She moved away from the temple and its huddle of dirty peasants, and watched her corpse army swarm the burning figure of her god-touched brother. His terrible rage and golden fists incinerated them with every swing. Powerful as he still was, he had been greatly weakened by his battles and the occasional sword managed to pierce his body before he burned its wielder to ash. Red blood flowed along with the gold.
A squad of battered Lucent soldiers emerged from a side street, looking from her to their lord and back again. She reached into their chests and rotted their organs, then sent their corpses into battle on her behalf. It was far safer to kill her brother’s men and send them to slow him down than it was to fight him directly. It was a death by a hundred pinpricks, his blood shed by the hands of his own men. How galling for him, she thought.
She fled south, reanimating the fallen as she went. A goodly number of Lucent soldiers had spread out through the town, kicking in doors and killing all those who resisted. And all the townsfolk resisted, whether they wanted to or not. She came upon several small groups and ripped the life from them on the spot. Any dazed survivors from Tarnbrooke she left alive, not because of any altruism but because they were weak and she had better prospects elsewhere.
Amadden roared as his burning body crashed through a house. He stumbled after her, swatting at the stinging corpses that plagued him.
She reached the tumbled, blackened remnants of the palisade and the piles of dead militia tangled up with Lucent soldiers. She recognised one she had spoken to before, a moustachioed man by the name of Nicholas. He rose with his fellows, picked up a spear, and they formed up into a wall of dead men blocking her brother’s exit from the street. They lowered spears and marched. Lucent footmen crowded behind them, broken shields and bent swords at the ready. All this to weaken her brother enough to finally kill him. Her knife could have ended him in a moment, but getting close enough to use it was an unacceptable risk.
She looked to the huge demonic corpse of Malifer, but her power found no purchase in the demon’s inhuman flesh.
Maeven awaited him in that place of death as he rampaged through her corpse army. The spears and swords took their toll on him, and his flaming armour flickered and dwindled as he left a trail of blood through the streets.
Finally, he stood before her, mere wisps of divine power leaking from him. His armour was shredded and his chest heaved for breath. He held a broken sword in his hand, devoid of holy flame.
She gripped her blade tight and lifted her hands high and wide, inviting him in as he closed on her. “If you really feel nothing for me then come, run your sword through my heart. I will not resist my brother’s blade.”
He snarled, and obliged. His sword split her heart and burst from her back. “Die, filth.”
She wrapped her hands around him, pulling her brother into an embrace, her mouth at his ear. “I’m also heartless, or so Lorimer said.”
Her black blade stabbed into his neck.
Death.
The golden fire winked out and his skull yawned open, brain fluids oozing out.
He sagged instantly, heavy in her arms. She dropped her brother like the garbage he was and frowned at the obsidian blade in her hand, watching as bright drips of red ran down the black.
There was no soul in that body to eat. But there had been something… A hint of power ripping him away just as she struck, something carrying his soul away to the far north. Brightwater.
His damned goddess had cheated her.
CHAPTER 42
Lucent Empire soldiers arrived, took one look at the corpse of their leader on the ground and fled for their lives. For most, the battle was now over.
As the town burned and the few remaining Lucent soldiers fought the ragged remnants of the town militia, Maeven sat on a bench and sewed up her chest wound with a needle and thread, the stitches neat as any seamstress. She willed the healing of her body to begin, slow and steady and directed. She was not quite a dead thing, half-alive at best and happy to keep it that way. Necromancy was such a useful skill.
A woman screamed nearby, shrill and annoying. It disturbed her sewing. She reanimated a dozen or so Lucent soldiers and set them hunting down their living brothers – anything for a little peace and quiet.
She finished up, tied off the threads and looked to the north, to where another Lucent army was marching through the Mhorran Valley towards Tarnbrooke, now only a few hours away. She got to her feet, cricked her neck from side to side and walked towards them. They were only mortal, and she was death incarnate. All they could do to her now was make her stronger.
Weeks later the necromancer arrived at the northern city of Brightwater at the head of an army of thousands of corpses that obeyed her every command. She sat on a padded shield held aloft on the shoulders of four dead soldiers, seeing no need to tire herself out when the relentless dead felt no pain or fatigue. They were by now, for want of a better word, ripe, and rotting.
It was a sunny morning and the lake glistened around the high towers of the castle on Lake Ellsmere, where the Bright One’s chapel and her sister waited. The city itself appeared clean and organised, with the Bright One’s sunburst emblem flying from whitewashed towers and brass spires across the urban sprawl. A newly built cathedral loomed large over the city, a glorious edifice furnished with stained glass and gold. It was a beautiful and peaceful scene, one she was about to ruin.
The knife thrummed in her hand as she waved her army forward, bodies empowered by their own stolen souls. To animate and control so many at once had been far beyond her abilities until the knife had fully awakened; Laurant Daryn and his hundreds had been such a strain, even though their old commander had operated as a secondary nexus of control. Now, commanding thousands of armed dead proved a simple thing.
After all these years of searching and preparing to free her sister, it was finally time. She had the power of countless souls, deadly arcane skill, and with her brother and most of his holy knights dead, and their main army destroyed, she finally had the opportunity.
For the first time in many years, Maeven felt afraid. What would Grace be like after being hidden so long away and “protected” by Amadden? Would he have forced her to join his twisted religion?
The guards on the city gates were confused at first, only seeing the Lucent army returned home unannounced. They were slow to close the gates and lower the portcullis. Slower still when she reached out and stilled their hearts. Her army poured through the gate and slaughtered anything that moved: men, women, children, animals, she didn’t much care. Her attention was focused solely on reaching the castle at the centre of the lake.
She willed a hundred of her dead towards the cathedral with orders to kill everything and burn the place down. It was an abomination to her eyes. The rest poured ahead of her, a screaming tide of peasants, merchants and priests fleeing or falling before them. What few soldiers remained in the capital of the Lucent Empire were old or still in training. They put up only feeble resistance to her army of the dead, shrieking in horror as mortal wounds did little more than slow the corpses down.
The palace of the old queen lay ahead, the sunburst emblem of the Lucent Empire adorning every high wall and flying from every tower. The drawbridge was up, and an expanse of shimmering water cut it off from the city. Mailed bowmen and men in the battle plate of inquisitors lined the walls. It was a formidable force, but Maeven was beyond them all now.
She willed her shield-bearers to lower her down and she walked forward to the edge of the water, well within bowshot of the highest towers. She lifted her hands and summoned the power of the void. Black and green necrotic energies writhed into the air from her outstretched fingers and a dark mist boiled from her mouth, swiftly rising in a cloud above her.
Arrows flew from the towers. Wooden shafts rotted to nothingness and corroded steel crumbled into the lake. Her cloud of death billowed up and out across the walls of the fortress. Men bled from the eyes, ears and nose, coughing up streams of blood and bi
le as they died in agony. The holy knights survived only a little longer, divine radiance flickering around them as they staggered to and fro atop the walls clutching at their throats.
Then the dead rose inside the fortress and lowered the drawbridge to welcome their master.
She entered the courtyard and admired what was once beautiful scenery, the dead flowers and brown ivy, the wormy wooden benches and mouldering wall hangings. If only it was easier to target only living humans.
She took a deep breath and delved into the minds of the recent Lucent dead. It was one aspect of necromancy she did not relish. They had only been dead for a matter of minutes but already the corpses’ brains were decaying, all thought breaking down to a shattered mirror of memory fragments. She found what she sought and wrenched herself free from the sucking grasp of that greediest of mistresses, death.
The thick oak door of the keep crumbled before her. She entered the great hall where her wretched brother once sat at court surrounded by his boot-lickers, and turned down a narrow spiral staircase.
At the landing below, desperate priests and acolytes tried and failed to stop her. Those howling fanatics flung themselves into the very face of death. One last stand to save their goddess, over in an instant. It was admirable in its own stupid way.
She paused before the white doors leading to the most sacred chapel of the Bright One. Ornate carvings of vines and leaves covered them, picked out in gold and silver, inlaid with emerald and ruby and mother of pearl. Maeven took a deep breath and then pushed them open.
Inside was a plain chamber of pink marble that reflected the light of dozens of brass lanterns. It lacked the ostentatious artwork found in the rest of the capital, and boasted nothing grand like the great cathedral raised in the Bright One’s honour. Fresh flowers sat in sconces all along the walls, a riot of rich yellows, creamy whites and pale pinks.
A door lay wide open to one side, revealing a glimpse of a four-posted bed covered in luxurious silk, soft fur and an army of stitched children’s toys, some old and worn, others bright and new and arranged into neat lines. Maeven’s wounded heart pounded painfully in her breast – one of those toys, a much-patched brown sackcloth horse with one eye, belonged to her sister. Her wonderful, gentle, simple sister. Racks of fine dresses lined the far wall, all of a size for Grace as she remembered her. The chambers were neat and orderly, and not lived in; more like a shrine of sorts.
Further ahead, a slender woman in a green silk gown knelt before a marble statue of the Bright One, depicted in a long flowing dress with flowers in her hair. The woman’s ankle-length blonde hair spilled around her bare feet like a halo of light.
Maeven swallowed and looked around, but the chambers were empty. No holy knights or priests. Just her little sister waiting to be freed. Every dark deed, disgusting path of research, and betrayal Maeven had undertaken over the last forty years had all been leading up to this moment.
“Grace?”
Her sister’s face turned only slightly, her chin and nose profile exactly as Maeven remembered it in her dreams. She had aged only a little; the benefit of living in a holy chapel perhaps. Grace said nothing in reply.
Maeven approached slowly, careful not to scare her. It had been so, so long. “Grace, it’s me. It’s your sister Maeven.” She placed a hesitant hand on a narrow shoulder.
Grace turned. A knife in her sister’s hand plunged between the necromancer’s ribs. Those once-innocent blue eyes were feral and furious. “Grace is mine and we shall never be separated.” Her sister’s voice with her brother’s venom.
Maeven lurched back, horrified. She looked into her sister using her arcane arts, and found only Amadden’s soul squatting inside.
Grace began to glow, the light bright and white and blazing with divinity.
“This world must be purified for the Bright One,” her brother said, using her sister’s lips. “She must be protected from all that is evil and corrupt. You think you stopped me at Tarnbrooke, but I have other armies of the faithful ready to march.”
Her beloved, innocent sister was gone, human soul scoured away by the torrent of belief flowing into her body. Amadden had always worshiped their sister, and he had turned her into his perfect ideal of a god, a hollow shell of a person that carried out his will.
“You destroyed her,” Maeven said, choking back sobs. “You know it, and that has driven you mad.”
The Bright One’s head violently shook from side to side in denial. “Lies! She has ascended to a higher plane of existence to eternally watch over me.”
The necromancer’s horror turned to cold fury. Grace had always been unfailingly kind, often to her own detriment. She had been a good girl with humble wants and needs, and Amadden was everything that their sister never was. His possession of her body made a mockery of her entire life, and Maeven could not abide it.
Fire and lightning roared around her, but died the moment it touched Maeven’s obsidian blade. Amadden’s eyes – she refused to think of them as Grace’s – widened as she plunged the knife into the Bright One’s chest.
The might of a goddess worshipped by half of a continent was beyond mortal comprehension. Even Maeven’s deadly weapon could not handle it. The blade shattered inside the deity’s flesh. Although the divine power and mass of belief fought to resist, in the end, nothing could stop death incarnate. Everything died. Even gods.
The Bright One… Amadden, or whatever abomination he had become in their sister’s body, was utterly destroyed. The empty corpse slumped at Maeven’s feet, the last breath escaping its lips as a quiet sigh. The necromancer knelt in her sister’s blood and wept.
A god died at her feet that day, and so did what was left of the necromancer’s heart. She picked up the body of her sister and carried her up the stairs, out of the castle and back into the sunshine. Grace deserved to rest among trees and flowers and the open skies of the countryside, the things she had loved best. Behind her Maeven left a city burning like a pyre, its cathedral crumbling down to ruin. There was no mercy left in her now.
Maeven dug the grave beside a cherry tree that she knew Grace would have loved to watch come into bloom, then piled stones on top to deter scavengers. She sat on the grass, crying and cradling a shard of obsidian, all that was left of her knife. It no longer held a powerful enchantment, but the volcanic glass was still razor sharp, and she had nothing to live for now. She examined the veins in her wrists and set the edge of the stone to her skin.
Her hand refused to move, and the stone refused to cut. She tried again and again to no avail. And then she realised.
She was still bound by her blood oath to Lorimer Felle and his people. Until that oath was fulfilled she would never be free. She screamed and threw the shard into the distance.
Brightwater had been cleansed but there were many more Lucent soldiers and acolytes remaining in the northern towns and villages. Even though Lorimer was gone, she had sworn the people of Fade’s Reach would be freed, and she had no choice but to see it done. That had been a price she happily paid to see her sister freed, and it had all been for nothing thanks to Amadden.
If she couldn’t kill herself, then slaughtering every single one of those who had served her brother and oppressed Lorimer’s people would have to do. If it was the last thing she ever did, she would scour her brother’s great work from every nook and cranny of Essoran. She would ensure the bastard would only ever be remembered as a deluded tyrant, if at all.
EPILOGUE I
The night was bright with flickering fires and the ember-glow of smouldering buildings abandoned and left to collapse, their owners dead or missing. A cacophony of wails and sobs echoed through the streets accompanied by hysterical, relieved laughter. Tarnbrooke reeked of fire, burnt meat and loosed bowels. And blood. Delicious, fortifying blood.
After two days buried under a layer of mud and ash, dead, or close to it, Jerak Hyden slowly rose and stared at the knife holes in his clothes. The wounds in his chest had closed over into puckered red
dimples, and he somehow knew his butchered heart had healed up better than before Verena’s knife cut into it. His experiment with vampire blood had proven successful. He had felt the changes happening within his body while he lay there half-conscious and immobile. He would need to make more of his kind and take them apart to study the process of biological repair in greater detail.
His mind had returned to its usual state. For the most part – the scent of blood now aroused a deep hunger he had never felt in life. Almost like… Was this what lesser beings called lust? He searched the ground for his spectacles, then it occurred that his eyesight was already perfect. Every sense had been heightened, so much so he found it distracting and confusing. Not conducive to methodical research at all.
“Ow,” he muttered. On probing his mouth, he discovered his bodily desires had induced his mouth to form lengthened incisors designed to rip flesh. They were most painful and pricking his lower lip.
Interesting, he thought. Lorimer Felle had never mentioned the impracticalities of his condition. He made a further mental note and filed it away for future investigation.
“Thith will not do,” he lisped. “Noth do at all.” His mind ruled this body, and he willed it into submission, smiling as the fangs slowly retreated back into standard human teeth, bone cracking and resetting around them. He worked his jaw, marvelling at the pain such changes inflicted, and how irrelevant such a thing seemed now. Increased pain tolerance. Noted.
As an immortal being he now had no fear of age and disability and had all the time in the world to research and experiment. “So much to do, so much to do.” All the time in the world and yet it would never be enough. There was more to existence than this mortal realm had to offer, and his very being burned with the need to study and experiment, to know everything about everything.
This new body he inhabited was far superior to a frail mortal man, but it was still dependant on blood and meat, and probably sleep, for survival. The artificial body he had created had proven to be an abject failure, but a good alchemist learned from failure, and he was certain with enough time and proper materials he could craft a far superior and more stable form for his consciousness.
The Maleficent Seven Page 37