Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Page 54

  And then everything went silent. Khouren launched to the wall. Hauling himself up it and through the floor above, he emerged back in the passage. It was ruined. Walls had been blown off their hinges. Metal gears and clockworks that moved them were jammed, broken. The Kets al’Roch had been blasted backward, severed from its trapped appendage, shattering the wall behind it. And now it lay in a tangled lump of hide and protruding bones, its pool of black, tarry blood spreading out over the stones of the floor. Khouren’s grandfather lay slumped, one hand clutching his middle. His breath was a rasp, in a way Khouren had never heard it. Khouren approached, trembling. Closer now, he could see by the light of a shattered torch the way slick ropes of intestine protruded from between Fentleith’s fingers, a spreading pool of tacky blood beneath his grandfather’s torn form.

  “Grandfather?” Khouren’s voice was low, careful. Even now, a stray flash of rage could kill him. Even when his grandfather lay dying.

  “Khouren?” Fentleith looked up, his brows knit in pain, his gold-brown eyes flashing no red. He grit his teeth, sucking air slowly through them. But even so, a low keen of pain issued out. Khouren hastened to his grandfather’s side, dropping to his knees, hand flashing out to feel at his grandfather’s abdomen.

  “We need a pressure bandage. Here.” He whipped back his leather hood, unwinding the charcoal black silk of his shouf, a gift, originally, from Fentleith.

  “No.” His grandfather stilled Khouren’s motion with a light, faltering touch. “It cut too deep. Just one claw, but enough. You can’t staunch this… I can’t…” Suddenly, his grandfather’s eyes rolled up. Eyelids closing, eyelashes flickering, his entire body twitched in the spasm that comes before death. His head lolled back over Khouren’s arm.

  “No!” Desperation raced through Khouren. His grandfather was dying. After all these years, after all they had been through. After all this. Fentleith Alodwine, Scion of Khehem, was going to die. This wasn’t the way. This wasn’t what they’d held fast for, all these years. Not to simply have him die and leave them untethered.

  Khouren couldn’t lose him now. Without thinking, he wrapped his shouf tight around Fentleith’s middle, trapping in the torn bowels. Taking a knee, he hauled the slighter man up over his shoulders, the weight as nothing. Khouren could have carried a bear had he needed to, especially with all the fire and determination flooding his veins right now.

  But as he stood, his gaze caught on a man standing through one of the broken hallways. Standing very still in his impeccable grey silk robes, imperious, his cold grey eyes flat upon Khouren. Khouren shivered, feeling the judgment of his Rennkavi. But before the man could say anything, before he could arrest Khouren’s intent with any command, Khouren turned, stepping through the nearest wall with his grandfather slung across his shoulders.

  It was a fair distance to the heart of Roushenn. Sliding through walls, trotting briskly through larders, jogging fast through long expanses of fey blue Hinterhaft, Khouren needed no compass to navigate the bowels of the ancient fortress. A fortress that was his by right, his by lineage, or so the House of Alodwine had discovered when they had traveled out from Khehem nearly a thousand years ago. And so many years of his four-hundred span had been spent wandering these halls, hadn’t they? Discovering its secrets, realizing the extent of his great-great-grandfather’s madness. Or genius. It was hard to say which. Only a mad mind, a brilliantly corrupted mind teeming with thoughts of betrayal could have made a palace such as this. A stronghold of oubliettes, moving walls, mazelike passages.

  Hidden horrors. Like the oubliette chamber of the Kets al’Roch.

  Khouren set his jaw, determined, feeling the weary beats of his grandfather’s heart slowing, blood pouring liberally down over Khouren’s shoulder, down his spine, soaking his black garb. But here was the larder next to the six-foot-thick stone at the center of Roushenn. Here was the Clockwork Room, the massive central chamber at the heart of the palace, gears larger than a man humming, churning in their deafening clatter and precise timing. Khouren raced through it all, straight through the chugging gears, the man across his shoulders just as permeable as Khouren, so long as their skin touched.

  And there, at last, it was. The madness of his great-great-grandfather made plain. Here, in the very center of the clockworks, at the heart of it all, there was hardly room to stand. No doors led here. No passages would take you through the deadly gears to get to this spot. It was a secret Khouren knew about, because he alone had found it, wandering one night through all the chugging, clanking machinery.

  And he’d only ever told his grandfather about this.

  Standing in the center, he eyed the small ornament atop its waist-high byrunstone plinth. A pyramid made of filigreed white stone, the ornament was no larger than his palm at the base, no bigger than an apple or a pear. Its filigree was luminous in the dim, chugging space. A pattern of scepters signifying the right to rule, the conflict of authority and leadership. Within, suspended in the air inside the pyramid, was a flat, plain river stone, etched crudely upon the surface as if done by knife blade. A wolf and dragon circled each other in the stone’s etching, fighting in perfect balance, surrounded by a wreath of flame.

  The Werus et Khehem. The eternal conflict of the Wolf and Dragon within the Unburnt Circle. Symbol of Khouren’s House. Symbol of the ancient Kings of Khehem.

  “Leith Alodwine, hear my prayer.” Khouren whispered, staring at the talisman. “Whatever magic you gave to this place, help us now. Fentleith, your grandson, he needs you. If anything of you yet lives in this place you built… let it restore my own grandfather now.”

  Kneeling, Khouren lifted his grandfather’s bloody hand. And set it to the filigreed stone.

  Fentleith came awake in a gasp of breath, spasming atop Khouren’s shoulders the moment his palm was set to the pyramid. A scream ripped from his throat. A horrible agony, a sound of beasts tearing out each other’s flesh and yet fighting on, fighting to the death. Machinery slowed suddenly, lurching around them to a low roar, then surged once more, chugging around them, buffering the scream.

  There was no time for whatever additional help the magic of the filigreed stone could give, not if the Rennkavi had heard that scream. Khouren lifted his grandfather’s palm from the talisman, thanking whatever gods there were. Turning quickly, he hefted his grandfather more securely, then fled back through the chugging machinery. Fentleith still spasmed atop his shoulders, curling and uncurling, screaming blood-wracked pain through his teeth. Bronze cogs flashed by as Khouren ran, silver wheels, steel pistons. He fled through the ancient clockworks, his heart in his throat. Slipping through a wall, and another, and another, he ran until he was safely away from the center of Roushenn, in a blind oubliette filled with books and ancient scrolls crumbling now to dust.

  Breathing hard, he struck a spark from his flint into an ancient torch in a bracket upon the wall. It caught with a crackling blaze, casting the tiny octagonal room in shifting shadows. Khouren sank to the dust-choked floor, sliding his grandfather gently from his shoulders. Fentleith was breathing hard, sweat-streaked, pale. His hands clutched spastically at his middle, over the bloodsoaked shouf.

  “Let me see, let me see…” Khouren crooned gently, pulling Fentleith’s hands away, lifting the edge of the fabric. And there, even as he watched, he saw flesh knitting. Bowels working themselves back inside, muscles slipping together and sealing closed. “Shaper and Undoer…!” Khouren breathed, relief flooding him.

  “This never would have happened if you’d heeded me.”

  Khouren’s gaze snapped to his grandfather’s face. The man was stern, his dark brows set in a hard line in the flickering torchlight, his brown-gold eyes furious. Ever-young. He looked just as Khouren first knew him as a child, even after four hundred years. Just a touch of lines at his eyes and mouth, but tonight these were set hard, livid.

  “I did what I had to.” Khouren murmured.

  “Bullshit. You gave that man what he wanted. Again. You led the Kets
al’Roch right to us! It doesn’t live in that part of the palace, Khouren. You and I both know that. You were the bait, just like ten years ago, leading that thing through the gauntlet of walls Lhaurent created, just like running a bull through a chute! Until it finds something to slaughter. And you. Poisoning the air to make men fodder for the beast! Yet again, Lhaurent has his bloodshed, all in the name of peace. But this time, the blood shed was mine.”

  “I never meant to risk your life!” Khouren pleaded, desperate. “You weren’t supposed to go with them! The Kets al’Roch was only a failsafe, only to be used if the Dhenra made it out of the coronation hall alive!”

  “I am sworn to protect her life.” His grandfather’s eyes flashed red, dangerous.

  “You are sworn to the Rennkavi! The Uniter!” Khouren hissed back. “By your own words, by your own hand!! You are sworn to the one who wears the Goldenmarks, lest fire take you, just as I am! And that man is here, in these very halls! Our Rennkavi is the Castellan, grandfather, though you accept it not.”

  “I will never accept him.” Fentleith spat it at Khouren, a drumming, scathing fury in his eyes. “A man who annihilates thousands is no Uniter of mine! And you are responsible for all those deaths! The blood of the Alrashemni is upon your hands, Khouren! For your part in unleashing the beast, in giving Lhaurent the tools to plan it all on behalf of the Khehemni Lothren. Your hands.”

  Slowly, Khouren sat back, a cold emptiness in his heart. “And does a King do any less upon the battlefield? To secure a better future for his nation?”

  Fentleith Alodwine struggled up to his elbows, then his bloody hands, fury in his gaze. And though he flinched from pain and one hand yet clutched his abdomen, his eyes burned red into Khouren’s very soul. “Take me back to the stables. I will follow the ones I serve, and you will follow yours. I disown you, Khouren. Right here, right now. I disown you and any scions you may ever have. You are no grandson of mine, following that beast of a man. And though you saved my life today, I owe you no debt, because it was you who put the Ghenje pieces into play. Giving that man my grandfather’s ring to resonate the palace walls. Showing him the Clockworks. Allowing him to summon the Puzzle from its resting place, and start the machine that controls the walls. Causing unholy hell today. And now… this…!”

  Fentleith gave a heavy sigh, his brows knitted in pain and a deep, unfathomable sorrow. He closed his eyes, hitching a hard breath.

  “This…?” A curl of fear took Khouren, not understanding his grandfather’s words.

  “I feel him.” Fentleith’s sigh was but a breath in the flickering dark, his hand lifting to rub his chest. “I feel Leith! A part of him now in me… his magic, his wyrria. His conflict. Undoer, Khouren! What did you do to me, setting my hand to my grandfather’s talisman, letting it drink my blood?!”

  “I didn’t know…!” Khouren’s eyes were too wide, his breath racing, fear driving deep into his heart. His beloved, mild-tempered grandfather. Now had absorbed the wyrria of a madman. A mad conqueror.

  Leith Alodwine. The Last Scion of Khehem.

  “I feel him stirring within me…” Fentleith murmured, eyes still closed, stricken. “Hot like forge-sparks. Chill like dragon breath. And I feel the palace stirring too… far under the earth… deep under Lintesh.” His eyes snapped open, burning like coals. “Only a part of Roushenn woke to Lhaurent slipping on that ring thirty years ago. Now the entirety of the mechanism beneath the city wakes to me, Khouren! To my blood, stronger than any Khehemni lineage that Lhaurent possesses. It wakes to me. But Lhaurent has the ring. He has my grandfather’s ring. He controls it all. Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

  Khouren sat back, his breath stilling. “I’ve given him the city at last. All of Lintesh is awake… for my Rennkavi to command.”

  But Fentleith’s eyes were sad upon him, sad and dead of love for his grandson. “You’ve given an awakening tyrant a fortress none can ever breach. And now you will live to see what he does with it. Let me out of here, Khouren. I go to the West Stables.”

  Khouren blanched, feeling the dismissal of his grandfather’s dire words. That was it, then. They were through. He had been disowned and now there was no going back. Tonight, they parted ways forever. And someday, one of them would pay the price for it.

  “I love you, grandfather.” Khouren murmured.

  “Take me to the stables, Khouren.” Fentleith Alodwine staggered to his feet, stumbled and caught the wall, not looking at his grandson. Slowly, Khouren stood, stepping to his side, feeling the cool, empty space between them. Lightly, gingerly, he took his grandfather’s bare fingers. But there was no love there, not anymore. Not like there had been when he was a boy, his mother dead and entombed in her bier at the heart of Roushenn, a child of only seven sobbing over her stone effigy. His grandfather Fentleith taking him quietly by the hand, wrapping him close in a bittersweet, loving embrace.

  Khouren swallowed hard. He’d made his choice. Following the Rennkavi was more important than a grandfather’s love. He stepped forward through the wall, leading a man he no longer knew through the wall behind him.

  * * *

  Lhaurent found him quite a while later. Khouren sat in their regular meeting-place, a rectangular space in the Hinterhaft with a long table for war-conferences. He had lit all the torches in the room, pushing back the dark, but they could not push back the heaviness in his heart. And now he sat upon the table, fingers leafing idly through an ancient tome bound in hide, but he was not looking at the beautiful illuminations of medicinal plants within. He heard the scrape of the wall as it swung inward over ancient dust. The soft, nearly soundless step of Lhaurent as he slipped in. The closing scrape of the wall. A scent of perfume, heady like ripening plums.

  “Khouren.” Lhaurent den’Karthus’ tone dripped icy scorn. “You have gravely disappointed me today, interrupting my plans.”

  Khouren did not look up from his tome. “Injuring someone dear to me was not supposed to happen today.”

  Khouren heard Lhaurent pause, thinking about this information, still behind him near the wall. “Who was that man who wielded lightning, who killed the Kets al’Roch? What did you do with him, Khouren? He would be a great asset to our cause…”

  “My grandfather will never come to you.” Khouren sighed. He heard nothing for a long moment. Slowly, Lhaurent den’Karthus stepped around the table into view. One long-fingered hand wisped lightly over the dust upon the table. On his index finger was the ruby ring of Khouren’s great-great-grandfather. The ring of Leith Alodwine with its wolf and dragon snarling, fighting around a ruby, ringed by white fire of a metal come from the heavens themselves. The ring that controlled the walls, for the right man with the talent. The ring that controlled Roushenn.

  And now controlled an entire city.

  “Your grandfather?” Lhaurent’s voice was soft, intrigued. “But the man I saw battling the creature… looked like First-Lieutenant Fenton den’Kharel.”

  “Just so.” Khouren heaved a deep sigh, looked up, meeting Lhaurent’s curious grey eyes. “Don’t ask me to go after him. He’ll never come to your cause. He believes in the Dhenra. Nothing I’ve ever said has convinced him that you’re the one. The Rennkavi. The Uniter of the Tribes.”

  Lhaurent was silent another long moment. But rather than angry, as Khouren expected, he seemed eager. Elated, a soft wonder suffused his face. “Khouren. Something’s… happened. I feel a change in the structure of the walls. In the pull coming from the ring, from the entire palace. It feels… stretched, wider, deeper. As if leagues and leagues of walls and floors and ceilings have suddenly wakened, hearkening to the wyrria in the ring. They’re… humming… all around me. Far into the city…”

  Khouren gave a deep, tired sigh. With a slow grace he rose, then sank to one knee. “Rennkavi, the city of my great-great-grandfather has awakened. It is yours to command.”

  Lhaurent startled visibly, a twitch taking him from head to heels. “What are you saying?”

  Khoure
n looked up, feeling sick, feeling elated, feeling vast conflict deep in his very bones. “The entire city of Lintesh lives by the wyrria of Khehem, the same as the walls of Roushenn do. My great-great-grandfather’s city has awakened, yoked now to the magic in the Clockworks. All those walls, the streets of Lintesh… they will move for you now. I awakened it today, by the blood of my line. And it will hearken to you. To the power in your ring, the ring of Khehem’s ancient royal line. Keep it well, my Rennkavi. For now you control far more than a mere palace. You control a city. Right beneath the very boots of any who might oppose you.”

  Lhaurent den’Karthus had taken a deep indrawn breath. Slowly, it came sighing out, sibilant, his grey eyes shining with a vast fever. “Khouren. Your opposition of me today is excused.”

  And something deep in Khouren shifted, restless, watching the man before him. Goldenmarks were upon him, inked there so many years ago by a seven-eye Alranstone, just like the Prophecy had said. And yet. Khouren watched those shining eyes, that serpentine pleasure in his lord and master’s gaze. And wondered for the very first time, if his grandfather had been right.

  Right to not follow this Rennkavi.

  Right to wait, hoping against hope, that another one would come.

  CHAPTER 37 – ELOHL

  Elohl opened his eyes as they burst through the side-door to the palace, rushing across a courtyard that was quickly churning into slick mud from the thundering downpour. Lightning forked the burgeoning green sky. Wind lashed the pines and cendarie upon the mountainside. They were out, but it had cost them. Three more of Therel’s men had been swallowed in the evershifting halls. Only Luc, Therel with Elyasin in arms, and four of his Highswords were left. A grim company, they rushed the stables, still in a tight knot, throwing themselves through the stable doors. Dead Guardsmen in blue littered the stables, blood soaking the straw over the flagstones. A group of twenty of Therel’s men held the stable, roaring at their arrival, but Olea, Vargen, and Aldris were not there. Nor were Ghrenna's thieves.