Eidolon (19 page)

Ildiko’s lungs threatened to burst with the need to scream, but she held silent, watching as light, which had become darkness, swallowed her husband whole. It spasmed and stretched before collapsing in on itself, only to extend once more as if struggling to break free of a shackle.

“That is how
galla
look.”  Megiddo’s words dropped like boulders into the sea of quiet.

Ildiko whined softly before casting the
Elsod
a murderous look. If the old crone had turned Brishen into a demon, she’d carve her into pieces and feed her to him.

The shroud of black light suddenly heaved upward with an audible snap. Everyone leapt back, and Anhuset shoved Ildiko behind her. Ildiko would have none of it and tried to dart to the side, only to be efficiently blocked by her guard. “Let me pass, Anhuset!”

“No.”

Brishen’s body lay in the snow, unmoving, bloody. His face was no longer the dolphin-gray with its undertones of pink and blue, but ashy-white with jagged black lines that stretched from his neck into his scalp. Ildiko was almost knocked flat on her back when she reached for him only to run straight into Anhuset’s outstretched arm.

The dark light, now a separate entity, continued its heartbeat pulse. It began to lighten, reversing in color to what it was before—black to indigo, to cobalt and finally azure. Its edges solidified, taking on hard angles and lines, a macabre butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

The luminescence dulled and lost its incorporeal quality, thickening from cloudy light to a true, solid form—one dressed in lamellar armor with long black hair and a single eye that glowed a preternatural blue, as if someone had dropped a torch into a vat of Dragon Fire and let it ignite.

“Wraith King.”  Gaeres’s voice held both wonder and horror.

The
Elsod
edged forward and froze when the king’s incandescent gaze landed on her. “What do you see, Your Majesty?”

“The soul of the Kai,” he said in a hollow voice devoid of any warmth, any life. “Age beyond age.”

Ildiko recoiled as bile threatened to surge from her stomach to her throat. Whatever this eidolon was, it wasn’t the Brishen she knew.

The eidolon crouched next to the still body at his feet and reached out a hand.

“Stop!” Ildiko cried. She battled Anhuset’s confining grip again and lost.

The eidolon paused. Ildiko shuddered as its cold gaze caressed her. “Peace, sweet wife. I mean no harm.”

She was torn between rejoicing and vomiting at the sound of such an endearment spilling from his lips. He reached out once more and flattened his hand on the still body, covering the bloody wound. More of the blue light flashed and pulsed. When he withdrew his hand, the wound was gone, the only marker of its presence, blood stains darkening the brigandine and surrounding snow. His skin was still ashy, but the ugly black lines were gone. Ildiko gasped when the body emitted a slow exhalation and began to breathe.

Spirit Brishen stood to face Serovek. The margrave stiffened for a moment, as if in preparation for an attack. When none came, he held out the sword to Brishen. “Your Majesty, your sword.”

Brishen grasped the weapon and slid it into the sheath at his side. “Now you know,” he said to the other four. “You can leave, and there will be none to stop you. None to judge you.”

No one moved until Serovek strode past Brishen and lifted the sword he had brought with him to the tor. Like Brishen’s and the others, its blade glowed blue, tiny bolts of lightning shooting up its length to spark off the tip. Brishen reached to take it, but Serovek held it out of his reach, shaking his head.

He approached Anhuset who leveled a scowl on him. “Vengeance,” he said with a half smile and offered her his sword. “You know you want to, sha-Anhuset.”

“You know no such thing,” she spat and stepped back.

He lost the smile but didn’t retract the offer. “I would be honored if you did.”

She glanced at Brishen who only watched her with a radiant blue eye. “Very well,” she said, and Ildiko sobbed quietly at the furious torment in her voice. The Kai woman grasped the sword grip with a gauntleted hand and centered the tip on Serovek’s torso. Her lips curled back, revealing the sharp points of her teeth, and she glared at him with eyes hot enough to immolate him on the spot. “You would punish me for the kindness of your healing,” she said. “What do you want from me, human?”

Serovek pinched the blade’s tip between thumb and fingers, positioning it against an unprotected space where lacing created a gap between the armor. “Everything, sha-Anhuset,” he replied with a faint smile and stared into her eyes. He pressed lightly until the blade tip indented his hauberk. “Here,” he said. “The weakest spot.”

She huffed. “I doubt it, though I don’t think cutting off your head or your prick will help you become a Wraith King.”

Were this a less awful scenario, Ildiko might have laughed.

His mischievous grin promised a retort to put Anhuset’s back up, and he delivered. “When I return, you’ll share my bed, warrior woman, and be very grateful you didn’t slice off my prick.”

Anhuset snarled and rammed the sword through armor, through flesh and muscle and the gods only knew what internal organs. Serovek bellowed and instinctively swatted at his attacker with a gauntleted fist. She dodged the blow and jerked the sword free. It fell to the ground, blazing bright, as she embraced Serovek.

His knees buckled, and he sagged in her hold. Had Anhuset been a human woman, he would have taken them both to the ground with his size. As it was, she staggered under his weight, half crouched, leg muscles straining.

Blood spilled out of his mouth to paint his chin. He gripped Anhuset’s arms. “Help me stand,” he said on a wet, wheezing breath.

She heaved him into a straighter stance, blood seeping into her clothes where she pressed against him. Megiddo stepped forward to help, and she snapped her teeth at him. “Back away.”

He held up his hands in surrender and retreated. She and Serovek half staggered, half stumbled together to where Brishen’s flesh and blood body lay breathing but unknowing. Serovek’s eyes rolled back in his head before he fell into Anhuset.

She grunted but held her stance and lowered his limp body to the ground next to Brishen. Her clawed hand fluttered over his face, not quite touching. “I will never forgive you for this,” she whispered before standing. The
Elsod
didn’t have to issue a warning this time. Anhuset retrieved the forgotten sword, set it next to its owner and waited.

Like Brishen before him, Serovek’s body bled out its lifeblood into the tor’s sorcerous ground. The black lines spiderwebbed across his face and neck followed by the devouring light that rent his soul from his body.

When it was done, Serovek’s eidolon picked up his sword and bowed low to Anhuset, his eyes changed from cold-water blue to that unearthly cerulean. Brishen laid his hand on Serovek’s corporeal body and healed the fatal wound.

The two transformed kings turned to the three men awaiting their equally gruesome fate. Ildiko turned away, unwilling to watch such wretched, purposeful violence. The agonized gasps and smothered screams were more than enough to haunt her nightmares for years to come, and she covered her mouth with her hand to keep from adding her own horrified shrieks.

By the time the ritual was finished and all the kings transformed, Ildiko was beyond numb. She didn’t even startle when each eidolon set the tip of his sword into the bowls containing blood and hair from both man and horse. The contents smoked, emitting the foul odor of burnt hair fibers. Ghostly tendrils swirled and gathered, mated to the light pulsing from the swords. They gathered together, much as the light had done over each king’s body, becoming solid, bigger, and darker until five horses—
vuhana
—stood together, snorting and pawing the ground. Spirit replicas of their flesh and blood counterparts, they looked upon their masters with eyes that burned white, without pupil or iris.

“Is it over?” she asked.

“Not yet, but we can’t remain here for that,” the
Elsod
said. She addressed the kings then. “Like you, the
vuhana
will not tire or thirst, hunger or bleed. Unlike you, they are nothing more than transport, a soulless replica of your horses. When you no longer need them, they will simply fade.”

“What will happen to our bodies?”  Andras’s eidolon motioned to where five bodies lay still on the ground, alive and yet not. Without spirit, without awareness or emotion. Nothing more than dolls with breath and heartbeat. Ildiko hugged herself and clenched her jaw against the urge to weep.

“They stay here,” Brishen said. “The magic of the tor and the magic I wield will protect them until we return and are united.”

One of Gaeres’s men burst out in protest, an emphatic argument only his fellow Quereci understood, complete with scowls and sharp hand-waving.

Gaeres translated. “He says they refuse to leave our bodies to the crows and wolves.”

“Then they will die.”  The Elsod pointed to Brishen. “The Khaskem will call forth the dead. Angry, vengeful dead. They’ll be as quick to turn on your men as the
galla
. All of us not touched by a king’s sword have to leave this place. Now.”

“She’s right,” Brishen said. “We’ve delayed long enough. Twilight rises. The time of revenants. The time of the dead.”

To Ildiko, he seemed far away, as if what made her love him remained behind in the sleeping body lying nearby. That was until he eliminated the space between them. He looked to Anhuset first. “Guard with your life that which is most precious to me.”

“I will,” she promised. “Don’t dawdle. Bast-Haradis needs you.”

Ildiko reached out with bloodstained hands to touch him. He stood so close, limned in ghostly light. He stepped away. “No, Ildiko. We’re pariah to the living now.”  He closed his eye for a moment. When he looked at her once more, the bright gaze had dimmed. “I leave my heart and my kingdom in your capable hands, wife.”

She inhaled a shuddering breath and cleared her throat. “I will hold and treasure both until you return, husband.”  She bowed.

“Pretty hag,” he whispered for her ears alone. “I wish I could touch you, one last time.”

His words jolted through her as if he’d touched her with one of his lightning-tinged hands. “Don’t say that,” she begged him. “Not a last time, just one more time. And many times after that when you come back.”

Anhuset tugged on her arm. “We can’t wait any longer, Your Majesty. We have to leave.”

They joined the reluctant Quereci who held the horses and trekked down the tor’s pitch, moving as quickly as they could without tumbling to the bottom. When they reached the base, Anhuset barked out orders in Common tongue. “Don’t linger. We don’t want to be even this close when they summon the dead. I’ve no interest in joining their ranks just yet.”

They mounted and rode a short distance away before stopping. The tor glimmered under the rising moon, white and ethereal. A colossal pulse of light shot from her peak, spreading out in ripples as if someone tossed a stone into the middle of a motionless pond. It washed down the tor’s sides, flooding the base in blue radiance.

Brishen’s voice boomed across the darkening plain, low as a dirge, deep as a crypt vault, speaking a language that raised the hair on Ildiko’s nape and set the horses to rearing and whinnying in panic. Once she controlled her mount, she sought out the
Elsod
.

“What did he say?” she demanded. “I know you can understand him.”

The old woman’s gaze remained frozen on the lit tor. “Rise,” she said. “Rise and come forth, ye sleepers and ye wanderers. Come forth and prepare for war.”

Ildiko’s horse heaved under her as Brishen’s command filled the air a second time. The
Elsod
translated.

“Rise, rise.”

And the dead obeyed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Brishen strode outside the circle to watch Ildiko, Anhuset and the rest descend the tor’s slope. They were silhouettes to his altered vision, leached of color except for varying shades of gray, black and watery green. Ildiko didn’t look back. Brishen hoped she wouldn’t. If she did, he didn’t think he could stop himself from tearing down the tor’s side and dragging her off her horse and into his arms. Such a reckless act guaranteed her death. He was wraith now, made of spirit rent from flesh by a sword doused in blood and stolen magic and warped by necromantic spellcraft. To touch the living was to kill them.

He returned to the circle and the other Wraith Kings who stared at him with fulgent blue eyes. The
vuhana
gathered behind them. Shadow mounts unfettered by a fear of the dead or the demonic, they would carry their masters into battle.

“Brishen…” Serovek began, halting when Brishen held up a hand.

He walked to the five bodies laid out on the snow, side by side. They were empty vessels now. Healed of their wounds, they breathed while their hearts beat and coursed blood through their bodies, but they were no more aware than the straw men he butchered in the practice arena at Saggara.

The ritual had split each man three ways, and they lived as body, sword and eidolon. The magic of thousands of Kai surged inside Brishen’s spirit form, along with a yawning emptiness. He had never been more powerful than he was now, and never more hollow.

He crouched beside his body and loosened the lacings of his brigandine at the neck. He found what he was looking for tucked beneath his gambeson—a silver chain upon which a recolligere was threaded.

Ildiko had given the memory jewel to him as a gift. A cabochon of citrine quartz, it was his most cherished possession besides the enchanted urn that held his long-dead sister’s mortem light. He curled his hand around the cabochon and recited an old spell. The jewel disintegrated into a pale powder, and from it rose a pale spark to hover before him.

“A mortem light,” Megiddo said in an awed tones.

Brishen shook his head, gaze on the transient light. “No. Just one memory from a woman still living.”  She’d given it to him to subsume if she died before he did. As a human, she didn’t possess a mortem light, but a Kai jeweler had used a spell to help her capture one memory in a recolligere. She gave it to Brishen shortly after he healed from his capture and torture.

He caught the spark in his hand. It dissolved into his palm with a weak lantern-flare before going dark. He closed his eye. One memory, and it was of him on their wedding day. He entered the room where Ildiko stood with the Gauri queen and a troop of servants. He viewed himself through her eyes, nothing more than a tall shape backlit by the blaze of afternoon sunlight. An outlander Kai with gray-skinned hands tipped with claws. Then he’d spoken. “It’s you,” she had said in a voice so full of joy, it made him gasp.

The memory, brief in time, prosaic in context, carried all her hope and all her wonder. Hope that she’d marry someone kind. Wonder that she would marry him. “Ildiko,” he whispered, and her name was both prayer and lament.  Thanks to her and that memory, he carried within him a bulwark against the frightful memories of the past and those he would surely make in the future.

He rose, surveyed the bodies that once housed their spirits, and turned to the silent eidolons behind him. “Brace yourselves,” he said. “When our army arrives, they will be hostile.”

The words he called up to summon the dead were drawn from the mortem lights of Kai who had lived when Emlek was a thatched hut on an isolated island and first used by a Kai necromancer whose fear of his own death was greater even than Secmis’s thirst for power centuries later. They scorched his tongue and filled the circle marked by the glittering menhirs.

Snow-covered earth groaned under his feet as a glow, bright as day, pulsed from the circle’s center and veiled the entire tor. The light faded, and the wind rose. From a zephyr’s whisper to a shrieking howl, the wind spun faster and faster around the tor until a whirlwind formed. It rocked and twisted, reaching skyward to blot out the stars above the menhirs standing in the calm eye.

The spinning coil darkened to a black smoke, shaping spectral faces that murmured and shrieked, cried and laughed. The deafening cacophony abruptly ceased, and the violent tempest collapsed, revealing sky once more.

“It seems we have company.”  Serovek’s comment cut through the sudden hush.

He didn’t exaggerate. Brishen slowly pivoted. The eidolons and their
vuhana
horses were hemmed in on all sides by a turbulent, black miasma. Phantom shapes formed in its depths only to dissolve as quickly as they configured.

A column of the revenant smoke separated from the main body, drawing closer to Brishen until it stood close enough to touch. Amorphous and featureless, it grew more defined until Brishen stared at a human male dressed in the garb of a peasant farmer.

“Why have you summoned and bound us, necromancer?”

Brishen couldn’t tell if the man spoke in Common, bast-Kai or any other tongue. In this moment, the language of the dead was universal. Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own. “Who among you were victims of the
galla
?”

The tenebrous vapor swelled. A wave of wordless fury washed over him from the restless dead. More columns of smoke parted from the mass and took shape. Mostly Kai, with a few humans, they faced Brishen, their eyes as silvery-blue as his.  He suspected many more Kai still lurked in the roiling darkness, including his parents.

One, an older Kai man, inclined his head. “Nearly all the Kai before you fell to
galla
. We tried to save who we could, give them time to reach the Absu.”

Had his eidolon a beating heart, it might have fluttered against his ribs. Brishen eyed the revenant. “Are you General Hasarath?”

“I am.”

Brishen went to one knee and bowed his head. “Your courage and your sacrifice are known and will be commemorated.”  He stood. “Step forward, those who held the line at the river.”

More shades broke loose to stand before him. Brishen sighed when he recognized one. “Ah, Tarawin, I had hoped not to see you here.”  Sorrow sat heavy on his shoulders. Less than a year earlier, he had brought home her son’s mortem light to her. He wasn’t surprised to learn she had sacrificed herself to save others. The only blessing in this tragedy was that her son had been dead too long for the ancient spell to capture his spirit and bind it to Brishen. The shame of it was it had captured hers. “It’s obvious from whom Talumey inherited his bravery.”

“I’m honored to serve you as my son did,
Herceges
.”  Her ghostly voice held no resentment.

Hasarath repeated the human revenant’s question. “Why have you bound us to you?”

“The living can’t fight
galla
. The horde is loose in the world, ravaging Bast-Haradis and threatening the human kingdoms. I call you and all our brethren to help us vanquish the horde and force them back to the void which spawns them.”

The human revenant’s shape blurred and pulsed, agitated. “We don’t follow Kai. We owe you no allegiance.”

“Then follow us. We aren’t Kai.”  Andras joined Brishen. “All our world will die under a
galla
onslaught. They don’t care if we’re human or Kai. We’re nothing more than meat to them. Help us so your descendants may live to boast of their ancestors’ bravery.”

A deepening hush gathered inside the menhir circle. Brishen’s gaze passed over the vaporous dead who filled the circle and spilled down the tor’s slopes. The cares of the living were no longer theirs, but to be remembered well and praised in song...even death didn’t fade such an ambition.

Hasarath ended the stalemate. “The Kai follow you, Brishen Khaskem.”

“As do we,” the human revenants said in chorus.

Relief surged through him as heady and powerful as the Kai magic. “Then we ride.”

The dead parted before him until he stood in front of his sleeping body and the bodies of the four men who would help him. He’d seen Ildiko’s gaze flick between his two forms, desperate, disbelieving, with a hint of revulsion when it rested too long on his eidolon. Unlike the
vuhana
horses, his eidolon was more than a simulacrum. Solid, strong, without the weaknesses inherent to his natural body. And that was the crux of it, the reason for the flicker of abhorrence in her expression. He was no longer just different; he was unnatural.

“I should have trimmed my beard before we left.”  Serovek stroked his chin as he stared at his body and the dark beard shadowing his jaw.

A chuff of hollow laughter from the monk sounded behind him. “I doubt anyone will show up here seeking your courtship.”  Megiddo led his
vuhana
through the crowd of waiting dead and swung onto its back. “Will they be protected while we fight?” he asked Brishen.

Brishen hoped so. He once more delved into the memories the
Elsod
shared with him. Ancient incantations built on the foundations of Gullperi magic. He incanted protection wards, touching each body as he walked a circle around them, leaving behind a ripple in the air that crackled with lightning.

“They—we—are as safe as I can make them.”  He nodded thanks to Gaeres who led his
vuhana
to him and handed him the reins. The simulacrum watched him with solid white eyes before giving an equine snort.

He was the last of the five to mount and found himself staring at a nebulous black sea of shapes and vaporous faces. Kai and human, they awaited his command.

“Which way?” Serovek asked.

“Escariel.”  According to scouts and witnesses, a portion of the horde had broken from the main body and reached the township. In his altered state, Brishen could smell them on the wind, like rot from a cesspit on a hot summer day.

The
galla
would linger there for a short time, confused by the sudden absence of tempting magic emitted by the Kai living in or near the township. It wouldn’t take them long to hunt for its newest source—Brishen and his army.

“They’re trapped by the Absu on one side. Are you familiar with double envelopment?”  Serovek and Andras nodded, while Gaeres and Megiddo shook their heads. “It’s a pincer movement in battle. Attack the enemy from the front, sides and back. You encircle them, then annihilate them. With the Absu acting as a wall, the dead only have to flank three sides. Once we block the
galla
in, we drive them toward the Haradis and do the same to the greater horde we find further down river. Use your swords to cut down any that break free of the net.”

Andras cocked his head. “I thought
galla
couldn’t be killed.”

“They can’t. A cut with the sword will simply send them back to the breach, where they’ll come right back out until we close it.”  Brishen looked to each man. “Ready?”  At their nods, he wheeled his
vuhana
around and raised his sword above his head.

“To me!” he cried and rode down the tor’s slope on the fleet-footed mount, Wraith Kings beside and behind him, and a host of shrieking, howling dead flowing like black water around them. A macabre hunt illuminated by moonlight, they tore across the plain.

They reached Escariel before the dawn broke, a two-day ride accomplished in hours. The
vuhana
Brishen rode looked like his living mount, except for the eyes. The similarity ended there. This creature didn’t gallop, it flew, ground rushing beneath its hooves.

Escariel was a husk of the town he visited days earlier. Empty of Kai and every other living thing that could flee the overrun township.

The midden rot smell buffeted Brishen’s face as they galloped toward the Absu. Strange chittering screeches accompanied the rancid scent, and he got his first true look at the
galla
.

Agile, twitching things with bowed backs and bony fingers as long as his arm, they cavorted along the Absu’s opposite bank, waving skeletal limbs and clambering over each other like rats in a feeding frenzy.

Their faces…

Brishen was an eidolon, a creature born of necromantic magic that controlled the risen dead, and even his spirit recoiled at the sight. If these were the twisted results of Gullperi ridding themselves of their malevolence to attain purity, it was no wonder their brethren punished them for the deed.

Anger fueled his revulsion. These things had fed on his people and threatened to devour everything in their path. They were an infestation to be burned out, scoured clean and utterly annihilated.

Their dissonant screams rose to a feverish pitch when they spotted the kings, some even separating from the legion to hurl themselves against the river’s invisible wall. The dead answered, trilling their own challenges as they lined up along the safe side of the Absu in infantry lines.

Brishen guided his
vuhana
behind the line, calling out commands to the kings. Megiddo paired with Andras while Serovek rode with Gaeres. Brishen plunged into the crowd of revenant to face Hasarath and the human leader who first refused to follow him. Both bowed at his orders to split their company, and soon the army separated into two distinct units, one with the monk and exile, the other with the margrave and the Quereci chieftain’s son.

Solitary, Brishen faced a
hul
galla
that repeatedly smashed itself against the river’s unyielding barrier in a frenzied attempt to reach him. He imagined he looked like nothing more than a sweet meat to a pack of starving wolves as his magic streamed off him like blood. He raised a hand and slashed downward. “Now!”

The dead surged across the river in a black wave, unencumbered by the impediment of water. They flowed around the edges of the
galla
mob, shadow grappling with shadow as the demons sought to avoid the tightening net, and the dead blocked their escape.

Brishen followed Megiddo as his
vuhana
raced along the perimeter. A pair of
galla
squirmed out of a break in the infantry’s rampart. “Cut them down, Megiddo!  Cut them down!”  He slashed at a third that ran straight at his mount and leapt on Brishen.