Acacia Omnibus by David Anthony Durham

Author:David Anthony Durham
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: 01 Fantasy

Chapter Twenty-Four

Even though he lived every moment of it, Rialus managed to disbelieve the entire ordeal. How could he credit such madness? What in all his years of life would have prepared him for the shoving, blood-spattered, roaring chaos that erupted after Devoth beheaded Sire Neen? The Ishtat soldier beside him lost his arm at the shoulder. His scream was so horrific that Rialus felt like it came from his own mouth. The flailing man drenched Rialus in a spray of blood, which he slipped in as he tried to back away. There, on the floor, he was smeared across the stones, stepped on, and kicked. He swam through bodies and severed limbs and once found his fingers entangled in a leagueman’s entrails. He had retched so hard and long he would happily have coughed up his internal organs to end it.

If all that was not bad enough, when he was yanked up off the floor it was an Auldek hand that gripped him; Auldek hands slapped sense into him; Auldek eyes probed his. As they dragged him from the chamber, he saw not one living Acacian. It was hard for him to remember what he saw, but he knew it had to have been a scene of hellish carnage.

When they left him alone, Rialus’s thoughts flew away from the details of his present horror. He thought through the pain to recall Gurta. He recalled all the things that had been, that might have been, and that had slipped from his grasp. She had loved him. Really she had. She had said so time and again in her plain, lowborn Acacian. He had seen her love on her soft-featured face and felt it in her caresses and known the truth of it when her body welcomed him each evening—as well as during the morning, afternoon, sometimes in the wee hours of the night. He had planted a child in her. Imagine that! A part of him living within her. Rialus made immortal! A boy child to carry his name and build up his fortune, a child he alone could educate about the world and shape in his image. Better than that, he could shape him in the image of what Rialus dreamed he might have been.

Now that fatherly role was destroyed. It seemed so dim and distant a possibility that Rialus gave himself over to grief. He did not know what was to happen to him, but he knew nothing would ever be the same. He cried, sobbed. He writhed on the floor in physical and emotional anguish, spitting out the blood that pooled in his mouth.

He was in just such throes of self-pity when Calrach found him. The Numrek crouched beneath the low door frame and entered the room. His bulk immediately made the space seem tiny, uncomfortably cramped. He stood a moment, taking Rialus in, and then asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

Rialus focused on him and, despite his misery, tried to find a way to answer the question. Nothing he could come up with seemed the right thing to say to the Numrek.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.