Blood Of Gods

CHAPTER 18

The walls are thick, but they are weakening, thought Velixar with a smile as he held the dragonglass mirror. It will end soon.

He and his god stood five hundred feet from the wall in a giant crescent-two hundred shield men to the front, protecting the three hundred archers who stood behind them, with seventy of the Ekreissar arrayed fifty feet behind the human archers, launching arrows with their stronger bows and superior aim. The rules of engagement were simple, the same as every other day: Pound the walls with the catapults, fire arrows over the ramparts, and keep Ashhur’s frightened children awake and afraid. The only new wrinkle was Lord Commander Gregorian’s surprise bombardment to the north, an attack meant to make Ashhur’s people panic. Panic meant casualties and yet another strike to their morale. The soldiers uninvolved in the attacks, more than twelve thousand of them, slept in the camp a quarter-mile away. Their bodies needed to be rested if they were going to continue the hunt for the food needed to feed an army, as well as the labor required to finish building the engines necessary to end the siege.

Karak glanced at the mirror as Velixar put it away.

“Have you learned anything new?” the god asked.

“I have,” he said. “I had a breakthrough tonight. I could actually see through his waking mind. Your brother, he is making weapons, swords, and axes along with replenishing their stores of arrows. They have built a bunker, a six-hundred-foot trench running along the left of the main gate, shielded by a stone partition that faces the wall.”

“What else?”

“They have only five hundred Wardens left, who act as nursemaids, as usual. Also, the only section of the wall where they have mounted permanent defenses is right here in front of us. The rest, mile after mile of it, has been ignored.” Velixar grimaced, picturing the Lord Commander ordering boulders thrown against-and over-the wall to the north. “It might have been useful to know that earlier. But perhaps it is not all bad. They will now thin out their resources to keep the entirety of the wall guarded. When we choose to make our final push, they will be hopelessly outnumbered and unable to resist.”

“What of my brother’s children? Are they capable warriors? Is there a secondary gate into the settlement that our scouts have not yet found?”

Velixar frowned. “I do not know. I am still finding it difficult to pierce Patrick’s mind; he resists me far more than I expected and I must rely on trickery and exhaustion until he breaks. I thought him a buffoon, but he seems cannier and wiser than he lets on. In addition, I must be careful. When I was finally let in tonight, Patrick suffered a violent outburst. He almost cut down a Warden because of the visions I sent him. Should any take a closer look at him, or even worse, his sword, whatever advantage we might have would be lost.”

“Then use caution,” Karak said. “It will be some time still before we are ready to commence the final assault. Any information we can gather before then would be most welcome.” The deity grinned, looking up at the blackened, snow-dappled sky. “Once the walls fall and we are inside, there will be no limits to what we can do.”

No limits, thought Velixar, and frustration overcame him.

“My Lord,” he said, “the sun will rise in three hours. Do you have any further need of me this evening?”

Karak gazed down at him, his glowing eyes quizzical. “Do you wish to rest?”

“Not exactly, my Lord.”

“Ah,” said the deity, nodding deliberately. “I assume my High Prophet must broaden his horizons?”

“Something of the sort.”

“Very well then. Off to your pavilion. May you find the order you seek in your studies.”

“I am sure I will, my Lord. I am sure I will.”

Velixar bowed low and pivoted on his heels, marching back toward the waiting camp. The phalanx behind him parted, creating a human passageway for him to walk through. His cloak snapped in the wind and pride welled inside him. Ever since the night Karak had visited him in his pavilion, when the deity admitted his failings, their relationship had flourished. No more did Karak affront him, no more did he cast doubt on his actions. When they spoke, it was with respect, and Karak always listened intently to any counsel Velixar had to offer. Velixar had found himself in the one place he always longed to be-on equal footing with his god.

Yet that was not completely true, and he knew it. He still had his limitations, and there were aspects of the demon’s knowledge inside him that he could not quite grasp. For nearly a hundred years he had studied the legends of the beasts, had nearly every event of Darakken, Velixar, and Sluggoth’s hundred-year war with the elves imprinted on his memory. Unfortunately, the creature had not come with instructions, and his efforts to control its power were sluggish at best. He needed to find out more, and his only other recourse was to go to the source and rip that knowledge from the demon itself-or at least from the consciousness Jacob Eveningstar had cast aside.

It took him a half hour to trudge through the muck and snow to his pavilion, his heart beating out of control. He stepped inside, not bothering to remove his boots or cloak. He ignored his desk and bedroll and strode directly toward the chest on which he had placed the head of Donnell Frost. The onset of freezing temperatures, and the fact that Velixar felt no need to heat his pavilion, had done wonders for preserving the head. Though the one good eye had shrunken like a tiny white raisin and the flesh had taken on a brownish hue-as much due to the wax coating as to rot-no more maggots squirmed beneath the skin.

He hung the dragonglass mirror on the support strut behind the chest and knelt down before the head. His heart continued to race. The snow coating his cloak had frozen, and when he bent his elbow, it cracked and flaked away. Velixar brought his hands up, placing them on Donnell Frost’s cold, waxen cheeks. Almost immediately the fires within him were stoked. This was the time. He knew it. Years of planning, of practice, had led to this moment. It took every ounce of restraint within him to keep calm.

“Life is a hindrance,” he said, slowing his breathing. “The secrets of the universe do not dwell in the realm of the living, but of the dead. While the body corrodes, the soul endures. Only in decay can there be true knowledge. Bring that knowledge to me.”

He closed his eyes, focusing on the words now streaming into his consciousness. When they came to him, he said them aloud, his voice sounding strange to his ears, as if he were speaking through a pool of molasses. Donnell’s head seemed to melt beneath his fingertips, growing hot as magma bubbling up from a crack in the earth. His body felt suddenly weightless, and a strange feeling overtook him. His excitement grew. It will work this time. After so many weeks of trying, he was near success. The demon Velixar had commanded an army of undead elves during the great Demon War; it should have been simple for the new Velixar to commune with a single dead soldier.

Everything around him fell away. When he opened his eyes, he floated through a watery darkness. The skeletons of entities long dead floated past him, things that should not have been there but were, men and women and children and gods and demons, all wandering aimlessly through Afram in search of a place of peace. Only in this emptiness can there be true knowledge. In the distance, a small glow appeared, near and far at once, the conscience of the demon he’d swallowed calling out to him, though he could not move toward it. He had expected this to happen. A smile stretched across his ethereal lips.

“I seek Donnell Frost!” he called out into the nothingness. “I seek my guide through the land of the dead!”

The remnants of beings long passed parted, and a lone ball of light drifted forward through the murk. It had no shape, no characteristics at all, and the sight of its frenzied non-form nearly drove Velixar mad. The human mind was never meant to take in such things. This is the true kingdom of the gods, and gods create form from nothingness. He concentrated, and the twisting ball of light took shape, becoming the likeness of the man Donnell had been.

The apparition stared at him with hollow eyes, features flickering in and out of existence. “Donnell Frost, faithful servant of Karak,” Velixar said, “I call you to serve once more.”

It seemed to want to speak, but it could form no words. Velixar sensed a wave of hate emanating from it, however, as if Donnell was not happy to be torn from the afterlife he had been given.

Use that to your advantage, he told himself. It is a spirit, an afterimage. It wishes for only one thing. .

“Departed soul, in death you have been granted the inherent wisdom of the void. I seek the resting place of the demons of old, the discarded creations of the ancient Kaurthulos. Show me, and I will release you to the peace you knew.”

Donnell’s image seemed to nod. It did not reach out for him; it did not move in any discernable way. Yet Velixar felt invisible fingers prying through the miasma of his ethereal form as Donnell’s spirit tugged him through the black.

He had expected to be taken on a long journey and be privy to wondrous sights, but time seemed to have no meaning here. Instead, it felt as if he went nowhere at all. One moment the glowing phantom shimmered before him; the next a giant, iridescent wall passed through him, and the ghost he had called to his aid disappeared. Instead of a black void, he was now surrounded by great swashes of swirling color, indigo and purple and crimson and ochre; the shades of creation, of un-creation, of eternity itself.

Velixar did not hesitate. “I call on the Beast of a Thousand Faces!” He screamed into the swirls, his human voice like the squeak of a mouse beneath a crashing ocean wave. When nothing happened, he called out again, and this time the colors before him shifted, pulling apart and then drawing together in millions of patterns. Through the chaos an image came forth, that of a face with eyes that glowed as red as Velixar’s, concealed within an unearthly façade that shifted from one moment to the next. They were a multitude of faces, both elven and things different, darker, harder to comprehend, the molds never once repeating. The mouth didn’t move when the thing spoke a single accusatory word that stretched throughout perpetuity, its tenor shaking the fabric of the universe.

You.

Velixar gazed in wonder at the creature, and for the first time since he had cast aside its consciousness in the throne room of the Tower Keep, he felt a moment of doubt. The beast was so immense, so powerful; it was no wonder a mortal as tiny and human as Jacob Eveningstar would find it difficult to master all the wisdom of this demon.

Leave this place. You are not wanted here.

“I will not!” shouted Velixar. “I have come to commune with you, Beast of a Thousand Faces, the creature I admired for all of my short yet eternal life. I will not leave until you tell me what I wish to know.”

We have a name. You will speak our name.

The beast’s image wavered like colored waters mixing together, and Velixar realized it was frightened of him. He might have only been a man, but he had defeated the creature already. It was now dead, just as its brother Sluggoth the Slithering Famine was. It was a spirit, but not powerless; it was a creature of the void, whereas Velixar was but a visitor, and it still had its knowledge. A show of strength was necessary.

“You have no name,” he told the demon. “I cast you out. I shredded the cords binding you together. You are legion no longer. You. Are. Powerless.” He lifted an invisible, ethereal hand, ancient words of magic leaking from his visage and making the demon shrink from him. The thing shrieked, the sound like comets colliding. It was the most beautiful thing Velixar had ever heard.

Stop. We relent.

Velixar smiled, and he wondered if his true body, still kneeling with hands pressed against Donnell Frost’s cheeks, was smiling as well.

“I do not come to you out of malice,” he said. “I only come seeking knowledge.”

Then ask.

“Tell me the secrets of the dead. Once you controlled legions of them, yet I have failed in all my attempts. What spell was used? How did you control them?”

The demon seemed to mull this over, its shifting face swirling along with the myriad colors. You ask the wrong question of us. The dead are useless shells, merely vessels for the power that fills us. It is that power you must seek.

Velixar was confused. “Why must I seek that power? I consumed all that you were, consumed your very soul. I should have your power.”

You are powerful, yet a fool. The Beast of a Thousand Faces laughed. You consumed memories and echoes, nothing more. And souls themselves are not power, but merely vessels for power, which stems from the gods. We have always known this; we are surprised you do not.

“But what of a world where the gods do not exist?” he asked the beast. “Where does power stem from then?”

The gods exist everywhere, human. In every rock, in every ocean, in the very air of any habitable world. Everywhere there is life, there are the gods, for all life was created by them. Their power lingers, shadows imbued into the fabric of everything, lurking in wait for one who knows how to wield it. Draw from it if you desire, or draw from the deities themselves; it is no difference.

Velixar felt his frustration growing. “I have channeled the essence of my god, demanded power of him, and felt it flow through me. . yet it is not enough. There must be another way.”

You know nothing, said the demon, just as Karak had told him so many times before. The well you draw from is as infinite as the universe itself, yet you mewl it is not enough. The gods’ power is greater than even the gods themselves. We channeled our creator, the grand Kaurthulos, and became so potent, we almost slew the goddess. You can do the same, Velixar. We can show you how.

It seemed a promise too good to be true, and he instinctively distrusted it.

“Wielding such power would break me,” he said. “My mortal form would not endure.”

The beast laughed, and the endless space seemed to ripple along with it.

The soul is limitless. With our help, you will become as mighty as the gods themselves.

Velixar found his consciousness assaulted by tiny pinpricks of light that gradually built up within his ethereal form, expanding it, filling him with knowledge. The pain was exquisite, and when he screamed, his voice seemed to rip through the heavens, pulverizing stars, exploding galaxies, causing time to fold in on itself.

“Why!” he screamed amid it. “Why would you help me?”

Laughter was his only answer, and then he opened his eyes. He was back in his pavilion, the head of Donnell Frost a heap of liquefied flesh and bone stuck to his fingers. He fell back, his rump splashing in the puddle of melted snow behind him. Rising to his feet, heart pounding, mind racing, he pulled the pendant from beneath his tunic and watched the bas-relief of the lion atop the mountain pulse and throb with a dark purple glow.

The soul is limitless. Velixar gritted his teeth and squeezed the pendant, feeling its warmth thump in his hand like a heartbeat.

“As mighty as the gods themselves,” he whispered.