She heard the steps of the Companions marching to battle behind her. Bulsurrus did not attack. He knew he could not command the loyalty of the others.
They are mine. They are my Companions. They are what you should be, Bulsurrus.
‘Come!’ Gravskein called again as she neared the bowl, issuing her challenge to the ambushers she knew were hidden around her. ‘Come and be Unmade! Come and taste the gift of pain!’
Her voice echoed against the cliff sides. Silence answered her. There was no movement.
The warband crossed the bowl. Gravskein saw sigils and emblems of every description on broken shields. She did not recognise any of them. None of the skeletons bore the telltale mutilations of the Unmade.
We are the first to pass this way.
Her teeth parted, awaiting the taste of triumph.
The band had reached the centre of the bowl when the attack came.
The enemy advanced in a crescent moon formation. They came from the rear. Gravskein must have passed within a few feet of her foes. They had been invisible in the field of boulders. They wore helmets graced with emerald plumes, and many of them carried two blades, almost all their weapons serrated and barbed. Some carried hooked nets as well, and long tridents to skewer their prey. One figure held back. He was hooded, and two enormous serpents, their scales the same shade as the plumes on the helmets, coiled around his body, and hissed at the Companions of the Harrower.
They moved swiftly, with grace, but also with the sharp, angular, stabs of a scorpion. Gravskein saw a dance in the flowing elegance of steps, but it was utterly different from the dance of the Blissful Ones. It was controlled, a planned, tactical, meticulous action, as if everything about these warriors were carefully, murderously premeditated.
The Unmade warband turned to charge, a spear striking at the centre of a sickle. Rezhia, who had been bringing up the rear, was at the head of the rush. She was several feet from the nearest enemy when he struck her cheek with his whip. It was not a strong blow. It was enough to draw blood from her flayed face, but a minor thing. Beneath the notice of an Ascended One. The attacker danced away, pulling back from her. Rezhia took two more steps and then fell like lead. Her scream of pain choked off as if her throat had swollen shut. Her limbs hammered on the ground, and her body swelled. In moments, she was covered in boils. Her tongue, suddenly inches thick with the foam of leathery bubbles, forced her jaws apart. The boils ruptured, streaming viscous, green fluid, and she stilled.
The crescent of the enemy closed more tightly around the Companions. The warriors kept their distance, lunging in to strike and then retreat. The hooded man with the serpents carried a blade, but he did not advance into the melee yet. He chanted, moving his arms in complex, sinuous patterns. His monsters mimicked his movements, and when he thrust his arms forward, a rush of snakes slithered from cracks in the floor of the bowl and from beneath the shields of the fallen, sinking their fangs into the legs of Unmade. Where they struck, flesh ballooned instantly, and blood thickened to black, stinking sludge.
Gravskein was the furthest from the attack, and she sprinted across the bowl, her leg-blades striking sparks against the stone. In the time it took her to reach the heart of the struggle, more of her warriors fell to the poisoned weapons. Trezzog and Akransia and Hepherred and Ekrensak, killed in moments. They died shrieking, and at least they had pain to the end, but the pain was brief, cut off by death suddenly, a monstrous crime against great agony.
‘You are cowards!’ Gravskein shouted.
‘We are artists!’ cried the serpent sorcerer. ‘We are the Splintered Fang, and now you know the power of our bite.’
There were perhaps ten warriors of the Splintered Fang. At the start of the battle, the numbers were almost even, but the poison took a rapid toll on the Companions. Bulsurrus managed to duck beneath the sword thrust of one of the enemy and then disembowel him with a quick crossing of his sword arms. But the Splintered Fang kept pulling away. They needed little more than a single wound, and their venom did its work.
The Unmade understood the danger quickly, and fought defensively, blocking strikes and holding off the foe. But this was an unnatural form of battle for them, and it could not be sustained for long. Gravskein sprang through the air on her leg-blades, and showed the Splintered Fang that the Companions of the Harrower could fight with speed as well. She moved too fast for her target to withdraw. He stabbed forward, but she spun, and her huge, hooked blades cut off both his arms at the elbow. His blood washed over her as he fell backwards. She tasted it through her hood, and her assault built towards the frenzied dance.
A barbed net tangled around her left hook. The Splintered Fang hauled on her, bringing her towards the points of his trident. She yanked back, surprising him into a jerk forward. She turned, tangling and tearing the net. He managed to jab the trident into her side. Her flesh erupted with the fury of the poison, but she had drunk from the well that had killed the land. She would not be felled by a dose of venom this small. Her skin bubbled. Pain seared her torso, and she laughed.
The warrior of the Splintered Fang had begun to withdraw, but at her laughter, he hesitated. She yanked on the disintegrating net, and in his hesitation, he did not let go. He stumbled forward, and she drove her right hook down through his helmet, skewering his skull.
Serpents coiled on the ground beneath her. They broke their fangs against the iron of her legs. She flew at the sorcerer. His monsters reared up to face her. She was now consumed by the full bloodlust and pain of the bliss of war, and she whirled, ecstatic. She was not flesh. She was blades. She was wind and iron. She was the bringer of pain.
She laughed again as she felt the impact of her hooks decapitating the serpents. Then, with a kick, she plunged a leg through the sorcerer’s chest.
The Unmade rallied. The Splintered Fang’s formation was cut in two. They had lost both of their leaders within moments of each other. The tide turned, and they were no longer the masters of an ambush, picking their prey apart at their leisure. They were fighting for their lives. They slashed and stabbed with all the skill they had shown before, and their envenomed blades were just as deadly. But the Companions of the Harrower fell upon them, smashing swords aside with arms that were no longer flesh and could not be poisoned.
At close quarters, the Unmade made their brutality count. Their bodies were sacrifices to unending pain. They could not completely avoid being injured, and so they died, but they brought the Splintered Fang down with them. Gravskein danced through blood and flesh. She drove a leg through the throat of one enemy. She bowed to slice another’s torso in half. Her limbs were tributes to dual agonies, hers and her victims’.
She stopped dancing only when the music of the screams ended, and she no longer had partners in pain. She calmed, and stood dripping in gore. The silence in the bowl was terrible. The Splintered Fang were all dead, their bodies in pieces. Of Gravskein’s warband, only Bulsurrus and Skarask remained. Skarask looked at her with fevered hope, but the Joyous One’s eyes were dulled with despair.
Gravskein turned to face the far side of the bowl. She could see a path snaking its way up between the boulders to the craggy ridge high above. ‘Our comrades have sacrificed themselves to open the way for us,’ she said. ‘Let us see what awaits.’
If there is anything to see, she expected Bulsurrus to say. He said nothing, which was almost worse.
Only three. We are only three. One way or another, our journey comes to its end.
She could not let herself believe it would end anywhere else than at the tower. Not now.
As they reached the other side of the bowl and began to climb, Gravskein laughed with joy. ‘Look!’ she cried, pointing with a hook. ‘Look!’
Near the peak of the cliff, a waterfall of silver burst from the rocks and fell some twenty feet before disappearing beneath the stone again.
The Companions marched steadily up. As
they drew closer to the cataract, its roar resounded in Gravskein’s ears like a promise from the Gods. She climbed faster, the path winding up beside the fall of poison. And when, at last, the Unmade reached the summit, and she saw what was beyond, tears of gratitude spilled from her lidless eyes.
Part III
The land dipped for a short distance past the ridge, and then it rose again, leading up to two massive hills of solid, bare rock. They were in the shapes of colossal beasts, facing each other in anger. Whether a divine hand had carved them, or whether they were petrified monsters, Gravskein could not tell.
Just ahead of the hills, and at the centre of the beasts’ furious gaze, stood the Tower of Revels. Built with black brick, it was a squat, glowering presence. It was much lower than the hills, yet the beasts looked upon it as if they were cowed. It was strong, a clenched fist of power. The river of poison emerged from its base. It streamed across the land and dropped underground again just before the ridge. The tower was at the centre of a low rise, and Gravskein saw dried riverbeds radiating out in all directions from it, even running between the two hills.
The slope down from the crest and the terrain around the riverbank were broken, strewn with huge areas of jagged debris, and gave the three Companions good cover for their approach. But the last few hundred yards before the tower were smooth and hard as a bare skull. Gravskein, Bulsurrus and Skarask crouched behind slabs that resembled huge teeth and looked up at the tower. Above the parapet, the banner of the Splintered Fang flapped in the wind, its entwined serpents seeming to writhe in venomous triumph. More than a dozen guards stood sentinel.
‘To have come this far…’ said Bulsurrus.
‘Even now?’ Gravskein asked him. ‘In the shadow of the Tower of Revels, even now you doubt that fate has brought us here to victory?’
‘The Splintered Fang almost slaughtered us when our numbers were evenly matched. And now you expect three of us to storm the tower?’
‘Then we will,’ said Skarask. He turned to Gravskein, his eyes shining. ‘I believe,’ he said. A mere Ascended One, his fervour should have shamed Bulsurrus.
Instead, the Joyous One said, ‘We are here to die within reach of our goal. What better or more bitter irony could fate have decreed?’ For the first time, he was not blaming Gravskein.
‘I will ask you again,’ she said, ‘as I have asked and asked on our journey, what would you do instead?’
‘I do not know,’ said Bulsurrus. His voice had a ghastly, hollow echo. His words expressed the one pain that the Unmade dreaded. It was the pain that the others helped keep at bay. It was the pain of the abyss of grief and despair.
Gravskein understood. She had been teetering on the edge of that abyss. She was clinging to the exhilaration of seeing the tower to keep from taking the same plunge. Even the thought that the quest might soon end in death had been a comfort, because at least oblivion would keep her from the pit.
Bulsurrus had fallen. She might catch him yet. If Gravskein had still possessed a hand, she would have placed it on his shoulder.
‘We see what we have sought for so long,’ she said. ‘We see it. We will fight in the name of the Flayed King in the shadow of the Tower of Revels. Is that not glorious?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘How shall we attack?’ said Skarask.
‘As we always do,’ Gravskein said. A direct, murderous charge. This was the way of the Unmade. The fact that there was no other possible approach to the tower made this last, greatest charge seem even more like the product of destiny.
She felt the weight of the slug-horn around her neck. She would not blow it yet. But she would, soon. She swore it.
They leapt out from behind the rocks and ran beside the river, heading straight for the tower. The wind of Gravskein’s flight blew back the scrolls hanging from her arms. She ran as never before, streaking over the ground. She felt as if every stride should carry her for a league. She shouted without words, snarling the savage hunger of the Unmade. Bulsurrus and Skarask roared with her.
The guards on the parapet shouted, and arrows began to rain down. Gravskein gnashed her teeth in contempt. She jerked left and right, evading the first shots with ease. Skarask and Bulsurrus kept pace beside her, sprinting as if fresh to battle.
A shaft struck Skarask in the shoulder. He choked. He kept running, but he dropped his sword, his hand shivering. His head jerked back, his arms rigid at his sides. His chest thrust suddenly forward. In the desperation of the end, he put on a final burst of speed and for a few steps he was ahead of Gravskein. Another arrow hit him, and things that looked like long, curved horns exploded from his thorax on four sides. They pushed out further, and they were teeth. A maw had formed inside his upper chest. The four fangs snapped shut over his head, crushing it with such sudden violence that fragments of his skull flew out like hail. Blood and the pink meat of his brain squirted out from between the fangs, and he fell.
We are two.
They had covered less than a quarter of the way to the Tower of Revels. The air above the parapet darkened with a new flight of arrows.
We will fail, Gravskein realised. No matter how strong and swift she and Bulsurrus were, they could not fight through to the gate. Not like this. She had made a mistake.
And then she remembered, once again, the path she had been shown.
Look for the poison.
‘Swim!’ Gravskein shouted. She held her breath and jumped to her right. Arrows whistled past her head. Then she plunged beneath the surface of the silver water.
The poison embraced her with agony. It flowed over her ever-open eyes, and she saw all the shades of pain. They were silver, but they were also red, and violet, and they were fire, and they were blades, scraping and burning through her eyes, through her skull, through her very being.
The current pushed hard against her. With no hands and no feet, she could not swim. The iron of her blades pulled her down to the bottom of the riverbed. It was not very deep, though deep enough that the arrows could not reach her. She saw nothing except the liquid flares of pain. She did not know if Bulsurrus had followed her, if he was moving forward, or if he was alive. She was barely aware that he had ever existed. There was only pain.
She embraced it, as she always had, as she always would.
This was the greatest pain, and she received it at the moment of her greatest purpose.
She pushed up from the bottom, driving herself forward. She dropped back down, and pushed again. She propelled herself along the riverbed, and managed to hold her breath though all the pain in all the realms had gathered to squeeze her in its grip. She launched herself again and again, for she could do nothing else, and she would do so again and again until finally she could hold her breath no longer, and the pain would finally carry her to the oblivion that had dogged her so long, awaiting her failure.
She refused to fail.
Darkness began to impinge upon the brilliance of pain. The agony had given her the strength and determination to make it this far, but soon she would have to breathe, and then she would drown. But even as the edges of the blazing light went black, she realised that she was jumping off from the bottom more frequently. The riverbed was rising.
She leapt, and leapt. She was one with the pain of the venom. She gave herself to the joy of torture’s utmost extremity. She was no longer simply in pain. She was pain. She had journeyed to the source of the river of poison. She had defeated its current. She was returning the purity of pain to the Tower of Revels.
Gravskein leapt again, and she broke the surface. She gasped, feeling the welcome scrape of daggers in her lungs as she inhaled air and drops of poison. She fell back beneath the water, but after two more leaps, her head stayed above the surface. She held back the scream of ecstasy and agony, not wishing to give away her presence. Instead, she hissed. The sound was long and drawn out, as if she were the nemesis of the
Splintered Fang’s serpents.
Soon, she could see again, though her eyes still burned with sulphurous fire. She was in a chamber with a low dome, illuminated by the dim silver glow given off by the poison. She was standing in the shallow end of a reservoir. Streams of the lethal water poured in from eight pipes jutting from around the circumference of the dome. The lip of the reservoir was just ahead of her, and past it was a stone platform. A doorway in the far wall opened onto a narrow staircase leading up.
Gravskein looked for Bulsurrus. At first, she seemed to be alone, but then he bobbed to the surface with a wrenching, grinding moan. She caught him under the shoulder with a hook before he went down again. Lifting carefully so she did not slice through his arm, she dragged him out of the reservoir and onto the platform.
Bulsurrus shuddered, caught in wracking pain that was too great for him to embrace. His veins were swelling to the surface of his skin, and had turned a deep black. Blood, viscous and dark, flowed from his eyes and mouth. Where his blades met his arms, his skin was soft, dissolving into gruel.
His eyes did clear, though. They focused on Gravskein, then on the chamber. ‘Tower…’ he whispered.
‘Yes,’ Gravskein said. ‘You are in the Tower of Revels. We are here, Bulsurrus. We are here to take it back.’
Bulsurrus tried to rise. He fell back down. ‘I cannot stand,’ he said. He coughed up more and thicker blood. He was dying.
‘The pain is yours,’ said Gravskein. ‘Embrace it. Use it. Defeat the poison.’
‘I am fighting it. But it is winning.’
Gravskein nodded. Hooking her blades under his arms again, she dragged him over to the wall and propped him up, seated, against it. ‘Fight as long as you can,’ she said. ‘Stay until I bring you news of victory.’
‘I will,’ he promised.
She left him and climbed the stairs, her leg-blades scraping against the steps. The staircase wound up in a wide, gradual spiral, lit by torches in recessed sconces. As Gravskein left the reservoir behind, the hollow, splashing sound of the poison gushing from the pipes faded. It was replaced by a deeper, rushing roar.
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