Free Phoenix in Shadow - eARC by Ryk E Spoor Page A

Shrike’s body and hold a funeral in your absence.”
    I who was so furious at this...Phoenix for leaving my father to rot...I did the same thing in my anger and need to find vengeance.
    There were even brief moments he wondered if he deserved to find vengeance. I’ve helped murder people. Should I seek vengeance if there are those out there who would seek the same on me?
    The worst of those, of course, would be Kyri Vantage. Condor faced that truth. He’d helped kill her parents—even though it had been Shrike who struck the killing blows. And he’d known what was going to happen to her brother, even though—in all honesty—he couldn’t have done anything about it. He wondered how she was. Maybe she’s found some peace in faraway Zarathanton. I hope so. As long as she’s alive, I know there’s a bright spot out there, somewhere.
    He rose and dusted himself off, finally, feeling much more himself . Food, drink and rest; a soldier, or a Justiciar, needs these to keep going. He’d neglected himself from shock, pain, guilt, and desperation, and that could have gotten him killed.
    I have to be almost there . Their patron’s directions had been clear and simple—follow specific landmarks that, despite his fears, had been easy to spot, and even in thick jungle he’d been able to find spots to verify his heading often enough to not get lost.
    But he had no idea of what to look for after he got there.
    Green sunlight gave way to unfiltered gold, and he stepped from the edge of the jungle to see a plain of waving green and rose grasses—with some rippling movement that was not just wind—before him. The plain stretched several miles before him and to either side; towards the horizon, low, jagged, bare mountains rose abruptly, smoking faintly in the lowering sun. On his right, the plain gave way to a dusty, cracked plain with what appeared to be ancient ruins wavering in the distance through the heat of the day. On his left, the plains reached a river, on the other side of which lay a dark-green forest of pines. He shook his head at the warped and contradictory sights. The monsters are bad enough, but this place is insanity incarnate.
    Without warning, shadow seemed to boil up from the ground, flow from the air above, and the ground shuddered. He was suddenly assailed by a feeling of such terrifying foreboding and evil that the darkness he had known all his life seemed light and friendly.
    And then there was a concussion, a roar and scream of earth and air rent and crushed, and he was blown from his feet, deafened, battered, cast aside like dust before a storm. He tucked and rolled, but all around him he heard creaks and tearing, rending, ripping sounds as the screaming manic wind blasted the forest flat, sending the boles of mighty trees smashing down around him, shattered limbs battering Condor, trying to crush him even through his Justiciar’s Raiment.
    The air was cold now and the sunlight gone, and he smelled chill of ice and the scent of decay of eons, and looked up.
    He came to his senses slowly, aware by the stiffness in his limbs and dryness of his mouth that he had been gazing in unbelieving horror for minutes with no thought at all, just absolute disbelief and terror.
    Before him loomed the Black Wall as told in some of the oldest tales, polished like an obsidian monolith a thousand feet high and more. But even as tall as it was, still beyond it he could see twisted spires, dark buildings, and far beyond, in the center so far off that it would be beyond the horizon, a tower of pure ebony that rose towards the roof of the sky and faded into...elsewhere.
    Now he understood his patron’s knowing smiles, Kerlamion’s laugh. There was no passage here to the Hells.
    The Hells had come here , to Zarathan itself.
    The forest was deathly silent now. Even the worst monstrosities he had seen would have fled, be cowering in their burrows or still running, flying, swimming through the ground until they dropped of