John Fultz - Seven Kings

She slapped him. One of her jeweled rings left a tiny cut across his cheek. It gleamed scarlet, a mark of shame. He said nothing, protests dying in his mouth. She stared at him, and again her eyes betrayed her with tears.

“I must have an heir,” he said. His voice was ragged with arguing, weary as that of an old man, though he looked not a day older than when they had married. Golden hair fell about his shoulders as her magic winds died away, and the gems in his crown sparkled. “A King must have an heir, Sharadza.”

“She is a whore,” Sharadza whispered. The child in Cymetha’s belly could not be D’zan’s, would never be his. She wanted to tell him now, to shatter his illusion and strip away his arrogance. But she could not. She could not tell him plainly that Cymetha had lain with some dozen other men. That one of them had substituted his own potency for D’zan’s powerless seed. Of course Cymetha knew this. Of course she had ensured her pregnancy. Such was her path to Queenhood. The child would be an imposter, raised to be the next King of Yaskatha, with only its mother to know it was a fraud. A bastard, like Sharadza’s own brother Fangodrel.

Bitter, unhappy, wicked Fangodrel. The thought of him stung her like the point of a dagger. Suddenly a flame lit inside her skull. A fear blossomed in her stomach where D’zan’s seed could not. She turned and walked away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. She pretended not to hear.

She spent that night in the library, reading by the light of a dozen fat candles. She studied the ancient accounts of sorcerers rebirthing themselves, forming new bodies from vapor, ice, earth, or shadow. The spirit was eternal… Sorcerers could not die because they had embraced this truth. In fact, many sages claimed that a sorcerer could not truly rise to power until he had shed his earthly body as a moth sheds the cocoon. The new body, the one built of sorcery and raw elements, that was the sorcerer’s true self. As such, it could never be destroyed, only created and re-created. She knew this firsthand, as Elhathym had re-formed himself upon the stolen throne of Yaskatha after falling to D’zan on the field of battle. Yet she had helped Iardu capture Elhathym’s life force. A dark vapor trapped inside a crystal prison.

Seven short years ago she had watched in a reflecting pool the scene of slaughter that destroyed Shar Dni. She saw one brother slay another to gain revenge for the death of a third. Vireon cut the head from Fangodrel’s withered body. Poor Tadarus, her oldest brother, was avenged. She watched as Vireon the Slayer wept over the corpse, realizing himself now as much a kinslayer as Fangodrel. She had seen, and yet she had not realized.

Fangodrel had inherited the sorcery of his true bloodline. The son of Gammir the First, the Prince known as Gammir the Second, was Fangodrel’s true father. Thirty years ago Shaira had been raped by the Khyrein Prince, and Vod had repaid the offense with death for both the Emperor and his son. Yet a seed of darkness had been planted in Shaira that grew into Fangodrel. A viper curling in the bosom of the north until one day it struck, delivering its poison to the heart of her family. Tadarus had been the first to die.

Could Fangodrel truly be dead? Or could this new Khyrein Emperor be her depraved brother reborn via sorcery? If Vireon had freed him from his earthly body, Fangodrel might have formed a new one. He might have taken on the name of his true father and grandfather, neither of whom he had ever known.

He might be this new Gammir. The Undying One.

She brooded on the possibility for weeks, cloistering herself in the library or her bedchamber. D’zan no longer joined her there. He took a separate chamber for himself and his other Queen, the one who would bear his child. Perhaps he hoped Sharadza would eventually forgive him and accept her place as Second Wife. She cared nothing about losing the title of Queen, although it would surely happen. It was the loss of D’zan that pierced her heart. But she put that aside during the researching of her new theory.

On the night of the bastard child’s birth, she went into the gardens alone. She breathed deeply of the citrus air tinged with a salty breeze. The labor cries of Cymetha rang from an upper window where torches guttered and midwives worked to preserve the bloodline of Yaskatha.

It’s all a lie, she realized. All of this… the riches… the power… the world that Men build to hide themselves from the touch of Reality.

Honor… loyalty… love.

All lies.

She needed Truth. It was the only antidote for the poisoning of her soul. She wiped her eyes. The sounds of a squawling newborn drifted through the tower window.

She bent her head and grew smaller, sprouted black and gray feathers from her flesh, flexed her sharp talons, and flapped her owlish wings. The palace and its gardens grew small beneath her. She flew into the dim east, toward the festering marshlands where loneliness was but one of many dangers.

A gardener found her sitting there among the roots. It was a young Khyrein slave girl carrying a pitcher of water to feed the blossoms. The slave gasped, clutching the container to the breast of her white tunic. Her dark eyes were full of fear below her shaved pate. She had obviously never seen a stranger in this place. Certainly not a green-eyed maiden with northern skin dressed in robes of Yaskathan purple.

Sharadza calmed her with a smile. With a wave of her hand she left the girl sleeping on a bed of moss. Taking now the girl’s form, she wandered toward the wide marble steps where the scarlet tigers lay purring between rigid sentries. Carrying the water vessel, she walked timidly up the steps, and the guards did not spare her a glance. The tigers, too, paid her no attention. No beast would, unless she willed it.

Inside the vaulted hall of the palace she walked on thick carpets between rows of onyx pillars. Mosaics and tapestries adorned the walls, inlaid with blood-red rubies, sky-blue sapphires, and starlight diamonds. The patterns were mostly arcane, abstract. Khyrei’s artisans did not celebrate their great thinkers, warriors, and sages inside the palace. Instead they carved and sculpted only images of the Emperors and Empresses that had reigned over the jungle kingdom throughout the centuries. She entered a colonnade where the statues of past tyrants and their imperious wives stared down at her with eyes of obsidian. She supposed Gammir the First and Ianthe the Claw must stand among them, but she did not scan the graven pedestals for their names.

Arched corridors led in every direction from the central chamber, and the skylights glittered with brilliant stars. Night lay heavy over Khyrei now, and the palace interior was thick with dancing shadows. She felt unseen eyes at her back, but turned to see nothing. She picked a corridor at random and fled down it as a tiny black rat. The water pitcher sat unnoticed on the flagstones behind her.

Rodent senses came alive; she smelled blood and sweat and roasting meat. Hunger swelled in her tiny belly, but she denied it. Skittering through frescoed galleries and winding passages of polished jet, she found a black stair spiraling up. From its position she guessed this was the central tower, the thorn-crowned immensity that dominated the entire structure. She took the stairs one at a time, staying close to the wall. Now she smelled what she was looking for… an odor of the foulest sorcery. It called her upward, toward its secret source.

As a rat she passed demon-faced guards standing before doors of archaic iron. A quintet of slaves came rushing down the stairs carrying the body of a sixth one, a pale youth with a red gouge in his throat, like a dripping blossom that had opened in the flesh. It reeked of the sorcery she scented. Yet the stronger odor came from above…