Shadowed by Demons, Book 3 of the Death Wizard Chronicles Page 11

  But the Daasa did not attack. Instead, it raced off in search of other prey.

  They mean us no harm. We are protected.

  At that moment Torg and Laylah appeared, walking toward them hand-in-hand, both as naked as the day they were born. The wizard held the Silver Sword in his free hand; the sorceress carried Obhasa. The Daasa avoided them as well, but killed everyone and everything else. The streets began to clear. The City of Thieves was being cleansed of its sinful keepers.

  “Modesty is not your finest quality, Torgon,” Rathburt whispered to himself. “Do you never tire of showing off?”

  10

  TORG WAS growing weary of being naked so much. Often when he wielded his magic, he could preserve his clothing with a protective sheath of blue energy. But when Laylah had released his chaotic power, his pirate outfit had been incinerated, as had hers. Silly as they were, he’d become fond of his colorful new clothes. At least they were warm. He wished he had Jord’s ability to conjure magical clothing, but that highly convenient art surpassed him.

  When a pair of terrified pirates tried to run past him, he reached out and banged their heads together, cracking their skulls. Then he removed their knee-length jackets and gave one to the sorceress.

  “Here is my first present to you, my love,” Torg said. “I made it myself.”

  Laylah laughed. “Why, thank you. I’ll treasure it always, even if it does stink like cigars.”

  The carnage continued all around them, but Torg paid it little heed. His concerns over how Lucius initially would manage the Daasa no longer worried him. It was obvious the creatures were grateful for being rescued and knew whom to credit for it. But would that be enough for them to follow Lucius into battle against deadly enemies? That remained to be seen.

  Amid the confusion, Torg noticed Ugga leaning over Bard, who was lying motionless on the street. He and Laylah raced over and knelt beside the handsome trapper. When Ugga saw Torg, his broad face brightened.

  “Master Hah-nah, ya must help me Bard. A nasty dart stuck him in the face, and he is dying, I swears.”

  Torg saw a tiny prick of blood on Bard’s cheek, just above his beard. A purple ring had expanded around it. He took Obhasa from Laylah.

  “This must be done quickly,” he said to the others. “Form a circle around us and be certain nothing disturbs me. I need to concentrate.”

  Torg lowered the rounded head of Obhasa and held it a finger-length above Bard’s cheek. A tendril of blue-green flame, thin as a human hair, sprang from the staff and leapt into the wound, vaporizing the poison that lingered near the surface. Then Torg touched the wound with his sensitive fingertips, sensing that some of the poison already was working its way into Bard’s brain. Torg willed more healing energy into the wound, until the trapper’s entire face became encased in magical fire. Suddenly Bard’s back arched and body convulsed. Without hesitation, Torg pressed his mouth against Bard’s, exhaling healing essence into his companion’s lungs. Bard’s body went limp, but the color slowly returned to his face.

  Ugga sobbed. “Have ya healed him, Master Hah-nah? Have ya saved me Bard with a kiss?”

  “The Mogols use terrible poisons that usually kill within moments, but Bard is stronger than most,” Torg responded. “He’ll sleep a little bit, but I believe he’ll be fine when he wakes. It was close. A while longer, and it might have been too late.”

  Bonny tugged on the sleeve of Torg’s new coat.

  “Lucius is hurt too,” the pirate woman said, motioning to the firstborn, who tottered nearby.

  “I’ll be all right,” Lucius said with a grimace, but his right shoulder drooped, and his arm was swollen throughout its length.

  “He saved me from a Porisāda,” Bonny said, her eyes full of adoration. “Can you heal him like you healed Bard?”

  Torg walked over to Lucius. “I can heal you. But it might be a while before you regain full strength in the arm.”

  “Do I have any choice? I won’t be much good at leading my new army the way I am now.”

  Torg smiled. “From the looks of your arm, a bone has been broken. And your shoulder needs to be forced back into place. That might hurt the worst.”

  Lucius nodded and gritted his teeth. When it was over, the firstborn’s arm and shoulder were healed, and his posture returned to normal. This relieved Bonny, but she finally noticed that Rakkhati was not among them, giving Torg a quizzical look.

  “Rakkhati did not survive the horror of the Mahanta pEpa,” Torg said to her.

  Bonny’s dark eyes filled with tears. “I will miss him so much. He rescued me from the streets and introduced me to the glory of Ekadeva, the One God. I was a terrible person before I repented.”

  The pirate woman then took Lucius’ left hand in hers. “I’m a good woman now,” she said to the firstborn. “With Rakkhati gone, I have nowhere to go. Can I come along with you? I promise not to cause trouble. And I can fight better than you might think.”

  Lucius smiled at her. “My lady, it would be an honor if you joined me. As for your past, it can’t be any worse than mine. But I can’t swear to you that I’ll ever believe in Ekadeva, Uppādetar or any other. In fact, right now I’m sick and tired of gods of any kind.”

  “The One God will change you, but I promise not to bother you about it. We’ll win our war first and talk about God later.”

  Lucius said, “Fair enough.”

  Torg agreed. Fair enough.

  WHEN BONNY came to him and offered her services in battle, Lucius was stunned again. Why she cared so much about him was baffling, but he wasn’t about to complain. In a short time he had grown quite fond of the red-haired pirate. Any time he thought of her, his emotional pain over losing Laylah became far more tolerable to bear.

  However, something entirely new distracted Lucius even more than his injuries or feelings for Bonny. A source he could not identify assaulted a portion of his mind, as if someone or something was trying to communicate with him in a language he could not comprehend.

  Bonny noticed his strange expression and patted his back. “Are you all right, sweety? Is the pain still bugging you? Maybe you should sit down and rest.”

  Lucius heard her voice, but it sounded far away.

  “Firstborn, what disturbs you?” said the wizard, who also noticed his distraction.

  “I’m not sure,” Lucius muttered. “There’s a weird sort of buzzing in my head. Could one of those darts have hit me? Wait . . . listen . . . can’t you hear it?”

  Laylah moved beside Torg. “The Daasa are making all kinds of noise,” the sorceress said to Lucius. “It sounds as if they’re tearing down half the city. Is that what you mean?”

  But Lucius could not understand her. The noise inside his head continued to intensify. Lucius’ vision began to blur, and his legs went out from under him again. This time Bonny caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. Now he was barely lucid, his mind spiraling out of control.

  In a series of frenetic memories, the firstborn found himself reliving his life—backward.

  He was in Avici, helping Laylah escape.

  He was humiliated by Mala in the training grounds east of Uccheda.

  He was reporting nervously to Invictus.

  He was riding in a wagon from Kilesa to Avici.

  He was being taught to read and write in the learning academies deep in the catacombs of Kilesa.

  He was rising, twisting, tearing out of a pod of clingy goo, taking his first gasps of air. Invictus was there with his scientists and magicians, watching his birth with fascination. Lucius could see the shredded remains of the body that had borne him. It was swollen, pink, and splattered.

  It once had been a Daasa.

  In sudden comprehension, Lucius realized with horror that Invictus was using the living bodies of the pink-skinned creatures to magically breed his army of newborns. No wonder the sorcerer had been resistant to Mala’s requests to tame Duccarita. Invictus needed the Mahanta pEpa to prevent the Daasa from shape-shifting
, not so that he could torture them, but so that he could use their bodies as birthing chambers.

  Lucius had been the first to be born this way.

  The Daasa, in effect, were his kin. They shared the same flesh.

  And the same oneness of mind.

  Lucius sat up and let out a shout, nearly giving Bonny a heart attack.

  “You bastaaaarrrrd!” he screamed with all his might.

  “What’s wrong with Master Loo-shus?” he heard Ugga saying. Somehow the crossbreed’s gentle voice brought Lucius back to full awareness. The others stood in front of him, their expressions a mixture of confusion and concern.

  “For Anna’s sake,” Rathburt whined. “Not even The Torgon ever scared me that bad. Are you trying to end all our lives?”

  But Lucius wasn’t listening. “Jord must have known. That’s why she brought us here. She must have known. But how is that possible? Did she see?”

  “See what?” Ugga and Rathburt said in perplexed unison.

  “What Invictus has done. Of all his cruel acts, this is the worst.”

  Though the others remained baffled, Torg seemed to intuit what Lucius was trying to say. The wizard turned and faced the slave pits, raising Obhasa aloft. A burst of blue flame, laced with tendrils of green, scorched the air like dragon fire. “Behold!” he shouted in a voice so loud even Lucius was startled. “The army of the Pathamaja (Firstborn) has won its first battle. And now it returns to its general!”

  Only what returned was not ten thousand monsters with clapping fangs and swollen bodies. Instead, the Daasa had reverted to their gentler form. One by one, they wandered up, their pink faces beaming like children without a care in the world.

  “Aaaaah . . .” Bonny said.

  Lucius felt the same kind of affection. And when he stepped forward, the first of the returning Daasa gathered around him. Some even lay on their backs, like submissive dogs wanting their tummies scratched.

  Faerie and Ghost Child

  11

  JORD WAS NOT helpless, but her powers to maim were limited. In an aerial battle pitting flame against flame, she was not Bhayatupa’s match. Her charred carcass had fallen from the sky, smiting the outside of one of the walls and tumbling downward before finally coming to rest on a patch of bare ground tucked within a jumble of boulders. There her remains sizzled like an old bonfire. Later that night, it rained hard for a brief time, extinguishing the cinders and leaving a scorched bundle of flesh, feathers, and hollow bones.

  After the rainstorm, the night air became clear and warm. Invisible to the naked eye, millions of mushroom spores floated in the breeze. A few hundred came to rest in the damp dirt near the corpse, forming a circle around it as if planted by an unseen gardener.

  On the same morning that the Daasa bowed to Lucius, the mushrooms began to sprout. At first their miniature caps and stalks were barely recognizable, appearing as tiny buttons on the surface of the soil. But they quickly grew to maturity, the stalks rising upward and the caps enlarging and then unfolding like a series of pale umbrellas, forming what the native people of Mahaggata would have called a fairy circle. According to legend, tiny winged sprites danced within these circles until exhaustion overtook their playfulness. The sprites then used the mushrooms as seats on which to rest.

  As the thin gills beneath the caps spread wide, the mushrooms released more spores. But instead of floating off in search of new habitats, the spores were drawn within the circle, where they began to spin faster and faster, eventually forming a miniature whirlwind that glowed like green phosphorus and crackled like lightning. As the sun rose round and hot above the horizon, the whirlwind collapsed upon itself, consuming Sakuna’s remains as it imploded.

  The giant eagle was gone, replaced by something else. A woman lay quivering on the ground. Not until noon did she manage to struggle to her knees.

  Her skin was pale, her eyes green, her hair long and white.

  Jord had returned to the Realm of Life.

  12

  IN THE BLACK, barren depths of the demon world, the baby had cried. Once again she had been abandoned in the darkness, hungry and afraid. Thousands of efrits gathered around her, her wails attracting them like moths lured to light. Demons wandered by and listened, but they knew better than to get too close. If the baby were harmed, the mother’s wrath would shower upon them. In the Realm of the Undead, Vedana reigned supreme.

  The baby looked like nothing that existed in the Realm of Life. The closest comparison would be a black worm constantly changing size and shape, though at one end there was something that resembled a face with a mouth and tongue.

  Within the wriggling worm, a consciousness had begun to emerge. Like that of any infant, it was buried deep in a foggy haze of hunger and desire. But it was there, gaining focus.

  Every moment it grew stronger. Every moment its awareness increased.

  At a crucial juncture of development, when Mother was away, the baby had reached out and spoken to Father as he wandered through the wilderness with his companions.

  I’m alive, she had told him.

  “Dhiite! Dhiitaake!” he had cried in response. (Daughter! Little daughter!)

  But the wizard had recognized her as more than just his offspring.

  Though born of a demon, the karma now thriving within his first and only child had been familiar. After all, it had once been known as . . .

  . . . Peta.

  March of the Asēkhas

  13

  SINCE THE TUGARS’ encounter with Mala at Dibbu-Loka several months before, Chieftain-Kusala, leader of the Asēkhas, had learned once and for all that it was better to obey Torg without asking too many questions, even if his lord’s mood had seemed fey. Kusala understood—as did the Tugars—that the Death-Knower was their only real hope against Invictus.

  Since that time, Kusala and the Asēkhas had been reunited with Torg at Kamupadana, the Whore City, and had escorted him and his companions into the wilderness, where they were pursued and finally chased down by Mala and his army. Rather than permitting Kusala to remain with Torg, Kusala’s king had issued yet another baffling command.

  “Kusala, deter Mala for as long as you can. But do not die. When you are overmatched . . . flee!”

  Kusala had been loathe to abandon his king. But from the sound of it, the enemy approached too quickly for further argument. Kusala had bowed and then raced up the path, followed by eighteen other Asēkha warriors. When they emerged from the thicket of vines, the leading edge of Mala’s army greeted them. More than one hundred black wolves surged toward them, each bearing a Porisāda warrior loosing arrows and launching poisoned darts from the wolves’ backs.

  Podhana, Churikā, and seven others released a spray of missiles from their slings. The small iron beads pierced flesh and bone, and soon more than twenty Porisādas, and at least that many wolves, were slain. Meanwhile, Kusala, Rati, Tāseti, and the seven remaining warriors charged forward, wielding uttaras in one hand and Tugarian daggers in the other. Though the wolves stood as tall as horses and weighed close to half a ton apiece, the Asēkhas were not intimidated.

  Kusala somersaulted forward, hacking off the front legs of the wolf on his right with his uttara and simultaneously stabbing another between the ribs with his dagger, twisting the blade with deadly force. As the beasts tumbled to the ground, their riders were thrown. Rati decapitated both before they could stand.

  Tāseti leapt high over the head of a wolf and landed on its back above the rear limbs, then drove a lightning-quick backstroke into the rider’s neck, killing him instantly. She severed the wolf’s spine with another stroke before pouncing onto a second wolf to record more kills.

  In a short time, more than one hundred wolves and riders had fallen. Now the Asēkhas stood in a spread formation, awaiting the next wave of assailants. Not one of the desert warriors had suffered an injury. However, when the main strength of the enemy thundered into view, the Asēkhas found themselves outnumbered fifty to one. To make matters worse, sev
eral cave trolls and a dozen druids joined the melee. The trolls wielded iron hammers that weighed as much as small trees. A straight-on blow from one of these weapons could injure even an Asēkha. The druids also were terrifically strong, and they spat acidic liquid from their mouths.

  Kusala and his warriors fought with increased intensity, hacking six of the druids to pieces and butchering two trolls. During this skirmish, Rati suffered a glancing blow to the back of the head from a Porisāda war club, which he most likely found more embarrassing than painful, knowing him.

  Next to emerge from the woods was Mala. Because of the heavy chain he bore, the monster could no longer run as fast as an ordinary snow giant, though he still seemed able to move quickly when the mood struck him. But when Mala appeared, he was in no particular hurry, seeming content to allow his minions to do the brunt of the fighting. A Kojin shadowed Mala, and the arrival of these two giants inspired the rest of the army. Not even the Asēkhas were capable of withstanding that much might for any significant length of time.

  Kusala shouted a Tugarian command.

  “Paharati ca Evati!” In the ancient tongue, this meant kill and flee. Kusala knew all too well that his warriors despised retreat, so he was at least giving them permission to wreak as much havoc as possible during their flight. Then Kusala let out a high-pitched shriek that only Tugars were capable of hearing. The sound carried for more than a league. For better or worse, Torg now knew that Kusala and the rest of the Asēkhas were withdrawing.

  “Take care, my lord,” Kusala whispered. “We hope to meet you again in better times, whether in this life or the next.”

  Then he blended into the forest and was gone.

  AT DAWN THE following morning—the same day that Torg and his companions, now separated from the Asēkhas, entered the valley of the Hornbeam—Kusala sat cross-legged on a gray sheet of shale that overhung a bubbling stream. The northern foothills of the Gap of Gamana were as quiet as a soft breath. A flock of birds flew playfully among the trees, unaware of Kusala’s presence. His eyes were closed, his face peaceful, his body motionless. A starling with a yellow beak flew down and perched on the thick muscles at the base of his neck, probably mistaking him for an odd-shaped boulder.