Blood Of Gods (Book 3) (33 page)

“Citizens of Paradise,” said Karak, his voice elevated so that it could be heard from seemingly miles away. He proffered his hand to the still-smoking gate behind him. “These walls were built not to protect, but to
enslave
. Your creator would deny you your liberation! He has kept you as infants when you should have become strong.
My
faithful embody the strength you lack;
my
faithful have been given the means to flourish. Ashhur gave you all you desired, even the very weapons your defenders now hold, but I . . . I allowed my people to grow on their own. The towers outside were crafted by their sweat and labor, the steel they wear and hold molded by their brothers. Accept these gifts. Accept the knowledge I offer. The time for remaining children has passed. I do not wish to destroy you. I wish for you to be
FREE
!”

Velixar watched with interest as the multitudes shuffled and mumbled among themselves. A woman stepped forward. She was old, with white hair and wrinkled flesh, but her posture was straight as an arrow. She glanced once at her deity, then threw her head back and stared at the god who opposed them.

“And if we refuse your liberation?” she asked.

Behind her, the massive crowd murmured. They were growing unruly.

Karak crossed his sword over his chest. “A land divided is a land of chaos, and I will have order in my kingdom.”

“This is not your kingdom,” Ashhur proclaimed. The Wardens and humans surrounding him began to spread out, lifting their weapons.

“The peoples’ lives are in my hands, not yours,” Karak said, eyes narrowing. “Tell me truly, whose kingdom does that make it then?”

The western deity frowned.

Karak shook his head and turned back to the throng. “Come to me, people of Paradise. Turn your back on this feeble god.” He pointed toward Velixar. “Do as the first of your kind did long ago. Come into my arms. Allow me to make you as powerful as he.”

Velixar’s heart filled with pride, swelling the power that already existed within him. He took a step forward and looked toward the unkempt citizens, holding his arms out wide, feeling the heat on his cheeks as the glow of his eyes intensified.
I will be an example for them. I will be a beacon of Karak’s glory.

Amazingly, the old woman who had stepped forward lowered herself to her knees. The thousands behind her were hesitant at first, but eventually they followed her lead. The sound of the knees of the assembly hitting the ground, one after the other, was like a stampede of horses through a sodden field. Velixar smiled warmly, his pride growing. His eyes kept returning to Ashhur, trying to gauge the deity’s reaction to his people turning their faith to Karak, but his face was like stone.

Karak stepped through the maze of corpses with long, purposeful strides. It was then that Velixar noticed something odd, something he had not noticed during the rush of battle. More than half of the bodies on the ground were long dead, their skin gray going on blue, their joints stiff to the point of immovability. Those bodies had not been there two days ago, when last he had seen the outside world through the eyes of Patrick DuTaureau. He could think of no reason for them to be there now.

Karak spoke, yanking that contemplation from his mind. “My new children. I welcome you into my arms. You may not be forever safe and warm in them, but you will . . . ”

His words trailed away as the old woman who first knelt began to sing. It was a sweet song, one filled with hope and love.
“And let Ashhur always hold us in his arms,”
she crooned. Soon a few of the others behind her joined in, the song rising in volume, voice added to voice until at least half of the immense congregation was lifting their song to the heavens. To Velixar’s ears, the sound was like the scraping of steel on stone. His mouth dropped open. These people . . . these
children
. . . would they prefer death to the freedom of creating one’s own life? Would they rather cower in the arms of Ashhur than stand strong before Karak’s dignified order? It made no sense. They were frightened, confused, and they knew with each word they sang, they sank deeper into their own graves. Yet still they sang.

Still they sang.

Velixar looked to Ashhur. The god’s face was still as stone, but tears flowed from his eyes.

“You leave me no choice,” Karak said, his voice thundering over the chaos of the five thousand. “Above all else, I will have order.”

“You never will,” Ashhur said, and though it was spoken as a whisper, Velixar heard it with ease. “Not this year, not this century, not this millennium will you ever have the order you crave. You are chasing illusions, and I will not let you destroy my people in your wake. I promised to protect them, no matter the cost, and so I will.”

His head dipped as Karak bellowed for his soldiers to ready their blades.

“No matter the cost,” said Ashhur.

A brilliant light flared from the god’s eyes, so bright that Velixar could not look lest he be blinded. As he covered his face with his hands, a single, deafening word rocked the landscape.

“RISE!”

Mordeina grew larger and larger in his vision as Patrick slapped the reins again and again. Steam rose from his mare’s bobbing head, and hoofed feet pounded into the icy, snowy ground. His half helm bounced against Patrick’s head while Winterbone, its scabbard fastened to the side of the saddle, thudded against the horse’s flank.

His body ached from being tossed around, but he gnashed his teeth and ignored the pain. He could hear the conflict inside the walls escalate, even over the constant
thud, thud, thud
of charging hooves. Karak’s voice came clear, and Ashhur’s as well, so loud that they might as well have been five feet away from him instead of five thousand. The sky above the walls lit up with flashes of light. A series of low, resounding
booms
followed.

“Faster!” he shouted. Only one thing was important now—
getting
through the walls and defending his place of birth.

The walls were close, so large in his vision that all he could see was a backdrop of mottled gray and black stone. He counted nine wooden towers butting up against the walls, empty and forgotten. Two of them were on fire. In the wide space between two of the towers was a gaping chasm in the wall’s thick stone. He leaned over, urging his mare to quicken her pace. With the afternoon sunlight shining down, brightened five times over by the snowy landscape, he realized that it wasn’t a single fissure he was seeing, but two, one through each wall, each wide enough for ten men to stroll through abreast, leading directly into the settlement. He swore he could see a flurry of activity on the other side.

They were now two thousand feet away and closing fast.

Shadows appeared on either side of him, and Patrick glanced in both directions. Preston had ridden up on his right, the old warrior’s face a hard mask of calculation, while Denton Noonan kept pace with him on the left, his eyes ablaze with anger and focus. The hoots and hollers of the younger Turncloaks echoed behind him.

When they were a thousand feet from the gap, the blood-
curdling
screams of those inside were almost deafening. Patrick bore down, chancing to take one hand off the reins and grab
Winterbone’s
handle. He saw clearly into the heart of Mordeina, where countless tiny forms were locked in combat. He tensed his neck and shoulders to keep his upper body steady while his lower bounded with his mare’s strides. Numerous bustling shadows then appeared within the
jagged
hole in the wall, moving hastily. A
second
later, soldiers poured out of the opening. They ran haphazardly, shrieking as they stormed through the slick snow. Patrick slowed his mare ever
so slightly

“Ready!” he shouted as he tore Winterbone from its sheath.

C
HAPTER

28

T
he thousands of dead littering the ground took to their feet. To Velixar’s ears, the sound was like a million twigs being snapped all at once. Screams followed, from followers of Karak and Ashhur alike.

“Kill them!” ordered Karak. “Kill them all!”

Velixar’s feet were seemingly frozen to the ground. An immensely tall figure rose from within the melee; the Warden Judarius, his fellow member of the Lordship back when Velixar had been Jacob Eveningstar. Only Judarius’s face was wrong. His flesh had gone gray, his eyes milky, and the left side of his neck was a mess of flayed skin. The Warden moved his head slowly to the side, his lifeless stare lingering on the soldier standing in front of him. The soldier appeared bewildered, his dazzled blue eyes shining in the intense light Ashhur created. He never looked up, not even when the
Warden
lifted a bloodied maul and brought it down on the back of his head. The sound of steel and bone shattering echoed over Karak’s furious screams.

Bedlam ensued as the walking corpses lashed out at the soldiers with whatever weapons they still held; those that had nothing bit with their teeth and scratched with pale bleeding fingers. Men fell, their bodies torn asunder, while Ashhur’s children fled in all directions, looks of abject terror painting their faces.

Velixar couldn’t believe what was happening. He’d seen images like this in the memory of the demon he’d swallowed—the Beast of a Thousand Faces had raised an army of undead elves to march against Kal’droth during the great war—but he had never expected Ashhur to take such an extreme measure himself. But no . . . that wasn’t right. He’d seen this before. His thoughts retreated to the moment when the western deity had animated the corpse of
Brienna
Meln, the elf Jacob Eveningstar had loved. Terror filled his soul.

A cold hand grabbed him around the neck, ripping him from the painful memory. In desperation he whirled around, flailing violently, and the hand fell away. When he pushed back his hood, he saw a staggering dead man with a slit throat before him, the symbol of the roaring lion embossed on his breastplate. The walking corpse righted itself and stared at him with eyes that shone with soft yellow light. The dead thing reached out for him again, fingers curled into claws, and Velixar stepped back. His horror and disbelief made him weak; the link funneling the power from Karak into him vanished. Still, he was strong enough to take out a single undead monster. Words of magic spat from his lips and the thing crumpled into a mound of useless flesh and bone.

When he turned, everywhere he looked there were undead. Thousands of them, men, women, and children from Paradise, along with a great many dead soldiers of Karak. They fought with mindless intensity, even those who appeared to be long deceased, their movements forceful but erratic. The living soldiers were thrown into panic, unsure of whom they should defend themselves against. Whenever one of their brethren fell, a moment later he stood again, eyes shimmering with that sick yellow light.

The whole time, Ashhur conducted the chaos, glancing this way and that, steering his undead horde.

Velixar desperately searched for Karak as the battle raged around him, found his god flinging the walking corpses left and right as he shouted for his army to remain strong. None were listening. Soldiers fled for the hole in the wall, first a few, then many. Even Aerland Shen and his Ekreissar, though they handled the undead with relative ease, retreated toward the opening. Velixar wanted to scream at them, to pulverize their bodies with a word, but a group of seven corpses lurched toward him, their jaws chattering wordlessly. He impaled one with a lance of living shadow, crushed another’s skull, set a third aflame, but that didn’t stop their advance. They knew no fear, no pain. Even the one he’d impaled with shadow continued on despite a gaping hole in its chest and the entrails spilling out around its knees.

Four more continued on, so close now. Velixar fled, the shame of it burning in his chest. Toward Karak he ran, veering side to side, nearly having his head lopped off by a cluster of living, terrified soldiers. He ducked beneath the attempt and kept on going, his gaze focused on his beloved deity.

Karak seethed as he stared at his brother, looking like he was ready to leap into the air and pounce on him had it not been for the undead that clawed at his godly form. “Face me!” he shouted, his words aimed at Ashhur, who still played puppet master behind the stone bunker. “Come face me yourself!”

The undead pressed even harder as Ashhur watched from across a sea of writhing corpses.

The
hiss
and
clink
of his fellow warriors drawing their weapons was music to Patrick’s ears. He raised Winterbone, holding it steady despite its great weight, and prepared to strike. He was on the first soldier in moments and drew back, ready to slash with all his might.
But when he caught sight of the soldier’s expression, his eyes
bulging
with fear, Patrick faltered. Instead of lopping off the man’s head, his blade glanced off his helm, raising a flurry of sparks, and the soldier rushed right past him. Patrick pulled up on the reins, forcing his mare to rear and nearly pitch him from the saddle. When he spun the horse around, he saw that the soldier had simply kept on running, his feet trudging desperately through the snow.

He heard the ring of steel meeting steel, and he whirled in a circle. The Turncloaks and Denton’s brave civilians had followed his lead and halted their horses as well, randomly hacking at the charging soldiers, yet meeting no resistance. None of the running men wearing Karak’s sigil tried to assail them.
They aren’t charging. They’re fleeing.

“STOP!”

Hesitantly, his mates ceased lashing out at the soldiers, Big Flick punctuating the stillness when he brought the hilt of his longsword down on a soldier’s head with a
clang
. All twenty-three sat slack-jawed and bewildered, their horses fidgeting nervously as hundreds of terrified men hurried past. They were like stones in the middle of a surge of water.

“What’s happening?” yelled Tristan over the din.

Patrick grinned, his heart rate quickened.

“He’s winning! Ashhur is winning!” he proclaimed. “Come on, follow me!”

Patrick urged his horse forward, working his way through the fleeing soldiers. Their numbers parted like the knees of a wanton maid after too much wine, allowing them uninhibited passage through the holes in the walls. He could smell blood and smoke in the air, as well as the sickly sweet stench of burning flesh. He crossed through the break in the outer wall, followed closely by his compatriots. He was past the ten-foot chasm between the two walls in the blink of an eye.

When he charged through the second fissure and into
Mordeina
,
he found himself surrounded by absolute madness.

There were people fighting everywhere, tight-knit clusters swinging swords, mauls, axes, rods, and even hands and fists. It was so crowded that the hordes pushed up against both sides of his mare, sealing off any possible escape. A helmeted head collided with his knee, and something heavy shoved at him from the other side. A spray of blood caught him in the face, momentarily blinding him. Invasive fingers grabbed at Winterbone, trying to pry it from his grasp. For a moment he thought he heard someone shout his name, but it was impossible to tell. There was so much conflict, so many voices, that it was as if nothing existed save screams and clashing steel. He glanced about him in a panic, but couldn’t make out anything except the flurry of bodies locked in struggle. He couldn’t see Preston, Big Flick, Edward, Denton—anyone. It was all confusion.

It was like the night he had led the Turncloaks against Karak’s soldiers in the chasm, only a hundred times worse.

Another stream of blood splashed against his cheek, and his mare shrieked in pain. The beast reared back, this time far enough that Patrick tumbled out of the saddle. He threw his arms up as he plummeted, keeping Winterbone high in the air. His back collided with a seemingly solid wall of humanity, but the force of his fall carried him, and those he crashed into, to the ground. Someone gasped—the first distinguishable sound he’d heard since entering the settlement—and he rolled over, his elbow splashing in gore-soaked muck. The man who had broken his fall writhed, face down, arms and legs pounding the sodden ground, weighed down by his heavy plated armor.

Even though a swarm of bodies crushed in on him from above, seeing the struggling soldier caused Patrick’s head to clear. He glanced at his right hand, saw that he still held his sword, his fingers clenched so tightly they had turned white. Quickly, he scampered to his feet, seeking higher ground. As he had learned that night in the chasm, Winterbone was nearly useless in close quarters.

He shoved his way through the throng, stabbing at those in armor to try and keep them at a safe distance. He took a nasty slash to the bare flesh of his left wrist between his vambrace and his mailed glove, but he couldn’t turn enough to see who delivered it. Instead, he put his head down and churned his uneven legs, bulling his way through.

Finally, he reached a gap in the fighting, nearly falling when suddenly there were no obstacles blocking him. Ahead of him was the bunker, but in front of that were two soldiers locked in battle with a Warden with long auburn hair. Patrick recognized him as Ludwig, and he was badly hurt. The soldiers hacked away mercilessly at him, and though Ludwig was much larger than they were, he was not nearly as good with a sword. It was all he could do to bat aside every third blow. Two of the fingers on his left hand were gone, a massive gash yawned on his chest, and innumerable other tiny cuts covered him.

Patrick charged, relishing the freedom of not being crushed by countless bodies, and came down hard with Winterbone. In the clamor, the soldiers never heard him coming. His blade sliced through steel, flesh, and bone alike, severing the arm of one of the men. It flopped uselessly on the ground. He then drove the tip of his sword through the slit in the soldier’s helm, and the man fell backward. The second had turned when he realized his partner no longer fought with him, giving Warden Ludwig a chance to stab him through the neck from behind.

With both soldiers down, yet more approaching, Patrick rushed to the Warden and drove his shoulder into him, forcing the injured being against the outside of the bunker. “Climb, dammit!” he shouted, and Ludwig complied, albeit weakly. Patrick pushed and prodded until the Warden had reached the top of the five-foot curved wall. Only when he disappeared over the other side did
Patrick’s
fingers find a crevice in the stone. With bodies beginning to flail toward him once more, he pulled himself up.

For a moment he stood atop the bunker and gawked at the carnage, but a second later he began running along the curved surface, slashing at the soldiers standing below. He noticed a Warden with a wide back and thick black hair, carving his way through a group of Karak’s men. Patrick hacked off a soldier’s sword-wielding hand as he tried to climb the bunker, then looked back up at Judarius and smiled. The Warden was a beast with his maul, an animal of single-minded fury. He crushed three skulls before turning around, and when Patrick saw his face, he stopped in his tracks. The Warden was horrific, his jaw dangling, his loose-fitting tan leathers saturated with red. Yet it was his eyes that riveted Patrick. Judarius’s eyes had been green, but now they were pale and glowing slightly. His expression was blank.

That’s when Patrick noticed that he himself was being mostly ignored. He looked this way and that, his eyes growing wider as he took in the battle scene around him. Soldiers were fighting soldiers. Soldiers were fighting men and women whose flesh was every shade from gray to blue. Soldiers were fighting attackers missing one or both of their limbs.

“What the fuck . . . ?”

Velixar swung Lionsbane, taking half the head off a naked dead woman, and slid to the snow-and-gore-covered ground when five more reached for him. Fingers snagged his cloak, and he lifted his arms, allowing it to be torn from his body. He almost lost Lionsbane in the process, but his grip on the sword’s handle was true. He scampered to his feet, his pendant bouncing against his chest as the undead descended upon the cloak as if he were still in it. Without protection from the elements, the cold hit his sweat-soaked body like an icy wave. He shivered but kept running.