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Chapter 1
Metta hyor a los marzas. Set fire to your ships.
4000 A.C., After Chaos
King Kayno set fire to his thirteen ships one moonlit night. Having shot all the wall sentries and ship lookouts, his archers had lit their arrows and taken to the river docks. No other city or oasis existed for leagues around, and without a way across the river, Kayno’s citizens now slept in their own slaughterhouses. The gods blessed him this night; the river tide was at its highest all year, and the guards had just switched shifts. Kayno and the rest of his army waited at the other end of the city, ready to tip open the front gate.
Signaling the end of his five-year wait, a distant fireball of thirty arrows flew into the sky, fanned out, and dived behind the Palace. Kayno grinned from eye to eye, approached the front gate, and placed his hands on the intricate steel. Out of his thin, dry lips slithered the royal Lopian words. “We open to trade and not to war.”
The gods had indeed blessed his entrance. With a lengthy earth-shaking creak, the gates swung out of the shadows and into starlight, bringing with them wire depictions of river tides, crocodiles and hippopotami among papyrus stalks, farmers chasing river fowl from their wheat fields, and merchants dealing with mages and kings. Colored wire speckled the arching doors’ upper halves. Unlike the duller pictures who worshipped them from below, these glinting wire girls played in the moonlight. Stupid little things, thought Kayno. By the time two thousand shouting archers lined the walls, Kayno’s army had already slipped in.
The outer wall began to alert the city. Among the sentries, orange fire mages spat white flares from their hands, and confused Lopians scrambled out of their clay houses, screaming and stumbling over one another in the streets. Beggars ignored the flares and rushed to occupy the newly vacated homes. From the Temple, red illusion mages flooded the streets and followed the vacating citizens, turning them into black toads. Kayno’s army, however, was already upon the fleeing Lopians. They had once had their own mages, and they knew very well the leaping toads were the moving feet of their prey. They knew. Four Lopians would fall for every slash dealt above the toads’ heads.
Palace archers and scimitar men attacked Kayno from the side. Raising their shields, the invaders fended off the arrows and picked off the defending archers with their own. From their right, a wave of silver psychic mages blasted back the invaders. Now far from the fleeing Lopians, Kayno snapped an order, and all his archers halted. As soon as they had, half of the psychic mages let down their guard to throw silver daggers of light—right into the shields of Kayno’s sword ranks, who then dove to the ground. Half the silver mages were shot.
Just when Kayno’s army was ready to break through the psychic mages, a rainbow of more Lopian mages flooded into the intersection, and the army of invaders was inundated with thunderbolts, lightning, sharp leaves, magic nooses, boulders, and gravity fields. Some of Kayno’s sword wielders began sinking into the ground, too heavy to move their weapons.
The Lopians could tell, however, that something was wrong. Thrown by the hundreds, their nooses returned to them, bloodless, clean. The Head Priest shouted, “Stop!” Instantly, all the Lopian mages fell behind the psychics, who set up a shield around them all. They waited.
From clouds of dust and rubble, only one invader stepped forward. It was Kayno, alone. From behind him, golden rays of dawn shone through the front gates and past the shadow of his hooded cape. Kayno’s army had disappeared during the barrage. “You were always easily to fool,” said Kayno. He lifted his hood so that all his subjects could see the dark, sun-kissed man he had become. At this moment, none of the mage children recognized him. The rest of them all recoiled.
The Head Priest approached Kayno, amulets on hand. “Prince Totka?”
Kayno unleashed a thin, famished laugh and flashed his red eyes at the stars. “Your prince is no more. I’m your king.”
“You’re not our king.” One of the priestesses stepped forward, and suddenly, Kayno fell silent. Glaring from behind their shields of silver air, the Lopian mages' thousand robesrustled against each the deep orange drapery of a fire mage, she was also the Prophetess, whose name was the curse word on every Lopian’s lips. Though fear broiled in her eyes, none of the Prophetess’ kindred mages set up a shield for her. She needed only one look at Kayno’s blood-red eyes to speak. “It was an illusion. They’re at the docks!” Instantly, the mages, including the Head Priest, were dashing after their escaping citizens, a flurry of multi-colored robes in the approaching dawn.
Kayno dashed after them, only to be shoved back by the Prophetess’ long, powerful hand. Her robes glowed a deep, thick orange in the light of a rising sun, and a shadowy braid fell across her chest. “Nice to see you too,” said Kayno.
The priestess unsheathed twin scimitars from her belt. “I should have foreseen you would ambush us when we fled for our ships.” Overpowering the musk of fallen cinders and the stench of fallen citizens, the smell of smoking roses blew into Kayno’s nose. “This poison has waited for you for a very long time.” Her scimitar sent a golden flash down the street of flat cobbles, and Kayno could see it emitting red smoke.
“My dear, smoldering rose,” said Kayno. He closed his eyes and breathed it in. “You didn’t have to tell them that.” He approached her, but she took a striking Willow pose, drawing the points of her blades to the side. “Is this how you welcome me back?”
“The day I foresaw your return, I stopped being your wife. I know what you seek, and you will not find it here.”
“You’ve hidden them. I knew you would.” In a flash of motion, Kayno’s black nails elongated and screeched against the cobbles. They swung into position, his left claw like prison bars at his face. His right-hand nails pointed at the Prophetess. “Iah, I don’t want to fight you.”
“You’ll have to.”
“Where’s my nephew? And our daughter?”
The Prophetess swung up her scimitars with a whirr and struck at him like a spinning, thrashing tree. Like a mirage, Kayno dodged over, under, and back. The smell of smoldering rose poison blew into his lungs, and he grinned from eye to eye. “You’ve changed,” he said. “But you haven’t changed enough.” He and she had sparred when they were young, and those days came back to haunt Kayno as he sliced and jabbed at her with his claws. Neither blade nor nail made contact with the other, and the two of them danced against each other, dodging, attacking, until the Prophetess’ scimitars slapped Kayno’s arms wide open, then sliced across his chest. All that came out of him was blood-red dust.
Kayno pointed claw at her. “Move aside, Prophetess. Get away before you join my brother and his wife.”
The priestess closed in for the attack. “You’ll harm them the day you defeat me.” From the distant burning Palace, near the sabotaged docks, a flaming arrow flew down the center of the city, and in a few heartbeats, it struck her squarely in the back. She looked down and found a well-grooved arrowhead protruding from her chest. Eventually, dark trickles drew their design on the orange of her drapery.
“My good, good archers,” said Kayno, listening to her choke. “Do you know what they have signaled to me?”
The priestess fell to her knees. Slowly, the words bubbled from her throat. “Your brother and his wife—”
“Yes,” said Kayno. “The false royals are dead.”
Heaving her last breath, the Prophetess swung her scimitar at Kayno. His skin ripped like a papyrus scroll, and the sword fell back to the ground, dripping in sparkling red sand. With an orange-flecked trickle of blood down her chin, she uttered her last words. “What are you?”
Kayno’s grin grew wider. “I’m king.” As the Prophetess fell among the strewn Lopian bodies, the orange flecks disappeared from her blood, and her fire magic was gone. One of Kayno’s swordswomen appeared, bearing the golden jeweled bands of his brother and the Queen. “I bear bad news, Majesty,” said the woman, “though I bring you your crown.”
Kayno stared downat the Prophetess’ open, coal-black eyes. “What is it?” he asked.
“Your daughter and your nephew are nowhere to be found.”
Kayno’s canines gleamed yellow from under his lips. “My wife employed those stupid little things.” He looked up at the sky, and there they were, two glittering dots of light, two flying stars escaping toward the safety of day. Kayno pointed a claw at them and shot. With a greathiss, crimson snakes slithered out of his fingers. They spiraled into the two fleeing lights before they could fly past the city wall. Grinning from one eye to the other, Kayno listened to distant falling screams.
“Majesty,” said the scimitar woman, “one of them escaped.”
“The spare will be back,” said Kayno. “Gather the survivors. I have a daughter to find.”
Somewhere among the ruins of Lopus, a child screamed like the wind.
