd before returning to her. “Good riddance at last,” he said softly.

No one spoke; no one breathed. They had just witnessed an execution the like of which they had never seen before and would probably never see again. Ildiko suspected she stared at Brishen with the same expression every Kai around her wore: stunned amazement, horror, and no little fear. What power did this transformed king possess that he could destroy a soul at will?  She knew, and that secret would die with her.

“It’s about damn time,” Anhuset said in a loud voice. “I never could abide that jackal in fancy dress. At least now I won’t be ashamed to say I’m related to you, cousin.”

Her irreverent remark broke the gravid quiet. Ildiko chortled, a mixture of true humor and shattered nerves. Brishen joined her, and soon laughter echoed through the crowd. It wasn’t the twisted amusement of watching vengeance so finally delivered, but the joy of relief, of hope.

The living shield wall around Ildiko opened so she could return to Brishen. His face softened as he stared at the baby in her arms. He drew closer, blue eye no longer as incandescent as he took in the sight of his niece. He then dropped to one knee and raised the ensorcelled sword he carried in offering instead of threat. His declaration, earnest and resolved, carried across the plain. “The queen is dead. Long live the queen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Serovek studied his body with a critical eye. “At least my beard didn’t get any thicker while we were gone.”

They were once again at the peak of Saruna Tor, with the dead swirling restlessly around them. The physical bodies of the kings lay undisturbed, features peaceful as if they slumbered without worry or care. Brishen’s gaze settled on Megiddo. Deathless sleep. Dreamless, soulless, trapped in a state of waiting for a spirit that would never return.

They all appeared unchanged until something caught his eye. Andras’s body, supine beside Megiddo’s, was not as they had left it. He lay with his arms crossed over his chest in the pose of a supplicant, fingertips resting against the opposite shoulders. At least the fingers of his right hand were. The left hand was deformed, shriveled into a twisted claw encased in necrotic skin.

Megiddo’s severing of Andras’s eidolon hand had left its mark. Andras might not have bled blood or suffered pain when it happened, but his physical body displayed the effects. The hand wasn’t missing, but it was as useless to the Gauri lord as if it were.

“Do you get used to it?”  Andras stared at Brishen with bright, bitter eyes.

Brishen didn’t need to ask what he meant. Many had leveled the same question on him after he healed from his injuries, half blind with the loss of his eye. He shrugged. “What other choice is there?”

He turned away from the bodies and faced the vast army spilling down the tor. He was done. Done with the feel and taste of death, of unlife that coursed through his eidolon’s spectral veins. They were poisoned with the lingering essence of Secmis’s venom.

She’d thrown herself at him, and he seized the chance, the moment, to do what he swore he’d accomplish all those years ago when he freed his murdered sister from her diabolical clutches. The
galla
had consumed Secmis’s body; Brishen obliterated her soul. The power that gave him dominion over the dead also gave him the ability to destroy them and left a stain on his spirit. Profane. Unclean.

“General Hasarath,” he said.

A revenant separated from the ghostly crowd and shaped itself into the memory of the old Kai general who sacrificed himself for so many at the Absu. “Sire,” he replied and bowed.

“None will forget what you and the others did at Haradis. Every generation of Kai born from now forward will know the honor and bravery of Hasarath, of Meseneith, of Satsik…”  He named each of those who stood before that first wave of
galla
and made themselves willing prey so that others might reach the safety of the river. He’d build monuments to their names, temples in their honor, and have scribes write of their heroism. Just like humans did.

The Kai could no longer rely on the reaping and storing of mortem lights with their precious memories. Those Kai too young to have their magic manifest yet had escaped the thievery of Brishen’s spell. But who knew if the power they inherited would be strong enough to reap the memories of their elders. The magic of the Kai, if not completely dead, flickered weakly in its final days.

His voice softened when he spoke Tarawin’s name. She floated toward him, her shadowy features still kind, still gentle. “My family is indebted to yours for all time, Tarawin. Your son fought under my command, and now so have you. Your daughter Kirgipa rescued my niece. That act alone saved a dynasty and a marriage. I will raise her up, ennoble her and the children she will bear. Your house will be exalted and your daughters the matriarchs of princes.”

Tarawin drew closer until the smoky mist of her essence drifted over his arms and shoulders in the lightest caress. “Live long,
Herceges
. Live happy.”  She withdrew into the miasma, becoming nameless and faceless once more.

Brishen bowed before the dead. The other Wraith Kings did the same. “We release you from service with our eternal gratitude,” he said. “May your journey continue beyond the reach of this world, and may you find peace.”

A rippled flowed through the gathering, accompanied by a drawn sigh, and the dead faded away. No epic whirlwinds or howling faces in spinning vortices. Only a quiet vanishing as if they had never been there at all.

Brishen listened, savoring the whip and swirl of the natural breeze spinning between the encircling menhirs and lifting strands of his hair from his shoulders. No frightful screaming from ravenous
galla
rent the quiet. Instead, he heard the muted thud of hooves and the encouraging commands of riders as they coaxed their horses up the tor’s pitch toward the peak. Gaeres’s men. They had kept sentinel at the tor’s base while their leader rode with Brishen into battle, retreating only far enough away to avoid the returning dead. That danger was gone now, and they climbed the tor to reach Gaeres.

“What happens now?” Gaeres asked.

“We become whole again.”  He hoped so. He prayed so. Brishen bowed a second time, this time to Megiddo’s still body. “At least four of us.”

“And what of the monk?”  Andras’s belligerence hadn’t lessened. Tiny forks of lightning arced around his handless wrist, and he glared at Brishen.

“I’ll bring his body back to High Salure,” Serovek said. “His brother’s family are my guests there for now. Either they will take him or return him to his monastery.”

“So he’ll just stay like that for eternity?  Dead but not, and a captive of the
galla
?  This is wrong!”

“Then give me an alternative,” Brishen snapped back. “If we destroy his body, his spirit has no place to return. I will not—
will not
—reopen the breach for any reason. I couldn’t if I wanted to. What power I have left, and it isn’t much, will be used up reuniting our spirits with our bodies. All we can do for Megiddo now is protect his body until someone finds a way to retrieve his eidolon.”

He braced for another volley of arguments, but Andras stayed silent, mouth thinned to a tight line. Gaeres clapped a hand on Serovek’s shoulder. “My men and I will help you bring Megiddo to his family before we return home.”

Serovek thanked him and turned to Brishen. “Let’s finish this. We’ve spent long enough chasing demons.”

Brishen couldn’t agree more. “Unless anyone objects, I’ll reunite you first.”  He removed the ward surrounding Serovek’s body and called up the words to reverse the incantation that separated each man into body, sword, and eidolon.

The strength of the spell rode hard on him. It didn’t require the blood and violence of its counterpart, but the force of its draw made Brishen see double. He touched the sword Serovek held. “The king is the sword; the sword is the king,” he incanted in a language long dead and long forgotten. The blade’s light pulsed as lightning crackled up and down its length. Two radiant flashes, and the light shot up the hamon line, through the guard and grip to sizzle along Serovek’s arm.

The margrave’s eidolon convulsed in one great shudder before collapsing in on itself until it was nothing more than a shining sphere. The sword fell to the ground, once more a weapon made only of steel and the labor of a swordsmith’s arm. The sphere hurtled into Serovek’s body, sinking into his chest through harness, clothing, and flesh. He gasped, arching his back, and his lids twitched open.

Brishen bent over Serovek and peered into his eyes, no longer an encompassing spectral blue, but cold-water dark, with pupils and irises and the strange white sclera the Kai found so repulsive in humans. “Welcome back, my friend.”  He backed away before Serovek could touch him. Gaeres signaled, and the Quereci who had made it to the tor’s peak rushed forward to help Serovek stand and retrieve his fallen sword.

Andras chose to go last, and Brishen repeated the incantation over Gaeres and finally the Gauri exile. By then, his power was almost extinguished. What faint threads might remain once he recombined belonged to Megiddo. A chance to rescue the monk and return his spirit to his body, while improbable, wasn’t impossible. Brishen would guard those last drops of sorcery inside him until he found a way.

Performing the incantation on himself proved strange. The sword in his hand bore a life of its own, that portion of his will and awareness that had hacked through
galla
and bore their taint. Since the start of this macabre journey, he’d felt hollow, incomplete. He was. When the part of his spirit occupying his sword sank into his eidolon, he almost shouted his astonishment to the heavens. When the muscles of his body screamed in agony, and his eyelid slammed shut against the harsh sunlight, he laughed out loud.

“I’m not mad,” he assured a concerned Serovek and Gaeres as they helped him to his feet. “I’m whole again.”

“Well said,” Serovek replied with a grin.

Their celebratory hugs weren’t shared by all. Andras stood to one side, his withered hand tucked away from sight. He already held the reins of his living mount, watched over by the Quereci while he was gone. The simulacra they rode faded as the dead had once Brishen was whole and the incantation complete.

“My daughter awaits me,” Andras said and swung into the saddle. “Do you need me for anything else?”

Brishen shook his head. “No, though you have the thanks of a kingdom for your help. You saved a world, Andras.”

The Gauri lord looked at Megiddo, still within the protective ward, and back to Brishen. “Don’t garland yourselves yet,” he said with a sour scowl. “There are no heroes here.”  He nodded to Gaeres and his Quereci and tapped his heels into his mount’s sides. Horse and rider trotted out of the menhir circle to descend the slope.

“There goes a man eaten alive by guilt,” Serovek said, his gaze fastened on the spot where Andras had disappeared.

“I couldn’t halt the incantation. I wouldn’t, nor would I alter my decision if I had to do it again.”  Brishen was as gut-strung by Megiddo’s fate as Andras. They all were, but he didn’t lie to himself or the others. Closing the breach trumped everything. Megiddo’s self-sacrifice had proved he understood that.

“We know,” Serovek replied. “So does the Gauri. He just needs time to accept it and to understand that no matter if he had double or triple the strength, he wasn’t going to pull Megiddo free. By the time they got that first claw around him, it was already too late.”

“He may not wish it, but I’ll confirm with Sangur the Lame that Andras Frantisek was instrumental in banishing the
galla
and deserves to have his lands reinstated to him. He may not accept my accolades, but I hope he will.”

“He will. You heard him when we first met. He has a daughter to dower, and if he was willing to face
galla
for the chance to do it, he’ll accept your accolades and the lands resulting from them.”

They lingered at the tor only long enough to build a simple sled and carefully transfer Megiddo onto it. His ensorcelled sword glowed brightly in the sun before Serovek wrapped it in layers of fur and leather before tying it to his saddle. He, Gaeres and the Quereci would start the trek home as soon as everyone was mounted and Megiddo secured to the sled.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to ride with you to Saggara?  It isn’t that much of a detour.”  Serovek, looking not at all troubled by his tenure as a Wraith King, wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “I’ll take any excuse to see the fair Anhuset again.”

Brishen chuckled. “You just saw her a day ago.”

“That doesn’t count. I was playing nanny to the dead and was too far away work my charm on her.”

“Your charm will get you killed.”  Brishen shook his head. “I want to travel alone, see if I can enter Saggara without much notice or fanfare. That would be hard to do with an entourage of eight humans and a Wraith King in tow. Besides, you need to get Megiddo to High Salure for his safety and to tell his family.”

Serovek lost his jocular demeanor. “The worst of all tasks.”

Brishen parted company with the others under a cold winter sky. As he did with Andras, he bowed to Gaeres, professed his gratitude and promised any and all aid in the future if it were needed. He and Serovek clasped forearms. “Fair journey to you, friend. It seems I will be in your debt forever.”

The other man released his arm to punch him in the bicep. Brishen’s arm went numb for a moment, even through the double layers of chain mail and padded gambeson. “No debt,” Serovek said. “But I want an invitation to your next
Kaherka
festival, and I’ll claim a dance with the beautiful Ildiko.”

“I’ll make sure the kitchens prepare your own scarpatine pie.”

Serovek grinned. “You’ve always been an exceptional host, Brishen Khaskem.”

Brishen watched them ride away before turning his horse to Saggara. Unlike the
vuhana
, his earthly horse’s gait didn’t cover leagues in minutes, and he didn’t arrive outside Saggara’s gate until mid morning of the following day.

The grasslands that stretched from Saggara’s patch of young woodland was empty of tents and the vast multitude of Kai who had descended on them over the course of weeks. A few yurts hugged the tree line, and small knots of horses grazed on the short, brittle grass peeking through shallow snow drifts. While the Kai may have returned to their homes, they’d left behind a trampled swale littered with the remains of campfires and scattered animal bones. Brishen guessed two summers would pass before the grasslands reclaimed this patch of earth and wiped away any hint that half a kingdom had once huddled here.

His breath hung in the frigid air, a misty cloud, but he paid no mind to the cold. Saggara loomed ahead, with its walls and fortifications and its legions of soldiers who helped him guard territories. Once it had been the summer palace of an ancestor. It would be so again. Not nearly as grand as the royal seat in Haradis had once been, and not as haunted.

Ildiko waited behind those walls, and a niece to whom he would now surrender his crown. He grinned and nudged his horse into a faster gait.

Brishen hadn’t truly believed he might sneak into the fortress unnoticed, but the hue and cry raised the moment he was sighted made him flinch. He rode into the bailey, swung out of the saddle and tossed the reins to an open-mouthed stablehand. People bowed as he strode to the manor, some reaching out to touch his arm as he passed. He didn’t stop, didn’t linger to talk or greet those who called to him or begged him to wait.