David Dalglish - Blood Of Gods

The same as every other day.

The sun dipped even lower, half of it now obscured by the mountains to the west. Laurel glanced up at the red lines streaking across the sky. A riotous roar shook the air, vibrating the branches of the tree they were in, knocking bits of ice to the ground. Still she held on, staring out at the blackening structure. She had to remind herself to breathe.

“Laurel, we must go.”

“Not yet,” she replied.

Darkness slowly descended over the land, the last rays of light making the windowless temple look like it was constructed out of living fire. Nothing was happening. Nothing at all. The lion roared again, and Laurel heard it echo all around her.

“Laurel, please. Roddalin will be here come morning. Our time is over.”

Laurel’s head snapped around, and she stared at the girl. “Not yet.”

“We must. The Judges will work their way toward the Bend. If we are not there before then. . ”

Laurel reached out and grabbed the girl by her wrappings with both hands. “Listen to me, Lyana. We must do this . There has to be something we haven’t seen. Something, anything. . ”

“Even if there is something, how would we know? The temple has no windows, Laurel!”

In her panic her voice rose, and Laurel placed a hand over her breast to calm her.

“I don’t know, Lyana. But I need to watch, I need to try . Please allow me that. None have stayed this late already, which means we are seeing things others haven’t.”

“Even if that is nothing?”

“Even so.”

Lyana huffed and sat back against the branch. She unwound the wrappings from her head, gradually revealing the pretty young girl beneath, the girl that looked so much like her grandmother, the dearly departed Soleh Mori. Laurel found herself staring. She’d grown fond of the young sprite. After all, they had so much in common. Neither had a family any longer. All they had was each other.

She was so focused on Lyana that at first she thought the sound that reached her ears was a trick of her imagination. But then she saw Lyana’s eyes widen, and she turned around, inching forward on the branch until she could see the whole of the temple clearly.

The top of the structure rose above their spot in the tree, and it was from there that the sound originated. It was the singing of a plethora of innocent voices. She saw outlines on the roof of the temple in the dying light, and many flashes of red.

It was the acolytes, marching in a circle as they sang Karak’s glory.

She squinted, confused, and then strangely, in the center of the temple above the massive door, a single shutter opened. There stood the mumbling priest, Joben Tustlewhite, breathing in the cold night air. Laurel could see everything inside the room-the bed, the cupboard, the candles, and a writing desk against the far wall. She looked on as the priest turned away from the window, went to the desk, and sat down.

Still, the acolytes sang on the roof.

Lyana was suddenly beside her, head poking out of the branches. “What’s going on?”

Laurel threw a hand over her mouth and shoved her to the side, almost losing her balance and falling out of the tree in the process. She held her breath as Joben stood up, came to the window, and peered out into the oncoming blackness. When he saw nothing, he returned to sit at his desk.

Putting a finger to her lips, Laurel pointed to the ground. Lyana got her message and silently descended the tree, making sure to help Laurel along the way. It was times like these that the last surviving member of House Lawrence ridiculed her own childhood love of girly things. Had she shadowed the boys for even half her youth, she would be much better prepared for the deeds before her.

Their feet touched ground, and they waited a few moments as the acolytes continued to sing. As one song ended, another started. When it became apparent that they wouldn’t be stopping soon, Laurel and Lyana crept back along the tree line and then began running, praying that the boys were too intent on their praise of that bastard Karak to look down and notice them.

None did. They passed by Karak’s Temple and continued to head east, then north into the forest bordering Veldaren, their footfalls crunching much too loudly in the thin layer of icy snow. The sky was completely dark now, the stars shimmering overhead. It was only when the temple was the size of a child’s block behind them that they chanced stopping. Lyana whirled in place, searching for signs of the Judges, and Laurel doubled over and coughed.

“What was that?” asked Lyana.

Laurel spit a wad of phlegm and wiped a stray strand off her chin, which in turn removed some of the caked-on mud that assisted her Specter disguise.

“That, Lyana, was our opportunity,” Laurel said with a tired smile. “Now let’s get going before the lions find us. We need to talk to Pulo and King Eldrich. We have a priest to kill.”

After a while, it was hard for Ahaesarus to tell the difference between the walking dead and their living counterparts-other than those missing limbs, that is. They all had the same blank expressions on their faces, moved with the same hunched, uneven gaits, and were covered with equal amounts of filth. If not for the tears shed by the living and the gaping wounds marking the flesh of the shuffling corpses, they might as well have been one and the same.

Over the last four days, Ahaesarus had taken a rough count of the reanimated dead that stood guard outside Mordeina’s walls. Their numbers included four thousand soldiers of Karak’s and sixteen thousand of Ashhur’s children. The remaining three hundred and twenty-nine were Ahaesarus’s brothers in servitude. They towered above the rest, majestic even in death, their skin pale and their clothes tattered. Of the original thousand that had been saved by Celestia and Ashhur when the winged demons descended on Algrahar, only one hundred and eighty-three remained living. Ahaesarus thought of the destruction he had witnessed during those fateful days, of the screams of his family and the ripping of steel through flesh, and it came to him that everything had come full circle. His second life had become just as anguished as his first. In his dark moments before sleep, he wondered if it all had been worth the trouble for him and his brothers.

Of course it was. We helped create Paradise. We helped forge peace.

Yet now that peace was gone. Now Paradise was in shambles, Karak setting fire to the countryside as he fled back to his kingdom across the river. The eastern sky glowed red day and night. All of it, ruined. And for what? What remained now that all safety and prosperity was gone? He looked down at his right leg. Beneath the thick fabric of his breeches, there would be a white scar there, encircling his calf entirely, a reminder of a wound that would have been mortal had Ashhur not been there to mend him-though the god had been too weak, too overly strained, to heal him completely. He flexed the leg, and felt the dull ache of pain in his bones. It was a sensation he knew would follow him to his death, whenever that happened to be, and loathing churned in his gut.

There is justice. There is retribution.

He heard a familiar pleading voice above the murmur of beseeching sobs and looked up. The living citizens of Paradise were weaving their way through the wall of undead, seeking out their loved ones as they had been for days now. He scanned their numbers, searching for the voice he’d heard, and found Judarius standing above the other undead, his dark hair matted and clumped in greasy tendrils, his face a mask of ruin. Azariah was standing before him, grasping his dead brother’s hand. The shortest Warden muttered words of a long-forgotten prayer, an entreaty to Rana, the god of their long-dead world. It was a prayer Ahaesarus knew well: “Treaty of the Fallen,” an appeal to the god of Algrahar to watch over the souls of the deceased. Ahaesarus had spoken those words many times in his former life, when he had been a priest in the Temple of Forever Light. He gulped down the bile that gathered in the back of his throat and began walking.