Blood Betrayal Page 13

  “You’ve read the data files,” Jared replied, “You know why Zheng brought us here, what he intended to do.”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Jared said in a defeatist tone, and he again shifted to the image of Garod.

  “The admiral wants something with Cor’El, and we can’t allow Doctor Brown to help him,” Paul pressed, but he knew he’d already lost Jared Lance back into Garod.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m afraid something worse than your people have ever seen is about to be unleashed,” Paul explained.

  “If it has to do with the boy, I am sure his father will control him. Now, leave me be,” Garod commanded softly, and Paul Chen found himself standing at the closed and sealed platinum doors outside Garod’s Vault.

  “God, I thought I had him,” Paul said aloud to himself. “I thought I brought him back, but he only stayed lucid for a few seconds. And now here I am talking to myself. How long ‘til I lose it, too?”

  Thyss the Sorceress

  Thyss awoke shortly after break of dawn and felt shockingly refreshed and ready to do something, anything. She sat up and threw her legs over the side of the bed she shared with Cor, reaching her arms as far out to each side as possible. Her stretch ended with a soft, pleasurable groan as she lifted her arms over her head and then folded them into each other. The bronze skinned sorceress turned her head slightly to peer at the Lord Dahken out of the corner of her eye, and she saw that he was in fact awake, his eyes following the trail from her neck down her spine. Only moments passed before she felt his lips upon the back of her neck and his body pressed up against her back, interest renewed in the previous night’s activities.

  After, she left him in their bed as he drifted back off to sleep. A cool breeze blew through their ever open windows, a contrast to the heat that would soon be upon the city, and Thyss wanted to get ahead of it. She dressed in her shimmering black silk garb, tied on some sandals and looped her sword belt about her shoulders. She took great care not to wake Cor as she left.

  Thyss found her way outside the Crescent and stretched again in the warming sun, feeling her muscles strain just a bit, and then she launched into a lively jog into the city. Some fifteen years ago, Thyss found herself with child, and at first, she suffered it angrily. But as her pregnancy wore on and she began to feel the movements and power of the babe within her belly, she learned to cherish it. Then she found herself the mother of a new infant, and while she fought a number of battles, motherhood became the greatest of all of them. As Losz was destroyed and reorganized into East Aquis, and as the trials of early motherhood faded into memory, she began to enjoy the life of luxury as she watched her son grow.

  Thyss the sorceress had become soft, at least much of her body had. It wasn’t that she had become either ill proportioned or unattractive to any man’s eye, but the muscles of her lithe form lacked the definition they once had. She found that she could no longer battle Cor’s physical strength in their bed, and she doubted that she could battle a trained opponent with her sword. One day, she had simply looked at her hands and could no longer find callouses of swordplay.

  The golden haired, bronze skinned woman from Dulkur became a common sight every second or third day, running through the inner section of Byrverus in the morning. At first, Thyss could barely manage a mile, but her endurance built over several months so that now she ran no less than seven, as that was the length of her circuit. But sometimes she added to it and ran as many as ten miles.

  Upon her return to the Crescent, Thyss spent no time catching her breath. She ended her run in the very plaza that Keth trained the Dahken, the very plaza in which her son had felt the need to prove his strength over all of Cor’s young people. She drew Feghul’s Claw from its sheathe on her back and admired the wicked scimitar’s green gleam in the golden sunlight. For years, she had forgotten what it was to wield it, and Thyss had decided some months ago that she would never again allow the wear on her hands to melt away.

  As the sword’s deadly arc flashed through the air, Thyss tried to make sense of the previous day’s events as she looked at the spilled blood that still stained the plaza. Cor had explained it all, and she again listened to the entire story in her mind. She had even confronted their son herself, and he did not bother to deny what had happened. He even seemed proud of it, and despite the life she’d worked so hard to build with Cor and his Dahken, Thyss felt the pride of it as well. For so long, she had spent her life using her strength to take anything she wanted from anyone she wanted. Then one day, a young gray skinned bastard she met in Losz gave her something she neither could have taken from anyone else, nor that she realized she wanted, and things had never been the same for her. She realized that life was more than wielding great power to conquer others.

  Thyss had tried to help Cor’El understand that, too, but he was still so young. And he was already so powerful, maybe more so than her. Maybe even Cor.

  She practiced with her sword for well over an hour, and the day grew hot as the sun reached its zenith. Her muscles burned gloriously, her palms grew sore and sweat ran off her brow, down her back and in between her breasts. Thyss removed her sword belt and slid Feghul’s Claw back into its curved sheathe and moved toward the Crescent’s entrance. She leaned the sword up against the wall next to the doorway and leaned over to lift a bucket that one of Cor’s young Dahken always filled with water when Thyss went out for her run. She poured the cool contents onto her face and over her head, relishing it as it washed away the sweat and smell of her workout.

  Thyss left the bucket where she found it, retrieved her sword and went back inside, leaving drops of water and wet prints of her sandals behind her. She found that neither her son, nor her husband were to be found in their respective rooms, so she removed her wet clothing to hang it on the window sills to dry in the sun, ignoring the open mouthed gawking of Westerners in the streets below. Thyss stopped a moment to admire herself in a seven foot tall mirror mounted on one wall of her bedroom, and smiled at the body she saw – a body of a woman that men would kill to be with, the body of a warrior that could easily kill those men. She used a woolen towel to soak most of the water out of her hair before crawling into her sumptuous bed for a well-deserved midday nap.

  * * *

  Thyss burned everything in sight, reveling in the hellish blaze that tore down everything she had come to accept as her home and life. First went her apartment and all of its lavish entrapments, and then the Crescent followed. She found herself taking flame and steel to the carpets and tapestries of Byrverus’ palace, followed by the table at which King Rederick’s Council met. Once that turned to cinders, persons she had known for years – King Rederick and Queen Mora, the other Counselors, even Cor himself – suddenly stood before her, their eyes downcast to the floor as they accepted the fate she wrought upon them. It was truly glorious, and though she raged, there was no true joy in it, nothing but a strange forlorn sadness at the wonderful destruction.

  A booming sounded three times in some far away part of the palace, and Thyss paused her havoc just long enough to listen. The knock came again on her door in the next room, and Thyss labored her eyelids open as the dream dissipated and began to fade. She didn’t move from her place on the bed, her limbs flung away from her body with abandon, entwined with silk sheets, and she hoped that whomever it was would simply lose interest and go away.

  She heard one of the double door’s hinges squeal so very softly, followed by, “Mother? Mother, are you here?”

  “Yes,” Thyss called, “I am. Give me a moment.”

  As the sound of the door closing easily reached from the next room, Thyss sat up, the sheer, silk sheet falling into her lap to expose her naked breasts, and she rubbed her eyes with her fingers for a few seconds to clear away the sleep. Thyss stretched her arms, reaching up to the ceiling as far as she could and started to disentangle herself from the silk bedding. Once done, she stood, her feet lighting
on the cool floor and moved to retrieve her clothing.

  It was then that she saw it out of the corner of her eye, the form of someone standing in the doorway connecting the two rooms of the apartment. She turned to find Cor’El just standing there, watching silently and impassively, but there was nothing impassive in his eyes. Her hands, clutching the black silk tunic and leggings that she’d worn for as long as she could remember, instinctively moved to cover as much of her body as possible.

  “Dammit, Cor’El, what are you doing?!” Thyss cried. “Go wait outside!”

  “I’m sorry,” he replied, an apparent sheepishness in his voice, but again, his eyes betrayed it.

  Thyss recognized the fires of hunger when she saw it, as it had been so prevalent in her own soul for so long, and her flesh suddenly felt as if it wanted to crawl right off of her bones. But Cor’El did not leave. He stood gazing at her quietly for a moment, and it almost seemed as if he made some sort of arithmetic calculation in his head, as a scheming merchant might. Then he simply turned to face the other way.

  “I said, go wait outside!” Thyss screamed at him.

  “Why?”

  “Go, Gods damn you!”

  Her son paused for a moment and then left the doorway, but his course did not take him to the door through which he’d entered a few minutes previously. Instead, he nonchalantly moved into the apartment’s main room, where it sounded like he found a chair, divan or couch to sit upon and wait. Thyss clenched her jaw at his defiance, but swiftly set that aside to clothe herself, as if the nigh unbreakable silk itself would somehow hide her from the gaze she now found so disturbing. She took her sword, wrapping her hand around the sheath just below the guard, and strode into the room in which her son waited.

  “How dare you?!” she accused, her face screwed in anger.

  “What?” he replied innocently from his place on a silk cushioned divan, a new one for which her husband had just paid a merchant from her homeland handsomely.

  “I told you to wait outside! You disobey me and stare at me, your mother, the way you would at a common whore!”

  “No, mother, not at all,” he shook his head. “I love you.”

  Thyss swallowed hard at the words, the doting mother fighting with the aggrieved woman. She replied in a lower tone, “You’ll not look at me in that way again.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” Cor’El said, rationality creeping into his voice, “Why does it bother you so now?”

  “It is unnatural.”

  “For a man to love his mother?”

  “In such a way, yes! The very idea makes me want to retch, and you are no man, no matter what you may have done with the Slut Dahken Marya.”

  “Your words hurt me so, but so far as Marya is concerned, well…” Cor’El’s voice trailed off, and he merely shrugged. He stood from the divan and tugged down on his plain, black wool tunic to straighten it. “Mother, everything should change. Everything is going to change.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, and her brow furrowed slightly at the question.

  “I am the strongest Dahken that ever lived. I wield the forces of Hykan and his brethren, just as you do. Even Garod has lent his strength to me. The world is in constant ruin, blood running freely over its lands and into its oceans. I can end it all. I can rule and prevent all the needless death and suffering. The powerful should rule; you of all people know that, and Cor is too weak to do it.”

  “He is your father. You should not call him by name,” Thyss admonished, but it gave her son no pause at all. “Ruling is not as easy as you may think. Besides, there will never be enough to rule. You’re right. I know the thirst for power, and I also know it only leads to greater thirst.”

  “Then I shall also rule the stars, worlds without end,” he answered, and his eyes contained a different kind of fire than the one she beheld earlier. It was the flame of someone who truly believed.

  “And when is this all going to happen?” she asked.

  “Soon.”

  Thyss had no immediate answer as she stood and regarded him silently. Her disgust with him just a few moments before had already abated, as so often with her moods that shifted as quickly and dangerously as Hykan’s fires. Now she faced her son, a young man who looked so much like her, even dressed similarly with his black tunic and leggings, though they were made of Western wool rather than the silk of Dulkur. He was powerful, to be sure. She felt it radiate from him even now, not just heat as he had done as a babe, but true power the likes of which she’d only felt from one other man. Who was she to say that he shouldn’t have everything he wanted, and was it not her duty, as his mother, to help him achieve it? At the same time, his words screamed danger, and if his thoughts truly mirrored them…

  “You must choose your own path,” Thyss agreed softly, but she continued with the tone of a parent speaking to a child, “but for now it is up to your father and I to guide you. I’ll hear no more of this today. Tomorrow morning, let us breakfast together, the three of us.”

  Cor’El stared at her, his eyes never leaving her face as they apparently searched for something, some hint as to what she thought. Finally, a slight smile upturned the corners of his mouth, though the fire in his eyes had again faded to nothingness. He moved toward the door, opened it and turned to say, “As you wish, mother.”

  Dahken Marya

  Marya crossed the brilliant marble plaza between Garod’s temple and the palace, clad in her black plate and chain armor, ignoring the heat that shone down from the sun and the bright reflections from all of the white stone that so blinded all who were not used to it. She always wore her armor, sword and dagger, in all circumstances, as it had become part of her as a powerful Dahken warrior. Over the years, she had learned to avoid social functions with priests, lords and bureaucrats throughout the city, but even when she could not, she still appeared ready for battle. Secretly, she loved the surprised glances and sidelong looks everyone gave a warrior of such short stature, and a woman too!

  She strode right into the palace’s front entrance, its doors ajar, receiving only cursory nods from the plate clad guards that flanked it. They even wore helms, and she doubted that the high shine of the steel did much to dispel the oven-like heat inside the armor. Today was a day for open court, and inside King Rederick sat upon his throne, the pregnant Queen Mora sitting at his side, as they listened to an emissary from some noble explaining why she was late on tax payments. From the excruciatingly bored looks on the faces around the hall, Marya assumed that court must have been going on for hours.

  Perhaps it was time to rescue all involved. Marya started to weave her way through dozens of bodies. She neither knew the reason any of them were present, nor did she care, but she finally made her way to the front of the crowd, receiving protests as she went. “Hey,” and, “Wait your turn,” were the most common of these, but a hard look from her silenced most concerned. Her very stance and countenance exuded that she was not to be trifled with. When she arrived, King Rederick took note and held his hand aloft to stop the groveling of the bureaucrat in front of him.

  “Tell Lady Haness that His Majesty understands the hardships the entire kingdom has born for the last number of years,” Rederick intoned magnanimously. “I will accept her payment for now, but the balance must be paid. Taxes, as much as I despise them, pay for the protection that our soldiers provide, pay for the roads that connect our cities. The treasury needs coin to pay the expenses of these services, as well as provide for those who govern, and I do not live in the extravagance that others have before me. She has six months to pay the remainder, equal payments in each of the six months. I believe this is more than fair. Thank you.”

  King Rederick stood from his throne, and it appeared to Marya that he stretched slightly as he did so, further confirming that he had been trapped in his chair for quite some time. The man truly was almost a giant and standing at the top of the raised steps that led to the throne made him appear easily twelve feet tall. He hadn’t changed a
bit since Marya first met him holed up in Garod’s temple with an army of walking corpses standing just outside. His reddish brown hair had receded back perhaps just a bit, but no more lines creased his face. His shoulders stood broad and firm, despite the weight of an oft troubled kingdom upon them.

  “Dahken Marya,” he called to her, and she kneeled quickly as expected. “Please approach. I assume you have cause for coming here today of all days.”

  “I do indeed, Majesty,” she replied in a raised voice for all to hear as she approached the bottom of the steps. “As you may know, Lord Dahken Cor is out in the countryside with his Dahken.”

  “I did not,” Rederick interrupted, “but then it is not necessary for Cor to inform me of his whereabouts daily.”

  “Indeed, Majesty. He left me behind to watch over the Crescent. One of our warriors, named Hun, was sent to me with a message. Lord Dahken Cor asks you to assemble the Council, Majesty.”

  Rederick squinted slightly as his head tipped in surprise. “It is… less than uncommon for Cor to make such a request.”

  “It is,” Marya agreed.

  Rederick turned his face toward his wife and almost shrugged, at least it looked as if his face shrugged, and he replied, “I suppose, then, that we should grant his request. When does he wish the Council to meet?”

  “As soon as possible, perhaps in an hour. He is already on his way back to Byrverus. He’ll come straight to the palace,” Marya replied.

  “Very well,” Rederick agreed, “though not everyone will be there. I am sure Menak can use his magick to arrive in time, but Lords Karak and Pall are attending their lands. What of Dahken Keth?”

  “Dahken Keth is with Cor. I am sure,” Marya said nodding, “that the Lord Dahken will approve of the best we can manage.”