He couldn’t lift his head. His neck was perfectly exposed. Acidtongue could cut through flesh without resistance when it was hot and singing with battlelust. One cut and Bikker could take his head off.
Croy couldn’t lift it. He was just too tired.
Cythera, he thought, I love you. I am so sorry.
The blow didn’t come.
Croy opened his eyes but still couldn’t move. He looked down at the grass beneath him. It looked very soft, and he thought it would be nice to fall, face forward, into its green embrace. One shard of his broken sword lay on the ground there, etched but still shining with polish.
Bikker still hadn’t killed him. What was he waiting for?
“Look at me, Croy.”
Slowly, painfully, Croy lifted his head and met his foe’s eyes. Bikker’s face was wild, his eyes mad. Froth flecked his lips.
“Good,” Bikker said. “That’s taken care of. Draw Ghostcutter. Playtime is over. Now we’ll fight like men.”
Chapter Eighty-Six
Malden kept his eyes shut until he was sure the hellish light of sorcery had drained from the room. His hand clenched tight at the hilt of his bodkin, and he started to draw it, careful not to make a sound.
When the glare faded from the inside of his eyelids, he opened his eyes again and saw Hazoth still before him. Something had changed, something he noticed only in his peripheral vision, but he focused entirely on the sorcerer. Hazoth was breathing heavily and his hands were down by his sides. Malden bent his legs like springs and then jumped, thrusting the bodkin before him so it would cut right through the sorcerer’s belly and come out the other side.
He fully expected Hazoth to turn and glare at him, eyes blazing with some spell that would tear his flesh from his bones. Or perhaps Hazoth would simply vanish before he could reach him. Instead he caught the magician completely off guard. He felt the point of the bodkin part the fibers of the sorcerer’s nightshirt, felt it sink into the hated flesh, felt it scrape on bone. He pushed and shoved with all his might until it broke free from the sorcerer’s back. He did not feel hot blood pour over his hand, but that surprised him less than the look on Hazoth’s face.
The sorcerer simply looked disappointed.
Malden fell backward, pulling the bodkin free. He stared down at the length of iron in his hand and saw no blood on it, nor ichor nor living fire nor any of the things he supposed might flow through a sorcerer’s veins. He looked up and saw the hole he’d cut through the nightshirt… but the flesh underneath wasn’t even scarred.
“A violent response to a threatening stimulus. The hallmark of an unenlightened being. Rodent, you have surprised me so many times tonight-now you prove that there is a limit to what a primitive creature can do with cunning. Ah, well. I suppose even the most advanced of the species must eventually revert to rodentlike behavior. Oh, and now look at what you’ve gone and done.”
Cythera cried out. Malden looked over at her and saw her staring at the palm of her left hand. The ink there looked like it was boiling. Flowers bloomed and their petals fell away, driven up her arm by a howling wind entirely contained within her skin. Vines circled around her wrist so tight they looked like they would constrict her pulse. On her face a hundred snowdrops wilted, while roses erupted in blossom across her shoulders, their thorns gleaming with painted poison.
It would seem the link that bound Cythera to Hazoth wasn’t just for inimical magic. It could absorb physical damage as well.
“Cythera!” Malden shouted. “No-please, forgive me, I didn’t know-”
“It’s… all right, Malden,” she said, straightening up. “It doesn’t pain me. It just startles me a bit when it happens, that’s all.”
Hazoth looked from one of them to the other. Then he clucked his tongue and faced Malden again. “You interested me, briefly. That’s why I’ve let you live for so long. But not for your animal passions, rodent. For the way you seemed to exceed the limitations of your upbringing. But now I see you’ve only been so clever, so brave, for one thing-that prize Cythera keeps between her legs.” He shook his head sadly. “Pathetic. I’m afraid that attacking me was the last mistake I can permit you.”
Malden’s blood curdled in his veins. He knew he’d never been closer to death than this exact moment. His brains turned over in his head, desperately trying to imagine what to do next. He could think of only one thing: obfuscate. Stall for time. “I beg to disagree,” he said. His mouth was so dry he had trouble forming the words. Hazoth had not given him leave to speak, but he knew it no longer mattered. Silence at that moment would have been his death warrant.
“What’s that, rodent?”
“You suggest that my logic was faulty in some way. That I made an irrational decision by attacking you. I would say instead that my information was merely incomplete. I did not try to stab you before, when you caught me. I did not try to do so when your back was turned. I waited until your magic had drained you and distracted your attention to the point where an attack might logically succeed. You see, I thought very carefully before I struck that blow.”
Hazoth looked upward, as if consulting a higher power. “Almost clever,” he said. “There is one flaw, however. One place where your logic falls apart.”
“Yes?” Malden asked, in the tone of a scholar asking for a gloss on a particularly thorny text.
“You,” Hazoth said, “are the human equivalent of a cockroach. I am a being of extraordinary power. You should have recognized that someone like you could never, under any circumstances, harm me. The intelligent thing to do in this situation would have been to curl up and die. It would at least have saved you from what comes next.”
Hazoth walked a few yards away from Malden and looked up again.
For the first time, Malden saw what had changed. When the sorcerer had cast his spell, Malden did not know what effect it might have. Now he understood. He had been transported from one place to another, without traversing the intervening distance. He was no longer in the sanctum.
Hazoth had delivered the three of them to his grand hall. They stood in the shadow of the iron egg.
“Now, I’ll ask again. Who sent you here?”
Malden looked away. “I came on my own-this was all my plan,” he insisted. Why implicate Cutbill? It wouldn’t save his own life, and it would only make trouble for the guildmaster of thieves. If he could spare Cutbill that, then perhaps he could earn a little something with his death. “I need the crown or Anselm Vry is going to kill me.”
Magic buzzed through the air toward Malden like an angry insect. An invisible stinger jabbed him in the chest, causing a bright blossom of pain to stretch its petals all the way around his rib cage.
“Impossible,” Hazoth said. “You lack the will for something like this.”
“I… swear,” Malden said as the pain radiated outward, toward his extremities. Red blood stained his vision. “It was wholly… my own… notion… I-”
“It was Croy!” Cythera shouted. “Croy paid him to help me!”
The pain left Malden as quickly as it had come. He dropped to the marble floor, still writhing with the memory of it.
Hazoth turned to face Cythera. “Truly? I suppose I can believe that.” Hazoth looked almost disappointed. “I had thought I might discover the name of my fellow schemer. Hmm. But yes-yes, Croy would be foolish enough. Very well.”
He shrugged and came over to where Malden had curled up on the floor.
“So. We have reached the end of our experiment. The subject has failed to justify the hypothesis. There remains nothing to say,” Hazoth said. “And there are other matters that require my attention. There is a knight errant on my lawn, brawling with the hired help. I think I need to go boil him in his own blood.”
“Croy,” Cythera said, one hand to her mouth. “No-you can’t…”
Hazoth looked over at her. “You know perfectly well that I can,” he said. “And now, by telling me he was behind this intrusion, you’ve given me every reason to do
so immediately.”
She went pale beneath her tattoos. “I meant-I meant to say-you may not,” she said. “I won’t allow it, Father.”
Malden’s eyes went wide.
“Father?” he said aloud. “He’s your-”
“I did not say you could speak!” Hazoth screamed, and Malden’s voice was lost.
It didn’t matter. His own thoughts were louder than anything he might have said.
The demon is his child, she had said. It is not his first.
He had assumed she meant he’d sired other demons.
Not all of his protections are magical, she had said.
He’d assumed that meant the very human retainers he kept to guard his gate. But perhaps she’d meant, instead, that he had a hold on her that was more complex than a mere contract of employment. She had betrayed him, Malden, and now he knew why.
In truth, he had never trusted her completely. Even when he’d kissed her, he half expected her to destroy him with her stockpile of curses. He had made sure she only knew half of his scheme. Now he understood that he could not expect her aid any longer. That she was not going to rescue him at the last minute.
He had, in a way, expected this.
It still hurt. It still cut him to the core.
“I will do as I please,” Hazoth said, as cool as an autumn day. “As for you, rodent, I’m afraid you have to die. I know your simple brain will have trouble accepting this fact. You’ll think there must be some way you can defeat me, no matter how desperate it may seem. I can assure you you’re wrong. Please try to think of it philosophically. You had, what, a few decades left to live anyway? Eyeblinks, compared to my life span. The tragedy of your death will last as long as it takes a single tear to roll down Cythera’s cheek.”
“Very well,” Malden said, thinking, Not quite yet. “And how shall I die? Are you going to curse me to death, or open up a crack in the earth and send me down to the pit?”
“Wasteful, and quite beneath me,” Hazoth said. “I’m going to give your existence a purpose, albeit a small one. I’m going to feed you to my son.” He reached up and slapped the iron egg with the flat of his palm. It rang like a bell.
And then it began to crack.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
“Glorious! When it is finally born, there will be no power in this world that can stand against me,” Hazoth said.
Red lines of infernal fire appeared on the surface of the iron sphere as a cascade of rust fell to the floor. The egg rocked slightly on its stand as the demon inside hammered again and again at its shell, trying to break out.
“The Ancient Blades will stop you,” Malden insisted, more for his own benefit than to intimidate Hazoth. “They know how to slay demons.”
“Luckily for me I have one of their number on my side,” Hazoth pointed out. “Bikker will gladly slay all his old comrades, if I pay him well enough. It’s important, rodent, to consider every angle of a problem. That’s where you failed. You made a clever try of things, but you just didn’t think them through deeply enough.”
“And you have? This is madness,” Malden said. “To release a demon on the world…” He thought of the beast that nearly killed him in the palace tower. Unless it was kept wet it grew at a furious rate and would never stop. “It is a creature not natural to this world,” Malden said. “What will it do, once released? Will it eat every man and woman in the city? Or will it burn us all with hellfire?”
“Nothing so dramatic,” Hazoth said. “Perhaps, when he is fully grown, he will have the power to do as you say. But my son is not ready to be born. When he emerges he will know nothing but pain-and there is only one way to quench that agony. He must devour the first living thing he encounters. Please, don’t get any foolish notions. Cythera and I will be perfectly safe, as the demon will know his own blood. But he will swallow you whole, and that will give him strength to return to his egg and resume his gestation.”
A thin shard of iron slid free from the shell and clattered to the floor. Red light shot out of the gap thus made.
“He will not rest until he has devoured you,” Hazoth went on. “Night and day he will chase you. He could follow your trail for hundreds of miles, even if you do manage to escape this room. I don’t think there’s any reason why Cythera should have to watch you die. She seems quite taken with you. So I’ll leave you to your fate.”
Malden shrank back from the egg as it rattled and shook and more shards of iron fell away. “Hazoth!” he shouted. “You said that after eight hundred years, magic had corrupted the Burgrave, yes?”
The sorcerer frowned. “I suppose.”
“What of the enchantments on your own self? After so many centuries, what have they done to your soul?”
Hazoth lifted his hand in the gesture that would transport him and Cythera out of the room. “An interesting question, but one that seems quite moot. You’ll never learn the answer, I’m afraid.”
Malden threw his arm across his eyes as light burst all around him. When it faded he was alone in the great hall.
Though not for long.
The egg continued to hatch as he watched, horrified. For a moment he couldn’t move, so transfixed was he by the spectacle of the demon’s birth. Then the thing inside the egg howled in utter pain, and he found his feet once more.
Many doors led away from the great hall. The obvious choice was the massive portal that opened onto the front lawn. If he could get out there he could get a head start before the demon came in pursuit.
That would, of course, only delay his doom. Besides, he had another scheme in mind.
He hurried to a door on one side wall, between two statues. It was the door that led eventually to the library, the same way he’d been taken on his first visit to the house. The door was locked but the mechanism was quite simple and perfectly ordinary. Malden hurriedly unwrapped his picks and wrenches from the hilt of his bodkin.
Behind him a clawed hand emerged from the egg and stretched raw flesh in the cold air. The demon started hauling itself out of its prison.
Hands shaking in fear, Malden stared at the rakes and hooks he held. Then he dropped them and kicked at the door until the flimsy lock shattered. When the door swung free he turned and glanced once more at the cracking egg, for a spare fraction of a moment.
What he saw made him yelp in terror.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Bikker was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of one hand.
That was the extent of what Croy’s best efforts to kill him had achieved. His tunic was cut in a number of places, but that only showed that the mail shirt he wore underneath it was unbroken. Croy’s arm hadn’t been strong enough to pierce the chain mail, even with the good dwarven steel of the shortsword.
“Get up,” Bikker spat. “Come, now. I trained you to put up a better fight than this.”
It was all Croy could do to keep his eyes open.
“Damn you, a good stiff breeze could kill you right now,” Bikker insisted. His voice was not so hard as his words. “Croy, you don’t have a chance. I could have cut you down a dozen times just now. Don’t you want to live? Don’t you want to win?”
Somehow Croy managed to find a little breath, which he used for forming words. “I’ve already won, Bikker. I kept my faith. I kept to my beliefs. You can slay me now, certainly. Doing so won’t make you more of a man.”
“And letting you live will?” Bikker snarled.
“No. There’s nothing you can do to regain your honor. I understand that now. I had hoped to heal the wound on your soul. But it’s too late.”
Bikker growled then, or perhaps he shouted. It was an inchoate, wordless noise that came out of him as he clawed at the air with his free hand. He stamped his foot in rage. And then, little by little, he regained his composure. He came back to Croy and stood over him and looked down on him with something approaching calm.
“Draw Ghostcutter. Do me the honor of dying on your feet. Come!” Bikker seized Croy roughly under the arm
pits and hauled him upright. He held Croy there until the knight had his feet underneath him. He could stand, if he braced himself perfectly. But he couldn’t lift his arms. The mere effort of standing took all his wind.
“This is folly,” Bikker said. “You should learn from it, Croy. Sir Croy. You need to be woken up from your dreams of nobility and honor. Did I not teach you that even a mighty lord dies the same way as a humble villein? Apparently you weren’t paying attention that day. A shame-if I kill you now you’ll never learn. You’ll go and sit by the Lady’s side still thinking that heroes bleed a different color than the rest of us.”
“I kept my faith,” Croy whispered. “I lived that dream. I do not fear death.”
A mischievous light crept into Bikker’s eyes. “Interesting. Because it absolutely terrifies me. That’s why I trained so hard, learned to be so strong. Because I knew that the only thing standing between me and the pit is my right arm and whatever iron I hold. But perhaps-perhaps there is something more to life.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” Bikker went on, “it’s all true. All those pathetic slogans and vows of sacrifice you made, perhaps they mean something after all. Shall we see?”
“What do you mean?”
Bikker leaned very close until his face was only inches from Croy’s. “Let’s perform an experiment, like Hazoth in his laboratory. You’ll be my test subject. I’ll give you a simple choice and we’ll see how much you believe your own fancies. Hmm?”
Croy was too tired to reply.
“I’ll make you a promise. You can go free, and I won’t chase you. After all, killing a weakling like you isn’t going to be any fun. I’ll let you live the rest of your life unmolested. All you have to do is turn around and walk away from me, without another word.”
Croy frowned. This seemed unlikely.
“There is one proviso, however,” Bikker said. “You must leave Ghostcutter here.”
He looked very satisfied with himself for having devised this bargain. Croy’s lips drew back from his teeth and he snarled.
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