The Ippos King (Wraith Kings #3) - Grace Draven Page 0,2
to warm his fingers before reaching for a quill. Tantalizing aromas of herbs and spice drifted to his nose from the still hot teapot, but breakfast would have to wait a little longer.
The ink in the inkwell had thickened to sludge, and he held the glass over another lit candle until the flame warmed and thinned the ink. He looked forward to writing this letter. Brishen had replied to the previous letters to him with an invitation to visit Saggara and partake of its hospitality. Belawat might consider Bast-Haradis an uneasy neighbor at best and a possible enemy at worst, but Serovek considered Brishen Khaskem a friend and looked forward to seeing him once more.
His lips turned up in a smile as he wrote. Winter had enforced a near total isolation for the garrison. Except for the necessary descent into the lowlands for patrol, those of High Salure had stayed close to home to wait out the snows and avalanches. It had been three months since Serovek crossed into Kai territory to visit the Khaskem and his pretty human wife.
And his magnificent second-in-command, sha-Anhuset.
The quill paused in its scratching on the parchment. Serovek rubbed absently at his midriff, a habit these days he hadn’t bothered trying to break. Every so often his muscles there would contract—memory of a moment when the Kai woman had rammed a sword blade into his gut with all her formidable strength before wrenching it free on a gush of agony and blood. The act hadn’t been one of aggression but of brutal necessity, and he knew, down to his bones, that were the Kai able to weep as humans did, tears would have welled in sha-Anhuset’s firefly eyes when she stabbed him.
He sighed and returned to writing. Mooning over the dour Anhuset only served to distract him from his purpose, and he put her from his mind to concentrate on his message to Brishen. When he finished, he sanded the parchment, folded it closed and sealed it with a wax stamp of his family crest.
There were plans to be made and his own trusted seconds to meet with, men who had held High Salure for him when he left to battle the galla and would do so again when he brought Megiddo’s body to the monastery where he once served as a heretic cenobite of Faltik the One.
His lightened mood, brought on by the anticipation of visiting friends at the new Kai capital, darkened once more. He blew out the candle, watching as black smoke from the extinguished wick rose in a serpentine spiral. Some of the galla moved like smoke, sinuous and choking. Others jittered and splayed like skeletal puppets pulled by a madman’s strings, their twisted limbs and black-fanged maws dancing to a discordant tune that made the ears of the living bleed.
He clapped a hand over his midriff a second time, remembering the feel of the galla swarming him and the spectral vuhana he rode. Even now, a crawling sensation purled along his skin and up his spine.
Galla had swarmed the lower chamber where the wound of the world pulsed and birthed the abominations as fast as he and his fellow Wraith kings butchered them.
Serovek’s heart tripped several beats at the memory of Andras’s desperation as he tried to claw the monk free of the hul-galla’s grip. The horde wrapped around Megiddo’s body like murderous lovers, a gleeful, writhing, gibbering mass. But it was Megiddo’s expression—that bleak acceptance of his horrific fate—that haunted Serovek most, his last word, a dirge that threaded his darkest dreams.
“Farewell.”
Chapter Two
You learn from your enemy; your enemy learns from you.
Anhuset
The sharp crack of a silabat stick against armor sounded loud in the room as did the curses that followed. Ildiko Khaskem careened into the wall before ricocheting back into the arms of her attacker.
Anhuset caught her neatly before pushing her back to the center of the imaginary circle in which they sparred. She spun the offending silabat in her hand with a casual flick of her wrist and offered the scowling hercegesé a faint smile. “You’re slow this evening, Highness. Maybe you should tell my cousin to leave you be for a day.”
Such familiar teasing didn’t go beyond the chamber’s closed door. Outside, Anhuset adhered strictly to the protocol of address and rank. Here though, with the human duchess as her student and she the teacher, Anhuset relaxed her rigid rules a little. And the hercegesé seemed to enjoy it.