Mistress Of The Ages (In Her Name, Book 9) (20 page)

Keel-Tath was about to try to send her second sight to a new destination, somewhere away from the Homeworld, when something in the Bloodsong changed. It was a song of fear, of fury, whose voice she instantly recognized. Unbidden, she saw Tara-Khan in her mind’s eye, running at full speed down a corridor in the palace. Ka’i-Lohr, wounded, ran behind him, his pace faltering.
 

Just then, the doors to her chambers were thrown wide. Opening her eyes, startled now out of her meditation, she looked up to see Ulan-Samir standing there, his bloodied sword in hand. He stared at her, a grim expression on his face, before he came for her.

***

Gasping for breath now, Tara-Khan pushed himself faster. Ka’i-Lohr could normally best him in a foot race, but not with blood seeping from his shoulder and his strength waning. Tara-Khan passed him and did not look back. More warriors were following in their wake, drawn as much by the turmoil in Tara-Khan’s spiritual song as by his pursuit of Ulan-Samir. Tara-Khan’s only surprise at this point was that the priest had killed no one else, and he feared that perhaps Ulan-Samir had taken a turn somewhere and shaken his pursuers.

Rounding the last curve before the door that led to Keel-Tath’s apartments, he saw that he was still on the right track. Two warriors lay dead, one on either side of the door, and half a dozen robed ones were kneeling in the antechamber.
 

And there, silhouetted in the doorway by the warm light flowing through the crystalline windows of Keel-Tath’s apartments, was Ulan-Samir. He held his sword in his hand, and as he stepped into the room, he began to lift the tip of the blade.

“Ulan-Samir!” Tara-Khan shouted. “
Stop!
” He felt the familiar weight of a shrekka in his hand, having drawn it from the harness on his shoulder without realizing it. With a timing that came naturally to him, he measured his steps and the arc of his arm, hurling the weapon at Ulan-Samir’s back with unerring accuracy. It was a dishonorable form of attack against an unsuspecting opponent, but Tara-Khan did not care. Ulan-Samir would know it was coming and easily deflect it. It was merely a momentary distraction while Tara-Khan closed the distance.

***

“Ulan-Samir,” Keel-Tath said in a steady voice. She looked at the blood dripping from his blade. “You dare to kill under the roof of your host?”

“I did what I had to do in order to reach you,” he said as he lifted his sword toward her. “And they died with great honor, did they not?”

She ignored the question as he stepped closer. “Why have you come?”

“To offer you…” He paused as a familiar whirring sound filled the air, and Keel-Tath’s heart turned to ice with horror. Ulan-Samir closed his eyes, and in the terrible moment before the weapon struck an expression of relief transformed his face, as if a tremendous burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
 

The shrekka struck him square in the back. He grunted and staggered forward as the whirring ended in a wet thunk and one of the blades pierced through his breast armor, emerging just below his heart. “…my sword.” His final word was accompanied by a trickle of blood from his mouth. He opened his eyes, looked at Keel-Tath, and smiled before sinking to his knees and falling forward onto the floor, dead.

Tara-Khan pounded to a stop above the priest’s body, staring at his old mentor with disbelief. He slowly sank to his knees before looking up at Keel-Tath, his face revealing the wretched misery that had taken his soul. “I only threw it to catch his attention. I never thought…” He gestured helplessly at the body. Throwing his head back, he screamed in anguish.

Behind him, Ka’i-Lohr could only stand and stare, his mouth hanging open in shock. Others, both robed ones and warriors, came at a run and stopped in their tracks as they saw what had happened, as they beheld the warrior who had killed a Messenger.

Her body numb except for the all too familiar warmth of mourning marks streaming down her cheeks, Keel-Tath stared at Tara-Khan and whispered, “What have you done?”

***

Once again the denizens of the Great Moon were assembled in the throne room, but for a far more somber affair. Their number had grown considerably with the addition of the survivors of the other priesthoods. In an added stroke of good fortune, by working together the priests and priestesses had managed to save all but a handful of the robed ones and children, even those of the Ima’il-Kush who had been taken by Ulan-Samir, from the marauding Ka’i-Nur in their First Age armor. More priests and priestesses had been lost in the series of savage battles that had been fought at the temples, but they had managed to deny Syr-Nagath the rich reward the robed ones would have provided had they been taken. It had been a painful victory, but a victory nonetheless.
 

Keel-Tath, however, could not bring herself to care. She looked out upon the assembled multitude, which even now only covered a tiny fraction of the throne room’s floor. Her people were arrayed much as they had been to welcome the most high of the other orders, but no sentinels lined the steps, and the most high of the six ancient orders flanked the throne, three on each side. Dara-Kol, as First, stood at the foot of the steps to the dais on which the throne stood. Looking down, Keel-Tath met the gaze of Ka’i-Lohr and Drakh-Nur, who stood in the front rank of the warriors. Both looked stricken.
 

Another ceremony had been completed that morning, but outside, beyond the walls of the palace. They had put Ulan-Samir’s spirit to rest as his body was consumed by a great pyre assembled by those of the Nyur-A’il from wood found in the subterranean forests deep below the palace. Keel-Tath herself had lit the flame, and she had watched until the last of the smoke had drifted away and the coals had died.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Keel-Tath spoke in a quiet voice that carried throughout the throne room. “Let it be done.”

Dara-Kol slowly drew her sword and held it high, then gracefully lowered the tip of the blade until it nearly touched the floor. In a very precise movement, the assembled ranks on each side of the room turned toward each other while simultaneously stepping back to open a passage down the center.

Somewhere a drum began to beat a slow bass beat that echoed like distant thunder, and Keel-Tath tightened her grip on the arms of her throne, her talons digging deep scratches into the ends.

After only a few beats, Tara-Khan emerged from the great corridor that opened into the throne room, facing the steps of the pyramid. He strode slowly, his cadence in time with the drum beat, and his face was chiseled from brittle stone. Black marks of mourning covered his cheeks and ran down his neck as if they were an extension of his gleaming breast plate. While he still wore his armor, he had been stripped of his weapons. All he had now were the fangs and claws with which nature had endowed him.

As he made his way toward the steps of the great pyramid, the spectators of each row he passed pivoted sharply to face the throne.
 

Keel-Tath forced herself to be still, forced herself not to scream, as the drum slowly marked time. Tara-Khan’s ascent to the top of the pyramid took a lifetime.

But at last he was there, mounting the final step that brought him before the dais. He stopped, as did the drum. His eyes met hers for only an instant before he fell to his knees, head bowed.

Keel-Tath looked at him, then at those gathered below. It took her a moment to gather the courage to speak. “Not so very long ago,” she began, “we were all of one race, yet stood apart. To one of seven ancient bloodlines we were born, lived, and died in a cycle that few thought would ever be broken. While the Books of Time have recorded all the deeds and exploits of ourselves and those who have gone before us, nothing has truly changed in the last hundred thousand cycles since the end of the Second Age. Most of us, myself included, would have been content for things to continue as they always had, for our dreams to be the same honorable, simple dreams as those of our ancestors.” She paused for a moment, looking through the crystal walls at the Homeworld, which hung heavy in the sky just above the horizon. “But that was not to be. The prophecy of Anuir-Ruhal’te and the rise of Syr-Nagath changed all that. Now we stand together, as one, six of the bloodlines united under common cause against an enemy the likes of which we have not known since the Final Annihilation of the Second Age. The Dark Queen seeks to destroy the Way by which we have lived since the ancient orders were founded, to plunge our people into eternal chaos and darkness.” She stood up and walked to the edge of the dais, her hands clenched into fists. “I vow to you that I will not let this happen. The Way will continue, although not as it has in the past. No longer will it be a means to constrain our lives, to maintain our civilization in an endless stasis. Instead we will use it as a foundation on which we can build, a way for us to reach higher, to attain anything we might imagine, even beyond the greatest achievements of the First and Second Ages.”

She slowly took the steps down from the dais and came to stand before Tara-Khan. “But the one thing we must preserve, above all others, is our honor, which is at the heart of the Way. From that, every other tenet flows. Without honor, the Way is meaningless, as are our lives.” Drawing her dagger, she said, “Atonement for many offenses may be found upon the Kal’ai-Il. Those too serious to be mended by lashes of the grakh’ta may be redeemed through death.” She took a step closer to Tara-Khan, and wanted nothing more than to scream in hopeless rage. “But some few offenses are so terrible,” she said, her voice a rasping whisper now, “that even death is not sufficient. For those most terrible acts, such as the killing of a Messenger, only one punishment can suffice.” Bending low, she took one of Tara-Khan’s braids, the Braid of the Covenant, in her free hand. Two rings of living metal had already been put in place near the scalp. She whispered softly, so low that only Tara-Khan could hear, “Forgive me.”

Holding the dagger high, she then put the edge of the blade against the braid between the two rings. Gritting her teeth, she sliced through his hair, severing the braid.

Tara-Khan screamed and collapsed to the floor, hands on his head as Keel-Tath staggered back. The melody that had been his song in her blood, the strongest among all those bound to her, was instantly silenced. Her heart thundered in her chest and she felt like vomiting. She would have fallen but for Dara-Kol’s steadying hand.
 

“Tara-Khan,” Keel-Tath managed, “you are forsaken from all who follow the Way, honorless even among the honorless, your soul doomed to endless darkness after death finally takes you. I banish you to the Kal-Uzmir, where you may join those who have gone before you in dishonor. Take him away!”

With a grim expression, Alena-Khan stepped forward, wrapped her armored hand around the back of Tara-Khan’s neck, and lifted him to his feet. Two of the other most high put shackles of heavy, rough iron on his wrists. The drum again began to beat. Flanked by the priests and priestesses of the six orders, he was marched down the steps. Just before he reached the floor, the assembled multitude turned about, presenting their backs to him, shunning him.

Keel-Tath watched from her throne, every beat of the drum a dagger through her heart. At long last, after she thought for the hundredth time that she must die of grief, Tara-Khan had passed beyond the throne room and the drum stopped beating.

Dara-Kol dismissed the gathering with a terse order, then silently escorted Keel-Tath back to her chambers. Closing the doors, shutting out the world, Keel-Tath collapsed on her bed of soft animal hides. Putting her face to one of the pillows, she wept for all that might have been, but that now would never be.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tara-Khan and his escorts found themselves standing upon the Kal-Uzmir, which was located in the far north of the Homeworld. Like the Kal’ai-Il, it had a ponderous central dais carved from ancient dark gray stone, with ice covered steps that led to the frozen ground beneath an arch supported by massive pillars. Unlike the Kal’ai-Il, the Kal-Uzmir had no surrounding elevated stone rings upon which spectators might observe the proceedings, for none were ever witness to the doom of those exiled here. All that surrounded the ancient construct was an endless landscape of frozen white in every direction. The terrain varied between undulating snow drifts and sheer walls of ice that reached hundreds of spans upward. In other places the ice was broken to reveal dark crevasses that fell away to depths unknown. He shivered as a slight breeze stirred the bitterly cold air, and his breath turned to steam as he exhaled.
 

One of the most high stepped to the side of the great dais where a huge metal gong was suspended from another set of stone pillars. Taking the striker in hand, she rang the gong once…twice…thrice. The gong was made of living metal, for anything less resilient would have shattered, made brittle by the cold.

After the peals of the gong faded to silence, Tara-Khan heard nothing but the occasional crack of ice expanding under the warmth of the sun. It was mid morning here, and he was not sure if he should count himself lucky. Had he arrived in the dark of night, he would have frozen to death before he had gone a dozen paces. Hundreds of bodies littered the ground around the Kal-Uzmir. Most were close by, and some were even frozen to the lower steps. Those farther out were covered with more snow and ice until they became unrecognizable parts of the landscape. Many of the bodies, especially those farther away, were desiccated, mummified from long cycles of endless cold. Tara-Khan had no idea how long ago the most recent additions had been made. Dozens of cycles past, perhaps a century or more. He had no way to tell.

Five of his escorts were staring at him as he turned back to face them. As one, they turned their backs, a ritual of shunning him, before they disappeared.

Only Alena-Khan remained. Stepping forward, she removed his shackles and tossed them to the ground. Then, reaching behind her back, beneath the folds of the long black cloak she wore, she produced a short sword and set it beside him on the thick stone railing encircling the dais.