The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  Sibold did not answer because the arrow in his neck, while not seeming to hinder his movement or threaten his life, shut him up. Seeing Sanglant, Henry’s men shook off their doubt and with cries and shouts pelted forward. Lewenhardt released his arrow, taking one man in the thigh, then scuttled backward with the rest.

  Out in the woods to either side, shrieks rent the air. The Ashioi had reached their prey. Sanglant braced. He was not used to fighting on foot, but he could hold his own. Spears jabbed at him, but the light wasn’t good enough for his enemies to hit true. Above, on the wagon, Zuangua swept his blade above the swarm of men, then struck among them like black lightning. His spear passed through armor and shield and deep into the bodies of his foes. With every blow a man fell, struck not through flesh but through soul, killing the being that animated the mortal shell. Lightning flashed, and flashed again, and a third time in quick succession, and as if it had torn a gap in the stillness a gale blew across their position out of the east. The trees creaked and no few swayed dangerously in that tempest. Leaves and branches rained down, striking men in the head and knocking them flat. A leafy branch crashed right down through Zuangua, and though the wind drove some men to their knees, although Sanglant had to dodge blows and branches alike, the shadow prince stood balanced upon the wagon’s side as if it were a calm day. Men struggled to fight him, but none of their blows had any force against a shade.

  Sanglant laughed, knowing how cruel an irony this was. He had found an army that death could not claim.

  Lightning flashed and thunder rolled; this time the Earth itself trembled beneath their feet. Men screamed out among the trees. The world had gone black except for bolts of lightning that lit the sky. The moon was gone and all torches blown out by that wind. Only the firefly lights borne by the stalking Ashioi darted within the wood.

  As quickly as it had come, the gale stilled. Zuangua trilled a war cry and that cry was echoed a hundredfold throughout the woodland. That cry had no words but every soul within earshot knew anyway what it meant:

  Vengeance.

  The Wendish army fled except for the few who fell to the ground speaking prayers or simply weeping at the judgment now laid upon them.

  “The hour is at hand, Cousin! The sacrifices are ours to take.” Zuangua leaped from the wagon, thrusting at will deep into the bodies of the men who had fallen to their knees. He gave no mercy; he sought none. Sanglant ran at his heels as a second gale crashed through the forest. The shouts and screams of men rose in counterpoint to the crash of falling branches and the roar of wind in the leaves. They pressed on as branches fell all about them, as the ground shivered beneath their feet, as lightning dazzled in wave upon wave until day and night melded and splintered and here and there in the forest trees exploded into flame where lightning struck and dry limbs and dry leaves flashed and blazed. Smoke curled among the trunks. Men ran, and fell where hissing darts pierced their bodies. A fiery rain pattered down around them, but it was only burning leaves. There was no rain, no clouds. It was as hot as it had been in the daytime with the sun overhead.

  There, unexpected, waiting unshaken in the road with a brace of noble companions at his back and his banner planted beside him, stood Henry.

  The emperor needed no torch to light his way. He was a torch. His eyes gleamed with an unearthly light, cold and brilliant. A nimbus cloaked him, shedding that inner light onto the path and into the air. Where wisps of smoke trailed around his feet, the smoke glowed a ghastly silver.

  Sanglant stumbled to a stop. Zuangua paused next to him as a dozen Ashioi ghosted out of the woodland to take up positions at either flank. The hawk-masked woman slipped into place at her prince’s right hand with her bow drawn and her lips pulled back in a feral, unavian grin.

  “This is your father?” Zuangua murmured. For the first time he sounded uncertain and even afraid. “I did not know any woman of my people would embrace a daimone of the lower sphere.”

  Sanglant wept to see him. Of course Hathui had told the truth. He could smell that this was not his father but an interloper residing within his father’s shell. Perhaps Henry’s noble companions suspected something was amiss, because they stared at the emperor in shock and then belatedly recalled that they must keep track of their enemies, now gathering before them. No human man could shine so brightly, not even one granted the luck of the king. Yet a lingering trace of his father still existed, hidden away beneath the daimone’s presence. If he could reach the man, he might give him the strength to fight against the creature that possessed him.

  “I pray you, Father,” he said. “Let us call for a truce. Let us end this war.”

  “Kill him,” said Henry.

  Sanglant took one stride, another, and broke into a run. Behind, he felt the hesitation of his kinsmen; he marked it, but he was already at full speed and dared not stop. Would not stop.

  He would rid Henry of the daimone. He would rescue him.

  Henry’s guard shouted. Several lords leaped forward to place their bodies between prince and emperor, but Sanglant took one in the thigh, shattering that man’s mail, and another in the guts, thrusting so hard it split the man’s mail shirt. He twisted the blade and pushed him aside with his foot. Three others fell to bolts of elfshot.

  Henry had not even drawn his sword. He stared indifferently at the death of his companions.

  “Damn you! You’re not Henry!” Yet Sanglant could not strike his father. He seized him by the gold brooch that clasped his handsome cloak and yanked him, but he might as well have been pulling on a mountain.

  Henry did not move until he himself struck. The back of his hand caught Sanglant under the chin and sent him flying backward, lifting him right off his feet. The prince landed hard, jaw cracking. Blood rimed his lips.

  Zuangua lunged, but Henry dodged and raked Zuangua with a mailed hand. Bronze armor gave way as three wide furrows of blood opened across Zuangua’s chest as if Henry’s hand bore unseen claws. Astonished, Zuangua leaped back, still grasping his spear. Although the stark wound did not seem to hurt their leader, the Ashioi were now less eager to press forward.

  Sanglant clambered, wincing, to his feet.

  “Traitor,” said Henry in another creature’s voice. His voice had the timbre of a bell and it carried far into the forest, out to the ranks of his terrified army. His companions took a step back from him. “You have all along plotted with your mother’s kind. Now we see the truth of it. Duke Burchard. Duchess Liutgard. My noble companions. My captains. Do you see it? Do you mark him for what he is?”

  “Murderer!” cried Duke Burchard, rallying. “You betrayed my daughter!”

  “Traitor!” cried Liutgard more passionately. “I believed that you were loyal!”

  Sanglant stood, unsteady, as the ground shook and he struggled to focus his eyes. His ears were ringing and ringing although there was no thunder. Silence gripped the land, or he had gone deaf but for a whooshing that resolved itself into the griffins, circling above.

  Ai, God! The feathers! He grabbed for his knife’s sheath, but in the course of the battle the feathers had torn it right open. They were gone, and half the sheath with them. If only one feather would come drifting down from on high into his hand, he could succeed.

  Henry—the daimone—laughed cruelly and lunged forward. Just in time Sanglant stepped aside and parried the blow, but that blow hit his shield so hard that wood disintegrated and he was sent reeling, and tripped, and stumbled, and barely fended off another cut from one of Henrys captains, then went down on a knee. The captain gasped sharply as a dart sparkled in his shoulder.

  Sanglant got to his feet. Zuangua had leaped to cover him and now danced back and forth as Henry struck blow after blow, attempting to get through him to Sanglant. The shadow prince was bleeding from face and leg and gut, and still he fought while his warriors pressed back the nobles.

  Sanglant pulled his knife out of his boot and leaped in to grab Henry from behind. He kicked him hard at the back of one knee as he wrapped
his arm around his father’s throat and pulled him backward. But the daimone caught the blade and just the touch of that hand shattered the iron blade into shards that sprayed out, caught fire, and spattered against the ground in a hissing hail of sparks.

  Henry reached back and wrenched Sanglant’s helmet right off his head. Before the prince could react, Henry twisted his fingers into Sanglant’s hair. Sanglant squeezed harder, trying to choke him, but those fingers ground into his flesh and twisted as though to yank his head right off his neck. What claws had cut open the aetherical substance of Zuangua’s shade had no purchase on mortal flesh, but the cutting edge of Henry’s iron gauntlets cut into Sanglant’s skin and seemed likely to sever tendons.

  He struggled, but it was futile. Henry’s unnatural strength could not be bested, not even by him. The pain made spots flash and fade before Sanglant’s eyes. The world hazed as the daimone throttled him. His own grip slackened. He could not hold on.

  Zuangua’s black-edged spear stabbed right through his father’s head. He felt the whisper of its passing as a hot tingle below his own chin.

  Clutched so close, he actually felt the daimone die as the shadow blade pierced its soul and released it. That inhuman strength snapped and with an ungodly shriek it vanished into the aether, banished from Earth. He recoiled and collapsed onto his back with his father on top of him and his arm still wrapped around Henry’s throat.

  His gaze was forced heavenward as he fought for breath. Through the boughs he saw stars swollen to twice their normal size. The Crown of Stars stood at zenith, so bright it hurt his eyes. The wheel of the stars throbbed and pulsed until that music reverberated through his head and sank into his very bones, making him weak, shaking the Earth itself with a roar filled with bangs and loud knocks and tremendous booms rolling on and on and on and on. Successive waves of a sickly, nacreous light washed across the sky.

  “For Henry!” shouted Liutgard behind him.

  “For Wendar!” cried Burchard. “And the empress!”

  Then it hit.

  A wind blasted out of the southeast. Trees snapped and splintered as they were scythed down. Men tumbled to the ground. Horses screamed as the gale sent them flying. The gale scorched the air and turned the heavens white, and the leaves of a butcher’s-broom shriveled, curled, and disintegrated right before his eyes. His skin hurt.

  He rolled to get his father’s body beneath him, to protect him from debris, and in that movement saw Zuangua and his companions staggering backward and their bodies shifting and changing as the wind howled over them, as if that wind were filling them with substance, with earth, with mortality. Liutgard had flung her spear before she was herself hurled to the ground; the weapon carried on the wind but held true, piercing Zuangua in the shoulder where he clung to a toppled tree trunk.

  The Ashioi prince screamed, who had gone untold generations without any pain except that hoarded in his heart. Blood as red as a mortal man’s gushed from the wound.

  The wind died abruptly, although Sanglant heard it tear away across the land, moving outward. He sat back on his heels. We must take shelter, Gyasi had said, and he knew it to be true: there was worse yet to come.

  A horrible orange-red glare shot up into the heavens along the southeastern horizon. It looked as if the world had caught on fire. It reminded him of Liath, and a wave of sick dread coursed through him. Was she dead?

  Henry groaned.

  “Father!” He pulled off his father’s gauntlets and helm, chafing his hands, staring into his eyes, which looked like any man’s eyes in this strange half-light. “Ai, God! Father!”

  Henry lifted an arm weakly. “Hush, son,” he said in a voice entirely like his own familiar beloved voice. His hand brushed Sanglant’s hair and stroked it softly. “Hush, child. Go back to sleep. You are Bloodheart’s prisoner no longer.”

  Sanglant wept.

  Around him, folk began to shake out of their stupor, those who had not been knocked unconscious by debris or falling trees. He heard a thrashing out in the forest as men and horses came to their senses, got up, then fled or shouted for help or moaned in pain, depending on their injuries. An unseen soldier yelled out an alarm, but it was too late. A dust-covered, blood-soaked nightmare of a man stumbled out of the trees, laughing as coarsely as a madman. This creature steadied himself on the shaft of a banner pole from which hung a tattered banner so stained and ripped that it was almost impossible to mark what sigil had been embroidered thereon.

  Almost, but not quite: it was a glittering crown of stars set on a sable field representing the night sky.

  “Cousin! I have found you at last! God Above, you bastard, you abandoned me on the field! But this time I bested you. I won!”

  Zuangua had roused; now he spoke a word. The hawk-masked woman leaped forward and, before Wichman realized what she meant to do, pulled the banner out of his hand. In an instant she stood back beside her captain, spear raised. Other Ashioi clattered in from the woods to form a grim wall made up of flesh and blood bodies and expressions filled with an ancient hatred.

  The air was utterly still, the only sounds the cries of men and animals out among the trees, the snap of a weakened branch and the rustle and crash of its falling, and the steady filtering patter of falling ash.

  “Let him go,” said Liutgard sternly. She had regained her feet although she had lost her horse. Burchard lay on the ground, not moving; Henry’s companions shook themselves off or writhed on the earth, and at least one had been crushed by a falling tree.

  “Ah!” said Henry, blinking his eyes. “I’m dizzy. Sanglant, what has happened?”

  The prince rose, but he knew already what faced him, standing as he did between the two sides and with what remained of his army, he prayed, safe within the fortress—but out of his reach. He was no different than his dragon tabard—one half smeared and grimy with earth and the other stained with blood. As inside, so outside.

  “Now it is time to make peace,” he said.

  Liutgard scoffed at him. “Traitor and murderer! How is it you can speak their language if you have not long conspired with them? This disaster is your doing, Sanglant! Let your father go.”

  Zuangua laughed harshly, for it was obvious he could not understand one word Liutgard had said. “Peace? Nay, now it is time to make war. Who do you choose, Cousin? Humankind, or us?”

  “Neither,” said Sanglant furiously. “Both.”

  “Stand back, Liutgard,” said Henry in a stronger voice. He attempted to rise but could not. Blood leaked from the wound in his head. He choked on blood, coughing and spitting, and raised an arm. “Sanglant! Help me. Help me sit up at least.”

  “Ai, God.” Sanglant knelt beside him, still weeping. “Father, you must rest.”

  “Nay, I have rested long enough. I have suffered….” He coughed again; with each pulse of blood he grew weaker. Burchard groaned, and a captain helped him rise. The nobles drew closer to attend the king. “I have suffered under a spell! I saw Villam killed by traitors. God! God! My own dear wife conspired against me.”

  “Adelheid?” croaked Burchard as he knelt on the other side of the king. He had taken off his helm. “Not Adelheid!”

  “What do you mean, Your Majesty?” Liutgard asked, coming up behind Burchard. She glared at the Ashioi, who held their position, as ready to strike as she was. “Yet it’s true you were shining in a most unnatural way, there on the path. Is it true, what Sanglant claims? Were you ensorcelled and chained by a daimone?”

  “Presbyter Hugh and Adelheid between them … with the approval of the Holy Mother … Anne … to force their own schemes forward. They thrust a creature into me … into the heart of me….” He shuddered. Blood pumped from the wound. He sagged into Sanglant’s arms. “Hurry,” he whispered. “Hurry. Listen!”

  They crowded forward. Behind, Zuangua snorted at this display, but he held his place and his peace for the moment.

  “These are my wishes … my last wishes … my dispensation, as is my right as regnant.
All my life I have wished … but custom went against it.” His head grew heavier against Sanglant’s arm, yet through sheer force of will he kept speaking although his face grew ghastly pale under the weird orange-red light as his life drained out of him through the hole made by Zuangua’s spear. The shush of falling ash was the only sound beyond his labored breathing and the footfalls of men creeping closer to listen, to see, to seek comfort within the orbit of their dying king.

  “What are you saying, Your Majesty?” asked Liutgard.

  “My right… as king … to name my heir.”

  “Princess Mathilda is your heir, Your Majesty,” said Burchard, troubled now, wiping ash from his face. “You named her yourself.”

  “Under duress … even Sapientia not worthy. This one.” He reached across his chest, found Sanglant’s other arm, and clutched it tight. “This one. Swear to me. Give me your oath. You will follow Sanglant. He becomes regnant after me. Swear it!” He choked and convulsed, but he held on. “Swear it!”

  They swore it, each one of them, because Henry was their king, the one they had followed all this way.

  “Ah!” he said when last of all Burchard and Liutgard knelt and gave their oath. He looked up into Sanglant’s eyes. His own were free of any taint. “Ah! The pain is gone. My son. My beloved son.”

  The light passed out of him. His soul was released, there one instant and in the next gone utterly.

  Sanglant bowed his head, too stricken even to weep any longer. At first, the rustling seemed part of the strange night, more ash falling, perhaps, or leaves tickling down through dead and blasted branches. Then he looked up.

  They had knelt, all of them; all but the Ashioi, who waited. Tears streaked Liutgard’s cheeks. Burchard sobbed silently, shoulders shaking. Beyond, as far back into the forest as Sanglant could see, captains and sergeants and men-at-arms knelt to honor their dead king.

  Out of the gloom stumbled two recognizable figures—Lewenhardt and Hathui. The Eagle cried out and flung herself down beside Henry’s corpse.