The War Born, page 14
Valam stood near his mother’s bed and stared at the wall when he was not studying the sleeping shape of the most important person in his world. Merros wanted to offer the boy comfort but didn’t know what to say.
She had collapsed the day before and had not recovered yet. Every one of the Sa’ba Taalor had suffered, but none quite as much as Swech. Though he did not understand everything that had happened, he knew that something had happened to their god, Paedle. The notion that a god could be injured was unsettling but the thought that all of the followers of that god could suffer as well was even worse.
Merros looked at the woman he had once just possibly loved and worried his teeth across his lower lip. He did not like to think about her, but thoughts of Swech distracted him from every thought he should have been having.
Goriah swept into the room, moving with the liquid grace that marked all of the Sisters as surely as their nearly unearthly beauty. She nodded to him and then moved to Swech, frowning as she studied her patient.
It was not common for the Sisters to work as healers, but then Swech was not suffering from a normal affliction. It was not her body that was injured as far as anyone could tell, it was her mind, or possibly her spirit. Many of the healers in Canhoon were affiliated with the religious sects, but Swech did not follow their gods. Her demeanor hid most of her contempt for the gods of Fellein, but he understood how very little she cared for the silent gods. Their ways were very nearly the methods of parents who had abandoned their children in her eyes, and therefore they were contemptable.
Besides. There were ten Sa’ba Taalor who were now incapacitated. Swech was the king of her people and, as far as Merros was aware, the companions who had been with her were not as severely affected as she was, but they were not well.
“How is she?”
“She’s the same, Merros. What you see is what I see.” They both spoke in the common tongue of Fellein, and he did not know if Valam could understand them, but Merros suspected he could despite his quiet demeanor. Swech was a woman who believed in being prepared for all circumstances and teaching her son the words of the people she saw as an enemy or a friend made sense to her way of thinking. It was one more fraction of Valam’s life where he could have control. For a boy his age, he already seemed enough like his mother that it was very nearly haunting.
Before he could ask Goriah said, “The others are still the same. They are conscious, but they are weak and easily disoriented.” She shrugged. “It is not all of the Sa’ba Taalor and as far as we can tell not even all of the followers of this Paedle, but some of them are just as… weakened, I suppose, is the best word to use here.” Merros nodded. That was what he had expected. The people closest to Swech were close to her god, and Paedle was the god closest to her heart. Some of them suffered almost as much as she did, and some, he expected, were not hurt at all.
“What can fight a god, Goriah?”
The woman looked very tired, despite her unnatural beauty. There were no bags under her eyes, no noticeable blemishes, but she moved differently than he was used to, and her focus seemed less.
“Desh thinks it’s the Overlords.”
“Truly?” he frowned. That was a disconcerting notion. “How powerful are these things?”
“Strong enough to harm a god, apparently. Strong enough to raise a mountain.”
“Then how are we supposed to fight them?” He looked around the chamber as if the shadows might have an answer, or perhaps Swech could reveal secrets from her sick bed, but there were no mysteries solved in his scrutiny.
“That is precisely what Desh is considering.” She shook her head and sighed. “He has us looking for notes about how they were defeated, in books written centuries ago. There is so little written down and most of what we have found is conjecture. We have two separate sorcerers who are old enough to have lived through the conflict and neither of them remember what happened or even what the Overlords truly are.”
“That cannot be coincidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can accept that there are blank spaces in their memories, but I cannot believe that two sorcerers have completely forgotten what these Overlords are capable of. From what I’ve heard this was a vast chapter in the history of Fellein. Surely one of them or both of them would remember well enough what happened, or at least they would have when they wrote their passages in the books you seek to study.” He shook his head. “Exaggeration be damned. I don’t care what time has done to their recollections. Something has happened to stop them from remembering the Overlords or, as a lot, sorcerers are fools.”
She looked ready to argue with him, not surprising as he had just insulted all of the sorcerers in one comment but then she stopped and thought hard about his words.
“You think the Overlords have done something to Desh and Corin alike?”
“I’m not saying I remember every detail of my childhood, Goriah, but I remember the big events. I remember the first time my father punished me, and I remember why. I remember the first time I trained with a sword and how bloodied my knuckles were by the time that session was done. Those were important things. If two of the smartest men in all of Fellein have both forgotten what happened with these Overlords from when they were younger, then I have to think someone has willfully cursed them to forget. You said yourself these Overlords have magic of their own and if they can fight gods, they can surely cause mortals a problem or two.”
“Sometimes I forget how wise you can be, Merros.”
He wasn’t sure if he found those words comforting or insulting, but they were uttered now and could not be unspoken in any event.
“I’ll talk to Pella and Tataya. We will investigate this possibility. If something has been done, perhaps it can be undone as well.”
“If that’s the case, then kindly restore Swech. She has a son to attend to.”
“Fortunately, the boy has a father as well.” She couldn’t have startled him more if she had slapped him in the face.
Merros looked toward the boy, who stood as he had before, looking at his mother and studying her as if she might suddenly sit up and attack. Considering her history, Merros supposed it was always possible, but seeing her and how she seemed to have shrunk in on herself, he had his doubts.
Drask Silver Hand
Three kings paced around the bonfire, each looking ready to attack and kill any possible threat.
Drask understood their mood all too well. He felt the same restlessness in his breast, brought on by the simple but impossible fact that someone or something had attacked a god and caused that deity grievous harm.
Not far away, Andover Lashk stood in silent contemplation, his silvery eyes flickering at every sound. He could guess what the boy was thinking: here he stood unharmed, when he was supposed to be the champion of the gods. Trained by the gods themselves, yet somehow, he had failed them. Like the kings, he was chosen. Like the kings, he felt he had failed.
Somewhere among the Fellein, Swech was surely raging at the thought of being forced to stay in Canhoon instead of fighting for her god.
Somewhere, Paedle suffered and languished, wounded but not dead.
Drask contemplated all of that as he considered where he stood in the grander scheme of the Daxar Taalor’s plans. He had been gifted with incredible power. He had been trained in the use of that power. He had, quite literally, leveled a mountain for the gods. Like the people around him who doubted themselves, he had been given a gift by the gods, had been chosen by the gods for a reason.
There had been a moment when he considered consulting the kings, but he pushed that thought away and spoke to the gods themselves. “What would you have me do?”
Ganem replied. “We would have you honor us with your actions.”
Drask looked back at Paedle, the mountain, the home of a wounded god, and considered the words of another deity.
How does one honor a god of war? That was simple enough to answer. One went to war for the god. Drask closed his eyes and considered the possible enemy of Paedle. He had to find that enemy before he could attack and, to do that, he used the sorcery he had learned from Tega to reach out to her, to speak to her directly.
“Tega, remind me, how does one scry for secrets?”
She spoke, but her voice sounded distracted, and he knew his timing was poor. The directions she offered would have made no sense to him five years earlier, but she had taught him well. The instructions were simple enough to one who had been trained in the art of sorcery. Drask kept his eyes closed and reached out with his senses, feeling through the air, until he reached the heart of Paedle and sensed both the god’s pain and the source of the injuries Paedle endured.
There, hidden within the volcanic heart of Paedle, he found one of the Overlords, coiled like a serpent wrapped around the god, binding the Daxar Taalor and crushing inward.
“Tega. Nolan. I need you both.” He spoke to them, pushed through the defenses they had up. They were far away; they sought to understand the source of their power, of the gift they had been given by the gods, uncertain as to how or why they were chosen.
Nolan March, through the broken mind he had received when the gods gifted him, had decided long ago that his blessings were an accident. He was never supposed to have the power as far as he could tell, but Drask suspected otherwise and always had.
Tega did not worry about why she was gifted, but instead used those abilities to expand her mind, her own powers, and to contemplate the seemingly endless energies that each of them had absorbed from the very gods.
“What do you need?” Tega’s voice was calm and confident.
“Power. I fight an Overlord.”
Without another word he willed himself into the fray, uncertain as to exactly what it was he was about to fight.
Tuskandru
Tusk looked around as Andover Iron Hands let out a gasp.
Ten feet away from him Drask doubled, nearly tripled in size and then vanished like a cloud dissipating in a hard wind. He was there, he grew, and then was simply gone as his shape turned completely toward Paedle.
A moment later, the mountain shook, and the top of the volcano belched forth a great tongue of flame that licked the sky and lit the clouds with fiery brilliance. All three kings felt the change in Paedle, and heard their gods roar their approval.
Whatever it was that Drask had done, the gods were pleased by his actions.
Drask Silver Hand
War is not about a fair fight, it is about advantages. Drask knew that, and took care to keep every advantage he could. He had never encountered the Overlords. He did not know what they looked like, or what they were capable of – but then, he barely understood his own powers since the Daxar Taalor had changed him. He merely knew that he was more than he had been, and that had to be enough. He had traveled the world and tested himself and he thought he knew his limitations and his strengths well enough.
He attacked while the Overlord was busy trying to wound Paedle again. The god of liquid metal roared and fought back, and Drask took advantage of the rejoined combat, striking the Overlord as quickly and brutally as he could.
The Overlord did not have a simple form. It was not human in shape, nor was it truly solid. He did not know if the thing reflected back the liquid form of Paedle, or if it simply did not have a single form, but it changed again and again even as he struck his first blow. One moment the creature was solid, a powerful shape not unlike a Pra-Moresh, with powerful limbs and rending claws, and the next it flowed into a serpentine thing that wrapped around Drask and crushed him with coils of muscle and scales.
Had he been untouched by the gods the attack would have killed him, but Drask had abilities far beyond what most of his people understood. Like the Overlord, he flowed into a new shape, becoming a flood that dissolved around the writhing form of his enemy and coalesced into a heavy wave that surrounded the twisting, writhing form, enveloped the creature and then squeezed, crushing down with power enough to shatter stone.
The Overlord reacted instantly. Exploding outward into a hundred stabbing shards, ripping through Drask’s body, forcing him to rethink his attack. Had he been solid at the moment, he would have been cut to shreds.
Rather than attempt to change shape again, Drask concentrated on stopping his enemy from continuing its onslaught of new forms. He froze the Overlord, forced it into one solid form, pushing with the power he had been given by the gods. He felt the very cells of his enemy solidify and freeze, crystallize at his will, and felt the potent hatred of the Overlord as well. It was not used to being defied. Whatever the creature truly was, it had long-since grown accustomed to simply changing itself into new forms as it wanted. If the world was solid, then this creature was plasmid, ever changing. It moved like fluid between rocks, filling in gaps and crevices to reshape as it needed.
The thing moved like mercury, the liquid metal that defined Paedle. The fluid silver was poison. The Overlord was venomous. They had that much in common.
Drask forced that unstable flesh into a frozen mass, aided by Tega and her understanding of matter and liquid and energy. She had taught him much over the last five years.
The Overlord tried to fight back. When it was captured inside the shapes Drask willed, it grew angry and struggled desperately to be free, but Drask would not permit that. He had learned new methods of fighting over the years of his travel, had developed his mind in ways that were new to the Sa’ba Taalor, that would have puzzled Tusk and Tarag Paedori. The combat was not completely physical. In a very real sense, he fought with his mind as well as his body.
The thing he fought had spent a much longer time preparing to fight in different ways. Where Drask had opened himself to the possibilities of combat beyond the physical realm, the Overlords had spent literally centuries exploring with their minds, well beyond the physical realms. Drask fought tenaciously, but to the Overlord he was almost a child. He fought with enthusiasm, yes, but he lacked skill and finesse.
Had he been alone in his combat, Drask Silver Hand would have been easily crushed. The Overlord would have swatted him aside as casually as he himself might strike down a toddler. All of his strength would have been wasted and he knew that.
Like a toddler, he counted on his parent to be with him. In this case, he counted on Paedle to fight beside him as the gods had always fought beside him. He had come to Paedle’s aid, yes, but that did not mean he expected a war god to sit idly by and watch him fight. He expected the god to join him, and he was not disappointed.
Paedle struck back at the Overlord and struck true. The god of silent combat attacked as an assassin should, waiting while the Overlord fought Drask and striking at the first vulnerability with a precise and deadly blow. It was not a physical attack, nor was it entirely spiritual, but rather a combination that would have meant nothing to anyone who could only see in one realm or the other. Drask was fortunate enough to see in new ways, as gods and Overlords see, perhaps, or merely in ways that his people could not properly comprehend. In any event he got to witness a god striking an enemy and it was as miraculous and incredible as anything he had ever witnessed.
Paedle drove a thousand venomous strikes into the shadowy form of the Overlord and the creature shrieked in agony as those venoms tore through its body, its mind, and its spirit, withering all of them as surely as a flame incinerates paper.
Drask watched as the Overlord died, and moved back cautiously as it tried to strike at him several times, like a wounded beast.
Paedle writhed, injured by the battle that only Drask had witnessed even in part.
How badly was his god wounded? Drask did not know and dared not ask, for fear he would hear an answer he could not stand.
No child likes to find that a parent is not indestructible. For the Sa’ba Taalor, the gods were parents in many ways.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jeron
The Overlords were not gods, not truly, but they were godlike, and feeling one of them die shook Jeron to his core. He had only just escaped dying himself, and he remained hidden from the other sorcerers only because he had arranged a misdirection. Now, only barely confident in his ability to hide, he felt one of his newly chosen deities slaughtered by the gods of the barbarian Sa’ba Taalor, and he was unsettled deeply by the change of situation.
Normally he would have looked to Roledru to offer him a calm word or two, as the man was almost always levelheaded, but Roledru was dead and Jeron found himself without the benefit of a confidant.
In the cavern where he hid himself, the Godless lay in slumber as the War-Born prepared for a grand battle. Snow drifted silently down in heavy flakes and buried the world in a white caul. The silence around him was deep and abiding. It should have comforted him, as silence had always been a comfort to him, but now it left him too much time to think.
He contemplated the face he wore and the new body. It was simple vanity, and he should never have considered it under the circumstances, but he found Roledru’s form did nothing to comfort him. He remade his new body in his old image, carefully reshaping his face until he once again looked like Jeron and not a peasant servant. He kept the hair on his head, however, as he had grown tired of the cold, and the thick tresses offered a modicum of warmth.
Unsettled and not truly wishing to be alone, Jeron shifted into a comfortable position and pushed his mind outward, seeking his plaything again. The boy called Whistler was under the delusion that he had been chosen by the gods themselves. He believed that because Jeron wanted him to believe it. In truth he was a trinket, a toy and little more. But he was a useful plaything, a pleasant distraction that could be manipulated, and so Jeron looked to his living weapon and pointed him back in the right direction.
“Go,” he whispered into the boy’s mind. “Seek out the Inquisitor and kill him. Make his death painful and you shall be rewarded. Fail me, and your pretty face is once again forfeit.”
