The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4) (39 page)

“He will die. You have taken too much,” Tanid told him. “He cannot recover from the loss of so much blood. You should at least use all of it now.” The god pointed toward the almost-unconscious soldier. “Please. Have mercy.”

Ewan tried to control his outrage. “No. Enough.”

The god calling himself Gavril nodded at Ludevit. The man removed his ax from his belt and swung deftly. The halfmoon blade chopped into the soldier’s neck, almost severing it. There was no squirting, no sputters, just a lazy leak of red that colored the grass. The moaning and the spasms ceased.

“Now, please, take the rest of the blood, while it’s warm.”

Ewan wanted to hate Tanid, but it would be pointless. The god had his own measure of right and wrong, and they went beyond anything Ewan could imagine. Almost in a trance, an oily bubble of disgust wrapping his emotions, Ewan pressed the bloodstaff against the neck wound, and the tendrils of crimson snaked into the staff, filling it up. Soon enough, Javor’s corpse was a wizened husk, dry and the color of old bone.

He looked at the weapon, hating himself a tad more.
I am a monster
. He looked imploringly at Tanid.

“Level it against the Naum forces. And squeeze the rod in the middle, there.” Tanid stepped back, and everyone else followed suit. Ewan realized he was holding an ancient artifact of magic in his hands, and it could do untold damage.

Ewan turned toward the Naum force. It had advanced half the distance across the valley, and it was probably about a mile and a half away. You still could not tell individual soldiers apart, but their menace was that much bigger, more palpable.

He spread his legs for better leverage and braced himself. Thunder and fire. He pressed. Silence. Deathly silence. A streak of red pellets, almost too fast to see, sped across the gorge and soon became just a shimmering dazzle of crimson dust. The torrent of magical hail crashed into the hillside, halfway to the target, upsetting stone and dirt. But still, there was no sound, no violence.

“Too far, they are too far,” the young Sirtai wizard observed, standing near him, craning forward. “You need to elevate the weapon. Higher.”

Ewan frowned. Like an archer, then. He pointed the bloodstaff toward the cloudy sky.

“Less. About seventeen degrees,” Lucas said, angling his arm in a mock salute.

Ewan closed his fingers on the rod again. More red death sped away at an incredible speed, and then, he noticed the front ranks of the enemy van crumpling, dissolving. You could see a great cloud of debris rising, masking the distant, silent carnage.

“More,” Tanid insisted. “Aim wider.”

Ewan held the weapon at the slight elevation and moved it left and right, spraying magical death against the enemy congregation, watching it diminish, watching it become a still carpet of white on the wet slopes of the nearby hill. Several stragglers were fleeing, beating back toward their encampment, clambering away. He could only imagine the chaos and terror amid their ranks. But from this great distance, with nothing but the wind whistling in his ears, it felt surreal, clean and simple. Quite merciful in a way. Elegant. Noble. The way death ought to be.

“The weapon works,” Jarman said in a reverent whisper.

“It is magnificent,” Gavril intoned. “We will save the realms.”

But not my soul
, Ewan thought. Why had he done this? Why? To stop Calemore? He understood the significance of his act; he understood the importance, the necessity. He recalled the lament of murdered gods in the Abyss; he remembered Damian. This was justice. But that did not mean he would ever like being the instrument of delivery. Never that. Once you
got used to the killing, you lost your humanity. That was what Ayrton, his dear friend, would have said.

Once, people who had killed in the name of various causes could go to the Safe Territories and ask for forgiveness, ask someone else to embrace their guilt and remorse, to cleanse their souls. He knew better than that. For him, there would be no one to share the burden. Weeks ago, he had felt relief at meeting the one remaining god. Now he realized that deities never quite shared human emotions. On the contrary, they had created men so they could unload their own onto their creations. Cowardice in its perfect form. And he was an accomplice.

Perhaps one day, he would figure out why he had been made this way, why life had steered him toward loneliness and pain. Perhaps one day he would figure out a way to undo his legacy and regain a normal, simple life. Until then, he was a monster, and ignoring that would be to lie to himself. He would never forget that.

Disgusted, disillusioned, he went down the slope toward the camp, ignoring the religious and scientific celebration taking place behind him.

CHAPTER 27

“H
igher. Go higher. Careful. Now, shake the branch.”

The thin boy was scrambling through the crown of the apple tree like a little monkey, his feet deft on the slender branches. They bent and creaked, but did not break. The last fruit of autumn was always the sweetest. A few big, succulent apples would always remain near the top, defying wind, rain, birds, and the inexorable pull of the ground. Not today.

There was a nervous rustle as the lad tilted the branches left and right, swaying them like a banner. The big apples swayed, refusing to come down. But then the stems broke, and they plummeted onto a stretched-out blanket held by three other youths.

Calemore approached and scooped up one of the red fruits, wiped a season of dust against his shirt, and bit into the shiny, unblemished skin. Delicious. Divine.

He could have used magic to get the last apples. But that would have been sacrilege. Using magic to somehow alter the natural growth of an apple tree. Crazy. If he had to do that, he might as well destroy the world altogether, because there was no point to its quirks, imperfections, its randomness, and mostly its complete disregard for those who trod upon it.

Soon, the human monkey was done, and he clambered back deftly, fearless. He dusted himself off, bowed to his master, and ran back to the camp. The three other boys lowered the blanket, collected the apples into a silk-lined basket, and carried it away.

In their eagerness to prepare for the autumn and winter, some of his soldiers had cut down half the grove for firewood. Any other time, Calemore would have punished the morons for their transgression, for using fruit-bearing trees as kindling. He would have ordered the woodcutters tied to the back of a wagon and dragged until their guts left a slimy trail down the road, like slugs. Now, though, he had just asked the commanders to exact their own judgment over the ruin of an orchard, as it should have been left intact for after the conquest. Next year, once the war was complete, the nation would need food.

The taste for killing had left him. Nigella had bewitched him.

Only now, he had a new reason to try to regain his love for violence.

Someone had used a bloodstaff to kill his men.

Someone had found the second example.

He had thought it lost in the war somewhere, buried under hundreds of thousands of tons of molten rock and earth. He had thought no one would ever remember that it had existed, let alone figure out where it might have last been used before the defeat of Damian’s and his forces. Even he had forgotten all about it, until now.

Apparently, though, the one surviving god was much more resourceful and cunning than he had imagined.

That scared him. Genuinely scared him.

The bloodstaff could not kill him, but it could utterly decimate his troops. That would render his eternal plan useless,
undo the generations of careful preparations. Well, if his stupid father had not tried to double-cross him, he could have been a god by now, and this forceful invasion would never have taken place. Too late for that now. Brute force should have decided the battle, and his enemy had just undone the element of surprise and numerical advantage that he had. His success was no longer certain. The victory of the Naum forces was not a foregone conclusion. Far from it.

Real, stark fear, exhilarating, breathtaking, gut clenching, ecstatic, bloodcurdling, terrifying.

Everything he had ever wanted was at stake now. He might not become a god.

The realization almost made him scream in fury.

It wasn’t the challenge that galled him. It was not the uncertainty. It was the understanding he could no longer rely on his immortality, on his magic, on his power to win this war. He had just become as insignificant as his opponent.

Almost human.

Flawed.

Calemore walked into the ghost town of Bassac, its buildings mostly intact, the streets empty and quiet, apart from an odd team of engineers inspecting the damage, searching for traps, examining the livability of the place. The defenders had fled, leaving most of their belongings behind, apart from the crucial bits like food and tools. Bassac might house people, but the winter would scourge it clean unless his craftsmen could make it hospitable for the coming wave of Naum families.

A small procession was coming toward him, three wagons teamed up with mules, plodding slowly over old, worn cobbles. The wind stirred, and a whiff of death tickled his nostrils. Munching the apple, savoring the tart juices, he walked toward the deathly convoy and looked into the back of one of the carts.

A neat pile of bodies was gently festering in the sun of the last summer days. The people of the realms would welcome the autumn in one of the evenings, boost the strength of the surviving god with their stupid prayer. His foe was just getting stronger, more confident, and he was becoming insecure, frightened. He had to visit Nigella, the risks be damned. He must have her prophecies.

The bodies looked just like he expected, serene and clean. Some had tiny punctures in their armor and bodies, almost too small to notice; others had their limbs severed cleanly, as if by a giant cleaver. They looked all too peaceful, nothing like the chop of a typical battle, when these stupid humans rushed against one another with hammer and sword. This was death in its higher form, beautiful and precise.

The only problem was, the dead belonged to him, not the other way around.

He had not planned for his enemy to gain the second bloodstaff. That made him wary, hesitant, maybe even confused. It ruined all his planning. He had intended to use the entire strength of Naum in one unstoppable wedge, drive south down the spine of these realms, and then split west and east and finish the survivors. Now, the massive throng just meant his forces posed an easy, large target for the wielder of the second weapon. Compressed together, for a quick slaughter.

So what should he do now? Abandon centuries of preparations? No. That was inconceivable.

He would just have to risk going against the surviving god in person.

He had intended to remain behind the scenes, guiding his troops to a leisurely victory, to let them sap religion from the land, to slowly weaken the god until he withered and died. Or maybe wait until the god was killed in an errant battle.

Now, this ugly development in the war meant he had to get personally involved. He still must not murder the deity, but he could assassinate his most trusted followers and army leaders, kill his champions, cripple his organization. A great risk, but one he must undertake. He must.

But what if the survivor was wielding the bloodstaff himself? What would he do then?

That scared him.

He had no answers. But he expected his bespectacled, homely prophet to provide them. She would unravel the future for him, tell him what he must do. She would help him best his enemy. Besides, he missed her, no matter how much he hated admitting it.

Nothing was quite working out as he wanted. His troops were suffering significant losses in the northeast, and it could not be just the weather, the terrain, or bad luck. Not anymore. There must be a ghost army shadowing his own force, trying to hamstring his supply lines. That suggested a very keen, resourceful, and agile enemy. The unification of the two bodies was taking still much longer than he had foreseen, with delays and loss of transport. In the south, the enemy was gathering in larger numbers, still a fleck compared to his own might, but then, they no longer needed the numbers.

Humanity had its share of dirty tricks, and it did its best to thwart him by the simple virtue of being unpredictable. The humans’ greatest, deadliest weapon.

He found the elders in one of the abandoned inns, and they didn’t have anything good to report. The usual share of confusion, road wear, illness, ineptitude, withering food supplies, slow convoys getting lost, and the horse training hobbling along like a cripple.

“We have almost three hundred fast animals,” the elder of Tirri reported. “We will have our first unit of scouts ready in a few weeks. We should be able to match the locals then. They will no longer have the ability to outmaneuver us.”

“I want ten thousand,” Calemore said. They did not argue.

He had considered extending a friendly hand to the mercenaries and scum of these realms, offering a boon to their greed, but the language was a great barrier. His troops did not speak the Continental tongue, and no one could piece together the Naum one around here. Large sacks of gold would work, but it would just add more confusion. After all, he had come here to destroy the people of this land.