by Myke Cole
Heloise could feel the metal buckle under the blow, barking hard against her face, her head rebounding against the leather cushion behind her. She felt fresh blood trickling from her scarred cheek. She blinked, relief flooding her as she realized her remaining eye could still see.
The devil was shrieking now, a sound somewhere between its clucking growl and the eagle scream. It shook its hand, one of the knuckles twisted, black blood leaking from where it had broken against the machine’s metal plate. One of its remaining hands rose to soothe the wounded one, but the last snaked forward, probing with a clawed finger toward the visor’s eye-slits.
The devil beneath her had given up squeezing the frame, was flailing to get out from under her.
Her knife-arm was free.
She shrieked, swinging the blade up, punching it into the devil’s neck. Once, twice, three times. The creature screamed, knocked her knife-arm away, and she punched it again lower, plunging the blade into its side. She felt the hard scales flex, then break beneath the machine’s relentless strength. Drops of the creature’s black blood fell through the faceplate to spatter across her face, filling her nose with the swamp-stench. Somewhere to the north was her father, held prisoner by the Imperial army, and this thing was stopping her from saving him. She stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, and the devil’s struggles grew weaker, until at last she ripped her shield arm up, slamming the corner into the devil’s head, sending it rolling off her.
She rolled the machine onto its stomach, then levered it to its feet. The devil that had been beneath her sprang to its feet, reached for her.
And then Barnard was between them, hauling his huge hammer over his head, swinging it down with all his might. Its massive head was a brick of black iron nearly as heavy as an anvil. It landed square atop the devil’s foot. The scales were good enough at turning an edge, but they crumpled under the weight of the hammer blow, the metal sinking deep as it shattered the bones and bit into the meat beneath.
The devil wailed and its charge turned into a stumble, all six arms flying toward its crippled foot, head bowing. Xilyka appeared, snarling. She reached up with her throwing knife, thrusting it into the center of one patch of stalked eyes. She spun out of the way as the head hurtled toward her, weaving between the long black horns.
Heloise rolled her shoulder, bringing her knife-arm up and then hurtling down, driving the point into the top of the devil’s head, the weight of the fist snapping the horns, pushing the creature face down into the dirt. She leaned into the strike, felt the devil’s skull hold, then flex, then break. She thought of Basina, pressing down until gray-black jelly squirted out to coat the metal frame to the elbow. The creature stiffened, kicked, and was still.
Heloise braced herself on her knife-hand, feeling the breath rush in and out of her.
She looked up. The devil she had stabbed so many times lay still, sprawled on its face a few paces distant. At the head of the Red Lords’ column, the infantry had formed up into a hedge of spears, were slowly driving forward, pushing three of the monsters back. One of the devils gathered itself to charge them, but then it ducked under a hail of arrows fired by the Red Lords archers, formed up behind the spearmen.
Behind them, the dead lay in heaps. Heloise marveled that so many could have been killed so quickly.
There were too many to count, all wearing the red tabards of the Free Peoples. Heloise knew she should feel horror, pity. But instead she found herself battling the relief that her own people were spared. No one deserves this. The Red Lords are your allies. Help them win.
She gave a final push against the pulp of the devil’s head, lurched to her feet, driving the machine at the devils. “The Throne!” she shouted.
Her war cry echoed from the throats of hundreds of villagers, arriving to assist the Red Lords at last. The people she had known all her life, who had followed her this far, through battle after battle. Heloise saw Chunsia and Danad. Even old Poch Drover with a spear in this thick fingers. The sight made her heart swell. “The Throne!”
The devils gave a final hiss, turned, and ran, leaving trails of gore and the black, fetid slime they had made of the snow. They were answered with cheers so loud that Heloise felt carried on them. A shower of sling stones, javelins, and arrows followed the devils, most falling well short. Some infantry pursued the monsters a few steps, but Heloise could tell it was half-hearted, a show of terrified men, conscious of their place in the songs that would be spun around this day.
Heloise let the machine slow and finally stop. The cheers had set her blood alight, but she heard them grow fainter behind her, and knew she was alone. The devils had been run off by an army, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t turn to fight if she came after them by herself.
The treetops shuddered as the devils pushed into the woods, the sounds of breaking branches receding. The cheering and shouting subsided, until an eerie silence blanketed the column, broken only by the dripping of the rotten slime that the devils’ touch had made of the trees, the hoarse sighing of the wind, and the cries of the wounded.
They were gone. The heat in her blood faded, and Heloise shivered. Devils. So many devils. Sacred Throne, what is happening? Where did they come from?
Wolfun ran to the machine’s side. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Heloise panted, her head still spinning. Xilyka was still turning, knives fanned out in her hands, watching for threats. She slowly backpedaled, moving closer and closer to Heloise, ready to strike should the devils return, or some enterprising assassin try to take their chance now that chaos reigned.
Heloise tried to count the dead, stopped at one hundred. At last Xilyka stopped turning, stood beside her. Heloise could hear the tremor in her voice. “So, these are your famous devils. They are … daunting.”
But Heloise wasn’t listening. “It all happened … so fast.”
“The Great Wheel turns as it will. Sometimes quickly. They died well, at least.”
There was an emptiness in Heloise now, so great she thought she might never feel whole again. “They still died.”
“A moment ago, that Red Lord was going to throw us all at the enemy while his precious roses held back. Perhaps his arrogance spun the Great Wheel thus.”
Wolfun let go a shaking breath. “Sacred Throne. Six devils. Six!”
“There were more,” Heloise said, “in the woods.” She remembered Clodio’s body splitting in half, the bright light shining through him, his skin sloughing off like a crumpled bedsheet, the devil climbing through. She remembered what Leahlabel had said to her of it. That is not a portal, Heloise. That is the reflection of the world beyond. You are seeing a tiny sliver of what the wizard sees. Sadly, by the time you can see it, there is no saving them. Had there been many wizards? Could so many devils come through one person?
“And you would have killed the rest, if they hadn’t run.” Barnard’s voice alone did not shake as he admired the black blood dropping off his hammer’s head.
“I didn’t kill them alone.” Heloise blinked at the devils’ corpses. They seemed so much smaller now that they lay twisted in the snow. “Xilyka helped me. And you.”
“We are the Emperor’s instruments,” Barnard said. “We do nothing but that which is according to His will. You are His Palantine, His hand in the world. You are the tool he uses to deliver us from the enemy.”
“Tell that”—Heloise gestured at the heaps of dead—“to them.”
Barnard reversed his hammer to wipe it off in the snow. “I do not rejoice in their deaths, your eminence, but they were heretics. The Emperor protects His own.”
Heloise knew she should correct Barnard, but she could not stop wrestling with the enormity of what she had just seen. So many devils. “Where … where did they come from?”
Wolfun opened his mouth to answer, but a wailing cut him off, so grief-stricken that it froze Heloise’s heart. She had cried like that when she’d had a moment to accept that Basina was gone. Her father had cried like that
when he thought no one could hear him, standing over Leuba’s corpse.
Onas and Giorgi were on their knees, sobbing over a crumpled form. At first, Heloise thought it was one of the Red Lords, but then she saw the subtle difference in the shade of red, that the scarlet cloth was not a tabard, but a cloak.
Like the devils, Leahlabel looked smaller in death. Heloise couldn’t see the wound that had taken her life.
Onas gathered Leahlabel in his arms. The boy looked so much bigger than the fragile doll that was his mother’s body that Heloise couldn’t believe he was her child. He buried his face in her hair, shrieked out his sorrow.
Her father was taken because Heloise had insisted he ride out. Now, Leahlabel was fallen because Heloise had insisted she come with her. The Sindi Mother had been the first person Heloise had seen when she’d awoken in the Traveling People’s camp, the fiercest advocate among her people to give Heloise and her village shelter. Heloise swallowed her tears. It wasn’t her place to weep. This was Onas’s mother. Heloise had already lost her own.
Sir Steven broke her from her reverie, bellowing at one of his captains. “Get pickets set up! I want eyes all along the column! Put out outriders! Get these dead cleaned up, counted, and prepared for the pyre!”
He strode around in front of Heloise, ignoring Onas and his grief. “I don’t suppose”—he stabbed an angry finger up at her—“that you can tell me what in the name of the People just happened?”
“Devils,” Heloise managed. Over Sir Steven’s shoulder, she could see the other Sindi Mothers weeping, placing comforting hands on Onas’s shoulder. The young man was still sobbing over his mother’s corpse, but Giorgi had mastered his tears and stood with arms folded, looking down at him, eyes hollow and red-rimmed.
“Devils,” Sir Steven nearly spat, “are stories. Fables sown by your false Order to frighten the Emperor’s subjects into submission.”
“They are real,” Heloise said. “I killed one.”
“You killed three, your eminence,” Barnard said, gesturing at the monsters sprawled in the snow.
“Where did they come from?” Sir Steven’s face shook, and Heloise realized that his anger was a fragile screen, scarcely covering the terror beneath.
“I don’t know,” she answered, trying and failing to pry her eyes away from Leahlabel.
“I do.” Giorgi’s voice was stricken. He waved in the direction of the sick-colored light that hovered over the horizon in the direction of Lyse. “Someone was Veilstruck. Enough to tear a hole through the veil so wide it stayed open.”
“There is no veil!” Sir Steven fumed. “It’s a damned story!”
Heloise remembered the wizards the Order had savaged, beating them until they worked the most powerful wizardry she’d ever seen, strong enough to collapse one of Lyse’s walls. She remembered the censer the Red Lords had found, burned with such heat that the metal had melted. Of the rags, there was little more left than ash, the Red Lords had said of the wizards’ clothing. Something powerful had consumed them. She thought of the blinding white light that had emitted from Clodio as the portal opened within him. She hadn’t gone back to check his remains, but it had certainly looked hot enough to consume what remained of her old friend.
“The wizards,” she said, “the ones that took down the wall.”
“What are you talking about?” Sir Steven asked.
Heloise turned to him. “The Order did this.”
“Nonsense,” Sir Steven said. “Why would the Order bring devils into the world? I thought their whole purpose for being is to keep them out.”
“I don’t think they meant to,” Heloise said. “I don’t think they knew this would happen.”
“What? What are you talking about—” Sir Steven began.
“You!” Onas cut him off. Heloise turned to see him striding toward her. He had laid Leahlabel back down in the snow, where Mother Tillie was busy wrapping her in her own cloak.
“You”—Onas’s hands were white knuckled on his knife handles—“you let my mother die.”
Xilyka stepped between them, her eyes fixed on Onas’s hands. “Be careful, Sindi.”
“You are every bit as guilty,” Onas spat. “Where were you?”
“Right where I was supposed to be.” Xilyka’s voice was calm. “Fighting the devils. Protecting Heloise, as our mothers charged us.”
“You couldn’t protect a stone!” Onas seethed.
“I am the finest caster in the Hapti band.”
“Are you? Show me the wounds in the devils made by your hand. It was Heloise who laid them low.”
“Onas, I had help…” Heloise began.
“Not the right help. Not the help that would have kept my mother alive. You should have taken me.” His voice broke. “Why didn’t you take me?”
Heloise’s mouth worked. She’d had good reasons. She didn’t want to bring too many people to the council. She was trying to be true to Xilyka’s vision for them—to be one people. And the ugly truth beneath it all—that she’d wanted Onas away from her ever since he’d pressed his idiot suit back in Lyse.
The thought brought the rage hot and quick. “Because I lead here, Onas,” Heloise said. “I decide who guards me. Because I do not belong to you.”
Onas’s face turned purple, then white. His hands flexed on his knife handles, and Xilyka tensed. Heloise’s throat tightened at the thought of him harming Xilyka. She moved the machine forward, raising the knife-hand. Barnard advanced as well, hammer coming off his shoulder. Wolfun came with him.
Onas held their gazes, eyes trembling. Then he turned and scooped his mother up, carrying her back toward where the Traveling People’s wagons were lined up, pale smudges in the snow. Giorgi held Heloise’s eyes for a moment before he turned to follow, the Mothers in his wake.
“Giorgi,” Heloise called after them, “Analetta, Tillie!”
But none of them turned, and none of them answered.
6
BREAKS THEM ALL ALIKE
The sword, the spear, these are the instruments of the soldier. The Emperor’s hands succor and provision, heal and mend. They bear the threshing flail, the only weapon that may make bread as readily as it may take life.
—Writ. Imp. XXI. 17.
The Traveling People circled their wagons at the head of Heloise’s column. When all three bands disappeared inside the circle, the villagers were wise enough not to follow.
Xilyka had been as reluctant to leave Heloise as Heloise was to have her go, but Heloise insisted. Wolfun and Barnard had shadowed her from the moment the Hapti girl had gone, eyeing the circle of wagons with undisguised worry.
Heloise knew the Traveling People were sending Leahlabel “up the wheel,” the Traveling People’s custom of honoring their dead. Heloise had seen the ceremony once before, and that time, too, the Traveling People had held her responsible for the deaths. Leahlabel had healed Heloise and her father, but even more, she had been a friend, the latest in a long line of them lost to her. A sob rose in her throat, so sudden that she could not choke it back entirely.
“I … I am sorry for your loss, your eminence,” Barnard said.
“Which loss?” she asked him. “My mother, my father, Leahlabel?” She knew she was being cruel. Barnard had lost as many loved ones as she had, but she was too drained by the worry over her father and the grief of losing Leahlabel to apologize.
Barnard spread his hands. “Whichever you wish, your eminence.”
Heloise swept her eyes across the circled wagons, picturing the hundred-odd Traveling People inside. She looked across the long line of villagers, at least triple their number, shivering in the snow, waiting for orders.
Heloise’s orders.
“I don’t think”—Heloise pointed with her knife-hand, taking in all the assembled people—“that it matters what I wish anymore.”
Sir Steven trotted into view, his horse stepping awkwardly through the thick snow. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting,” Heloise said.
“For what?”
“For the Traveling People to finish saying goodbye.”
“How long will it take?” Sir Steven was clearly losing his struggle to keep the impatience out of his voice.
“What do you want, Sir Steven?” Heloise didn’t bother to keep it out of hers.
“I need their knife-dancers. My riders have been out longer than I’d like, and I want to cover more ground. We have the Empire to our fore and those … things off our flank.”
“They are called devils,” Heloise said.
Sir Steven ignored the correction. “Can you not speak with them?”
Heloise finally turned to look at the First Sword. “They are sending one of their most honored Mothers up the wheel. If you want to interrupt them, go ahead. I would take your guard.”
Sir Steven looked as if he were seriously considering it, then his face brightened, and he waved one red-gloved hand over his head. Heloise turned to see a rider in a red surcoat galloping toward them. The man’s horse began sliding as it tried to forge through a high drift, and he finally leapt off, finishing the rest of the distance on foot. He bowed, a stiff incline of his head. “First Sword.”
“I hope you have a report for me,” Sir Steven said.
“Aye, sir. We’ve found them. A great slaughter. I’ve never seen the like.”
Heloise’s heart leapt. Father. The emotion warred with rising dread. The Imperial army, deployed to meet them in a field battle. One they would likely lose.
“A slaughter? The Empire or … or the creatures?” Sir Steven asked.
“They are together, sir. Or, at least, they were.”
“What do you mean?” Sir Steven frowned.
“The devils, sir…” The man caught Sir Steven’s glare and hastily corrected his words. “I mean the creatures, sir, it looks like they went on up the road after the young lady ran them off.” He nodded toward Heloise.
“The Empire is dug in across the road,” Sir Steven said.
“Not anymore, sir. The monsters did them worse than they did us.”