Heirs of the Fallen: Book 03 - Shadow and Steel (28 page)

They are too close!

She nocked another arrow, drew, fired at a sea-wolf’s nose. The arrowhead struck lower, smashing through his bared teeth. She reached for another arrow, her movements jerky with panic, and then the Kelrens were on them, swords flashing. They howled with the throats of neither men nor wolves, but creatures loosed from the Thousand Hells. All they sought was the blood of the living.

Nola leaped back with a pained shriek, blood splashed across her face, her eyes wide with horror. A fist, wrapped hard around a sword hilt, crashed into Belina’s temple. She tumbled backward, and landed on her rump. Dazed, fumbling for her sword, she heard Damoc bellow. Heedless of the danger, he jumped between his daughters and the horde, slamming his bow into one monstrous face after another.

Then Sumahn and Daris were there, slashing through the Kelrens. Where they walked, death followed.

But there were so many foes.

Belina struggled to her feet, head spinning. She swung her blade, chopping off a reaching hand. More groping fingers sought her, the tips of swords and daggers stabbed and slashed all around. Inhuman faces leered, pressed forward.

So many.

Too many
.

Chapter 44

The veil wrapped around him as it had before, caressing him, pressing in like jellied ice. And as before, his skin tingled. But this time, whatever protected him from the strange, prickling pressure building inside him shattered like an eggshell, allowing that cold ooze to pour into his muscles. It sank deep, past his bones, until filling his marrow. Fire and frost warred for dominance within him, and Leitos’s mouth stretched around a scream—

He fell through the barrier, his knees striking the floor of the Faceless One’s domain. Shaken but still upright, Adham and Ulmek stepped through, then rushed to help Leitos up.

“What is this place?” Ulmek breathed, the hollows of his face ghastly against bleached white skin.

Leitos hastily dragged his gaze from Ulmek. The man’s ghostly appearance stirred the hair on the nape of his neck.

“It is the enemy’s throne room.” Leitos’s voice sounded strange to his ears, heavier, thicker. Groggy, his bones feeling cracked by the icy cold filling them, he looked across the lightless plane. Gone were the lurid flames of before. In their place, shadows danced. But of his enemy, Leitos found him seated upon his obsidian throne.

“We should not have come here,” Ulmek said, all strength gone from his voice. Fear and dismay swept through the trio like a windborne sickness. All three retreated a step back the way they had come, then another step.

Leitos was first to gather himself. He caught hold of Adham and Ulmek. “We cannot turn back.” The peculiar timbre to his voice sank into the ears of his companions, and they turned toward him.

“Gods good and wise,” Adham blurted, lurching away. Ulmek jerked back as well, his sword waving uncertainly between him and Leitos.

When Leitos looked at them, his breath caught in his throat.
Both
were pale as specters, not just Ulmek. Gossamer strands of light rose from their skin, making undulating auras. The Faceless One had known they were coming, and had laid a trap of some sort. “What’s happened to you?”

“Us?” Adham and Ulmek said as one.

“Not us, my son,” Adham said, sounding near to tears, “but you. You alone.”

Laughter rolled like thunder across the gulf between them and the Faceless One.

The icy sludge within Leitos came alive at that voice, poured through his veins, gathered at the center of his being, compressing into a knot harder than steel. It fought to reach its master, threatening to take him along. He resisted the pull, but then he was shambling across the lightless plane toward the Faceless One.

Adham wrapped his arms around Leitos, trying to hold him back. “Help me!” he cried to Ulmek.

The Brother hesitated, shaking his head.

“You craven wretch,” Adham shrieked.

That broke Ulmek’s resistance like a hard slap, and together they threw their weight against Leitos, but still he crept forward, their efforts distant to him, insubstantial, the fluttering of a moth’s wings.

The ball of ice in his guts swelled larger, filling him up, pushing beyond him. Adham and Ulmek abruptly staggered back, hands held before them like penitents. Their fear seemed to feed his strength, and he drew it in until they dropped to their knees. Then he was past them, seeking richer fare, a pillar of it, not blue as before, but black as pitch and seemingly miles across. Within that darkness he sensed the weapon he needed … a power he desired above all others.

Each step came quicker than the last, until he was running. Faster he ran, until it seemed as though he soared through a starless night, his hair whipping behind him. The closer he came, the greater his longing grew, until there was nothing else. Fire sprang up where the knot of ice had resided in his middle, burning away the cold in his marrow and veins, filling him more deeply than the ice ever had. In his ears, in his heart and chest, in every limb, storm winds raged.

His hate for the Faceless One surged like floodwaters. When it burst from him, it was as though his skin covered not bones and muscle and sinew, but a red sun, leaving him to shine like a beacon-fire atop a mountain so high that the eyes of all men and every crawling beast could gaze upon it. He was the mountain, he was the storm, and more than all else, he was death.

Lost in the tumult of power, he stretched out his hand, and marked his foe. A crackling stab of lightning struck the Faceless One, cutting off his laughter, and from that impact flared an expanding ring of brilliant azure.

Leitos halted abruptly, eyes pinched to slits. The ring raced toward him across all that darkness, and before its silent assault, he detected a fleeing figure. The light burned brighter, and he recognized Adu’lin, his narrow Fauthian face stretched in terror.

In a single instant, that luminous burst scorched away the man’s flesh and bones, leaving a swirling drift of ashes, then setting even them alight, and reducing them to less than dust.

Leitos trembled, fearing such a fate for himself, his father, and Ulmek. At the same moment, he found his answer to that consuming ring of light, and reached out to the power locked within the Faceless One’s oblivion. Somehow, he drank in the endless night around him, becoming one with the boundless black.

The vast chamber rang like a struck bell. The darkness began to twist and swirl, and poured into him like ink into a vessel. With a thought, he swept a wing of protection over himself and his companions, knowing that shield would withstand all threats.

The chamber began to fade to gray, and then to crumble. From far, far above came the grinding crunch of granite hills smashing together. Fire erupted from rock, molten rivers flowed. Burning pieces rained down, large as houses, palaces, some larger yet. They crashed against the glass-smooth plane, and exploded into dust and smelted ore. Others punched through the surface like fists, leaving rough holes in their wake. Cracks and widening fissures spread outward, releasing living shadows of such hellish forms that Leitos could not bear to look upon them. But where his eyes revolted, his soul devoured their being, taking them into himself, erasing them from existence.

The ring of light continued to widen, roasting all before it. Yet his only thought was to quench his thirst for the surging energies cascading through the decaying chamber. He hungered to take his fill from the purest source of all that darkness, from the Faceless One himself.

As the light bathed him in its immeasurable heat, he fortified his shield, and then reached out, his desire manifesting as a clawed hand passing through the searing radiance, reaching to the Faceless One.

The dark and sustaining pillar of energy abandoned the enemy of humankind, and stretched out to meet Leitos. When they touched, the motion of life ground to a sudden, violent halt. The world Leitos knew, the chamber, all ceased to be.

Chapter 45

Leitos stood before the obsidian throne, not sure how he had gotten there. The chamber’s destruction had ceased … but that was not quite true. The devastation remained, but frozen. Massive stones had ceased their plummet, and the cracks in the chamber floor no longer spread. All was stationary within a clutching gray mist.

He remembered trying to take the Faceless One’s power, reaching out to catch hold of it. Storms continued to rage inside him, and his veins rushed with dark energies that threatened to unmake him. By his will alone, he withstood those forces.

To one side, Ulmek lay on his back. His unblinking eyes shone with fear, and a dribble of foam flecked his lips. To the other side knelt Adham, hands clasped in his lap like a child taking instruction, his gray eyes locked on the figure upon the throne. Both men resembled wraiths, their skin bleached and haggard.

Leitos slowly looked to the one he had come to destroy. The man slumped in the magnificent obsidian chair, the fingers of one hand idly tracing mysterious shapes engraved in the arms of the throne.

“Show yourself to me,” Leitos commanded.

“You should not have come,” answered the same tired voice he had heard the first time.

Leitos could have offered up innumerable condemnations, hurled curses, made demands, but when he spoke again, he begged the simplest question. “Who are you?”

The man slowly raised his head. Inch by inch, his features came into view. In place of roiling blue fires, a rugged, craggy face peered at him through ropes of lank hair. Stubble bristled his hard jaw. Pale blue eyes, the whites shot through with blood, locked on Leitos, a stare that was at once harsh and unforgiving, yet captivating.

Leitos’s heart seemed to freeze solid inside his chest. While there were differences, he knew well this man’s likeness, for he had seen its legacy written in the bones of his own face.

“
Father?
” Adham rasped. “How have you come to be here … why—”

“Adham, my son,” Kian Valara said, his face twisting as if another presence lurked under the skin. “I did not expect to find you alive, let alone here. But you cannot stay. Return to Izutar, and warn the others that—”

“No!” Adham was on his feet now, trying to claw his way up the black stone pedestal to reach the throne. “Why are you here … why are you serving the Faceless One?”

Kian’s features writhed, his teeth clamped together in a grimace. By shuddering fractions, he went still. His icy stare began dancing with blue flame. “I serve no one,” he said, a murderous grin pulling his lips tight.

The fires of his eyes began to spread, licking out over his cheekbones, puffing from his nostrils and mouth. More sprang from his skin and clothing. Above him, the black pillar of energy burst once more into existence, and all that had been still, again fell into motion.

Over the thundering roar of destruction, Leitos’s grandfather, the legendary ice-born king who was said to have rallied his people against the Faceless One, declared a different truth. “I am the lord and master of this world. I am the Faceless One.”

Adham scrambled away with an agonized sob, but Leitos stepped closer. Whoever Kian had been, he was no more. He had proclaimed himself the greatest adversary to humankind, and Leitos needed no other reason to attack.

As the blue fires engulfed Kian, Leitos reached out to the black pillar of bound power that gave strength to his foe, and stole it into himself. The pillar withered and paled, like a vine stricken with pestilence.

“No!” cried the Faceless One, leaping down from his seat. Where his feet struck, the plane cracked like rotten ice. A crimson blade came into his hand, and he stalked forward.

At a thought, a rippling sword sprang from Leitos’s fist, its length black and cold, a weapon forged from the souls of the thousand and more Mahk’lar he had taken within himself.

As the Faceless One drew near, Leitos swung his blade. The two weapons clashed with the shriek of damned souls, and swirling sheets of fire erupted between them, driving them apart, forming a barrier. Before those crackling flames burned out, Leitos sought his father.

Adham knelt at Ulmek’s side, attempting to help him to his feet.

“You must flee,” Leitos warned, the resonance of his voice shaking the chamber.

“No,” Adham said, his face twisted with misery. “You are all that I have left in this world.”

A shout jerked Leitos’s head around. The Faceless One’s sword ripped a burning line through the air, and Leitos barely deflected the attack. Again, an impenetrable wall of fire burst between them, and Leitos danced back to stand over his father and Ulmek.

Beyond them, the now pale plane buckled and heaved under the falling ceiling. No safe passage showed itself … and so he made a way, though he did not know how, save that he desired it, and it was so.

One moment the way back was blocked, the next a gleaming passageway of transparent gold led to the distant blue point. Where blocks of molten stone slammed against the arched pathway, they bounced away or shattered.

“Follow it to safety,” Leitos ordered.

Adham shrank away from the power of his voice, but did not heed him. “Not without you!”

“Go, and I will follow. Do not slow or stop, no matter what happens.” As he spoke, he could feel the heat from the clashing of swords diminishing behind him, and knew the Faceless One would attack again at any moment.