Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (163 page)

February: 3,389 BC

Earth: Village of Assur

Mikhail

With a weary cry of victory, the Assurians finished off the last of the enemy, but Mikhail did not feel victorious, and by the look of her, neither did Pareesa. His young protégé stared at him with large, brown haunted eyes, no longer innocent, no longer his eager little fairy, and rushed over to some enemy bodies to begin rummaging for something, though he had no idea for what. It occurred to him that perhaps he should help her dig, but that uncomfortable echo that something was wrong had stayed with him and it ate at him now even though, deep in his bones, his intuition told him it was too late to do anything about it.

He closed his eyes and focused on the feeling which Ninsianna had tried so hard to teach him to
see
, but which he could still only
feel
with the vaguest of mental images. It was his heart which told him which way to go. An empty space. A fading heartbeat. And tears. Oh, so many tears. It was the tears which led him to the widow-sister’s house, and even as he landed, he knew the news was terrible.

Blood…

He pushed open the door and stepped inside, the lingering effects of the Cherubim battle incantations giving him the odd impression that there were
three
people in the room instead of two. The image faded as the old God of War drew his attention to the body lying on the floor.
Look. Look here. This is what you need to see
.

“Zhila!!!”

Mikhail burst across the room and fell to his knees, pleading with the goddess to let Zhila be okay. The stench of burnt flesh offended his olfactory senses and confirmed that Zhila had been hit, but he pressed his fingers against her neck anyways, hoping against hope his friend would still be alive. A great, powerful eruption of emotion welled in his chest and made him shudder like a volcano which had just erupted.

“No!!!” he threw back his head and howled.

For a moment, it felt as though someone touched the back of his wings, but when he glanced behind himself, he saw nothing but the wind blow the open door shut. It was then that he heard the whisper, a ghost of a voice which called his name.

“Mikhail?” Yalda called.

He wiped at his tears and made his way to the cot they’d set up for those nights when he did not feel like staggering home to the war zone that had become Immanu and Needa’s dying marriage. She lay in the bed, little more than the empty husk of a frail, old thing, a dying leaf which clung to a tree in autumn, waiting for the wind to carry it away. A lump rose in his throat. He tried to speak and failed, so he took her hand and then he tried to speak again.

“Yalda,” his voice warbled. “Who did this to you?”

Yalda’s hands were large for such a frail old woman, a legacy of a lifetime of kneading bread, so when she unclenched her gnarled old claws and held before him something shiny, it took him a moment to recognize it was a golden key. She gave it to him, and then she lay back as though she had finished a great mission, and now her work was done.

“What is this?” Mikhail asked.

The key was not large, nor was it an ordinary key, but a cruciform key with many different layers of bits, the kind which would be used for opening up a complicated lock. It was plated in solid gold, with an ornate little handle that looked like an eleven-pointed star, and at the top was embedded a jewel. Along its shaft were symbols, but in no language that Mikhail could read.

Yalda trembled, and then she gasped for breath. Even though she bore no sign of injury, he could sense she was not long for this world and had only held on to give to him the key.

“You must summon your Emperor,” Yalda whispered. “And take him to the temple at Jebel Mar Elyas. He will know what to do once you bring him there and give him this key. Him, and that other emperor you oppose, the dragon. You must bring them
both
there, for only if they work together can they bring the Evil One to his knees.”

She lay back her head, and just for a moment she closed her eyes. Mikhail grabbed her arm and shook her.

“Don’t go,” Mikhail pleaded with her. “Please don’t go! You’re the only family I have left.”

He clenched her hand and bowed his head in prayer, wishing with every ounce of his being that he possessed the gift to heal like it was rumored his sub-species of Seraphim had once possessed, but he was ungifted, and Yalda did not wish to stay. Her husband, her sons, and now her sister had preceded her into the dreamtime, and her one surviving daughter was grown and had moved away. She wished to join her sister, whether or not he needed her to stay.

She looked right past him, as though he wasn't even there.

“It's so beautiful,” Yalda murmured, her eyes already looking into the next world. She nodded as though listening to somebody speak to her, and then said, "yes, Zhila, we promised we would tell him the truth.”

“Tell me what truth?” Mikhail asked, his voice hoarse with grief. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he gripped her hand more tightly, as if that, alone, could encourage her to stay.

“She loves you,” Yalda said, her eyes distant as she looked into the next world. “You don’t remember what she did for you, but when she healed you, you chose
her
to walk with you for all eternity.”

“I know,” Mikhail said, wiping his eyes as he choked back a sob. “I’ll get her back as soon as I can get a raid together. I’m going to get her. I promise.”

“Not
her
,” Yalda said, her voice barely a whisper. “The Other One. She is carrying your…”

Whatever Yalda had been about to say, she never finished it. Her words trailed of, unfinished, as her spirit left her body.

Trembling in a mixture of grief and rage, he fought the urge to hunt down and slaughter the few remaining Sata'anic prisoners. The Cherubim had always been adamant that he must control his rage, for rage opened the door to other things, though they would never tell him what. He remembered what Jingu, the Cherubim queen had said to him one day after he'd grown angry and blacked out after a novitiate had picked on him.

“Let out your grief. It is too big to keep inside of you. Let it out, or someday your rage will destroy us all.”

Cradling Yalda’s body to his chest, he howled an agonizing cry as he felt his heart break in a million pieces. Great sobs wracked his body as he curled into Yalda’s body, his friend who had become a best friend and a grandmother to him, and wept uncontrollably. It was too much! His wife? His home? His village? And now the closest thing he had left to family in the universe were gone as well! Gone! All gone! How much more could a spirit take before it broke? His wings drooped to the ground, shuddering as he wept.

Others in the village heard his cries, but they knew better than to disturb him. They had their own dead and injured to grieve. Several came to the door, but part of his consciousness heard someone shoo them away. For a long time he wept, cradling Yalda's body, alone. For in this life, he forever walked alone.

Gradually the room grew dark. He picked up Yalda’s body and lay her down gently on her sleeping pallet, and then he returned to the main room to pick up Zhila as well.

“Goodbye, my sweet grandmothers,” he said, kissing first one’s cheek, and then the other. He pulled a single blanket over them to cover them both.

A sense of hopelessness settled into his bones until he began to wonder whether there would be anything left to care about by the time he summoned the Emperor. Ninsianna was gone, the devil cruiser had blown up Immanu’s house, and now his adoptive grandmothers were dead. That old hunger ate at him, reminding him that if he didn't find Ninsianna, he would be condemned to wander eternity alone, the fate of a Seraphim who did not find his mate.

Alone…

It was the only fate he had ever feared.

He spent the night on the cot where Yalda had passed away, clinging to the bowl of unbaked bread which his two friends had not lived long enough to bake for him for supper.

~ * ~ * ~

Galactic Standard Date: 152,324.02

Monoceros Ring: Eternal Light

Former Supreme Commander-General Jophiel

Jophiel

The mood within the
Eternal Light
was nervous as they tailed the curious armada comprised of Sata’anic ships, Tokoloshe dreadnoughts, and other vessels from petty kingdoms hostile to the Alliance traverse the empty space between the Monoceros Ring and the broken Orion-Cygnus spiral arm which jutted through the larger Perseus arm like an arrow which had pierced a lover’s heart.

Jophiel stared with frustration at the images her scout ships relayed to her via a primitive direct line-of-sight. Five-watt yagi relays were an exceptionally primitive form of communication, but one which made it difficult for the enemy to pick up their radio transmissions. Unfortunately, the
Eternal Light
herself would be much harder to hide. The moment they broke cover from the red giant, it might as well have been a supernova, so blatantly would her ship show up on even a perfunctory scan.

“Have our long-range drones picked up anyplace we might take cover when we try to leap across the empty space?” Jophiel asked her second-in-command, Major Klikrrr.

“Not so far,” Klikrrr clacked his mandibles together. “It is as if the goddess, herself placed this ring around the galaxy as a frame.”

Jophiel leaned back in her commander’s chair, her snow-white wings raised with irritation and apprehension. She had a choice to make. Either travel far up the Monoceros ring until the natural curvature of the galaxy provided cover for her to make the leap across the vast, empty space. Jump now, and pray the lizards had decided to behave blind, deaf, dumb and stupid by not posting a rear-guard. Or wait until the Sata’anic armada disappeared far enough into the Orion-Cygnus spiral arm that the star systems they put behind them would finally silence the noise.

None of these options was a good one. Like her, the Sata’anic armada was operating under line-of-sight communication and they kept making random course corrections, none of them logical, of a type typical when a military vessel wished to avoid being tracked. The chances of reacquiring the target once she lost it were slim and none.

If only her living needle ship hadn’t disappeared! Now
that
little ship could leap between the dimensions, unseen by all except the goddess herself, and while it was prone to forgetting it was supposed to be on a military mission, it had prior to now always been a loyal little ship, counted upon to return so it could tell her
where
, at minimum, it had last seen the armada.

Damantia!

“We have no choice,” Jophiel said. “Mark the exact trajectory of where they entered the Orion-Cygnus arm and program a drone to sit there, waiting for our signal to reawaken it so the lizards don’t pick up its broadcast." She ran a stellar calculation in her head. “Recall the remaining drones and shuttles. We’ll go the long way around and hopefully we’ll pick it up again.”

She paced up and down the bridge, her white wings fluttering with irritation as she watched her crewmen work, waiting for her shuttles to return. She did not dare leave them out here. All of her shuttles were designed to operate out of a forward operating base or a command carrier. To leave a pilot behind would be a death sentence for them. Only a few deep-space reconnaissance shuttles existed, one less since Mikhail’s shuttle had disappeared, and not one of them was currently under her command!

If only she’d had the foresight to assign one to her own ship before Lucifer had rebelled, fractured the Alliance, gotten himself killed, she’d been placed under arrest, started her own little counter-rebellion, stolen back her command carrier and disappeared out into the middle of absolutely nowhere!

The absurdity of planning for all those contingencies gurgled in her throat until she broke her normally serious demeanor by chuckling in front of her crew. The more she tried to stop, the harder she laughed, until tears began to roll down her cheeks and her sides hurt from trying to suppress it. That was it. Now, to top it all off, she had just gone insane!