House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  Devon closed his eyes a moment, remembering—as if it was ever in doubt—why he served these men and why, in time, he would serve their heirs.

  The gods met, like lightning and earth, like tidal wave and shore. In their wake, their followers, lesser and insignificant, followed. They shouted, yes; they raised voices in the war cries of their people. But even the Kings’ voices were lost to the roar and the fury of a language that defied comprehension.

  Shorn of heralds or horns, the Kings’ men carried the banners of Wisdom and Justice into the shadows and darkness, where they were quickly lost to sight. The god did not cleave to shadow but produced it—as Bredan produced moon’s light. They were both night creatures, and they were both terrifying in their way.

  But their voices quickly became as natural as earthquakes or the storms that threatened all ships in harbor; the Kings’ men were left to stand against them. They readied weapons as they moved, and they moved slowly.

  The humans arrayed against them—and they were here, in number—were not so reluctant; they were robed, but glints of chain could be seen as their robes moved and parted at the length of their stride. Where their demon masters waited, ringed in fire and shadow, they charged toward the fray, as if war were a child’s toy, and they were afraid any hesitation might take it from them.

  Their feet crushed the faces and limbs of the dead, and the dead, in their cumbersome piles gave those feet uneven purchase; some stumbled, righting themselves with difficulty. They kicked the corpses that had dared to inconvenience them, and some alchemy of spirit transformed the horror that the Kings’ men felt into an instant, growing rage.

  Although enraged, they were cautious, and they moved only to the outer edge of where the bodies lay piled, like an awkward mountain of refuse. They wished, even in the preservation of their own lives, to cause no more indignity to the dead.

  Even, Devon thought grimly, if the dead were now beyond caring and beyond the sting of such indignities. He moved forward, unsheathing one dagger and holding it in his left hand; in his right, he had his favored sword.

  Sigurne watched Meralonne APhaniel.

  Matteos stood by her side, the signature of his power so clear she could almost touch it, although she could see no sign of it at all. “Sigurne,” he said quietly, as the Kings’ men began their slow convergence on the lesser army of the Lord of the Hells.

  She nodded. She could see the Kialli; they numbered perhaps half a dozen, surrounded by their servitors, their immortal slaves. Not since her captivity and her apprenticeship in the frozen lands of the North had she seen such a gathering of creatures, and there? They had been at the beck and call of a mortal mage. They had loathed him, yes, but no more than she herself had loathed him, and they had served him, in the end, just as faithfully as she. They had merely been less effective.

  “Sigurne?”

  She shook her head. “A moment, Matteos.” She turned to watch Meralonne APhaniel. For decades she had worked by his side, often under his rough tutelage. He had seldom asked her what she had learned from her first master, and she had been grateful for his lack of curiosity. Or for his certainty that there was nothing she could, in turn, teach him. In a youth long gone, she had never been certain which of the two it was. But she had been certain, on the first day she had seen him, before she had learned either his name or her own fate.

  On that day, she had thought him angelae, some lost scion of the gods sent, at last, into the folds of the world to free it from the grip of the kin.

  He had been—he was—so profoundly free, so unfettered in his savage joy; he was without mercy and without fear. She had not even been able to envy him; she had recognized him as something above, and beyond, her ken.

  Years had dimmed that perception, but it lay waiting. He had walked toward a Duke of the Hells without that savage joy, and he had lost, in the process, the shield that he had carried on that bright, clear, azure day, when he had been a thing of wind and light.

  She thought the loss of the shield meant the loss of the use of the arm, but she was wrong; he had drawn his sword, and as he walked abreast of the Kings’ men, the wind that touched nothing else began to fray the blanketing edge of his hair, teasing it toward the unseen sky.

  She couldn’t see his expression, for the magi were not here to fight on the front lines, and he did not face her. But it was not his words that returned to her now, not the words of her long-ago savior.

  It was the words of a fellow captive, kin to the creatures that had slaughtered countless innocents in pursuit of this moment: the moment when their Lord might again walk the face of the world.

  Watch, Sigurne. Watch. You will be the only witness, in the end, of any worth, for you have seen and you have understood enough to give this battle context. Watch it, for I suspect you will see an echo of the ancient days in its unfolding.

  She watched, and she witnessed, but she was no longer young, and she was no longer trapped within the confines of a tower overlooking a battle she could not affect.

  As Meralonne closed with Sor Na Shannen, she shook herself and turned to Matteos. “My apologies,” she said, in as soft a voice as the noise in the coliseum would permit. “Look now to the Kings and the Exalted; the kin have used fire as their predominant form of attack, and that is what our first line of defense must concentrate on. The Exalted will—must—deal with the Shadow and the Winter magics on their own.”

  But even speaking, her gaze was drawn again to the demons, and to this particular one, the woman who had danced with Ararath in the former glory of the Cordufar manse. Even here, surrounded by fire, a red sword in her hand, her movements implied both dance and pleasure because they were so graceful, so powerful, and so joyful.

  Do you exist simply for war? Sigurne thought. Is battle the only joy you know in your existence?

  But no. The answer lay at her feet: the dead. Their corpses had been tossed like refuse in piles around the arch but one final indignity remained to them. They rose.

  Rising, they were still obviously dead; they lumbered to their feet like a poorly made, teetering wall, their broken or missing limbs dictating their gait and their stability. Their eyes—where eyes existed—were sightless, their jaws slack and open. They didn’t speak, but they weren’t silent; speech was denied them, but low, animal grunts were not. Tall, short, young, old, they shambled into place before the Allasakari, standing between them and the forces of the Kings. They held no weapons; they needed none. Their deaths had the force of accusation, and it was turned wholly toward the people who had failed them.

  Only the dead nearest the Allasakari themselves remained in place, but they linked arms, with no concern for height or comfort, and they planted their feet, broken or whole, against the floor. Those that rose on the farthest edges of the loose formation turned toward the Kings’ men and began to walk.

  Will you cut us down again? They seemed to ask.

  Sigurne became as motionless as they could no longer be.

  “Sigurne—” Matteos’ voice was unsteady. Even Matteos.

  She shook her head, not in horror but to convey the answer to the question he could not quite bring himself to ask. “No. There is no magic I recognize in this. I cannot detect anything that we could work against; this is in the hands of the Exalted.”

  But if the Exalted bore the blood of gods, they were, in the end, as mortal as Sigurne. Like Matteos, the sight of the moving dead struck them—and the demons knew it. Of course they knew; pain was their study, their only area of expertise, and they were capable, at need, of subtlety.

  “They are not alive, Matteos. They are not trapped here. They are not aware of us at all.”

  As if to deny the truth of her words, the dead turned their gaze to the armed and armored men; the look seemed to sweep the coliseum like a scythe. Matteos stiffened; he did not, however, take a step back. Others, less fortunate, did.

  Sigurne, however, did not. Not even when the dead—those who had throat for it—began to wail and
keen, as if they were already damned and might never escape.

  The Astari were the first to recover.

  The fact that Duvari seemed entirely unmoved might have been worthy of comment, but Sigurne, likewise, seemed unaffected. In Sigurne, however, it surprised, because Sigurne Mellifas cultivated the appearance of affectionate and slightly feeble age. Those who knew her well knew the story of how she’d come to the Order of Knowlege—but the story, like so many stories of wild, impatient youth, had no strength, no edge. They forgot that she had been born in a land where simple exposure to the air could kill. Death was guaranteed. Survival was not; one had to work to earn it, day in and day out, often in the face of creatures that were likewise caught up in the simple struggle to do the same. In the winter, that left little room for either joy or guilt.

  She had walked into a winter night. She had entered a nightmare that not even the tower of the mage in the frozen North had given her. She gestured, sharply, and the ground around the feet of the magi shifted; it was subtle.

  “Tell the Kings to be wary; there are kin hidden among the dead, and they are by far the greater danger.”

  Matteos nodded; he lifted his voice, cloaked it in magic, and sent the words to where they might do the most good; he could not tell, at this distance and in this light, how well they were heeded—but that was true of most advice he offered.

  Devon ATerafin stood beside Duvari; on his far side was a woman whose name Sigurne did not immediately know. All three now carried daggers in both hands; they had surrendered the greater damage and reach they might have achieved by using their swords. It was odd to see them at the side of the Kings, armed with nothing but ceremonial daggers; odd to see them sheathe swords in favor of the lesser weapon.

  Sigurne was, however, intimately familiar with the daggers, and it made their choice entirely sound. She had given such weapons, time and again, to Ararath Handernesse; she had taken them from his hands and returned them to the cathedrals upon the Isle, where they might once again be imbued with a moment of Summer.

  Against a god, they would be of little use. But against the kin, and against these teetering corpses, they might be.

  But Sigurne—even Sigurne—flinched, for the first of the undead to reach the front lines of the Kings’ men, and with them, Devon ATerafin, was not, or had not been, adult. There was always tragedy in the simple fact of a child’s corpse. This was far, far worse.

  Her suspicion about Devon’s presence at the side of the Kings hardened into certainty as she watched him. Amarais, she thought, you are canny.

  The child wailed piteously as it approached the line, arms stretched as if seeking parental embrace and the comfort it would provide. The soldiers shuddered, although the line held. Devon, however, did not; he might have been chiseled from the same quarry that had produced Duvari. Moving, the two daggers in his hand shedding a faint and uneasy light in the shadows, he brought the blades to bear against the smallest and slightest of the lumbering undead.

  The child shuddered as the blades bit into his flesh, but he did not stop moving; his arms were still open, still held wide. Devon knelt, his blades still, and he lifted the dead child in his arms, as if offering comfort. The knives pierced the dead flesh of the child’s back, and it screamed.

  It was almost too much for Sigurne. But she had endured worse in her time: she had seen the slaughter of the living. There was no soul for this child, no spirit, nothing that gave it the spark of life. Life would never return to its limbs.

  Devon lifted the child as it finally stilled, and he threw its corpse into the moving line of its undead brethren.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  IN THE DARKNESS THEY FOUGHT. The Allasakari, shielded by the moving dead more effectively than the Kings’ men by simple armor, drew their swords. They weren’t encumbered by heavier armor, but neither were their blades encumbered by natural law. The dead didn’t trouble or concern them; they moved among them without guilt or fear.

  They were not, however, proof against the mage-born. And if the mage-born warriors had offered only protection and witness to this point, they were now unleashed, and they responded as if driven. Sigurne did not direct them; Meralonne, in theory, did. But Meralonne was dancing—in a deadly, compelling way—with the former Lord Cordufar’s mistress. He had not yet died by her fire or her sword, and she used both; nor had he managed to kill her. There would be no quarter offered here; she would die, or he would; nothing else would end their combat.

  Sigurne therefore left Matteos in charge of the magical shields and protections the Kings and the Exalted required; the Exalted, even now, limned in golden, weak light, were slowing the progress of the dead. The dead, cumbersome, and slow, were both the least significant of the dangers and the worst. If they could be laid, at last, to rest, it no longer mattered where or how; their keening was almost soul-destroying in its justified rage and fear.

  She turned to the warrior-magi, young and harsh. They were few; they had always been few. Of the Order’s many mages, they were the least trusted and the most foreign, for they did not bend their power or their intellect to discovery; they bent it to the application of the discoveries of others. And Duvari feared them, for they were the open face of what the magi could become: weapons. The weapons by which whole battles might be fought and won.

  They were not Duvari; they were pale. But they were also determined, and when she ordered them to fire into the ranks of the undead, the undead burned. The light from that burning was both horrifying and welcome, for it exposed the darker-clad Allasakari, and the mages began to kill them; the Kings’ men did their work there as well.

  But above the battle, which was even now consuming life and time, the din of the voices of gods raged; not even Meralonne’s dance of death could drown it out.

  Beauty was not often something that terrified, but here, it did, for the gods, both gods, were beautiful, and they were almost paralyzing to gaze upon. Sigurne kept her focus as tight and as narrow as possible.

  The wind came.

  A breeze, at first, it stirred even the dead, as if it were a reminder of all they had lost and would never know again. This was artifice; she knew it. But she felt the same, and she would, if she were standing at the close of this battle, emerge into sun and sea wind and open skies once more. It was welcome.

  But in this dark and twisted place, what was welcome, what was natural, could not remain so. The breeze grew stronger, and stray bits of debris were caught in its folds. Matteos shouted her name, and she glanced back at him. The wind passed through the shields erected by the magi, where the fires of the enemy did not.

  And the wind grew. And grew, until words and shouts no longer traveled in a predictable direction; they had bards who could bespeak the Kings and their men, but there were few indeed of those.

  She glanced and saw one. But Kallandras of Senniel? He was nowhere to be found among the Kings’ men, and she could not clearly see him in the chaos of the unfolding battle.

  But she heard the seer curse, and curse loudly, before her voice was also lost. Turning, she could see that Evayne a’Nolan held her seer’s crystal between her palms; she could not clearly see her expression because the light the ball now shed was too bright in this dark place. Beside her, almost aloof from the battle that had unfolded, stood the lone Hunter Lord, his hand upon his spear, his expression shadowed and remote. He watched the gods; no one else dared.

  He waited.

  Once more the wind parted, capricious; it tugged at the Kings’ standard, twisting the weighted fabric and distorting what was embroidered there. Sigurne cast, quickly, to succor the man whose sole task was to see that it did not fall.

  And she heard, as she did, the seer’s shocked voice: “Kallandras, no!”

  The wind came.

  One man heard its voice as clearly as the Master Bard who had summoned it and unleashed its delighted fury in the darkness. One man understood what it signified. No mortal could call the wild elements; no mortal could—al
one—control them. This was wisdom and, in its fashion, truth. But it was not the whole of the truth.

  The wind’s voice was strong and wild, yes; it found fire, and the fires around Sor Na Shannen banked at the ferocity of its attack. Had it attacked only fire, it would have been a benison. But it was sightless and confined in these tunnels, this cavern. A city had once stood here; the heights had been utterly destroyed by the fall of a god. Would that he had died.

  Meralonne parried and danced, and the wind touched his cloak and his sword, pulling at his hair. He did not try to contain it; it did not try to harm him. Open his mouth and he might speak, for a moment, the language it spoke.

  Sor Na Shannen was not what she had been on the night he had first encountered her in the Terafin manse; nor was she what she had been in her role as Lord Cordufar’s very bold, very desirable mistress. She stood in her Lord’s shadow, and she spoke with the edge of his voice; his power infused her. She was not, and would never be, Karathis’ equal—but she was more, much more, than she had been.

  Meralonne APhaniel was sundered in both space and time from his Lord; he might never again hear his Lord’s voice or feel the privilege and honor of his Lord’s power. His shield was riven; all that was left him was his sword. His sword and the experience with which he wielded it. The wind tugged him. It shredded the fires. Sor Na Shannen barely seemed to notice their absence; their voices were now too small.

  But she felt the wind, even she.

  “What is this?” The wind was fickle in its fashion; it was drawn to power that was not immediately inimical to its nature. Her hair, ebon to his platinum, the wind also caressed, drawing it up and around her face in fine strands.

  Do you not know? he thought, putting his sword up for a moment. She had done the same, and he watched her expression, her confusion. Do you not understand what it is that you hear? Has the long sundering diminished you so much that you must walk, deaf, across the face of the world?