Varis hesitated for the barest moment, and Otaker was sure that he saw doubt flicker across the prince’s face. When Varis spoke, the words rang with lies. “You have been beaten for your insolence … and to prove the truth of who I am to any who have lingering doubts of my claims. I have found deceit in your heart, lord marshal, and now so have those gathered here. Sadly, for your sake, your continued resistance and deception have proven that you cannot be trusted.”
“A charlatan dares name me a liar?” Otaker laughed until he fell into a fit of coughing.
Varis’s expression hardened, and the enthralled looks of his followers fell away to reveal masks of inhuman fury. Otaker nearly cried out when he saw his wife and children looking at him in the same manner. Then, as if obeying an unspoken command, everyone save Varis set upon Otaker, kicking and striking him on all sides. None spoke, none raged, only their eyes told the tale of their wrath.
Otaker tried to resist, holding his arms up around his head, curling into a tight ball, but the battering only increased. Someone shouted for them to stop, but in his agony, he did not realize it was he himself who was crying out. The last thing he heard, a secretive and deadly noise below all that shouting, was the sound of steel sliding free of a leather scabbard. The last thing he felt was that same icy steel slamming into his chest, past his ribs, and into his fluttering heart. Ride, Ellonlef, he thought, eyes glazing over in death, ride!
Chapter 17
Pleased and not a little stunned that his followers had acted at his merest thought, Varis strode forward, pushing aside the guard who had stabbed Otaker. The prince searched for the glimmer of luminosity that marked the lord marshal’s life force, but it was gone. Needing answers, despite what he had told Otaker, Varis drew the strength from those in the chamber, letting it flow through him and into Otaker’s corpse. Distantly he heard gasping, then choking, and finally the heavy thuds of his underlings falling to their sides, as the strength of life was torn from their bodies.
Yet the lord marshal did not reawaken. No matter how much life Varis forced into the corpse, Otaker did not stir. To Varis’s eyes, it looked as if he were trying to fill a sieve with a glowing silver fluid, and that fluid was simply draining away and dissipating.
When it became obvious that Otaker was well and truly dead, Varis cut off the flow with a curse, and began pacing. Scattered across the floor, the only person still conscious was Uzzret, and him just barely. Varis did not bother to help him, not yet. He needed to think, and did not want the distraction of the man’s fawning.
Varis left the room and moved to the same balcony where he and Uzzret had earlier found Otaker. As he had then, Varis scanned the eastern horizon. The glow of living things was miniscule out on the desert, from the faintest threads emanating from bushes and dry grasses, to the brighter but still faint glow of lizards and vipers and desert-dwelling birds roosting for the night. Of Sister Ellonlef and the horses with her, the shining pillar of light of her being that he had seen earlier burning amongst so much darkness, there was nothing. She was gone.
When he had last looked for her, she had been just at the edge of his sight, moving due east. He concluded that she was riding for Ammathor, which dictated that he had to intercept her before she could warn the Ivory Throne of his intent. While he could easily destroy every citizen of the king’s city and then resurrect them, that was not what he wanted. He desired more than a kingdom full of mindless puppets over which to rule. Any man could lay claim to a field of stones and declare them his worshipers, but he needed people to worship him in truth-though it mattered nothing to him whether they heaped adoration on him out of fear or desire.
He turned back to Otaker’s corpse with a scowl, wondering why his powers had failed to draw the man back from Geh’shinnom’atar. Was it another secret Peropis had kept from him?
He shook his head in irritation. More than ever, he acknowledged that he needed to move quickly and decisively. There was so much he could envision doing with the powers of creation, but there was no time to waste in learning. He could take life from the living world and sustain himself. As well, he could take a person’s life and then restore it … but perhaps he could not raise those who had died by another’s hand, as seemed to be the case with Otaker? Ultimately it did not matter. If he had to personally slaughter a thousand men, then revive them in order to have an army, then he would. Soldiers, to his mind, were more puppets than men already.
In time, Varis found himself considering how Kian had managed to take into himself the powers of creation, unwittingly using that power to shield himself. This led to another more troubling consideration. Were there men and women who had taken in enough of the powers of creation to create life, steal it away, raise the dead, and more? In the future, could there be other contenders to his rule?
For every answer there were hundred more questions without answers. Varis shook them off, sure that deeper understanding would come in time. For now he would use the strengths he understood to take Ammathor, all of Aradan, and more. Once his rule was secure, he would destroy all of his enemies-Peropis, Kian, and any others who harbored the power of dead gods within them.
He looked again at the people strewn across the floor, and pulled life from the living of Krevar, just enough, and emptied it into Uzzret and the others. One by one, their flesh grew fuller and flushed with the heat of living blood. One by one, they were roused, and turned their eyes upon him. All except Uzzret, who had barely survived but survived all the same, gazed at him with a disconcerting, breathless worship.
“Life Giver,” they murmured, over and over again, until it became a low, croaking chant. The tone of their words disturbed Varis, albeit only a little. He could not be sure, but he sensed something in their inflection, a guarded mockery. He abruptly shook his head, sure he was imagining things.
Uzzret got to his feet, never raising his eyes. “Master, forgive me.”
Varis frowned. “For what?”
Uzzret scanned his sandaled feet as if trying to find the answer. “For … for displeasing you?” he said, making it into a question.
Varis did not have time to coddle the man. “We must prepare to depart this heap of blasted stones. Assemble my Chosen.”
“M-master?” Uzzret stammered, his old bones shaking. “Are we not all your chosen?”
I liked him terrified better than fawning, Varis considered. Focusing on the question, he said, “Only those I freed from the Thousand Hells will have the strength to travel with me. As for you, I will sustain you. The others I will leave behind to secure this portion of my kingdom. They owe me their lives, as well as the lives of their loved ones.”
Uzzret seemed to relax upon learning he was among those who would travel with Varis. “Very well, Master, but is such haste necessary? Should we not plan?”
“The opinion of the Sisters of Najihar has great sway with the Ivory Throne-too much, I have always thought. I cannot wait for Sister Ellonlef to reach Ammathor, where she will doubtless warn the enemies of my ascension. Whether she is captured or killed, I care not, but she cannot be allowed to reach Ammathor ahead of me. I will send riders out immediately to search for her. The rest of us depart at dawn.”
After Uzzret bowed his way out of the room, Varis turned on the still kneeling people before him. They stared at him with blank eyes, and to his sight, their auras seemed not to burn with the normal brilliance of life that he had come to expect from the living. He tried to recall if that glow had been so weak and pallid before. It was as if they were only half alive. Or are they half dead? he thought distractedly, wondering if there was a difference.