The Gift of Life

Chapter 3 Part 2/2

"Stop there!"

She barely heard the voice before she slammed into a body, taking it down into the grass of the hillside. They rolled and landed a little bit apart. A young man shot up from the ground beside her, staring at her in astonishment.

"Where did you come from?" His eyes went down to the sheet wrapped around her body. The other soldiers closed in around them, but they were not looking at her. They were staring up at the castle as the sounds grew louder.

"Who are you?" the man asked, seemingly oblivious to the noise.

"Who are you?" she countered. Though he spoke Imperial without a trace of an accent, he had the auburn hair and slender dark eyes that were both common in Kirigael. But she did not recognize him, and he seemed not to know her either. He couldn't be the one who resurrected her.

She glanced back at the hilltop, and that was when the monster showed itself.

From behind Izina's remaining tower peeked a head with sharp black ears as tall as olive trees, a short, snubbed nose, and a sinuous neck that kept coming on. It was not a monster from the drawings in a story book. Not a monster described in any folk tale she'd ever heard. It was something she had never imagined, something pulled from the formless depths of a nightmare and put into flesh.

Aumeri turned to run, but the young man grabbed her arm. "Stop," he hissed, "it will chase you."

She went still. The monster let out another strange, rattling groan that seemed to vibrate through the ground beneath her feet. She was afraid to even breathe, lest it hear her, but the soldiers showed no such fear.

"Viifraud, Anthalim," said the man beside her, "you go to the north." The others looked to him. "Visago, Erk, to the south."

She recognized the look of men steeling themselves for death, but there was also a gleam of anticipation in their eyes. Four others remained with her and the young man who seemed to be the commander.

"Stay with us," he told her. "We will guard you as best we can."

"Your Majesty," one of the remaining soldiers called, this one a woman in chainmail. "You should--" But the rest of her words were drowned out by the monster's roar.

The soldiers were creeping around the walls of Izina, two on either side. From their vantage point she could see both groups of men, and the monster moving its head from one direction to another, sensing them coming, but not, it seemed, able to see them.

"Viertran, now is our chance to distract it."

"Your Majesty..." the pale, blond-haired boy called Viertran looked petrified. "I don't think that's..."

"Go on," said the commander. "Call up your strongest thunderbolt."

Viertran gulped, but he knelt down on the ground, and all around them, the earth began to hum. He was a mage, Aumeri realized. Perhaps this was not the madness it seemed. She backed away from the hum of his power, and so did the others. Their faces were all set; apart from Viertran, she couldn't tell if they were the least bit afraid.

The sky darkened. There was a tiny flash of lighting, but it struck wide, and the monster turned its head toward them. Aumeri glimpsed its eyes for the first time - three of them, with three huge pupils in each. Its gaze froze her heart, but around her the soldiers were still moving.

The commander started shouting something, but the monster roared again, and she didn't catch his first words. When the roar faded, and she could hear him, she realized he wasn't giving orders. It didn't sound like his voice at all, but like a scream, hoarse and haunted. "Tear out my heart!" he called. "Peel off my skin, wear it as a coat, cut off my head and bathe in my blood!"

The words struck a chord of fear in Aumeri even as she tried to make sense of them. It seemed he was taunting the monster, trying to draw it's attention.

But then she heard the answering voice. Not a voice, so much as a collection of low-pitched moans and screams formed into words. "Cut my head! Tear out my heart!" It had to be coming from the monster, and yet somehow its mouth wasn't moving at all.

There no longer seemed to be a point in running. What was the point of living in a world with such a monster in it? Aumeri looked up to see it flying toward them. Beyond its head made of eyes and ears, its long neck, was a body like skin stretched over a wire frame, all wings and little else. The sunlight glowed through those translucent wings. The mage boy was working frantically, his lightning bolts like tiny arrows falling short.

It was no use. The commander had killed them all with his choice.

He didn't seem to have noticed it, as he continued to shout at the creature. And like a trained bird, it repeated him. "Tear out my heart, burn my bones, bury me!"

Then it was sweeping down on them, stretching its clawed hands, its dark mouth opening wide like a snake's. The commander and his men drew their bows - short bows, their arrows tipped with barbed steel. The monster was bigger than all six of them put together, but the soldiers stood their ground, their speed like nothing Aumeri had ever seen before. The arrows pierced the monster's wings, again and again, slowing its pace as it continued to shriek the words the young commander had taught it. The smell coming off of it was caustic, not in the way of rotten meat or bad breath, but in the way of burning metal.

The sunlight made cracks in the monster's wings, and then it dropped out of the air. The soldiers fell on it at once with their weapons, the commander foremost among them. He swung a sword, cutting clean through the monster's neck, cutting off its screams, and blood spewed out, as purple as violets. Its three eyes continued to roll, and the body spasmed, but silence fell over the hilltop of Izina as they all realized it was over.

The other four soldiers came running, reaching them only now that the monster was dead. They kept their swords drawn as they examined the monster's corpse. It lay in a twisted horror, a mouth full of bared fangs, wings raised in the air like the legs of a dead spider. Once they had assured themselves it was dead, the four soldiers' faces darkened with anger, and they all began shouting over one another.

"Your Majesty," one began, while another started off on the commander's guards, and a third berated the mage.

"Your first duty is to protect the emperor," said an older man with a thick, dark beard. "Not to play along to a boy's whims."

Silence fell over the rest as his words settled in, and a few of them winced.

Emperor?

Aumeri stared at the commander. He was no taller than her, but with his sword drawn and his windblown hair, his shirt stained with dark violet blood, he looked every inch a hero from myth. Like one of the first emperors, the children of the gods who'd carved out a home for humans amid the chaos and the wilderness.

But he wasn't the kind of emperor they'd had in Aumeri's time. From what she had seen of Zermengiel XI, she remembered a reserved, stern-faced man. It had always been difficult to catch a glimpse of him behind the knights who guarded him. He'd been strong and healthy, and presumably trained in the arts of war, but he was the heart of the empire and his life was not his own to risk.

Last she had heard, he'd been in his mid-thirties, with a strained marriage to a western queen and a three-year-old daughter as his only heir, but with a long reign before him.

How could this young man be the emperor? The smell of the monster's blood was burning in her lungs, and the hillside was spinning around her. This was not the world she had known, but there was Izina, and there were her father's gardens.

How many years had passed? What if it was a hundred, a thousand?

They could all be dead. Akiya, Meline, Darzhiim, all of them.

Pressing her hands to her eyes, she sank down into the grass on the hillside.

They could all be dead, and she would never be able to find their bones and call them back.