The Demon Horsemen (36 page)

‘We killed him,’ came the emotionless answer.

‘Impossible,’ A Ahmud Ki challenged.

The Horseman’s arms and hands moved and A Ahmud Ki instinctively leaned hard to his right. A lightning bolt cracked past his left shoulder. He wrenched at his reins but was too late to save his mount from two more bolts that ripped through its chest and side and tore the hapless creature apart. Unhorsed and tumbling through the air, he immediately took falcon form and banked sharply as another lightning shaft flashed past. He stooped, racing for the ground, buffeted by a sudden burst of wind and pounded by deafening thunder. As he flattened out, the ground around him erupted, throwing chunks of rock and earth dangerously in his path. He rolled and banked, using his magical energy to multiply his flying speed, everything becoming a blur as he weaved between a
series of deadly lightning bolts. Ahead, briefly, he spotted a gum tree and as he shot madly towards it he imagined a tiny portal appearing between two branches. He flew straight into the light as a massive lightning bolt obliterated the tree.

‘For those of faith who sacrifice their lives to serve others there is eternal reward; not for those who make the sacrifice but those for whom the sacrifice is made. This is the irony of faith and why faith is the hardest path to follow.’

F
ROM
T
HE
W
ORD
,
AUTHOR UNKNOWN

A
Ahmud Ki lowered his cup and gazed from the window of his apartment across the city’s white roofs. Two large dragon eggs drifted in the rich blue sky, their white fabric shining, carrying passengers east and west. Yul Ithrandyr was always beautiful whatever the time of day, but he loved best the dawn colours that temporarily stained the buildings gold and amber. Later, the hot midday sun would make the city sparkle, catching the tiny mica flecks trapped in every building stone and roof tile. At sunset, the city would be washed in purples and blues and more amber, like a romantic painting, light glinting off the ancient spires of the old city where the Ithosen had reigned supreme under the watchful eyes of the Leiksha up until five hundred years ago. The city he had briefly lived in a millennium earlier had quadrupled in size, spilling westward past the once-mighty white wall onto the plains, and had become a city of invention and power beyond anything the Ithosen might have imagined for its future. Back then the city had been a prison for him, even when he received status to study as an Ithosen. Now, a thousand years later, it was again a prison, a place where he could only move in privacy and with care.

A knock at the apartment door brought him back to the moment, and he rose from his cane chair. ‘Who is there?’ he asked in the Ranu tongue.

‘Paper,’ came the reply.

He opened the door to a porter dressed in a white tunic and trousers with the traditional white turban. ‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the newspaper and returning to his chair by the window. He opened it and glanced at the date. A month had already passed since his desperate escape from the Horsemen, but portalling to Yul Ithrandyr had been a mixed blessing. His unanticipated arrival at his former presidential home, coupled with his changed appearance to his younger self, had caused a dangerously awkward situation from which he’d been lucky to escape unscathed. The Ranu bodyguards had tried to arrest him so he had resorted to another portal and appeared in a brothel he had visited when he was the president, leaving an astonished young woman and her embarrassed client staring after him as he walked out of their room.

He had conjured money with his magic, enough to buy clothes and rent an apartment, and his altered appearance meant that only the very observant might notice more than a vague resemblance between the young man and the former president of the Ranu People’s Republic. Thereafter, he avoided places he had frequented as the president, places where people who had known him well would go, and he made certain that he only interacted with ordinary citizens for necessities and news of the state.

Several times during the initial days after his escape from the Horsemen he had considered announcing his return to Ranu Ka Shehaala so he could go back to the life that had sustained him for so long. But he knew he would struggle to explain how he had been able to travel from the eastern region so quickly. The army and
navy he had commanded during the expansion of the Ranu empire through Kala and finally into the Kerwyn kingdom—if any had survived the rampaging Horsemen—could not yet have returned to Ranu Ka Shehaala. And he suspected the new president, this man of peace, would delight in any opportunity to call him to public trial over his failed expansionist policy.

He read the front-page headlines. WAR! they blared, and beneath: WILD RUMOURS NO LONGER SPECULATION.
So the new president and the Council are already going to war
, he mused.
Do whatever it takes to get elected before you do whatever it is you want to do
, he thought, remembering the political maxim his long-dead advisor Jazet Na’Keem had recited when A Ahmud Ki was being groomed for the presidential role.
Some things never change
, he decided wryly, and read on:
The foreigners’ claim that an enemy of the empire was intending to bring war to our land was borne out yesterday when a farspeaker message from General Tazim, based on the Stepping Stones Islands, reported mass destruction of our naval base at Ne’er Kaza and the loss of two thousand lives.

A Ahmud Ki continued, learning that Tazim’s message had been truncated in its transmission and that no further word had been received from him. He reached the final paragraph where the reporter named the foreigners involved:
The former king of Kerwyn, along with his military attaché, Blade Cutter, and his advisor, Meg Farmer, were taken to General Benir’s headquarters in Lightsword late last night for further questioning in this matter.

He lowered the paper, astonished by the revelation.
Meg is in Lightsword. And the Horsemen are still coming
. The morning light had already lost its soft glow, the white buildings shining starkly in the sunlight. The Horsemen were still at their work. How much of
the world had they consumed? He’d hoped that they would have been content with the destruction of the Kerwyn land, that whatever revenge they were driven to fulfil would end when they had turned everything associated with that kingdom to dust. The realisation that they intended on destroying all life everywhere was terrifying.

He read the article again and then a related piece that focussed on the foreigners. Meg had led her family and friends to Lightsword and tried, in vain, to get the authorities to rally against the Demon Horsemen. A Ahmud Ki shook his head. Such resistance was futile in the face of the coming storm.

He sat back and lowered the paper onto the table.
Does she still have the sword hilt
? he wondered, his mind beset with myriad permutations of what he knew. Nothing mortal could stop the Horsemen, that was certain. A Dragonlord’s magic might stop them one at a time. He had spent days working out what might be possible. There was a way he believed he could fight them, one on one. One spell, the very spell Mareg had gifted to the Horsemen that gave them the power to destroy—the spell of unmaking—could be used against them in single combat. One Horseman alone couldn’t cast the spell, but one Dragonlord could. He guessed Mareg had planned this from the outset when he created the Horsemen, so he could control his potent minions in Se’Treya. He’d probably even demonstrated the spell on one to show the others that he was their master. But they caught him out somehow and killed him. Perhaps it had come to a simple showdown on the dusty Se’Treyan plain, where magic was nullified and a warrior’s brutal skill triumphed. Or had the Horsemen defied Mareg when he released them to destroy something else in the mortal world, turned as a pack on him and torn him apart?

A Ahmud Ki could stop one, but not all of them at once. Meg, if she knew the spell, could stop another. But there were eight Horsemen at his last encounter with them, and unless they could be separated so Meg and he could deal with them one at a time, the unmaking spell was useless.

So there was only the sword.

He walked to his bedroom, where he opened a dark wooden wardrobe and retrieved a small ivory casket from under a pile of clothes in the base. He sat on his bed and passed his left hand across the plain casket, unlocking the magic spell binding it shut. He lifted the lid and pulled out the slender amber bracelet. He held it up to the light in his right hand, examining it as he had a hundred times since receiving it from Erin. ‘Whisper,’ he murmured, remembering the unsought affection the black bush rat had offered him from their first meeting. ‘You knew.’ He lowered his hand, returning the bracelet to the casket and simultaneously touching his chest through his black tunic with his left hand. ‘I was a Dragonlord,’ he said. ‘You knew that and yet you gave me your life because of what I said to you.’

He went to the window to look over Yul Ithrandyr once more. A dragon egg with a vivid red nose section hovered over the city’s south. Further south-west, smoke rose from a hundred factory chimneys in the city’s industrial sector. The blue sky was cloudless. He took a deep breath and watched a little yellow-breasted bird hop along the roof opposite his window in pursuit of an insect. Quarry snapped up, the bird fluttered away. A tiny fly landed on his windowsill and he asked it, ‘How can we escape our destinies?’ but the insect took flight without answering.

The sound of children distracted him and he looked into the street five storeys below where a dozen boys were kicking a ball, jostling and laughing. A dog started
barking at their antics, and a barrel-chested man strode out of a shop and bellowed at the dog, which only made it bark with greater fury. A Ahmud Ki watched the vignette with mild amusement before he headed for his wardrobe again. He pulled out a travelling bag. The last item he packed into it was the ivory casket with its precious treasure.

The room was small, white and lit by a wire-lightning bulb. It was windowless with only one door. Meg led her companions inside, escorted by six Ranu soldiers who took positions around the walls. Two men sat at a rectangular white table, one in a white military uniform, the other in a white shirt and black trousers.

‘It seems your military leaders have successfully caught our boundary forces napping,’ said the man in the Ranu officer’s uniform, his medals shining on his chest. ‘What exactly are you hoping to achieve?’

‘We have no army,’ said Inheritor with tired patience.

‘Then what attacked our forces on the Stepping Stones Islands?’

Blade Cutter answered. ‘The Demon Horsemen.’

The Ranu officer raised an eyebrow and glanced at his companion, a balding government official.

‘Horsemen?’ repeated the official, peering at Cutter over the glass nearseers perched precariously on his nose. ‘Is this your name for some special military force?’

‘This is no military force,’ said Cutter, ‘and you can’t defend yourselves against them.’

‘That makes no sense,’ the official stated. ‘You say we cannot defend our people from this army?’

Meg met the official’s disbelief with her steady gaze and said, ‘The Horsemen are not an army. They’re magical creatures—’

‘Will you stop this preposterous nonsense about magic!’ interjected the military officer and he glared at
Meg and her companions. ‘There is no such thing as magic!’

‘Then what’s this?’ Meg asked. She held out her hand and a small metal ball appeared in her palm. As the astonished Ranu watched, she made it levitate and grow into a radiating light sphere. ‘Explain that with your scientific rationale,’ she challenged as the sphere vanished. ‘The Horsemen are not mortal. You can’t kill them with your peacemakers.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said the military officer. ‘This is nothing but sophisticated propaganda designed to make us capitulate before your army gets here. And I’m telling you, it won’t scare us. We have inventions you haven’t even dreamed of.’

‘You haven’t ever dreamed of anything like the Horsemen,’ said Inheritor.

The military officer stood, studying Inheritor. ‘Whoever you really are, you’ll at least have the pleasure of watching your army destroyed, that I promise you.’ He nodded to his colleague as he left the interrogation room.

‘He’ll regret that,’ Cutter warned.

‘High General Laksham has never regretted anything,’ said the official. He shuffled some papers on his desk, drew out a single sheet and took up an autoscribe, saying, ‘Now, back to business.’ He looked at Inheritor. ‘Tell me again what your leaders did with the former president of the Ranu republic.’

Inheritor sighed heavily and replied, ‘I’ll tell you again: we did nothing to your president. He was trying to help us against the Horsemen.’

The official selected another piece of paper. ‘According to the last report received from—’

‘The captain of the dreadnought
Shar k’mel
—yes, we’ve heard this over and over,’ said Inheritor. ‘I’ve memorised it. Ki did not perish on the dreadnought. He
escaped the destruction of Port of Joy with us and that’s the last we saw of him.’

‘And we have no proof of this,’ added Meg before the official could continue. ‘At least, we had no proof until the news you received from your unfortunate general on the Stepping Stones.’

The official adjusted his nearseers and shuffled his papers some more, methodically organising them into discrete piles on the table. ‘Under the Treason Act of the Ranu People’s Republic, and with the authority invested in me by the citizens thereof,’ he announced, ‘I hereby declare that you will all be charged with conspiring to bring down the democratic government of the people through subversive action. The penalty for this crime against the Ranu state is death by public beheading.’

As he finished his pronouncement, someone knocked heavily on the door. He gestured to a guard who opened it. Another official entered: a younger man with a dark beard, also wearing a white shirt and black trousers. He beckoned to the older official, who rose from his chair, saying, ‘I will return in a moment,’ and left the room.

‘What’s that all about?’ Cutter queried.

‘No idea,’ said Inheritor.

‘Whatever the outcome, we have to prepare for an escape,’ Meg said.

‘To where?’ Inheritor asked. ‘If the Horsemen have really come all this way, where else is left?’

Meg had no answer. Where could they run? Their last hope had vanished with A Ahmud Ki’s disappearance. The fact that she couldn’t make a portal connection with the Khvech Daas library and Erin compounded her fear that the Demon Horsemen had outwitted them. The Last Days, as the Seers had called them, were rapidly counting down. How much of the world was already dead grey dust?

The official returned with a contrite expression. ‘You have a visitor,’ he announced and stepped aside to admit a tall, slim man, his grey hair styled short, a neatly trimmed beard framing an elegantly handsome face. Meg felt a sudden, strong shiver as if she was in the presence of powerful magic.

‘There’s no need for anyone else to be present,’ A Ahmud Ki said firmly, and he waited for the official and guards to vacate the room before taking a seat opposite the prisoners. Smiling, he said, ‘We meet again.’

‘How?’ Meg asked, unable to frame the full question, amazed to see A Ahmud Ki alive.

‘I read the paper,’ he said. ‘Seems the Demon Horsemen weren’t satisfied with just destroying your land.’