Forged In Flame (In Her Name: The First Empress, Book 2) (20 page)

After nearly an hour, judging from the positions of the stars, and just when Keel-Tath was getting worried, Dara-Kol returned. 

“Come,” she said, beckoning them to follow. She led them down into an arroyo, then up the other side toward the telltale bulges of a large
churr-kamekh
hive. This one, however, had been ripped open. “It is empty. Sometimes a
genoth
, when desperate, will attack a hive for water and to eat the
churr-kamekh
larvae and the queen.”

“I thought you said the
churr-kamekh
can kill a
genoth
,” Keel-Tath breathed as she staggered up the steep slope toward the hive.

Dara-Kol stopped and pointed farther down the arroyo, where a set of huge bones lay, gleaming orange in the fading sunlight. “So they can. But if the
genoth
takes enough of the water or kills the queen, the hive dies. Other predators will often take over an empty hive for a lair, but in this case there was only a nest of
gret-kamekh
. We will be eating fresh meat tonight.”

Later, as they sat in the cool, dark cavern of the gutted hive, they feasted on the four
gret-kamekh
Dara-Kol had killed. The beasts had long, membranous wings that spanned the height of a warrior and could carry the creatures many leagues through the air, and when found in numbers they could be deadly. But these four, resting before taking wing in the night, were no match for Dara-Kol’s sword. The meat was tough and greasy, but Keel-Tath had never tasted anything so good in her life.

None of the companions had the strength to carry on a conversation, nor was there anything to say. Once they sated themselves on the meat and the water from the hive’s cistern, they collapsed, exhausted. 

The last thing Keel-Tath saw before she closed her eyes was Dara-Kol, watching her.

***

In Keel-Tath’s dream, the Homeworld was being torn apart. Great cities, fantastic constructs of pyramids, domes, and spires that reached high into the sky, were shattered by titanic explosions. Some of the energy was absorbed by the shields created by the builders, but it was not enough to avert disaster. Not nearly enough. One by one, the cities were reduced to rubble in the glare of fireballs that reached from the ground into near space, and with each one, millions of lives were snuffed out, their songs erased from Keel-Tath’s blood in an instant.

The Great Moon overhead was not the dead artifact Keel-Tath had always known. A billion souls lived there, as they had for thousands of years, in cities every bit as grand as those on the Homeworld itself. But these, too, were being destroyed. Explosions bloomed across the moon’s face, and the bombardment did not stop until every life there had been extinguished, every city destroyed, every structure reduced to dust. The moon glowed orange and red where its crust had been ruptured, leaving wounds that would not close for several thousand years.

In the space around the Homeworld and the Great Moon were thousands of warships in a dance of death, an orgy of slaughter the likes of which her race had never known. And though it was beyond her sight, she knew that similar devastation was occurring on the worlds of the Settlements, far away among the stars. 

There was no strategy now, no plan for victory, for any hope of winning this war had long since fled. The warring factions knew that the only thing awaiting them was destruction, and their only hope was that they could destroy their enemies before they themselves fell into the abyss. None of those doing the fighting now, at the end of the Second Age, could even remember how the war, this final annihilation, began. They only knew how it must end. 

The people, those who fought and those who were victims of the fighting, had prayed to the old gods for deliverance, but the old gods had betrayed them. The people cursed the gods, and as the end loomed near, the religion of old was destroyed as the people realized their gods were false, nothing more than wishful imagination. False gods could not save them.

The final heaving cataclysms destroyed the wonders of the First and Second Ages, and only a few of the Settlements, which had once numbered in the hundreds, survived as more than glowing lumps of slag drifting in space. The Great Moon was nothing more than an ugly, scarred monument to the dead. 

As the heat and glare of the last weapons subsided, the ancient martial orders, which were once little more than curious sanctuaries for the socially challenged, emerged to salvage what was left of civilization. Harnessing the powers of the seven ancient crystals of power, so old that they were legend in the First Age, they set the survivors on the path of what became the Way. And while combat and war, which had always been in the blood of the people, remained a way of life, the bloodshed was held in balance, and the priesthoods would never allow the followers of the Way to totter on the brink of destruction. 

All these things Keel-Tath saw in her dream, even as she realized that it was not a dream, but memories from the living and beyond-the-dead eyes of Anuir-Ruhal’te. Keel-Tath could feel a sliver of the ancient oracle’s soul in hers, as surely as she could still feel the scar from where the shard of the crystal heart had sliced her palm. Anuir-Ruhal’te’s followers had spirited her away somehow to the underground crypt before the end of the Final Annihilation to keep her spirit safe until it was time for her to reveal herself once again. Only that time never came, because the vessel of her spirit was destroyed in the final fall of bombs upon the Homeworld.

In Keel-Tath’s mind the flashes of light and the crash of explosions never stopped. Nor did the anguish and fear in her blood, the screaming…

“Keel-Tath! Wake up!”

Her eyes snapped open. In the darkness, it took her a moment to remember where she was.

A blinding flash exploded outside the hive, followed by a deafening boom that echoed through the rocky arroyos. Then another, and another. Water cascaded through the top of the hive, where the long-dead
churr-kamekh
had created channels to take it to the hive’s cistern. And through it all could be heard a deep-throated roar like a thing alive, the sound of water raging somewhere outside.

But the storm itself could not explain the sense of fear she felt in her blood. It took her another glimpse through a strobe of lightning, squinting against the glare, to understand. In that instant she saw Dara-Kol on the floor of the hive, the handle of a dagger protruding from her stomach, just below the breast plate. Alive or dead, Keel-Tath was not sure. 

Reacting on instinct, defending against something half-seen in the corner of her eye, Keel-Tath drew the long dagger at her side and brought it up in a blocking motion as she stepped back. The move saved her life as a sword crashed against her smaller blade, but the force was sufficient to break her grip on the dagger. It flew off into the darkness, and sent her stumbling back to land beside Dara-Kol.

Another series of flashes lit the hive, and she saw Ba’dur-Khan grappling in stop-motion with Lihan-Hagir. She had no idea who was friend and who was foe, for she had not seen her attacker clearly. 

There was also no sign of Drakh-Nur or Han-Ukha’i. 

Drawing her father’s sword, willing herself to be strong enough to wield it, she was stricken with fear as Ba’dur-Khan and Lihan-Hagir continued their battle in the lightning-lit darkness. Which one was the enemy?

The next flash of lightning brought an unpleasant revelation. The dagger sticking from Dara-Kol’s belly belonged to Ba’dur-Khan. 

Dashing forward three paces, guided by the flashes of lightning that showed Ba’dur-Khan hammering Lihan-Hagir to his knees, she thrust her father’s blade through Ba’dur-Khan’s back plate, right through his heart.

With his sword poised above Lihan-Hagir, who had lost his own weapon, Ba’dur-Khan crumpled to the floor, dead. His weapon clattered to the floor as she stomped on his back and yanked her father’s sword — her sword, now — from his body. 

Another flash of lightning showed Lihan-Hagir looking up at her with wide eyes, a look of utter disbelief on his face.

“Help me with Dara-Kol!” Keel-Tath had to shout to be heard above the howling, booming storm.

Making her way back to her fallen protector, Keel-Tath knelt down. In another flash of light she could see that Dara-Kol’s eyes had opened, and her lips were open, as if she was speaking, but no words could be heard. Keel-Tath leaned down, putting her ear to her lips.

“Lihan-Hagir…”

That was all she could make out. It was more than enough for Keel-Tath to know that she had made a dreadful, horrible mistake. In that moment, she froze in horror.

Something slammed into her back, driving her down on top of Dara-Kol just as something else crushed her sword hand. She screamed in pain and rage, but a brutal blow to the back of her skull silenced her.

Stunned, she was flipped onto her back, and the next cyan explosion of lightning illuminated Lihan-Hagir’s face above hers. She watched, unable to move, as he reached over and pulled Ba’dur-Khan’s dagger from Dara-Kol with a cruel twisting motion. Dara-Kol gasped and weakly grappled for the bloody blade, but Lihan-Hagir, expressionless, batted her hands away.

With one last pause, waiting for another flash of lightning to make sure of his aim, Lihan-Hagir raised the dagger.

In the same pulse of light, Keel-Tath saw something behind him, something that he could not see. In the next flash of light, she saw Drakh-Nur’s sword, frozen in the instant that it sliced through Lihan-Hagir’s neck.

Keel-Tath’s face was sprayed with hot, coppery blood, and the weight of her would-be killer’s body fell on top of her as his head rolled to one side.

With a cry of anguish and despair, she rolled his body away and sat up, just as Drakh-Nur dropped to his knees in front of her. Another flicker of light showed that he was bleeding badly from a stab wound in his side.

She wanted to rage, wanted to fling herself into a blazing pyre, so wracked with guilt was she over having killed Ba’dur-Khan, who was trying to protect her. But her training, her sense of duty, overrode her guilt. For the moment.

“Where is Han-Ukha’i?” She held Drakh-Nur by the shoulders, afraid that he, too, would collapse to the floor, unconscious. 

“Lihan-Hagir threw her from the hive.” She did not need to hear the grief in his voice. Touching him seemed to enhance the strength of his song in her blood, and he, too, was torn with guilt. “I tried to find her, but came back when I heard Ba’dur-Khan shouting your name.”

“I must find her!” She made to stand up, but Drakh-Nur held her arms.

“She is lost, mistress! The arroyos are awash in a flash flood from the storm. She has been washed away!”

It might be true, but Keel-Tath knew that Han-Ukha’i was still alive. She could sense her fear. And if they were to have any hope at all of survival, she had to find the healer. Dara-Kol and Drakh-Nur would both die, otherwise, and Keel-Tath had little hope of surviving the rest of the journey to the Western Sea on her own.

“She is alive! Let me search for her!”

Reluctantly, the giant warrior let her go.

Dashing to the opening of the hive, Keel-Tath looked outside. She may as well have been standing on the deck of a ship in the middle of an angry sea. The rain came down so heavily she could barely see past her fingertips, and only a few arm-lengths below the hive the water churned and frothed. An animal of some sort, bloated in death, swept by, and she was astonished at how quickly it disappeared from her sight. She knew that she had power over water, but did not know how to properly control it. In the underground river she had nearly died. Here, she surely would.

“Han-Ukha’i!” Her shout was lost in the howling wind that drove the rain against her in pounding sheets. “Han-Ukha’i!”

She leaned farther out of the opening and set one foot on the rock wall where they had climbed up. It was slick as ice, and she slipped from the hive, nearly plunging into the waters below before she caught herself on the edge of the opening.

But had she not fallen, she would not have seen the hand that still gripped the edge of one of the rocky spires just downstream from where Keel-Tath was hanging. 

With a surge of determination, Keel-Tath edged hand-over-hand along the opening to the hive, then dropped down to the slope below. Driving her talons into the rock, she clung there, gasping in fear of the water that rushed past, just below her feet. She made her way, a hand-breadth at a time, toward the spire where the hand still clung. Keel-Tath prayed for lightning as she moved in the darkness, for without it everything was lost in seething darkness. 

Keel-Tath took a deep breath and slid down into the water, letting it carry her to the spire. Gripping the rock, she cried out as the sharp edge sliced right through the leatherite of her gauntlets. The pain only fueled her determination. 

“Han-Ukha’i!” She could feel the healer’s body next to her own. “Can you move?”

“I…I do not know, mistress.” The healer’s voice was weak. The water was cold, and there was no telling how long she had been down here, holding on for dear life.

“Wrap your arms around my neck!”

“You will drown, mistress!”

“Do as I command!”

With a series of desperate, jerky motions, Han-Ukha’i did as she was told. Keel-Tath gasped at the strain, for the healer was larger than she, and the force of the water against them seemed to double.

With a howl of effort, Keel-Tath pulled them out of the water, using the rocky spire for leverage. The edge lacerated her hands, but she ignored the pain, and instead tried to hook the edges of the metal plates of her armor onto the rock, using them to pull herself up.

Bit by bit, her talons biting just far enough into the face of the rock to hold them, she made her way toward the base of the hive. More than once she slipped and nearly sent both of them plunging to their doom. But each time she held on. She was determined that she would not die with the stain of Ba’dur-Khan’s death on her honor. 

At last she reached the hive. It was so close, just the length of an outstretched arm above them, but she had no strength left. Every muscle in her body was spent, burning and shaking. There was no way she could climb up by herself, let alone with Han-Ukha’i on her back.