Then D'haan loomed overhead: an angel of death, towering black against the flashing sky. He reversed his hold on his sword so the blade pointed down, toward the gaping hole in Lar'atul's armor and what remained of his life. Lar'atul spat out his spell to ward him away. But the chant's effect, like all things, required the Pulse to exist—and the Pulse was steady no longer. It was screaming and chaotic, a wretched thing under attack.
It mutilated the spell.
As D'haan brought down his blade, emerald brilliance sprayed from Lar'atul's hands. It annihilated the falling snow and stopped the wind; within its reach the very air disappeared. D'haan's head and one shoulder disintegrated, blasted into nothingness by the twisted chant.
His body reeled backward. The sword fell from its dead hands, collapsing to a black ash that the shrieking wind carried away. The rest of him—his body, his garments—became a greasy slag that scattered instantly in the gales. Nothing remained but a black ring he had worn, which fell through the scorched ash of his finger and clattered against a rock.
Lar'atul collapsed, sucking at the frozen air, his eyes clenched against the blood pouring down his face. I live. The fact was a miracle, but the blizzard grew more fierce with each passing moment. It would build his tomb quickly. Fitting, he tried to think, but the cauldron was cracked and bleeding now, nearly shattered, and the words reeled in his mind like drunken fireflies. Tomb. Dead. He sank back into endless snow, his muscles weakening as the life leaked from his head and chest. The world is dead. What have they done.
What have they done?
The thought pierced his confusion, triggered visions of the book that burst in his ruined thoughts like suns. The wardbook! Beyond the blizzard, the sky continued to flash. There may still be time!
His hand flopped through the snow until it found his sword. Then he rolled, clenching his teeth against the dizzy scream from his head wound, and used the blade as a crutch to lever himself up. He wheezed as if sobbing and climbed to his knees.
He cast about for the book as the world swayed. A rock swam toward him from the sea of snow, crowned with D'haan's black ring. The ring was important, he knew, though he couldn't recall why. He grabbed it and heard it call to him, but its voice, too, was weakened by the Pulse's agony. He shoved it into a pocket. Then, with a colossal force of will, he rose to his feet.
The ground bucked and heaved. The dying world spun around him. An endless expanse of smooth snow now coated the hills, save for the thrashing mess of the combat and a gentle mound at the foot of a nearby slope.
His strength had gone; urgency alone drove him forward. He lurched across the battlefield, a broken man chased by a trail of blood. His legs betrayed him as he reached the mound, and he toppled to his knees. Then he plunged his hands into the snow, felt the hard contours of the book's cover, and tore it from the storm's grasp.
The metal band that served as the book's lock was split into a front and back, with no clasp to connect the two; they flapped in the blizzard wind like loose window shutters. Lar'atul joined both ends of the metal so the book was closed. They were ice on his fingers.
The ghost of D'haan's words drifted through his mind. She shares your purpose. For the last time, Lar'atul's resolve wavered. The words frightened him, though his damaged mind could no longer understood why.
Then, somehow, he began to chant.
Beyond the fury of the storm, the sky scintillated with green and white, red and violet. For a heartbeat, the rhythm of the flashing colors matched the cadence of his words. Remember, he thought, fighting for every syllable. Remember what is.
He completed the chant and looked at the clasp. No brilliant light gleamed from it; no shivering power strained against his palms. But the two metal bands had fused, sealing the book with a single, simple rune.
Relief assailed him; he coughed a gasp of bitter joy. Delirious, he clutched the book to his breast and struggled again to his feet.
Snow raked the hillside. The trees bent nearly in half beneath the wind. The sun was a distant memory.
He staggered to a crest and teetered there before deciding to stumble down the hill's far side. But with his first halting step he fell. The world flipped around him as he rolled, alternately stuffing his face with snow and exposing him to the dangerous vastness of the sky. Then he was spinning in freefall, with nothing below or above except the snow, charging him with glee and fleeing in terror again and again. In his arms he felt the wardbook, and it was solid. Real. The only thing that still was.
Finally he smashed into cold rock, and slid. Down, and down, until he plunged into a cavern and a tunnel's darkness swallowed the throbbing sky. The cave's wall scraped along his back until he came to rest. D'haan's black ring tumbled from his pocket and clattered away.
He felt the rock trembling around him, heard the echoes of stone screaming as it tore, saw the distant flickering colors at the tunnel entrance that heralded the Pulse's end.
My Queen, he thought. I'm sorry.
As he died, the book slipped to the stone and began its long wait to be found.
1
i. Melakai
It was sehking cold at the peak of Thakhan Dar.
It had been two weeks up the mountainside, with every dawn colder than the last. When they'd first set out from Keswick, some small part of Kai had enjoyed the crisp tang of the morning air after a night spent in camp. It had rejuvenated him, made him feel young again.
Feeling that way had been stupid.
Now he craved nothing so much as his warm bed. To have one evening—one sehking evening—where he didn't spend part of his time digging the snow out of his boots.
"We seek the wardbook!" Syntal called, continuing a fruitless attempt at parley that had dragged out for the better part of the last half-hour. She stood before an old stone bridge, anchored to the rocky mountainside, which spanned a dizzying drop swirling with snow. Two stone statues, their eyes gleaming cold and blue, watched impassively from the far side. "I've followed the clues set out by Lar'atul! We come at his direction!"
"GO BACK." The words issued like thunder from the golems' unmoving lips. The same words, yet again, that they'd uttered countless times since the group's arrival.
Iggy shrugged. "Maybe we should go back."
The joke was lost on Lyseira, the only one who seemed nearly as put out by the cold as Kai was. She shot Iggy a glare. "I didn't come two thousand miles to be turned away by a talking rock."
Two thousand miles. Not for the first time since this trip had begun, Kai thought, What in Hel am I doing?
And the answer, still unchanged from that first day: The bidding of your king.
After the riots that had slaughtered or driven out nearly every cleric in Keswick, a lot had happened, and fast. A group of miracleworkers had dedicated themselves to Lyseira—"the Grey Girl." Prince Isaic had asked Lyseira to use this new authority to name him the King of Darnoth, by claim of divine right, and the girl had eventually agreed. At the same time the Fatherlord had coronated Isaic's brother Jan in Tal'aden, naming him the true King of Darnoth and raising an army under his banner. And then, just as that army had set out for Keswick, a massive blizzard had engulfed the entire kingdom, end to end—stranding Jan's army and crippling the war effort just as it had begun.
All of it sounded like a preposterous fairy tale. But, as Kai had to keep reminding himself, it wasn't. It had all happened in the last month of summer—including, strangely, the blizzard.
The girl Syntal—not just a witch, if her story was to be believed, but the first witch, the one who had actually caused the first Storm and all that had come after—had gone to her friends to tell them she knew where to find the fifth wardbook. Syntal's friend Harth had brought word back to Kai, who had passed it on to King Isaic. Who, of course, had immediately assigned Kai the task of accompanying Syntal and the others on their journey.
Watch them, he'd said. Learn how they work. Find out what this wardbook is all about. Be prepared to seize it if necessary.
One did not support his prince's play for the throne and then fail to serve him when he became King. And so Kai was here, more than a month and two thousand miles from home, hauling his creaking bones up the tallest mountain in Darnoth as the kingdom's most famous witch yelled at a pair of statues.
"Kai," Iggy said. The young man seemed impervious to the jagged wind; even when the cold sliced through Melakai, Iggy never flinched. "Maybe you should try."
Kai gave him a dead stare. "Try . . . what?"
"Talking to them."
Kai looked at the towering golems. Each stood easily nine feet tall and clutched a two-handed bladed weapon that more closely resembled a club than a claymore. Compared to them, the bridge they guarded appeared downright brittle. "I don't think so."
"No, listen." Syntal turned away from the bridge and tightened her cowl against the wind. "That's a good idea." She knelt and produced a longsword from her travel pack—a beautiful weapon. "This belonged to Lar'atul—the man who made those things," she said, nodding back in the direction of the statues. "You should show it to them."
"It might be worth a try," Seth said. He was the last of the five of them, a young man of few words who seemed to go wherever Lyseira went.
"What? Why me?"
"I think you're tei'shaar," Syn returned at once. She'd used the word a few times now. He still had only the vaguest sense of what it meant—and worse, he suspected she didn't know much more than he did. "Just like he was."
"M'sai, but what does that mean?"
"I don't . . . you said you shot lightning from your sword, back in Keswick."
"Yeah." He'd never regretted sharing a secret more. He still had no idea how or why that had happened, and it had never happened since. He had been facing down a bishop's Preserver, alone, and something had happened that he still couldn't explain. "I don't think that was me. It must have been some kind of spell, some witch from the crowd, or―"
"Angbar and Harth were the only chanters in the square, and they weren't in the temple yet. I talked to both of them. It was you. We've discussed this."
"I . . ." Sehk. He glanced at the sword, fuming. Never thought a little girl could make me so uncomfortable. "So . . . what? You want me to hold up the sword at them and—what?"
Syn gestured in broad circles with her free hand, trying to express the idea. "Introduce yourself. You know, sound important."
She had triggered the Storms that had transformed Or'agaard. Seth was, essentially, a Preserver with no oath. Iggy could transform into animals. Lyseira had saved the King's life and become the leader of a new church. "Girl, I am literally the least important person here."
Syntal ignored him. "I told you, Lar'atul most likely created them as guardians of some kind. The book we're looking for has to be behind them. And there has to be some way past them, something tied to Lars—there always is."
"Sure." Kai was willing to take her word on that, even if these conversations always made him feel impossibly old and confused. "But I'm not tied to him."
"I think you might be." She stepped forward and proffered the weapon.
"Kai, please." Lyseira shivered beneath her furs. "Just try it."
Sehk'akir, he thought, and sighed. This is a terrible sehking idea.
"Just tell them who you are," Iggy said. "Convince them you belong here."
He took the sword. The instant his hand touched the grip, the blade began to shed a ghostly azure light.
Lyseira gasped. "Blesséd sehk," Iggy breathed.
"It never did that for Helix," Syntal said. "Or for me."
"It's never done that at all," Lyseira said.
"Yes it did." A note of vindication crept into Syn's voice. "In our vision, at Kesselholm. Remember? It glowed for Lar'atul, just before he sent us home."
Kai sighed. He knew when he'd lost an argument. It was a beautiful weapon, he had to admit: a perfect blade with a tinge of blue in the steel, balanced like a lover in his arms. "All right." He stepped toward the bridge and presented Lar'atul's sword.
"Go on the bridge," Syntal insisted. "Face them."
He gathered his courage, hid his glower, and did as the girl said, crossing halfway over the bridge before stopping. The golems looked at him, the pinpricks of their cold eyes penetrating his gaze.
"GO BACK."
"I am Melakai Thorn," he said. "Tei'shaar."
"GO BACK."
"Confidence!" Syntal called from behind him.
Scorch it, he thought, and hoisted the sword high. It caught the light of the sun, its blade glittering with hints of blue fire. "I am Melakai Thorn!" he shouted. "Tei'shaar!" He took a step forward.
One of the golems stepped back, freeing room for the other to take up a more central position facing the bridge.
"I think it's working," Iggy said. Then, to the others: "Come on."
"Keep going!" Syntal called as they hurried onto the bridge.
"We come at the bidding of Lar'atul!" Kai shouted. "Your creator! I bear his weapon, the blade of Lar'atul!"
"GO BACK."
Kai took another step forward. "We are not your enemy! Your creator summoned us here! We've come to find his book, to fulfill his wishes!"
"GO BACK."
"I, uh . . . !" he shouted. "I—I am Melakai Thorn!" he tried again. "Tei'shaar! I hold Lar'atul's sword!" He spared a doubtful glance backward.
The golem swung its massive weapon into the bridge, shattering the old stone and plunging him into empty space.
ii. Helix
Iggy lifted his feet from the collapsing stone and became a hawk. Seth grabbed Lyseira and leapt to safety. Syntal continued standing in midair as if the bridge had never collapsed beneath her. Only the stranger plummeted.
Or he'd already plummeted. Or he would plummet—sometime, but only for a heartbeat before Syntal chanted to catch him.
The vision was the latest wave in a relentless onslaught. It washed over Helix's senses, filled him with dread—then receded, draining his vision to blindness, before a new one rose to take its place. This time he saw a little house in a small village, nestled in the foothills. A woman opened the door, holding an infant. Who are you? she said.
"Helix," Helix said. "I . . ."
Seth tore loose his spear, murder in his eyes. Seth, no! Lyseira shouted.
A new vision washed that one away—a beautiful woman twice his age, with lustrous raven hair. She screamed his name before the next wave crashed in, showing him a sky swirling with flame.
Kesselholm. He clung to the thought like a castaway to flotsam. That was the past. That already happened. I saw it.
The door in his little room opened. Or would open. The old man came in—or would come in. Are you well? he would say or had already said.
"No," Helix said, clutching his head. "No, I'm not, I—I'm going mad. I can't tell . . . God, I can't tell what's real." He reached for the man, standing right in front of him, but his hands found only air. "You're not real," Helix gasped. "You're not real!"
Again, the click of the latch. "I'm real," the old man said. (Would say?) "You beat me to it again, that's all. Ben, remember? Ben."
He felt a comforting squeeze on his shoulder, and seized it with both hands. Real. It was real. Cool and papery. Gnarled. An old man's hand. "Ben," he said.
"That's right," Ben said. Helix looked up to see him turning away, fetching a bowl of hot soup. But he could still feel his hand—indeed, he wouldn't release it.
"Don't get the soup," Helix said. "Not yet. Please."
"I won't." Ben smoothed Helix's hair with his other hand.
Eat, Ben would say after he returned with the bowl. Hold it carefully, now. It's hot.
"Ah, you poor thing," Ben would say. No, said. He was saying it now. Right now. "I hope Marcus screams in Hel for what he did to you."
The torture chamber. Lyseira's screams melding into his own. The blinding heat of the poker, gouging out one eye and then the other, releasing a torrent of visions that swept him into madness. The
last real thing he remembered—or thought he remembered. Maybe it, too, was something that hadn't happened yet. Or had happened to someone else. Or was entirely fake.
Helix would pronounce judgment. The courtroom would be filled with witnesses.
Rabbit stew, Ben would say. Sorry I can't do better. It's this curséd snow. He'd shake his head. It won't let up, and all the food stores are running low.
A dozen militiamen would die screaming in a green fog. Their flesh sloughed off their bones as they collapsed.
"Are you sure you're not hungry?" Ben said. "You have to eat something. I'll stay until you finish—stay as long as you'd like."
"They're melting," Helix answered. "Their faces . . . just . . . melting off."
He would scream. Dash his father's sword to the stone.
The dead man would jerk the spear from his chest.
It was the same with Matthew, at first, Lorna would say, her eyes filled with sympathy. Just the same. He couldn't tell what was real.
"Lorna?" He released Ben's hands and shot to his feet. "Wait, no, Lorna―"
"Ben," the old man corrected, patiently. "Hang on, there. Hold on." He took Helix's shoulders, pressed him gently back to his chair.
Lorna melted away, replaced by a laughing little girl. You did? she would ask, disbelieving.
We did, Helix would answer, smiling. And then you know what happened?
What?
He would lean forward conspiratorially. I peed on them, he would whisper, and the little girl would giggle.
Right there! she would say to Ben in an entirely different room, pointing at a map.
And one day the refugees would flee across the ocean, persecuted. Ships full of them, escaping their ancient enemy. "Messian," Helix breathed. "Go with them, they need you."
"Here, hold out your hands. This is real. Rabbit stew." Ben cupped Helix's hands around a warm bowl. He was right—it was real.
"She should've gone with them," Helix murmured.
Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 2