Luck blessed him when he paused to choose which way to continue the hunt for his wife. While the rain had obliterated most spoor, a few remained. Hoofprints, embedded deeper in the ground than those of a barefooted human woman had withstood the wash of water so far. They showed a path the Kai’shorse had taken, from the necropolis’s outer perimeter to its inner circle. Brishen backtracked the prints until the flat terrain dropped off into a steep decline.
The mad hope of finding Ildiko safe and sound had set his heart to drumming when he’d seen the rope and trousers. That same organ seized when he peered over the hilltop’s edge and spotted a pale, crumpled figure far down the slope amid a scatter of rocks, scrubgrass, and brambles. Another figure lay not far away, twisted at an odd angle. Faded yellow eyes glowed dull and unblinking in the oncoming night.
Brishen didn’t hesitate and leaped to careen down the slope at breakneck speed, sliding across a field of mud and slippery rocks. He lost his balance once, landing on his side as stone and thorns tore his tunic and ripped his bow and quiver off his shoulder. Something sharp nicked his cheek, just below his eye. He barely noticed the sting or the warm trickle of blood washed away by the water sluicing down his face.
He almost crashed into Ildiko on his knees, scrabbling for purchase by gripping nearby tufts of scrubgrass whose wet blades sliced into his palms as easily as knives.
Ildiko lay in the mud, looking like a poppet thrown about by a child. Bruises mottled her pale skin, along with scratches and a cut on her forearm purposefully inflicted by a blade. Rain pelted her features, mixing with the blood trickling from her nostrils and the corner of her mouth. More blood matted her hair on one side.
Brishen knelt beside her, gently cupping her cheeks in shaking hands. The chant in his head kept pace with his racing heart.Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh gods.He bent close, praying he’d feel her breath against his face. Nothing. Terror screamed through his mind, blinding him to his surroundings. Shouting her name would do no good. Instead, he scooted back and layhis head against her chest, listening for a heartbeat and begging deaf gods not to steal her from him.
The breath he held gusted from his lungs when the faintest pulse, unsteady and weak, whispered in his ear. Had he been human, he might have wept. He pressed his forehead between her breasts, drunk with relief. A caress of fingers in his hair made him raise his head. His wife stared at him, blinking away raindrops. “Ildiko,” he said, her name an orison on his lips.
Her mouth curved into a half smile as her fingers wove through his wet hair. “Brishen. I knew you’d come.” The smile became a frown. “Tarawin?”
“Safe.” He swiped away rivulets of rain from her cheek with his thumb. “Anhuset and Dendarah are taking her to Saggara.”
She licked her cracked lips. “Thank the gods.” Her voice had a wheezy quality to it and was hardly more than a whisper. “It’s getting darker.” Her eyes rolled back before her lids drifted down.
Alarmed, Brishen grasped her hands. “Stay with me, wife. Open your eyes.”
Her eyelids fluttered, and she raised them enough for him to see the lower half of her sclera, irises and pupils. “I think I’m broken inside.” The cough she expelled and the weak cry of pain that followed, broke the dam holding back his panic.
He ran his hands lightly over her torso, careful not to press too hard and hurt her even more. She felt as fragile as a bird. There was no obvious injury beyond the cuts and bruises he could see, but his alarm didn’t lessen. The new bright blood spilling down her chin, and the blue tinge to her lips were testament to her concern that she was, indeed, broken inside. He caressed her head where old blood matted her hair and came away with a palm stained red.
For the first time in his life, he floundered, helpless in the face of her unseen injuries. He was good with a sword and axe,physically strong, and willing to face armies of galla, but this…this was beyond his capabilities. He was without a healer, and if he was right, Ildiko was dying.
The slightest wheeze of a breath escaped her mouth, then nothing. Brishen bellowed her name, spurred on by desperation to shout her recovery into existence and make her open her eyes. Neither happened, and he bent to press his ear to her breasts, seeking the weak but precious heartbeat. Still nothing.
He wasn’t a healer or a sorcerer, but he was the Khaskem and the last adult Kai to retain a pittance of Elder magic not lost or weakened by the fading of the Kai and the spell he’d wrought to rob them of their heritage in order to save them. He’d held onto those thin threads of ancient sorcery with both hands in the hopes of one day rescuing Megiddo’s eidolon from his horrific fate. He sacrificed that magic now without hesitation, without regret, summoning it from within so that it arced like lightning through his veins and muscles, sizzling down his arms and making his claws shimmer with blue light. The luminescence bathed Ildiko’s wan face, turning it into a death mask.
This was the sorcery of necromancy, once revived by a macabre spell fueled by spilled blood. It was all he had to wield as he tried to save his wife, and he poured its dark power into her dying body. It cascaded out of him, making his head spin and his vision fade until Ildiko was no more than a hazy outline of color smudged by rain.
“Please, Ildiko,” he begged her. “Don’t leave me.”
The magic continued to rush out of him with a speed that made him reel. Ildiko’s features went from hazy to sharp in his vision. Her eyes opened to stare past his shoulder to an infinite horizon. She spoke, not in a weak, whispery voice, but in two voices, both strong and powerful. One hers, the other deeper, male, familiar. Megiddo.
“Witch, open the gate for me.”
The strange command slammed an ethereal door shut, and Brishen gasped when the flow of power suddenly stopped, sending a shockwave of nausea through his gut. He rolled away from Ildiko and vomited into the bramble bush next to him. Limbs shaking, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and crawled back to where she lay.
Rain mixed with blood created pink ribbons that unfurled and dripped off her chin. She hadn’t changed position, and her eyes were closed again. Her pallor, however, was no longer the sickly gray of the dying. She was still pale but with a rosy undertone in her cheeks and her lips.
Hollowed out by the loss of his remaining magic and too frightened to pray, Brishen pressed his ear to her chest a second time and heard a heartbeat, slow and steady. Hardly daring to believe it, he put two fingers to her throat, then placed them under her nose. Her breath fanned gently over his knuckles.
The euphoric laughter erupting out of him held more than a tinge of madness. The sky answered him with a far-off crack of thunder as the storm rolled south, and the drizzle lightened to a sprinkle. Brishen clasped one of Ildiko’s hands and brought it to his mouth to press kisses across her palm and fingers. He would have kissed her lips as well were it not for the lingering sourness of bile still on his tongue.
She hadn’t awakened, but she was alive, and if he weren’t already on his knees, he would have fallen to them, a grateful supplicant before merciful gods. Her hand flexed in his grasp. Brishen held on and used his free hand to scrape away the wet tendrils of hair glued to her cheek. “Ildiko?”
A smile graced her mouth, and her eyelids gradually lifted. He inhaled sharply at the sight, squeezing her fingers until she flinched. Cerulean light ringed her irises and tinted her sclera. She stared at him for a long time without speaking. When she finally did, her voice was neither the feeble whisper of a dyingwoman nor the powerful command of two entities speaking in tandem. It was simply Ildiko, his beloved. “I’ve always wondered what the Kai might look like if they could weep.” She lifted her other hand to wipe the rain from his face. “Now I know.”
The sudden tightness in his chest rose to close his throat. He gingerly lifted her into his arms, breath held as he waited to hear a cry of pain. Instead, she draped her arms over his shoulders and pressed a kiss to his throat. She sighed in his embrace. He shuddered in hers and buried his face in her neck.
Somehow, he’d managed to heal her, though how much or in what ways, he didn’t know. Getting her off this slope without hurting her would still be a challenge. But she breathed and smiled and even joked. And while she might have a Wraith King’s magic flowing through her veins now, she no longer bled.
They held each other long enough for his knees to protest their genuflection amid the sharp rocks. The rain had completely stopped, and night lay fully upon them, made hazy by a rising fog. His vision might be sharp during the nocturnal hours, but fog blinded both Kai and human alike. If he and Ildiko didn’t leave soon, he’d have to guess his way back up the hill’s flank. “Woman of day,” he whispered near her ear. “Are you ready to come home with me?”
Ildiko’s fingers combed gently through his wet hair, her short huff of laughter warm on his skin. “As long as you don’t have a scarpatine pie waiting to celebrate my homecoming.”
