by Holly Lisle
“You planned to die,” he whispered. “You planned to go into the void with me—you accept eternal oblivion for yourselves as the price for my death. Your uncle has abandoned you to me, and yet, knowing that you cannot win, you still intend to fight. What manner of madness has gripped you? Have your lives no value to you?”
He gestured again, and his body became brighter and began to expand. “How can a god bargain with those who embrace oblivion? I cannot offer you heaven; I cannot threaten you with hell. I can only destroy you regretfully, then use the energy I draw from your destruction to create something good.”
Kait kept circling, keeping Luercas between her and the void, keeping Ry always in position where one of the two of them might have a chance to lunge in again if Luercas became distracted or dropped his guard.
Dùghall should have been there, she thought. He had said he would be with them—if he were there, he could have provided a third distraction, and perhaps she or Ry might have gotten a clean shot at Luercas’s throat, could have dragged him into the void.
What had happened to him? Had he faltered at the last moment? Had his fear grown to be too much for him?
In her mind, she felt Ry’s comforting touch. If it is to be just us, then it will be just us. Hunt, love; hunt with me as we would have hunted in the hills together. We have only this moment. Let us make it count.
Between them and the void, Luercas shook his head. “Your choice, then. I offered reason, you picked annihilation.” He made a single, simple gesture, and power began to pour into him as if it were water from a broken dam. He began to expand and to brighten, filling with cold white light, stretching upward and outward.
They weren’t going to be able to destroy him, Kait realized. They simply didn’t have a prayer.
Nonetheless, she leaped at him, and in the same instant, Ry leaped, too.
Chapter 56
Dùghall, his spells awaiting only the trigger of a single event, crouched inside his chalk-drawn circle, staring at the still Karnee-Scarred forms of his niece Kait and her soulmate, Ry. They lay in each other’s embrace, lovely creatures even in their altered flesh. He would miss them, he thought—and then he thought, no, he probably wouldn’t. He probably wouldn’t miss anything.
He peered within the Veil through the tiny connection hidden within the decoy he’d built—his pretty little sphere of void, surrounded by lights, marked DANGER, DO NOT ENTER—and dangerous though it truly was, completely useless for the purpose he’d claimed for it.
It was quite useful, though, as a way to watch without being seen or suspected.
He’d told Kait and Ry the truth when he told them that they would have to fight Luercas within the Veil. He’d lied to them, though, about everything else. He had no choice. Had they known the truth, they might have accidentally betrayed it to Luercas—that innocent betrayal would cost them not just their lives, not just their own eternity, but a world.
Dùghall stared at their unmoving bodies for a long moment, and he shivered. No matter what reassurances he had given them, he had known all along that neither Kait nor Ry, nor even the two of them together, had any hope of defeating Luercas.
He did fear they might fall prey to Luercas’s carefully worded, reasonable-sounding arguments. He heard the Dragon offer them life within his safe new world and Dùghall snarled at the arrogance of the bastard. Luercas offered Kait and Ry the same bargain a herdsman would offer wild beasts: Come to me and I will protect you from the hunters, care for your old and your young, give your lives purpose, shelter you, feed you, improve you and your lot. And all I ask is that you work with me.
And what he did not say was what the herdsman never said: I will rip your young from your side because I covet the taste of their tender flesh and in any case I would rather have your milk for myself than let you feed them with it; I will care for your old by destroying them because the old will only slow me down, eat expensive food, and give me nothing I desire in return. I will shelter you in a cage of my making and kill any who try to escape. I will feed you the cheapest and foulest swill I can obtain, because while your continued existence serves my purpose, your happiness is meaningless to me. I will improve you to my preferences and needs, not yours, culling out the intelligent and the curious and the adventuresome in favor of the docile and the stupid and the slow, because docility and acceptance make my work easier. Your burden will be anything I wish it to be, and nothing you do will ever be enough to earn you my gratitude or your own freedom; when the day comes that you have borne me your last offspring or given me your last drop of milk, I will slaughter you for your bones and your skin and your teeth, because those who can no longer serve me in life must serve me in death.
And the bargain you make with me will be binding on your children and your children’s children through all of time. You will pay for your illusion of safety with everything you have and with everything you ever could have hoped for, as will your heirs. And in the end, only I will gain anything from this bargain we make, for security is only an illusion, and safety is a prison. Only those who risk losing can ever hope to win.
If either Kait or Ry believed Luercas’s lie, the battle would be over before it could even begin—but neither of them faltered for a single instant.
Dùghall nodded grimly; his time to act would come soon, then, for when Luercas discovered he could not enslave Ry and Kait, he would be forced to kill them. No herdsman dared tolerate rogues.
Dùghall crouched in the circle with his hands pressed together, biting his lip. He was afraid, as deeply and wholly terrified as he had ever been. He alone had a chance of defeating Luercas. He alone controlled a power strong enough to pose any challenge to the ancient Dragon. If he was given an opening. If he was fast enough and brave enough to take it.
He held the last word of the last spell on his tongue, kept the magic he had gathered together and formed with a focused concentration that left him sweating and trembling—and fought against the fear that consumed him. His body shook and his soul cried out for reprieve. He had never been so alone.
On the other side, Dùghall felt his enemy begin to rip the souls from his own followers to give himself power to shatter Kait and Ry. He felt Kait and Ry bunch their muscles, bound into the air in a twin leap that they knew even as they took it was futile, and doomed.
Time slipped through his fingers like quicksilver; the harder he tried to hang on to it, the more it ran away. Give me the strength to do what I must do, he said to any gods that might be listening. He embraced the energy that connected him through his created void to the hopeless drama that unfolded within the Veil, and distanced himself from the horror that scrabbled in the back of his mind, shrieking with the certain knowledge of things worse than physical death.
He found the darkness of the Veil, and within it, the pale lights that were Kait and Ry, and the bright, hard light that was Luercas. The three of them closed in a single awful collision, focused completely on each other. In that single instant, Luercas dropped the shields he had maintained around himself so that he could release the power he had stolen in one hard, fast, devastating thunderbolt that would obliterate Ry’s and Kait’s souls.
In that one instant, after Luercas’s shield dropped but before the magic flew, Dùghall erupted through the link he had created, screaming the final word of his final spell, swarming at and into and through Luercas so that the essences of their two souls occupied the same space. Their energies melded and the fire of their blended lives blazed like an exploding star. Get away from us, he screamed at Kait and Ry, and felt Kait protest and felt Ry catch her and pull her far from them and their battle. His spells swirled around himself and Luercas; one wrapped them within a mirrorlike ball that kept reflecting every cast spell back at them—instantaneous and brutally effective rewhah, which blocked them from doing any damage except to each other . . . while simultaneously and equally damaging themselves.
The second prepared spell raced off into the darkness of the Veil, screaming
like a banshee, blazing like a meteor, and vanishing into silence as quickly as it had appeared.
The spell which Luercas had released, intending to destroy Kait and Ry, slammed instead into him and Dùghall, its energy ricocheting within the mirrored ball that confined them. Pain tore through them both, a blinding, deafening, nauseating hot white agony that melted their souls, twisting them and binding them together so that they became one soul—but one soul with two minds.
“Release me or die,” Luercas howled. “I have the strength of a thousand men . . . and a thousand women . . . and several thousand children. You and your Falcons are not and can never be my equal.”
“I know what I can do,” Dùghall said. “And what I can’t.”
“I’ll tell you what you cannot do. You cannot win, you jackass. You’ll expend yourself in fighting me and gain nothing for your loss. You should have stayed hidden in your house on the hill. I might have left you there—I might have let your little nest of wizards and freaks survive.”
“I cannot win,” Dùghall acknowledged. “But I can fight.”
“You can die eternally. And when I’m done with you, the rest of them will die, too, and die forever.”
Dùghall felt a shift in the darkness that surrounded them. He rested for just an instant, then struggled to drag Luercas toward the void he had created.
“You think to take me with you into oblivion?” Luercas began to laugh. He resisted Dùghall’s struggles easily, simply drawing more power into himself to counter Dùghall’s efforts. The mirror that surrounded them both did not keep him from drawing out the souls of those who served him—it simply prevented him from loosing their power on anyone save himself. “You noble fool.”
“I am the gods’ sword,” Dùghall said, feeling an indescribable weight streaking toward them, knowing that the end came quickly now. “I was forged out of need, for this day, against this moment. The gods unsheathed me and aimed me for your heart, and in this moment I strike.”
Luercas in that moment heard the first soft noises that rapidly became banshee screaming, and saw the first flicker of light that became with horrifying speed the return of Dùghall’s meteor-spell, tearing through the Veil straight toward the two of them.
In the instant after, he became aware of that which moved silently behind it.
“No,” he whispered, and in that moment, Dùghall felt his enemy’s fear.
Luercas tried to disengage from Dùghall, but they were completely enmeshed. “Release me,” he said. “Quickly. One of those which hunt between the worlds approaches.”
“I know,” Dùghall said. “I summoned it.”
“No!” Luercas struggled harder. “Those which hunt between the worlds devour souls. It will . . . it will eat us. We’ll cease to be forever.”
“I know.”
“It isn’t like the damned Mirror of Souls, you whoreson! Nor like a gate—we can make ourselves a Mirror or a gate if we hurry, and even if we’re trapped inside for a thousand years, we’ll eventually find a way out. This—this will be the end of us. Both of us!”
Now Dùghall’s voice was sad. “I know.” He resisted Luercas’s increasingly frantic attempts to break the mirror-ball and cast a spell that would create an escape for the two of them; he buffered the mirror-ball with every drop of strength he had and every drop of magic the collective souls of the Falcons could feed him. And he held them steady, in the path of the approaching hunter. The energy that fed into the two of them burned ever brighter, drawing the mindless devourer to them all the more certainly.
“I know I’ll cease to exist. But the tools of the gods are often broken in service—and I will serve. You’ve cared nothing for the uncounted souls you’ve devoured. And with your destruction, your evil will stop.”
Luercas suddenly stopped struggling. He began snapping the ties that bound him to all his captive souls. “If we go dark, it won’t notice us,” he said. “It’s drawn to our energy. Just send that spell of yours past us and let us release our strength and hide in darkness. It isn’t too late. We can save ourselves.” The light the two of them cast began to dim as he broke away from soul after captured soul.
“It was too late when you decided that you would pay for immortality in the world of the flesh with the souls of others. In that instant, the gods themselves cast lots against you. And I was chosen to be the vehicle of your destruction.”
“At the price of your own immortality? Let me go, Dùghall. Let us both go—make the bastards who chose you to die come after me themselves. You have my word—I’ll never touch you or yours again. My word—sworn on my soul.”
“No. I accept my fate.”
“Why?” Luercas screamed. The nightmare was almost upon them. “Why would you accept oblivion?”
Dùghall was quiet, watching the immense, dark shape gliding toward them.
“Why?”
“Because I love them,” Dùghall said, realizing in that moment that it was true. “I love all of them. It was Solander’s final gift to me, that I would know what it meant to truly love—to love every living thing with all my soul.”
“What gods could claim to love you and send you to oblivion?”
“No gods could make me do this. I was their chosen sword, but I alone strike the blow that will end you. That is the Falcon way—at the final moment, we can offer only ourselves, and only if we give ourselves freely.”
They were a small, dim sun by that time. In the merest fraction of a heartbeat that had passed since Luercas first sensed the presence of the soul-eater and began trying to hide, he had broken free from all the souls with which he had fed his body.
Alone, without the strength he had stolen from others, Luercas was weak, Dùghall realized. Weak enough that Dùghall might hope to trap him within a soul-mirror and so save himself—but Luercas had spoken truly when he’d said that, given time, he would find a way to escape.
The decision of the gods was final—had to be final. Luercas had committed the only crime for which there could be no forgiveness. And the only way Dùghall could be certain that the justice of the gods was meted out was to stay with Luercas and hold him until the soul-eater devoured them both.
So he held fast while the coldness and utter lightlessness of the hunter between the worlds descended on him, maw gaping.
He thought of life—of sunlight and the warmth of summer evenings in the Imumbarran Isles. In his last remaining instants, he remembered the sounds of laughter in the streets, the touch of lips against his cheek, the way his first daughter’s hand had felt when, newborn, she gripped his finger and looked into his eyes. Their souls had known each other always, he realized. Their time together had been a gift. He remembered Galweigh House, and the struggles of the Falcons to bring love to the city of Calimekka. He thought of Kait and Ry, and saw for just an instant the battles that still lay ahead of them—a lifetime of struggling, endless chances for defeat, a single path that might, if they were strong and faithful, lead them to triumph. But through the struggles they would have each other . . . and when it was all over, they would have forever.
He had given them that chance. The chance to struggle, the chance to live. The chance, at last, to rejoin the gods.
“Let me go!” Luercas screamed. “Let me go!”
Dùghall blended himself more completely with Luercas and held fast. “Vodor Imrish,” he prayed, “I offer myself freely that others may live. I know there is no other way to do this . . . but I’m afraid. I love life. I don’t want to die to all of eternity. If some part of me can survive, please . . .”
He stopped short of asking for a reprieve. What he did, he did for Kait, for Ry, for Solander and Vincalis, for Hasmal and Alarista, for his many sons and daughters and their many sons and daughters, for his friends, for the Falcons, for strangers he would never meet whose souls were nonetheless good and deserving of life. What he did, he did for life.
What he did, he did for love.
I truly love them all, he thought, and was fill
ed with wonder, for in that instant, he was no longer alone.
He filled with love, growing brighter and warmer, expanding, stretching out, filling the universe. Luercas shrank inside of him, recoiling from that all-accepting love. I love even Luercas, Dùghall realized. He cannot continue to do his evil, but I love him nonetheless.
You are my brother in truth, a voice whispered in his thoughts. And you will not go alone into the darkness.
In that last instant before the soul-eater reached Dùghall and Luercas, Solander linked his soul with theirs. Their combined brilliance became a fire that erased the darkness of the Veil—their love poured into the emptiness of the void, filling it for an instant with perfect music, with perfect hope.
Then oblivion swallowed them.
Chapter 57
From their vantage point well away from Dùghall’s void and the struggling souls of Dùghall and Luercas, Kait could see a darker form growing in the darkness of the void. Immense, unspeakable, it was a cancer in the flesh of eternity.
She knew what it was without having ever seen such a thing before—her soul knew, and cried out in terror, and she tried to flee back along the silvery line that connected her still to her flesh self.
But Ry, trembling himself, held her tightly to his side and said, “Wait. We may yet be needed here.”
She fought to find her courage. She thought of Dùghall, of how he had come to save her and Ry from Luercas when she’d been so sure all was lost, of what he was doing at that moment to end the horrors of Luercas’s reign. She grew calm, she centered herself, and she said, “I’m strong now. I’ll wait.”
For an instant, the radiant sphere that was Luercas and Dùghall grew dim, and Kait feared that Luercas had beaten Dùghall, and that the dimness came from the destruction of Dùghall’s soul. Then, suddenly, the sphere grew brighter and brighter, until it blazed more brilliantly than any sun. From far away, she felt its warmth, its light, and its love. At the touch of that love, she rejoiced.