Thaena’s hands curled into fists as the prince studied her. He squinted as if she were barely there, a figment of his imagination. He had defended himself with the same nonchalant grace, dismembering most of her magic and weathering the rest without a wound to show for her efforts. Syrolf and the others charged him, slashing and cutting before retreating from his feeding aura, yet his flesh only flushed at their efforts. Scars faded and pale skin grew anew. Despite the futility of the assault Syrolf would go back, again and again, urging his men on for the memory of fallen Duras—to keep the prince from the northwest tower.
As the runescarred berserker raised his blade and prepared to attack again, Serevan’s expression changed. A wave of rippling force left his palm, laying the berserkers flat and sliding them against the far wall.
“Enough,” he said calmly, tilting his head as he stared at Thaena.
She endured the icy gaze, glancing away once to see that Syrolf was still conscious and trying to rise. Serevan shook his head, sheathing his sword and staring at the floor and walls as if with new eyes. He stumbled briefly, unbalanced, and Thaena nudged the blade of a dropped sword with her boot.
“This—this is not a trick … Athumrani. Wh-what has he done?”
Slowly kneeling to retrieve the sword, Thaena paused as the prince’s body wavered, a double image flickering in and out around him. The double’s mouth was silently screaming, its face contorted in pain before falling away and disappearing. It left Serevan staggering, dropping to one knee. The pale light from outside, that first dim glow of dawn, faded away, overtaken by a renewed darkness. Night returned as all wind stopped, the air frozen, and Thaena felt herself stilled.
She had never in her life experienced such a profound quiet and sickening dread, as if all creation would topple at the resounding echo of a single heartbeat. She started as the first cries came from beyond the walls, growing into a chorus of wailing and weeping voices. The last remaining torches guttered out. Panic rose in her chest, overcoming reason as she took up the sword and rushed the incapacitated prince.
He looked up, eyes clear, seeing her plainly for the first time. The thrust of her strike forced itself through air thickened by a pervasive and malevolent chill. The blade met his outstretched hand, stabbing through his palm, grating against the metal guard on the edge of his gauntlet. She sobbed as she pushed, grief and anger powering the tip of the sword into his breastplate. It screeched to a stop, half a hand’s length through the armor. Serevan made no sound, gave no indication of pain as he stood and regarded her.
The open fingers of his pierced hand closed tightly on the blade. Crystals of ice formed on the steel, rushing down to her hands and feeding at what felt like her last reserves of energy. She tried to scream, to give voice to the chaos of emotion that had replaced her insides. Naught escaped her save a raspy whisper of choking breath.
“No,” was all that he said as she felt her legs grow weak.
He shoved on the blade. The pommel struck her chin and she swooned, the sword pulling free as she fell back in a daze. Syrolf’s arms caught her, pulling her away from the bleakborn.
Serevan stared thoughtfully at the pair, then at the closing wound in his palm. “The Word opens again, and death does not come for his pittance.”
He turned on his heel and strode for the open doors, tattered cloak billowing behind him.
Thaena lunged, sword in hand, after the prince, but Syrolf held her back.
“Forgive me, ethran,” he said weakly, “but we have done all we can. The Shield will not let him die easily … and we are in no condition to explore the limits of that strength.”
She did not struggle long against his grip, slumping on her knees as the voices of the dead sang a distant dirge of despair. Her half-lidded gaze sought some spark of light from the world outside, a link to the natural order of things. She found nothing but the dying embers of a steaming torch. She lost herself in its glow, alone at the end of all things.
chapter twenty-five
The floor fell away, stone fracturing and splitting to reveal an expanse of indiscernible shapes and infinite pits. Otherworldly winds blasted Bastun’s body, a forceful gale in contrast to the stillness of the Breath and the feel of solid ground beneath him. He crashed through glassy barriers, plummeting, shattering the veils between reality and those realms that lay in wait on the other side. Glimpses of passing things caught his eye, shifting and scurrying through dark corridors, seeking holes through which they might crawl into mortal worlds and minds. Other visions came as well, more immediate to his concerns, fleeting and misleading, showing him times that were and those that could be.
He saw Thaena, beaten and weak, her eyes dull and lifeless, as Syrolf held her amidst the remnants of her fang. She looked upon the retreating form of Serevan and the darkness that had taken hold of the world outside the Word. The prince gazed out with awakened eyes upon the ruins of Shandaular and the quieted walls of the Shield. In a blink these visions were replaced, over and over again, each more horrible than the last as Bastun descended further into a deeper cold. Every muscle in his body tensed at the growing power that pulsed through the Breath, yet he fought to hang on to the only solid object that existed.
Legions of beasts populated the blurring places and corridors that flew by. Some turned, catching his eye, watching him disinterestedly before returning to tasks of flame and iron. Fiends of horns and leather wings, claws and needlelike teeth, thrashed against the transparent walls of the tower. He could still feel the Shield around him, the enclosed space, the smell of stale air, and the magic of ancient runes humming in his ears.
The monsters, appearing and disappearing with a scratch of hungry claws, did not disturb him so much as those few that looked as human as himself. Something in their flashing eyes made him look away, afraid to see the corrupted souls behind their cruel and dispassionate stares.
Bursts of lightning surrounded him as he was engulfed by a blanket of swiftly moving clouds. He closed his eyes against the brightness, thunder pounding and shaking his bones with each strike. Motes of pain danced across his knuckles, and it seemed as though they might split, such was his hold on the Breath. The unnatural storm grew more intense. There were no breaks between the lightning and thunder, both existing as one in the wind and stinging rain of ice that stung his flesh and tapped against the surface of his mask. The chaos threatened to tear him away from his anchor, send him spinning into a nowhere that had no place for sentient beings or coherent thoughts. He screamed, trying to force one small note of something into the maelstrom of nothing.
At the end of his breath he inhaled, and everything stopped. Silence slammed into being, leaving a deafening ringing in his ears. Cracking open his eyes, he found himself kneeling. The Breath was before him, still in his unceasing grip, yet now its blade lay buried in ice, not stone. A twilit sky lay at the distant horizon of a vast ocean of ice and jagged peaks. Lightning danced across the sky, so high above that its thunder no longer had a voice with which to reach him. He exhaled a long breath of steam, eyes widening, hands aching, as he prepared for what was to come next.
This was the end. The destination that had been a hair’s breadth away from everything he knew, yet all the forces of reality and nature kept them apart. One of many planes of existence, it had waited for him in that narrowing space between the Breath and the Word—a frozen hell known as Stygia.
The very air felt alive, circling him and studying this mortal that dared tread upon unhallowed ground. The ground shook as the mystic nature of Stygia began to gather around the Breath. The sword trembled, and ice formed within its ancient runes, crawling up to his hands. It began as a slight tingle in his fingers, cold and volatile, searching and almost curious. The sudden flood of power that followed nearly broke his determined grasp.
It pooled in his gut, rose, and sloshed through his chest in icy waves of pure energy. His skull filled with burning, he bore down on the Breath. The pain electrified every fiber of his being, but h
e kept control.
The spirit of Athumrani, so long bound to the ancient sword, fell away in that first jolt of power.
The memory of the Magewarden’s death, swift and violent, tore him open, releasing the gathered power of Stygia across the whole of Shandaular. The fires had snuffed out. Soldiers and commoners alike had been slain. The Word had opened and, in the instant before closing, it consumed Athumrani’s life and laid waste to the city it was meant to defend.
The memory of the grieving father’s death left a taste of ashes and copper in Bastun’s mouth, but unlike Athumrani he did not bring sorrow with him to place upon a frozen altar in an uncaring hell. Stygia devoured sorrow, ripped away love and compassion.
Bastun imagined himself a vessel. He allowed the power to tear through his body and spirit. Long jagged wounds opened and closed in his skin as he pulled the power into himself, denying it entrance to the world. Each rip brought tears to his eyes, yet focused them, sharpening his vision as he spent his rage. Slowly, the cold resealing of his skin became less painful and more numb. Stygia accepted the currency he had brought, though he wondered what he had purchased in return.
Several strides away, on the edge of the ice, the durthan stirred beside the black waters of the Stygian ocean. From the limitless depths of that dark sea, he sensed the attention of an ancient mind and felt its touch flow through the rush of power in his body. Malicious thoughts marched along his arms like an army of needles.
The reasonless tempest of Stygia’s power became a living thing as evil caressed and crushed all at once. It whispered loving words in his ears, crooning and cajoling him to release his control, to open the doors of his willpower and loose hell upon a world that had no use for him. It shouted and screamed, the thunderous voice echoing as if submerged, tearing at the insides of his flesh in frustration to free itself.
He could see it, buried somewhere in the ocean’s dark—a glacier bearing a dark blot of the prisoner within: Stygia’s frozen devil-prince, Levistus.
The ice shook and cracked around him, geysers of water bursting from beneath. White faces of the damned sobbed and screamed from within the shifting blocks. Anilya rose on her hands and knees, crawling away from the rising waves of the ocean.
Despite pain and the croonings of that evil, Bastun held back the tide that swelled to break him.
This had been the failing of Arkaius. The long-unanswered covenant he had forged in Ilythiiri runes had been too much for Shandaular’s king. His desire to save his people had driven him to desperate measures, pitting devils against the Nentyarch’s demons. In the end he had turned away from the call of that dark mind in the depths, horrified by what he had created.
Bastun knelt alone on that precarious perch, resisting the weaknesses of his own humanity in order to hold the edges of the Word intact for those he left behind. The power that Arkaius had denied, Bastun reluctantly accepted.
He felt a measure of control transferred to him as strength flooded through his arms and legs. The wound in his side disappeared. His aches and pains fell away. Spent rage left him hollow, and he sensed the sighing approval of Stygia and its hidden lord. With a strained thought he willed the ice to stop its quaking, and an ominous stillness settled uncomfortably within him.
Anilya approached slowly, shaking with cold, though Bastun sensed little more than a cool, gentle breeze. He looked up, coursing with a torrent of borrowed power, and only faintly felt the desire for vengeance. All doubt and things unnecessary, emotions that could unbalance his control, he made a space for them within. She had chosen her path, and he would make sure only she suffered for that choice.
“You killed him,” he said, voice low and growling, amplified into an inhuman sound that grated in his ears. The last memory of his master’s face, dying in the snow, flashed through his mind.
Anilya looked at him in fear, then over her shoulder at the nightmarish landscape that surrounded them both.
“You opened the Word, vremyonni,” she said, straining to breathe the cold air. “Do not accuse me of trifles like murder!”
The durthan lunged, dark flames spitting from her hands as she sought to take hold of the Breath. The spell licked painfully at his hands and arms, hissing where it touched the buried blade. He stared curiously at the effect as if outside of himself. Anilya pulled and scratched at his fingers, finding them as hard and immovable as stone. The shadowy flames disappeared, leaving bits of his skin brittle and peeling, blackened and steaming. Looking into the durthan’s crazed eyes, he watched her confidence waver and fade to fear.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
Force gathered around him, and he willed it outward, watching as Anilya was slammed backward. Her body flew through the air and crashed against a spire of ice, then slid to the ground. The sound of breaking bone echoed, the reverberations tingling across his skin.
As he witnessed the violent effects of a mere whim, he wondered what he had done to himself. The swirling power clenched on his innards, twisting and stretching as it sensed the presence of his doubt. Gasping in pain, he pushed away his brief fear and breathed heavily as the pain subsided.
Anilya coughed, blood staining her lips as she pushed herself to a sitting position. She cradled a broken arm and one leg was bent at an unnatural angle. In the distance Bastun could see shapes diving and winging through the clouds. Black feathered wings bore tiny figures ever closer. Waves rolled in the ocean as beasts rose to the surface, spiny backs breaking the water before submerging again. Wiping her mouth on her sleeve, Anilya turned and saw them as well.
“They’re coming for you,” he said, shaking with the strain of maintaining the caged chaos that flowed from the Breath.
“So it seems,” she replied, shifting her shoulders and looking away from the awakening denizens of Stygia, “though I suspect they’ll have an eye for you as well.” She shook with cold, frost forming in patches on her face and arms. “We could leave together, use this power for the greater good.”
“I told you once before,” he said. “Your passion lacks sincerity—and there is no good in this.”
Pale arms, encrusted with ice, broke the ocean’s surface and gripped the edges of the small island. Humanoid bodies, their faces frozen in grotesque expressions, pulled themselves sluggishly onto solid ground, flopping and sliding as they piled over one another. Dark angels, screeching hideous dirges overhead, circled and cast black eyes onto the procession of the damned.
Slowly, Bastun turned his head downward, unable to look upon the foul souls as they sought purchase on the ice. The slight weakness pained him, but the unnatural strength did not fade. The power did not so quickly punish this flaring spark of humanity. Claws scraped and drew his attention to the left where he spied a serpentine monstrosity writhing over a distant block of ice. Its pale blue eyes met his and he found a part of himself hiding in its multifaceted gaze. He shuddered, and the pain grew a bit more, but subsided more swiftly as if the power of Stygia were reshaping each lapse to its own design.
“Don’t look away, Bastun,” Anilya said hoarsely, and he looked at her blue-tinged lips, frozen droplets of blood clinging to her chin. “Remember this. Remember all of it.”
The first of the condemned souls grasped her ankle, and she winced as her injured leg was tugged. Try as he might, he could not look away, could not abandon the need to see the fate of his friends’ murderer. He whispered under his breath, in equal parts praying to the Three and recounting all that had brought him to this moment, this choice, this grim acceptance.
Anilya had not the strength to scream or cry out, but the damned did it for her as they pulled her inexorably to the ocean. Bastun heard in their voices a lament for their own existence, the dim memories of lives and deaths and torments suffered. He realized the curse of Shandaular and its Shield was birthed in the depths of this place, in the unceasing repetition of a frozen hell. Its power rushed in his ears, leaving him numb as a tangled mass of limbs and faces
engulfed the durthan.
“Remember it, vremyonni!” she called out. “Remember the power! Rashemen may yet have need of it!”
The first splashes of falling bodies broke the water, and she was gone, the voices of her captors gone with her. In a daze, Bastun lowered his eyes and stared at the hilt of the Breath, studied the strange hands, his own fingers wrapped tightly around this fulcrum between worlds.
“It is done,” he muttered, and yet he knew it could not be true, briefly imagining having to repeat the words every morning for eternity. The thought broke through the separation between will and flesh, and he pulled at the blade. Ice cracked and split as the sword shifted. The runes along the Breath flared, and he felt the walls he had built around his humanity begin to crumble. Pain flared behind his eyes, and he tugged harder, his new strength breaking the magic’s grip. The walls of the Shield flickered around him, indistinct and transparent.
He rose and braced his feet on either side of the embedded Breath, straining and staring into the storm-laced skies above. Dark-winged angels, fiendish minions of Levistus, dived from their heights and fixed him in their black-eyed stares. The Breath glowed with a brilliant white light, and it felt as though he were tearing a limb from his body as the blade began to slide free from the clinging ice.
Flashes of darkness, stone, and lightning danced before his eyes. Black wings surrounded him, enveloped him in soft, downy feathers that reeked of perfume and death. Scarlet lips whispered in his ears, promising unimaginable pleasures and ancient secrets.
He fell away, tumbling backward as if struck. A cold stone floor arrested his fall. The Breath clattered and clanged as his arms fell out to his sides. Ilythiiri runes squirmed in the ceiling above, their magic fading once again into dormancy. They settled back into their patterns, entwined inside the knotwork of the Word’s symbols. Bastun’s head rolled from side to side. He stared at the walls and the mirage of power that swirled through the chamber.
The Shield of Weeping Ghosts Page 28