Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 8: Kaiser of the Damned

The door of the room swung open. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

A guard came in — seven feet of Rakshasa, clad head to foot in a bronze-like metal armor. He looked at the puddle of blood on the floor, and then across the room, the way a man looks when he expects to find a body lying somewhere in it.

Something flickered in the cruel eyes of the Council guard when they met Kaiser’s instead — Kaiser, standing in the corner where the jade flagon had been.

" Come out. You have been summoned. "

Kei moved toward the door slowly, his hands behind his back, a shard of sharp jade hidden inside his fingerless glove.

*If this comes to it, I will open as many throats as I can before I go down.*

He stepped out, and the crowd opened around him, and he felt like a man alone on an island with a sea of Rakshasa on every side. He steadied his nerves and walked. It was the first time he had seen these humanoid creatures face to face, and there was something in it that crawled.

" Onto the dais , " the guard behind him said.

He stepped onto the circular dais, and it rose — floating up and halting level with the top of the fifth floor, the whole amphitheater’s eyes fixing on him at once.

And what they saw was this.

A Rakshasa of middling height, near five foot ten. His skin a licorice black — and across it, red stripes, running up from his wrists to his shoulders and up from his feet to his waist, curling round his limbs in a circling pattern, as though the red had been worked into him fine as a tattoo. A frame lightly muscled, the muscle of his arms and legs moving in a low rhythmic undercurrent as he shifted, the way strength moves in a thing that has it.

And his hair — Kaiser’s hair, that had been red — had turned a beige white, set stark against the black of his skin.

The whole hall was shaken by it. The nobles of his mother’s family most of all. That Kaiser could have awakened at all, born of a human male — it had seemed to them a thing that could not happen, and the same thought sat in every mind in the building.

The High Priests were caught too. But their surprise ran deeper, and along a different line: Kaiser’s skin was not a single color. Every awakened Rakshasa came out of the ritual monochrome. The red stripes laid over the licorice black were a thing none of them had seen — bizarre, unheard of, nothing the history of the true awakening had a place for.

Following the crowd’s stares, Kei looked down at himself, and was as surprised as any of them. It was nothing like the body he had seen in Kaiser’s memories. It had come out of the awakening changed.

Into the sudden silence of the hall, Lymic spoke.

" Kaiser. We see you have awakened your bloodline, and changed greatly in it. It puzzles us — how one such as you could wake the beast-blood at all. But we will keep to the rules, for now, and ask you to show us your claws and your canines. "

Kei looked at his hands. The reversed palms faced back toward him — a thing he would have to learn to live inside. He waved the hands, hoping the claws would come. Nothing came.

He closed a fist, picturing the claws sliding out. Nothing.

He opened his mouth and put his fingers to his teeth to feel whether the canines had lengthened. They were the same as they had been.

" I cannot show them , " he called out. " My claws and my canines are still their normal shape. "

" Filthy human-spawn — it is some spell — kill the imposter — he does not belong among us — "

The voices came from every part of the hall, angry, scornful, robbed of the failure they had come to feast on.

" Silence. "

Lymic let the hall fall quiet, and when it had, his voice went out flat and cold.

" Kaiser. We will give you one chance to come clean. We know what waited for you — the Screaming Sea, if you failed to wake your bloodline. So. Have you used some spell, some charm, to alter your appearance and slip your ending? "

A pause.

" Tell the truth now, and we will grant you a quick death. Lie — and we will find it out, we always find it out — and we will punish you in a way that will have you begging for death as a mercy. "

*Shit.* Kei kept his face still. *I don’t even know what to say. What spell? What charm?*

*I am damned.*