House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  Carver leaped down the stairs, his hands already glinting, as The Terafin crumpled toward the floor. The Chosen were silent and unmoving, as frozen in their shock as Jay. He heard Angel follow, taking the stairs three at a time as he, too, headed toward the woman who had given them a home.

  At their back, they heard Jay shout, “Stay where you are!”

  It didn’t matter; she wasn’t talking to them.

  But as they reached The Terafin, Torvan turned, moving slowly and stiffly. They stared at his face, at his expression, and they faltered, although Carver’s weapons never fell.

  “Why? Why?” It was Angel who shouted the single word that no one else found breath to utter. Horror and fury mingled in the two syllables; Carver thought Torvan flinched at the sound. He couldn’t be sure.

  Did it matter?

  As if in answer to the angry, pointless question, Torvan looked up. It was not a brief glance; he threw his head back, his arms wide, as if, for a moment, demanding the judgment of gods. The cry that escaped his mouth destroyed silence, and more: It was a wail of loss and betrayal that seemed to go on forever.

  Angel didn’t move, but Carver stepped back as Torvan lowered his head and threw away his sword, exposing his chest. He meant to die.

  Carver knew, at that moment, that he would die—but it wouldn’t be Carver who killed him. Something was wrong here.

  Something was wrong enough that Jay had to see it.

  Jay would know.

  There were no more Allasakari in the foyer. What remained of the force that had killed half the Chosen could barely be called corpses; they were so torn and rent. The shadows that had followed the Allasakari, both succoring and devouring them, slowed the great beast as it inched its way toward the light and those who still remained standing. The beast snarled and roared, its claws and teeth tearing at the darkness; the darkness, without an obvious corporeal form, returned those blows, rising and falling as if it were a cloud of tightly packed locusts.

  Beyond the beast itself, to the west, lights flashed: some red, some blue, and some the brilliant white of lightning. The ground broke beneath Meralonne APhaniel and the woman who had commanded the Allasakari. The beast did not try to interrupt the odd dancing flight of their battle.

  But the Hunter Lord, Gilliam of Elseth, stood sentinel; he did not take his gaze from the creature. Instead, he waited, calm now, his dogs still and alert at his feet. No doubt disturbed his expression; he expected the beast to reach them.

  The shadows lessened inch by inch, until the broken and twisted columns that had once framed the southern arch could be seen. Night had fallen on Terafin; Night now gave way to the ugly uncertainty of dawn.

  The creature that the Hunter Lords had somehow summoned roved among corpses as if seeking life; it found none.

  And finding none, it turned at last toward the Chosen who had failed in their retreat. They stood in a wide circle around the body of their fallen lord.

  “Call it off!” Alayra shouted. “We can’t retreat—The Terafin’s been injured. It’s done what it was summoned for—call it off!”

  Stephen of Elseth turned to look at her; he did not speak.

  “CALL IT OFF!”

  “We don’t—we don’t control it! It’s—you’ve got to flee!”

  Jay reached the foyer floor. Carver turned sideways to let her through. Angel, feet planted, knees bent, didn’t move or give an inch. But, like Carver, he didn’t attempt to end Torvan’s life.

  Carver lifted his hands, fingers dancing in den-sign. Jay didn’t even look; if she was aware of him at all, it didn’t show. He glanced at her expression as she moved toward Torvan ATerafin, and he flinched. They’d failed, he thought. The Terafin had, as Jay had seen, fallen.

  But it wasn’t to The Terafin that she looked, not for The Terafin that she reached.

  “Don’t kill him!” she shouted, raising her voice so that it carried above everything else that was happening in the foyer.

  But if the Chosen faltered, if they halted at all, someone else didn’t.

  Lightning flew from the heights toward the ground on which Torvan, still weaponless, stood. It struck him, and smoke rose from his armor before his knees buckled.

  “Stop it!” Jay shouted, louder now. “Stop it—you’re just making it worse!”

  Lightning struck again.

  Carver thought there should have been rain, should have been thunder. And maybe there was—but it was all in Jay’s voice. It didn’t occur to him to tell her that Torvan had killed The Terafin; it didn’t occur to him to argue with her at all. Whatever it was she’d seen in Torvan, she’d made her decision, and she was Jay.

  She was their leader.

  He took a deeper breath, felt a different type of tension in his arms and legs as he backed into Jay, turning his daggers out toward the world. Toward the Chosen. Toward the beast who was moving across what was left of the floor toward them.

  Is this what Duster felt? Is this what she felt before she—

  Four of the Chosen carried swords, shields; they closed with Torvan’s back.

  “Carver!”

  He nodded. It was odd, to have Jay at his back; he was used to Duster. She touched his arm, and he spun.

  “Where is it?”

  He pulled the sheathed dagger out of the folds of his tunic; it caught on the threads of his shirt, and he yanked hard, dragging half of them out with it. He handed it to her.

  “It’s not Torvan, is it?” he asked, as softly as he could.

  “It’s not just Torvan—but he’s there. In there.”

  Spitting to the side, he nodded. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just get the hell out of the halls, and take everyone else with you.” She glanced over his shoulder at the great beast. Her eyes were a little too round, a little too wide. Whatever the creature was, Jay knew something about it that the rest of them didn’t. And whatever it was she knew, she didn’t like.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Get out!” She turned away, not even waiting to see if he followed her orders.

  Carver might not have obeyed, but Angel, silent until that moment, caught his elbow.

  Carver signed like a madman.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Angel said, pausing at the foot of the great stairs and signing to the rest of the den. “This is what she needs us to do, right now.”

  Carver swore. Angel, who hated to leave her side, was willing to leave it now. “Not down the damn stairs,” he told Angel. “There are other, faster ways, and they’re going to be a hell of a lot safer than that.” He pointed at the beast.

  “He’s pulled down the arches and two pillars,” Angel began.

  “We’re not crossing them. Trust me. I know where we’re going.” Because he knew, suddenly, where Angel intended to go. “Finch!”

  She started to speak, then fell silent. “I can get us there,” Carver told her. “You need to get him out because I’m not putting my weapons in his damn little box.”

  She knew he meant Alowan. She nodded, and Angel caught her hand. “We’re not taking the main halls; if there’s fighting, we should be able to bypass most of it.”

  “If there’s shadow?”

  “We’re dead,” he replied, with a grim smile.

  Morretz had stayed his hand.

  He could not say why. Torvan ATerafin now danced, moved, and fought—without weapons—and he had not yet fallen. Mage fire circled his feet, and mage shields rose around his chest like armor.

  But Jewel Markess, street urchin and seer, had urged—had ordered—Morretz to stop. Even in his fury, even as shock had given way to something vastly darker and emptier, he had obeyed. The shock of obedience, in a man who owed obedience to only one woman while she lived, had taken him to the eye of the storm.

  The Chosen faced someone with magical skill; Morretz should be among them. But he glanced at the girl who was trying to see her way through their moving ranks, and he cursed.

&
nbsp; Jewel.

  She looked up, but she did not look to him, and he cursed again. It had been years since he had used this particular skill; Amarais did not require it.

  Jewel.

  She looked around again, and this time, when he cursed, the words slipped into the realm of the spell used—at cost—to speak clearly and cleanly across distance. She heard the words he would never utter aloud; his professional dignity forbade it. Odd, to think of that now.

  “Morretz!” She turned, then. “I need your help!”

  We don’t have a choice. We have to kill him.

  “We have a choice, curse it—get me to him!”

  He had only seconds to decide. Amarais had always trusted this girl’s strange vision, her unusual instincts—instincts honed on the streets of the inner holdings and strengthened there. Gesturing, something that had irritated his teachers and mentors in his years in the Order of Knowledge, he caught her in the folds of one of his strongest spells.

  She was slight of build, but he was not entirely used to lifting such unwieldy weight; had she struggled at all, he would have dropped her. As it was, she lurched in the air like a bird with three wings.

  At your command, he told her.

  The servants’ halls were empty. The servants were either asleep—which Carver highly doubted—or someplace the servants gathered in an emergency; it was something that had never come up in his many conversations with Merry. He’d have to ask her later, if there was a later that allowed for simple things like speech.

  But because the halls were empty, because there was no shadow, no guards who suddenly and unexpectedly turned into their worst nightmare, no locked doors, the den could fly. Or as close as feet allowed.

  The manse was such a big damn place! But the den? It was good at running. Single file, taking corners without much of a slowdown because they could use the walls for balance, they ran at his back. No one asked questions, no one argued; if they talked at all, it was with their hands, and he couldn’t see the gestures because he didn’t look back.

  He’d spent some time ranging these halls, first with Merry and then on his own. He’d met a lot of the servants that way, and while many of them were surprised to see him, no complaints had got back to the den. He wasn’t a servant—in Merry’s opinion he lacked whatever it was that made a good one—but he wasn’t, quite, a House member either; they’d let him wander between the two, turning a blind eye.

  This, he thought, would repay that tolerance, that indulgence. If they made it. If they made it in time.

  Morretz held her in place, moving her as if she were an ungainly, badly constructed puppet and he, a drunken street performer. He felt sweat bead his brow; he lost the ability to speak to her because he hadn’t the skill to hold the two spells simultaneously.

  Torvan—if the creature was Torvan, had been Torvan at all this eve—had not yet managed to down the Chosen who circled him, but they were caught in fire and sent rolling back in a clatter of plate and arms; had he been fighting only one or two, they would now be dead. Yet there was something about his magic, and his movements, that was ungainly, awkward. As if he were fighting against his will.

  Was that what Jewel saw?

  He couldn’t ask. But he saw that she held a single weapon: a dagger. And he knew, suddenly, what that dagger was and what she intended. In the moving glimmer of fire, lightning, magestone, and shadow, it glowed, and it glowed like Summer sun. He was aware of the strange and ancient branch of magic that Meralonne APhaniel had used to save The Terafin’s life from the first demon.

  Morretz couldn’t drop her near ground, and he couldn’t deposit her before—or even directly behind—Torvan ATerafin; Jewel was no mage, and even the rudimentary protections that the least of mages learned were beyond her. He didn’t think she could survive a few seconds of the fire. As if she were a sword, he watched, and he waited; she spun in the air, watching as well.

  Entering the main halls again was like entering another world. The silence of the servants’ halls, with their low ceilings, their unadorned walls, gave way to the distant sound of horns, of thunder, of the raised voices of men. Whether they were Terafin or Darias was impossible to say; what Finch knew, as her feet hit polished marble, was that they were distant. It was enough.

  Teller was by her side, grim and pale; she glanced at him once and then headed straight to the single, simple door of the healerie. At its side, lid down, the box that Carver disliked so much stood mounted on the wall; she paused for a moment to deposit her daggers there.

  She didn’t knock on the door; she threw it wide. And she saw, beyond the aboretum and its quiet fountain, that the lights were on. Alowan was already approaching the door from the healing sanctum beyond, and at his back, some handful of his aides. They’d been prepared for injuries; they’d heard the alarm raised, had heard the bells on the grounds.

  His expression wasn’t so peaceful, and when he saw them—Teller, Finch—he closed his eyes briefly.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Quickly.”

  Finch shook her head. “We’ve no time,” she told him. “You—we need you to come with us. It’s The Terafin.”

  Morretz didn’t speak another word to Jewel Markess. He was angry—at her, at himself—because they had both failed in their watch. But even angry, he’d done as she’d all but ordered; he carried her, her slight weight causing a strain that his duties to the House seldom offered. He was unaccustomed to carrying a weapon of any significant size, especially one that squirmed or gasped or struggled in spite of herself.

  He looked for openings in the magical fires, the lightning, the raised and lowered shields. He looked for some way through the Terafin Chosen, as angered, as guilty, as he. When he found it, he wasn’t gentle; he couldn’t afford to be gentle. Nor could he afford to instruct or guide her.

  If he had been thinking at all he would have taken the dagger from her. But he was not entirely certain that it would allow itself to be handled by raw magic; its glow was unlike any he’d studied in his years as a student of the Order of Knowledge.

  Torvan—or whatever Torvan had become—was both swift and awkward; it was a compelling combination. Jewel would have once chance. He gave her that chance, now.

  She held the blade, and he held her, and she brought it in and down.

  Torvan turned before it struck him, wheeling instantly; he raised a palm and flame blossomed, long and fine, like a blade’s edge. But he didn’t try to kill her or cut her from the air; he tried to parry.

  Instinctive reaction.

  Had he attempted to kill Jewel, she would now be dead. As it was, the incidental damage singed her clothing and blackened her auburn hair. But the dagger? It passed untouched through the heart of the flame, its ornate blade penetrating the plates that protected Torvan’s shoulder.

  Morretz staggered, then, and let her go as Torvan screamed; the fires around him guttered, and he doubled over. Blood bubbled up, surrounded by shadow, the liquid and the essence of darkness entwined.

  But the shadow? It burned. Even at this distance, free of the burden of Jewel Markess, Morretz could see this clearly. So.

  It would have been cleaner, he thought dispassionately, had Torvan died the moment The Terafin fell. It would have simplified life in the future—if they were to have one at all. Not even Morretz in his deepest concentration could avoid the snarling roar of the creature that dominated the southern foyer.

  But Jewel Markess was young. She wouldn’t have understood.

  And why, he thought, should that matter? He drew breath. Pulled some small power and used it to amplify his next words. “Chosen, in the name of The Terafin, stay your ground! Hold your arms!”

  He was not their lord, and not their master; he was domicis. But . . . they obeyed. Thus, the relationship between the domicis and his master.

  Jewel found her feet and crouched over Torvan’s bent body; he could see the fall of her singed hair as it spilled into her eyes. She pushed it back. Her hand still held the dagger
, but its metal was flat and cold; it no longer burned with golden light.

  She didn’t seem to notice that she was holding it as if it were still a dangerous weapon, that she was, in fact, holding it toward the Chosen, who had stopped their attacks. She wasn’t snarling, but she looked, to Morretz, like a wild, feral child defending her kin.

  Arrendas pushed his way through the standing Chosen. He had come from the front of the line that now faced the great beast, and he had come quickly.

  Morretz descended the stairs, unnoticed.

  “Jewel—what has happened?” Arrendas asked. His voice was not gentle.

  “It’s not his fault,” she replied, the dagger pointed toward his chest as if it would do any good. “You sent him to get the mage alone—and he did—but he was—”

  “The shadows were waiting.” Torvan ATerafin lifted his head. His face was gray, and his voice was cracked and dry. But it was, Morretz thought, entirely his. “Arrendas, The Terafin—” He couldn’t speak further, and in that moment, Morretz understood what it was about him that Jewel Markess, in her ignorance, had been unwilling to surrender.

  One of the Chosen, a younger woman, pushed her way past Arrendas and knelt beside the body of her lord. Interesting, that Jewel allowed this. She touched The Terafin’s throat, removing her gauntlet first, and then said, “I don’t know. Call Alowan, now.”

  “We’ve—we’ve got him.” Morretz looked to the north, and in spite of himself, he felt something like hope. It was quiet, and it was carried in the hands of Finch—a girl with no other name, no family other than the den of Jewel Markess.

  Alowan Rowanson walked beside her. His hand was in hers.

  The rest of the den? They were with her as well. Beside, behind, armed—except for Teller—they formed a rough escort for the healer. They had run, yes, at Jewel’s command. He’d even heard the words she’d spoken.

  But they had done what they had seen as necessary. They had run to Alowan. They had brought him back.