Excerpt - The Fury She Feeds

Prologue

A throne of solid gold cast scintillating reflections across a grand hall. Hundreds of gems encrusted the throne – emeralds, diamonds, opals, topaz, rubies. Any gem a man had ever mined, seen, or dreamed of caught the smoky, guttering light of torches mounted to grand columns, and the numerous refractions shifted to glow with more colors than there were stars in the night sky.

“Your Glory, you must parlay. You may yet bargain for your own life,” Decros said, his voice imploring.

Azhara neither deigned to consider the eunuch’s plea nor did she turn in her grand throne to look at him. She’d always detested his bulbous, ponderous form that required copious amounts of powder lest his sweat stains show through his robes. He lusted after her constantly, one of the few eunuchs she’d ever owned who was capable of such desires, and she occasionally indulged him, allowing his lips on her most secret of places. But never had she allowed him to do any more than please her.

Regardless of all that, Decros was the best servant she’d ever had for running her empire. His acumen for finance and law was unmatched. He couldn’t wait to sacrifice his testicles in service of her, not that he would have had a choice.

She sat upon the throne that had cost a king’s ransom to craft and stared across the hall. White marble tile stricken with veins of gold had been laid throughout it’s five hundred foot length. Two dozen columns, each sheathed in silver and bearing an iron protected torch, rose to the vaulted ceiling some hundred feet overhead.

With the exception of the ritual chamber protected by a small, iron banded door set into the wall behind her throne, Azhara spent all of her time in the palace’s single grandest room. She ruled from her throne and dined there. In the northeast corner, a set of arches adorned with scarlet silken draperies led to her bed, and in the northwest corner, an enormous marble tub had been laid into the floor. It was large enough for four people, and it often contained so many as she tended to indulge her more hedonistic desires.

“Your Glory,” Decros urged.

“Silence,” Azhara snapped, “your voice made high by loss of your balls offends me.”

“Sorry, Your Glory,” Decros replied, lowering his face toward the floor.

Two bronze clad guards flanked the twenty foot tall double doors on the far side of the hall, swords drawn and shield ready. She watched them. At first glance, they appeared not to react to the clanging of bronze and screaming of men beyond the doors. But the more she studied them, the more nervous they appeared. Both men’s eyes darted around her hall, and she wondered how much bravery they would show when the barbarians of Solkar pounded on the doors.

Would they stand and fight? Would they surrender, or would they flee? No, the last wasn’t an option. They knew she’d melt their bronze armor to their flesh, broiling them alive if they fled. Such would be petty, spiteful, but her subjects had learned just how petty she could be during her seven hundred year rule.

She had always known this day would come. The Second Age, the millennia of sorcerous rulers and bronze, was coming to an end. Her contemporaries, rivals and allies alike, refused to believe it, but Azhara had seen it during one of her rituals over four hundred years ago. She sought to stave it off, but her lands did not border the great plains of the barbarians and their hordes, and the others would not listen. As much as they respected her power – Cepheus, Ignium, Golgarath – they did not believe her, disregarding her vision as a mere dream brought on by a drugged haze.

And then a barbarian king learned the secret of forging a new metal. It was stronger than bronze and held a keener edge longer. The bronze swords of the Second Age bent under its assault, and it rent bronze armor asunder almost as easily as flesh and bone. Solkar united a hundred tribes under carnage wrought by this new metal called steel, and one by one, the others fell.

Azhara was all that remained, and her lands fell to the horde no differently than had all the others. It was foretold to her. As the Second Age died, the Third Age was born, and it was an age of mortal men, steel, war, and bloodshed.

But no Age was eternal, a fact Azhara made plain to her fellow sorcerers. One day, her Age would come again. Patience.

The battle reached the doors to her hall. The two guards inside her hall came away from the door and turned to face it, weapons at the ready. The ringing of steel and rending of bronze sounded from the hall beyond as her final defenders met the onslaught. Men cried out in pain and death as they were cut down by indifferent steel. Within seconds, all fell silent, and her last guards shifted their weight from one foot to the other, throwing each other uneasy glances.

They jumped when something collided with the bronzed doors, a deep boom echoing through the columned hall. Muffled by the doors, Azhara heard raised voices followed by more thudding impacts and then the scrabbling of many feet on stone.

There was no mistaking a man’s voice shouting, “Battering ram!”

“We have some time, Your Glory. Perhaps we should make peace with our gods,” Decros suggested.

“Pathetic. I was right to take your balls from you. You never needed them,” Azhara sneered. Her voice carried to her guards across the hall, though she didn’t care to raise it, “Unbar the door. Let them in.”

The guards turned to face her, their faces masks of uncertainty, and Decros hissed, “Your Glory!”

As pleasurable as the cool gold was against her naked olive skin, she pushed away from her throne. She wore a single garment – a teal veil of sheer silk about her loins. Except for Decros, the men present averted her eyes from her. Seven hundred years, and yet her figure stayed young, firm, and full. Womanly perfection.

Her people bore a weighty cost in blood and souls to keep Azhara so youthful, but it was a cost she was willing to pay. Of the other three, only Ignium endeavored to remain so young and strong. The other two had been happy to only keep themselves alive, spending hundreds of years as old, bag of bones sorcerers. Azhara delighted in the pleasures of the flesh and found her lovers more enthusiastic when she appeared younger.

The guards stared at her, pure hesitation rather than a lack of comprehension. Their eyes darted to each other and then Decros, before one asked, “Your Glory?”

Azhara turned to gaze at her chief advisor with dark eyes that matched her near black, straight hair. Many men had been enraptured by that gaze over the centuries, and many had found her needs and desires as fickle and tempestuous as the seas. She moved close to him, placing one hand on his cheek while the other reached into his robes. His cheek, like the rest of his body that had never been tempered by physical activity, was as soft as the tender flesh of the girls she slew to keep her youth.

“My dear, Decros, we’ve reached the end,” she whispered. His knees seemed to weaken even as other parts of him grew stronger. “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky, Your Glory?” he replied with hitched breath, and he ground his teeth to control himself under her tender ministrations.

“Yes. Many eunuchs are incapable of this,” she said with a glance down.

“A curse, Your Glory,” Decros disagreed, “for your touch is the only one I’ve craved, and you only give it to me now in the last minutes of our lives.”

“And that is all of it you’ll receive,” Azhara said, removing her hand from inside his robes. While Decros rearranged his robes, she turned back to her pair of guards and said, “Unbar the doors. Allow the barbarians entry.”

“Your Glory,” one said with a half bow. Both men sheathed their swords and placed their great round shields against the wall. Two heavy bars, each ten feet long, a foot wide, and several inches thick rested across the doors. The men groaned as the two heaved a load meant for three or four at least. They moved off to one side and let the bar down with an echoing clatter on the stone floor before setting to the task again.

No sooner had they lifted the second bar from its brackets before the doors slammed inward. They knocked the guards backward with the impact, and one lost his balance, sprawling to the floor. Men streamed through the open doors, and their swords slew Azhara’s guards before the men could react.

She stood before her throne, confident and defiant before the barbarian hordes that filled her hall. They surrounded her, forming a semi-circle of flesh and steel that kept a healthy five or six yards between them and the sorceress. With a shuffling of slippered feet, Decros slid up behind Azhara, as if she could or would shield him from these men and their bloodlust.

“Make way! Make way!” a gravelly voice called.

They did as the voice demanded, pulling back to open a channel in the middle of the crowd. A man strode toward Azhara. He was not unattractive despite the silvery touch of the years at his temple and in his unshaven beard. He wore a full suit of steel plate armor stained red from fighting, and it rang softly as his sabatons struck stone. A heavy steel longsword hung at his belt, and he kept one hand on its hilt to angle the weapon so the point of his scabbard didn’t drag. As he neared, she saw a face and hands that had bronzed from years in the sun. He walked past his men and came to a halt less than ten feet away from Azhara.

“You,” she said, “are not Solkar.”

“Nay, Your Glory, I am not,” he said, his voice strong but respectful. “I am his servant and general, Kortho. I have come with an offer for Your Glory.”

“You invade my lands and kill my subjects to make an offer?” Azhara asked, her voice angry, incredulous.

“It was important that you understand you have lost, Your Glory. That way, you may recognize just how charitable Emperor Solkar’s offer is.”

“Emperor Solkar,” Azhara sneered, “a barbarian playing at rulership.”

“He is our ruler, by his own hand,” Kortho nodded. “The empire now stretches from the eastern sea to your lands. You are the last of the sorcerers. The others are dead.”

“They were weak.”

“And yet here we stand in the halls of Vehrak Thul, your city-palace fallen. All that remains is you and your,” Kortho paused as distaste crossed his face, “servant. All else are dead or have surrendered to me.”

“Speak your offer, worm,” Azhara said, her tone unshaken by the facts.

“Emperor Solkar offers you your life.”

“In exchange for what?” Azhara spat, knowing the answer.

“That you become his consort and teach him your ways.”

“How dare you!” she hissed. “Lay with that pig-spawn? Teach him my ways? His mortal life would run out before his low mind could grasp the first secret.”

“Emperor Solkar,” Kortho said slowly, taking in a deep breath to force himself to remain calm, “already has learned much from the journals of Ignium. He may rule for a hundred lifetimes.”

“Ignium,” Azhara sighed, and she spat something to her right. “That stupid, old fool. He knew better than to write down any of our secrets. I would flay him alive for all eternity for such stupidity.”

“Perhaps,” Kortho agreed, “but he is already dead. Solkar allows you one day to consider his offer.”

“One day, one year, one thousand years!” Azhara cried, her voice echoing throughout her hall. “I need none of them! The answer is no!”

“Then I am to bring back your head,” Kortho said with a shrug.

Azhara laughed then, a deep, throaty chuckle that came from deep within her core. At least a hundred men surrounded her, all of them brandishing weapons of steel, most encased in armor of the same, and yet they shifted from one foot to the other. As she continued in her mirth, they shot each other worried glances and held their weapons more tightly.

“Then come strike me down.” Azhara lowered her voice, her eyes growing even darker as if they were windows looking out into an abyss. “I promise that none of you will leave here alive. Whose steel will try first?”

But it wasn’t steel that struck Azhara down, and she never saw the blow coming. From somewhere under his robes, Decros produced a bronze bladed dagger. As weak as the metal was compared to the Solkarites’ steel, flesh was no match for it. He plunged it once into the bare skin of her back. The blade pierced Azhara to the left of her spine and under her ribcage, angled upward so that the point passed through her heart. A perfect blow struck by a master assassin, a talent of his even she wasn’t aware of.

As her blood spurt onto the bronze blade and over his hand, the hilt glowed as hot as the sun in Decros’ hand. He willed his hand to release the dagger, but he couldn’t. As it seared and melted his skin and the flesh underneath, the eunuch would have given anything to take back his revenge. His moment of satisfaction had been taken from him, replaced by the most intense pain he’d ever known.

His hand burst into flames first, white hot and more infernal than any forge in the world could manage. They spread up his arm, wrapping his entire body in fire that burned away his robes in the blink of an eye. His body went next, the fat of his ponderous stomach, back, and thighs bubbling and boiling away. His eyes melted almost instantly, the humor sizzling and vaporizing. His eardrums blew at once so he couldn’t hear his own screams.

The men of Solkar shrank away from the devilry. Even Kortho took several uneven steps backward, but it was pointless. As Decros wailed in his agonizing death, so did the sorceress Azhara. Her head thrown backward, her eyes and open mouth faced the ceiling of her palace hall in the dead city of Vehrak Thul.

The ground shook so that no man could stand upright. They shouted in alarm and scrambled toward the exit only to be knocked down again by the quakes. Blocks of stone fell from the walls and ceiling, columns collapsed to crush men by the dozen.

Somewhere within the city-palace, the ground rent asunder, and the molten blood of the mountains spilled forth. Sulfur spewed from peaks across the range, blanketing the land with horrific miasma. Men fell to the ground, choking on the fumes, and they were the lucky ones. For many more fell under the onslaught of molten lava that poured from a dozen volcanoes or were swallowed by the very ground.