James West - The God King

The room beyond proved to be a hovel so dilapidated as to be unappealing to looters. Sometime past, a fire had gutted the small building, and the previous owner, perhaps Hya herself, had boarded up the windows. Rot had created wide gaps in the boards, allowing the light of the Chalice’s present burning to cast a lurid radiance over the dusty floors and walls of the tumbledown building.

Kian moved to a window and peered out. Men and women rushed by like animals fleeing crazed butchers at their heels. He had hoped the chaos had not spread so far. For all he knew, the Chalice and Ammathor both were beset by the desperate madness of the night.

“Hya,” he asked, “which way do we go?”

“Left out of the front door and down Wine Street,” she said, shaking her head in disgust at the sight of so much wanton carnage.

“ Against the flow,” Kian said, shaking his head. “We need horses, but without those …” He glanced around to Hazad.

Hazad rolled his eyes. “I will lead. The rest of you just make sure no one pokes my backside.”

All moved to the door facing Wine street and gathered behind the big man, Kian and Azuri placing Hya and Ellonlef between them and Hazad. Hazad looked back, received Kian’s nod and, with a bearish roar, kicked the boarded door, sending it and its splintered frame soaring into the street. In the general panic, few runners so much as glanced their way.

Then they were out, running into a maelstrom of wind and snow, screams, blood, fear, and raging fire. Hazad was a ram before them, battering aside anyone who came too close. The rest followed in a narrow cone bristling with sharp blades. Hazad halted them as a handful of howling riders charged past on lathered horses, their swords and cudgels falling at will. Their victims, old and young, rolled through the deepening snow, leaving trails of blood.

A battle cry turned the murderers, and a dozen mounted House Guard charged them. Outnumbered, they wheeled their mounts and galloped away. The guardsmen surged after, so intent on their prey that they did not see their true targets standing not twenty paces distant.

Hazad set off again, going this way or that under Hya’s guidance. Every turn revealed sprawled, bloody corpses and innumerable wounded littering streets and alleys. A screeching trull was assaulted by a pair of crazed brutes, while not three paces away one of her companions indifferently rifled through the pockets of a dead man. Farther off, a gathering of urchins was busy trying to break into a closed shop, even as another group was using torches to set afire whatever they could, apparently just to watch it burn. Mostly, however, people who could ran. Everywhere was madness, chaos, fury and terror.

“These people deserve Varis,” Kian growled, even as he broke from the group to strike off the arm of a bloated wretch of a man dragging a squalling naked girl of no more than ten years into an alley.

His pain muted by shock and wine, the man reeled, his stump pouring scarlet. His mouth yawned wide as if to protest, but Kian gave him neither a hearing nor mercy, and rammed his steel into the man’s filthy guts. As the brute sank to his knees, his one hand failing to hold back the roping spill of his innards, Kian searched for the girl. She was already gone, fled into the night. He gave a brief and silent prayer for her safety. Of the man who had been intent on raping her, he left him moaning in the snow. For him, Kian prayed that the bastard would suffer through the whole night before death stole him away.

Kian rejoined his companions, fury boiling in his chest. “Go!” he ordered, torn anew by the idea that he might well soon give his blood for people who deserved a life of chains and servitude. And if not for the little girl who had escaped, he might have changed his mind on the instant, and departed Ammathor and made for Izutar. But the girl, while he could not foresee her future, she at least deserved a chance at a better life, deserved to make the choices that would ruin her or bring her out of the sewers of the Chalice. Like her, and as he and Azuri and Hazad had been as children, there were countless others who were merely trying to survive in a merciless world. Varis would offer no choices, save to worship him or to perish.

The snow was falling faster and now lay ankle-deep. Above the dilapidated rooftops, wind-driven blazes tinted low, scudding clouds a baleful orange. Roiling smoke stung eyes and tightened throats. As they crossed one street, Kian saw the first soldiers under Prince Sharaal ride forth in a precise rank and file formation, their scarlet uniforms and flapping Crimson Scorpion banners making it seem as if they were on parade. Some bore lances, others swords, and still others rode with bows at the ready. They paid no heed to the swirling insanity, only rode north, pushing their adversaries under Varis’s command hard toward their ultimate objective-their master’s usurped throne. Before they reached their destination, Kian knew, they would fully meet Varis’s men and do battle. And such a battle, that of brothers-in-arms fighting each other under the command of a warring father and son, would leave a bitter regret in their ranks that would last a generation, no matter who triumphed.

Kian pushed that aside. His intent was to reach and destroy Varis, for the greater good of all men. Despite himself, he nearly laughed at that. He was a survivor, a man of battle and steel, a man of honor and duty even, but he was no hero as told of in a stories. He went because he must … for he was the only man on the face of the world who could.

After running from shadow to shadow for what felt like hours, Hya ordered them into the lightless throat of an alley that ran at a right angle to the storm’s ferocity, giving them a measure of relief from the stinging white gale. The others peered at her with concern, as she collapsed against a wall.

“Are you well?” Hazad asked. “Should I carry you?”

“I am well enough,” Hya gasped. “Just old and tired. As to toting me about like a sack of potatoes, there is no need. We are nearly there.”

“Down!” Ellonlef cried.

Kian threw himself flat just as a hail of arrows clattered against the wall where Hya had been standing a moment before. If not for the screen of swirling snow, the archers would have pinned them all. Gleefully calling out, as if murder was but a pleasurable game, the attackers galloped off into the night.

“By Memokk’s stones!” Hazad hissed, as he jerked his head out of a deep snowdrift. Frozen stiff, his beard braids poked out at all angles, like crusty white adders.

Kian scrambled to his feet with an enraged grunt, squinted into the storm as more riders charged past the mouth of the alley. The riders loosed flaming arrows at windowed shops along the street. Where flame kissed wood, infernos followed, eating quickly and hungrily. Soon, the whole of the Chalice would become a pyre.

“If we do not reach these friends of your soon,” Azuri said flatly, “they will be roasted alive before we can use their services .”

With a look of weary sadness in her eyes at the spreading pandemonium, Hya nodded. “Cross the street before us. Keep on as straight as possible, until I say otherwise.”

They continued, now matching their pace to the old woman’s. After many more twists and turns through the warren of streets and alleys, the worst of the fires and bloodletting fell behind, and they came to the northern edge of the district. Around them, massive mud-brick storehouses sprouted like fortresses. It was the only place where the lives of people from Ammathor and the Chalice overlapped. Here, bands of criminals propped themselves up as merchants, and kept their strongholds amid the common wares of the realm.