“Ah, you are a lucky god!” he said, quaffing deeply on his wine. “Such beauties would be the envy of any ruler in this world. I used to have a very impressive harem myself, you know. Before…”
His face fell and his hands started to shake. The trauma of being possessed by the Warlock was still too raw and fresh to simply look past.
“Have some more wine, Glorious Emperor.” I gestured to his goblet.
Getting drunk would steady his nerves for a while, and help him at least to forget, even if only temporarily. He gulped down another big swig of wine, and his hands stopped trembling.
“I should have stopped that demon when I could have,” he muttered, “when he was weak and vulnerable. But I thought he was just another conman, just another charlatan who would make some quick gold off gullible fools and then disappear. How wrong I was, how stupid I was. And when he first started getting his claws into me, I tried to brush it off as a regular illness, even though I knew, deep down, that it was anything but …”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” I said. “You couldn’t have known what he was planning, and what he was going to do.”
He nodded, but defeat and guilt remained on his face and in his eyes. I could see that it would take a long time for him to get over what he’d done to his kingdom. After dinner, the Emperor sent a sparrow with a message signed with his personal seal to his most important official in Gongxiong, instructing him to allow my army onto Yengish soil with immediate effect.
We ourselves set off late in the afternoon, carrying an official document from the Emperor that we could show to any officials who gave us trouble. No longer did we have to travel in disguises and pretend we were itinerant entertainers or merchants; now we were able to openly carry our weapons. As for the Emperor’s elite warriors who I’d killed and raised as zombies, the palace armorers painted their equipment black and gray to mark them as my own troops.
The last embers of daylight burned faintly on the western horizon when an exhausted sparrow came flying over to Yumo and landed on her shoulder. The bird, one of her own flock of messengers, had a tiny scroll on its leg. Yumo was uncharacteristically gentle and sweet as she handled the little creature, removed the scroll, and read through it. When she looked up, I could see something was seriously wrong.
“It’s from my sister,” she said. “She, Elyse, Isu, and my parents have barricaded themselves in a cave in the mountains near my parents’ village. They’ve been besieged by the Warlock’s reptilian beasts, and it’s only a matter of time before the monsters break through the barricades …”
“How fast can we get there?” I asked.
“If we ride the panthers and cut through the woods to the west, we could be there by dawn tomorrow.”
“Then we leave right now; there’s no time to waste. My new undead warriors can sprint behind us, but if they get left behind, so be it. They can always catch up with us later.” I turned to address the rest of the party. “Everyone, there’s been a slight change in plans. We’re going to be getting to the Warlock’s territory a lot sooner than expected. Mount your panthers; we’re sprinting at full speed through the night, no rest! And tomorrow at dawn, we’re killing some monsters.”
We left the palace with little fanfare, and the Emperor asked for a final divine blessing before we traipsed through the City of Jewels. Before we could cross into the forest, Ji-Ko called out to me, and I called the panthers to a halt.
Ji-Ko pointed behind me. “A storm is coming, God of Death.”
He was right. On the horizon, a vast mass of black storm clouds was gathering. Violet flickers of lightning flashed at rapid intervals. It was no natural storm, I knew that much. The Warlock wanted revenge, and he was marshaling all his powers to get it.
We’d have more cover from lightning strikes in the woods. Then again, I recalled my father telling me as a boy that in a lightning storm, you didn’t want to be around trees. Even so, it was probably a better bet than being out on the open plains, where the Warlock had a clear view of us and could fire at will with his lightning bolts.
As the storm clouds billowed and blackened the darkening sky, we all mounted our panthers and kicked them into full-speed sprints. The beasts veered off the road and plunged into the long grass of a field, the darkness of the open woods looming at the far end. I sent a command to my new undead Yengish warriors to follow us at a sprint. They would get left behind, of course, but hopefully they would reach us sometime the next day.
We raced into the blackness of the close-packed trees, and in the shadows I felt safer. A hundred of pairs of unfriendly eyes watched us, but none of the forest beasts dared to attack, not with us mounted on a pack of the region’s apex predators. My night vision was much improved after becoming a god, but when I viewed the world through my mount’s eyes, the inky darkness became clear as day. Even at the beasts’ furious speed, this allowed us to easily navigate the forest.
I could feel the Warlock’s wrath in the air, and hear his screams of rage carried on the howling gale. He couldn’t see us but he knew we were in here. He wouldn’t let us leave alive.
The first lightning strike hit about a mile ahead of us, accompanied by a thunderclap loud enough to make my skull feel as if it had exploded. The second lightning strike was even further away, perhaps
