“What happens to Kozalin?” I asked.
Her ears drooped.
“That’s what this was all about, right? Destroying the veil anchor? Once it’s gone, will the attack on the city stop?”
She pawed uncomfortably at the ground.
“I wasn’t expecting to steal a mystic artifact of invincibility, and be able to do this all with just my own minions. I had a whole invasion plan set up with big sis, and it’s too late to call it off now. Even if I could, it wouldn’t do you any good. Mom’s been planning the destruction of humanity for thousands of years, and she already has an army coming to Kozalin. I can’t stop them, and they won’t leave anyone alive.”
“But they’ll leave you alone if you join me. Your island is off away from the city anyway, but I can stay for a little bit and make sure of that. Or you could leave. Father has a place where his faithful are gathering, and I’m sure you’d be welcome there. You could even bring your people.”
“But everyone in Kozalin will die,” I said. “If your mother has her way that will only be the beginning, and all humans everywhere will die.”
“Well, so what?” She exclaimed. “What did the humans do for father, when he was tied to a rock with his own son’s guts and tortured for six hundred years? They praised the Aesir and gave them sacrifices, that’s what!”
“Some of us have spent our lives fighting the Aesir,” Cerise pointed out coldly.
“Most humans don’t worship the Aesir,” I said. “Their followers only rule Europe, and even here there are a lot of people who see them as foreign invaders. Honestly, I don’t see why Loki’s forces are so intent on attacking humanity. You’d think they’d save their energy for the enemy.”
“They are,” Mara said. “Humans are the foot soldiers of the gods, and Hel’s forces have to pass through Midgard to reach the Golden Fields. Besides, the Aesir can’t truly die while they still have human worshippers. The final battle won’t happen until both sides have lost so many worshippers that being killed isn’t just a temporary inconvenience anymore.”
Well, that was a chilling thought.
I sighed. “Mara, I understand where you’re coming from. I’d want to tear down Asgard too, if I were in your position. But I’m not going to be a party to genocide.”
“You’ll die when Gaea’s army gets here,” she pleaded.
“No,” I said firmly. “They will die. As long as I’m in Kozalin any army that attacks the city is going to be destroyed. So if you care about them you’ll warn them to go elsewhere.”
“I’d just as soon they all died,” she admitted. “The ape men are disgusting creatures, and their leader… well, let’s just say that I’m not fond of mom’s sons. If you really can kill him, I hope you do.”
“Fine. I can’t stop you right now, and a fight between us isn’t going to accomplish anything. So how about this? You do what you came here to do, and then give me back my amulet and get out of here. Maybe we can talk again once you have your immortality, and your mother doesn’t have anything to hold over you.”
“Can’t you just make another one?” Mara protested. “Really, Daniel, this thing is amazing. As long as I have it they’ll never… well, it would be really useful.”
The other fox head, the one that had patiently held the stone while we talked, nudged the head that had been doing the talking. She gave herself a startled look.
“What? But this is different.”
I had a moment of confusion, before I realized what I’d just seen. I felt the shock on my face before I realized it might have been smarter to hide it. Mara saw, and gasped.
“No! Fuck, after all this time! Don’t you dare say a word about it, Daniel Black. Not to anyone, not ever! In fact, I should just take you out now so you can’t talk.”
“You can’t,” I said evenly. I reached out to the amulet she had hidden somewhere on her person, and hit the kill switch I’d built into its enchantments when I made it. “You can’t use my own tools against me, Mara, and you know how strong we are. But I’ll keep your secret for you, in the name of friendship.”
She recoiled in shock, staring down at herself as the force shield and healing aura died. Then she processed the rest of what I’d said.
“Friendship?”
Cerise gave me a confused look. “Secret? What secret? Did I miss something?”
“Friendship,” Mara repeated. “Huh. You really are a strange man, Daniel. But I‘ve never had a friend before, and it sounds kind of nice. Alright, it’s a deal. Secrecy for friendship. But you tell no one! Not even Cerise.”
“Agreed,” I said reluctantly.
Two heads. Two minds. I wasn’t sure why Mara was so intent on hiding the fact that she had a sister sharing her body, or why the one that didn’t talk had given herself away like that. But to be honest, most of the theories I could think of only made me more sympathetic to their situation.
Mara huffed. “Alright, then. I’m getting out of here before anything else goes wrong. I still think you’re crazy, to think you can take on mother’s armies. But if you survive somehow, we’ll talk.”
Her teeth ground down on the runestone, and her power flared again. The stone cracked, crumbling into fragments. I felt a flash of magic, a change in something vast and insubstantial that lurked just on the edge of my mystic senses.
Then her aura flared, rising up into a column of golden fire that blew the roof off the room. When it faded she was gone, but the amulet she had taken was lying on the floor.
Cerise shook her head.
“Why didn’t we fight, Daniel? We could have beaten her.”
I picked the amulet up, checking it for damage and reactivating it. It was a huge relief to put it back on, and feel its force field form while all the minor injuries I’d picked up in the night’s fighting began to fade.
“Maybe,” I replied. “Maybe not. She’s stronger than that dragon she raised, Cerise, and we barely beat it. But win or lose it would have been a bad idea. She’d have broken the veil anchor either way, and then we’d have to try to deal with this invasion after getting beaten half to death fighting a demigoddess.”
“I guess that makes sense,” she conceded, and turned to go. I followed her out of the sanctuary, and across the main temple chamber.
“But I’m betting part of it is you just didn’t want to hurt such an epic babe,” she continued.
“That might have something to do with it,” I admitted.
If there were any survivors of the temple garrison they’d been driven off, so once we’d dealt with the handful of enemies still beating on my stone wall there was no one to turn Carl over to. I shook my head at that.
“Well, I guess this is a test of your planning abilities,” I told him, as I wrote a sign on the pavement next to him explaining why he was there. “With the city in chaos I’ve got no way to get a message to anyone, so I’m leaving you here. If the Conclave finds you first, great. If you’ve got a backup plan for getting rescued, I guess you’ll be sneaking off to wherever Loki’s spies go after an extended deep cover mission.”
“That’s fair, Daniel,” he said. “No hard feelings, right? I was just here to infiltrate the Conclave, so I could report on their doings and provide a cover story for other agents. I have to say, I never expected someone like Mara to take advantage of the ‘foreign sister’ cover story.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Just tell me this. Was our first meeting a setup?”
“Not as far as I know. But with the gods involved, who can say?”
We left him there, and hurried back to the docks. There was a pitched battle taking place at the gate between the two districts, with several hundred men from the garrison trying to retake the structure from the undead warriors who had captured it.
There seemed to be a steady stream of undead reinforcing the position, and I didn’t want us to get bogged down in another long fight. So we detoured a couple of blocks to the east, and I turned my earth talisman into a ladder so Corinna an
d her dryads could climb the wall while I jumped to the top for a look around.
The west end of the harbor was in flames, casting a lurid glow on three strange ships that were docked near the graveyard. They had the lean lines and single mast of a Viking longship, but were easily the size of a Spanish galleon. Their hulls gleamed oddly in the firelight, looking more like dark plastic than wood, and a dense shell of wards protected each vessel from virtually any kind of magic.
But the alarming thing was the endless stream of troops debarking from them. There were far more men than could possibly have fit in those ships, even if they were stacked like cordwood. They weren’t disorganized mobs like the undead we’d fought earlier, either. I saw disciplined companies of swordsmen, troops of cavalry, and even what I could swear was a column of Roman legionaries.
There were already enough of them headed for the battle at the gate to overwhelm the garrison troops there. More were methodically knocking down doors to murder the civilians huddled in their homes, or moving towards the gates to the military district. Several hundred infantry were assaulting my forces at the head of the causeway, and getting a lot closer to our lines than I would have liked.
“Fuck me,” Cerise breathed from beside me. “Hel’s black ships. They must have sailed here all the way from the Underworld.”
“How did they fit so many troops in them?” I asked.
“There’s a doorway in the hold of each ship that opens onto the dock it sailed from,” Cerise answered. “Once they make landfall Hel’s whole army can march through any one of them. Are you sure rejecting Mara’s offer was a good idea?”
Chapter 25
The situation was bad, but a closer look showed that it was far from hopeless. The fires at the western end of the docks prevented Conclave forces from taking the direct route here, but also kept the invaders from pushing deeper into the city in that direction. To the east, it looked like the garrison had retaken the gate to the Military District and was mustering a substantial body of troops. The spearhead of the undead assault was oriented towards the temple in the middle of Kozalin, an objective that had already been destroyed.
What I wouldn’t give for a radio right now. But at least our enemies didn’t have instant communication either.
“We can still salvage this,” I said. “We just need to destroy those ships before they unload enough troops to take the city.”
“How are we going to do that?” Cerise asked. “They’re going to be warded, and that army isn’t just normal men. Look.”
She pointed, and I saw a massive construct of gleaming bone emerge from one of the ships. It was easily twice as tall as a man, with a bulky armored torso and four arms. The lower two ended in long scythe-like blades, while the upper ones had giant hammers instead of hands.
“Bone golems. They’ll have a lot of other magic, too. Not many wizards die in battle, and Hel has her own priests. Probably witches, too. The Aesir destroyed Hecate’s last refuge two hundred years ago, and since then Hel has managed to claim most of our souls.”
“Why would they fight for Hel?” I asked.
“Some of them would fight for the chance to destroy Asgard, or for the semblance of life she can give them here. The rest are probably bound. Hel has dominion over souls in the Underworld, so I doubt even the strongest witches could defy her there.”
Corinna and her dryads had joined us atop the wall, and were watching the battle now. There were a few soldiers on this stretch of wall as well, and one of them gathered his courage and approached us as I pulled up the magic ladder.
“Who goes there?” He called, gripping his spear nervously.
“Daniel the Black,” I called back. “Do you have enough men to hold the wall here?”
“Ah, for now, lord wizard. We have word that reinforcements are on the way. Are those your men down by the shore? They’ve been giving those zombies a real bloody nose.”
A thunder of rapid cannon fire interrupted us. I looked down to see a bone golem being shredded by fire from two skimmers.
“Yes, those are my men,” I replied. “But we’re going to have to kick it up a notch to win this one. Good luck.”
I turned my earth talisman into a bridge, with one end anchored at the top of the wall and support columns dropping to ground level periodically as it grew towards the position my men were defending. I took the lead, and opened fire with bouncer rounds as we walked into range of the undead attackers. That drew a bit of arrow fire in return, but the distance and our height made it largely ineffective.
As we drew closer Cerise spread her arms and chanted something long and involved in Greek. Shadows pooled around her, forming a swirling mass that grew for several long moments before she reached the end of her chant. Then they arched out across a hundred yards of intervening space to descend on the nearer of the undead columns. A chorus of shouts and screams erupted as the formation was hidden from view by the onrushing tide of darkness.
“Since when could you do that?” I asked, impressed.
“Since you made me the strongest witch in Europe,” she replied, panting slightly. “Between the demons and the dragon and this amulet, I can cast anything. Even spells that are supposed to take thirteen witches and an hour-long ritual.”
The attack was falling apart now, the remaining undead retreating under a withering barrage from Marcus’ men. I pulled Cerise into a one-armed hug, and surreptitiously checked her health. She was straining to control the draconic power she’d stolen, and casting big spells like that could easily damage her magic. But the demonic vitality she’d assimilated made that risk almost meaningless. She was already regenerating the minor injury she’d done herself.
“Don’t fuss,” she huffed, reminding me that she could feel my magic. “I’m fine, Daniel.”
“Sorry, I just worry about you. Let’s get down from here before someone comes up with a spell that can reach us.”
I grew the bridge the rest of the way out to where my men were set up, and dropped a stairway down behind friendly lines. Marcus clapped me on the back as I stepped off onto the street, and then Elin was rushing up to hug me.
“Daniel! Thank goodness you’re safe. Oh, Cerise! What happened to you?”
“I kinda ate a dragon,” Cerise replied with a grin.
“A dragon! How could you possibly absorb so much power? Are you alright? You’re not going to, um, explode, or start eating people?”
“Well, you do look pretty tasty,” Cerise teased.
I turned to Marcus as Elin fussed over Cerise. “Things don’t look good from the wall. What’s your situation?”
“We’ve thrown back four assaults, each one bigger than the last. Elin here managed to keep the fires from spreading for a bit, but there are too many of the enemy now to send her out again. We’ve taken in about a thousand civilians during the breaks in the fighting, and our casualties have been light so far. But unless you’re planning to join us here I think we’re going to have to withdraw soon. If one of these assault forces gets in among us they’ll cut us to pieces, and there seems to be no end of them.”
“They’re coming from those ships in the harbor,” I said.
“The black ships that sailed in half an hour ago? Yes, I suspect they have portals in them,” Elin put in.
“Looks like it,” I agreed. “We saw several thousand men mustering over by the Military District, and I think they’re getting ready to make a push. That will take the pressure off you here, but I don’t think they’ll make it all the way down to those ships. The docks are too big, and there are already too many undead here. By the time they could fight their way half the distance the enemy will have offloaded enough troops to outnumber us again, and they aren’t going to stop coming.”
Marcus frowned, looking off across the harbor. “We don’t have a line of sight on the ships from here. But what if we backed the skimmers up onto the causeway to get a clear line of fire? I think the cannons could range on them from there, and a ship is a big enough ta
rget we might be able to hit them even at that distance.”
I shook my head. “You’d be making holes well above the waterline. You could shoot the superstructure to pieces, but that won’t actually sink them unless you get lucky. Sinking ships quickly takes plunging fire.”
I trailed off with a frown, considering another option. It wasn’t really ready for deployment yet. But if I could make it work, it would be the perfect solution.
“I can bestow water breathing,” Elin offered. “I think I could do four or five people at once, if you want to try a surprise attack from the water. But they’ve seen me putting out fires, so they may be anticipating something like that.”
“I think we’ve had enough crazy stunts for one night,” I said slowly. “For all we know Narfing might be lurking out there somewhere, just waiting for another shot at me. No, I think I’ve got this. I was working on something that should get the job done, I just need enough time to get it deployed.”
A shout from one of the soldiers drew my attention back to the street, where a thick mist had started to form. At the same time a large, flaming ball arced high over the surrounding buildings to land on a nearby roof.
“Time is the one thing we don’t have, sir,” Marcus said. “It looks like they’re finally getting smart.”
I nodded. “So I see. Alright, we’re pulling out. Fall back to the tower and seal the gates. Elin, head back now and let them know we’re coming. Cerise and I will be with the rearguard, just in case.”
“Yes, sir,” Marcus replied.
“Alright. Be safe,” Elin added.
She turned to go, while Marcus walked towards the defensive line shouting orders at the sergeants.
I turned to Cerise. “Got a counter for that mist, or shall I just blow up the whole street on the assumption there must be something in it?”
“You can never have too many explosions.”
I chuckled, and started looking for a good firing position. Then I heard Elin scream.
Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) Page 39