Thief of Destiny: The Collected Saga of the Panther Read online

  Quiet to her words, Manwe squinted against the azure light of the stone, remembering how he had stolen it from the deepest depths of a subterranean city conquered by the same evil that had taken his first love, the fence Toba.

  He remembered the young girl he had murdered to win it.

  "If these days aren't jokes now, I fear to see when they are," he said, deep and low. "Voduni Calla will lay waste to the guilty and innocent alike and all they will have is the ruin of a world where nothing, good or ill, shall ever rise again. If that is revolution, then I would find it as laughable as you did."

  "How long do we have?"

  Manwe pressed his lips together until the feeling left. "I'd rather not guess."

  One of the vodunis broke away from the circle in the next room. A tall, muscular man dressed in scraps of old rawhide and chain armor, he greeted Manwe and Folami with a firm nod of acknowledgment.

  "What do the kindred think, Voduni Ogun?" Manwe asked. "Was our sojourn to the underworld worthwhile?"

  "Very much so, thief." A scarred man, Voduni Ogun folded his hands before him. "The power of the stone is immense, pure... the kind of thing one would need to combat Calla's evil. The ghouls should shy from it, but he won’t."

  Manwe's shoulders drooped, accepting the truth for what it was. "So, whoever faces him will have to get close. Close enough to kill."

  "Yes." Turning halfway to where his brothers and sisters revered what may have been their only chance at salvation, every fiber tensed as Voduni Ogun stared—not at the light, or the stone, or even the room, but something past it. "A mere soldier could brave the course to him, but I suspect a sorcerer would fare better with it."

  "We have one of those," Folami remarked.

  The tall voduni glanced back at her with a kind expression. "That we do."

  Manwe refocused on the blue stone, eyes set on its glowing glory. "We will have to find a way to let the innocent escape the city before the dead are upon us. Can the city vodunis help with that?"

  "We are already in preparation with the Five Fences." The voduni smiled, an out-of-place thing for a man who seemed nothing if not stoic. "You two should be commended. For the longest time, the choices were war or subjugation, never compromise. If the Senate Consul is a man of his word and ends slavery after all this is over, then there will be a new age, Panther. An age you, Folami, and that lovely sorcerer birthed."

  "Then to the death with the old one first," Manwe said, trying his best to sound appreciative. "Let us go, then."

  Final agreements made, the plans for their roles set, the city vodunis exited the abandoned shop with Folami in tow, headed off to gather the people they would march out of Tolivius. Where they would go, how they would treat each other—such worries meant little to Manwe when he was left behind with the stone.

  Walking to the table it rested on, he vexed, his face bathed in the odd cold its azure light shed. He whispered to no one, or someone, be they there or beyond his small prayer. A sigh that could have become a whimper of sadness, he palmed the stone to snuff its illumination.

  Onward the dead marched, burnt, decayed, shuffling as they crossed the fields of Tolivius' southern farmsteads cutting down any living things they came across. The few survivors of Kosey’s living army, a few dozen teenage boys and girls that had survived the battle with the Gypus' imperial force, slaughtered those they found hidden in barns—no matter if they were Juutan or Gypian, free or enslaved.

  All innocents were enemies under the order of Voduni Calla.

  The first calls came in the middle of the clouded night, when the gods wove thick curtains of storms to hide the stars. Manwe wondered at his people's own gods and their ways as he stood on the city's white walls, long the symbol of the Juutan oppression. His hands and arms wrapped in old canvas up to the elbow, his feet covered in a pair of war sandals plucked from an emptied armory, he watched them come, line after line.

  This was not what Toba had wanted. This was not what he had wanted.

  All people free, Juutan or not, left to love and be left alone. For others to be treated with the dignity they were born with from the Mother's womb. That was what he had dreamed of.

  Not this. Not evil.

  And yet he had made this so, he realized when the horde cleared the farmsteads and crowded the packed dirt highway leading to the southern gates. Every home robbed, every jewel stolen, he had helped this awful thing come to be—first out of patriotism, and then vengeance. Vengeance of the kind Voduni Calla carried in his heart to infect those Manwe had called comrades.

  Were any of them still alive, ravenous and wild in Kosey's band of lucky few, or were they somewhere in the mass of the desecrated? Was Karlee, the young boy who had been so brave at Aemon's Fort?

  Manwe did not know, thumbing his knife's edge while studying the formations the Gypians sent to defend their gates while its citizens fled north. Freed or enslaved, brown or tan, lawful or lawless, they went together, made equal by the doom that had come to claim them.

  Tears filled his vision when he heard the barks of the commanders in the tunnel below him. He might never see Folami again, thinking on how he had never told her how much of an equal he thought her to be, or inform Sophicus about how right the fence had been about revolutions.

  He didn't say goodbye to Magera, the priestess of the Goddess of Love and his truest friend.

  Where was she?

  The smell of dead ghoul flesh, roasted by the pitch their fell master had covered them in, reached his nose first. Their moans, broken noise that found no harmonies, rose in cacophonic chorus from hell. Tens of thousands spread in a disheveled line, left to a lone order.

  Destroy, he heard the dead sing.

  Destroy.

  "Silver for your mind, Panther?"

  Startled, Manwe sprang, his knife bared for a fight.

  Cleon—handsome, ethereal Cleon—stood on the parapet they shared, that knowing smile plastered on his beguiling mouth. The sorcerer had sheathed himself in a leather cuirass and soft leather gloves. The red cloth of his robe shimmered in the dull gloom of the night's endless shadow, just a small hint of his magic at play.

  Calmed, Manwe reset his vigil, hoping to spy out where their wicked enemy might be. "Calla will have to be found quickly. We may number a thousand, but his forces number more. It is important that he dies quickly and that we destroy his stone."

  "Oh, that will happen."

  "Only if we put in the work."

  Cleon chuckled. "I've always liked that about you, Manwe. In fact, I love you for it."

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "The focus. The willingness to do what you think is right, no matter the outcome. It is something not many have."

  Manwe darkened at the compliment. "Would that less had it."

  Cleon touched Manwe's face, a light sensation as he drew him around so that they looked into each other's eyes. The sorcerer smiled widely at him, containing a happiness the latter could not match. Faces closed, lips met, and for a brief second, even Manwe could find no reason to fear.

  Until the scene bubbled and hazed.

  Lightness bled into his every nerve of his body. Manwe's knees gave away. Swooping in a red blur, Cleon caught him in his arms, a place of warmth that threatened to pull down the dark into the place of dreams and sleep.

  "Cleon... what have you..." Manwe fought make words.

  "Oh, Panther." The sorcerer cooed like the mischievous lover he was, proud at the sweetness he had accomplished. Manwe felt the sorcerer slip a hand into his loincloth and extract the blue stone he had placed within, its weight wrapped in a small wad of cloth. "Did you really think I’d make it so easy?"

  Cleon strutted toward the gates, whistling a merry tune his mother had taught him when they lived in Gypus' dark streets. Oh, those years... pickpocketing during the day for bits of bread and gruel, hiding from sight when her callers would come for their few minutes of pleasure at night. It had been a hard life before he found his talents at s
pells and spying, after he was discovered by...

  No, too much. He did not want to tell that story.

  Oh, he looked marvelous. He had picked the breastplate out of the Senate Consul's personal armory, leaving Marcus to curse about the iron armor he'd have to lug to the gates. Say what he would, Cleon at least respected the little shit for having a fine sense of quality. The softness of the harness, the rich brown of the crafted leather—oh, he did look marvelous. The armor matched well with the red.

  Under the torn skies he tarried, noticing how the smoke from the ruined fields outside the walls had overrun Tolivius’ skies, a portent he thought appropriate for what waited on ahead. A hot breeze eddied like snakes in the alleys, leaving the coming night steamy. On high, he spotted an eagle, its tawny span far from where they usually flew. Another omen, he guessed, sent from the gods of Gypus.

  "You're probably wondering why this matters," he said to the predator as he made for Tolivius' southern gate. "See, looking good is the difference between being remembered for ten years and being remembered for a thousand. Stories work like this: you have a hero, which is my Manwe, and you have a villain, which was me before the real villain—a fascist, no less—appeared and ruined what was going to be a very saucy tale. The sex we could have had... I personally blame the people who said nothing during this entire tragedy. Audiences love a good speech about how they are going to make things better, but nobody wants to get their hands bloody over what they did wrong. Manwe did, and that's why I respect—"

  Cleon stopped in his tracks and touched his lips with a finger. "No, it is why I love him. I may not agree with his views, but nothing is sexier than a man of conviction, which is lacking in most of you gods with your white towers built of sand, or you victims who decry every microscopic thing with no regard that people are suffering, enduring, surviving, and moving on to actually help make the world a better place for others like them. You, the ‘elite’, with your feckless selves and your undeniably broken kids."

  The eagle cried back at him.

  "Have you met me?" he asked, booming with amusement. The march for the gates continued. "Now look at Manwe again: blacker than black, queerer than queer, wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a knife, and not a pretty one at that. For the heavenly dull-wits like you, he is a representation of heroic purity, the kind of thing myths are made of. Minimalistic, rugged, and willing to do everything needing to be done, even it means he gives life and limb for others. I find it foolish when I consider you lot, yet he is so terribly inspiring."

  Turning at the corner of a rundown street he was sure had been beautiful once, the soles of his hobnailed sandals—the finest to be found and sent from Gypus' most revered cobbler, by the way—clacked on the gray stones. "Now, I'm not a hero. I'm a spy and provocateur, skulking in the shadows or gallivanting at parties in the best fashions. I use my power for my whims and my whims alone. Some of you petty little boys and girls will say something about lawfulness and evil. Spare me. I'm me, not your categories. You'd be lucky with your bum-lives to be even near as glorious as I have made myself. Praise-be to god complexes."

  He spotted the mass of volunteer soldiers lined up before the tunnel, an ancient channel made of dingy white stone with two great elephant statues on either side, gaudy accoutrements that threw back to when the conquerors appropriated the conquered as a method of subjugation. These fighters would die tonight, brave but forgotten.

  And so might Cleon.

  "So why am I doing this, if this is a foolish end with a foolish hope that you undeserving may sup on its miracles?" He halted for a moment to check his robes for the tools he had brought.

  There was his copper wand, a few potions that did interesting things he'd not reveal at the moment, some old nails that would come in handy, and a hammer—a plain hammer, made for smashing rocks apart. He'd need that. "Well, the answer is complicated, as love always is. I can't let Manwe throw his life away for people who will never appreciate it, and second... well, heroes have a way of making us better queens."

  The battle, probably the first that ever mattered to the sorcerer, waited beyond the tunnel.

  "If you would excuse me," Cleon said dismissively, "I have to go be better than the insensitive prick that I clearly am. For love, life, and the fight for freedom, I guess."

  Cleon waved his wand to the side, drawing the fire he conjured like a great ribbon. It licked alight any of the ghouls near enough to be ignited by its heat. A stupid thing, he thought, that Voduni Calla would revive the dead with such a flammable substance, a clear miscalculation among many that the wicked priest had made.

  The length of red copper in his right hand, the blue stone in his left, he focused his power through its many facets and chambers instead of the more delicate instrument of his body. Impressed with the bauble, he marveled at its ability to manifest even the most complex of desires, a focus he had researched into distinctly, as all sorcerers at some point do, during his time under the tutelage of Gypus’ greatest sorcerers.

  His flaming tongue dissipated. Bringing the tip of his wand to the stone as charred ghouls fell, dead and destroyed, he swirled it around the edges of its cut corners, summoning forth another conflagration, this time a curved bar of fire that held itself solid beyond the line of burnt corpses. The barrier served its function, causing the oncoming tide of ghouls to slow their approach.

  Arrows and stones flew down from the wall behind him, downing undead struck in the head while turning others into hobbling pincushions, horrifying sights Cleon thought amusing given the hellish comedy of the world. Over fifty thousand attacked, only to be decimated by his great power. It had been enough to convince Marcus and his volunteer militia to retreat to the city, preparing a way for the peltasts and archers posted on the parapets.

  "They're not doing much," Cleon said, scanning the field for what came next. "But sometimes you need to let people feel like they are important to the task. The Panther is much better at that than I am. I don't need to organize a city, after all."

  One of the ghouls made it past the firewall, its bones revealed through the popping blisters that exploded yellow pus. Arms raised, it came at Cleon, leaving chunks of flesh behind with every step it took. The knees boiled, bones blackened, both legs broke before it reached Cleon. Writhing for a few seconds in one last attempt to reach the sorcerer, the ghoul stilled.

  "Perhaps I gave this voduni too much credit," he said in sing-song, daring whatever god listened.

  The creeping dead ceased their constant march, locked in place where they stopped. A green flare from the farmlands, a fan large enough that it set the smoke of the destruction and magic to a ruddy green, appeared in the distance. Booms shattered the air, distortions that twisted reality in glasslike cracks. The explosions grew closer, closer, until it sounded as if a giant marched upon the city.

  "Oh, come now, you dramatic sows," Cleon chastised with a wry smile. “He’s just showing off. Watch this.”

  Without thought, he tapped his wand on the azure crystal he held, drawing a bit of its power. A small point of blue held itself to the copper tip until he pointed it at the smoking clouds above. A burst of light, blinding the world, flashed and subsided instantly. Rain fell from heaven, drops of gold that caught the debris in the air, banishing it in a period of minutes as all fires were snuffed out. For those who watched from the wall, the brief respite offered more. They cheered when the shower ended, alive and loud, seeing the starry sky and the beautiful face of the moon in a time when they had never expected to see it again. Songs, of Juut and of Gypus, choired in the heights, their faces washed clean of grime.

  Cleon paid them no attention.

  No, instead the sorcerer focused on what his exorcism of evil had revealed, a haunting figure dressed in robes darker than his walnut flesh, with the fabric cut and stitched in places so his shoulders lay bare. With that skin barred, the mass of scars made by a slaver's whip displayed themselves, pale and gnarled. A gaudy vulture's skull, strung with le
ather, hung around his neck. Green magic pulsed from its hollow eyes. The voduni came bearing a short staff, a knife tucked in the yellow sash binding his robe shut, and behind him rested a trio of hens in a wooden cage.

  "You and your chickens,” Cleon said. “I guess you will be blowing fire next and rolling your eyes into the back of your head. Maybe a little dance and shuffle as well, right?"

  Voduni Calla, his eyes sunken, stared unblinking.

  Cleon stared back, his cocksure grin widening. The two men, experts in the arts arcane, stood like statues on the field they had chosen, a sloping hill posted in scores of ghouls that neither moved, or sounded, or saw.

  "I remember you," Voduni Calla said. "You were there."

  "Excuse me?"

  "When they took me to Gypus. When they caught me for escaping for trying to free my wife—you were there."

  Cleon's smile waned. "You'll have to forgive me, dear, but we've never met. I've met many loathsome individuals in my time, and I would have remembered you."

  "I wasn't me then," the voduni replied. "I was just a slave tied to a block. You were there when they whipped me. You were there when they gave me these." Calla lifted his arms slightly, bringing attention to the wounds on his shoulders.

  The red-robed sorcerer shrugged. "Maybe? I saw a lot of prisoners whipped, not only Juutans. Pays not to run away, I guess."

  "You're a slaver."

  "Guilty."

  "You're a traitorous Gypian."

  "By birth and culture," agreed Cleon.

  "Then why did the god of this story, if it lasts, deign to make you the hero instead of me?"

  Cleon burst out in laughter. "Because I never set out to desecrate the dead, you twit, or convinced innocents to drown themselves in pitch. You can cry out your title as a freedom fighter but you are nothing, if anything, but a terrorist who hides behind perceived holiness."

  "There are no innocents," Calla shouted. "Just those who suffer and those who make others suffer! I decided long ago to be neither, to master myself and bring my people forth!"