by Matthew Ward
Altiris fell to hands and knees, leaden tongue fumbling for words that would stop her from killing him. Shivered breaths stung the back of his throat and burned his lungs. That she meant to, he’d no doubt.
But in that moment, he felt something stir deep within. A shard of radiant light. Sidara’s light, the piece left behind when she’d saved his life years before; that had held Kasvin’s seductive will at bay in Sothvane. The shadow recoiled before it, the cold alongside. Sidara yelped and staggered away, shadow unwinding.
Every inch an agonising, frozen mile, Altiris rose to his knees. Worthless, leaden fingers sought his sword.
Eyes murderous, Sidara bore down anew. The light blinked out, smothered. A candle guttering at midnight. Shadow rushed in, colder than ever. Altiris’ pulse slowed, the drab colours of Eskavord’s ruins growing more muted still.
“Don’t do it, Sidara.” Through dimming eyes, Altiris saw Constans approach, his hood back and empty hands held up in surrender. “It’s him. Not a trick. Not a deceit. It really is Altiris.”
She rounded on him, shadow writhing. “You told me he’d died!”
“I always lie to you, remember?” He scowled away a grimace. “I wanted you to be more like me. But no one should be like me, least of all you. One’s enough. One’s too many.”
Sidara drew herself up. “You always lie to me. That’s true.” Her laughter rippled through the shadow. “You’re lying to me now.”
Her shadow heaved, flinging Constans away. He caromed off a tomb and went still, blood gushing from a wound on his scalp and seeping away into the ash.
Freed in the moment she’d lashed out at Constans, Altiris regained his feet. Juddering fingers at last found his sword.
“Sidara, please.” The words were like grit in his throat. “Come back to me.”
She looked down at her brother’s motionless body, shadow seething about her shoulders.
“This is what Viktor needs me to be.” For all Sidara’s words offered reply, Altiris had the sense she’d forgotten about him. She stared down at herself – hands spread and darkness curling about her fingers – and again at Constans. “What the Republic needs me to be.”
She sagged. For a moment Altiris thought he glimpsed daylight beneath the shadow’s pall, like thunder crackling behind clouds. But then it was gone, if it was ever there. With it went her last doubts, her back straighter than before and her eyes clear. The Lady of Light lost to shadow. The wellspring of Viktor’s army, and the means by which he’d drown the Republic in Dark. Lost in contemplation of the brother she’d likely killed. Distant. Distracted.
Vulnerable.
Shivering and heartsick, his knuckles aching about his sword’s grips, Altiris staggered towards her.
Viktor’s right arm collapsed as he made to stand, his shoulder screaming. Vision blurred, the ruins of Eskavord’s gateway indistinguishable from the night sky. Breath rasped hot over his tongue. Ahead, the battle raged on. Behind, the mournful call of the Huntsman’s stag, and the staccato double-thump as it gathered to the charge.
Again, Viktor tried to stand. Again his arm buckled, and he fell.
But something else arose. The old fire. The determination that had seen him through countless battlefields of the spirit or the sword. The reminder that all things turned on a single moment, for good or for ill. That triumph and defeat turned on such moments. Made a man a hero, or a failure.
He’d come too far to fail now.
He’d been wrong to fear Ashana’s lickspittle, who was but an echo of moonlight. The Dark was older, and he its master.
Viktor stuffed the wound with shadow. Made the Dark’s cold strength his own and banished even the idea of pain. This time, the arm buckled, but held.
Fingers closing about his claymore and drawing strength from its weight, Viktor rose into the Huntsman’s path. As the starlit spear dipped, Viktor sent forth his shadow. Light rose to meet it, the magic of the Huntsman’s creation roused in opposition to the Dark from which it had been fashioned. It had preserved him while his equerries had surrendered to ice, and would do so again. But Viktor had never meant to win the contest, only to distract.
The spearpoint twitched. Not much, but it was all the opening Viktor sought.
Viktor sprang forward into the Huntsman’s path, claymore upright and scraping the spear-shaft’s inner edge. Blinding starlight scraped past his head. Blood hissed to scalding vapour as the tip sliced his brow. Pain boiled to fire, and fire to strength.
The claymore shuddered in his charred hands as he drove it up under the Huntsman’s ribs, the momentum of charge and counter-charge driving the point up through his armour. Roar of effort melding with his foe’s pained bellow, Viktor drove the Huntsman backwards off the stag.
They struck the ashen ground with a bone-jarring impact. An antler snapped. The claymore’s steel sank deep into the Huntsman’s divine flesh, pinning him to the soil. Driven to his knees and heaving for breath, Viktor clung to the grips for support.
“This is the might of Ashana’s demon?” he said, voice thick with disgust. “Can she do no better?”
Beneath him, the Huntsman stirred, green eyes fading beneath his helm. “Probably. But we all serve our purpose. This was never her battle to fight.” Ragged gasps turned to a deep, vibrant chuckle. “… and I was only ever a distraction.”
A chill gathering in his heart, Viktor staggered upright, eyes outward across a battlefield thick with swirling leaves, the last of the equerries overmatched by the Ocranza. But beyond, a line of green shields, broader and thicker than it had been since he’d returned to the battlefield. The broken and dismayed returned to purpose he’d striven to strip away. Beneath the banner, Rosa held her sword high. The familiar cry rang out.
“Until Death!”
The Huntsman’s chuckle blossomed to throaty laughter. Overcome by wrath, Viktor twisted his claymore and wrenched it free. A wind sprang up, stirring the leaves of the Huntsman’s passing. But his mocking laughter lingered.
The pain of his wounds pulsing beneath shadow, Viktor gazed beyond the Ocranzas’ reforming line to the Essamere advance. Fury sought to set his shadow upon them as he had the Huntsman’s charge. Reason warned that to do so was folly. That what remained of his ephemeral body stood on the brink of collapse. Only the Dark held it together.
Still, the advantage remained his. He’d won more battles with his shadow held in check than with it loosed. His Ocranza outnumbered Essamere. That advantage would only grow as Sidara dredged more soldiers from the clay. Essamere would be swept away, Rosa alongside. One last victory, and a Republic to remake.
As he started towards the Ocranza lines, his shadow shuddered with a piece of it rooted elsewhere. Not in pain, but confusion. Courage shaken and slipping away.
Sidara.
Viktor swore, belatedly realising that the Essamere line was empty of too many faces that should have been there. Too much to hope they’d perished in battle. A distraction, the Huntsman had named himself. By chance or design, Essamere had become the same. If he lost Sidara? If he failed her as he had so many others?
Turning on his heel, Viktor left Essamere to contest the Ocranza and strode back through the gate. Ruined streets passed in a blur, each stride undercut by pain even his shadow couldn’t fully contain.
He forged on as the sounds of battle renewed split the air, leaving behind the ashen cobblestones of the marketplace where Malatriant had for ever altered his life’s course. Past the winding road and the wall behind which Branghall’s broken-arched ruins reached up at the moon. To the stone bridge and the gorge below, where the swift-flowing Grelyt River fled Eskavord’s desolation for haler fields.
It was there Viktor at last found his path blocked. At the bridge’s crest stood a helmless man in battered armour and torn phoenix tabard, an Essamere shield at his feet and sword point-down on the cobbles. His expression was as weary as Viktor’s own.
“Hello, brother,” said Josiri. “Time to make an end of this.”<
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Sixty-Seven
Viktor halted before the bridge, eyes on the Grelyt’s rushing waters and claymore against his uninjured shoulder. The other shoulder screamed beneath the shadow’s embrace, a fit match for the aftermath of Anastacia’s light still seething in his charred hands. Try though he might, he could manage no hatred for Josiri, not for betrayal in the city, nor ambush hidden beneath promise of parley. His heart held only weariness, and a sense of inevitability birthed by cosmic humours.
Of course it had to end there, on that bridge. On the spot where Katya Trelan had once given herself to the Raven for want of the courage to live, her son now did the same.
Such a waste.
Viktor reached out through his shadow, and recanted as his wounds screamed for attention. Even an hour before, he could have ended Josiri’s threat with barely a thought. Now, to assail him with shadow carried too great a risk. His whole being felt diffuse, as much a part of the Dark as the Dark was of him.
He needed no shadow to beat Josiri. He’d laid low emperors in his time, and fought an Empress to a standstill. All through steel and discipline, and the will to triumph. He was a hero, a champion. Josiri was only a man. An ordinary man. Viktor had killed more ordinary men than he could readily count.
But Sidara’s disquiet was a growing blight in his thoughts, and he feared delay as greatly as defeat. He risked a little shadow, reaching out to the umbral presence of Ocranza in nearby streets. To Drazina further east, their minds awash with thoughts of survival as they fought a running battle with Phoenixes. A caress of shadow – a nudge – and it was done, and Viktor free to grant Josiri the Raven’s mercy.
“Are we really to do this, brother?” he asked.
Josiri hesitated before replying, his aspect no less weary than Viktor’s own. “What choice have you left me?”
Viktor snorted. How small he seemed. Not just in stature, but in vision. He cursed himself for not seeing it before.
“I thought it was I who blamed my failings on others.”
Josiri’s only reply was to sweep his sword to the formal salute. For all the steel in his voice, his limbs shook. Impossible not to admire the man for marching knowingly into death. Viktor resolved that the Republic’s histories would hold no record of this moment. Let future generations believe Josiri loyal to the last. He could do that much for the man who’d been his closest friend.
He returned the salute and strode onto the bridge.
Viktor raised his sword to a two-handed high guard, letting his left arm bear the burden of the injured right. At once, Josiri shrank back, slipping into a defensive stance, shield to the fore. His limbs no longer shook, and the point of his longsword held steady.
The claymore looped about, the blade rising to threaten Josiri’s left side. Steel chimed, the longsword’s parry as textbook as the stance. Slower than it should have been, but Viktor allowed that neither of them were at their best in that hour.
With a cry borne of the day’s frustrations, Viktor launched a flurry of short, efficient strikes at Josiri’s head. A dull scrape sounded as the shield cheated the first. Others found empty air as Josiri retreated. Viktor thrust before the other regathered himself. Josiri’s cloak tore beneath steel.
Pressing his advantage, Viktor cleared the bridge’s crest, a roll of the wrists making feint of a downward arc in favour of a vicious slash at Josiri’s left. Taken off guard by the superior reach granted by Viktor’s height and the claymore’s length, Josiri again let his shield weather the blow. It bucked, the rim clattering against armour.
Again Viktor pressed in. Steel flashed between them as Josiri went on the offensive for the first time. Viktor’s hurried parry struck the slash away, but there was another, another, another, each attack flowing seamlessly into the next. A practised, blurring rhythm that sent Viktor scrambling back across the bridge’s crest.
Harrowed eyes tight, Josiri advanced, ash billowing about his feet.
A thrust cheated a slow parry as they recrossed the bridge’s crest. Steel shrieked as Viktor’s breastplate turned the blow his sword could not. Unbidden, regret arose that they’d never duelled in comradeship, not even between the red pennants on Stonecrest’s lawn. Unthinkable that after everything Josiri might prove the better swordsman.
Frustration gorged on pride and flared to fury. Roaring, Viktor swung a downward two-handed haymaker, fit to cleave a man in two. Josiri stepped aside. Too late, Viktor realised he’d meant to tempt such recklessness.
Even as the claymore sparked against cobbles, the longsword blurred silver beneath moonlight.
Viktor hurled himself away. The rising lunge meant to take his throat instead scored his left cheek. Warmth sheeted Viktor’s face and neck, the tang of blood sharp above the bitter, ashen air.
Snarling, he let loose a portion of his shadow. Let resurgent pain lend much-needed purpose. One sweep of the claymore battered Josiri’s shield wide. Another sliced deep into Josiri’s exposed forearm, severing the shield’s straps and drowning the vambrace in blood.
As Josiri cried out, Viktor gathered him up in shadow and hurled him against the bridge’s northern wall. A sweep of the claymore ripped the longsword from Josiri’s hand and sent it skittering down the bridge’s western slope.
“Why did you make me do this?” Viktor bellowed, loss and fury a poisonous mix in his ravaged heart. “We were brothers!”
Trapped in the shadow’s embrace, Josiri offered no reply.
Even in that moment, a piece of him yearned to stay his hand. To show mercy. But only a piece. In a single, smooth moment he raised the claymore and hacked down.
“No!”
The cry and the blur of movement came as one.
Flesh parted beneath the claymore’s blade. Collarbone and ribs snapped, the sensations travelling up Viktor’s arm to awaken shuddering empathies. And yet, there was no blood. The blow sent to bestow mercy Josiri no longer deserved fell not upon him, but a pale woman in shadowthorn robes, her grey eyes cold and unflinching.
Apara Rann cried out as Viktor ripped the claymore free. Again, as he seized her by the throat. Whirling, he slammed her against the bridge’s wall, scattering loose stone from the parapet and into the rushing Grelyt below.
Another loose end. Another act of mercy gone awry. How long would he suffer the mistakes of his past?
“Have you not learned your place, thief?” he demanded.
Her right hand clawed at his. Her left hung limp at her side. “Right now?” she hissed. “It’s between you and Josiri.”
“Foolish to be so, without even a sword.”
Somehow, she smiled. “Oh, I had one. I gave it away.”
Red rage crowding his vision, Viktor sent what he could afford of his shadow flowing into her, seeking to break her anew. But the riven, pathetic woman of Tarvallion’s cells was a stranger to them both. He weaker, and she stronger in ways that defied ready words. His shadow, already stretched to breaking point, recoiled.
Apara’s smile turned vicious. “I’m not your slave any more.”
With a roar, Viktor hurled her across the parapet. A splash of white in the darkness, and she was lost to the rushing waters. Chest heaving with exertion and anger, Viktor straightened.
As he did so, the night paled.
Josiri staggered into sight, bloody, tattered and weary beyond words, the sword in his hand blazing with alabaster flame.
“We’re not done, Viktor.”
Tzila spun on her heel, right-hand sabre slashing at Kurkas’ head, the left at his midriff. He ducked the former, flung a hurried block at the latter, and stumbled away. Lungs labouring fit to burst and his heartbeat a stampede, he propped a shoulder against a statue. The empty-eyed serathi stared back.
He hoped the others were doing better than he was.
“For the Phoenix, Halvor,” he gasped. “Don’t you remember? Sunshine, shadowthorns… all that good stuff?”
Words that had twice frozen Tzila barely gave her pause. A sabre arced down. Kurk
as flung himself aside. Steel chimed off stone. He staggered about, eyes scrying the black sallet helm for crumb of comfort. Some sign his words were getting through. Lumestra knew his sword wasn’t.
[[That’s not my name.]]
“But it is!” he said. “It is! Droshna’s just made you forget, that’s all. Come on, Halvor! You really gonna bend a knee to a northwealder and not even question?”
He hobbled into a colonnade of tombs. Last resting place of Eskavord’s wealthy before rebellion and war had scattered its families. High-roofed sepulchres, guarded by dead yews and yet more graven serathi, their features thick with dust and ash.
A moment. Just needed a moment to get his breath back.
Who was he kidding? He’d not been Halvor’s match in life, with all his parts and pieces, let alone now, with his leg throbbing and his life bleeding away into his shirt. Main thing was to keep her away from Altiris. Give the lad time to talk sense into Sidara.
He glanced back through the mist. No sign of Tzila on the path between the tombs.
“Come on, Halvor. Snap out of it!”
Still no sign. Had she wandered off? Was she even now sticking a blade in Altiris’ back? Getting stabbed in the back wasn’t an experience Kurkas could recommend.
He edged back the way he’d come. At last, Tzila stepped into sight, sabres again at her sides, the points inches from the desiccated vines and yew roots choking the path.
But there was movement behind as well, betrayed by the scrape of stone upon stone and the crackle of long-dead fibres.
Risking a glance, Kurkas saw Ocranza moving amid the tombs, cutting off his retreat.
He sighed, and shook his head. Like that, was it? Fair enough. Couldn’t say he’d not had a good run. Better to go out on a high.
Putting the last of his strength behind his sword, he threw himself at Tzila.
For the first time, she retreated, sabres flashing to a parry. Kurkas’ thrust became a feint, became a neck-high slash, the moves flowing from aching shoulder to creaking wrist. No thought now to the deeds. No worries of Altiris, or Lord Trelan, or other comrades lost to the mists. Only survival instincts earned in Dregmeet’s cruel streets, honed in the army and practised to perfection on the battlefield. The sick fury at how Lord Droshna had contorted so fine a woman into an obedient puppet.