Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (96 page)

"Sarvenaz," he whispered, breaking the spell. The Happy Bird disappeared, and in its place he stared into a flashlight someone shone into his eyes.

"He's alive!" someone shouted. He didn't recognize the voice.

The stench of cooked meat assailed his nostrils. He tried to move, but pain screamed through his body. It hurt! It hurt! A great gulf of darkness swallowed him alive. He drifted for a while, no longer hearing the song, but then there were voices, and the scent of burnt flesh and electricity.

"Clear!"

A jolt tore through his body and ripped him back into his pain.

"Husband! Please!"

He heard the anguish in her voice, and he wondered who had dared hurt the woman he loved. He fought to get to her, for all his life he had fought for causes far less worthy than his wife. He ignored the pain. He ignored the choking sensation in his lungs. He pushed back against the flesh that screamed as though it burned on fire. Only one thing mattered, to get back to Sarvenaz's side.

"We have normal sinus rhythm."

"Will he make it?"

"I don't know how he's even still alive."

Hands touched him, lips pressed against his. An obnoxious beeping filtered into his subconscious. Where was he? And why was he not snuggled next to his wife?

He opened his eyes, his breaths jagged and painful.

"
Mo ghrá,"
he whispered.

"Husband," Sarvenaz wept. "You must stay with me. I make deal with dragon to get you back!" She waggled her finger at him. "You no stay with me, I go live with
him
."

Shadows moved around her. Other voices. Other people.

"Don't touch him!"

"He's badly burned, Ma'am."

Touch. Oh, gods, how he craved her touch!

He could see from the worry in her eyes that his injuries terrified her. She was brave about it; however, for Sarvenaz had always been brave. She looked past the burns to focus on his eyes and caressed the good side of his face, the side which had not been burned. He noted she was dressed in black widow's garb, and that her hair was no longer chestnut, but peppered by dozens of long, grey hairs.

"Let me go,
mo ghrá,
" he whispered. "For I am hideous, and you deserve a husband who is whole. I will wait for you, just but on the other side, and when we reuinite, I promise I will be beautiful for you to look upon once more."

Sarvenaz shook her head.

"You my husband," Sarvenaz wept. "Sarvenaz not let you go. No matter
how
badly you burned."

Shadows moved around them. Other people. Doctors?

"I'm going to give you something for the pain, General."

There was a pinch, and then t
he pain grew duller. For a while he drifted, anchored only by her weeping and the feel of her hand in his. When he woke up again, he could feel the hum of the
Jehoshaphat
beneath his back, the vibration discordant, almost as badly wounded as
he
was. He was in his quarters, IV's stuck into his arm. He wore little except for the bandages they had used to cover his burns, and even his wings were splinted into traction, almost completely devoid of his hawk-grey feathers.

Gentle fingers stroked his cheek, his belly and his thigh, the only places he wasn't badly burned. His heart grew fuller with every stroke, yearning to drink it up like an elixir, and despite his pain he grew aroused, for the first thing any mated pair sought to do after a period of separation was to reconnect using the only physical means granted to them here in the material realm.

"Sarvenaz?"

"Yes, Husband?"

"You should have let me go."

Sarvenaz shook her head, her lips trembling as she pushed back her black widow's headscarf and pressed her lips to his.

"You alive, Husband. It the only thing that matter to me."

His hunger for her touch hurt worse than the burns, and though he had no right to make such a request of a beautiful creature like his wife, him an old goat who was now no longer just scarred, but hideous and crippled, his yearning to reconnect with her had grown so great that it subsumed even the pain from Shay'tan's burns.

"Make love to me?" Abaddon pleaded. "Make love to me one last time, so that if I die, I will die a happy man?"

Sarvenaz sniffled.

"You hurt," she said. "Doctor say must not touch until you heal. If I lay down with you, it make your hurts-hurt worse."

His hand trembled as he fought to raise it so he could wipe away the moisture which glistened on her cheeks. Her tears soaked into his bandages, stinging his raw flesh with the salt of
her
pain.

"The only thing which hurts
mo ghrá
is the prospect of being separated from
you
,
"
Abaddon said.

She stretched out carefully alongside him, taking care not to lean against the places where he was hurt, and kissed and caressed every place he was not burned. As she touched him, she reawakened the song he had caught a glimpse of as he'd lay dying in the cave. He closed his eyes and drank up the love which poured out of her fingers, understanding this was not a sexual act, but a spiritual one. As she led him towards climax and he felt their sprits intertwine, he caught once more a glimpse of the Eternal Tree. It swayed gently in the wind of the song which drifted through Eternity, its branches heavy with the fruit of infinite universes, each one swirling with galaxies, and stars, and countless planets which whorled around the spiral arms.

"Ki," he whispered, for he understood at last what the Eternal Tree really was.

The song filled him as his wife's spirit merged with his, desperate, weeping, pleading with him not to die. The small, brown bird fluttered down from the branches and drew his eye to a broken seed, the remnant of a universe that was no more. As the bird's song turned mournful, he understood he looked at a remnant of Ki's devoured children. The remnant had embedded itself into the Milky Way galaxy, into a small, broken spiral arm which had, itself, become embedded here at some point in the past when two great galaxies had collided.

'Her planet lies somewhere within the uncharted territories.'

He realized he'd been looking in the wrong direction, but it didn't matter, for in this place he was no longer separate from her, but their spirits had intertwined as a single, loving whole.
Mated pair.
So long as they were together, whether this lifetime or the next, it did not matter, for not even death could separate them for long. The song blew the branches of the tree, and down from the leaves danced happy little seedlings, the soul-sparks of creatures not yet been born. They giggled, happy little stars, and danced around Sarvenaz's head just like a crown of light.

It was the fruit. The fruit of the Eternal Tree.

She touched his face and the soul-sparks danced from her to him.

"I can see it," he whispered. "I can see Eternity. All this time I wished to give to you its' fruit, when all along it was
you
who offered it to
me
."

Sarvenaz kissed him.

"I see only
you,
my Husband," she said. "You are the only thing which matters, the song which fills my heart."

The song subsided, but it did not go away, filling his heart with a sense of joy. At some point during the night he broke the bindings of his traction and rolled to cover her with a charred wing, yearning to get closer to her, yearning to feel the sensation of her flesh pressed against his. And when he awoke to the familiar tap-tap-tap of their daughter kicking against his hand, which he was in the habit of splaying across Sarvenaz's belly as she slept, he realized he was in much less pain.

Sarvenaz rolled towards him, opened her eyes and smiled. Her fingers moved up to trace the sword-scar which had always defined him, across his eyelid, down his cheek, and disappeared into his jaw. She kissed his mouth, and then removed the bandages which were no longer necessary except for in a few places where the scabs had not yet fallen off to reveal the soft, pink scar tissue growing underneath.

"How?" she stared at his healing injuries with wonder.

"We are a mated pair,
mo ghrá,"
Abaddon said. "And when two spirits love each other as much as I love you, not even death can keep us apart for long."

~ * ~ * ~

Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.12 AE

Zulu Sector: Light Emerging

Brigadier-General Raphael Israfa

Raphael

Brigadier-General Raphael Israfa copped his best approximation of Mikhail's
'I think you're a turd, but I'm too cool to let you know it, so I'll turn my face into a stone wall'
expression as he stared down, or more precisely
up
at the two feuding battle cruiser captains and
tried
to act more intimidating than he really felt. He wondered how long these men would consider him too wet behind the ears to get a grip on the egos of two competing ship's captains, both out to win the same recognition. As an intelligence officer, Raphael's expertise had always been to get people to talk to him, not to make them shut up and take their lumps, but ever since the Eternal Emperor had put him in command of this armada and its mission to find Earth, he’d had been learning a whole lot of new skills.

"Did I, or did I not, order you to position the
Emperor's Chariot
in a trajectory that was twelve light-years from the
Eye of the Leonid?
"

The Centauri captain towered over Raphael by a good two meters. The half-equine/half-human super-soldier had been genetically engineered to surpass even the Cherubim’s intimidating height and stature, and as a fledgling commander, many of the more battle-seasoned captains still considered Raphael to be an FNG (f-ing new guy). He was a burly stallion, with the typical chestnut coat and skin that all Centauri had inherited ever since their genetic diversity had become homogenized, and like most Centauri in the fleet, the
Emperor's Chariot
captain had been promoted to the rank of captain not due to his infinite grey matter, but because of he was fearless in the face of death.

Raphael suppressed the urge to shout and reminded himself the two ship's captains were acting up because they were bored… 

"We thought we heard radio waves," the Centauri captain said.

"We heard them first!" the Leonid captain interrupted him.

"They were in
our
search grid!" The big stallion crossed his arms across his muscular chest.

"Not if you'd stayed in search pattern you were
ordered
to stay in!" the Leonid captain growled.

If anything, the Leonids were proving to be an even
greater
challenge to Raphael's command than the Centauri. At eleven feet tall, including his luxurious reddish-brown mane, the truculent Leonid captain was an even match for the Centauri commander thanks to his white fangs and the sharp, retractable claws which adorned his finger-like paws.

When both ship's captains had ended up on the same habitable planet at the same time, one whose mission it had been to explore it, the other who had jumped the gun to get there first because the planet lay only a one-sixteenth light-year outside of his search-grid, the two had come to blows, right in front of their crews and a tiny settlement of pre-sentient creatures who would no doubt carry forth legends about the day two creatures had come down from the heavens and duked it out in front of them. The
Emperor’s Chariot
captain had claw marks raking down his flanks, while the
Eye of the Leonid
captain sported a freshly bandaged ribcage, thanks to a well-placed Centauri hoof.

"You were dawdling!" the Centauri captain snorted. His nostrils flared as though he smelled something bad.