by Evie Manieri
Rho pushed his way through to the tower stairs with his whole right side vacillating between fiery-hot and icy-cold. He was sure now that Gannon had pulled apart something inside him that wasn’t going to go back together on its own, but he didn’t care as long as he got back to the Argent with Dramash. He gathered as much momentum as he could by running down the last hallway and using it to propel him up the steps, though he was forced to slow as the climb grew steeper. Then a gust of wind moaned past him and he realized that the door up above had been opened. He moved back on the next landing and brought his right hand up to his shoulder, ready to draw, but when he looked up the steps, he saw Dramash’s small face peeking out from layers of fur. He was holding Ani’s hand, and a third person was coming down the tower steps behind them.
A door opened on the next landing down and Rho heard people running behind him. His reunion with Isa would have to wait. He backed up and turned around just as an Eotan guard with an imperial sword charged up the stairs. He was leading five others that he could see, and probably more behind that.
“Run!” Rho called back, checking over his shoulder to make sure Ani and Dramash could get away as the guards rushed them.
He saw Ani take a long pin from somewhere under her coat and prick her palm—without flinching—until she drew up a drop of red blood. Then before he could understand what he was seeing, much less stop it, she lifted up Dramash’s hand, pulled off his mitten and did the same to him. He squeaked when the needle pierced his skin and his eyes stretched wide in surprised pain.
A terrible sense of foreboding made Rho look behind him.
The imperial sword of the second guard shot forward, and she stabbed the man in front of her straight through the back. Blue blood bubbled out of the victim’s mouth and he collapsed in a heap at Isa’s feet. The guard who’d killed him dropped her black-bladed sword in horror and backed into the man behind her, who screamed out a warning even as he swung his blade into her neck, nearly taking her head off. The same man then sliced into the shoulder of the man behind him like he was splitting a tree stump. After that, the scene turned bloodier than Rho’s worst nightmares. Frantic screams and cries of pain blended into one soundless roar as the swords turned against their owners’ wills, and still more soldiers kept charging forward up the stairs behind them, trying to get to the enemy they knew must be up ahead.
Rho turned back around.
Ani was still holding Dramash’s hand. Tension shivered through his limbs and his eyes stared at nothing, but that particular look—that one that plagued Rho’s dreams—wasn’t there. Dramash was not the one doing this. Then how—? Oh, sweet Onraka, he said to himself as his gaze slid to the old woman at the boy’s side. The look on Ani’s face wasn’t one he had ever seen on a living, breathing person. It was the haughty, serenely curved lip and the unblinking eyes of a carved deity: somber, powerful, and utterly pitiless. She was the source of this carnage, and she was wielding Dramash like an axe.
“What are you doing to him?” he cried out to her. “What are you?”
She considered the question for a moment. “Patience,” she said. “That’s what all gods are, in the end.”
He would have lunged toward her then but Isa flowed in front of him with her liquid grace.
Rho couldn’t understand how everything had gone so wrong so quickly. It was like the world was a table and someone had come along and heaved up one side, sending everything rolling down onto the floor into one tangled mess.
The slaughter had ended, and now instead of boots pounding up the steps and jingling sword belts, he heard the sound of bodies sliding slowly down, a few steps at a time.
Rho lifted Fortune’s Blight and pointed it at Ani. “You are not a god.”
“Don’t, Rho,” Isa said as she slid her shoulder in front of his to move him back. A hectic wash of pink and burning orange flowed out from her, a torrent of emotion. He had never felt anything remotely like it from her, or anyone else before. “I’m taking them back to the Shadar. That’s why I’m here, to help Daryan. Everything’s going to be all right now.”
“Isa—” More alarmed than ever for her now, he reached out to her with the easy intimacy of their friendship, but all that color just swept him back again. His heart gave a heavy thump. “Isa, you can’t take her to the Shadar. Didn’t you see what she just did?”
“I was protecting us. Isa knows that,” said Ani. “She knows it’s time for me to go back to the Shadar. It will be different this time, with Dramash to help me.” The boy’s eyes were beginning to focus again, and his limbs had lost that horrible rigor.
“He’s just a child,” Rho cried out. “He’s been through enough. Can’t you just leave him alone?”
“Oh, he doesn’t want that,” said Ani, “not now he’s seen what he can be.”
The boy tilted his head up to the old woman and Rho saw something kindling in Dramash’s eyes that he feared was a dark kind of triumph.
“No,” said Rho, through clenched teeth, “you can’t do this to him.”
“What would you do with him?” asked Ani. Her voice spiraled down the walls toward him, hissing like a sandstorm. “Hide him away? Make him ashamed of what he is? You want him to be something you can control, but you never will. The other ashas burned up because they weren’t strong enough to channel my power, but not Dramash. I’m taking him home with me. We have work to do.”
He saw the pommel of Blood’s Pride coming at his head, but his body in its present state was too slow and stupid to do anything about it. It smashed into his skull over his right ear, and Fortune’s Blight fell from his hand as he stumbled back against the wall and crashed to the floor. The dead guard with the severed neck lay beside him with her fingers still curled in the shape of the hilt of the sword Ani and Dramash had ripped from her hand.
Rho heard the shuffling of their boots across the landing and then down the stairs. He couldn’t move, but he was still conscious. Isa could have killed him easily, so he found a little hope in the fact that she had only knocked him down.
He crawled over to Fortune’s Blight as soon as he could and fought his way to his feet. Going down: down was like falling and he could do that. He hugged the walls to get past the bodies of the murdered guards, trying not to count them or categorize their wounds, and then made it back down past the other landings, moving as quietly as he could. Thankfully, he encountered no one else.
Even before he emerged back out into the entrance hall, he knew something had changed. A huge silver urn rocked on its side in front of the doors and the hall held nothing but rubbish and dead bodies dumped into corners, lying on the ground or across the stairs. The looters were gone but so were the guards, the high clansmen, even Gannon’s dogs, and Rho thought he smel
led smoke.
Isa, Dramash and Ani had already disappeared. He made his way across the hall, trying to ignore the pounding in his head, using anything he could for support. He could hear the tinny rattle of swords clashing in the distance so the situation outside had not improved, but the loud cracking and groaning sounds nearby worried him more.
He made his way out onto the darkening Front where the freezing air instantly chilled his lungs. He stopped at the top of the steps, intending to throw himself after Dramash as soon as he spotted him in the crowd, but now he understood why the looters had fled the castle: the afflicted were everywhere, and they were terrifying. The colored tabards had ceased to have any meaning; the only distinction that mattered was between “cursed” and “not cursed,” and even that designation was looking horrifyingly fluid. He could see hundreds of lurching, convulsing creatures screaming and slashing at anything that came near them, and just as many others on the ground, writhing in agony and begging for death.
He slid to a dead stop and then inched back through the slush as another high-pitched groan rose above the general clamor. A sliding shadow turned the snow in front of him to a pale green and just as he realized that some catastrophe had smashed the terrace in two, the eastern half listed over on its green-glass columns and the whole thing up-ended.
The statue of Eotan smacked down right in front of him, splitting into sections where the separate castings had been joined. The wolf’s head bounced on the black stone, kicking up a cloud of crushed ice, and then landed upright on its severed neck with nothing but indifference in its green-glass eyes. The platform slid down on one edge and cracked apart into flat chunks that went spinning away across the Front. Three soldiers in Garrador tabards were plowed down right in front of him, while everyone else scrambled out of the way.
“Dramash!” he called out, searching for them in the heaving crowd, but no one responded. He careened down the steps until Eotan’s severed green-glass torso blocked his way, then lumbered around it before nearly walking straight into the point of Isa’s sword.
Ani and Dramash were standing behind her, next to a saddled and armored triffon. Amidst all the chaos, the beast had its head down between its paws so that Dramash could reach across to scratch the bristly fur at the top of its snout, just where the armor skullplate ended. Rho remembered Dramash doing something similar the first time they met, the night of the mine collapse. He had tried to bribe him with a sweet to leave before Frea got there, but the boy had refused to go.
“You shouldn’t have followed us,” said Isa, speaking in Shadari so the others could understand—or maybe because she didn’t want him in her mind. Whatever was the matter with her was breaking Rho’s heart, but he didn’t know how to help her. “Dramash doesn’t want to go with you.”
“It’s funny you put it that way,” Rho said as he took a step back and raised Fortune’s Blight, “because I don’t care what Dramash wants. He’s a little boy and I’m his guardian. I’ll decide what’s best for him, and that’s absolutely not going with her.”
Dramash stopped petting the triffon—only for a moment, but Rho saw it.
“I won’t let you stop us,” said Isa. The point of Blood’s Pride never wavered.
“Yes, you will,” Rho said, with the cold burning his throat. “I don’t know what this woman’s doing to you, but you’re stronger than that. Look at what you’ve done—just look where you are.”
“Step away from him, Isa,” said Ani, and took Dramash’s hand again. The needle in her hand already had a drop of red blood swelling at the end of it and Rho thought of those bodies on the stairs and the amount of blood spilled by just eight imperial swords. Not twenty paces from him, five guards surrounded one of the cursed; between them, they had six imperial swords. To their right, General Olin sat on the ground, pressing a cut on his thigh. His imperial sword lay next to him in the snow: that made seven. He could keep counting; to ten, to twenty, to fifty, without even trying. He could count to a thousand, and still not have counted every black blade on the Front right at that moment. And Ani could control them all through Dramash.
He pushed Isa aside and ran toward the boy just as every single one of those black-bladed swords ripped out of the hands of those who held them and shot up into the air. They hovered there, turning gently, suspended by an energy that tightened Rho’s jaw and felt like a fist clenching his heart. Those swords would come back down like a flight of arrows when they dropped, and no place on the Front would be safe from them.
One sword swung like the needle in a compass until it pointed straight at him. Ani’s eyes flashed and her body tensed; Rho held his breath. The black blade sliced through the snow toward him, but then jerked to a stop as if someone had grabbed the hilt.
“Dramash,” said Rho sternly, “I’ve had enough of this.”
A shadow moved through the boy’s eyes. Then he smiled, except it wasn’t really a smile, not at all. Rho stepped back as Ani’s face twisted into the exaggerated snarl of a mummer’s mask. She tried to pull her hand away, but Dramash didn’t let go. She gasped, and her frail body stiffened.
Isa ran toward Ani and Dramash with a silent howl, throwing away Blood’s Pride so she could chop her arm down to break the connection between them. Ani dropped to the ground and a blast of unseen force shoved Rho back into the fallen statue. His shoulders cracked against the ice; he dropped Fortune’s Blight and clutched at the statue to try to keep himself upright, but the green-glass just slid out from underneath his gloves and he slipped down, plowing up the snow in front of him.
He lifted his face to the snow-filled sky in time to see the black blades burst into dust.
Each sword—a thousand and more—puffed into its own little black cloud and remained suspended there by the wind, even as the empty hilts came tumbling back down. Rho threw his arms up over his head as all of those bits of metal fell, banging on shields and bouncing over the rocks. The black dust began falling on him and everything around him, turning it all the same dirty gray. All movement on the Front ceased except the writhing of the people who had fallen ill.
Dramash tottered dizzily for a moment, and then fell face-down before Rho could heave himself off the ground to catch him. The boy was so bundled up that Rho couldn’t tell if he was breathing, much less conscious.
“Dramash?” he called out, scrabbling through the black-crusted snow to get to him.
The boy rolled over, displaying a bright red nose and cheeks and a jutting bottom lip.
Rho wiped the grit from his own eyes. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” said the muffled voice.
“Can you get up?” Rho asked, tugging on his sleeves to help him. “Where’s your other mitten?”
It was getting dark; at least Rho thought it was getting dark, but the way it was darker around the edges than in the middle made him a little suspicious. His side felt numb now, but not numb enough that he didn’t still have the sensation that something inside him was leaking like a punctured wineskin.
“I don’t want to go with Ani,” said Dramash. Tears spilled from his eyes and soaked into his fur hood.
“I know. You’re not going to. She’s gone, anyway.” Rho had seen the shadow of the triffon as it flew away and knew without even looking that Isa had taken Ani away. He was certain he was going to regret letting that happen someday, but for now he was just happy to find Dramash’s mitten caught in his scarf. He handed it to the boy and went back to get Fortune’s Blight. On the way, he found a bloody rag stuck to one of the chunks of the statue. The fabric looked familiar—Rho realized he’d seen it tied around Isa’s leg earlier. For no sane reason, he took it and stuffed it into his pocket.
Then he bent down to pick up the sword, and the light snuffed out like a candle.
Chapter 41
Lahlil jumped across to the other side of the terrace, looking to see if anyone had escaped the carnage. Blood had turned the green-glass into a slippery mess, and the swaying of the unstable structure only mad
e it worse. No one there was still alive.
She made her way to the other statue of Eotan, the one that still had a head. Putting her back up against it, she threw one leg over the balustrade and waited. On the next swing, the supports finally gave way and she rode the balustrade as the terrace tilted down toward the ground, sliding off before it smashed and running as fast as she could to clear the shards of green-glass flying in all directions.
She shoved her way through a dizzying spectrum of tabards as people smashed into her, darted around her or rolled at her feet. Blue blood leaked out from under hoods and tabards and rolled down necks and arms, mixing into the silver-tainted snow. Triffons circled overhead and an arrow clattered down nearby, but no one was looking for glory now: this fight was far uglier and dirtier than that. There was no objective, no castle to take or river to cross; these were just people trying to escape the curse that had just transformed their friends and family—their brother, sister or lover—into a horrifying monster. And they were doing it all wrong.
They came for her in a constant stream, the sick and the well from every clan and every strata of Norlander society, and she fought them off with Valor’s Storm bending and gliding in her hands like no weapon she had ever wielded before. She pushed them back unharmed where she could, wounded when she could not, all the while searching the ground around her for the signs—twitching or convulsing, weak movements, a faint cry for help or plea for a quick death. She knew no one would listen to her; showing them was the only way.
The first person she found was someone she recognized from campaigning against the Norlanders: old General Denar Eotan was lying next to his sword with a shallow gash across his throat. The familiar silvery pus leaked from the wound and from his eyes and mouth, and tremors pulsed through his twisted limbs. He had already passed the violent stage and was now succumbing to weakness, just like her brother and Gannon and Vrinna. Lahlil shied clear of his mind, knowing he would beg for death.