James West - The God King

“People are … they are dying everywhere. It’s a plague.”

Ellonlef looked up from the washbasin, water dripping off her cheeks.

“You must come, Sister.”

Ellonlef dried her face and followed Alia out of the room. The servant woman hurried down corridor after corridor, all blazing with the light of rush torches and firemoss wall lamps. Everywhere she looked, death and stunned grief met her eyes. Here and there, guards stood over their brothers in arms, men who had perished from what looked like a year-long wasting sickness. The faces of the dead were gray as bathwater, with glazed eyes floating in hollow sockets; mouths gaped, as if they had been crying out even as they perished.

Ellonlef sank to her knees at a child’s side. The girl looked the same as the rest. The mother, another servant woman, was shrieking and clawing at her cheeks in despair. Suddenly, as if she had been slapped, the mother’s cries cut off. Ellonlef made to touch her arm, but Alia caught her wrist and dragged her back.

“Do not touch her!” Alia screamed.

Before Ellonlef could protest, the mother’s face began to gray, and her cheeks thinned and sunk. Alia released Ellonlef and backed away, a hand held over her mouth. Ellonlef’s attention remained on the dying woman, who had fallen to her knees and pitched over on her side to lay gasping like a landed fish. Guards approached from the other end of the corridor, but when they saw the woman, they halted.

Disregarding her own safety, Ellonlef moved to the dying woman’s side. Alia begged her to stay away, and would come no closer herself. Ellonlef took the woman’s head in her lap and smoothed back her black hair. It had been dark and thick moments before, but now was brittle as straw, and broke off at her touch. The woman’s skin was cold as the grave, dry as desert sand. Searching eyes found Ellonlef. She tried to speak but no words came, and her lips pulled back from her teeth in a withering rictus.

Ellonlef did not know how long she held the woman before Lord Marshal Otaker joined her side.

“Sister, please, come away. This sickness seems to spread by … touching a victim, or by the very air we breathe.”

“I have never seen the like,” Ellonlef said, voice hollow. “This cannot be a catching sickness. Nothing save poison kills so swiftly. But even poison cannot drain away one’s vitality in this way.”

Otaker gently pulled Ellonlef to her feet and directed her away. The servant woman, along with all the others who had perished, was left where she had fallen. Those still alive stared with sad surety etched on their features as Ellonlef and Otaker departed. To them, there could be no question that both would soon fall.

They were rounding the corner to Otaker’s chambers before Ellonlef regained her composure. “There is no need to pull me along.”

Otaker released her arm and looked away, a sheen of unshed tears in his gaze. Her insides twisted with sudden insight. “Lady Danara … your children?” She let the unvoiced question hang before them.

The lord marshal bowed his neck, his chin trembling. The strong, proud features she had always known was lost behind a face of abject misery.

“Come,” Ellonlef said, but in her heart the brief flare of hope she had that Danara and her children remained alive had already perished.

Together they hastened to Otaker’s chambers, only to be stopped short by a handful of grieving servants waiting outside the door. Otaker eased through them. When they saw who it was, the women bowed their heads, and the men touched their fists to heart in homage. Ellonlef followed, hard on his heels.

She halted as soon as she caught sight of Lady Danara lying on the bed, a wasted gray husk like all the others. Her heart ached at the mewling sounds she heard emanating from Otaker’s throat. He stumbled to his wife’s side, took her hand, and collapsed to his knees. He looked at her a long time, then raised his face to the ceiling and howled in anguish. The echoes of that despairing cry swept through the keep, and wherever it was heard the listeners felt their blood run cold.

Desolation sank into Ellonlef, playing havoc with her soul. It overwhelmed her. She turned and fled, shamed by her weakness, but unable to bear the pain of so many, not after all she had seen since the Three had collided and burned in the heavens. But no matter where she went, sorrow followed her. Men, women, and children, with no regard for rank or birth, lay like cordwood at every turn. Eventually she fled the keep, only to find worse out of doors.

On she ran, until coming to the market square, where she finally halted. There, instead of grief, the power of fear had taken hold, backlit by leaping, roaring flames. Those not yet stricken ran to and fro with blazing torches raised, eyes wild. Standing atop a pile of crumbled mud bricks, Magus Uzzret urged on the frenzy.

“Burn the dead!” he bellowed, his eyes bulging with a desperation bordering on insanity. “Burn them all!”

Soldiers and townsfolk alike rushed to do his bidding, so lost in terror that they did not conceive that touching the dead might poison their own lives. Bodies were dragged from the shadows and haphazardly thrown onto roaring bonfires. Thick smoke poured from the tangled corpses, which seemed to catch and burn as easily if they had been dipped in oil.

Uzzret raised his arms before the flames, the wafting heat rustling his blue robes. He shouted incoherently, as if urging the inferno higher.

“Tell them to stop!” Ellonlef urged. “This is madness!”

The magus cut off his incoherent ranting to glare down at her. Spittle flecked his quivering lips. “Would you defy the judgment of the gods?”

Ellonlef was taken aback by the rapid change of heart of a man who had so recently proclaimed that there were no gods. He had gone from an unbeliever to a zealot in a matter of hours.

As if reading her thoughts, Uzzret added with disturbing calm, “To my shame, I have disavowed the gods, as has my brotherhood. I see now my folly, and the folly of the world. This sea of death is a sign as surely as is the shaking of the world and the destruction of the Three, and even the fires that rage in the west.

“Too long has the world cavorted at the perverse altars of debauchery and bloodlust, with the Kingdom of Aradan serving as the High Priest. Too long have we been turned from the faces of the true gods, chasing after the desires of our hearts.” The longer he spoke, the faster and higher came his voice.

“We who should have known better! You and I, our orders, have cringed in cowardice, trading our morality for peace, rather than speaking against sacrilege and debauchery. Now, the gods of old have bestirred themselves, have awoken from their long slumber, weighed our worth, and found the world of men wanting. Judgment has come! The fires of their enemies’ burning brighten the heavens by night, and terrible rumblings lay waste to the lands by day.” He leered down at her. “This is only the beginning of the end! We must appease our true creators before it is too late.”

“Pa’amadin, the God of gods, Creator of All, desires our devotion-not toasted corpses ,” Ellonlef offered in a soothing voice, hoping to instill a sense of calm into Uzzret.

His dark eyes, mirroring the flames all around, took on a hard light without a whit of compassion. He jabbed an accusatory finger at her. “Pa’amadin is but another false god, a device created by corrupt and shameless hearts. The true gods , be they nameless or their names merely forgotten, demand fire and blood, as in the days of old! You deny that which is undeniable. Even as the waves of catastrophe break around us all, you stand apart from truth. If you will not humble yourself, even as the realm burns in the fires of our own making, then you must burn in those fires … as will all heretics .”