Madness of the Horde by Zoey Draven

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Let me speak to them,” Vienne said, her voice soft and shaking. “Please!”

We had just made it back to the encampment. As we did, I bellowed a war cry to my darukkars, loud and echoing, and in an instant, they were racing from their volikis, dozens and dozens in a rush.

“Nik,” I snarled down at her. If she hadn’t been with me, I would’ve gone after the Ghertun right when I’d spotted them spying in the darkness. How long had they been watching us? Watching her? “Never.”

“Davik, you don’t understand,” she said. “Please! I need to—”

“Nik, I do not understand and I never will,” I told her, shoving her into the arms of a warrior guard. To him, in Dakkari, I said, “Do not let her from your sight. Take her back to my voliki and stay with her until I return. Find another guard to stand watch outside.”

“Lysi, Vorakkar,” the guard, Urik, replied.

Vienne’s gaze flared in disbelief, mingling with her fear and her panic. She obviously feared the Ghertun—fear that made me want to kill them, so she would never feel that kind of fear again—and yet, she begged me to see them? Speak with them? For what purpose?

Not now, I thought, watching as Urik began to drag her away, though she struggled in his grip. There was a Ghertun scouting party that we needed to track down and eliminate. I would deal with my leikavi’s anger later. Right now, the horde was in danger.

Still, I watched her until she was lost in a sea of darukkars as they raced to their pyrokis, remembering the way she’d trembled with barely leashed fury as I told her about Mala. One of my darkest secrets, now bared to her forever.

Hedna found me. “What is it?”

He was still fastening his sword to the belt around his hips.

I shook my head, erasing all memory of Mala. I was a Vorakkar now, not a young male frightened and alone in Dothik.

That was my past. And I took solace in the knowledge it was gone forever.

“Ghertun,” I informed Hedna.

Ghertun who had seen her. Ghertun who knew that she was here, among my horde, I amended quietly.

They needed to be eliminated, no matter what.

His lips pressed together.

“What are we waiting for?”

* * *

“One is alive,”a darukkar reported to me, eyeing me because I was dripping in green blood, blood that had splattered across my chest and across my cheek when I’d beheaded one of the Ghertun.

I grunted, scowling, hardly capable of words. Whenever I killed, I grew quiet. Like I knew I was just adding to the shadows that I would see. My own private little army of the dead.

“Your orders, Vorakkar?”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I stepped over another dead Ghertun, stalking over to the small group of darukkar that had assembled close by. In the middle of them, surrounded by the points of their swords and lying on the ground, was the last of the scouting party. A breathing Ghertun with green blood rolling from the corner of his mouth.

My darukkars fell away when I approached.

“Rothi kiv,” I growled at them. Leave us. I wanted to speak with this Ghertun alone.

If my darukkars were surprised, they didn’t show it. On my periphery, I saw Hedna lingering, however.

“You too, pujerak,” I said, keeping my gaze on the vertical slits of the Ghertun’s eyes. They closed from left to right, not top to bottom, a translucent film covering them for a brief moment before it peeled back with every blink.

“We can take him back to the horde,” Hedna said quietly.

“Nik.”

This Ghertun would not set foot inside my horde. This Ghertun would not get close to her.

Hedna knew I would not be swayed and he, too, fell away, giving me and the Ghertun privacy. His breathing was ragged in his chest, his hand pressed to a wound in his abdomen, trying to keep the blood inside.

“You spy for Lozza?” I asked him quietly.

Those eyes blinked slow, that film appearing before peeling back.

“Tell me what I wish to know, Ghertun, and I might be persuaded to let you scurry back to your mountain.”

A laugh bubbled from his throat, wet and scratchy. “You?” he asked, his tone incredulous, even this close to death. “I know who you are.”

My jaw tightened.

The Mad Horde King.

“Then that is all the more reason to speak,” I rasped, narrowing my gaze on him. “Don’t you think?”

My dagger flashed in the moonlight as I cleaned it off on his skin, the edge of the blade just pricking his scaled flesh. His breathing quickened. For the first time, a flash of uncertainty flickered in his gaze.

“Were you looking for her?” I asked, my tone deadened and even.

“Who?”

My head cocked slightly and I grinned down at him. My teeth flashing made him blink faster, his breathing going rapid again as he desperately eyed the dagger in my hands.

“The female?” the Ghertun asked, his voice shaking. “No.”

I remained silent, so he would know that answer wasn’t enough to slake my thirst.

He continued quickly. “Our king just told us to watch for her. We followed her to the city, to make certain she got inside. Nothing more.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

“N-nothing,” he rasped, more blood leaking from his lips. “Just that she is a slave. A—”

His words cut off in a pained howl as I slammed the flattened edge of my blade into the seeping wound at his abdomen, digging deeper.

“You should not call her that,” I commented. “Not in front of me.”

Through his raspy gasps, I saw his eyes flicker at whatever he heard in my voice. Realization made the slits of his eyes grow wider. He blinked, as if the darkness of death was beginning to take him. His wound was mortal. He wouldn’t live much longer.

He began to laugh—terrible, thickened sounds that made the back of my neck prickle with revulsion.

“She is already dead, horde king,” he told me, his blinks becoming longer and longer.

“Neffar?”

“She was dead the moment she left.”

I growled, pressing my dagger deep, ignoring his choked cry of pain. “Tell me what you know!”

“Help me,” he said, his hand going for a sword that my darukkar had already taken from him. He was weaponless, dying. He knew he had nothing left to offer. “Help me and I will tell you how to save her.”

He lies, I thought.

“I—I don’t want to die. Not yet. Not by a Dakkari,” he spat that word as if it was sour on his tongue.

“Then tell me what I want to know,” I hissed.

“It will take her quickly once it sets in.” He began to laugh again. “You will watch her die.”

My nostrils flared, something shifting in my chest, something unfamiliar. Panic. Fear, for someone other than myself. The last time I’d felt it…it had been when I’d watched my sister die.

Nik.

“What are you talking about? What will take her?” I growled. “Tell me—”

The Ghertun went limp, his laugh dying in his throat all at once, as if that last, lingering effort had drained him of his life force. The film covered his eyes, though his eyelids remained open. No more blood pushed from his lips.

Dead.

I wouldn’t see him in the shadows, I knew. He wouldn’t haunt me.

But his words certainly would.

You will watch her die.

I hadn’t delivered his mortal wound but I wish I had.

“Burn them,” I bellowed to Hedna. “Burn them all.”