Blood Of Gods (Book 3) (35 page)

Laurel and Lyana didn’t follow the road directly to the fountain; instead, they veered off to the right, heading for the residential sections that sat in the elbow between South Road and the Road of Worship. The buildings were spaced farther apart here, forcing them to descend and walk on the road, but it was actually safer there than it had been on the rooftops. With nearly three-quarters of Veldaren’s residents now gone, either to Karak’s Army, beneath the Bend, or to the grave, the place was nearly deserted. It was also the area where some of the Sisters resided during the night, which meant they would be free to move as they pleased until just before sunset.

Soon the houses ended, and the foundations of unfinished buildings and stacks of rotting timber peppered the landscape. Laurel and Lyanna kept far out of sight, dashing through the field a good half mile away from the Road of Worship. Here the snow was still present, and they ran through the tall grasses, recently uncovered by the thaw, to hide their approach. On the distant road they could see the wagon lumbering along behind them, the Sisters peering out, hands cupped over their eyes to block out the low-hanging sun.

Finally, after running for nearly forty minutes, they arrived at Karak’s Temple. It was an unseemly rectangular structure, five stories high and black as midnight. The onyx lions outside its front entrance were captured in mid-leap, their mouths hanging open in an eternal roar. Lyana grabbed Laurel’s hand, pulling her across the field and toward the building. The wagon was close, almost close enough for the Sisters to see them. Once they reached the small thatch of evergreens that stood on their side of the road, Lyana helped Laurel climb one of the trees before bounding up effortlessly after her.

Finally at a vantage point where they felt it safe to watch without risk of exposure, they sat still and waited.

The wagon pulled up in front of the temple as acolytes stepped outside. The mumbling priest got out of the wagon, what remained of his white hair flapping in the breeze. He pulled his cloak up over his head and approached the boys in red robes. The acolytes escorted him inside. The door closed. The Sisters piled back into the wagon, the driver turned it around, and they plodded away.

The same as every other day.

The sun dipped even lower, half of it now obscured by the mountains to the west. Laurel glanced up at the red lines streaking across the sky. A riotous roar shook the air, vibrating the branches of the tree they were in, knocking bits of ice to the ground. Still she held on, staring out at the blackening structure. She had to remind herself to breathe.

“Laurel, we must go.”

“Not yet,” she replied.

Darkness slowly descended over the land, the last rays of light making the windowless temple look like it was constructed out of living fire. Nothing was happening. Nothing at all. The lion roared again, and Laurel heard it echo all around her.

“Laurel, please. Roddalin will be here come morning. Our time is over.”

Laurel’s head snapped around, and she stared at the girl.
“
Not yet
.”

“We must. The Judges will work their way toward the Bend. If we are not there before then . . . ”

Laurel reached out and grabbed the girl by her wrappings with both hands. “Listen to me, Lyana. We
must do this
. There has to be something we haven’t seen. Something, anything . . . ”

“Even if there
is
something, how would we know? The temple has no windows, Laurel!”

In her panic her voice rose, and Laurel placed a hand over her breast to calm her.

“I don’t know, Lyana. But I need to watch, I need to
try
. Please allow me that. None have stayed this late already, which means we are seeing things others haven’t.”

“Even if that is nothing?”

“Even so.”

Lyana huffed and sat back against the branch. She unwound the wrappings from her head, gradually revealing the pretty young girl beneath, the girl that looked so much like her grandmother, the dearly departed Soleh Mori. Laurel found herself staring. She’d grown fond of the young sprite. After all, they had so much in common. Neither had a family any longer. All they had was each other.

She was so focused on Lyana that at first she thought the sound that reached her ears was a trick of her imagination. But then she saw Lyana’s eyes widen, and she turned around, inching forward on the branch until she could see the whole of the temple clearly.

The top of the structure rose above their spot in the tree, and it was from there that the sound originated. It was the singing of a plethora of innocent voices. She saw outlines on the roof of the temple in the dying light, and many flashes of red.

It was the acolytes, marching in a circle as they sang
Karak’s glor
y.

She squinted, confused, and then strangely, in the center of the temple above the massive door, a single shutter opened. There stood the mumbling priest, Joben Tustlewhite, breathing in the cold night air. Laurel could see everything inside the room—the bed, the cupboard, the candles, and a writing desk against the far wall. She looked on as the priest turned away from the window, went to
the des
k, and sat down.

Still, the acolytes sang on the roof.

Lyana was suddenly beside her, head poking out of the branches. “What’s going on?”

Laurel threw a hand over her mouth and shoved her to the side, almost losing her balance and falling out of the tree in the process. She held her breath as Joben stood up, came to the window, and peered out into the oncoming blackness. When he saw nothing, he returned to sit at his desk.

Putting a finger to her lips, Laurel pointed to the ground. Lyana got her message and silently descended the tree, making sure to help Laurel along the way. It was times like these that the last surviving member of House Lawrence ridiculed her own childhood love of girly things. Had she shadowed the boys for even half her youth, she would be much better prepared for the deeds before her.

Their feet touched ground, and they waited a few moments as the acolytes continued to sing. As one song ended, another started. When it became apparent that they wouldn’t be stopping soon, Laurel and Lyana crept back along the tree line and then began running, praying that the boys were too intent on their praise of that bastard Karak to look down and notice them.

None did. They passed by Karak’s Temple and continued to head east, then north into the forest bordering Veldaren, their footfalls crunching much too loudly in the thin layer of icy snow. The sky was completely dark now, the stars shimmering overhead. It was only when the temple was the size of a child’s block behind them that they chanced stopping. Lyana whirled in place, searching for signs of the Judges, and Laurel doubled over and coughed.

“What was that?” asked Lyana.

Laurel spit a wad of phlegm and wiped a stray strand off her chin, which in turn removed some of the caked-on mud that assisted her Specter disguise.

“That, Lyana, was our opportunity,” Laurel said with a tired smile. “Now let’s get going before the lions find us. We need to talk to Pulo and King Eldrich. We have a priest to kill.”

C
HAPTER

30

A
fter a while, it was hard for Ahaesarus to tell the difference
between the walking dead and their living
counterparts
—
other than those missing limbs, that is. They all had the same blank expressions on their faces, moved with the same hunched, uneven gaits, and were covered with equal amounts of filth. If not for the tears shed by the living and the gaping wounds marking the flesh of the shuffling corpses, they might as well have been one and the same.

Over the last four days, Ahaesarus had taken a rough count of the reanimated dead that stood guard outside Mordeina’s walls. Their numbers included four thousand soldiers of Karak’s and sixteen thousand of Ashhur’s children. The remaining three
hundred
and twenty-nine were Ahaesarus’s brothers in servitude. They towered above the rest, majestic even in death, their skin pale and their clothes tattered. Of the original thousand that had been saved by Celestia and Ashhur when the winged demons descended on
Algrahar
, only one hundred and eighty-three remained living. Ahaesarus thought of the destruction he had witnessed during those fateful days, of the screams of his family and the ripping of steel through flesh, and it came to him that everything had come full circle. His second life had become just as anguished as his first. In his dark moments before sleep, he wondered if it all had been worth the trouble for him and his brothers.

Of course it was. We helped create Paradise. We helped forge peace.

Yet now that peace was gone. Now Paradise was in shambles, Karak setting fire to the countryside as he fled back to his kingdom across the river. The eastern sky glowed red day and night. All of it, ruined. And for what? What remained now that all safety and prosperity was gone? He looked down at his right leg. Beneath the thick fabric of his breeches, there would be a white scar there, encircling his calf entirely, a reminder of a wound that would have been mortal had Ashhur not been there to mend him—though the god had been too weak, too overly strained, to heal him completely. He flexed the leg, and felt the dull ache of pain in his bones. It was a sensation he knew would follow him to his death, whenever that happened to be, and loathing churned in his gut.

There is justice. There is retribution.

He heard a familiar pleading voice above the murmur of beseeching sobs and looked up. The living citizens of Paradise were weaving their way through the wall of undead, seeking out their loved ones as they had been for days now. He scanned their numbers, searching for the voice he’d heard, and found Judarius standing above the other undead, his dark hair matted and clumped in greasy tendrils, his face a mask of ruin. Azariah was standing before him, grasping his dead brother’s hand. The shortest Warden muttered words of a
long-
forgotten
prayer, an entreaty to Rana, the god of their long-dead
world. It was a prayer Ahaesarus knew well: “Treaty of the Fallen,” an appeal to the god of Algrahar to watch over the souls of the deceased. Ahaesarus had spoken those words many times in his former life, when he had been a priest in the Temple of Forever Light. He gulped down the bile that gathered in the back of his throat and began
walking
.

By the time he reached Azariah, the Warden had released his brother’s cold, dead hands. Azariah’s eyes were downcast, his arms crossed over his chest. The long white robe he wore was splotched with mud and dried blood. Azariah had spent much of the last four days among Mordeina’s wounded, mending bodies and souls alike, and Ahaesarus wondered if this was his first trip outside the walls. He placed a hand on the shorter Warden’s shoulder. He wanted to say something comforting to his colleague but couldn’t think of the proper words.

“He often surprised me,” Azariah said without looking up.

“How so?”

Azariah shook his head, a sad smile on his lips. “Back home, Judarius was a ruffian. Callous, belligerent, full of anger, and always drunk. All he ever wished to do was fight, and it was only when Father had had enough of his antics and sent him to the Citadel that he harnessed his anger. Judarius took to the teachings of Rana’s paladins, and he calmed. He was only forty-three when he was christened a knight of the Order of the Two Suns, the youngest ever given the title.”

Ahaesarus looked down at his friend, stunned. “He was accepted into the knighthood? He told me he was simply in the honor guard of Rana’s Shrine.”

“That is because his past shamed him,” said Azariah, gazing back up at the ruined face of his undead brother. “The knighthood was his penance for his past sins. If not for his misdeeds, he would never have been sent to the Citadel, and the paladins would never have taken him under their wing. To him, the title he bore was a constant reminder of all those he had hurt.”

“That
is
surprising. I never knew Judarius to be sentimental.”

“He was. To a point.”

The short Warden fell silent, staring down at the ground and shuffling his feet. Finally he lifted his head and looked over at
Ahaesarus
once more.

“Do you know why he never created a knighthood here in
Paradise
?” Azariah said. “I asked him once.
‘The concept of a knight might be noble, but by definition it teaches a life of violence. I would never form a knighthood here, for I see no use in it. I do not see the need for this young race to ever learn about violence at all.’
Those were his exact words.”

Ahaesarus thought of the battle, of the violence consuming their new world.

“Do you think he felt that way at the end?” he asked softly. “He fought valiantly; he fought viciously. He seemed to think he was made for it.”

Azariah shrugged and gestured toward his brother. “He was, and he did, but you would have to ask him. And I think you might find it difficult to pry the answer from his lips.”

Azariah then turned away from Ahaesarus and began walking through the crowd of people, both living and dead. “We will be leaving on the morrow,” Ahaesarus called out after him. “Will you be joining us?”

“No.” Azariah stopped and turned, facing him again. “My place is here, among my students. As I have told you before, this world needs healers as much as it needs warriors, perhaps even more so. Our roles have shifted, Ahaesarus. My brother is dead. You are now the warrior, as he was. I . . . I am now the priest, like you once were.”

With that, he turned and approached a throng of fifty youngsters huddling before the wall of the dead, focusing on two in particular: a tall boy and girl with sandy hair and flesh a shade darker than the others around them. If Ahaesarus remembered correctly, their names were Barclay and Sharin Noonan, siblings who had traveled with Ashhur when the god trekked from one corner of Paradise to the other, collecting his children and bringing them here to Mordeina. Both the youths’ cheeks glistened with tears as they stared at one of the standing dead men, most likely their father. Ahaesarus looked on as Azariah touched the dead man’s forehead, whispered a few words to the grieving youths, and then wrapped his wide arms around them. He guided them away from the swarm, heading for the holes in Mordeina’s walls.

Ahaesarus shook his head. “You were right, he
is
the sensitive one,” he spoke, looking at Judarius’s corpse. “And perhaps he is also the smartest of us all.” He looked up at Celestia’s tree, its branches pressing upward into the late winter sky, and followed Azariah and his students into the settlement, walking with a slight limp.

Unlike the exterior, inside the walls there was no time for sadness and disbelief. The last four days had been spent repairing what had been lost. With Karak having fled, Ashhur dismantled the bunker he had raised, using the stones to rebuild and expand on the murder row lining the road leading into the settlement. The usable lumber from shattered edifices was repurposed into new constructions. The numerous dead horses were hauled away, to be butchered and salted for the nearly starving populace.

Those four days also featured preparations for the march east, which was set to begin on this day at noon. The remaining horses were saddled, supply wagons built, weapons gathered. Discarded armor from Karak’s Army had been collected, the black painted over before being distributed among those who would depart. All supplies were amassed at the base of Manse DuTaureau’s hill, and the crowd was thick. Wives and mothers offered their husbands and sons teary goodbyes. Young King Benjamin was out as well, Ahaesarus was happy to see, with Howard Baedan steering him through the people, along with Isabel DuTaureau’s children and grandchildren. And halfway up the hill, Ashhur knelt in the sparse snow, holding court with a gaggle of youths. Ahaesarus felt his heart plummet at the sight. Ashhur was always at his benign best when speaking with children, his godly face beaming, the glow of his eyes bringing vibrancy to the landscape that didn’t exist even on the brightest of days. Yet none of that was in evidence at the moment. The deity appeared sidetracked, exhausted, even glum, as if he wanted to be somewhere else, and from the looks on the children’s faces, they noticed it.

Ahaesarus glanced up at the manse and thought he saw the outline of a redheaded waif in one of the windows. Isabel seemed to look right at him despite the distance. He shook his head and turned away.

The decision to pursue Karak had been met with bewilderment at first. In the aftermath of the bloodiest day in the history of
Paradise
, and with the shock of seeing the dead rise, not many knew how to react. Ashhur had preached, trying to convince his creations that what he wished for was righteous, but the response he received from
his people were hesitant at best. It wasn’t until Patrick DuTaureau, his
Turncloaks, and a collection of two hundred men and women who resided in the northwest corner of Mordeina voiced their enthusiastic support for the plan that the others joined in. Whereas Ashhur pleaded with their sense of justice and the need to survive, Patrick drew on a much more base desire—vengeance. The morning of that second day, he had stormed through the assembly, screaming at the top of his lungs, fire in his countenance. Many then joined the cause.

In the end, more than thirty thousand volunteered, men and women, the young, old, and infirm. So many offered their services that most had to be turned away. There simply weren’t enough armor and weapons to go around, and Ashhur was adamant that he wouldn’t send his children into battle unprepared.

A little too late for that,
Ahaesarus thought at the time, then felt guilty immediately after.

Now he scanned the crowd, looking for Patrick, but could see only the elder leader of the Turncloaks guiding his young cohorts in saddling the last of the horses. Finally, he spotted the malformed redheaded man, riding from the front gate, that giant sword of his resting on his lap. The look on his face was intense, his posture strangely rigid. A young girl ran up to the side of his horse and pulled on the leg of his mailed breeches, but he shoved her hand away. Ahaesarus frowned at the sight. He had always known Patrick to be a carefree sort, crass yet loving, and even insightful at times. To see him act this way made him feel the same as when he saw Ashhur teaching the children—distraught.

The misshapen man rode up to him. “Master Warden,” Patrick said, no humor in his tone.

“Patrick.”

“It’s time.”

Ahaesarus nodded. Neither said another word.

Ashhur rose to his feet and lifted a giant horn to his lips. His golden hair flowed around him like a mane of silk. When he blew into the instrument, the trumpeting rang throughout the walled settlement with the force of an erupting volcano. All work ceased, all eyes turned to their god.

“Citizens of Paradise, my precious children, the time to forge your own destiny is now.”

The fighting men and women formed haphazard ranks. Horses were tethered to the wagons and whips cracked. Ashhur gave the word, and mismatched armor clanked and spears thudded against the ground as the new army of eight thousand surged forward. They were a flood of flesh and steel, flowing toward the newly reconstructed front gate, too disorganized to form the lines necessary to pass through without creating a logjam. One hundred seventy-five of the remaining one hundred eighty-three Wardens marched at their lead, trying to get them under control.

Ahaesarus lingered by Ashhur’s side in front of the inner wall, watching the force approach. Patrick and the Turncloaks were there as well, and the Master Warden studied them. The soldiers who had turned against Karak didn’t seem as somber or frightened as the rest, and they gazed up at Ashhur with utmost respect. Even Patrick seemed to join in, his sullen mood interrupted when one of the youngest of the Turncloaks leaned over and whispered in his ear. Patrick threw his head back and laughed. “A tit?” he said through his guffaws. “He thought it was a
tit
? Ha!”

Then came the rumbling, and all laughter ceased. The ground shook, causing the advancing army to stop and hold their arms out to keep their balance. Ashhur took a step forward, his image wavering in Ahaesarus’s vision. The god gazed skyward, and the quaking of the earth ceased. The people of Mordeina shuffled about
nervously
, murmuring to each other. Something odd was happening, they could feel it in the air. Ahaesarus hurried to the front of the army, to where Ashhur marched, seemingly oblivious to the now fearful brightness of the sun.

“My Lord,” the Warden said, putting a hand on Ashhur’s forearm. Before his god could respond, Ahaesarus heard the voice. It was soft, feminine, and seemed to float on the wind.

My love . . . my love, you must stop this folly.

Ahaesarus immediately understood who spoke. It seemed all the land stood still, and when he looked about, it was truer than he thought possible. The horses were frozen, the people unmoving. Though the Warden felt wind blowing from all directions, not a strand of hair blew, nor a single thread of clothing. Even the sparse clouds in the sky remained in place. Only he and Ashhur seemed unaffected, and standing there in the sudden stillness chilled Ahaesarus to the bone.