War of the Magi: Azrael's Wrath (Book 2) (9 page)

“How long has it been since you’ve been here, Veneka?” Samira asked.

“More than a year.” The healer grimaced as the scent of death grew stronger. “Maybe we should go closer to the shore to see if anything has—”

A wet slapping sound on the port side made everyone jerk and jump. They looked, but only saw a little water running down the inner wall of the boat.

“Was that a crocodile?” Veneka asked. “Or a hippo?”

“No, not in a lake like this. Water’s too deep.” Zerai frowned.

The surface swished and flashed just ahead, and Veneka saw a gleaming green fin slip back under the water. “That looked like a fish.”

“A big one.” Iyasu glanced around and then pointed to their right. “There. It’s circling us. Maybe it’s hoping we’ll drop something it can eat.”

“Then we should hurry on, before it loses its patience,” Samira said, adjusting their course so the wind would carry the felucca a bit faster across the lake.

Everyone continued to watch the water, but as the moments passed and nothing happened, they each eased back down into their seats.

“So Iyasu,” Veneka said quietly. “I am curious about your friend, the Maqari prince. Prince Faris. You never said why he refused to take the throne himself. Why did he need you to find someone else to take his place? Did he tell you his reasons?”

“He gave me a hundred reasons,” Iyasu said. “None of them very good. He said the daily burdens of a king were too onerous, too mundane, too repetitive, too complex. He said he was afraid of assassins, of political marriages, of wars, of state dinners.”

“Well, you are a seer.” She glanced away from the water to look at him. “What do you think his real reason was?”

Iyasu sighed. “All of them. Faris is as lazy as he is fearful. Although I guess if laziness is a fear of work, then we can just call him fearful. He doesn’t like to leave the palace. He doesn’t like to talk to strangers. He doesn’t like to taste exotic foods or listen to new music.”

“How pathetic.” Petra shook her head.

Iyasu cast a dead-eyed look at her. “However inconvenient his fears are, they’re very real. I’ve seen him sweating, shaking, pale, nearly forgetting to breathe when anything new is forced on him. It’s no petty self-indulgence. He really is terrified of strange new things.”

“So then, how does he pass the time?” Veneka asked.

“He reads old books, listens to old music, paints landscapes, practices his archery with his bodyguard, and tends his gardens. He’s actually very good company,” the young seer said. “He’s funny and kind, and generous. He just doesn’t want to…”

“Go outside or meet people or do his job?” Zerai smirked.

Iyasu shrugged. “No.”

“Well, I guess that’s one way to live,” the falconer said. “At least he’ll live longer than most other princes.”

Veneka shook her head. “If I had that wealth and power, I would wake up every day with a hundred ideas for how to make my people safer and happier, to make my city more beautiful, to bring peace and prosperity to my neighbors. I cannot understand how someone with the power to do so many great things could just… walk away from it.”

“Better he squanders it than abuses it,” Iyasu mumbled as he rubbed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine.” He blinked and looked away at the lake. “The fish is back.”

Veneka stood up again and saw the dark shimmer of the huge fish’s scales just beneath the surface. She cast a worried look at Zerai, who stood up and frowned at the shadow under the water.

“Master Bashir.” Veneka looked over at the djinn alchemist. “Do you have anything you could scatter over the waters to draw the fish away? Some oil or scent that we could throw behind us to distract the fish?”

“It’s only a fish,” the alchemist said.

“No. It is too big, and too interested in us. I think we should do something about it before it does something first. Your bag is quite large, you must have something in it we can use.” She took a step toward him.

Bashir grabbed his bag, clutching it between his hands and his knees, and hissed, “Stay away from me.”

Veneka stopped and studied him, squinting as the sunlight bounced off the rolling waves into her eyes.

What is he so afraid of? What is he hiding?

“Oh no,” Iyasu whispered. “Oh God.”

Veneka spun around and saw the seer peering down into the lake. “What? What is it?”

“This fish.” The youth turned slowly toward her. “It’s a mazomba.”

Zerai shrugged. “Is that bad? Because it sounds bad.”

The fish burst up from the lake into the air and leapt high above the boat. Veneka saw its long arching body, its spiny fins, and its long jaws full of saw-edged teeth. The monstrous fish was larger than any crocodile she had ever seen, and as it twisted about in midair, she saw the beast flick its black eye to her and gaze down on her as it turned and began to fall.

“Iyasu!” Veneka grabbed the youth and pulled him back toward the center of the boat. But as she yanked him off balance, he threw out his arms to steady himself, extending his right hand over the water just as the mazomba came crashing back down.

The young seer fell screaming into Veneka’s arms, and she froze as she saw the bloody stump where his hand had been a moment earlier. The skin and flesh were shredded above the wrist, and dark red blood pulsed from the wound onto the deck.

“Iyasu, close your eyes, close your eyes!” she shouted.

But the seer stared at his arm and a look of mindless terror passed over his face before he gasped and lost consciousness.

“Get us out of here!” Veneka ordered as she wrapped her hands around Iyasu’s wound and tried to focus on the words and face of the angel Raziel.

“It’s coming back.” Zerai drew his sword.

The huge fish leapt from the water a second time, wriggling in the air like a snake as it flew over the boat, snapping its long fanged jaws as it passed. Zerai leapt up, slashing with his khopesh through the last spiny length of the beast’s slippery tail. A small chunk of white flesh and green scales fell into the boat.

Zerai hooked his fingers in his mouth and let loose a high piercing whistle, and an instant later he was answered by a similar shriek from the skies.

Veneka didn’t look up. She knew Nezana’s cry all too well, and she had more important matters to attend. With a gentle word and a slow exhalation, she coaxed Iyasu’s severed wrist to begin building new finger bones, to entwine those bones in thin sinewy muscles and tendons, to lace those muscles with delicate blood vessels and nerves, and finally to wrap the newly grown hand in a fresh skin, layer by layer.

The process practically raced along compared to nature’s inability to regrow a lost hand, but to a person bent down and peering at the new digits one by one, it was agonizingly slow, and made worse by the shivering and moaning of her semi-conscious patient. When the copper-and-iron odor of blood and young flesh became too much for her to bear, she leaned back and blinked her tired eyes, only to see the alchemist staring intently at her as he clutched his lumpy bag greedily between his knees.

Is that all you have to offer? Silence? Stares?

Frowning, she resumed her work.

“Ven!”

Veneka looked up to see the mazomba smash its head against the wall of the boat right beside her, spraying her with oily water and foam.

“Nezana!” Zerai shouted, and the saker falcon answered. With his pale wings folded, Nezana plunged from the pale blue sky nearly too fast to see and threw wide his wings at the last moment as he sank his talons into the lashing tail of the lake monster, hauling it up from the water. The aging falcon did not have a fraction of the strength needed to lift the entire beast, but he was strong enough to lift the slender tail above the edge of the boat.

Zerai lunged out over the water and sank his blade deep into the mazomba’s thick tail, hacking off a huge mass of scale, meat, and bone almost as long as a tall man. The severed tail splashed down into the lake and the mazomba vanished into the depths.

“It will come back,” Samira cautioned.

“It can’t!” Zerai glared at her, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. He slid his sword back into its scabbard. “It can’t possibly swim with that much of its tail gone.”

“Yes, it can.” The djinn cleric adjusted her sails and tiller to better catch the faint breeze. “There are mazombas in the rivers deep beneath the earth, and in the black lakes that surround Odashena. It won’t die, and it won’t stop hunting until we take off its head.”

Zerai raised an eyebrow. “I find that hard to believe.”

The surface of the lake directly in front of the felucca erupted in a shining wall of water that reached all the way to the blazing disc of the sun, and above that shimmering curtain flew the black coil of the mazomba. It writhed and lashed in the free air, its severed tail sending trails of blood arcing across the clouds as the vicious beast began to fall toward the boat.

Veneka clutched Iyasu to her chest and raised her fist to fend off the inevitable impact.

It’s going to shatter my arm, but I can’t move Iyasu in time. I have to keep it off him and hope Zerai can kill it quickly.

She grimaced at the sight of the long fanged jaws racing down toward her.

“No!” Zerai screamed as he planted himself over Iyasu and in front of the healer, casting his shadow over her and obscuring her view of the sky.

“Zerai!” She grabbed the back of his shirt with her free hand and tried to push him to safety, but he was too heavy and too steady, and there was no time.

Please God…

“Aaaaagh!”

Veneka dropped Iyasu on the deck and grabbed her Zerai with both hands to do whatever was needed to keep him alive, but she found him completely unharmed.

The mazomba missed?

Slowly, she stood up and looked over Zerai’s shoulder. The falconer’s whole body heaved rapidly as he gasped for breath. His sword stood raised in his hand, but still unused. And then she saw why.

The mazomba, in all its hideously spined and scaled enormousness, hung motionless in the air, supported by half a dozen thick wooden spears lancing through its body, each rising at a different angle from the deck of the felucca to pierce the beast from its head to the stump of its tail. The creature sagged, its eyes milky, its gills closed and still.

Zerai finally caught his breath and lowered his sword, and cast a pale glance back at Samira in the stern of the boat. Veneka looked back at the djinn cleric too, hoping that her wide staring eyes could convey all the gratitude that was roaring through her heart at that moment for the other woman’s help.

With shaking hands, the healer sank back down to the deck and cradled Iyasu’s head as she gently massaged his new hand.

He could have died, right there, right in front of me. I might not have been able to… no, there was no chance I could have saved him, not if that monster had torn him apart, or dragged him overboard into the water.

I could have lost him. Just like before, with the demons. So close to death, all the time. I was so close to losing him. This world is still insane, still full of horrible deaths like this.

How can he want to bring a child into a world like this?

And how can we, of all people, hope to raise it?

Zerai sat down beside her and put his warm hands on her shoulders, and she wanted to lean back and sink into him, to wrap her arms around him and crush him against her skin, to know with all her flesh that he was truly safe.

But she didn’t, because Iyasu needed her more.

Samira raised her hand and her wooden spears fanned out into wooden axes that easily sliced the body of the mazomba into a half dozen pieces, and let them fall one by one overboard into the lake. Then the spears melted back into the deck of the felucca and the cleric sailed them to the closest shore where everyone quickly disembarked and moved away from the water’s edge.

Veneka sat on the grass and watched Iyasu slip into a deep, sound sleep. She watched his chest rise and fall and heard the comfortable murmurs on his lips. Then, when she was certain that he would be fine, she finally raised her eyes, hoping to see her Zerai sitting beside her, ready to take her hand.

Instead she saw Bashir looming tall and gaunt a few paces away, and she said, “What are you doing?”

He shook his head. “You created that hand from nothing.”

“Not from nothing. From his own body,” she said. “When he wakes up, he’ll have aches and pains all over, and he’ll be hungry. Very hungry.”

Bashir nodded, turned, and walked down toward the lake.

Veneka glanced at the others sitting just above and behind her, include Zerai who seemed more interested in watching Nezana circle above them. The healer called out to the alchemist, “Why did you not help us? Why not use your venom on the mazomba? You just sat there, doing nothing. We could have died.”

“Everyone dies,” the djinn man said softly.

“Veneka.” Samira shook her head. “Don’t press him. He isn’t one of us. He’s more dangerous than he seems. When he was still just an apprentice in the alchemist’s guild, he murdered all of the masters in his house and claimed the title of master alchemist for himself. So while he may be very talented, he can’t be trusted, not by anyone.”

“Then why bring him?” Veneka asked.

“I brought him to use him, not to trust him,” the Tevadim said.

Veneka frowned as she watched Bashir move slowly through the reeds along the shore, pausing here and there to pull small dripping things from the water. After a moment of watching him, she stood up and followed him.

“Ven?” Zerai started to stand.

“No.” She waved him back.

She came within a few paces of the alchemist before she said, “I care nothing for how talented you are, or how useful Samira thinks you might be. I think you are a danger to this mission, and a danger to the people I care most about in this world.”

The djinn continued to pick through the reeds. “You’re probably right.”

“Show me what is in your bag.”

The alchemist paused. “No.”