Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (66 page)

He moaned like a sheep which had just had its throat slit, and then moved onto the floor, making a pathetic whimpering sound as he clutched his hands over his ears.

Gita clutched her sides as her
own
wave of nausea hit again. This was not the first time she'd suffered from such an illness, and she knew what to do to minimize its duration. She forced herself to vomit into the chamberpot, and then coaxed Firouz to do the same. She then dragged him over to the floor next to Mikhail's bed, and curled up between the two so she could attend to them both. She was too weak to sing as the evil spirits tore through her body, so she held Mikhail's hand, mindful of her promise she would never leave him alone.

'Please, Mikhail,' she prayed as convulsions wracked her body. 'Please don't forget to breath while the sickness ravages through me...'

She closed her eyes and focused on the dark pain in her stomach, willing her body to transmute it, willing her body to exorcise whatever misery had decided to take up residence in her bowels. She remembered the rhyme sung to her by her mother, the one she now used to help her digest the cast-off goat slops whenever she had no other food to eat.

Darkness to darkness,

Light to light.

Embrace the pain,

Don't give it a fight.

Become one with the poison

Until it is known.

And then you can fight it,

Once the antidote has been shown.

An image came into her mind of a small, white flower. What it was and how it had come to be in her water did not matter. All that mattered was the way the substance attacked her stomach. Don't fight it. Your body already knows what to do. Lay down on your side and vomit until there's nothing left to come up so the poison doesn't travel any further into your system.

She whispered to Firouz to do the same. He didn't need any coaxing from
her.
Already the two of them were covered in their own disgusting, partially digested dinner.

After an eternity of pain, she became aware of voices down on the first story of the house. Immanu? She thought he wasn't due back until tomorrow? The sound of many feet climbing up the ladder warned her that something was amiss. The voices spoke not in Ubaid, but an unknown language.

A sense of horror permeated through the fog of Gita's pain. Warning! Danger! Assur is being attacked!

Pain clenched at her gut as the poison refused to release its hold. Fight. She must fight. Every instinct she possessed screamed she must defend Mikhail with her very life.

The flicker of the tallow lantern reflected off of Mikhail's sword, shiny and silver, still placed neatly beneath the bed where Pareesa had hidden it. Gita slid her hand around the cold, bumpy hilt. She had never been privy to Pareesa's sword training, nor had anyone ever taught her to channel the Cherubim god who now spoke to Pareesa like a friend, but she had to defend him.

Who would answer the call of a girl who no god ever
saw?

That dark gift which had whi
spered to her ever since her mother had been murdered reminded her there
was
another god who protected Mikhail, one with whom she'd felt an affinity ever since the night those pitiless black eyes had met her gaze across a field of bodies.

"Please," Gita prayed to He-who's-not, "show me what to do!"

Calm emptiness filled her body until it found an emotion upon which it could feed to help her. Not despair, for despair was a useless emotion when one needed to act, but anger. Anger that she'd been put into this position in the first place. Anger at being forced as a child to witness her mother's murder. Anger at her dead friend for being so weak-minded as to succumb to the Evil One's plans. And anger most of all that Mikhail's enemies dared come for him when he was in so sorry a condition that not even the Dark Lord himself could reanimate his vessel.

Three men burst through the curtain...

With an inhuman howl, Gita rose up from the placenta of her own vomit and mercilessly hacked to pieces the assassins who had come to kill the man she loved.

~ * ~ * ~

December, 3,390 BC

Earth: Village of Assur

Jamin

Jamin peered through the darkness at the village which had once been his home. The lizard-people had loaned him their wondrous magical eyes, a talisman which could pierce the darkness and let him see as though he was a hyena. He scrutinized Assur's defenses, trying to discern what changes his father had made since he’d been cast out to wander the wilderness. The outer wall stood solid and tall, an impenetrable barrier which had stood for as long as Jamin had been alive. To his now-jaded eyes, it appeared inadequate. What hope did a wall made of mud-bricks have against the kinds of weapons General Hudhafah would bring to bear if his attempt to eradicate the troublemakers failed?

"What do you see, brother?" Nusrat asked. Aturdokht's brother had taken to calling him
brother
even though, until Mikhail was dead, Jamin would not be free to marry her.

Jamin adjusted some tiny handles on the talisman which made everything clearer, if turning it all a peculiar shade of green.

"Would you like to look?" Jamin asked.

Nusrat hesitated, and then nodded. Jamin pulled the awkward helmet off of his own head and fitted the goggles over Nusrat's eyes. If there was one trick he'd learned from the lizard people, it was how very tempting their magical devices were to men such as himself, or more accurately, men such as he
used
to be. Primitives. Jamin grinned at his future brother-in-law's amazement as he pointed out each aspect of the village they were about to raid.

"It looks like the gate is still guarded," Nusrat said.

"Not effectively," Jamin said. He pointed towards the darkened gate even though, without the goggles, he could not see it any longer. "The torches have burned out and nobody replaced them except for that one. That means there is probably only one guard who is not indisposed from the hellebore."

The Uruk raiders muttered and shuffled as their leader made his way forward to get a better look. Taziq was a bit shorter than Jamin; broader, but not obese; the wealthy third-son of a minor chieftain who wandered the desert, seeking trade and fortune because he had little chance of inheriting his father's village. He placed a hand on Jamin's shoulder and pointed towards Assur.

"The last time I saw I saw these walls," Taziq said, "my recollection is that they were shorter."

"When was that?" Jamin asked.

"It would have been right around the time you were born," Taziq said. "You and Marwan's son here would have both been cubs at your mother's breasts." The Uruk leader's laugh sounded like the rough bark of a hyena. "We could not breach those walls then, what makes you think we can breach them now?"

"You
saw
the lizard people's sky canoe," Jamin said.

"The lizard people are not here," Taziq answered, "and I am still not convinced of their benevolence."

Jamin forced himself not to stiffen.

"Thus far the lizard people have delivered every promise they have given," Jamin said, "and when they could
not
deliver, they have told me thus beforehand, not held out false hope or wooed me with promises they had no intention of keeping. Do you really expect the armies of a great empire to just step in and fight our battles
for
us without a demonstration of our fealty?"

"Then why not simply use their big firestick to blow up the winged demon's house from the sky?" Taziq asked.

Nusrat interrupted before Jamin's anger might cause him to undermine their tentative alliance.

"You saw my father's foot," Nusrat said. "Only great magic could have healed that wound. And Sergeant Dahaka
himself
descended from the heavens to teach you how to use that knife."

"Ay," Taziq caressed his newly gifted silver hunting knife, far finer than any stone blade. "It was a most invigorating demonstration, especially when paired with the news that every Ubaid village has abandoned Assur to fend for itself."

Jamin gestured for Nusrat to hand Taziq the magical eyes. He had his
own
suspicions about why the lizard people were being so parsimonious with their demonstrations of power, but he kept those thoughts to himself because he wanted the lizard people to succeed. He'd weathered enough enemy sieges and battle preparations for a far more familiar enemy, famine, to recognize the symptoms of an army that had gone too long without a fresh infusion of reinforcements.

Taziq strapped the magical eyes to his forehead and then gasped with wonder as he realized he could see Assur almost as clearly as though it was daylight.

"Shay'tan believes every man must earn his
own
way in the world," Jamin said. "But if you prove to be a worthy ally, he will reward you with riches beyond your wildest dreams."

Taziq, by this point, had forgotten all about his questions and was too busy peering through the magic eyes.

"Is it normal for your village to be this dark?"

His
village? Even now, there was a rightness about the word.

"Not this early in the night," Jamin said. "Just because it is almost the winter solstice does not mean people go to bed immediately after supper. Laum came through for us, it appears."

Taziq pulled off the night vision goggles and passed them to the man he'd appointed to finish off the winged demon, and then to the other men in their raiding party. One by one, the six-man group tried the goggles on and gasped with wonder as Jamin pointed out the places he advised them to scale the wall. If the villagers were all sick to their stomach as Marwan had promised, this assassination attempt should go flawlessly with few collateral casualties.

"I wonder what Laum will do when he realizes he betrayed his village to help the very man he's sworn to destroy?" Nusrat asked him in Halifian so their Uruk allies wouldn't understand what he said.

A pang of guilt clenched at Jamin's gut.

"The man will be safely out of
my
village," Jamin said, "wealthy beyond his dreams and happy with a new wife and child to replace the ones he's lost. Under the circumstances, it's the best I can do to atone."

Sometimes Shahla came to him when he was dreaming, carrying her decrepit rag doll. He'd taken to visiting the place where the lizard-people had buried her with honor, to speak to her and apologize that things had gone so terribly wrong. It was ironic that, in death, Shahla had become his only friend.

"Our friends are anxious to get this over with," Nusrat said.

Jamin met his gaze.

"You will stay here and make sure Taziq doesn't double-cross me?"

"You know I will," Nusrat said. The Halifian grinned. "Or at least if I sell you, it will be to improve your position even more!"

Jamin gave him a weak grin. It was ironic that, in her betrayal, Aturdokht had won his respect.

He silently led the raiders down the now-trickling stream bed to the strongest, highest place along the wall, the place they never guarded because none except a man with wings could scale a wall so high. He reached into his satchel and pulled out the strange, three-pronged contraption the lizards had given him.

"Is that device magic as well?" the sloe-eyed Uruk he thought of as 'snaggle-tooth' grinned at him.

"Yes, it is magic," Jamin lied. "The lizard people call this device a
grappling hook.
"

With a jam of his wrist, he forced the three prongs to unfurl from their sheath. The Uruk
ooh'd
like good little primitives. He unwound the rope, a light, thin thread about half the width of his pinkie finger, far more slender than the coarse, hemp ropes the Ubaid usually braided.

"Stand back," Jamin ordered.

The Uruk stepped back, curious to see what he would do. He grabbed the rope about a cubit from the device and began to swing it around and around until the weight of the grappling hook pulled the rope taut. With a still-awkward move, he heaved the hook over his head and sent it flying up over the wall.