The great armoured triangle of Ythek’s head swung to survey him and, as the full weight of its regard pressed down on his cringing brain, he understood in one appalling instant just what Marek Endain had faced. The Herald’s maw gaped wide, leering at him with an infinity of teeth. Saliva wove a glistening web between them, oozing from their needle points in steaming corrosive threads that splashed and scarred the wooden floor. Pain spiked Aldric’s staring eyes, bored into his mind and the world slid out of focus…
Time stopped.
Gueynor was beside him, her hand about his wrist, but even through the armour, layers of steel and leather, he could feel that her grip was different. As if her fingers were longer and narrower, as if the hand he saw was not the hand he felt. Aldric turned so he could look her in the face, but that too was changing. Like a painting on thin silk, another face overlaid the one he knew; delicate as fine porcelain, ivory pale skin framed by dark, dark hair, great sad eyes. Though he had never seen the face before he recognised it from descriptions, and in the same instant realised what Gueynor held so tightly in her clenched left hand.
The knucklebones of Sedna.
“You have power, Alban.” Even the familiar Jouvaine voice was husky with an unmistakable Vreijek accent. “Give it to me. Let me direct it.” Moving stiffly, like an automaton, Aldric removed the loops of silvered steel from his left hand. Without the warm pressure of the spellstone in the centre of his palm he felt at once lighter and younger, somehow incomplete, and desperately vulnerable.
“Take it,” he said to the sorcerer who spoke through Gueynor’s lips. “Take it, and use it, and bring it back.”
Time began again.
The slight blonde figure, which was at the same time tall and dark, walked out to the middle of the floor. Beneath her armour, Gueynor still bore the markings of a consecrated sacrifice. She was an unclaimed victim going willingly to face her would-be slayer, but within her and around her was one who had been neither consecrated nor willing. One whose life had been stolen, and whose death violated the Balance of things…
Ythek Shri bent over her, and Aldric held his breath. Then the Devourer backed away. As he watched in disbelief it bowed low, abasing itself. Behind and above its Herald, the demonic flower-form of Issaqua throbbed like a beating heart. Its song was very quiet now, the scent of roses barely perceptible.
Marek Endain, the queller of demons, let his hands hang down by his sides as he watched. This thing had passed beyond him, leaving his much-vaunted knowledge far behind. Like Aldric, like Ythek, like Issaqua, all he could do was wait.
Then the tower, the citadel, the whole world seemed to explode. A searing lash of energy poured from the stone of Echainon where Sedna held it high in Gueynor’s hand. Light met darkness, heat met cold, and life met death. The blue fire wrapped Issaqua the Dweller in Shadows with coils of brilliance until no darkness remained, even in the crimson heart of the Bale Flower’s being. With enough light, there can be no shadows. With enough warmth, cold cannot exist.
Ythek Shri howled its anguish, beating its monstrous talons against the floor as if a self-inflicted pain could cancel one beyond its control. The Warden of Gateways shrieked as a Gateway not of its own making gaped wide to draw its substance back into the Void. Then the dreadful lost howling shredded to thin squeals like a pig as Ythek’s form wavered and dissolved, dissipating like ink on wet paper. An unclean translucent fog swirled through the withered petals of a crumbling, faded rose…
And then there were no more demons.
*
“My lady…!” Aldric used the honorific with sincerity for the first time ever, his voice shockingly clear in the vast stillness which no longer thrummed with the Song of Desolation. His ears had grown accustomed to that constant sound in the background of anything he heard or said or did, and now it was silenced he seemed able to hear even the rush of blood in Gueynor’s veins.
She turned in answer to his voice and she was Gueynor Evenou, Evthan’s sister’s daughter. Not Sedna ar Gethin the Vreijek sorcerer, not half-and-half, but Gueynor again, whole and entire. She held out her hands without saying a word, and Aldric took them as they opened. In one glowed the spellstone, its fires now the butterfly flutter of an alcohol flame, while in the other there was dust. All that remained of the knucklebones of Sedna.
Only dust…
“There was little enough for obsequies,” said Marek, looking at the fine white powder with a sad smile before pouring it into a leather pouch. “But these poor bones received a more worthy funeral than any I could give.”
“You?” said Aldric. “But you didn’t even know her.”
“She was a sorcerer, I’m a demon-queller. That makes us siblings of a kind. And I give respect to a sister.”
“So it’s over,” Gueynor said. “At long last.”
“Not yet.” Both Marek and the girl looked at Aldric, who returned their stares without embarrassment and jerked his head toward the darkness of the tower. “We haven’t accounted for Crisen yet.”
“Crisen is dead,” Marek said quietly. “Ythek took him.”
“But did you see him dead?” persisted Aldric. “I have my reasons for wanting to be sure.”
“No,” Marek admitted. “I didn’t see him. Because…” He hesitated, reluctant to introduce ugliness into the peace of afterwards. “Because if he died as I believe he died, there would be nothing left to see.”
“Aldric, please let it go.” As he unlaced war-mask and unbuckled helm and coif, Gueynor touched her fingers gently to the sudden vulnerability of the young eijo’s scarred cheek. “Dead is dead.”
“Maybe so.” Aldric remained as unconvinced as King Rynert would be. Then he stiffened and his gaze slid past Gueynor to focus on the shadow cast by a rack of weapons. As the shadow moved he moved too, taking a swift step forward as Isileth came up to a guard position. “But half dead is still alive.”
If only just.
Crisen Geruath had spent only a matter of minutes in the company of demons. Long enough to be obliterated, if that had been their intention, yet not long enough for even Ythek Shri’s tapered talons to amuse its master Issaqua with the infliction of much delicate damage. But damage had been done. Crisen lacked a great deal of flesh, all teased in artistic patterns from his chest and belly, thighs and buttocks, where its removal wouldn’t be fatal. One eye was missing, not both, and with a little shudder Aldric guessed that vicious mercy was so he could continue to watch his own gradual dismemberment. It went beyond mere physical harm. He had seen the expression on Crisen’s lacerated face before. Then it had been a hunting dog, driven beyond endurance by the Beast it pursued – but man or dog or any other creature, the vacant glare had only one meaning.
Crisen had gone so far beyond sanity that there would be no coming back.
“Finish it, Aldric,” whispered Gueynor. “Kill him.” Aldric glanced sideways, lips skinning from his teeth in a small, humourless smile.
“Kill that? No. If he was still Crisen the Overlord I would kill him willingly, but that is nothing. Less than an animal.” He looked her full in the face “Less even than a mad wolf.”
“What would killing be except a kindness?” Marek said, with a long straight stare at Widowmaker. Aldric caught the look and shook his head, turning the taiken so that starlight shimmered up and down the blade as he released the scabbard strapped across his back. “A kindness,” the demon-queller repeated, with no more attempts at subtlety. Aldric watched him for a moment, and studied Gueynor for the same brief time, while Isileth Widowmaker whispered softly as she slid out of sight.
“So show kindness if you want. I’m not inclined.”
They stared at him, then at Crisen, and both huddled unconsciously closer to each other in the presence of demon-born insanity and the unremitting hate which was its cousin. The Overlord watched them all. His one remaining eye didn’t blink, he scarcely seemed to breathe and even the blood which streaked his lacerated form had long since ceased to flow. There wa
s only dreadful immobility.
“My god…” he mumbled. “My god…” It might have been an oath, or a prayer. “My god…” Crisen said again. And then his voice rose to a scream. “You killed my god!” He was charging forward now, a reeling, staggering run on flayed and broken feet, and there was a battle-axe clutched in his ruined hands.
Aldric didn’t reply – words were useless – but his arms thrust out to either side, pitching Marek and Gueynor out of Crisen’s way and gaining space to move. It was just in time. A scraping sound of metal on metal came from his armoured shoulder as he sidestepped from beneath the falling axe and let it waste its force on empty air.
Crisen let a formless wailing like a dying dog as he stumbled past, and Aldric turned with him, right hand already on Isileth’s hilt. With a viper’s hiss he long blade leapt free, up and around in an eager arc of steel. Half a second more of preparation would have made it a proper Justice Strike, the horizontal sweep at shoulder height that echoed what was done by headsmen. Instead Crisen’s head stayed on his shoulders and there was hardly any sound of steel striking home, a slight metallic thud and nothing more. But it was effective enough.
The Overlord went down as if his legs had been hacked from under him, crashing full-length against the floor and skidding with his own momentum. Where the base of his skull became the nape of his neck was a razor-thin gash that scarcely bled at all. But it had passed between the linked bones of his spine to snip the cord within. Now Crisen lay face downward with arms, legs and body all useless now, and he was as good as dead. But all three heard his voice in the instant that breath left him.
“Oh god,” he said. “Oh father.”
And said no more.
“The father he killed?” wondered Marek.
“Or the Father of Fires?” said Gueynor. Aldric looked down at the corpse as he cleaned and sheathed his sword.
“Perhaps,” he said, and stared out at the pallor in the sky which would become another day. “But what would make him ask for either? Or think that they would listen?”
*
Aldric checked his saddle-girth and glanced up towards the sky. It was clear blue: no clouds, no rain, no threat of thunder any more. A summer sky at last.
“So,” he said in a quiet voice meant for no one’s ears but Lyard’s and his own, “the sun can also rise on a Gate of the Abyss.”
“Seghar is not a Gate.” Marek, standing beside Gueynor on the steps of the inner citadel, had either heard the words after all or read them off Aldric’s moving lips. “Not now. The way is closed.”
“Is it?” Aldric looked towards them across the big Andarran’s withers. “Marek Endain, you above all people should know closed doors can be unlocked.” His right hand touched his crest-collar, and though his voice didn’t alter, the full weight of his rank and title were in his next words. “Stay here, until you’re sure that what you claim is true.”
Marek didn’t bow outright, a pointed reminder that he was Cernuan not Alban, but he inclined his head to acknowledge the order as he would had it come from King Rynert himself.
“Will you not stay, Aldric – even for a little while?” There was a note of pleading in Gueynor’s voice, and Aldric’s resolve wavered for an instant. So like Kyrin, he thought. Then he shook his head.
“No. I have to go. Too many of my duties are unfulfilled, and now I have a new one. Setting right what happened here.”
“But Aldric…!” As he set boot to stirrup and swung into his saddle, Gueynor hurried down the stairs. “Aldric, what will I do?”
“Rule. Or run. As of now you’re the legitimate heir to Seghar, by right of succession and by right of conquest. You’re its Overlord. The place is yours, to do with as you will.” Aldric leaned low enough to take her outstretched hand and raise its fingertips to his forehead in respect for her newfound rank. “But I ask one thing only. If you do hold Seghar, then give thought to your dead. Honour them. And hold it well.”
*
Gueynor stood beneath the sheltering arch of the Summergate with Marek at her back, and watched as the man on the black horse dwindled slowly towards the forest. Aldric didn’t look back as he rode away, not even once. That was as she had wished. Yet when the distance-thinned wail of a wolf came drifting down the wind from the Jevaiden, he stiffened in his saddle and made to turn around. Instead, recalling his promise, he raised one arm as he had at Evthan’s funeral.
Half in salute, half in farewell.
Then he shook Lyard to a gallop and was swallowed by the trees.
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