The Black Shriving (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 2) (69 page)

There is a way,
said the blade.
If you love her enough.

Asho stared down at the sword. "What are you talking about?"

There is a force within Starkadr that, if unleashed, could challenge even the lofty heights of Aletheia. You could lead that force. You could storm Aletheia's Portals and wash aside all resistance. Crush all who dared oppose you.

Asho wanted to drop the sword, but was afraid that it would continue speaking to him even from the floor – afraid that he might find that he could no longer silence that voice.

"A force? What are you talking about?"

Do you trust the Aletheians? The Virtues and their Grace? Do you trust them to care for Kethe?

"No," whispered Asho.

Then take matters into your own hands. My kind can heal. A rough healing, it is true, but we could return Kethe to herself. Draw her back from the White Gate's embrace. Untouched, unharmed, alive and well. Let me show you how, Asho. There is one below, akin to a god, who would be grateful for your assistance. Free him. He will save Kethe. I swear this to you.

Asho's pulse was pounding in his ears. His legs were shaking.
My kind
. A demon, then.

Think on it, master. This war you are beginning. The allies you are choosing. It can only culminate in either your death or the end of the empire. But we can help. We can end this war tonight. We can sweep away all resistance. We can open the Portals to every corner of this world and flood it with our might. Lady Kyferin can return to her castle. You can return with her to wed Kethe and be the lord of all you see. A different lord, one wise to the ways of the world, one who understands both the high and low places. A just ruler. Fair and compassionate. You will wield your power in such a way that -

Asho slammed the blade into the scabbard. "No," he growled. One word, absolute, that rang out into the dark vastness of Starkadr.

The sword went still. He stared at it, panting for breath, then collapsed to his knees and retched. For aching minutes he simply gagged and writhed as his body fought the sudden onslaught of nausea and exhaustion. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the cool stone floor.

No
.

The voice, when it came, was so quiet as to be almost inaudible within the confines of his mind.
Never?

Asho went to swear never, then stopped. He was all alone. Alone with this demon, this blade, this source of strength and sure damnation. Who knew what ends might come to pass? Into what corners they might be driven?

He thought of freeing the Bythians. Tearing down the Ennoian warlords. Killing the Aletheians. Remaking the world as he saw fit.

Never?

With a groan, Asho rose to his feet. He knew he should discard the blade, toss it into the deepest abyss. And yet. They needed it. He needed it. He had to return to Lady Kyferin and tell her about his newfound ability to open the Portals. He had to help her begin planning the next steps, devise a strategy to mine the Gate Stone and cement their alliance with the Agerastians. There was much to do.

Mæva's voice came to him, steeped in regret and sorrow.
"I was so young. When the moment came, I realized that I didn't want to die. I thought I needed Ashurina, no matter the cost."

Asho grimaced and brusquely wiped the sweat from his brow. This was different. By the Black Gate this was different.

"
Akressat M'chazk
," said Asho, and the Portal rippled back to life. He stared at the liquid surface and felt a shiver of excitement mixed with dread.
I can open Portals
, he thought.
I can go where I will
.

He took a deep breath, placed his hand on the sword's hilt, and stepped back through into Mythgræfen.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

From then on, Tharok seemed to dwell in in the half-light of twilight and dawn. It was Kyrrasthasa's preferred time for movement, when objects seemed to lose their definite nature and become subtle and bleed into each other, their colors leaching to grey, when the hour was magical and filled with the potential incumbent in all boundaries.

Often he would stalk forward alone, making his way ever higher into the peaks, filled with a restless, yearning energy that seemed to buoy him on long after he thought his muscles should have burned and failed him. Something of Kyrra's gift, he thought: the medusa's kiss, lending him strength.

Of the medusa he saw relatively little. He had thought to engage her in long conversations as they traveled, to ask her of the legends and lore that surely her millennial life span had made her privy to, but she was rarely by his side. Instead, she coursed far afield, moving much faster than he was able to, hunting no doubt, perhaps building up her strength. Occasionally he would catch sight of her in the gloaming or pre-dawn light, a smear of lurid crimson and dangerous yellow, strangely brilliant in contrast to the paled world, as if her scaled hide glowed and glimmered with a light all its own.

By steady but slow degrees, Tharok ascended. He moved out of the Wyvern's Hide, leaving those badlands of gulches and canyons, serrated ridges and broken cliffs, and climbed into the grim and bare sloped peaks of the Cloud Raker mountains to the east of the perilous Five Peaks, which arose to even greater heights. Once again he found himself leaving the tree line altogether, his boots finding purchase on loose shale and broken rock.

Crouching down, he took up different stones and held them up to the faint light so that their metallic hues shone with subtle iridescence. Viridian green, cobalt blue, rock shot through with the rust red of the bones of the mountain. The cliffs here were layered; the different strata of rock lay sensuously upon each other in an almost organic way, undulating with the movement of the ages. He understood now how these cliffs had been formed, the gentle and achingly slow action that had accumulated silt and hardened it into rock. Ages beyond his ken. He considered the strange cliffs, saw in them the history of the world, shook his head and moved on.

Three days out, he knew that not too far to his west the Red River and Crokuk would have arrived at the Dragon's Tear. They would have ringed those still and deadly waters with their tents and issued forth the call for a Grand Convocation. That even now Nakrok would be solidifying his control over the Red River, having no doubt partnered with some ambitious highland kragh to take control. Tharok mused over Maur's fate, and Nok's. Shaya was no doubt being held secure, the great prize that would propel Nakrok to victory. He allowed these thoughts to fuel him, to power him forward as the air grew thinner, as it became ever harder to fill his lungs, as the slopes grew so precipitous that it seemed at times that he was not walking but rather climbing endless ladders of stone that only he could see embedded in the cliff faces.

Tharok moved without fear. He saw nothing to threaten his ascent. Kyrra's presence cleared the immediate slopes of all life, the animals fleeing long before he could cross their paths. Only the distant and circling specks that were the wyverns high overhead kept him company, their lonely and desolate cries echoing down to him on occasion as they searched for mountain goats and lonely kragh.

Each night Tharok built a fire and lay gazing at the flames. He found that the combination of the circlet's power and the medusa's kiss was a potent poison mingling in his spirit, and that by losing himself in the flickering fire he could almost sever his mind's connection to his body and travel the long and fevered roads of time. Strange visions came to haunt him: sights seen by other eyes, by kragh long dead and others who had worn the circlet in their own time. He found that he could sink into these reveries, that he could allow his thoughts to drift, and then would come disorienting and alluring visions. Dreams of other times, of other conquerors leading masses into battle, their war cries sounding so real that they seemed to echo from the cliffs around him. He saw blood smeared over bronze axes, tents aflame, endless butchery. A floating island of black stone with vast and echoing halls. Entire human populations fleeing him across cracked and empty plains, women and children and men.

Curling and coiling throughout these dreams of violence and ascension were sensations even more primordial. At times he visited dark cavernous places where mighty serpentine bodies as large as the greatest trees stirred languorously, and the air was filled with the sound of sibilant hissing. He saw great scales, each as large as his hand, and massive coils as muscular and powerful as the roots of the world. Those visions held a sense of antiquity far greater than those afforded him by the circlet. There was a language in his mind that he could almost understand, a sense of hunger, of need. Small beings worshipping, praying and screaming as they were taken up and given the favor of eternity.

During these times Kyrra would join him, her lithe and powerful body slipping out of the night to curl about the fire, infinitely more fiery and incandescent in her vermillion and cadmium yellows than the fire itself, so that it seemed a greater ring of flame circled the fire itself. She would gaze at him then, her eyes gleaming like the most entrancing of stars, and he would lie there, his own eyes half-lidded, and would sink and find oblivion in the depths of her gaze.

Finally, at dawn on the fourth day, Tharok stopped halfway along a ledge that curled out around the face of a cliff. Above and below him reared and dropped the heights, the ledge itself but an arm-span wide – but here, on this desolate spot, so high that below him vultures wheeled, he sensed the presence of trolls. He had not known how he would find them, had not known if he would locate them or they would announce their presence by hunting him, but as he stood in the early dawn light, he felt brush against his mind a vast and ponderous presence, as if the very rock of the mountain had shifted and was seeking a more comfortable position. It was the same sense of lethargy and might that he had touched for a moment when he faced down Grax.

Tharok stood still and pushed his mind outward, but the wisp of thought was gone. Frowning, moving carefully now, he proceeded, rounding the cliff face, hugging it where the ledge grew close, until it finally fanned out and opened into a small meadow of broken stones that were covered with a riot of lichen. He scrambled up these boulders, gained a path cleaved between two vast rock faces, and ascended it to the plateau above. Around him the wind whistled and called out in a lonesome manner, and the air was bitingly fresh, tinctured with the tang of mineral and clean stone.

A rock the size of his head exploded into jagged splinters barely a hand from where he was climbing, the sound a sharp and violent crack in that clear air. Tharok immediately ducked down behind a large and opportune boulder and resisted the urge to peer up and over to find his attacker. Instead, he cracked his knuckles, took a deep breath, and focused.

From somewhere above he heard the sound of great feet on bare stone, something heavy moving closer. He slowed his breathing. The troll had no doubt already palmed another rock large enough to smear him across the cliff.

Was there only one? He allowed his thoughts to sink deep.

There.

Tharok stood and gazed at the troll, its rock raised high over its head, its head swinging from side to side as it searched for him. It was a rangy old male, taller even than Grax had been, potbellied and scrawny, arms as long as branches, claws feral and broken, stone hide colored a sooty green in the depths of which flashed flecks of mica. Great batwing ears were extended from each side of his head, and a thick nose like a lump hung down near to its massively wide slit of a mouth. Eyes like wasp stings glared down at Tharok. The troll tensed his shoulder to throw - and then paused.

And in that moment Tharok knew he had him.

He moved forward, but his thoughts were not his own. There was in his mind a dull and constant beating of alien visions and needs, an urge to dig deep and quarry for the coldest and freshest rock to feast upon, rich with mineral and taste. An urge, too, to sit still in the afternoon sun, one rock amongst many, absorbing the rays into his hide, quiescent, losing his sense of self as he merged with the mountain.

The fire in his belly that the sight of fresh meat could awaken. How good blood tasted as it ran over his knuckles, licked clean with a rasp of his file of a tongue. The endless cycling of sun and moon, the passage of cloud and sky, to be admired while here on the surface, and then lost to thought when he delved deep into the belly of the world, deep into the caverns of the night.