Blades of the Demigod King Read online

  Book Three

  Groundbreakers

  BLADES OF THE DEMIGOD KING

  Map

  Prologue

  Orphans. So many tales of fancy begin with a parentless child. Humble beginnings, an air of mystery, and before you know it, the orphan has gone from being your average Tom, Dick, or Harry into a full blown, world-famous hero. (i.e. Tom Sawyer, Dick Grayson, Harry Potter.)

  Orphans. All the best stories have them. And that is why you are in luck, dear reader. For this tale features two orphans. Two orphans allied together. Imagine how they might reshape the world with the combined potencies of their pluckiness and their unlikely secret lineages!

  What’s that you ask? No, neither of our orphan-heroes has a mysterious birthmark. I agree, that would be more impressive if they did. And no, neither of them carries one half of a portentous broken medallion. And what’s that? How old are they? Well… yes, it’s true they are both in their twenties… probably their late twenties at that…. It’s so hard to determine for sure—what with them being orphans. And who said that an orphan had to be young to ‘come of age’ as a hero?

  Huh? Wait. Don’t leave! What if I throw in a third orphan in Chapter Two? Maybe a few more bonus orphans, if you pay close attention?

  Fine. Can I interest you in a ten-foot-tall peacock monster? Or maybe a giant god made out of human body parts?

  Oh, I give up. Just continue reading.

  Please?

  1 – Allées of the Garden Reach

  Jamal bent to pick a pebble out of his sandal. He rolled the tiny hunk of white mineral between his thumb and forefinger and frowned at it. Perhaps he was checking to see if it was a tooth. He flicked it away, where it bounced and was instantly lost among the scree of sun-bleached stones. He stared up at five tarred poles casting shadows across the backs of a dozen hunched mourners.

  One of the mourners reached up to touch the bare foot of a man hoisted onto the pole. The man had been killed. Impaled. The tip of the pole emerged through a ruptured hole in his shoulder. It was hardly the only hole on his body. Someone with an axe had opened mortal wounds on his chest and across the top of his skull. The vultures had been at the holes, tugging loose a fluff of brains and gory red tissue. The other four poles displayed corpses that were in equally awful shape—hacked open and turning to jerky for carrion in the unforgiving Albatherran sun.

  “They said the Albatherrans are famous for their open hearts and minds. I didn’t know that this was what they meant.”

  “Very funny, Jamal,” Sygne said. The redheaded scientician crinkled her nose.

  A woman in funereal black lifted her head from her hands and gave Sygne a nasty look.

  “I’m sorry,” Sygne said. “I meant ‘funny’ in a sarcastic sense… I…”

  The woman continued to stare. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but the moisture seemed to be rapidly evaporating against the intensity of her disgust. Sygne stammered on, “I… I suppose sarcasm isn’t very appropriate, either, given the circumstances.”

  Jamal placed his hand on Sygne’s shoulder and led her away. “Drat,” she said. “Why did you have to say that? And make me say what I said?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to ask what happened.”

  “Seems pretty obvious to me. We’ve heard no word of war in this region. And those mourners look like locals,” Jamal surmised. “I’d say that was an example of the Albatherran authorities doling out cruel and usual punishment.”

  “The Demigod King doesn’t believe in cruel and usual punishment. He’s rather enlightened.”

  “I don’t know,” Jamal jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the impaled men. “That looks like the work of a warlord. And from the rumors I’ve heard of the Demigod King—”

  “That he’s a ferocious warrior—with the strength of eight men?” Sygne scoffed. “That he killed a were-tiger with his own bare hands and a were-bear with its own bear hands?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Those wild legends aside, I’ve always known Albatherra as a place where beauty and rationality reign. Albatherra is home to the world’s largest garden, which flourishes with the world’s most exotic and most medically useful plants. In the twenty years I lived there, Albatherra and its surrounding Garden Reach have known only peace. If these corpses are a symptom of some sort of foreign incursion—or an extremist insurgency—then that’s all the more reason to hurry and share what we know about the Ancient Ones with the Mentors of the Academy.”

  They cleared a rise of briny shale, and then a mile of arid, white limestone stretched out before them, ending with a line of greenery at the horizon. If that far-off greenery was the western stretch of Albatherra’s vaunted parkland, then the Garden Reach was indeed very large. Jamal didn’t have time to think about that. His attention was drawn to other landmarks on the blighted landscape—strange black trees. He could see that the closest one only had four limbs, all of which were dangling toward the earth. A nimbus of flies circled its crown.

  “Essoth’s eyeful,” Jamal said softly. There had to be nearly forty pikes lining the road to the Garden Reach, each with its own mangled, leaking corpse stuck to it. He gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword. Something was definitely rotten in Albatherra.

  He said, “I agree we should hurry. If only to avoid the smell.”

  ***

  After such a macabre stroll, it was no wonder that Jamal—the Singing Swordsman, the Demon of Uhl-Arath, the Lion of the Blood Coast—entered the great Garden Reach in a pensive mood. For a moment he paused on the barren, chalky gravel that had covered the terrain for the last forty miles. He examined the lush green grass that would cushion his next step forward. The border of the Garden Reach extended in an unerringly straight line—seemingly for miles to his left and for miles to his right. Jamal had never seen such a drastic and orderly separation between one type of landscape and the next.

  “Drastic and orderly,” he mumbled the words as they came to him. It was a strange combination of descriptors, but they seemed to fit.

  “What’s that?” Sygne asked. She seemed to read the pinched look on Jamal’s face. “Oh, you mean the boundary of the Reach? The groundskeepers use falaj channels and wizardry to keep the land fertile, despite the local climates. The Demigod King believes in combining the best aspects of horticcultism and science to better his city. But of course if you ask me I’d say it’s the irrigation and composting techniques that—”

  “Where are the walls?” Jamal eyed the severe border between arid stone and lush greenery. “Is there some sort of magical protection? I’m not going to turn into a clump of fertilizer if I cross this line?”

  “No,” Sygne chuckled. “The Demigod King doesn’t believe in walls in the Garden Reach.”

  “I’ve never heard you talk so reverently of a monarch. It almost sounds like you know him.”

  Sygne didn’t answer that. She stepped across the threshold of the parkland and within a few steps she had disappeared through a line of flower-dappled saplings.

  Jamal followed her. The first thing he noticed as he stepped into the garden was that the temperature seemed to drop instantly. Silken blooms brushed his face and his shoulders as he ducked through that first line of trees. “Ooo. Do you feel that?”

  Sygne glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “It feels nice, doesn’t it? Welcome to the Garden Reach, Albatherra’s welcome mat to the rest of Embhra.”

  They passed through a row of pillars, each covered in fragrant creeper vines. A pleasant veil of cool mist settled over Jamal’s skin, which was dry and dusty after two weeks of traveling. He examined his ashy hands; they alr
eady seemed softer than they had before. “This is powerful magic. Benevolent magic.”

  Sygne said, “I have to admit—science alone couldn’t have precipitated such precipitation.”

  Jamal took in the sweep of verdant color before him—a seemingly infinite variation of shades of green, speckled with bright reds, violets, yellows, and blues. “Powerful magic indeed,” he said. “This place is truly a feast for the eyes.”

  Sygne smiled. “Meaning that you wonder where the food grows in this garden.”

  “You know me too well, Sygne Eugenia. I like a good feast for the eyes, but I greatly prefer a feast for the teeth and tongue.”

  “Ew. Okay. Let’s keep moving.”

  The scientician led Jamal through a double-row of cypress trees standing like soldiers at attention; then the estate dipped into a wide swale with fig trees and orange trees growing in it. The breeze wafted up from the shallow valley, almost as if it had been specially designed to carry with it the tang of citrus. They followed that beckoning scent into the shade of the grove, and soon Jamal was scraping back the rind of an orange with his thumbnail.

  He nodded. “You know, impalements not withstanding, maybe we’ll finally be safe here. Bliss thinks we’re dead. And even if not, her bounty hunters wouldn’t dare follow us into such a powerful kingdom.”

  “And once I convince the Mentors that the Ancient Ones are real, then we can begin work on making sure the whole world is safer!”

  Sygne patted the pocketbook that swung against her hip. Hidden within its leather folios were specimens of the first two Ancient Ones, the Dweller Under Dreams and the Lurker in the Void. Sygne smiled at him, but Jamal fell back into a wary mood when he considered their course of action for the next few days. Presenting evidence that the Firstspawn were real was just the first part of their plan. Assuming that the Mentors—the world’s most venerated skeptics—were convinced, Sygne and Jamal would then have to persuade the Albatherran authorities to do something about it. At that very moment, the Issulthraqis might already control the last Ancient One, the Strider Between Worlds. If the Issulthraqis could gather power from all three Ancient Ones at once, then they could assemble the Threefold Key and presumably remake the world.

  He decided to voice his concerns. “Sygne. What if we can’t convince anyone in Albatherra to go to war with Issulthraq?”

  “War?”

  “Yes. To prevent them from consolidating all three Firstspawn. The Strider Between Worlds is supposed to live somewhere in the Serrated Sea, off the coast of Mizzul. The Issulthraqis already control Mizzul, so we have to assume they’re sending out sorties from the coast. They may have found the Strider already.”

  “That’s true,” Sygne said. “According to the texts I’ve read—and the tales we’ve heard on the road—the Strider Between Worlds supposedly lives in a tall, hollow tower stretching up from the bottom of the ocean. Based on the fact that all of the other Ancient Ones have taken the forms of bottom-dwelling invertebrates, I’m going to assume that means the Strider is some type of eldritch giant tube worm.”

  “Gross.”

  “The tower emerging from the bottom of the Serrated Sea… I think that is the worm’s ‘tube.’ a sheath of chitin, which is the same substance that makes up a shellfish’s shell.”

  “Also gross”

  “The Lurker in the Void will be very hard for them to find, since it’s hidden in the expanse of the Tawr. The desert will starve and scald any army that Issulthraq sends there. We only stumbled upon the Lurker through sheer luck.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it luck,” Jamal said.

  “But as far as the Strider, I think you’re right. We have to assume that they already control the Strider. At least as much as anyone can control a half-mile-long, magical mollusk.”

  “Again, gross.”

  They passed through allées formed by perfectly straight shrubbery, taller than Jamal’s head. The branching corridors formed a pleasantly simplistic maze of flowering greenery. The ground was a soft, feathery mix of fallen leaves and loam. Miraculously, the mulch didn’t catch on his sandals as he brushed through it.

  The eastern edge of the allée maze opened up into a vineyard of grapes. As Jamal passed from one thick, aromatic arrangement of vegetation into the next, he couldn’t help feeling like he was performing some kind of border-crossing between fiefdoms—between different realms of horticcultist magic. The soil beneath the grapevines was rockier. The air felt less humid.

  For the first time Jamal saw people. They carried reed baskets that were overflowing with purple grapes. The serfs had obviously picked a lot and yet all of the awnings that Jamal passed under were still heavy with clusters of berries. He asked Sygne, “Is it all right if I eat these?”

  “Sure. They are free for all. “

  Jamal picked a huge cluster. For a while they walked onward. Butterflies jittered past.

  He asked, “Can we stop for a while?”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t peel these grapes and walk at the same time.”

  Sygne rolled her eyes. “You won’t eat an unpeeled grape? What are you, a royal consort?”

  “Please don’t belittle my finer tastes. Besides, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to cross this entire garden before nightfall. Perhaps we should go ahead and stop now and set up camp.”

  “It’s not wise to set up camp away from others. The Garden Reach doesn’t have walls, but that doesn’t mean there’s not other defenses.”

  “What does that mean?” Jamal asked.

  “I believe there’s a butterfly pond just up ahead. I’ll explain when we get there.”

  They walked around a majestic live oak whose branches dipped and undulated across the grass like a landlocked kraken. Jamal ducked beneath one bough, then straddle-hopped over another. Then he saw a beautiful pond hidden beyond the shade of the oak. Several tents were assembled around the placid disc of water. The tents were large, black, and heavy-duty. Jamal recognized them as tribal-nomadic, built to withstand brutal sandstorms and the unrelenting desert sun. They looked out of place in the dainty backdrop of the Garden Reach, like gigantic segmented beetles. Long tent poles protruded from their ends like curving antennae.

  As they approached the camp, Jamal saw that there were more than just nomads moving between the tents. He saw swarthy men in long tunics. They looked like they might have come from the harsh hills south of the Bed of Eshynihett. He saw a few Hinterland settlers with hair like Sygne’s—the color of wildfire. Also tawny Westerners. And more than a few Ardhians like himself.

  Sygne approached an Ardhian woman with kind, sad eyes. The woman had a mane of tight curls—here and there crinkled with gray. Jamal hadn’t seen many black women with hair that long; Ardhian slaves were usually forced to shear their hair close to the skull. She was obviously a freewoman.

  “I am Sygne Eugenia, this is my friend Jamal. We have just arrived in Albatherra. May we share your campsite tonight, if you have room?”

  “I am Mdobaa,” the woman offered Sygne a tired grin. Along the hairline of her forehead, her curls had been weaved in tight rows and caught in beadwork of gold and lapis lazuli. The beads made pleasant nock sounds as she nodded graciously. “Yes, you may stay in our spare tent. The one next to the tent I share with my husband.”

  Jamal felt his heart quicken, for just a moment. A real tent. In an established campsite. Not some windblown bivouac among the rocky hills—or some filthy inn. Tonight’s sleeping arrangements looked like they would be fairly safe and comfortable. And Jamal had a feeling, judging from how affectionate Sygne had been toward him, that she was expecting them to sleep together. Jamal was nervous about that. He was slightly concerned about being rusty—it had been a long time for him—but he was more worried about what might happen afterward.

  Over the last few nights, he’d been having the most intense dreams. And he had awoken himself several times in the middle of the night, gaspi
ng about a redheaded witch. So far Sygne hadn’t noticed, but if she ever did, Jamal felt certain that she would immediately realize what was happening.

  Mdobaa asked a question and snapped him out of his reverie. “I would be most pleased if you could offer something in return?”

  Jamal knew that this was a custom among the peoples who lived near the Sapphire Sea, to share some token of appreciation in exchange for hospitality. It was meant more as a gesture of fellowship and goodwill—not reciprocity—and the token was often something intangible, like an idea or a bit of news, or even a simple story.

  Sygne said, “I can offer you a new formulation for soap. I learned it from the Djungan people, in their beautiful home among the wadis and palm groves. It’s quite simple and ingenious, really.”

  “That sounds superb,” Mdobaa said. She trained her gaze on Jamal. Her eyelids were heavy and puffy, and it seemed to be an effort for her to keep them raised in Jamal’s direction. She asked, “Can your handsome friend offer something?”

  Sygne started, “He can… Uh…”

  “I can offer a song,” Jamal said, standing straighter.

  Mdobaa seemed to wilt a bit, and she leaned her head to one side. “We are not in the mood for music much lately. Happy songs have no effect on us. And sad songs… well, we are sad enough already.”

  Sygne touched the woman’s wrist. “What is wrong Mdobaa? Does this have anything to do with the dead men we saw on the way to the Reach?”

  “No,” Mdobaa said. “If anything, that is our Demigod King working to solve the problem. We are hopeful that his endeavors will save our daughter Sisprii, before it is too late.”

  Jamal put a hand to the hilt of his sword.

  Sygne glanced to him, then back to Mdobaa, “Please, tell us what happened. Perhaps we can help.”

  2 – A Stealth Mission

  Night had descended like a satin curtain over the maze-like allées of the Garden Reach. Crickets softly stirred the air. This part of Albartherra was such a beautiful place—probably the most beautiful in all of Embhra. It was ironic, Sygne mused, that she had never walked through these allées without something weighing heavily on her mind—something so huge or ugly that she couldn’t help but be distracted from the beauty that surrounded her. She had had a good life in Albatherra, but she’d also had hardships and confusion. Here, in the midst of all that beauty, she was reminded of why she had left.