But even the next moment wasn’t like it. Already, fresh worries flooded my mind. “The stallion—my horse—he ran off. He wouldn’t stay in the graveyard. How are we going to get out of here?”
“I have friends in the city,” she told me. “They’ll hide us until we can get another mount. But we have to hurry, before the next patrols.”
We hurried. And, in fact, we made it back through the corridors without encountering even a single guard. We slipped back behind the arras. Passed back through the secret door in the stone wall. Betheray relit her torch, and we traveled back through the underground hallways where the hungry dead—the yearning silhouettes of what had once been men and women—appeared by firelight, trying to seduce us into giving them our lives.
We reached the winding stair beneath the sarcophagus. Lady Betheray handed me the torch and went up first. I lit the way for her so when she reached the top, she could work the mechanism that undid the lid. The lid went up. She climbed out, her cape flowing after her over the edge of the death box. As I came up the stairs, she reached down and took the torch from my hand. I climbed out.
In the crypt now, we shut the sarcophagus lid. I looked around again at the skeletons grinning out of their niches in the flickering flames of Betheray’s torch. I saw the stone coffins with carved figures on their lids that seemed to move and live with the life of the fire. God, I would be glad to get out of this place, away from all these dead.
“Quickly,” Beth whispered.
We moved together to the crypt door. I pushed it open for her and she went out, then me.
The moon was almost gone. The mist was dim and gray. The ancient graveyard had almost vanished into its own shadows. But as my eyes adjusted, the strange and slanted shapes of the monuments and steles and broken sculptures half emerged out of the night fog. Once again, I saw the drifting tendrils of mist caressing the gravestones and slithering over the weather-worn statue faces. Again, I saw the mist take the shapes of the hungry dead below, momentarily drifting into the human form of their desire, striving against dissolution for a second, then vanishing with a whisper that might have been a moan or just the wind.
Then, as my eyes adjusted further, I saw the others. Lady Betheray saw them too. She gave a small, gasping cry of despair.
I should have known that we would never make it out of here alive.
“Well, well, well!” came a booming voice from the darkness.
A shadow moved forward out of the crowd of shadows that we could now see ringing us round.
“My spies on the wall were telling the truth,” the figure went on.
From every side of us, there came scraping noises. Sparks. Flames. Torches. We were at the center of a ring of torches held by some of the dozens of soldiers standing everywhere among the monuments. The night took on the color of a hellish day as the mist-tendrils swirled and curled around the red and yellow flames.
By that sickly light, I could see it was Lord Iron approaching—Lord Iron and, in his wake, nearly hidden by his bulk, his little raisin-faced wizard with his indigo robes flowing like liquid night.
On instinct, my hand went across me to my belt line. For a moment, I felt the scabbard there take shape. I felt the hilt of my sword come into being within my grip. I felt my helmet and my armor begin to ooze out of my flesh and encase my body.
But what was the point? There were too many of them. My arm went slack and fell to my side. The sword faded. The armor withdrew into nothingness and was gone.
Lord Iron now stood before us. His tall, broad-shouldered figure went bright and dark as the flames of the torches played over it. He was not dressed for action. He wore black leggings and an embroidered shirt fringed with white lace and open at the throat. His only weapon was the dagger at his hip. He gazed down at his wife with high disdain. She lifted her chin and glared back at him with righteous defiance.
“And here you are,” he said.
The wizard Curtin hung behind him like a shadow. His beady eyes were moving over me, examining me, searching me. I could feel him looking for a chink in my mind, a way into my will. I steeled myself against the creeping, probing fingers of his malevolent thoughts.
Lord Iron drew his eyes from Lady Betheray to afford me a quick, dismissive glance.
“Sir Aravist?” he asked.
“Dead.” I spat the word at him. “And his goons too.”
He smiled a little, but his eyes didn’t smile. “I’m impressed. He was the best swordsman in the country.”
“Was,” I said.
He snorted. Turned back to Betheray. “And you. Look at you. You still claim to be faithful to me?”
She drew in a breath, her eyes on fire with torchlight and anger. “Faithful, yes. But no, not to you.”
He nodded. “And you have the talisman, I suppose. That’s the only reason you would have risked coming back here.”
Neither of us answered.
“Never mind,” he said. “It’ll be more amusing to have it tortured out of you.”
Now, after the first shock of the ambush—after the first paralyzing wave of helplessness and defeat—my brain was beginning to work again. It didn’t have a lot to work with. We were surrounded by dozens of men with swords and bows. There was no chance we could escape, no possibility we could defeat them—and no way we could hide the talisman from them. Once they had us in chains and in prison, there’d be nothing left for us but agony and death and the final knowledge that we had failed the queen.
As I say, not a lot to work with. But there was one thing. One advantage I had, if you can call it that. Lord Iron didn’t know—none of them knew—that I was armed. My sword was invisible and wouldn’t come into being until I went for it. Which meant … what? Not much. I had a single chance to draw and strike at Lord Iron. If I could kill him … well, it would give me some satisfaction before the soldiers’ arrows shredded me. And at least Beth and I would die fighting instead of howling on the executioner’s rack.
So that was something. The only option, really. Still, it was hard to act on it. Like the choice back in the police station. I knew it was the best thing to do, but in the moment, it was hard to decide to die.
Lord Iron was not focused on me at all anymore, only on his wife. He was looking down at her from his greater height with an expression of cold hatred—that icy hatred a man feels toward a woman he admires when she has made him seem small to himself.
“I would have made you the first lady of this country,” he said. You could tell he meant it to hurt her. He meant her to regret the opportunity she’d missed.
She laughed once, harshly. Then she spat in his face.
I knew right away that was my moment. I could see as Iron’s features twisted, as his eyes blazed, as his skin reddened, that he was about to lose control. He wiped the spittle from his cheek and his eye, and then the fury exploded in him.
“Bitch!” he shouted.
He drew his dagger and brandished it above her.
I made my move. I reached across myself and, yes, there was Elinda’s sword. It gave a steely whisper as I pulled it from its scabbard. I swung the silver blade toward Iron’s neck, meaning to behead him in a single swift stroke before the archers could draw and cut me down.
But my arm froze. The sword froze—inches from him. My whole body was suddenly held there motionless by an overwhelming and invisible force.
It was the wizard. Curtin. He had lifted his hands, his fingers like talons. I could see blue sparks dancing round his long, pointy, filthy fingernails. My muscles locked. My mind disconnected from my body. He shrouded and bound my will with his own. I was held fast. Try as I might, I could not finish the blow and kill my man.
With my surprise attack foiled, the soldiers all around us in the torchlit cemetery had time to react. Some drew their swords. Some raised their bows and aimed their arrows at my heart.
But Lord Iron held up his hand and stopped them. No one attacked, no one let fly.
Iron looked at me as I st
ood there helpless, still mid-blow, my hand shivering with the effort to strike. He examined me like I was a specimen in a lab. He sneered.
“You love her,” he said. He sounded startled. Then he gave a quick laugh. He lowered his dagger. Sheathed it. “Good. I’ll make you watch her suffer before I kill you.”
I struggled with all my might against the force of Curtin’s magic. I felt his will tremble against the rebellious force of mine. But still he held me. He was strong, very strong.
Lord Iron, meanwhile, gestured. Four nearby soldiers lowered their swords and moved out from among the graves to come toward us.
“Take them to the dungeon,” Lord Iron said.
Two of the soldiers grabbed Lady Betheray by the arms. She struggled uselessly as they lifted her off her feet and began to half carry and half drag her away. The other two soldiers moved toward me.
I was still struggling against Curtin’s unbreakable chain of will.
But then, as the soldiers came toward me, I stopped struggling. I saw … something. Something over Lord Iron’s shoulder. Out beyond the crowd of soldiers. Beyond their torches. At the edge of the graveyard. In the darkness, through the mist.
I saw a little confetti-like sparkle of colored light.
Maud!
A bolt of hope and energy lanced my spirit and enflamed my will. I broke from the power of Curtin’s spell on the instant. I stepped away from the oncoming soldiers and swung my sword in a wild arc to hold them back.
At the same moment, a chorus of twanging bows sang out in the reaches of the night. Arrows arced up into the sky and fell like stars. All around me, Iron’s soldiers began screaming, collapsing. I saw eyes go wide by torchlight, mouths open in shock and pain, men dropping to the earth with blood spurting from the shafts buried in their necks.
The two soldiers who were coming for me stopped in their tracks. They looked around in confusion—and as they did, one caught an arrow in the eye and keeled over, dead. Lord Iron crouched low, afraid. The wizard was searching the night for a target. Who was attacking them?
A shout came out of the distance: “At them!”
And fast after came the thundering hoofbeats of a stampede.
Tauratanio’s centaur army charged through the mist, their dark faces jacked wide in the frenzy of attack. Their swords were uplifted. Their blades caught the last light of the moon and flashed. Their muscular flanks flowed as their horse-bodies carried them into the cemetery.
The Eastrim guards saw them coming, panicked, and lost control. They loosed their arrows wildly. They spun wildly this way and that. Some ran. Some lifted their swords clumsily, trying to get ready for close action.
Another second and the two armies crashed together among the graves. Blades rang on blades. Eyes blazed. Blood flew in arcs across the white mist. Dozens of war cries—dozens of high-pitched screams of agony—filled the boneyard darkness.
All this I saw in a second, but there was no time to take it in. Lady Betheray was being dragged off through the graveyard. The second soldier who had come to grab me now collected himself and charged. Our fight was over in an instant. I ducked beneath his swinging blade and drove my sword straight through the core of him. But as he gasped and died on the steel, Lord Iron seized the moment. With a beckoning gesture to his wizard, he rushed away into the night, following the soldiers who were carrying the struggling Betheray away.
I kicked the corpse from my sword and charged after them through the battle.
Arrows flew. Swords clashed together. Everywhere men and centaurs fought among the graves. I crouched low, my liquid armor flowing over me, my helmet taking shape around my head even as I hurried after Iron and his wizard and the men with Betheray.
And all around in the melee, I saw the flame-lit mist congealing here and there—and there and there—into human shapes, the emanations of the hungry dead. I saw those shadowy emanations reaching for the fleeing souls of falling soldiers, seizing those souls and dragging them down below the earth into their dank, toxic, miserable maze of corridors even as the now-inanimate soldier bodies hit the ground and were left behind facedown in the mud.
I rushed through it all, after Lord Iron’s party. Under the wizard’s protection, they were slipping unharmed through the chaos, heading for the verge of the graveyard, for the heavy wall of fog that hid the field beyond. I went after them full speed. I reached Lord Iron first. Roaring with rage, I whipped my sword around in a murderous sweep at his head. Near him, Curtin, the wizard, didn’t even look back at me. He merely gestured behind himself carelessly. Some invisible force flew from his fingertips. It shielded Lord Iron and deflected my blade so that it flew past him by at least a foot. The wizard’s will staggered me, and I fell back as Iron hurried his escape, putting distance between us—he and the wizard and the soldiers with Beth all moving away from me.
Over the battle cries and the sounds of hoofbeats, I heard her call out to me, “Austin!”
But I was losing them in the mist. Their shapes were growing dim in the fog and darkness. Looming centaurs and struggling soldiers were creating a mad confusion of shapes and action all around me. I killed a man who stepped in my way and rushed under the rearing hooves of a centaur just before they dropped on top of me.
Where was Iron? Where was Betheray? I had lost them. No, there they were. I spotted them through the battle madness. Lord Iron seemed to have stopped. He seemed to be confronting Betheray where the soldiers held her between them. He had his hand on her face and his own face pressed close to hers, his features gnarled with rage as he spoke to her.
The mist closed over them, and the action swirled before me, and I lost them again, but I fought forward, blocking a sword that swung for my head, kicking a soldier out of my way.
In another moment, I burst from the fog into a little clearing, a calm eye in the torrent of battle where there was only the night and the last moonlight and a headstone and a statue of an angel weeping and tendrils of mist winding through it all.
And there was Beth. She was standing alone.
My heart leapt up as I saw her. The soldiers had let her go. Lord Iron and the wizard had deserted her. I could just see them retreating into the further darkness and the furthest mist. Never mind them. Beth was free.
I sheathed my sword. I rushed to her side. I took her arm.
“Beth!”
She turned to me. Raised her face to mine. She smiled a little, her eyes glistening. I started to smile back. But then I realized something was wrong.
Her valentine face was stony white. Her breath was rattling in her throat. Her lips were moving as she tried to speak—but she couldn’t speak. She didn’t have the strength.
As the truth washed over me like a black wave, my eyes traveled down to where her two hands clutched at her center. Blood was pumping out between her fingers. I could see the ragged wound where Lord Iron had plunged his dagger in.
“No!” I said. “Beth! No!”
As I took hold of her arms, she made a move to bring her lips closer to me. She whispered: “My love … the emperor … the talisman … go …”
I caught her as she collapsed, and the weight of her carried me down to my knees. I knelt among the gravestones with her body in my arms. I saw the light of life in her eyes for one more second—a last look of sweet devotion—then the light went out and she was gone.
Roiling grief filled me. I cried out high and wild. Tears pouring from my eyes, I reached to touch her face—and as I did, through the mad sorrow clouding my vision, I saw the mist stir and swirl and gather around her and then rise up off her like a pillar of steam. The pillar took shape. Her shape: her rising emanation, the very image of her, revealed by the white drapery of the fog.
And even as that image rose from the corpse in my arms, other shadowy gray shapes began to move in around it. The dead. All the dead. Their misty figures came closer. They reached to seize her emanation, to drag her soul down with them into their yearning labyrinth.
Supporting her bo
dy in one hand, I drew my silver sword again with the other.
“Get back! Get away!” I shouted. I slashed at the gathering shapes, trying to keep them off her.
It was useless. They had no substance. The blade went through them like the mist they were. They didn’t even slow. They just kept moving in on her, reaching for her. I stared up into the night in horror as the circle of lost souls closed in on the mist-made shape of Lady Betheray.
But they never reached her.
As I looked on helplessly, the body in one hand, my sword in the other, some faint whisper of whirling wind rose up above the bloody sounds of war. Where the wind went, the mist was dispelled until a black border of crystal clear night formed around Lady Betheray’s ghostly emanation. The dark shadows of the hungry dead could not breach that border. I saw them reaching, striving to cross it, but the shapes of their grasping hands were swept away to nothing by the breezes.
In the next second, the image of Lady Betheray began to rise higher, and as it rose, it lightened. The dark fog that formed her caught first the red flames of the torches as it lifted up above the general mist. Then, rising even higher, her emanation turned pure white from some mystic source of illumination that was not the moon’s.
With my head tilted back to follow her ascent, I saw her figure turning white against the open air. I saw the hands of the dead reaching up after her helplessly. And then I saw …
I wasn’t sure what I saw. Lady Betheray’s emanation never lost the shape of herself, never faded, never vanished, yet as I looked up at her, she became so much a part of the fabric of the night that I could no longer distinguish her from the starry sky.
She was gone.
I lowered my eyes to her body. I lowered her body to the ground. For a second, the lingering impression of her image rising into the stars stayed with me, mitigating the hollowness of my grief. But then I looked up.
Here—here on earth—there was only chaos amid the graves. The centaurs and the soldiers traded sword blows in the mist and mud, churning both together into a swampy vortex. The horsemen’s front hooves kicked the air as the strange creatures reared and fought against the soldiers’ slashing blades. The swarming shadows of the dead seized hold of the souls of the fallen and carried them below. Torchlight stained the mist with red, and puddles of crimson blood collected on the earth.
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