The Dead God's Due (The Eye of the Lion Saga Book 1) (9 page)

Yazid frowned and shook his
head. “No. Not there.”

“It
is
!”
Ahmed cried. “A great evil, Yazid!
Terrible
evil!”
I can’t breathe!

Yazid nodded and placed a
soothing arm upon Ahmed’s shoulders. “I believe you,
child. I know that place. It is called Torium, and there is no doubt
much evil there. But this is not our destination. Look for a smaller
evil.”

Ahmed stared at Yazid in
frustration as the rest watched the scene in grim silence. “How
can I hear a whisper over that shriek?”

Yazid scowled in displeasure
and slapped Ahmed hard enough to rattle the teeth in his head. “Do
you trust Ilaweh or not, boy?”

Thank you!
The
pain brought him back from the edge.
Ahmed lowered his gaze
and stared at the deck as he slowly regained his breath. “Aye,
Master, I do.”

“Then listen for his
voice.” Yazid pointed at the map. “Again. Try further
away from Torium. Perhaps it will help.”

As Ahmed bent to his task once
again, Brutus said, “I will not take my men there, Prelate.
Even I know of Torium.”

“Indeed. ‘Tis a
place we would do well to steer clear of,” Yazid answered.
“For now,” he added, then gestured for silence.

Ahmed lay his fingers gently
against the map, letting the tips just brush against the outline of
the western coast. He immediately felt the pull toward Torium, a
poisonous, yellow, nauseating current, a river of filth flowing to a
sea of decay. It was overwhelming and disorienting, a sense of being
torn in two by opposing forces of revulsion and compulsion.

Ilaweh,
give me strength
.

Slowly, his mind cleared, and
the throbbing wound of Torium seemed to fade to a dull ache. He
reached out, searching, listening.

There.
A pinprick, a
slight moan of pain, and yet a sense of kindred.
My
brother is ill
, Ahmed thought to himself as he traced his
finger along a river, up into a series of mountains. “Here.”

Yazid looked at the point Ahmed
indicated. It was blank, an unmarked area surrounded by mountains.
Yazid smiled in satisfaction. “Aye,” he said, nodding.
“It seems just the sort of place they might have chosen.
Isolated. Unexplored, even. Unapproachable without their grace. And
it is very near us. It is surely the grace of Ilaweh that it should
be so.”

Brutus and Sandilianus nodded
in appreciation as Tahir scowled and stepped forward with his own
map. He stroked his chin as he considered the two maps side by side.
“Look here. We mapped the mouth of a river two days back. This
old map shows it going inland fairly close to the mountains. Of
course, how we’ll get past the mountains is anyone’s
guess.”

“If the boy’s
vision is right, there will be a pass,” Brutus noted. “And
there ought to be a river.”

Yazid agreed. “If there
wasn’t, the Meites would have made one.”

Brutus rose to his feet. “I’ll
need to prepare my men. What should we expect? What do you need?”

“This will be very
dangerous,” Yazid said. “We have no idea if they are
hostile or not, and we can’t afford to provoke them if they
are inclined to be friendly.” He scratched at his chin as he
thought. “We go armed, but we must not look like an invading
army. And we must be ready to weather an initial assault.”

Brutus nodded, grim-faced. “As
you say, dangerous, but I agree with your assessment.” He
turned to Sandilianus. “We take twenty men. You and I, and
your choice of our best to fill out the other eighteen slots.”

“Twenty one then, with
me,” Yazid said. “A fortunate number, three times
seven.”

Ahmed’s leapt to his
feet, indignant. “You would leave me behind?”

“Aye,” Yazid told
him, the look in his eyes suggesting that any defiance an Ahmed’s
part would earn him a beating. “If I fall, you must carry on
this work. I will not risk the both of us.”

Ahmed ground his teeth, trying
to contain his anger and disappointment. There was no arguing with
Yazid. Not only was he not a man to change his mind, he was
right
about this. But that didn’t make it any easier to be left
behind.

Ahmed nodded his assent, not
trusting himself to speak. His tongue might not obey his head, and
he would prefer to avoid humiliating himself in front of these
strong warriors.

Brutus waited a moment, then
nodded his admiration of Ahmed’s silence. “Tahir, turn
us around and let us have a look at this river. And you owe me a
hundred swords.”

Tahir waved a hand and sneered.
“I’ve heard much talk, but I see no Meites.”

Brutus grinned at him. “Aye.
But you will.”

They reconvened on the
forecastle two days later. The air at the mouth of the river was
thick with biting insects, the banks covered with more green than
Ahmed had ever imagined. A man could be swallowed up in such a place
and never find his way out.

“Can we sail the ship
upriver?” Yazid asked Tahir.

The navigator scratched at his
scraggly beard, considering. “Can we? Aye, but how far, I
can’t say. It will be slow. We’ll need to stay on the
sounding lines. But we could do it, at least part of the way.”

Brutus shook his head. “We
will anchor the ship here and proceed on foot. It’s no more
than twenty miles inland. I see no reason to announce our arrival
any sooner than we must.”

Yazid nodded. “I stand
corrected.”

Tahir pointed to the mountains
in the distance. Dark clouds boiled over the peaks, thick and angry.
“Could be trouble.”

“Bad weather?”
Brutus asked.

“Soon, I’d say.”

Brutus eyed the distant cloud
cover, scowling. “Then we’d best get started.”

Ahmed watched them until they
vanished into the green jungle.
It
made no sense, but he felt in his bones he would not see Yazid
again. Other men could dismiss such notions as unfounded, but what
was a man who had visions to think? How could he tell the
difference?
Father, I should be at your side.

But sons must obey fathers and
men must be brave, and so Ahmed waited with his fear. There was
nothing else he could do.

“I think we are ready to
approach them,” Yazid said.

Brutus considered, weighing
things in his mind. A week ago, they had left the ship and proceeded
inland on foot. Sooner than they had dared hope for, they had come
upon signs of civilization, small villages with tall, thin, pale men
working fields, tending animals, and otherwise going about farm
business. They had given these settlements wide birth, not wanting
to risk detection. Initially Brutus had learned very little beyond
what he could see through his spyglass.

Things had gone quickly after
that, however. They had found a cave and set up a small camp from
which they dispatched observers on reconnaissance missions. It was
simple enough to follow the villagers when they left their homes,
which led to the discovery of the pass, the road, and then the city.

It was obvious that these
people were harmless. The road was patrolled, but at regular
intervals, easily predictable, never more than a dozen armed men. It
was a trivial matter to avoid them and slip into the city proper, a
bit more challenging to blend in. The natives were tall, thin, and
had a deathly pallor, but hooded robes and hands kept in pockets
worked well enough as long as they were careful. No one questioned a
single man who minded his own business. They were clearly more
concerned about thieves than spies.

If the people were unusual, the
city itself was nothing short of astounding! Brutus had never seen
such great towers, so many people in one place, nor such a stark
separation between the rich and the poor. When he had first entered,
Brutus had thought that despite its appearance from afar, the place
was little different from any other city: dirty, crowded, and on
occasion requiring the use of his sword arm. Then he had looked up,
and seen a true wonder.

In the air above him hung
another
city, another
people
sharing the same land
with the common folks below them. Everywhere, real glass and
polished steel glinted, turning the night sky into a sight to rival
the very moon and stars. Indeed, it seemed the people who had built
this metropolis had been arrogant enough to block out the mundane
lights of the heavens so that they could not possibly compete. The
clouds over the city never parted, never thinned, never rained. They
simply hovered, dark and brooding in the day, orange and luminous at
night.

By now, Brutus knew the name of
the city: Nihlos. He knew the locals spoke a variant of Priman,
though a thousand years of divergence had created accents and
phrases that were at times different enough to pass as another
language entirely. He knew that they were relatively civilized, that
there were divisions of class in a hierarchy of noble, commoner, and
slave, though ‘slave’ meant something different here
than it would in Aviar.

He knew the paths food and
other vital supplies took from the outlying villages to the city
proper, and how to cut them off. He knew the location of the gates
about the city, and how paltry the forces manning them were.

Most importantly, he knew that,
of the estimated half million residents, less than one percent of
them were under arms. They were, for all practical purposes,
completely defenseless. They had no army to speak of, only police
whose chief concerns were thieves and drunks.

“Approach?” He
fixed Yazid with a smoldering stare and sneered. “Prelate, I
begin to wonder why I listen to you and your tales. These people are
weaklings. We have nothing to fear from them. This is a fool’s
errand.”

Yazid’s face grew even
darker, and his right hand clenched into a fist. “Even if you
do not fear them, you should fear to insult me.”

Brutus held his gaze for a
moment, then nodded his surrender with a laugh. “Fair enough,
Yazid. I will be more respectful. But truly, these people cannot
possibly be a threat to us. Bagdreme alone could field twenty
legions if her need was great enough, to say nothing of all Xanthia.
I think we can simply walk away from this. We know what we need to
know.”

Yazid shook his head. “We
do not. We know nothing, truly.”

“I try to be respectful,
Prelate, but I try to be honest, as well. I think this prophesy
business is bunk, Ilaweh be praised. It is time to admit you were
wrong about this.”

Yazid’s fingers clenched
and unclenched, and his nostrils flared wide. “If I am wrong,
then how came we here? How did Ahmed and I guide you to this city
that should not exist? How am I right about everything else?”
He spat on the ground. “Idiot. You think with your sword hand
and your dick.”

Brutus leapt to his feet. “You
will go fists with me for that, old man, or you will go steel!”

Yazid answered with his right.

Sandilianus raised an eyebrow
in surprise and admiration. “Just the one?”

“Aye,” Brutus said
with nod. He rubbed his aching jaw absently. “Ilaweh himself
struck that blow, and I struck the floor, so we do it his way. We’ll
hail one of the patrols.”

“A dozen of them. How
many of us, then?”

Brutus cast Sandilianus a gaze
that seemed to question his junior’s basic sanity. “All
of us.”

They took up a position in the
middle of the road, Yazid and Brutus in the lead, all of them
standing at parade rest, waiting. They were familiar enough with the
patrol timing that they knew they would not wait long.

Yazid watched as the strangers
approached. They were tall men, all over six feet, some closer to
seven. At six foot four, Yazid would be counted as barely above
average by these folks, but there was little substance to them. They
seemed almost skeletal, not quite skin and bones, but thin and
gangly, even their heads. They would have good reach in a fight, he
supposed, but their blows would lack power.

They had no discipline or
military bearing. They did not march, but rather flocked, each man a
separate unit in an amorphous group, ambling with his own peculiar
gait along the road in a loose pack with his brethren. They wore
mail of curious design, tight fitting and mostly black, with a bit
of silver here and there as studs and buckles winked in the
sunlight. Their helms were garish black affairs, most adorned with
bat wings for decoration, though some few had birds wings. Odd,
spiny protrusions ran along their legs or sleeves, like teeth or
claws.
It looks intimidating, to be sure, but it serves no real
purpose.
On closer inspection, Yazid
realized that not all of them matched, however: some had spines on
only half a leg, others a quarter or the full length. Only two of
them wore spines on their arms, and only quarter length.
Ah!
Marks of rank.
Each carried a lasso and small sword at his belt,
but no shield, no javelin, nothing with which to form a phalanx.

Brutus is right about these
people, even if he is wrong about the prophesy.
These men did
not deserve the name soldier. Police or guardsmen, perhaps, but no
more. They simply did not have the bearing.

There was a moment, as there
always is in first encounters, where the surprised party realizes it
is not alone, and quickly decides to flee, fight, or palaver. The
strange troops staggered to a halt one by one, some in the rear
actually running into the ones in the front.
Fools. Children
playing at war.
After
a
moment of confusion, hands reached toward weapons, considering,
testing.

Yazid nodded to himself. All
was as expected. He raised one hand above his head in greeting, and
said quietly to Brutus, “Hold your position. I will go alone.”

“Don’t get yourself
killed, old man,” Brutus answered. “I don’t think
I can stomach taking orders from the boy.”