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“You once said I wouldn’t survive you,” he teased. “While you were saying hello to my bits with your hand.”
She abandoned her crouch to take a seat in a spot that was a less tempting distance than the one next to him. “Keep that in mind should I ever extend the invitation.” She closed her eyes against the sight of him across from her and tried not to imagine him naked. “Since you plan to stay here and pester me, margrave, you might as well try to sleep and leave me in peace. Besides, I want to dim this lamp before I go blind.”
He caught the extra blanket she tossed him, gave her a salute and turned on his side away from her. “Goodnight, firefly woman,” he muttered before pulling the blanket over his head.
Anhuset shook her head. Silly nickname. Uttered in tones of affection. She dare not dwell on that too long.
She lowered the lamp’s flame a second time, sighing with relief at the returning darkness. Serovek stayed quiet, and she listened to the slowing rhythm of his breathing as he fell deeper into sleep, his ready willingness to embrace slumber wordless proof that he did indeed trust her. They still had hours before dawn, so she took the time to explore the stable’s interior before making a quick reconnoiter of the stableyard and the grounds immediately around the now dark and quiet tavern.
A rustling reached her ears, and she stilled in the shadows, lowering her eyelids to hide her eyeshine as two figures slunk around one corner of the tavern. They skirted the open space of the stableyard with its revealing shards of moonlight reflecting on the ground and kept to the darkness thrown by the inn and two outbuildings before stopping not far from the stables. They didn’t draw closer, only stared as if noting the placement of the doors and high windows shuttered for the night.
Their efforts at concealment were for naught. Anhuset got a good look at the two. Ragged men with the hard-edged mien of the scavenger about them, they wore knives on their belts and tucked into their boots. One was bearded, the other beardless, and both in desperate need of a bath. They used hand signals to communicate with each other, and while she wasn’t familiar with that particular language, she didn’t have to be fluent to understand the gist of the exchange.
The one without the beard tried to coax his companion into entering the stable. The other man shook his head, hands making slashing motions in the air as he argued against the idea. The slap of palm to palm for emphasis, an exchange of shoves, and the two came to an agreement before stealing away toward the town’s main road.
Now that was interesting. Either she’d just come across two horse thieves looking to help themselves to someone’s mount and trying to figure out the problem of her presence inside, or they’d seen Serovek’s party arrive and assumed whatever required an escort of six heavily armed soldiers was likely valuable and prized in the left-hand marketplace.
Fortunately for the thieves, they chose not to try their luck tonight. Anhuset would have dealt with them as nuisances. Serovek would have seen their thievery as insult. Hers would have been the more merciful punishment.
She scanned the area a final time before returning to the stable's interior. No thieves lurked in the corners, and every horse was accounted for. However, things were not as she’d left them. The animals nickered and tossed their heads, agitated. Their eyes rolled as she passed.
Her pulse surged when she came upon the stall where she’d left Serovek with Megiddo. The blue sparks of sorcery flickering earlier under the blanket covering Megiddo now encased the entire bier in a halo of luminescence. It spilled onto the ground, spreading in a pool that surrounded Serovek. The margrave lay on his back, face contorted into an expression of agony, jaw clenched. He breathed hard through his nose, and his eyes squeezed shut as if refusing to gaze upon some horror that faced him in the most terrifying of dreams.
He muttered a string of words, all of them nonsensical. Anhuset reached for him, intent on bodily dragging him away from the bier and out of the stall where the magic pulsed and swelled. She froze in mid-crouch, every hair on her nape standing on end, as laughter—insane, unnatural, and otherworldly—echoed throughout the stable.
Chapter Five
A Kai under a blue sun.
Demons dancedin the maelstrom of Serovek's nightmare. He stood in a whirling darkness, hemmed in by a miasma of smoke that shrieked and gibbered. If evil had a voice, it sounded like this. Icy horror spilled over him. He knew that sound. It had filled his ears as he, a monk, a chieftain's son, an exiled nobleman, and a Kai king battled their way through the ruined streets of Haradis to reach the chamber whelpinggallalike a diseased womb. This wasn't the chamber from which they spilled; it was the womb itself.
Something slithered against his shoulder while something else flitted along his fingertips—thin, sharp, like the edge of a razor. He recoiled, jerking to one side even as he pulled away. A mad gibber abused his ear, and the smoke spun and whipped around him, tattered veils caught in a hard wind. Within the gloom, he spotted pinpoints of crimson and cerulean light that flickered and darted to and fro. Eyes, he thought. They were eyes, and they watched him with the predatory stare of the ravenous.
Laughter rebounded off invisible walls, echoing back and back until one peal faded only to be replaced by another. Serovek gasped at the unearthly, inhuman scream above the mad cacophony. An awful, agonized shriek of despair, it built and built until he thought its reverberation might shatter his skull into a thousand pieces.
Instead of running from the ghastly clamor, he raced toward it. Desperation roiled in his gut to reach the source of torment and stop it. He batted away unseen hands tipped in claws as pointed as any Kai's. Sinuous tethers wrapped around his legs and grasped his arms as he hurtled in the direction of the ungodly screaming. The hovering feral eyes followed, watching him with a palpable hunger.
He plowed through shield walls of shadow thick as the morning mists that purled over High Salure before the sun burned them way. The sun didn't reach this unclean place to immolate its disease and never would. Mantle after mantle of convulsing darkness tore beneath his hands as he struggled to reach the voice of penultimate suffering. He stumbled, almost falling, when something firmer than shadow glanced off his side, leaving a burning sensation along the ladder of his ribs.
The tortured voice was louder now, closer, and where he'd heard only guttural screaming before, Serovek now made out words along with sobbing. Pleas for mercy, for surcease from the pain. Prayers not to many gods, but to one. Another tide of horror cascaded over him. He recognized the god's name and the voice of the man whose beseeching cries fell on a deity's deaf or uncaring ears.
“Megiddo!” he bellowed into the heavy gloom, and the gloom spasmed at the name before taking up the call in a venomous chant.
“Megiddo! Megiddo! Megiddo!”
The screaming halted just as Serovek burst through a drape of darkness into a pallid twilight. What greeted made him want to shriek as well. Megiddo hung before him, impaled at numerous points on a scaffolding of short spikes, a corona of blue light shimmering around him. He didn't bleed, but his skin bore the look of earth trapped in drought, fractured and fissured to reveal more of the cerulean luminescence.
Shadows spiraled around him, fluid and quick, revealing monstrous visages with gaping maws and glowing eyes that glittered with a twisted kind of glee. They capered through and around the scaffolding, a construction of polished blackness that reminded Serovek of obsidian and reflected the light spilling from Megiddo's eidolon. The shadows wrenched the structure one way and then the other, creating a torsion that wracked the captive monk's body in every direction until the snap of bone echoed amid the victorious squalls of cavortinggalla. The monk groaned, the sound animalistic in its torture.
Serovek lunged for Megiddo, sprinting toward the scaffolding. But for every step he took, the distance between them tripled. And thegallalaughed and laughed. He reached for his sword, enchanted by Kai sorcery, to hack through the foul creatures, but there was nothing at his hip to unsheathe and wield.
Thegalladidn't cease with their attentions. Unsatisfied with breaking bones, they turned to the fissures marking Megiddo's body. Serovek cursed them all, bellowing his rage and his torment as they peeled the monk like a grape, consuming his suffering as if it were a pleasure elixir. His wails filled the gloaming, and the blue light pouring from his exposed insides coruscated in a column that pulsed around him.
Thegallaebbed away for a moment, not in fear but in anticipation, as if they knew what would happen next. The light around Megiddo contracted, knitting itself together in delicate filaments under the hands of an unseen weaver until it bound him in a tight shroud that flashed once, twice, brilliant and bright before fading back to a dull glow, leaving the monk hanging as before but whole again, his eidolon unbroken, his skin no longer flensed away. He raised his head slowly, as if the weight of all the world rested on it, and stared at Serovek with glowing blue eyes made abyssal by despair. “You shouldn't be here,” he whispered in thready voice. “You can't help me. Save yourself. Go.”
As if his warning sounded an alert, thehul-gallasurrounding him suddenly turned its attention on Serovek, a malevolent scrutiny comprised of a thousand baleful stares. Serovek quashed the instinctive urge to run. There was nowhere to run, and he dared not turn his back on the horde. Megiddo begged him to leave, and in that moment Serovek wanted desperately to obey, but his nightmare held him in its grip, in this gods-forsaken place with a man whose spirit he couldn't help and whose torment clawed its way into Serovek's own soul.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker of more light, white instead of blue. A meandering seam no wider than a strand of hair but bright as the sun. And clean. An antithesis to everything in this accursed domain. He sensed it down to his bones. It drew him like a lodestone, like Anhuset's rare and sultry laughter. Thehul-gallaset up a screeching to make his head throb. As one writhing, smoky mass, they surged toward the thread of brightness.
