Blades of the Demigod King Read online

  “And they die a lot, don’t they?”

  Again, the Demigod King stroked his sturdy chin. “I suppose that’s true.”

  The first retainer stepped forward and began pouring the contents of her amphora into four cups made of carved ivory. A chunk of something hard clattered from the amphora into the first white cup.

  Pawn continued, “Twenty redshirts set off with men my last expedition to retrieve the Platinum Fleece. Only I returned.”

  A quick grimace passed over the retainer’s face. Pawn swept up two of the cups and hand them to Sygne and Jamal.

  “That’s awful,” Sygne said. “If they have such a high mortality rate, why do you keep using redshirts?”

  Pawn shrugged. “I suppose it helps to hide the blood? It makes life easier for our laundresses.”

  Sygne was aghast. The redshirts hadn’t existed when she left Albatherra. Had Pawn really become this blasé about human suffering, in just the past two years?

  Pawn flopped down onto the small section of cushions between her and Jamal. He flung his arms around both their shoulders. He carried two wine cups for himself, and Sygne felt a trickle of spilled wine roll down her arm. “After a mission, I prefer to focus on what has been gained, not on what was lost. Think about what we know about Urr-Ogshoth—so much more than we knew before.”

  Jamal offered, “We know that it’s a hideous ambulatory bag of human organs.”

  “Yes,” Pawn said. “And we’ve seen its priestess.”

  Sygne’s thoughts turned back to the other thing that was bothering her: the witch in the tunnel. Her face had been hidden, but there was something that seemed familiar about her voice. Or maybe it was her accent?

  Jamal sipped his chilled wine. “Mm-hmm! It’s so sweet. And I can really taste the ice.”

  He must have seen Sygne’s scowl. He cleared his throat and said, “We also earned the safe passage of our damsel.”

  “Sisprii,” Sygne clarified. “Can you tell us where she is now?”

  The Demigod King slurped down his wine and smacked his lips. “Oh, don’t worry about her. She will be treated fairly. I don’t require anyone to renounce their faith, even if that faith is placed in a repulsive, homicidal caterpillar made out of melted bodies.”

  Sygne interjected, “We promised Sisprii’s mother that we would return her to her home. That we’d keep her safe…”

  Pawn exhaled heavily. He leaned in close to her (he was already situated well within her comfort zone) and gave her an imperious look that told her he would brook no more of this conversation. This was her last gambit to keep Sisprii safe. She stared back at him—her eyes wide but determined.

  Finally he grumbled, “Fine. I’ll let you escort the woman back to her mother. Tonight. You know, you Academy folk usually advise me to err on the side of Prudence over Benevolence. So this is a nice change of pace. And I could never say no to you. You were always my favorite tutor.”

  The Demigod King peered heavily into Sygne’s eyes. She sensed Jamal shifting uncomfortably on his cushions. “There, then. It’s settled,” Jamal said. “We’ll return with Sisprii back to her mother’s much smaller, much less opulent tent. But first, we should enjoy a bit more of our host’s regal hospitality.”

  “Yes!” Pawn laughed. “Let us drink and be merry!”

  Jamal said, “I thought the phrase was ‘Eat, drink and be merry.”

  The Demigod King blinked at Jamal for a second. Then he proclaimed, “Bring this man a roast!”

  ***

  And so they ate and drank and drank for a good long while. At first they relived the early days of Pawn and Sygne’s friendship.

  “My allies brought me to the Academy, and I quickly chose Sygne to be my instructor. She had a way with…tutelage.”

  Sygne blushed. Jamal was too drunk to notice.

  Pawn went on, “That was back when I returned to the city as Ithjzur’s forsaken son. The Clandestine Prince. This was while I was consolidating power among the clergy, the Mentors, and the military. And right before I watched my father die. In other words, the best days of my life.”

  “Ah, lovely.”

  Together, Jamal and Pawn convinced Sygne that they shouldn’t move Sisprii until she had regained consciousness. After her third mug of wine, Sygne worried that she would pass out herself—just as Mdobaa’s daughter was waking. And yet, when the Demigod King offered her a fourth mug of wine, she took it. The alcohol was helping to wash away the visions of Urr-Ogshoth and its gold-veiled priestess from her head.

  “You see,” Jamal slurred. “Everything is going to be all right!” The Demigod King patted Jamal’s chest, and Jamal did the same to him. Jamal said, “One day that damsel will thank us for abducting her. For now, the important thing is that we had our hearts in the right place.”

  “Very true,” Pawn said.

  “Right here in our ribcages, and not stuck in some putrid swollen pus-grub.”

  Pawn laughed at that. “You certainly have a way with words, Gjuiran.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. You know—They call me the Singing Swordsman. I’m a poet. I love to play with words. To make youth museums.”

  “Euphemisms,” Sygne corrected, although her tongue felt sluggish from wine, and she didn’t think her pronunciation was any better than Jamal’s.

  “Excellent,” the Demigod King said. “You know, our language is very young…”

  “…and there are thousands of new phrases waiting to be turned into existence!” Jamal said excitedly. “Yes, I tell Sygne that all the time.”

  “It’s true,” Sygne lamented.

  “I love inventing new phrases.” Pawn clenched Jamal in a fiercely affectionate embrace. “Mottos and platitudes and the like. Have you ever done any wordsmithing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where you imprint words onto metal using a forge. That way the words will endure for posterity. Or at least for as long as reading is a thing.”

  Sygne rolled her eyes. “King Pawn thinks that alphabets are a fad. Eventually we’ll go back to communicating through iconography.”

  “Smiling faces and symbols for food and all that,” Pawn clarified. “But in the meantime, it’s fairly gratifying to coin a phrase or two.”

  “‘Coin a phrase?’” Jamal asked.

  King Pawn pulled a small disc of copper from the inside of his belt. It was pressed with a crude representation of his profile. A handful capitalized words circled his head. ‘IT IS WHAT IT IS.’

  Jamal read it out loud. “‘It is what it is.’ What does that mean?”

  Pawn shrugged. “I came up with it, but honestly, even I don’t know. It means different things to different people, I suppose. Personally, it’s not my favorite phrase that I’ve coined, but it’s really caught on.”

  Sygne stared at the letters. “It’s a bit of circular logic, isn’t it?”

  “What can I say? The people like it, so here we are…”

  “It is what it is,” Jamal said.

  “Exactly.”

  Jamal stared for a long time at the face of the Demigod King. He was quite inebriated, so his eyes slid in and out of focus. Finally, he said, “You ‘coined a phrase.’ I’ve never been more jealous of a man in all my life.”

  Pawn nodded graciously. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”’

  6 – Disclosure

  Sygne continued drinking with Jamal and Pawn, well into the night. The first rays of dawn were touching the sky by the time they finally returned to Mdobaa’s tent with her daughter. Sygne was thoroughly drunk, and she didn’t remember much of the mother and daughter’s reunion, except that it was tearful. Mdobaa cried tears of joy, and Sisprii’s tears seemed agonized and angry.

  Mdobaa was preoccupied, but she led Jamal and Sygne to a small tent in a secluded corner of their camp. Sygne nearly burbled an objection. She wasn’t used to sleeping in the same tent with Jamal; usually they slept in individual bedrolls
, separated by several years of rocky terrain. But she decided she didn’t want to seem ungracious. She collapsed with Jamal on the single, fairly narrow pallet. Instantly she drifted off to sleep.

  As usual she dreamed of Jamal’s younger days. As a late teen, after Nemeah’s heartbreaking departure, Jamal had entered a phase of asceticism, of self-imposed martyrdom. He wandered the barren lands west of Az-Bikkur and offered help to the poor farmers and refugees that he found there. Again and again, he repelled bandits and enslavers, leaping into fray after fray with no regard for his own well-being. Whenever he could, he fought with a pole—or with his sword fastened in its scabbard—so that he could avoid killing these awful men. Sygne didn’t like the indulgent self-destructiveness of it all, but she did like the fact that he turned so naturally to altruism, many years before her influence.

  Jamal, despite all his shallow pretenses, was truly a good person.

  And so it was perhaps not surprising that upon waking, Sygne found her head swirling with affectionate thoughts—as well as a pleasant pre-hangover buzz.

  The late morning sun streamed through the flue on the tent’s pitched roof. Sygne opened her eyes tentatively, testing the light like a swimmer dipping her toe into frigid water. At some point in the night Jamal had rolled over onto his back. Sygne was on her stomach, and Jamal’s right arm was draped over her shoulder blades. Timidly, she touched Jamal’s bare shoulder. She kept her eyes nearly closed; that way she could pretend that she was mostly asleep.

  Sygne wiggled her arm up until she could lightly touch the back of Jamal’s neck. His head was turned away from her. His arm moved, as if he were tightening the embrace around her back. Sygne clinched as well. She couldn’t lie to herself and say that she was half asleep. She was fully in the moment, and the nerves in her fingertips tingled with electricity as she touched Jamal’s ear lobe.

  Jamal grumbled, “Sygne?

  She froze, and Jamal rolled away from her. Now he was on his back, mostly off of the pallet. But now his face was pointed toward hers. He smirked uneasily in his sleep. Sygne raised herself onto her elbows, fighting through a dizzy lurch of drunkenness. She was still feeling the heavy effect of Pawn’s wine.

  She leaned forward and kissed Jamal gently on the forehead. His eyes were still closed; his lips parted.

  “Jamal,” she whispered.

  “Hmm?”

  She ran her fingers across his abs. She had always wanted to do that. Her heart was pounding. His lips were so close.

  “Sygne?” Jamal muttered. She imagined that his dream world was blending with the waking world.

  “Sygne. You shouldn’t… She’s watching.”

  “No one’s watching, Jamal.” Sygne glanced around the tent.

  “She’s watching,” he said. It was fairly clear now that he was talking in his sleep.

  “Who?” Sygne asked.

  “Nyfinein.” In his sleep, Jamal mangled the pronunciation, but Sygne recognized the name immediately. She jerked backward, and Jamal’s eyes finally opened.

  He was confused. “W-what?”

  “What did you say?”

  Jamal blinked groggily. He glanced downward. “Sygne, your hand is in my pants.”

  She saw that he was right; she had three fingers slid under the drawstring of his trousers.

  She recoiled and sat up. Her head swirled. A hangover was coming on quickly; Sygne could feel it building pressure in the front of her skull.

  “You said my mother’s name!” she said. “How do you know that?”

  “I…” Jamal started. He dragged his knuckle over his eyes. He was going to pretend to be groggy. To stall.

  “You were having a Dweller-dream, weren’t you?” she said. “You were seeing my memories. That’s why you knew my mother’s name!”

  That name, ‘Nyfinein.’ More than anything that name made her feel fear—and close on the heels of fear, anger. She growled, “You said you didn’t have dreams about my memories. Were you lying this whole time?”

  “Sygne, I…”

  “Answer me! Were you lying?”

  In the first few seconds of awakening, Jamal’s face shifted from stupor to confusion to panic—now it settled into shame. “I have been dreaming about you. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Why not?” she cried.

  Jamal shook his head. She could see him struggling to find an answer. Finally he scowled and said, “I thought it would embarrass you. Don’t you think it embarrasses me every time you start rehashing my teenage years? Every morning, you wake up and tell me”—Jamal put on a mocking, sing-song voice, a little extra edge to drive his point home—“‘Oh Jamal, I had another dream about you and your ex-girlfriend.’ It makes me cringe. You’re invading my privacy, then you try to make me laugh it off with you.”

  “You… You invaded my privacy and didn’t tell me about it. That’s worse!”

  “You want to complain about not telling things? You knew you had a mother. You’ve always told me you were an orphan!”

  “I was an orphan!” Sygne said. Jamal staggered to his feet, and Sygne joined him. This didn’t seem like an argument you should have while reclining in bed. “I never knew my father. And my mother abandoned me at the Academy when I was three.”

  “But she came back,” Jamal said. “She stalked you for years. These creepy family reunions… I saw her, floating in-between the aisles of the library like a ghost… Whispering threats to you… She was goddamn terrifying—and you were just a kid.”

  Sygne held her hand over her mouth. The thoughts of those horrible visits at the Academy, so long ago, were still vivid enough to make her shiver.

  Jamal was hunched over with the top of his head pressed against the fabric of the tent’s low ceiling. He said, “You never thought to tell me about that? Sounds like a pretty pivotal experience… Something you’d share with a friend. We’ve been on the road for over a month. In all that time, all that talking, you mostly give me tips on boiling things. You never mentioned that you knew your mother. You never mentioned you were friends with a king!”

  “Maybe I didn’t tell you because I knew you couldn’t be trusted,” Sygne jabbed her finger at Jamal’s chest. “You kept a secret from me, and your secret is newer.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Jamal asked. “I’ve saved your life more times than I can count.”

  “I’ve saved your life too.”

  “Yeah. From dangerous situations that you put me in.”

  Sygne stammered, searching for her next line of attack, but already she was losing her impetus for the fight.

  “You know what?” Jamal picked his clothes off the floor of the tent. He staggered sideways, as the previous nights alcohol pushed at his balance. “You don’t trust me, and obviously I keep risking my life being around you. I think it be better for both of us if we parted ways. Like we were supposed to way back in Krit.”

  With that, Jamal stormed out of the tent. All of Sygne’s outrage fled with him.

  She called, “Wait! Jamal, let’s talk about…”

  “No. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of your quests. I’m sick of you spying on my memories. I’m sick—” Jamal bent over and vomited into the garden’s bright green grass. He wiped his mouth and stared spitefully at Sygne when he was done. “I’m sick of your royal boyfriend’s white wine too.”

  “Jamal…”

  “No. This is it. Goodbye.”

  7 – Garden of Delights and Darkness

  Jamal awoke to the screech of a skylark, the cloying odor of hyacinth, the cool rasp of grass blades on his cheek. Normally these sensations would have been quite pleasant; especially considering that he had spent most of the last twenty days trekking through deserts and blighted limestone hills. But Jamal was still in the throes of an intense hangover, and so each new sensation grated against his sore nerves.

  Jamal had never been much of a drinker, but last night had been unique. A new type of wine, very exotic a
nd expensive. The company of a world-famous alpha-protagonist. The split-second escape from death (made all the more impressive by the later-revealed appearance of said alpha-protagonist). And then, yes, there had been the presence of Sygne, who was beginning to intoxicate him in her own right. Looking at her then—and seeing the way that King Pawn looked at her—it had filled him with a sort of thrumming energy. Ardent and competitive and invigorating.

  Now that mood was gone, along with everything that had brought it into being. Including Sygne.

  “Sygne,” Jamal moaned. What had he done? He remembered thanking Sygne in the village of Cynop, shortly after they had survived an attack from every fury in all of Hell. He had told her, ‘After all the troubles we’ve had, I want to thank you for never giving up on me.’ Even then he had known he was developing feelings for Sygne—feelings that one day might have grown to be as strong as his feelings for Nemeah. But now…

  One big secret. One stupid fight. Had Sygne given up on him for real?

  His head churned, and he groaned again. He was currently lying in the low, shaded space beneath the soft canopy of a large fern. He knew he couldn’t lay there forever; soon he would have to emerge and expose himself to the full scrutiny of the sun. In the meantime he writhed for a more comfortable spot in the grass.

  There was a rustle in the leaves behind him. Something pinched and tugged at the toes of his right foot.

  Something sharp.

  And strong.

  Jamal yelped. The thing clamped onto his foot and pulled hard. Jamal’s fingers dug furrows in the dirt as he was dragged out from under the fern. Some kind of animal. Luckily he had left his sandals on, or the beast might have already cut deep enough to draw blood. Jamal rolled and raised his left leg to deliver a kick.

  He paused for a moment and stared in awe.

  He was being accosted by a giant peacock.

  And it was beautiful.