Then he pressed his thumb-needle into Linciard's jugular vein and dosed him as much as was safe.
“Rallant!” the Field Marshal called again, voice thick and annoyed.
Pasting a smile onto his face, Rallant turned toward his master and bowed, slipping the earhook up his gambeson sleeve as he did. “I have found my pet,” he said. “And I am sure what he knows will be most enlightening, if your mentalists can read him through my thrall.”
“Sounds like a challenge,” the Field Marshal chortled, then coughed wetly into his fist. “Well, bring him here and let us see to the rest of these rebels. I'm tired of this already.”
“Yes, Field Marshal,” said Rallant, and rejoined the crowd with Linciard at his heels.
*****
The first rush of ahergriin nearly broke the Rakut team. From her vantage on the lip of the half-frozen fountain, Ardent watched in horror as the Seething Brigade turncoats froze like statues, losing step with their Blaze Company and Trifold brethren as the twisted monstrosities barreled forward. At the back of the ranks, Sergeant Benson squawked something that was definitely not an order, then turned and bolted for the far end of the square.
Ardent spared no breath for him, but shouted, “Watch your line!” and saw a few fighters take note and try to close ranks before impact.
If it helped, she couldn't tell. The first ahergriin impaled themselves on swords and pikes and kept going, their massive bodies forcing back the defenders even as the smaller monsters scrambled up them to leap the line. It was instant chaos: Seethers knocked down and trampled, Blazes stumbling over them, Shadow Folk pressing forward into what for many of them was their first true battle. Among them, the Trifolders sang their Brinvan hymns, shieldwomen and masked hammer-wielders bracing the soldiers as priestesses grabbed for the injured. Other priestesses had stayed back to draw red chalk lines on the brickwork—their sanctuary space—but how well a bit of chalk and faith would stand up to the Imperial monstrosities, Ardent couldn't guess.
“Crossbows on the rooftops,” she ordered the handful of shadowbloods still under her command. All the rest were away, either ferrying civilians to safety or aiding the Blazes at Riverwatch or bringing the foreign mages to their spots for the teleport-block; those Shadow Folk among the soldiers, fighting with short blades and truncheons, were the remnants of Bah-kai and the unblood Enforcers that had been assigned to her. A few valiant civilians and the goblin ambassadors' metal guardians had joined the melee too, but the rest of the crowd stayed back behind the fountain: hundreds of men, women and children who would go down like grain before a scythe if the defense fell.
Even now, they were in danger, for the smaller ahergriin sprang like insects past the defending ranks to skitter on bone-splinter legs toward anyone isolated or laid-out. Ardent shouted warnings to the sigil-writing priestesses and the medics tending the wounded, and saw more masked Trifolders step up to guard them: some like Brancirans in armor and bronze faceplates, others like Brigyddians in ceramic masks and kerchiefs. The blessed dead, returned to defend the living.
The ahergriin were quicker though, dodging ponderous blows and dashing past half-scribed sigils to jab and snap at the living priestesses. Wincing, Ardent hissed, “Go get them,” in eiyenriu, and felt her cloak fall away into individual screeching eiyets. Until the Trifolders' ward was complete, they were free to move around in it—and drew more of their brethren out from every shadow they passed, until they were a low skittering tide of black teeth.
One of the masked Brancirans looked back at her with what she could only interpret as disapproval, and she resisted the impulse to make a nasty gesture. Her organization and theirs went through phases of alliance and opposition and this wasn't the time to cause a switch.
Voices buzzed in her head from the earhook: more reports from Riverwatch and Lakeshore. She snapped a few orders tersely, aware that she was in command even if the others hadn't been told, but kept her gaze fixed on the heaving brawl ahead. Sergeant Benson was still nowhere to be seen, and a few others were retreating—Seethers mostly, half-numb from their conditioning—but the rest stood desperately firm against the flow. Trifolders' shields filled the gaps left by the too-small ones from the Shadows' supply; Ardent made a mental note to fix that if they survived.
She wanted to join the fray—to step down from the fountain and lash about with her still-drawn kukris—but forcefully suppressed it. The few eiyets still on her shoulders brought her shadowbloods' reports from the rooftops: more ahergriin emerging from the portal down the alley, at least four wraiths in evidence, and a dangerous lack of defenders on any of their own flanks. Silently she cursed herself for not anticipating this kind of assault—but then, how could she? The captain hadn't, nor Mako, and they were the ones familiar with such things. There'd been no reason to expect such massive retaliation.
But we should have figured on another bloody crush. As soon as we knew about Rallant's mindhook, we should have guessed. Flaming pikes, I let myself get distracted, I missed a trick, and now—
A hiss of rage went through the eiyets on her shoulders, and at the same time she caught a shout from a cross-street. Glancing that way, she saw a slice of light extend from the mouth of another alleyway then immediately be eclipsed by the shadows of invaders.
“Kalla drosh kitet,” she swore, then raised her voice to the crowd. “Intruders north! Defenders fall back, last ranks peel off and cover the flank! Fall back, fall back to the Trifold ward and cover the flank!” She repeated it for the earhook on the off-chance that Benson would hear it and come back to do his piking job, but she had the feeling she'd have to send the eiyets after him. To reclaim the earhook, if nothing else.
Hope Sarovy won't mind if he's been chewed on...
The Trifolders picked up her orders and echoed them forward, and she watched with knotted nerves as the defensive line began to split. The priestesses' protectors were already moving toward the unguarded flank, joined by the Shadow agent who'd cried the alarm and several nervous civilians with rolling pins and cleavers. The rest of the refugees were crowding into the buildings or moving toward the fountain and the Trifolders' ward; Ardent glimpsed the Lord Governor waving his lantern to direct them and was glad he hadn't bolted too. She'd had enough of unreliable men.
An absolutely massive ahergriin slammed the retreating line, dropping several defenders beneath its bulk. Smaller ones began to dart over it, but two metal elementals stepped into the breach, meshing into a moving wall of spikes that grabbed at leapers even as it forced the flesh-mass back. The line reformed behind it, haphazard and ragged; as more defenders peeled off to support the flank, its state just worsened.
Need to get us out of here, she thought as the first monsters hit the flank guard. Blasted Regency should have heard, should have come already, so what in Morgwi's name is keeping them? Is this another test, mother?
If it was, she knew the answer. Recall her shadowbloods, escape with the civilians and Trifolders, and leave the soldiers to be torn apart. She could do it too, mostly; some Trifolders would be trapped with the Blaze men at Riverwatch, but her mother would say they deserved it, and the Trifolders might even accept it. They believed in noble sacrifices.
No. He told me to take care of his men, and I won't let him down. He's run off on his own mission, but once he's back—
“Boss,” came an urgent voice behind her. Ticuo.
A chill ran up her spine. She'd sent him after Linciard, who'd gone after Sarovy.
“What?” she said, not daring to turn. If she didn't look back, she wouldn't see the absence that suddenly felt inevitable. The loss that had been destined from the start.
“The captain's dead. We saw him fall.”
He said something about Linciard after that, but she didn't hear it. There was too much noise suddenly: her own blood thundering in her ears, her mind on fire with black fury. Curse that man—curse that man! Luring her in, placing this burden in her hands, then leaving!
Curse the wraiths. Cur
se the monsters. Curse the Empire.
Let the Dark take them all.
She felt it there below the street, pervading the lightless places as it did in all cities, all realms. Waiting on the other side of the thin skin of Shadow for something to puncture through and let it surge forth. She was an expert in its use—one of the few shadowbloods both capable of touching it and not afraid to do so—and despite the many times she'd called the Dark bite, she had never been tainted by it. Burning passion was both her namesake and her shield.
Now she stepped down from the fountain and crouched on the street, her shadow darkening beyond black beneath her. Ticuo hissed in alarm, boots scuffing on the bricks as he retreated; she ignored him, and sank her arms up to the elbow in the stuff of night.
There was no umbral wall here, not with her rage already breaching the boundary, but she could feel where it stretched beneath the street and pooled in the cellars and sewers, crevices and cracks. The Trifold ward felt like a tourniquet on her arms, restricting her strength as she reached beyond it—but it wasn't complete, so it couldn't stop her. As her senses spread out like dye in water, she felt the gathered host below: the cold, tortured things that lived on the boundary of the Dark, always searching for some warm live vessel to slip into. None approached her; they had long since learned to fear her sting.
Breathing deep of the empty-cavern scent, she slid her Dark-lengthened fingers along the undersides of the roads, feeling the vibration of monstrous footfalls through black waters that wished only silence. Further and further she reached, until her palms throbbed with the painful light of the portals—until she felt the spongy texture of the umbral walls beneath the empty buildings that bracketed them.
A part of her knew she shouldn't be doing this. It had become too dangerous at the very moment the Imperial Light vanished, leaving only the moons to watch them in the sky. But she didn't care. She wanted these monsters drowned and these obligations secured so that she could draw her blades and descend upon her true enemy—her foolish captain's target—before he could somehow escape.
There was no time to play soldier games. No time for prayers and sigils.
Digging her nails in, she tore two great holes between the realms.
Immediately they felt different from the bites she'd done before. The space beneath the ahergriin offered no resistance, and beneath the portals scarcely more—so where she had expected to collapse the roads from below and drop a few buildings on the wraiths, instead she felt entire swaths of umbral wall rip away like rotten fabric. Nor did the upsurge of dark water recoil from either wraiths or portals; instead it lashed toward them hungrily with tentacles formed of black liquid and cored by Void, and what it caught, it dragged into the depths.
This isn't possible, she thought. This only happens in Void Seeker rites, where they've worn the barrier so thin that it breaks completely—
She grabbed for the fraying edges of the holes then, desperate to stitch them shut, but the damage was already propagating beyond the original tears. The few strands she caught disintegrated in her hands. She opened her mouth to cry a warning and felt cold brine fill it—opened her mortal eyes and realized there was no street beneath her feet, no fountain at her back. She was in a black glass bowl rapidly filling with darkness: a cyst at the edge of the Shadow Realm, the internal barrier hardening beneath her to keep the incursion from spilling into the Realm itself.
She tried to struggle upward, but the weight of the black water was too much. Void tentacles rushed past her to make use of the hole she'd fallen through—her own shadow—and through it she saw Ticuo with a short sword, a masked Trifolder with a hammer. Orange firelight flickered through but couldn't reach her, couldn't dispel the rising Darkness, and as the brine she'd gulped crept down her throat, she felt the kukri still in her hand.
In desperation, she turned its edge to her neck. Better to die than be hollowed—
Then she heard the wings.
*****
Lark lurched to her feet as the ground shuddered, nostrils suddenly full of the subterranean-ocean scent of the Dark. She turned toward Ardent to shout a warning but saw the woman fall through her own shadow; an instant later, a black whip lashed up from where she had been and took a vicious swipe at Enforcer Ticuo.
For a moment, Lark just stared, struggling to make sense of the sudden danger. She'd spent most of the time since her recovery just sitting among the medics and the injured, trying to think past her exhaustion. On her wrist, the Maevor-bracer tightened in fear; on her shoulder, Ripple rose like a wary snake.
Have to do something, she told herself as the tendril stabbed again for Ticuo, indifferent to the slash of his blade. Beside and behind her, other horrors were happening—screams and fleeing bodies, the roar of collapsing masonry—but she couldn't tear her eyes from the bulging black puddle where Ardent had vanished. It was behind the Trifolders' line, and if it spread…
She gripped the crystal and started to step forward, but something grabbed her ankle. A panicked kick, a man's curse, and she realized it had been Magus Lahngi, who was laying on the pallet beside her camp-chair, swirling tattoos peeking out from beneath the bandages that swathed his chest. “Dangerous,” he rasped. “Boundaries are thin. Do not get close.”
“I need to light it up,” she said. “It's the only thing that will chase it away.”
He shook his head, pale face going chalky at the pain it cost him. “Not now. You said...Dark water took your Light friend. Should not be possible, but with the sun gone, I think the Void is not afraid now. Pushing the Dark ahead into places it should not go. Must reestablish surface boundary, physical reality.”
She vaguely remembered babbling about Maevor to the tolerant medics. She hadn't realized Lahngi was listening. “I don't even know what that means!”
“Elementals.” He let go of her to make a gesture, and the tattoos on his skin seemed to shimmer and shift. Immediately a breeze coiled around them, gossamer wings filling the air. “They are the world, the wellcap of the Dark. They can stop this. Not air...too ephemeral. Water...”
On her shoulder, Ripple rose as if it understood, but she didn't. “I—I'm not really a mage, I don't know how to command him...”
Lahngi flashed a blanched smile. “Cannot command, can only ask. Go, will try to...support you.”
She turned away just as another building collapsed thunderously. Dust kicked past her, filling her lungs for the first instant of her startled inhale. Then a cloud-serpent whisked them clear, wings tickling at her lips as she coughed.
As the gritty veil swirled away, she beheld the battle. Beyond the burning red line of the Trifold ward, what had been a street full of ahergriin was now a black morass, the structures on both sides tilting in as if being eaten from below. The bricks and tiles that dropped didn't splash, just vanished instantly in the murk—as did anything else that touched it. The portal-light was gone, as were the wraiths; about a third of the defenders stood braced for impact, while the rest had bolted away. Dozens of tendrils were rising from the darkness, and though the Trifolders had raised their hands and voices in a sustained chant, it didn't stop the tendrils—just made them flinch as they lashed through the firelight-glow to strike at shields and flesh.
To the north, which had been at her back, more buildings were going down, more black water crawling up the street toward the imperiled crew. There was no ward-line there, just Trifolders singing. She had the terrible feeling it wouldn't help.
And the spot by the fountain was growing.
Terrified of the consequences, Lark forced herself forward. She and Lahngi and Izelina were the only mages here, and the girl knew even less than she did. That made it her responsibility. Still, her voice shook as she said, “Ripple, I—can you fight it? I know you did with Maevor, but there's so much...”
The water-snake hunched on her shoulder as if preparing to spring, and she took another step toward the hole, and another. A second tendril had pushed up from it to stab at a Trifolder trying to
help, and she saw the black tip lance through the bronze mask's eye-slit then recoil, saw the Trifolder's hammer spatter the tendril's midsection only for it to reform.
Pikes, pikes, pikety pikes, this is too much for me, she thought, then took another step.
Ripple leapt off her arm, splashed into the icy bowl of the fountain, and vanished.
“No!” she cried after it, but it didn't come back.
Tears pricking her eyes, she pulled the crystal from around her neck and thrust it toward the splotch. She had little strength left, but plenty of bitter anger, and pushed that into it until its bright matrix began to respond. The captive wraiths stirred sluggishly within, even Vallindas too drained to help; as pale light began to pour from its facets, her vision swarmed with spots, the edges going grey.
The bracer clenched again, and pain stung through her arm—followed by a surge of adrenaline. She gasped as the greyness withdrew, her mouth full of the taste of copper, her heart tripping in her chest, but took another step forward.
If the Dark considered her a threat, it didn't show. The radiance fell on its surface as if on oil, painting a sheen but doing no damage, and its tendrils stayed fixated on the two defenders within its reach. Closer, though, and a third tendril unreeled from the pool, its barbed tip aiming toward her like a scorpion's tail.
She felt the wind-serpents tear by, saw them strike droplets of darkness from it and shred them into nothing. Too few, though, and too small, for even when they took off the whole barbed tip, it just reformed, and more dark water bulked up from the spreading pool below. She thrust the crystal forward, but its glow just made the tendril go wide and flat, arching around it to engulf her hand in a sphere of blackness.
She screamed by instinct, then realized it didn't hurt. There was a cold aura around her hand but nothing touching the skin, and pressure on her sleeve-cuff of black water clamping around it but none yet reaching beneath. When she tried to pull back, it came with her, reaching pseudopods for her face; every glob that dripped from it just expanded its area of influence.
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 88