Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen (30 page)

Leitos groaned as he slid a finger’s breath farther onto the spike. It was all he could do not to scream. When the grinding descent stopped, he found breathing more difficult than ever. His heart thumped against the shaft running through him. If he slid another few inches, he would suffocate. That would not be so bad a way to go, but he could not muster the courage needed to make it happen.
None of this matters anymore,
he thought to the woman in his head.

She seemed not to hear him.
Peropis also told you that you are more than a mere man
.

If the nattering voice was not his last thread of distraction against soul-rending agony, he would have blocked her from his mind.
Then what am I?

You represent the life Peropis needs to become in order to escape the Thousand Hells.

There are others who could serve her needs
, Leitos thought in answer.

No one who is of Kian Valara’s bloodline. The powers that were within him and Prince Varis Kilvar were the purest forms of the Powers of Creation. Varis’s ambition and treachery enraged Peropis so much that she destroyed him. Kian’s will was unbending, but more importantly he knew Peropis, and what she was capable of. And so Peropis has waited for another to be born of Kian’s loins, one who is strong enough, one she could coax into filling themselves with the Powers of Creation in order to later steal away those powers for herself. You are the last Valara, her last chance of becoming a being of flesh and spirit, a being that can finally escape her eternal prison. As well, and more importantly, you are yourself a Na’mihn’teghul, the mingling of humankind and Mahk’lar, flesh and spirit.

Me, a changeling? You are mad
, he thought to the woman in his head, as a gurgle of disbelieving laughter squeezed past his gritted teeth.

Peropis heard his outburst and began to turn. At the same instant, a conversation he’d had with Belina bubbled to the surface of his mind. She had been asking him about the night the sea-wolves had nearly raped her atop Witch’s Mole. She had asked him if he remembered what happened to him. He had denied anything happening, but she had appeared not to believe him.
What did Belina seen?

When Peropis faced him, her study penetrating, Leitos dropped his gaze.
If I was a changeling,
he thought,
I would have known. Everyone would have.

Before your father took you and your mother to E’ru, Keri was caught by an Alon’mahk’lar patrol. They did what they always do to human women, but she escaped her bonds and fled.

Then how is it that her mind was not shattered?
Belina had told him that all the women of Yato lost their minds after suffering the abuses of demon-born.

Your mother was an uncommonly strong woman. She did not break, nor did she ever tell your father. And when you were born, she loved you as her own.

Peropis was striding closer.

Leitos closed his eyes so he to avoid seeing her approach, and his father hanging lifeless and bled-out behind her.

Father, forgive me
, he thought, recanting his earlier hatred for Adham. The man had been willing to sacrifice all to set Leitos free from the mines. And if that effort had ultimately been wasted, it was more than the watching denizens of Zuladah, who outnumbered their enemies a thousand times over, were willing to even consider doing. For Leitos, or for themselves.

Peropis’s footsteps came closer, light on the sand.

So like you, Zera, I am Na’mihn’teghul?
Leitos thought, not really believing it, but also beyond caring. He also knew the speaker in his mind was not Zera, but in these, his last moments, was it so wrong to entertain the idea that the woman he had loved was with him?

I am not Zera. She is dead.

With his last feeble wish denied, he thought,
Then who are you?

It does not matter. Not now. What does matter is what you hold within your being and within your soul.

I hold nothing
. Of that, he was sure, otherwise he could get himself free and destroy his enemies.

I am within you.
An image of an egg-shaped, topaz stone flashed into Leitos’s mind, and around him the wrecked throne room of the Throat of Balaam.

Who are you?
he thought again.

Come to me, Leitos, before Peropis can take from you the power she needs to unmake the world of men. Come to me, before it is too late.

Where are you?

You
know
where I am. Come to me.

Thinking maybe he did know, he opened himself to a vast and lightless sea.

Chapter 37

The golden spindle turned and turned before him within a sea of darkness. The silver hook on one end gathered countless threads, twisted them into a cord that passed over the spinning whorl to wrap about the shaft, before stretching away into nothingness. Zera drifted at his side, ethereal and more beautiful than he remembered. He reluctantly accepted that she was not Zera after all.

“To mend what was broken,” she said, “you must return to the remake the moment of failure, and turn the fate of humankind and of the world from disaster.”

That brought to mind what Kian had said about his two-sided coin. “My grandfather said something similar, but my father said those words were nothing but madness.”

“It took Kian nearly two hundred years to begin to understand the truth, but his understanding was infinitesimal, at best.”

“What truth?”

“His two-sided coin is your golden spindle, yet what you see is a more accurate picture of the workings of the Powers of Creation, and all the life and lives those powers touch.” A wry quirk turned her lips. “Are you ready, Leitos?”

“For what?”

“To fix that which was broken at the beginning.”

“How?”

“Follow the cord to me, Leitos,” she said, but was no longer with him.

Leitos hovered in lightless silence, watching the golden spindle winding the threads of life into a cord. He was thinking he could stay here forever, free of pain, free of trouble, when a resonant boom tolled, and great silvery rents showed around him in the darkness. The golden spindle began wobbling, and a vision of Kian’s crumbling sanctuary filled Leitos’s mind.
Peropis has found me.

Follow the cord
, the woman had said.

He hesitated, recalling how he had seen his own birth the last time he grasped the thread of his life.

More booms shook the emptiness, and the spindle wobbled more erratically. The chaos of threads awaiting their moment within that ordering silver hook began to gray and wither.

Not threads. Lives.

Peropis was coming for him, and if needs be, she would destroy every living thing in the world to reach him, for he was her last hope to escape the eternity of Geh’shinnom’atar.

Leitos stretched out his hand, and the golden spindle seemed to shrink—
or have I grown larger?
—until it fit within his palm. The whirling shaft stabbed and tore at his flesh. The only way to right what was broken was to grasp the cord. The woman had told him that. And it was the woman he must believe.

With as light a touch as possible, he caught hold of the cord, and sought the first moment that sprang to mind—when the center separating two sides of the same coin became one.

~ ~ ~

The air steamed, smelled of rot and moldering leaves. Midges droned in thick clouds. Blinking in confusion, Leitos gazed into the green gloom. His first thought was that he had somehow come back to Yato, but this place was much hotter, and bogs of stagnant black water lay everywhere. Some of that murky water was seeping into his boots. Creatures shrieked and hooted in the distance, their calls not at all familiar.

He opened his clenched fist, and was surprised to see blood covering the palm.
The golden spindle made those cuts.
Then he wondered,
Where am I, and why am I here?

To fix what was broken
, a ghostly voice whispered
.

When Leitos saw a saffron-robed man hunkered down behind a giant fern, his short hair a weave of tight curls, his skin as dark as Ba’Sel’s, Leitos understood.

“Where is Kian and the prince?” Leitos asked, splashing toward the Asra’ a’Shah mercenary. “And Ba’Sel,” he added belatedly, recalling that his mentor had been at the temple when the Well of Creation was destroyed.

He halted when the warrior bounded to his feet, an arrow nocked to his drawn bowstring. Leitos’s hands came up. “You cannot let the prince go into the temple.”

“Who are you?” the man demanded, his accent so like Ba’Sel’s, but thicker.

“There is no time for this,” Leitos said, stepping forward. “We must stop the prince.”

“How do you know of Prince Varis, boy, or of Ba’Sel?”

“Because he trained me,” Leitos laughed, thinking too late that would only confuse the warrior.

The limbs of the bow creaked, as the Asra A’Shah drew the bowstring farther back. “Hold!”

“What are you going on about, Fenahk!” a gruff voice called. A moment later, a gigantic man came into view. A wild tangle of black beard braids hung down the front of his studded jerkin. He went still when he spied Leitos. “Gods good and wise,” he breathed.

“Has your reflection in the water unmanned you?” another man said, his tone dry as dust. “Gods know it would frighten blind hags and starving dogs.” He stopped next to the big man, mild disdain turning his lips. He held a throwing dagger in his hand. Tall and fair-haired, the second fellow was almost pretty, Leitos thought, until the man turned his flat gray eyes on him. In them he saw the threat of the gravest danger.

Leitos knew them from his father’s descriptions. “Hazad, Azuri, where is my grand—ah, Kian?”

“Kian?” Hazad gasped. “
That’s
who he reminds me of. The lad looks just like him.”

“Don’t be daft,” Azuri said, taking a measure of Leitos.

“Not
now
,” Hazad said, “as he was when we were younger.”

Azuri’s eyes narrowed. “As much as it pains me to admit, you have the way of it. Who are you, boy, a bastard Kian never told us about?”

“And by Peropis’s black teats,” Hazad put in, “how did you get here?”

Leitos had not anticipated the need for explanations, but there was no time for them. “If the prince goes into the temple, we will all die—all the world will perish.”

Hazad and Azuri shared a hooded look. The Asra a’Shah slowly lowered his bow, but appeared ready to raise it again, on the instant.

“He’s delirious,” Azuri said.

Hazad nodded sagely. “Drank some bad water, he did.”

“What are you two going on about?”

Leitos recognized the voice of his grandfather, but when he looked for him to appear through a wall of wriggling brush, a dazzling burst of light turned everything the color of an autumn sky. A moment later, a column of roaring blue flames shot heavenward, burning a wide hole through hanging boughs. A heartbeat later, a wall of shrieking wind blasted through the forest, and Leitos knew he was too late.

~ ~ ~

Before him the golden spindle flailed wildly, and the cord extending from the long end of its shaft thrummed like a plucked lute string. Wide fissures showed in the darkness around it, not silver as they had been, but burning with the hideous fires of the Thousand Hells.

Kian’s voice came to him.
Remake the coin, Leitos, to what it was before I
—

Before you what?

The answer filled him abruptly, clear and perfectly formed. Leitos caught hold of the cord again, and followed it along its endless length. Countless images blurred in his mind’s eye, but he knew what he sought. And when he found it, he—

~ ~ ~

—stepped from an alley into a street teeming with people. A burly man jerked back from him. “Gods be damned, boy, where did you ...
how
did you—” He bit off the words and pushed his way deeper into the throng, casting fearful glances over his shoulder.

Leitos watched him go, wondering if he had simply appeared in this place, and if so, glad he had not appeared in front of a charging horse or wagon. And then he stopped thinking about what could have been.

Hawkers cried their wares in all directions, and ragged urchins ran underfoot. He might have been in Zuladah, save that there was nothing about this place that spoke of lives resigned to misery.

A red-haired woman slid next to him, the girdle of bronze medallions tight about her loins tinkling merrily. She smiled as if she knew him, and wrapped a bare arm through his and squeezed tight. The swatch of emerald satin she wore did almost nothing to contain her breasts. If anything, it seemed that her garments were supposed to give her the appearance of being naked, without truly being so.