The Brush of Black Wings Part 5

She might well have uttered that information in Kros sailor slang if Acseh's perplexed expression was anything to judge by. "What are you talking about? And what is a saruum?"

Martise hesitated. Acseh exhibited no fear of their captor. She called him Megiddo. Just Megiddo. Not Megiddo Saruum or King Megiddo. His otherness was obvious, but did Acseh a.s.sume him to be something besides a demon? Something still not human but not nearly so terrifying or lethal as one of the Wraith Kings? And how could she not know of the devastation they wreaked on the world? Or was she taken just before it happened?

So many questions with no answers. Yet. Martise didn't a.s.sume that Acseh's loyalties lay elsewhere than with Megiddo. She stepped carefully with her explanation. "'Saruum' is Makkadian and means 'king.' 'Saruui' is more than one king. 'Saruui Buidu' means 'Wraith Kings.' They were demons and almost destroyed the world a long time ago. Your time I think."

Acseh shook her head, her features more guarded than puzzled now. "I don't know of any Wraith Kings. Vigestri was at peace when I was taken. Though we heard rumors of a strangeness in the north and east where the gray Elders lived." Sparks of unease ignited in her eyes. "Megiddo is just a monk. Or was until he became trapped in the gray world."

"A monk?" Martise gaped at her. Her knowledge of demons and their behavior was far less than Silhara's, but she found it hard to reconcile the idea of one, especially a demon king, claiming false ident.i.ty as a lowly monk, and to a harmless human woman no less.

Acseh's voice echoed the uncertainty in her eyes. "Yes. One of the n.a.z.im. Do you know of them?" Martise shook her head. "They're a holy order devoted to Faltik the One. They act as guardsmen and protectors to royal households."

Conclave kept records of aristocratic geneologies that stretched far back into time. Ancient holy orders held no importance for them unless they possessed magic, and Martise had never come across records that mentioned the n.a.z.im or a deity called Faltik the One. Megiddo probably lied about him being one of those long-ago monks.

She didn't argue Acseh's a.s.sertion that Megiddo was a n.a.z.im. This woman was not an ally, and she had no wish to make of her an adversary. The demon king was more than she could handle at the moment as it was. She turned the conversation to something safer. "How did this cottage come to be here?"

Acseh's gaze shuttered. She wasn't fooled. "It came with me. It belonged to our gamekeeper. I was hiding inside-avoiding the attentions of a suitor at my sister's wedding-when Megiddo appeared. If only I'd known there was something worse waiting for me in the cottage. When this gray-this prison-pulled Megiddo back, it took everything. Him, me, the building. It's all I have as a reminder of my world." The despair in her voice was palpable. She plucked at the folds of her dress, more finely made than anything Martise had ever owned. "I've worn this same dress for a long time."

Martise opened her mouth to offer sympathy and screamed instead when Megiddo suddenly appeared next to her. She almost fell off the bench.

"Getting acquainted?" he casually asked, as if he'd just strolled through the door with a wave and a pitcher of ale to share.

Acseh didn't flinch, but she did glower. "Stop it," she said.

Her heart galloping hard enough to crack her ribs, Martise gawked as the demon king respectfully bowed his head at Acseh before turning to her. "My apologies for the fright."

Martise shifted as far to the bench's edge as she could, ignoring his widening grin. She met his gaze and tried not to look away from the lightning-riddled eyes with their steel-colored irises and reflective pupils. "I can't help you," she said. "I won't help you. You have no right to my world, not after you and your kind tried to destroy it."

"Megiddo, what does she mean?" Acseh's voice was soft, threaded with a rising fear.

The demon king's brow knitted and his shoulders slumped a little. Surely that wasn't regret Martise just witnessed? What demon ever experienced such an emotion?

She ceased to wonder when his back stiffened and his stare turned as icy as his touch. "It's my world too," he said in dead tones. His eyes narrowed. "What do you mean 'tried to destroy it?' We gave up everything to save it."

Ice water spilled down her spine, and the gut instinct that she walked a blade's edge between life and death dried every drop of saliva in Martise's mouth. She gripped her cup until her fingers ached and cleared her throat several times before she could speak. "What is written tells a different tale. Five kings, demons all, who led legions of lesser fiends against me, destroying everything in their path. Entire cities fell to ruin. People, animals, land-everything laid waste."

Megiddo reared back. "And yet you are here, alive and well in a time beyond mine."

There was no stopping now. If she refused to say more, he'd force it out of her. "You-the kings-were defeated by an alliance of kingdoms and your hordes driven back to the Abyss."

His eerie eyes gleamed white with lightning and his upper lip curled into a sneer. "Is that so?" The table vibrated under his drumming fingers. Dents in the wood marked where his fingertips tapped. His gaze slid past Martise to an unseen point beyond her shoulder. "We prevailed," he said softly. "We prevailed."

Martise couldn't help the fearful squeak that escaped her lips when that bright gaze landed on her once more. His voice, brittle and sharp, held the same despair she'd heard in Acseh's tones earlier. "For all that we suffered, this is how we're remembered?"

Suffered? What had they suffered? The kings had wrought suffering on an apocalyptic scale. He made no sense.

"You aren't remembered," she said shortly. "None now speak of the Saruui Buidu. I know of you from forgotten tomes stolen from an undead necromancer."

Gooseflesh peppered her skin at his humorless chuckle. "Fitting, I think, that those who led the dead should now only be remembered by them." He glanced at Acseh who'd risen from the bench and crept along the wall toward the door, her features drawn with horror. Megiddo's eyes went as flat a gray as the landscape outside, and his mouth turned down. "It's pointless to flee, Damkiana. You know this."

Acseh halted but stayed plastered to the wall, fingers laced so tightly together, her knuckles were bloodless. She stared at the demon king, new revulsion in her gaze.

Martise's own revulsion was no less than Acseh's despite the sudden doubt creeping into her thoughts. Doubt in the tome's accuracy; doubt in recorded memory. Demons were known to be sophisticated and subtle liars. She had no trouble believing Megiddo possessed the same skill, yet something in the way he reacted to her revelation of history's treatment of the kings made her wonder.

"Even were I willing, I cannot help you open the gate." She wasn't the catalyst that had anch.o.r.ed him to the temple.

Before she could expound on her statement, he lunged for her, gripped her shoulders and jerked her up from the bench as he stood. Martise dangled midair, caught in a frigid, unbreakable grip. Megiddo pushed his face close to hers until they were nose to nose.

"Who says I need your willingness, kashaptu?" Her stuttered plea for mercy evoked no sympathy as he shook her hard enough to make her head snap back and forth. "I will take what you refuse to offer."

"Megiddo, stop! Please!" Acseh's voice sounded miles away in Martise's ears as Megiddo threatened to break loose everything in her skull.

He didn't release her, but he did stop shaking her. Martise tried to catch her breath even as her vision swam. "Not me," she wheezed. "The sword. The king is the sword."

Megiddo dropped her as if she'd suddenly sprouted spikes from her shoulders. Martise struck the bench's edge as she fell. A shockwave of pain rolled across her shoulder blade and back, and her right arm went numb. She scuttled away from the king on her haunches and good arm, helped by Acseh who dragged her back to a corner of the room.

The two women huddled together, staring at Megiddo once more enrobed in the chimeric shadows with their tortured faces. He hadn't changed beyond the robes, but his presence filled the cottage, swelling to enormous proportions, and the structure's wooden frame groaned and popped with the strain.

"What do you know of the sword, kashaptu?" His voice swallowed stars, a dry well into which oceans had drained and left their dead rotting in the briny mud.

Terror robbed Martise of speech. Acseh keened softly in her ear, a wordless cant composed of every fear and nightmare that had plagued mankind in the deep hours when darkness was more than the absence of sunlight.

Megiddo strolled toward them, his pupils preternaturally large and bottomless, his spectral face merciless. "Answer me, kashaptu," he commanded. "What do you know of the sword?"

Acseh's grip around her midriff threatened to cut off her air, and Martise inhaled shallow breaths in an effort to speak. "The king is the sword; the sword is the king. Yours is buried beneath the temple. I'm not the anchor or the key. The blade is. You shouldn't have taken me. I can't retrieve for you what isn't here. The gate is locked to all of us now."

Her declaration accomplished one of two things-guaranteed her own execution or bought her a chance at returning home. If he believed her. Her gut churned, and in this world with no sun and no heat or cold, terrified sweat beaded her brow.

His expression didn't change, but the robes reacted. Writhing around his body in convulsive gyrations, they twisted the faces in their depths into new, more warped visages. Open mouths emitted screams no less horrific from sounding far-off and faint.

"You made a mistake, Megiddo Saruum," she said softly.

He advanced on them, his demon-white face blank and distant. Acseh whispered prayers into Martise's hair. "Holy mothers, I beg your mercy. Hear this handmaiden. Save us. Save us."

Something listened. And answered.

A lonely sigh echoed through the entire cottage, fluttered Martise's skirts and sank into her bones. Megiddo's eyes rounded. He spun on his heel, surveyed the room, glanced at her and Acseh and disappeared.

The sense of s.p.a.ce in the cottage grew once more with the demon king's absence. Acseh and Martise sat together in the corner, each shivering in the other's arms.

"What was that?" Acseh's voice was thick with tears.

Martise dared not hope too much but added her prayers to Acseh's. Silhara, she prayed. Let it be Silhara. "I don't know," she said aloud. She escaped the other woman's embrace and helped her stand.

Acseh wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve and swiped at her red-tipped nose. "He isn't a monk."

The urge to apologize hovered on Martise's lips. Apologize for destroying a merciful ignorance, no matter that the truth would be revealed at some point. Still, she'd sensed Acseh's acceptance, if not affection, for Megiddo. From what Martise could tell, it had made the woman's imprisonment with him bearable. Now there was fear and disgust, and soon hatred. "No," she said. "Nothing so simple or human as a monk."

"Saruum Buidu." Acseh stumbled on the words.

Martise stared at the spot where her nemesis had stood only a moment earlier. "Abomination."

CHAPTER SEVEN.

If the king was the sword and the sword the king as the lich's books stated, then Silhara had exactly what he needed to grab a demon king by the b.o.l.l.o.c.ks and twist.

The blade hung at his hip, hidden by the folds of his cloak. A light sword, well-balanced and designed for speed-draw, it dragged at his belt, made c.u.mbersome by the weight of dark magic infused in the metal and his own wards that protected him from its touch. His skin crawled any place the scabbard knocked against his leg. He'd drop the thing into the nearest blacksmith's forge and toast its destruction with a cup of Dragon p.i.s.s were it not useful for his own purposes. Given half the chance, he'd toss Megiddo Anastas in there with it and toast a second time.

The magic he used to iron-crow his way into the demon's prison had depleted some of his strength. The success of his endeavor lay before him, a barren wasteland in all directions. The only points of interest were a jagged line of mountains on a far horizon and the sky above him, wreathed in flashing images of people, places and events. They careened across the celestial road in an ever-changing panorama-lives lived across time and kingdoms, revealed yet unreachable.

His wife was trapped somewhere in this G.o.ds-forsaken place, captive of an ent.i.ty with the desire to break free of its cage and a certainty she was the means to do so. Silhara snarled and promptly gagged.

"Bursin's armpit!" he said into his sleeve as he covered his nose with his forearm. The reek of this world overrode the copper smell of his own blood drying in his nostrils. His eyes watered with true tears instead of blood, and his stomach bounced under his ribs in warning. The taint of the demon's mark on Martise's clothing had made his nose twitch but was only a ghost of the odor saturating this air. It was as if an entire world had dumped the rotting corpses of its dead here. The bodies had turned to dust, but the smell remained.

He breathed cautiously through his mouth and pivoted to better survey the landscape. The barrenness wasn't as strange as the lack of noise. Even the fetid wind was silent as it whipped his cloak around his legs and his hair into his eyes. In some ways, it reminded him of Corruption's plane of existence with its lifeless ocean and a beach made of burnt bone. That plane caged an exiled G.o.d, this one an exiled king.

A spike of warning p.r.i.c.kles shot down Silhara's back. This world might be mute and rank, but it wasn't blind. Something watched him, and the previously quiet sword began to whisper and rattle in the scabbard.

He smiled grimly. "Sense your master nearby, do you?" The hush deepened, reminding him of the stillness just before a thunderstorm broke over Neith. "Come out, come out, wherever you are," he taunted in a soft voice.

He leapt back as the ground in front of him erupted into a howling geyser of dirt. Soil and rock spewed upward to coalesce into a floating miasma. It hovered there only a moment before shifting shape into a javelin and hurtling toward him. Silhara flung a spell back at the makeshift weapon where it disintegrated into a harmless shower of dust.

He laughed aloud, his mirth devoid of any true humor. "King Megiddo. Demon handler and dirt-mover. Hardly worthy of the t.i.tle 'saruum.'"

The first attack had been a test, one to gauge not only his fear or lack of it, but also his power. Silhara had offered a hint but couldn't do much else until his adversary chose to confront him for a prolonged period. Mockery worked wonders in making men react; demons were no exception.

A shrieking black whirlwind spiraled across the empty plain towards him. The cacophony bludgeoned Silhara's bleeding ears. Screams of the dying, of the tortured and the mutilated. He had witnessed plenty of suffering in his lifetime. He was far less sensitive to it than Martise, but everything inside him recoiled at the sounds emanating from the whirlwind.

He held his ground as the monstrous vortex spun ever closer, revealing the outlines of racked limbs and shadowy faces distorted in horror. The force of the wind lifted him off his feet, and nebulous hands extended from the cloud to clutch at his clothing, yank his hair and rake claws down his arms and legs.

The spell he bellowed into the whirlwind halted its spin abruptly. It collapsed like a spinning top flattened by an impatient hand. Silhara dropped from his midair tumble and landed on his feet with a quick stagger. He shoved his wind-tangled hair away from his face and frowned.

This isn't what he expected-minor spells of wind and movement easily defeated or deflected by counter sorcery mastered by a third-year Conclave student. Silhara had prepared to engage in full-on warfare. So far, he hadn't even broken a sweat. He stayed on his guard. Demons were known to play with their food.

He braced himself for a third confrontation when the same black whirlwind gathered itself once more. Instead of aiming for him in a straight line, it zigzagged over the terrain, pausing at odd intervals to stir up dust in various spots. He pivoted slowly, tracking its movements, curious. He rolled his eyes once he realized what the vortex was doing.

Barrier circles made for handy self protection. Silhara had used them on various occasions when he worked dangerous magic. They made terrible cages for a mage with any reasonable skill and power. He left the barrier alone for the moment, puzzled as to why his adversary chose to construct it, especially when its power barely registered to his senses. No more than a fly's buzz and even less annoying.

The whirlwind spun tighter and faster, shrinking until it was no more than a thin black line that suddenly blossomed into voluminous robes made of the same shadowy, agonized faces and twisted limbs. The being who wore it possessed the visage of a man, but a man who had lost his humanity to the darkest forces and walked soulless among the living.

Silhara inclined his head in mock salute. "Megiddo Anastas."

"Who are you?"

The question surprised Silhara. He had expected more guttural utterances, demonic gibberish and possibly a lot of spitting. Instead, the Wraith King spoke a dialect of Glimming and watched him with strange eyes-steely and reflective like his sword's blade, with the same blue lightning crackling in their depths. His voice didn't echo in this m.u.f.fled world, but Silhara sensed a vast abyss in the words, akin to Corruption's lifeless seas.

"It doesn't matter who I am," he replied in the same tongue. "You've taken something of mine. I want it back."

Megiddo c.o.c.ked his head, his steel-plate eyes narrowed. "You have something of mine as well. You used it to open the gate."

Hardly, but the demon king didn't need to know that. Silhara smirked. "Shall we bargain?"

Diplomacy had never been his strongest virtue but he was a decent negotiator. He never imagined the skills he employed to sell his produce at Easter Prime's markets would serve him here, where he'd bargain with a Wraith King for his wife's safe return.

"Give me the sword and open the gate. I'll give you the kashaptu." Megiddo's grotesque robes writhed around his body, their fluid faces snapping fanged teeth at Silhara. The sword at Silhara's hip tugged on his belt, straining toward its master. Yearning.

Silhara snorted. He avoided using Martise's name and suspected the demon didn't know it-yet. "Give me the woman, and I'll return the sword."

As much as his gut clenched at the thought of the sacrifice involved, there was no possible way he'd reopen the portal into his world and let this loathsome thing through to wreak havoc.

Megiddo's features drew into even gaunter lines. "Open it or I kill the woman," he almost snarled.

Silhara snapped his fingers outward in a wide palm stretch. Sparks sizzled off his fingertips. A dull clap of thunder followed, and the barrier circle around him flashed twice before crumbling. The sigils drawn in the dust by the whirlwind scattered. "I'm no cull to fear threats from the rejected refuse of a respectable midden. Kill her, and I'll destroy the blade." He slapped the squirming blade at his hip, as much to subdue it as to make his point.

Megiddo's glance darted to where the sword hung, hidden by Silhara's cloak. "Unlike the kashaptu, I won't die."

"But you will wither and spend eternity here the shade of a shade."

The words struck home. Megiddo's eyes lightened from polished steel to white-hot metal, blazing in his equally pale face. Silhara watched, waited and pounced at the demon's first twitch of his shoulder.

"Hold!" he commanded, his hand wrapped around the scabbard. Fire coursed through his arm, the cold, unclean fire of both necromantic and goetic sorcery.

Megiddo froze, wrenched to a shocked standstill. His wide eyes lost their blaze, and the robes writhed back on themselves, twisting and convulsing until they coc.o.o.ned the king in a tightly wrapped shroud. His body flickered and wavered, like the illusionary waves on a near horizon that tricked a thirsty traveler on a hot day. The demon opened his mouth to speak.

Silhara slammed another spell into the sheathed sword, smiling grimly as it screeched a thin protest. "Be still, dog," he commanded the bound Megiddo. "Be silent." He'd swear to any who asked that he heard the demon's back teeth snap together in an unwilling clench.

He strolled to where the Wraith King rocked unsteadily on his feet. The robes squirmed, reaching for him. Silhara's lip curled. "Thought you'd nip off for a little murder to force my hand, did you?" The mute demon's wrathful gaze promised retribution far more unpleasant than mere murder.

Silhara kicked the side of Megiddo's knee, sending him toppling into the dirt with a m.u.f.fled thump. "Stay," he ordered.

He walked away from the p.r.o.ne king and turned in a slow circle, allowing his senses to expand in the flat, muted plane. The power he'd bled off from the spells protecting Neith's environs surged through him to swell his throat and fill his mouth.

"Apprentice," he said in a low voice, and the gray world vibrated beneath his feet with the word's resonance. It swelled, spilling across the featureless plain in invisible waves, carried to the distant fanged mountain peaks on a sorcerous tide.

He listened, breath held in hopeful antic.i.p.ation, and closed his eyes on a sigh when a thin cry carried back to him on the soundless wind. "Master."

The spell he used to cast his voice captured hers, spinning a delicate thread that bound her to him. He grasped the line, recited another spell and left the Wraith King rec.u.mbent in the dirt.