by Ari Marmell
What was she? What had Lisette become?!
The incoming blades froze, and then Lisette was standing directly before her, as though her arms had resumed their natural length and pulled her forward to match, rather than recoiling.
Or at least that's what Shins assumed later, when she had a moment to gather her thoughts. Now, all she saw was a sudden blur, the vicious leer, and then searing pain as Lisette slammed her forehead into Shins's face.
She'd tried to turn aside, to avoid the blow she'd somehow known was coming. All she'd accomplished was that her nose might be broken, rather than assuredly was; it was something, but between the throbbing agony and the horrid sound of something going crunch, it didn't mean much.
Olgun guiding her arm more than she herself was, Shins twisted her wrist inward and stabbed awkwardly, struggling to thrust with a rapier at a range where a far shorter blade would have proven far more effective.
Still, clumsy a strike as it was, it should have connected. Before the tip could cover those mere inches of distance, however, Lisette simultaneously dropped the rapier from her right hand and tossed the dagger from her left. Neither hand remained empty, however, as she caught the dagger in her right, and grabbed the blade of Shins's rapier in her left.
The sword just stopped; she might as well have stabbed an oak tree. That the grip was impossible, that no human hand was strong enough to arrest a thrust like that—let alone do so without slicing open her palm and fingers—wasn't remotely surprising, not anymore. In fact, Widdershins had just enough time to think a bitter Of course before Lisette plunged the dagger into her body.
Olgun did for her everything he could. Had the blade struck precisely as Lisette intended, punching into Widdershins's liver, the young thief would have died in agony, excruciatingly slowly, but not slowly enough for the tiny god to make any real attempt at healing the damage. At saving her.
Instead, with the last of the power he could muster, he deflected the steel, just the slightest angle. The result, instead, was a gut wound.
Meaning that Widdershins would still probably die in agony, excruciatingly slowly, but it might buy Olgun enough time to patch up the worst of it before that could happen.
Might. If he was even given the opportunity. If the red-haired monster didn't just finish her—finish them—outright.
Because whatever else, Olgun knew damn well that his powers were drained, that he could do only so much without Widdershins's will to channel his own. That he couldn't protect her any further.
In the deepest confines of the young woman's mind, the frightened, grieving god wept.
A piercing scream, a sob, a plea, all that and more. Shins fell back against the desk, felt the steel slithering from her flesh, then crumpled into a tiny ball on the floor, arms clutched tight to her stomach. Her sleeves were already soaked in thick, warm blood, but she didn't notice. Didn't notice she had fallen, didn't notice she still screamed and cried.
She had been stabbed before, in her life of conflict. Had strips of skin torn from her by the clinging fingers of the creature Iruoch. Had even been struck in the gut before, with a hammer wielded by a man large enough to make the Taskmaster, Remy, look like Robin.
She had never felt anything to match this.
Her world was fire, agony and nausea and terror. In that moment she would have done anything, given Lisette anything she could possibly have asked for, begged Olgun to kill her, anything to make it stop. Would have, had she possessed the presence of mind to try, but even that was denied her.
Around the edges of her awareness, she almost thought she felt the faintest tingling, a sense that Olgun was doing what he could for her injury, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough. Her body spasmed, wrenching muscles, as though sharply tugged inward by the wound itself.
“Please…” She'd no idea what she begged for, exactly, nor to whom. Possibly to Lisette herself, and Shins couldn't even find it within her to be ashamed at the thought. “Please…”
And all the gods be praised, the pain did begin to fade! She believed, at first, it was her imagination, or perhaps her mind shutting down. A chill spread through her body, from the wound outward, and where it passed the torment eased—sort of. It didn't go away, not exactly. Rather, it felt like the seeping cold formed a wall, a barrier of ice and numbness, between the agony and Shins herself. It was still present, still raging, but somehow the worst of it failed to reach her.
Widdershins vomited a gout of bile-tinted blood and then stared up at Lisette in utter bewilderment.
The older woman was cloaked in ribbons of nothingness, maddened worms of shadow that slithered and humped about her.
One of those lengths of shade had snaked its way between them, caressing the edges of Widdershins's wound, doubtless the source of that frigid relief.
“We can't have you overcome yet, little scab,” Lisette taunted her. “Not until the others have had the chance to meet you.”
“O-others?”
“Oh, yes. They've been almost as eager for this as I have.”
Those writhing shadows erupted to either side of Lisette, somewhere between a billowing cloak and widespread wings. The lanterns flickered and dulled, the light itself seeming to recoil, and the air was abruptly redolent with cinnamon and vanilla and other sweets.
From within those shadows, an array of figures formed.
The first was a silhouette only vaguely human, a lithely muscled man with skin the mottled colors of a stagnant marsh and the legs of a giant frog. His head was bald, and the corners of his lips reached all the way to his ears. Even in her state, Shins shuddered at the thought of that mouth opening wide, and of what might lie within.
He—it?—was followed by a young woman, pirouetting on long, slender legs. She was clad in a dress of leaves, and her hair was red—not the simple ginger of Lisette's own, but as deep and rich as rose petals. Her eyes, when she paused in her twirling to glare at Shins, were tree bark, and the fingers of both hands were long rosebush stems with vicious thorns.
And finally, the last, though this one was accompanied by his own entourage. Lanky of form and greasy of hair, he looked no older than Shins herself, yet there was something of the ancient about him. His left hand boasted long, slender switches where its fingers should have been, and his eyes were mirrors in which Shins saw her own reflection, but not Lisette's.
Crawling at his heels, moaning with every breath, were half a dozen children—or child-shaped creatures. Their flesh was maggot-pale, their eyes no more than gaping hollows into a seemingly endless darkness, their jaws distended around long and jagged teeth. They wore only old and tattered rags, all save one: from her neck alone dangled a silver pendant, badly tarnished, in the shape of an elegant swan.
Through it all, Olgun shrieked his fear and his warnings, to which Shins could offer no response at all.
“My dear friends, this is Widdershins,” Lisette announced grandly, “to whom we owe thanks for bringing us together. Widdershins, these are my new friends. Do you understand why they're here?”
It wasn't, even in her current condition, hard to puzzle out. “Iruoch…” she whispered, blood dribbling from one side of her lips.
As if in response, somewhere off in the distance, in a direction that had nothing to do with any compass, an entire chorus of children babbled.
“Very good,” the older woman congratulated with joviality so false it should have qualified as counterfeiting. “They're not really here, of course. Iruoch was invited, however accidentally. My friends were not, and the Church presence is still a bother to them. We're taking care of that, though, aren't we, my dears?”
The ghostly children cooed; the trio of fae nodded in unison.
“In the interim, they ride the magics they've bestowed upon me,” Lisette continued, now clearly bragging. “Lets them manifest in Davillon for small periods of time. And they so wanted to be here for you, specifically.”
Shins figured she was supposed to ask why and kept her teeth cle
nched tight. She wouldn't offer the satisfaction.
“For the same reason,” Lisette said, as though she actually had asked, “we've eased the pain of your injury.
“Part of our bargain is that I let them in on the fun, you see.”
The adolescent-looking fae with the reflective eyes advanced, then, the lashes on his left hand twitching, writhing, living tendrils of inhuman hatred.
“I wonder,” Lisette pondered aloud, “if their tender ministrations will kill you before you have the chance to bleed to death. I wonder if they'll feel it when a god dies.”
Not like this. It wasn't supposed to go like this. I'm so sorry, Olgun…
The vile creature raised its hand to strike, but Shins couldn't even see it through her tears.
This time, the dream was different.
Bishop Sicard awoke screaming, his cheeks glistening and his beard soaked with tears. Still he'd seen no recognizable images, gleaned no clear meaning from the baroque nightmare.
He knew only that somewhere, someone suffered. Somewhere, the world teetered on the verge of losing something infinitely, irreplaceably precious.
Again Sicard buried his face in his hands. And for long minutes, grieving for he knew not what, the holy man wept.
She couldn't remember her name, for even the concept of name, of self, had fallen away. If her whole world had become agony before, now there was no such thing as “world.” No consciousness.
No awareness.
No memory.
Not even a desire for it all to stop, because she couldn't recall that there ever had been, or ever could be, anything else.
She screamed, a constant, despairing keen, with no realization that she had ever not been screaming. Body, mind, and soul, she began to break, fractures running ruthlessly through her; fractures that, if permitted to widen, could never possibly heal. Still she didn't care, because she didn't even know she could, and beneath her, all around her, the abyss gaped, nearer, ever nearer…
Something else? Was there something else? She'd lost the very notion of “else,” but it came slowly trickling back as she heard it. Not in her ears, not only in her mind, but somewhere betwixt and between.
She screamed—and he screamed with her. The agony was not hers alone; he suffered, as she had never, ever known he could suffer.
He?
Olgun!
Olgun? Then that would make me…
Opening her eyes in that moment was the second hardest thing Widdershins had ever tried to do.
Remembering Widdershins, being Widdershins, was the hardest.
But she was. And she did. Because he needed her to.
She saw only the floor on which she lay, dark stone covered in dust and grit; and in the corner of her vision, a blurry lump, only slightly brighter in hue, that might have been the leg of a table or a…
Desk. The Shrouded Lord's desk.
As if that single second of sight had opened her other senses as well, the room rushed in on her. She remembered where she was. She smelled the years of boots treading across this stone, the lingering residue of the incense that used to fill the air, smelled—and tasted—the blood and worse that trickled from between her lips.
She heard Lisette, gloating at how she'd found something so much better than the “weak, cowardly god” who'd abandoned her when she needed him most; how her allies would render the Church as impotent as the Shrouded God.
She heard the distant laughter of children, cooing and cackling, and—more closely—the breathing of the child-sized creatures actually present.
And she heard the faint whistle of the creature's switches in the air before they landed again across her back.
Oh, gods, it hurt! Again she screamed, without intention, and it was only the howl of Olgun's own pain that kept her from slipping back under. No individual stroke was nearly so bad as having been stabbed in the stomach, but they just. Kept. Coming. She could feel her skin welting, opening, bleeding, burning.
They were more than whips, more than just injury. It was unclean, a physical and even moral degradation. The magics contained within were poisonous, unholy, obscene.
Which, she realized in the portion of her mind she'd managed to wake up, explained Olgun's response. He didn't just experience the pain through her, as he normally would; wasn't just afraid, for himself or for her. He actually felt the lash of every “finger,” his essence torn and abraded no less than her own skin.
She wondered, with a horrified shudder, if her god had ever experienced direct pain like this. As awful as she felt, at least it wasn't a totally unprecedented experience for her! Poor Olgun…
The creature raised its hand yet again, Shins began to tense in anticipation of the next blow—and Olgun whimpered.
Absolute fury, molten, searing, coursed through Widdershins's veins. Her scream grew louder still, tearing at a throat already savaged by stomach acids and bile, but no longer was it a cry of pain.
The fae torturer's lashing digits descended once more—and Widdershins, impossibly, rolled to her feet to meet them.
It wasn't that she'd somehow ceased to feel the pain. It roared over her, flames licking from her gut and her back, digging white-hot blades across every nerve. What survived of her clothes were drenched in blood, shreds caked tight to her skin. And it was only that blood, still thickly oozing over her stomach, that prevented her, when glancing down, from spotting bits of herself that were never intended to see the light of day.
None of that had gone away. She hadn't escaped anything. Shins knew full well that nothing but a stubborn anger kept her body from giving out beneath her like an empty sack.
But in that single, liberating moment of fury, she didn't care.
Lisette and even the fae, almost comically astonished, seemed unable to react. Shins's fist closed tight around three of the creature's switches, squeezing them into a thick bundle, and yanked him off balance. Still shouting in a voice growing ever more hoarse, she allowed her entire body to follow her arm in a forceful spin, hauling as hard as she could. Her enemy stumbled as she pivoted, almost staggering into her from behind, when the elbow of her other arm shot backward, cracking him hard across the bridge of his nose.
The fae, she knew from her own experience, weren't particularly susceptible to injury. She knew, too, that her divine connection to Olgun made her a partial exception to that rule.
Howling in pain, the creature threw her off, launching her across the chamber. She slammed into the far wall and collapsed in a boneless heap, every nerve screaming, the whole world flashing, sparking, strobing. Still, she saw blood—or a thin liquid that was probably blood, though it more closely resembled a wet and runny water-based paint—trickling from her tormentor's nose.
And, she noted when her vision began to clear, from the noses of his various child-sized companions, as well.
The distant children ceased their laughter. The fae, masters and minions, stared at Widdershins as though not entirely sure what it was they were looking at. Lisette gawped, at a loss for words for the first time the young thief could ever recall.
Through a mask of blood, coating her lips, staining her chin, welling up through her teeth, Widdershins tossed them all a broad, unwavering smirk.
They were going to kill her; she couldn't even hope otherwise. She had absolutely nothing left to fight with. They might even break her, first.
But she'd tainted it for them. They'd hit her with everything, buried her under tortures and torments, and she'd still bloodied them. Their perfect vengeance, their easy victory, was neither. Not entirely.
It was, under the circumstances, the best she could ask for.
Apparently, Shins wasn't the only one in awe of her own efforts. After a moment's hissed discussion between Lisette and her allies, the fae faded away. Once more they were only shadows, collecting around the flame-haired thief, and then even that thin veil was gone. Just Lisette, again—albeit Lisette with a whole array of inhuman magics.
“I'm impressed,�
�� she said, striding across the room, her steps a slow drumbeat as she neared. “Honestly, I am. I keep reminding myself not to underestimate you, and still you keep surprising me.”
A pace or two from where Shins lay, she stopped, dropping into a crouch so they might better see one another. “You're still more dangerous than you should be,” Lisette observed. “And while it's not exactly my usual way of doing things, even I think that degree of determination and sheer gutsiness should be rewarded.
“So no more torture, little scab. No more pain.” From the back of her belt, she produced a small flintlock. Beneath her thumb, the click of the hammer locking into place was deafening. “Time to end it. Maybe you can go see your little god.”
The barrel, so tiny from any other angle, gaped open like a darkened cave when viewed face-on. Battling every remaining instinct, Shins refused to shut her eyes.
Everything happened so fast, once the first bang! finally sounded, that it took Shins far more concentration than it should have to realize she wasn't dead.
The first was a gunshot from outside the chamber, echoed and amplified by the enclosed confines of the hallway. Lisette jolted back, startled, standing upright…
The second bang blew the heavy door to the Shrouded Lord's former sanctum clear from its frame.
Only Shins's position slumped against the wall, beside that door—or former door—saved her from the blast, as she was certainly in no condition to have avoided it. Already battered into uncertainty, her mind and senses threw an absolute fit. Her vision strobed again, offering only quick, still images of everything happening around her; her ears rocked from ringing to utter silence, allowing only the occasional sound in through their drunken staggering.
Dust and tiny shards of stone raining down, the petrified remains of a refreshing spring rain…