Time had changed her. More than seven years… She had always been slender, but now was lean as bamboo. Her hair, in all its glory, still reminded him of a storm but looked wilder than he remembered. There was a scar at the corner of one brilliant sapphire eye, a pale line that extended to her hairline and across one long, upswept ear. She wore Sēq armour, but his eyes lingered for a moment on her sword: shaped like a Seethe weapon, slender and straight, sheathed in carved jade-hued serill. Its pommel was unusual, a blackened onyx octopus with its tentacles wrapped around the top of the hilt. Indris felt a chill on his Disentropic Stain when he looked at the weapon. When he looked at her. As if believing was not quite seeing.
She was looking at him expectantly, the beginning of a worried frown starting to appear. Indris forced a smile as he took her into his arms, where she relaxed into him. Anj smelled of leather and the faint char of recently used ahm.
“I looked for you—”
“And I for you,” she cut him off, but would not let him go. Anj shifted so she could look into his eyes. “But none of that matters now. We’re here, in the same place, together.”
Together. Anj. Mari. Mari, who if he closed his eyes he could still smell, aloe and honey and not the smell of burned disentropy. The same Mari he had spent the day defending his friends with, protecting Vahineh. But, this was Anj.
“It’s time!” A Sēq Master bellowed. “Knights to the front, flank your Masters. Librarians, stay in the rear and focus your attention on your Wards! No mistakes! Now go!”
Around them, the Sēq who had been held in reserve joined the battle.
“Anj…” I think I’ve fallen in love with somebody else—
But she lay a chip-nailed finger, where it protruded from a worn old leather gauntlet, against his lips. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk later. For now, we’ve some red work ahead of us.”
Indris saw fire blaze behind his long-missing wife. A witch in the Aspect of a burning corpse in molten armour charged her. The ahmsah told him the Aspect was all illusion, showing him the shape of the portly witch beneath. Indris threw up a quick Ward and rushed forward. He grabbed the man’s wrist and upper arm, spun, and—rolling his shoulders—threw the witch head first into a stone wall. The Aspect stuttered once, then went out as the witch fell unconscious.
“Thanks, husband,” she grinned. And with that she turned and threw herself into the battle. There came the dry rattle of leather and metal, and a dark shape plummeted from the sky with a thunderous boom. Lightning crackled around her limbs and in her hair. Indris looked at the Stormbringer, whose expression was a warning in itself.
“You can ask questions and make cow-eyes later, boy!” The Stormbringer gripped her lightning-bright spear in gauntleted hands. Farstrike was brilliant with arcs of lightning that danced from the weapon and up her scaled gauntlet. Her armour was dented, some scales almost melted with laces burned away; others smoked in the flashing light of the battle around them. She drew back her arm and hurled Farstrike at a giant flayed wolf with volcanic eyes and tentacles growing from its shoulders. The Aspect gave a brief unwolf-like yell of pain, before it flopped to the ground as a red-robed old man, the side of his head and a long strip down his throat seared and smouldering. Farstrike soared back to the Stormbringer, clanging as it slammed into her armoured palm.
“I don’t know how, or why, but she’s here.” The Stormbringer spat into the dust, then cast a dark glance at Anj, who fought amongst the other Sēq against the witches. The air smelled of scorched earth. The sound of the battle was so loud it vibrated against Indris’s skin. “There’s no denying we can use her help… and it was she who warned us what was about to happen here.”
“How did she know?”
“We’ll be asking her that. Amongst other things. But she’s right. It’ll all be moot if we don’t survive this. And there are some faruqen questions I’ll be asking that little sherde, Zadjinn. Sneaky bastard showed up here with your wifey in tow, calm as you bloody please.”
Zadjinn? Anj? What in the Ancestors’ names is happening?
The energies expended by the warring Ilhennim ripped the night. Indris reached out with the ahmsah. The Mahsojhin and the area about it was dotted with black stars, light-devouring holes in the ahm. So much energy had already been used in the local area there was little left. There was a mechanism drawing massive amounts of energy at the doorway of what had once been the Hearthall. With his arcane sight, whatever it was looked like the spinning tumblers on a complex lock, interspersed with rotating cogs and bright glyphs, all circling a shadowy vortex. The machine powered the rift allowing the witches into the world. It also drew masses of power, freeing more witches who would draw on even more disentropy, an outward spiral of energy use. If it drew enough energy away, the arcane seal laid down by the Sēq centuries ago could well crumble of their own accord. Cinders of spent ahm already drifted like volcanic ash, eddying around half-seen, half-sensed geysers of sickly yellow green as tainted Drear energies oozed into the world. He felt the ahm currents pull on him, trying to draw on the energy his body produced. With an irritated frown Indris hardened his Disentropic Stain, becoming an obdurate rock in the flow, saving himself for himself.
“You’re using too much energy!” Indris shouted above the din. “You’ll kill as many of your own as you do of them if you keep this up.”
“What choice is there?” the Stormbringer yelled. “Do we let them go, only to fight them again when they’re even stronger? Did you know there’s some bastard out there in the city, releasing daemon elementals? We’ve had to destroy a few of them here, misbegotten imbecile things driven mad by who knows how long in captivity. In the name of every evil Ancestor who ever died—”
Memories of the Maladhi-sûk and the litter of spent puzzle boxes. “It’s Nix of the Maladhi. He was hording spent Dilemma Boxes and now I know why. They were practice.”
“And you didn’t see fit to tell me?” Surges of lightning arced along Farstrike, so bright Indris had to narrow his eyes. Changeling growled at the other weapon, which sizzled and rumbled in return. Indris opened his mouth to speak, but the Stormbringer just shook her head slowly. He took the warning.
“Now you’re here—” she started.
“You dragged me here—”
“—you may as well make yourself useful, boy.” She stepped aside and once more called down lightning, which sheathed her in coruscating brilliance, before unleashing it at her enemies.
Indris cast a critical eye over the battle. The Sēq were outnumbered, but not outpowered. The witches clung staunchly to their individuality, rarely fighting in groups and only doing so when overmatched by the Exalted Names of the Sēq.
The mystics fought extravagantly. Indris realized he had taken a few steps forward, his hand curled around Changeling’s hilt, before he stopped himself. There were voices in his head, slithering words that flexed like tentacles in his mind, urging him to let go of restraint. It was a siren song that at once cajoled and seduced, promising the joy of union with the soul of the world. The feeling of majestic power in his limbs. His mind becoming a beacon, burning hot enough to rival the sun and melt mountains to slag with a thought, even as he reached out to push islands beneath the oceans and raise ranges from the sea with the touch of his—
Indris reeled, hands going to his head. Changeling poured energy into him, igniting the potentials in his mind that were as addictive as black lotus seeds. He centred himself behind his Inner Fortress, feeling his hearts slow as the temptation faded away.
“Stop it,” he said irritably to Changeling, who still tried to fill him with the clean, warm energy that could fuel the fires to destroy worlds. In his dreams he had seen it. In his near Awakening he had felt it. Now he feared it more than ever.
Once more the fragments of words sung across the outer layers of his mind, coaxing him to relinquish his self-control. Indris shook his head to clear it, then fortified his mind with additional crystalline barriers and illusory paths to
confound any who sought entry. But something worked with a dire purpose, urging the mystics to burn themselves out. It was happening all around him as both scholars and witches used more of their vital energies to sing their lethal cantos. Beside him a Sēq Knight suddenly stopped in midsong. The fire behind the knight’s skin guttered, then faded as they fell, unconscious and drooling, to the dirt. A witch closed with Indris, his vulture-headed gibbon Aspect flickering before it faded away to reveal a young blond man with a suddenly confused expression. He looked down at the scythe in his hands as if wondering why it was there. A Sēq Knight beheaded him, took a few steps, then vomited bile. A witch in the Aspect of a rimed scorpion stabbed at the Sēq with pincers and tail. Indris drew his storm-pistol and shot the witch until it stopped. He did not need to inspect the ruined mass of the scholar to know he, too, was dead.
But they would not stop, even when mystics started falling from the sky like sparking hail. Others reeled as if drunk. Some of the mystics seemed aged. A few hobbled, lame from the damage done by the energy feedback in their bodies. Some looked about with wide, white eyes, obviously blind. Others, unconscious, were gripped by seizures as the mindstorms took them.
Indris gestured for nearby Sēq Knights to join him. They were breathing heavily and grimed with sweat and blood, but not badly wounded. He swept his arm to encompass the scores of battles happening in, around and above the Mahsojhin. “Be wary! There’s something trying to make us use too much energy. Remember your physical training and use it first. Now come with me. We’re going to shut down the rift!”
With Changeling in one hand and storm-pistol in the other, Indris and his small group of knights headed towards the yawning doorway of the Hearthall. A large number of witches in their Aspects stood guarding the rift, helping their brethren as they emerged, disoriented. But those witches who tried to stop Indris and his Sēq were reeling from too much arcane work. And while Indris tried his best to not take life, the Sēq with him had no such compunction. One of the Sēq Knights used the ahmsah to send a sizzling cloud of fractals at the witches. Then again. And again, despite Indris shouting for him to stop. The knight’s eyes were fever-bright and his lips were stretched in the idiot grin of ahm-stroke. As the knight stood on wavering legs, still trying to use more of their vital energy, Indris slipped behind him. He placed the knight in a chokehold, his resistance feeble as a child, and gently lowered the man to the ground as he passed out. Even behind the walls of his Inner Fortress, the temptation to let loose with his mystic energies was almost overwhelming.
Anj emerged from the carnage to grip his arm. “Don’t! There are too many of them, even for you.”
“But not for us.” He winced at how easily the words had come. As if the two of them had not been apart. Old jokes and well-loved quotes were forced back where they belonged, to a world where Anj was not a flesh and blood enigma, wrapped in painful questions and terrible supposition. But it was so easy to forget—
“Too dangerous for any of us, my beautiful man.” She tugged at his arm even as Changeling tried to draw him back to where he was headed. “We need you in the fight.”
“What I’m about to do will help stop it quicker, with fewer lives lost. Come on!”
“Fight with me, like we used to.”
“It’s less about the lives we take, as the lives we save.”
Anj smiled sadly as she slapped his cheek harder than was playful. From the corner of his eye it looked as if the tentacles of the squid on the pommel of her sword writhed in the uncertain light. “Suit yourself, but I’ve got things to do. Keep your skin whole, husband.”
You too, wife, he almost said, but the words were replaced by a sharp nod as he turned awkwardly away. His thoughts turned to Mari, who by now should be long gone from Avānweh. To his friends and family who were with her. Where he should—would—prefer to be.
Shaking the thoughts from his mind, Indris moved forward, he and his Sēq entering the Hearthall. Pressure built in his head, became a focused pain on the crest of a bubble that grew in his forehead. Words trickled into his brain, the susurrus of the minds around him, adding to the deafening cacophony of battle. It felt as if he could hear all the fears and regrets, angers and hatreds and sorrows of those around him. Changeling almost purred as if she, too, sensed the rise in Indris of the power he could not control. And was somehow gratified.
The Aspects of the witches were all but gone. Confused and weary, they stared at Indris for a moment, then seemed to be transfixed by something only they could hear, or see. Indris dashed between the witches as the knights engaged them in battle. It was with a sigh of relief that he stopped beside an ornate device, a step-pyramid frame with many lenses, moving wheels and a still pendulum. It was not so large as he had thought—coming no higher than his waist, and that due to the tripod—seeming bigger at a distance because of the corona of energy that magnified its contours. This close Indris felt the tug on his Disentropic Stain, as if the mechanism was trying to siphon off his energy. He inspected the artefact, looking for some means of deactivating it. There was nothing obvious.
A red-robed witch walked through a seam in the air, eyes unfocussed. Indris rapped her on the temple with his storm-pistol and she fell to the ground, unconscious.
Plagued by the feeling he was being watched, Indris turned to see Anj fighting not far away. She struck witches down left and right, spurring the other Sēq on. Her eyes rested on him, then the device. She shook her head in warning.
For lack of a better idea, and pressed for time, Indris turned and kicked the mechanism over.
The beam of light that pieced the clouds above disappeared. The wavering tear between here, now, and then vanished. Huh. That was easier than expected.
He picked up the mechanism, and moved towards the exit. Outside the Hearthall, on the far side of the forum, he saw Femensetri and some of the Exalted Names had taken position on a decrepit gazebo, an old folly that looked to be as much mould and rust as it was marble and iron. He gathered the Sēq Knights with him on the way out, though two of them needed to be carried by their friends.
Without thinking, Indris reached out with his mind and one hand, and picked up the Sēq he had rendered unconscious. His companions looked at him, ahm-drunk and bewildered, yet said nothing.
The remaining Sēq were converged around the old gazebo, its verdigris dome badly canted where the stone had collapsed and the supporting iron-work rusted away. The ground around it was strewn with fallen columns, fallen stones and fallen people. The air was redolent with blood and burned skin and hair, mingling with rotting flowers and mulch. Some of the Exalted Names remained. Some had gone to help the city. So few. A very pitiful few Sēq Masters and Knights remained; hollow eyed, breathing like wheezing bellows.
Most of the mystics were too exhausted to fight. The sky was empty except for a handful of very powerful witches and scholars, yet even they were drifting to the ground. Most of the people around Indris looked like they were ready to collapse, their energy spent. The ahm in the Mahsojhin was almost spent—only a fitful lapping of tepid energy touched his Disentropic Stain.
Indris carefully set the mechanism on the ground, but as he did, frenetic motion caught his eye. Anj was a dervish, her sword shimmering greener than witchfire as it hummed and sliced. Witch Aspects guttered out like candle flames as she struck.
A powerfully built young man in a badly torn red robe struck Anj on the shoulder with his heavy-looking club. Indris heard the crack as the weapon made impact. Saw the agony written on Anj’s dirt- and blood-smeared face. Indris took aim with his pistol and fired.
Nothing. He was out of ammunition.
He moved without thinking, away from the gazebo and towards his wife. Light footed, he covered the distance at speed, Changeling held low and trailing behind him like a snarling tail. The witch raised his club again as Anj surged to her feet, her own sword a whistling arc of emerald in shadow. A second witch narrowed the distance. A third, fourth, and fifth. On one knee, Anj par
ried and cut, her left arm curled against the ruined armour on her chest.
Indris sliced one witch from shoulder to hip. Pivoted on one foot. Windmilled his arm and cut another’s throat. By the time he had turned, Anj was making an end of the final witch, who slumped to the ground.
Indris offered Anj a shoulder to lean on, which she took. She kissed him, her lips feather light where his earlobe met his jaw.
“You’re so good to me,” she murmured, voice muzzy with pain, but she carried her own weight and only used him for support over the rough areas. Her amenesqa, with its disconcerting octopus pommel, was clutched in one hand, while with the other she took his. Indris looked down at the familiar gesture, conflicting feelings fluttering in his chest.
The exhausted witches and the Sēq glared at each other impotently across the killing field, stones and dirt soaked with wet, dark stains that glistened in the moonlight. Each faction had suffered heavy losses, the survivors leaning on their weapons, or each other, for support. It took Indris nowhere near as long as it should have to count those scholars who survived.
“It was like this the first night of the Scholar War,” Femensetri said as she came to stand by Indris’s side. Her voice was even rougher than the angular croak he had come to know. “We fought each other until we could barely stand. We had almost nothing left.”
“How did it get worse?” Indris asked quietly.
Femensetri scratched some dried blood from Farstrike. She inspected her nail from different angles, as if the rust-hued flakes somehow contained the mysteries of the living condition. With a grunt she flicked them into the breeze.
“How did it get worse?” she mused absently. When she spoke next her voice was filled with something Indris thought might have been shame. “We both wanted to be the power that held the crown in our greedy hands, is how. It’s amazing what can happen when power is the reward.
“Seems not much has changed.”
The Obsidian Heart Page 38