Blood Of Gods (Book 3) (32 page)

He grasped the booted feet with both hands and yanked, and the soldier slid out from beneath the wagon with ease. When he was fully exposed, Patrick roughly kicked him onto his back, grabbed him by the neck of his breastplate, and lifted him to standing. The soldier screeched and tried to get away.

“Please!” the soldier said. “Don’t hurt me!”

Patrick released him and took a step backward. The soldier before
him was young, no older than Joffrey, the youngest
Turncloak
.
He ha
d a head of silver hair, a slender jaw, and light-blue eyes like seaglass. He looked like he could have been Moira Elren’s brother in another life.

Tears streamed down the young soldier’s cheeks. “Please,” he groveled, clutching his hands to his chest like a small child. “Please, I-I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to go home.”

“You want to go home?” Patrick asked.

The boy nodded. Patrick almost pulled the dagger out of his belt and shoved it into the boy’s throat right there, but something stopped him.

My son will be that age one day,
he thought. He dropped his hands to his sides.

“Go,” Patrick said.

“What?” asked the soldier.

“I’m not going to tell you twice. Go.
Now.
Before I change
my mind
.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the young soldier repeated as he crept along the side of the wagon. When he reached the edge, he turned and began running through the snow, heading south toward the Gods’ Road. Patrick watched him go, his inner thoughts in turmoil. Then he saw a shadow pass over his head, and a moment later the fleeing boy fell. His body shuddered for a moment and then stilled, an arrow protruding from the back of his head.

“You got him, Denton!” he heard one of the other men shout.

Patrick turned, his fists clenched, and spotted Denton Noonan sitting atop his horse, three of his compatriots patting him on the back. Patrick was about to charge him, but strong hands grasped his wrist, spinning him back around.

“Don’t,” Preston told him.

“I let the boy go,” Patrick growled.

“Denton didn’t know that.”

“He should have.”

Patrick shrugged out of Preston’s grasp and stormed through the snow, approaching the body of another of the soldiers he’d felled. He kicked the corpse, and it spun over. He gazed down at the face of a boy not much older than the one he had decided to set free. This one had wavy chestnut hair and eyes of a deep green that were already beginning to grow milky with death.

“Children,” he muttered.

“Karak left behind those he thought either too old or too young to fight,” Preston said.

“How many?”

“Seventy.”

Seventy men, killed in less than ten minutes.
It was a horrific thought, and one that threatened to make him pitch the wine still sitting in his stomach all over the ground.

“Karak turned children into monsters,” Patrick whispered. “We’re no different. Joff is fourteen.”

“As the books say, war makes monsters of all of us,” said Preston. “We do what we must do to survive, and that is all. It’s something we all must accept at some point.”

“This used to be Paradise,” Patrick said, his mind in a daze. “It used to be beautiful. Now it’s just like me.”

“Patrick, don’t say such things. You don’t know—”

“Shut it, old man,” Patrick snapped. “You don’t get to tell me how to feel.”

Preston put his hands up and backed away. In the background, the battle raging within Mordeina’s walls rose in volume. Patrick’s anger began to churn once more. He peered over his hump at the grayed soldier.

“Go get the tindersticks,” he said, his voice low and grave. “Set fire to every wagon.”

“Hurry,” Preston shouted to the others. “If we’re quick, we can be back to the cave in no time.”

“No,” Patrick said, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around to face him. “We’re not running. There’s a battle raging, and we’ll go galloping in head first.”

Preston’s hard, pale eyes stared into his.

“And if Karak has won before we reach the melee?” he asked.

Patrick felt his blood run cold, but this was something he would not budge on, was something he knew was right.

“We charge, even then. Even unto death. If we’re going to die, we’ll die as good men protecting the innocent. Not as monsters.
Never
monsters, not ever again.”

C
HAPTER

27

K
ARAK, FACE ME!”
Ashhur had said.

Velixar let the memory of the western god’s challenge wash over him. There had been so much anger in those words, and he swore there was a hint of fear as well. He glanced up and saw Karak smiling as he stood before the gate cut into
Mordeina’s
inner wall, his glowing eyes lighting the dim, cramped space. Behind him was the pile of rubble from Velixar’s previous failed attempt to overrun the settlement, and behind that was the ironlike trunk of Celestia’s tree. All around were the broken bodies of the dead and dying, those who had plummeted from the top of the wall during the invasion. Half were men from Paradise; the rest, soldiers of Karak.

So many reminders of my failures on the day of our greatest victory
.

From within the settlement came the
clang
of steel, the shouts of the aggressors, and the shrieks of the dying. Velixar glanced behind him, where Lord Commander Gregorian stood by the hole the soldiers had battered into the weakened stone of the outer wall, and then stared up at his god. He took a knee before him.

“My Lord, we are beyond your brother’s protection. Allow me the privilege of opening the final gate.”

Karak put a hand on his shoulder.

“Do it,” he said.

Velixar stood and approached the gate, strangely aware of the many eyes watching him from just outside the fissure behind him. Beyond the gate, the slaughter had commenced. His fingers touched the pendant around his neck, feeling its warmth, then found the iron bars, eight inches thick and unbendable. Velixar smiled.
That which cannot bend will easily be broken.

He swiveled his head slightly and looked at the Lord
Commander
.
Malcolm had his arms crossed over his chest, his milky left eye seemingly glowing through the slit in his great helm.

“Best keep your men back,” Velixar said. The faithful man nodded to him and held his arms out. The eager soldiers gathered behind retreated from the opening.

“Hold nothing back, High Prophet,” said Karak from behind him. “This is the hour of our victory.”

Velixar squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. He thought back on the words of the demon whose power he now possessed. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he created a temporal rift within him, expanding his soul outward and inward at the same time. His essence became a shimmering sphere filled with magma swirling at its center. He imagined all of the cosmos, everything connected, and his pendant became a funnel, stretching out into the stars, seeking the heart of the sun that burned above him.

That sun was Karak. Those flames were his might.

For you, my Lord. All for you.

Velixar siphoned the power into himself.

He felt the energy flow. His nerves tingled, and his hairs stood on end. There was a tightening sensation as his flesh began to stretch with the hugeness of the power he had absorbed, threatening to burst his entire being.
The soul is limitless. It is the mind that restricts us.
He pictured his body as water, flowing free and formless, and allowed the essence of his god to infuse every particle of his being. Soon, in the world behind his eyelids, he had grown nearly as large as the world itself and just as mighty. He felt close to bursting.

Do not push it too far. Not yet. Keep yourself restrained.

He opened his eyes.

The world seemed to warp in his vision, pulsating with vivid colors. With his body tingling, he raised his hands and fanned his fingers, looking on in awe as shadows flowed around them. He opened his mouth, and words of magic sprung forth, raucous and potent.

Dark lightning leapt from his hands. A deafening explosion followed as the gate—and a good five feet of the wall bordering it—blasted inward. Smoke billowed and purplish fires blazed that no water could quell. Screams sounded from the other side, filled with terror and pain. Velixar looked behind him at Karak.

The god seemed pleased. Velixar’s heart soared.

“Go forth,” Karak said. “Prepare Paradise for my coming.”

“Lord Commander!” Velixar bellowed when the thick smoke dissipated. “Send in your men!”

He stepped to the side as Malcolm led the soldiers through the gaps in both walls. The constant drumming of their feet and clank of their armor was music to Velixar’s ears. It seemed to take an age for all four thousand to pass through. Only when the horsemen entered, their chargers huffing and snorting in the lingering smoke, did he enter as well, leaving Karak alone in the chasm.

“All this will be yours,” Karak told him, his thundering voice confident. “All you must do . . . is seize it.”

Excitement simmered through Velixar’s core, and he hastened his steps. Lionsbane, impotent next to the power at his disposal, swung on his hip. The place he entered was awash with blood, death, and confusion. The twin barricades that had once turned the causeway that stretched out from the gate into a thin culvert—
murder row
, as Patrick DuTaureau’s mind had dubbed it—were obliterated, lying in smoking piles of debris on either side of him. Corpses, both human and Warden, covered the ground, their bodies twisted and ruined. More than one had the remains of the gate’s iron bars protruding from him. Velixar stepped off the causeway, and all around him were small pockets of fighting. The heat from his energy and the blast had melted the snow, leaving muddy earth beneath his feet.

No matter where he looked, he saw bloodshed. Karak’s soldiers pressed onward, the Lord Commander forming his massive regiment into a brutal column that sawed through the settlement’s defenders. Off to the side, Aerland Shen, the Ekreissar Chief, was storming through ranks of opponents, cutting them down with his dual black swords. Screams filled the air. Though they now had steel weapons at their disposal, the people of Paradise had little training and were poorly armored. Men and women fell like blades of grass beneath a swinging scythe. Velixar lifted his eyes and saw the squat, bulky form of Manse DuTaureau sitting on its hill, surrounded by a massive throng of people, tiny as ants in the distance.
So many of them. They will be stomped just as easily.

A bright flash came from his right, and Velixar turned toward it. He saw a cluster of soldiers collapse as small fireballs and waves of electricity washed over them. Beyond those fallen soldiers he spotted six men in heavy cloaks surrounded by a phalanx of Wardens. The spellcasters worked diligently, their hands and mouths in constant motion despite their obvious exhaustion.

Velixar grinned and twisted his fingers into runes. So
powerful
was the energy running through him that he didn’t need to utter a single word before two of the Wardens collapsed into shapeless, fleshy heaps, every bone in their bodies crushed. He
imagined
organs rupturing, and blood erupted from another Warden’s mouth with such force that it rose twenty feet into the air.
Shadows
leapt from his fingertips, swirling around three more Wardens, spinning them, twisting their bodies until their limbs were ripped from their torsos. Eyeballs boiled in their sockets, hearts burst, faces caved in. The six spellcasters were the last to fall, four of their stomachs splitting open and their entrails vomiting out of them. Those entrails in turn became writhing snakes, choking the life out of the r
emaining two.

To Velixar, his work was brutal, effortless,
exhilarating
.

He sensed danger approaching and pivoted on the balls of his feet to find an arrow careening toward his head. He had no time to cast a spell to bat the bolt aside, not even time enough to duck, but his confidence didn’t waver. He simply smiled as the arrow caught fire, burning to a cinder as it passed through the swell of energy surrounding him. By the time it struck his billowing cloak, the arrow was nothing but ash. He looked in the direction from which it came, and there was Ashhur, knee deep in soldiers, fighting them off with all his might. Ropes looped around his neck, and as the deity lumbered forward, hacking away with his ethereal sword, he dragged soldiers behind him.

Velixar hooked his fingers, and a shadowy conduit shot forth, five feet wide and screaming with dark energy. The conduit roared along the ground, obliterating bodies both living and not, kicking up a bloody mist as it sought out its target. It struck Ashhur in the side, enveloping the deity in pulsating tendrils. The god screamed, as did the soldiers attacking him, and then the whole of the area was overcome by a ring of darkness. Purple flames licked along the surface of the swirl like a potent cosmic storm. Velixar laughed and brought his hands together, wringing the dark energy, compressing it, crushing all that was inside. He imagined Ashhur, his heavenly form squeezed thin as a reed, the magma of his life flowing out his mouth, eyes, and ears.

“I have you.”

Only he didn’t. Just as his palms met, and the swirling shadow constricted with an audible
thwump
, Ashhur leapt from within the black. He soared twenty feet into the air, arms and legs splayed, golden hair trailing behind. His silver armor was dented, the
plating
seared black, but his flesh was still immaculate. When the deity landed on the other side of the stone barrier that rimmed the southern edge of the settlement, one knee and one foot driving into the earth along with his fist, he lifted his glowing yellow eyes to Velixar and seethed.

Not even in Haven had he seen Ashhur so full of rage. The god appeared angry enough to crush the entire world in the palm of his hand. With a wrathful deity’s attention fully on him, Velixar felt dread for the first time. Ashhur’s presence also seemed to steel both the Wardens and his children, for they fought with renewed vigor, even those mortally wounded.

Velixar lifted his hands, and the heads of forty of the corpses surrounding him tore free from their necks. With a whoosh
the heads were alight with purple fire, searing away hair and flesh. The skulls left behind still burned, and when he thrust his arms forward they took flight, trailed by licking flames. They flashed through the air, heading for the throng on the other side of the bunker. It was a maneuver to frighten as much as injure, one he had seen utilized in the memory of the Beast of a Thousand Faces, when Kaurthulos’s demons laid siege to Kal’droth’s last elven stronghold.

It might have worked then, but not now. Ashhur didn’t cower; instead, the deity reached up a single hand, stopping the skulls mid-flight. He made a fist, and the fires extinguished, bits of smoking bone raining down on the blood-drenched snow. The western god then took a menacing step forward, pointing an accusatory finger Velixar’s way.

Ashhur’s voice echoed in his head, though the god’s mouth never moved.
Betrayer.
The force of the accusation was nearly enough to drive him to his knees.

“BROTHER!”

The sound rocked the countryside, feeling like the moment Celestia split the land to form the Rigon River.

“YOUR KINGDOM IS MINE.”

Karak’s voice was swelled with contempt. Ashhur’s eyes shifted to the smoking hole in the wall where the gate had once been, and Velixar looked that way as well. Karak came sauntering out of the hollow, his armor a black so deep it seemed to swallow all light, making the very air around him dim. He held his own ethereal sword in his hand, its blade alight with flames and swirling with shadow. The Divinity of the East took five steps and then stopped, leveling his gaze at his brother.

Ashhur stared at him, standing as still as the mountain embellishing his scorched breastplate. It seemed as if everything ceased, nearly all combatants stopping mid-swing to gawk at the stare down between the brother gods. The only sounds were the wind, the moans of the dying, and the sobs of those attempting to c
omfort them.

It was Ashhur who moved first. He lifted his chin, stared at the bright afternoon sky for a half an instant, and then glared back at his brother. The western deity was statuesque, the embodiment of beauty and dignity with his flowing golden hair and firm posture. Velixar hated him all the more for how much he admired him in that moment.

“Leave,” Ashhur said, his voice low and menacing. The blue glow of the sword in his hand brightened.

“No,” Karak said.

“Then I will make you.”

“As always, you lack wisdom,” said Karak. “You will not lift a hand against me.”

As Ashhur tilted his head and narrowed his eyes, seeming puzzled, a low rumbling sound reached Velixar’s ears. Karak gestured down the road behind his brother. Ashhur turned his head, and Velixar could see him visibly deflate, the god’s shoulders hunching.

The rumbling was the sound of innumerable marching feet. A multitude approached from the northwest, urged onward by soldiers on both foot and horseback. Babes cried, mothers sniffled, old men pleaded for their lives. It was one of the most pathetic scenes Velixar had ever seen.

The soldiers who’d scaled the walls at distant parts of the
settlement
had been given firm orders: Be brutal when
confronting
pockets
of resistance, but do not harm the innocents or those unwilling to fight. Instead, they were to gather as many as they could, as quickly as possible, and march them to the southern gate. The five hundred soldiers pushed and prodded the people through the center of the road, where the remains of countless humans and
Wardens
surrounded them. Bodies were shoved aside to allow room
for the bedraggled populace to stagger forward. Velixar was shocked
by the numbers he saw: There had to be more than five thousand.

The captain leading the charge stopped the procession three hundred feet from where Ashhur stood, surrounded by a ragged collection of bleeding defenders. The crowd was close enough now that Velixar could see their faces, see the fear and dismay that showed in their tear-filled eyes.