Heirs of the Fallen: Book 04 - Wrath of the Fallen (31 page)

“You look lost,” she purred.

“Is this the Chalice?” Leitos stammered.

She giggled and pushed her free hand under his robes. “Where else would it be?” She eyed him sternly. “You Izutarians really shouldn’t indulge in so much
jagdah
.”

Leitos extracted himself from her hold before she could disrobe him in the street.
Where would Kian be?
He had mentioned a place ... somewhere he had been when he made the wrong decision....

“The Green Eye Tavern,” Leitos blurted. “Do you know where it is?”

The woman squashed her breasts against his arm, and tried to get a hand under his robes again. “Why go there, when you can have me at the Fool’s Rose?”

“Answer me,” Leitos demanded, fighting her off. If his time at the temple proved anything, it was that he had little time to reach the tavern where Kian had met Varis. The place where he agreed to Prince Varis’s terms.

The woman pouted. “For a copper.”

“What?”

“I don’t give away anything without earning a bit of coin, boy.”

Leitos understood two things at once. The woman was a whore—something his father had told him of—and that a
copper
was the manner in which you paid whores.

“Very well,” he said, making a great show of digging inside his robes for what he did not have, nor had ever seen. “Two coppers, if you’re quick about it,” he added, thinking greed might ensure her cooperation.

Instead of answering, she caught his chin and turned his head. A hundred strides down the street, hanging above a sea of bobbing heads, hung a wooden sign painted with a frowning green eye.

Leitos was running toward it before the woman realized he meant to. Her curses chased him into the crowd, but she did not follow.

He kept on until he reached the tavern’s stoop, a wooden walkway covered in dirt and a thousand wine stains, many still wet. Men in colorful garb, their heads shaved, save for side-locks held in place by metal rings or cloth bands, and women wearing next to nothing, sat in chairs outside the open doorway. Still others milled about holding tankards. Leitos had to squeeze through them to get a peek inside.

Inside the Green Eye, pungent smoke hung thick, and only a few candles struggled to push back the gloom. But there were enough to see Kian, Hazad, and Azuri sitting at a table nearby. Hazad lifted a tankard and guzzled the contents all at once. Azuri snorted in disgust, while Kian surveyed their surroundings. Only Prince Varis was absent.

After shoving his way back outside, Leitos peered around, wondering which way the prince would come from. He poked a man in the ribs who was sitting in a chair with a woman on his lap. “I seem to have lost my way. Where is the king’s palace from here?”

The man squinted his red-shot eyes, but never stopped fondling the naked breast of the woman straddling him. “Wha’s a dribbling little cock like you want with the king’s palace?” The man laughed uproariously, and the woman leaned away from the spittle flying off his lips.

Leitos waited, suddenly aware that his hand was wrapped around the hilt of his dagger. Struggling to retain his outward calm, he released the weapon.

“Oh, very well, boy. Palace is tha’ way,” the man said, nodding off to the north, and promptly popped the woman’s nipple between his slobbery lips.

Leitos set out, but halted after a few paces. If he went too far, he might miss Varis.
If Kian and the others are waiting, the prince has to be close
....

The thought died when he saw a slender youth coming his way. His was whip-thin, like a snake, and beneath the voluminous hood of his robe, his face was pretty as a girl’s. This, too, was a description Leitos recalled.
But is he the prince?

A hasty search showed Leitos other men who stood out in the crowd, despite the filthy rags they wore. They were arranged in a loose arc behind the youth. The rigidness of their movements, the fierce watchfulness of their eyes, spoke of soldiers.
Or guards.

Leitos’s gaze swung back to the youth, certainty in his heart. This was Prince Varis Kilvar, the middling highborn whelp whose ambitions had set into motion the nightmare of the Upheaval, and all the misery that had followed.

Leitos’s dagger came out, and he held it close to his hip. He took two strides before drawing up short. The snaky youth’s gaze passed him over as he brushed by. Leitos began to turn, thinking to bury his blade into the base of the prince’s skull, but suddenly knew there was no reason. This place, this moment, was not where anything had been broken. No more than the temple had been.

Leitos slowly sheathed his dagger and closed his eyes, and—

~ ~ ~

—found that raging sheets of fire had burned away every scrap of darkness. Somewhere behind him, lost amid roiling flames, he knew the spindle was tumbling on its axis, yanking the fraying cord back and forth. With a desperate grab, Leitos caught the cord and pulled himself along. As he went, it grew thinner ... thinner ... until it was no wider than a few threads.
Three threads
, he thought, and sank into them a short distance from where they began, or ceased to be, and there he—

~ ~ ~

—found himself under a bright sun. Dancing lazily in a soft breeze, tall green grass and blooming flowers surrounded him. There was a scent in the air, an indescribable freshness, as if it had never been so much as breathed. It had been, at least a little, for birds swooped high and low, and bees lit upon swaying blossoms. In the distance, halfway up a hill, a herd of animals grazed.

Closer by, a clear stream ran chuckling over rocks. Beside the stream, three people stood holding hands around the pearlescent shape of a woman. They turned toward him, their lips parted in astonishment. They wore simple robes. Blue for the woman, crimson and amber for the men. In their faces, Leitos saw Peropis’s flawlessness ... yet magnified a thousand and a thousand times over.

By no choice of his own, he dropped down and pressed his face to the ground. Tears dripped from his eyes, falling like dew upon the sweet grass under his nose, and he knew they were tears of gladness.

“Rise and look upon us.” The voice was sweet, soothing, and he knew it straight away.
Come to me
, she said within his mind, and was gone.

After much struggle, he obeyed. When his gaze fell on them, he began to tremble, but he did not look away.

The woman could have been Peropis’s twin, save that her hair was a rich black instead of silver-white, and there was no menace in her clear blue eyes. The red-robed man beside her was stern of face, dark of hair, and his eyes were a clear hazel, like Belina’s. The man in amber stood tall and bluff-featured, and his short hair shone bright as spun gold. His eyes were as emeralds, so like Zera’s and Nola’s.

Instinctively, Leitos knew they were gods, the children of Pa’amadin. The Three. Hiphkos the Contemplator, the Leviathan.
Attandaeus the Blood Hawk, the Watcher Who Judges. Memokk the Bull, the Vanquisher.

“Has our father sent you?” Attandaeus asked doubtfully.

Leitos tried to answer, but made a croaking noise instead. He cleared his throat, and chanced a second attempt. “No,” he managed, and pointed at Hiphkos. “She did.”

The two men looked at their sister. “What is the meaning of this?” asked Memokk.

“I would know the same,” Hiphkos said, puzzled.

Leitos had no true answer, and let his gaze wander to the shimmering figure of the woman the Three had been standing around. That figure had not yet moved. “If you intend to name your daughter Peropis,” he said slowly, “you should end her now.”

“
End
her?” Memokk said, looking uncertain.

Leitos swallowed, and made it clear as he knew how.
“Kill
her, or she and all the children you create afterward will become abominations in the eyes of your father. If you go forward in making her, she will be the reason for your deaths, and—” he hesitated, spread his hands as if to encompass the whole of the world “—she will become the Bane of all Creation.”

Before they could demand it, he told them of his life, and the lives of those he had loved. They listened patiently, as he described the golden spindle. They seemed taken aback when he mentioned what little he knew of the Powers of Creation, and how at some point in the future, they would give up those powers as a final act of contrition. He spoke of Mahk’lar, Alon’mahk’lar, and even Na’mihn’teghul, though he did not mention that he himself was such a creature, a demon-born. In truth, he still was not sure he believed it. And by no measure was he ready to accept it. When they asked questions, he answered as best he could. In time, silence fell among them.

At length, Hiphkos said, “We must speak with our father.”

Leitos could not help but chuckle. “I wish you luck in getting answers from the Silent God of All.”

The Three looked among themselves as if he were daft, then they were gone, leaving him to wonder at their vanishing, and later to consider that he was alone with the being that might still become Peropis, if they did not believe him.

While he waited, the sun climbed high, and then began its westward descent. He drank from the stream and found it sweet and unspoiled. Occasionally he looked at the shimmering figure of Peropis, and wondered if his dagger would harm her. Here, the idea of killing was loathsome, so instead he sat in the grass, then lay on his back and watched the passing of high thin clouds.

In time, his thoughts turned to his father and Ba’Sel, Belina and Nola, Ulmek and Sumahn, and all the others who had come with him from Yato. He struggled to block the visions of his father’s death, and the memory of his impaled companions. Thinking of that, he felt ghost pains running through the center of him.
Are any of the others alive?
he thought, and then,
Would I want them to be, in that place, with Peropis and all her demon-born?

No
, was only one answer, and he realized he never wanted to go back. If it came to it, perhaps he could trap himself here, as Kian had trapped himself in his own sweet memory. How long he could hide from Peropis was anyone’s guess, but any amount of time would be better than returning to that impaling spike.

But it would only be better for him, not his friends. He knew he would have to return to those he left behind. What he would be able do for them was uncertain, but at least he could suffer and die with them, rather than abandon them. A grim choice, but one he was willing to make.

Leitos’s eyes were drooping, and a blush had colored the sky, before the Three returned. At Hiphkos’s beckoning, he came before them once more.

“We have spoken with our father. Among other things, he found it amusing that you would name him the ‘Silent God.’ Be that as it may, although we do not understand how the things you told us can be true, we believe the possibility
exists
that those terrible things could come to pass.”

Leitos waited, but she said no more. He asked, “What do you intend?”

Hiphkos seemed to struggle with some inner turmoil. “It is too late to kill the
spirit
of our daughter.”

Leitos’s heart fell. “Then this has all been for nothing.”

Attandaeus held up a restraining finger. “We cannot kill her, but there is another way.” Like Hiphkos, he seemed hesitant to speak aloud what troubled him.

“Tell me,” Leitos invited, displaying far more patience than he felt.

“This other option has consequences,” Memokk warned. As had his siblings, the Bull went still, a frown creasing his brow.

Leitos waited. His entire existence had been marked by costs and misfortunes of one sort or another, most of them damaging to his person, as well as to his soul. Surely another could not hurt.

Hiphkos’s brothers looked to her. “We cannot kill our daughter,” she said again, “but we can ...
unmake
her.”

That doesn’t sound so bad
. “When do you begin?” Leitos asked, for their sakes tempering his eagerness. To them, Peropis was as yet unborn and uncorrupted. They had not lived in fear of her, had not suffered the torturous nightmare of her rule.

“Should we do this deed,” Attandaeus said slowly, “there will be a steep price.”

“You said as much before.”

As the Three looked among themselves again, a tendril of worry began crawling through Leitos’s insides.

Hiphkos broke the silence. “To be rid of Peropis, we must unmake her. And to do that would unmake everything she would ever touch in the future.”

Leitos nodded. “I understand why that would trouble you, but ... you are the Three. You can create again.”

“We can and we will, of course, for that is the purpose our father has placed in our hearts.” She smiled and waved a hand toward the coming night’s first faint stars. “Between the darkness of the stars, unborn worlds await our will.”

While the thought was wondrous, Leitos had no cares for other worlds. “Then why delay? Be rid of Peropis.”

Attandaeus stepped closer. “We delay, Leitos, because you, and all you have known, are things Peropis would eventually touch, if we give her life. To unmake our daughter is to unmake you ... and all that you know.”