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Ada
Kill them all.
Those three words spun inside my skull as my mind scrambled to comprehend what was happening right before my eyes.
A swell of corpses flooded the encampment outside the Æfen Gate, drowning soldiers beneath bone-shivering moans and the stomps of their feet. Whichever mortals survived the wave of death fought to its surface with their mouths agape, their faces distorted in pain, their screams tainted with panic.
To my left, a young man struggled up a sword. He severed the head off a dead woman. It was of no use.
The headless corpse gripped his face between the clasp of her fingers, letting bony digits dive into his eye sockets. A soft flurry of snow scattered around them, some flakes tainting red from the splatters of his eyes even before they landed on the battlefield.
No, not battlefield.
This was no battle.
It was a slaughter.
When a gag pushed past my esophagus without consent, Enosh placed his hand over my eyes. He shielded me from the viciousness of his vengeance as though the heart-rending screams and pitiful pleas didn’t paint bloody pictures in the blackness before my eyes.
God confound me, my diaphragm convulsed as though I could still be bothered by such a sight after living through my own death. As though something inside me wanted to take pity on these men.
No, I wouldn’t.
They deserved it.
This needed to be done.
“It’s already over, little one,” Enosh whispered into my ear as he lifted his hand from my face no more than five breaths later, sending black and white floaters through my vision.
Impossible. “What?”
“They can no longer harm us.”
Because they were all dead.
An unwelcome quiver raked through my stomach. In five breaths, Enosh had decimated the entire encampment, butchering everyone.
Aside from a few soldiers who screamed here and there.
One stumbled over his dead comrades while frantically shoving his guts back into a hole in his stomach before he sunk to the ground. Another hung from a bone pike where it had gone through his shoulder, pi
“You took what was not yours to take…” Enosh said too calmly for comfort, letting our horse climb over the carpet of slain under blood-curdling screams from those not quite dead yet. “Oh, brother… show yourself.”
And there, beside a pile of twitching corpses, appeared his brother.
The wrong one.
Enosh groaned. “When I call upon him, he won’t come. When I ask him to stay away, he sticks like shit on a rock.”
Yarin hopped over a half-dead priest and strolled toward us, his forest-green frock lined with red fox pelt that matched his boots. Of course, the God of Whispers wouldn’t be far from such… madness.
Madness that made sense.
“And here I feared it would be another dull day,” Yarin said, weaving around a corpse with chewed off arms. “There I lay at my court, in a tangle of limbs, nearly—” Frowning, Yarin glanced over his shoulder at the soldier pi
At Enosh’s dismissive wave, a bone spike drove through the man’s throat, finally relieving him of pain and suffering. “The same ca
“Wonderful, how you’re trying yourself at humor. Married life seems to have loosened you up. Anyway, I was nodding off when a barrage of the most atrocious thoughts reached me. Oh no! The King of Flesh and Bone! He will kill us all!” He glanced around, tapping a finger against his smooth-shaven cheek before he shrugged. “And so you have, brother.”
“Not all.” Enosh jutted his chin toward seven men with their arms bound behind their backs—three soldiers, two priests, and two squires—led to us by corpses. “Why are you here?”
“Believe it or not, I realized I have a personal interest in your success.”
Enosh dismounted, letting someone’s skull shatter beneath the impact of his boot before he pulled me down. “In case you are here for more holes to fuck, just know I require the bone and muscle of every soldier.”
“You’re making me sound debauched, Enosh. No, my interest is inspired by this new title I shall acquire in… let’s say nine months, plus however long Eilam remains stubborn.”
“And whatever might this title be?”
“It is really quite simple.” Yarin straightened his spine, letting a lopsided grin form a dimple beneath his cheek. “Am I not to be Uncle Yarin? Ada, is this not what you mortals call it?”
Enosh and I sighed before I said, “Yes. Uncle.”
“I shall watch the little god or goddess while you two… kill priests or… otherwise enjoy yourselves in town every now and then,” he mused. “Uncle Yarin. I quite like the sound of that.”
Well, I did not, but it couldn’t be helped now, could it? “With a madman for an uncle, what could possibly go wrong?”
“Precisely. Now that we are speaking on madness… Oh, how fine you look, Ada, with your hair decorated with feathers instead of loam.” Yarin took my hand, guiding me around the dead soldier toward an area not littered by death, and let his lips hover over my knuckles in an almost-kiss. “Mmm, undeniably my brother’s wife. But black…? Truly, there’s no life in that color. If you were my woman, I would dress you in the finest brocade, embroidered with the richest threads of gold.”
Enosh slapped his brother’s hand away and pulled me against him. “If she were your woman, which she is not, she would be dead at her own hand.”
“Yes, yes, yes, but much better dressed on her funeral.” Yarin flung himself toward a pile of still twitching corpses, only to land on a tufted daybed that had appeared out of nowhere atop them, shifting in their final struggles as the legs sunk into their flesh. “Between us, Enosh, I shall never bed a warm woman again. No, I have sworn them all off. Since this renders Eilam’s threat to kill all whores before I even touch them quite irrelevant—well, I might as well partake in this, um… divine vengeance, crusade, soiree… whatever you wish to call it.”
Enosh clenched his jaw. “If you insist, brother. But at the very least, make yourself useful and watch my wife while I call upon the third.” He lifted me over the carpet of corpses, put me on the daybed beside his brother, then leaned in for a menacing growl. “Watch. Not touch.”
“I would never. If only because your possessiveness over her might be potent enough to get an immortal killed.” The moment Enosh turned away with a sigh, Yarin let a golden platter of fruits shape in his palm and reached it to me. “Hungry? Oh, I forgot.” He tossed it away, letting apples thud against skulls and grapes scatter across limp bodies. “Dead. No good with food. My apologies.”
Enosh walked over to the bound men. “Kneel.”
At the command, the seven fell to their knees in front of the corpses, lining up before us less than ten steps from the daybed. Fear flitted across their features, eyes wide and chins trembling. One of them—a squire who probably hadn’t seen his fifteenth summer yet—soaked his breeches, letting them darken around his crotch.
“Still so young.” The sight of his rosy cheeks, red pimples, and patchy blond facial hair brought an unwelcome hollowness to my guts that I couldn’t afford. “What will Enosh do with him?”
“Something that will vex Eilam like nothing else,” Yarin said with a devious grin lining his lips. “Never got along, those two. See, Ada, Eilam gets rather flustered when we cut a mortal life short before its due time, since it affects him in a way we ca
My throat tightened. What could possibly anger the god of life more than such a slaughter, where hundreds died in seconds?
My husband slowly walked along the men lined up for death, letting the snow crunch beneath his boots before he squatted before the youngest one—the one who’d pissed himself.
“Mortal, you have a choice to make.” A bone knife formed in my husband’s palm, of which he brought the sharp end to the squire’s eye. “Deny what I ask of you, and I shall carve your eyeballs out with this, slowly. They will dangle on a string of cartilage as I hang you upside down from a tree.”
No sooner had Enosh spoken that last word, did the earth tremble. Corpses tossed on the ground about half a furlong ahead of us as a flare of wind whirled up snow, blowing it toward them.
My breathing stumbled to a halt.
No, not snow.
Bonedust wafted from the copse of trees lining this valley, the old piles of corpses around the Æfen Gate, and the open meadows behind us. It came together in an avalanche, burying slain soldiers beneath a dusting of it as it roared toward us. The dead scrambled, crawling away from…
From what?
“As it so happens, my wife is fond of trees,” Enosh said, letting his dark voice loom over the squire’s whimpers like a foreboding shadow. “So I shall grow a magnificent tree right in front of our home for the world to behold, decorated with the twitching, wailing bodies of those who betrayed their god. Starting with you, mortal.”
Raw, numbing shock looped around my organs as the waves of bone collided, sending a puff into the dreary sky. The impact alone shook the world hard enough that nearby twigs snapped and a few horses broke loose to take off in a flight, their hoofbeats a terrified substitute for my heart.
A massive tree shaped right in front of my eyes, big enough one would be able to see its crown from Hemdale and beyond. Thick branches sprouted from it, gnarled and grotesque, like the gout-ridden fingers of an old witch, left naked without a single leaf of skin.
Instead, strings of something, hair perhaps, braided themselves downward like the swamp vines on the sunken trees in the western wetlands. From there, they formed offshoots that slithered across the ground. Some of them came toward us, only to wrap around the men’s boots.
With a start, the squire glanced over his shoulder at the tree—as did the others—his mouth falling open wider the higher his gaze wandered—up toward the treetop scraping at the winter-gray clouds.
“From this tree, you shall eternally hang.” Enosh pressed the bone blade against the squire’s cheek, returning his gaze to meet the god’s with a bloody cut. “And the crows shall peck at the two holes in your face. Greedy as they are, they will peel the skin off and dig their beaks through your skull before you manage to die. Or…” He tossed the blade in the air, gripped it by its blade until blood dripped from his knuckles, then reached the handle over. “Each one of you shall take a blade and, one after another, open the veins along your arms.”