Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert) by Leona Wisoker Read Free Book Online

to close her bulging eyes; stopped and sat back on his heels with a dry bark of self-disgust. I could have saved her. She wouldn’t even have come to Rosin’s attention if not for me. He shut his eyes, but that only made the pressure of bitter memory and self-recrimination worse.
    Damn me, if I’m not already, for this alone. Oh, Kallia. . . .
    He sucked in a breath through his teeth, focusing on the taste of the moldy, rot-filled air, then forced himself to stretch out his hand again. As soon as his trembling fingertips brushed the dank flesh, it exploded like a puffball mushroom gone to spore, flinging long-repressed rot and mold in all directions—including across Eredion’s face.
    He coughed and spat, his eyes hot and watery. The thick mask secured across the lower half of his face blocked most of the evil mucus, but he had to rinse his eyes out with a precious handful of water from his flask before his vision cleared.
    “Little enough revenge,” he muttered at last, looking down at what remained of her face.
    With a deep sigh, he began to recite prayers: one for cleansing a tormented soul, one beseeching forgiveness for wrongs done, and an invocation of all three gods in their proper aspects, to guide and bless the dead wanderer into the proper realm.
    This was his fourteenth such recitation this morning.
    Far overhead, the palace bells began to count off another hour towards noon: far too many of which, like the bodies in these dank catacombs, remained.
    By noon, Eredion gathered nearly enough human remains to fill the charnel-cart. Mostly he found piles of bones, many chewed—he felt a surge of nausea every time he found another one like that—but some entire, and even stacked in elaborate patterns, as though the creature had played with them.
    Eredion hated dismantling those. The bone sculptures emanated a slick, oily aura that had nothing to do with tactile senses; but once he overcame revulsion and picked them respectfully apart, chanting prayers of cleansing as he worked, the remains lost that grotesque awfulness and became simply dead bone.
    Even the air felt cleaner afterwards, which made moving on easier.
    Still, by the time the Palace bells rang the noon hour, his head ached as though a thousand blacksmiths hammered at his skull, the inside of his mouth tasted like the leftovers of a four-day drunk, and he wanted to get the hells out of the catacombs.
    He’d bring the charnel-cart to the grave keeper; she would do her own prayers and ceremonies and burn the day’s recovered remains on the giant graveyard slab, and then Eredion could go take a nice hot bath and get very, very drunk for the rest of the day.
    And not think about having to come back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.
    His attention fixed dreamily on that bath—and the drinking—he reached out to open a plain black metal door and found the latch secured by a huge padlock looped through sturdy metal bars welded to the door itself. It wasn’t too unusual for a door in the catacombs to be locked; it only meant that the person behind that door had once held value to Rosin.
    But nobody had opened that door for months. Only Eredion dared enter, laboring day after day to remove the worst of the gory hell as part of his self-imposed penance. Bit by bit, he had found and opened the secret passages, the secret rooms; but Eredion knew his ignorance kept him moving through the catacombs far too slowly.
    If anyone had breathed behind this door when Rosin died, they wouldn’t be doing so now.
    Eredion raised the sledgehammer, guilt and frustration surging like fire into his muscles, and shattered the padlock with one gigantic blow.
    As the door sagged open, shaken free by the tremors of his attack, the darkness within flowed out, enveloping Eredion in a cloak lined with a thousand tearing claws.
    He caught a brief glimpse of a tormented, grey-eyed stare; then an all-too-familiar pain racked through every nerve in his body.
    Oh, gods,