House War 03 - House Name

by Michelle West

  If they spoke at all it was a guttural, visceral language that could not be contained by the civility of words; they spoke in blood and talons, in sword and claw. Wings rose and fell, not in flight but in fury. But so, too, did tails; there was nothing remotely human about this combat.

  The tenor of the battle shifted as they watched. Not all could put up swords and bear witness; not all of the Allasakari were dead. But they, like the corpses, seemed bereft of shadow and power; they were not, in the end, a match for the Kings’ forces.

  But they were evenly matched, the Lord of the Hells and the Hunter God. Something had changed; Devon was not certain what. He shouted; he was not King Cormayln. The words were taken by wind, torn by them; he could not be certain who might hear them. Nor did it matter now.

  They watched.

  They waited. As much as they could around flying debris, they bore witness.

  Isladar watched. Veiled not by shadow but by lesser magics, he stood aside, his lips curved in the faintest hint of a smile. His brethren fought, but they fought poorly, for they had seen the destruction of the standing arch, the shattering of the keystone, and they understood what it meant: Immortality availed nothing, now. Time was suddenly consequential.

  Sor Na Shannen’s last cry did not linger or echo. But Isladar bowed to the ashes the wind carried. She had played her part and played it well; no matter that she had also played it with blind devotion and adoration. She had given him the gift of her fear. Such a gift might once have succored gods, but only one now remained who could draw strength from pain, and he fought for his life.

  The Hunter God was strong. He had taken a form rooted to earth; there was no such sustenance for Allasakar.

  The wind howled its endless, bitter rage. Isladar could not calm it and could not control more of it than this: He hid from it, dampening and silencing the presence of his power. The wind, however, was no one’s ally. It was caprice defined. It sought destruction now, and death, and it harried two gods, tearing chunks of stone edifices from the coliseum and throwing them.

  One struck the wings of the god.

  One struck the tail of the beast.

  Neither flinched; neither noticed.

  In their own way, they were as elemental, as wild, as the wind itself; the only thing that mattered, until the combat was done, was the presence of the enemy.

  Isladar smiled. Allasakar fought with one wing. It was almost time to end it. He was here now; his feet touched mortal rock and mortal soil. He was diminished, yes—but so, too, was the world; the ancient wonders were buried or destroyed.

  My Lord, he said, forcing his voice to carry by dint of magic.

  There was no answer; he expected none. He had often waited decades for some sign of his Lord’s response while he shadowed the throne of the Hells. But he could not wait decades here.

  My Lord, he said again, strengthening his voice. It was risky. This is but a battle. You are new to the plane; the Lord of the Covenant is old. He has waited throughout the centuries of his people’s ignorance.

  Stay and fight, and there is a chance that the work of decades is undone. This, too, was risky. It was truth, but the Kialli understood that truth was no excuse and no shield. The wrong truth uttered at the right moment might reach the Lord, yet still doom the fool who dared utter it. But if Allasakar fell here, it was over.

  He is bestial, now. He is much diminished, yes. But he is primal, and the wild earth has his ear. His cunning is animal cunning; it is direct, and brutish. He will detect no subterfuge, no subtlety.

  Again, there was no response.

  But look, Lord: the Hunter is waiting. Can you not see what he carries? It is bane to the Hunter God; bane to the Lord of the Covenant. He will Hunt, if the battle is over. He will send the Lord of the Covenant back to the bridge beyond, where he has long been absent from his See.

  They cannot stand against you, without the aid of a god. There is no other god but this one; if you fall here, in seeming, Bredan will finally return to the heavens; if he tries to return to the mortal world, he will return far too late to prevent your subjugation of the plane. Retreat, and plan in glory, and the gods—all the gods—will know, and they will be helpless in the face of your strength.

  This time, the shadows twisted against the wind. The Lord of the Covenant’s jaws snapped shut on the conceit of wing, and the wing tore.

  Very well. Very well, Isladar. I will play this game, and they will pay.

  Isladar smiled.

  The Lord of the Hells did not throw down his sword or expose his throat, and it seemed that very little about the combat changed. But that was the way of the Lord; where subterfuge was required, it was crafted with care. He could lie, of course; he had, in the past. But his lies were imbued with the force and strength of belief, of believability; they were the truth that his audience desired, and they were glorious lies, larger in all ways than most truths. This lie was no exception.

  The Lord’s enemies—his many enemies—wanted triumph; they wanted victory. To play into that desire and that hope was not difficult. They saw, in the end, what they both feared and desired: the death of a god. Even the Kialli paused a moment to stare and to witness.

  They saw what Isladar saw; they took from it something different. Lord Isladar of no demesne had returned to the world at last; he had no need to breathe, or eat, or sleep, and he did not therefore hold breath. But had he required it, he would have.

  Almost. The first step. The first move in the long game was almost complete. It was a game that could occupy the rest of eternity, but it had begun at the foot of the Lord’s throne in the Hells, and one day, it would end there.

  The Lord of the Hells wielded a sword of flame, kin to the weapons of the Kialli in the way that the man in his prime is kin to the infant he cuddles. His sword met bone, pierced flesh; the wound closed, as it had closed so many times in this combat.

  But the Lord took wounds as well, and they were slower, now, to heal. He hoarded his power.

  Go North, he told his leige. Take those that survive, if they will follow. Go North, and await me there.

  Isladar bowed. It would not be seen.

  Meralonne felt the battle’s turn. He saw it in the breaking of wings that were conceit and unnecessary power, and his smile was a slender edge. Thus, the arrogance of gods gave way to fury, for the arch by which the Lord of the Hells had traveled to, and attained, the plane itself was now scattered debris. What power he might gather now was scattered, and it would take time.

  The immortals seldom worried about time; it was one of the few advantages given those who toiled the whole of their short span in their desperate attempt to give lie to the fact of death. Mortals struggled with both time and death daily, and they were struggling now, in the shadows of gods. The earth broke, and broke again; cracks took marble, and the force of Allasakar’s sudden strike unanchored great slabs of rock.

  His sword, however, cleaved marble, missing the Lord of the Covenant, and in the slowed rise of its fire-edged blade, the Lord of the Covenant was there, jaws snapping at exposed forearm almost too quickly to be seen. But not to be heard. Even above the wind.

  And the wind harried them all.

  The Lord of the Covenant was driven back by shadow, driven into splintered marble that moved as he moved, clinging to rent flesh. He, too, was harried by wild air, but it did not move or stop him; it did not injure him. Where he bled, it was always from the sword of the god.

  It was not a battle that could be joined with ease by Meralonne or any mortal mage.

  Nor did the fighting between the remnants of Allasakar’s mortal forces and the Kings’ hold his interest long; the magi were harrying them, where the wind allowed them any safe purchase. There was only one fight left, and he braced himself and turned his face into the winds.

  There he heard keening. It was not the wind’s voice, although it was so twined with its rage it was difficult to separate the two. But if there was rage in the second voice, it was the rage
caused by pain, by one’s own choices. It sought no revenge, no justice; it did not speak of that kind of loss.

  But it spoke of loss, and Meralonne was stunned by it, silent in an entirely different way. He felt young again, but this youth was not the absent youth of ferocious delight, when glory was as yet untarnished. It was farther back, and deeper, than that.

  Once, he had had no colleagues, those fractious and oft-whining mages that cluttered the grounds of the Order of Knowledge on the Isle. He had had kin. Once, he had had a home in a distant Court and a Lord whom he revered and loved, as one loves those things that are terrible and glorious.

  His shield was riven, and he felt the pain of it, although his arm, by magic’s artifice, was whole. His sword came to his hand with no conscious effort on his part; it was what was left to him.

  Nothing was left to the other. Nothing: no kin, no weapon, no legacy. He had knowledge and the bitter pain of memory, and he had—he still had—hope. Meralonne had at least divested himself of that folly. But it returned to him now—the wages of hope, not the strength.

  Meralonne lifted his face, then; his hair streamed across it like a shroud. But he was not dead, not yet, and he would not die here. Not here. Not in the shadow of old battles and older glories. Not when new battles such as this one awaited. Nor would he fight them alone.

  He would meet them at the side of Sigurne Mellifas, while she held fast against the indignity of age; he would meet them at the side of the Kings, Reymalyn and Cormaylyn, or their untried sons. He would meet them in spite of the interference of Duvari of the Astari.

  And to do that, they too must survive.

  “Kallandras!”

  For he had heard the bard’s voice and knew it. And knew, as well, the how and the why of the wind’s power and freedom.

  In his youth, he had heard the wind’s voice. Clearer and sweeter than water or the harsh crackle of fire, quicker and lighter than the ponderous, slow syllables offered by earth, it had offered him the world. It was not a constant refrain, but it was there. Sometimes he rode the wind and saw, from the vantage of height, the whole of the world made small and insignificant. To the wind, height signified nothing, of course; the world was small and insignificant.

  But the wind’s voice was soothing, and it was, if one practiced a little caution, all-encompassing. Only the wind could achieve that with ease; all of the other wild elements would crush or kill in the attempt. The bard heard the wind’s voice. Meralonne thought, given the wild, rising fury of the wind, that he might no longer be able to separate it from his own.

  He called again, using magic husbanded until this moment. “Kallandras!”

  There was no shift in the wind. Nothing that indicated that the bard had even heard him. Meralonne closed his eyes.

  There was nothing to be done, then—nothing but to kill the bard; he could not take the reins of the wind while the bard’s will sustained it.

  The Lord of the Hells screamed in mingled pain and fury. Sigurne shook with the force of his cry, and it sickened her in almost the same way as the pleading of the unseen, torture victims had. Her own reaction both surprised and enraged her. Was she, then, a young child, to be terrified into pity and empathy at the simple sound of pain?

  Yet it was not the sound alone.

  She could see the Lord of the Hells. Hate him, fight him, dedicate her life to the frustration of his goals and desires—these she could do while she watched. But she could not despise him; she could not look away from him, could not think him anything but beautiful. This was the strength of the darkness: It was beautiful, it was desirable. It was night.

  She blanched when the jaws of the Lord of the Covenant snapped bone; she stifled a cry—with both hands—when the Lord of the Hells fell to one knee, sword slowly raised. The power that had sustained him was gone, the arch destroyed.

  All that was left now was to send him back to the Hells, to destroy the avatar, the physical embodiment. She was grateful, in the end, that the Hunter God was present and ashamed for the gratitude because it came from the wrong place. She could not have easily lifted hand against this god, and had she overcome that compulsion? She could not have destroyed him.

  And his death was necessary.

  She watched it. She watched the Hunter God—as beautiful, as terrible, in his own way—as he descended upon the fallen god at last; the winds flew around their forms, both obscuring them and parting like an artless veil.

  Meralonne approached, sword in hand. He could not control the whole of the wind, but he could barter with it for his purposes; he could move between its raging refrains and retain his balance in the air. Around him, rocks flew, and smaller pieces of metal—armor or weapons, he wasn’t certain—but they did not strike him or force him to ground.

  Instead, they rose to the heights of the cavern, and great, stone chunks crashed into the marble below and into the columns that girded the coliseum itself. The Kings’ men would not last, not even with the magi to protect them.

  He moved above them, separated from their fate, and only one thing gave him pause: the cry of the Lord of the Hells. Not even the triumphant sound of the Lord of the Covenant had the same effect.

  He bowed his head. It was over.

  And yet it was not. Lifting his gaze, he caught sight of Kallandras of Senniel, and he froze. The bard was singing. He was singing into the wind; his lips moved, his head rose, in utter silence. Bardic voice. Bardic audience. No one else would hear what Kallandras now sang save the person for whom it was intended—if he was within the range of his power.

  Seeing him now, Meralonne could not doubt it. His gold hair was wild, unkempt, the ringlets stretched and tangled by their contact with the air. He had thought the bard enspelled—charmed by the power and the compulsion of the wild element. He revised that opinion as he gazed at the bard’s face.

  Upon his thumb—not the ring finger that was the conceit of the Empire—a ring blazed with white fire; it burned both vision and flesh, and were it not for the roaring movement of wind, the charred scent would linger everywhere.

  What have you done? What have you done to yourself?

  Meralonne raised his sword and then put it up; it vanished as his will to cause the bard’s death wavered. It had been a long, long time—too long since the power of one man’s pain and loss had moved him, speaking to his own.

  Kill him, he told himself, dispassionately. Kill him, and have done.

  But there was no anger, no heat, in the words; they were empty. Almost before he had made the conscious decision, he reached out to touch the bard’s stiff, outstretched arms, avoiding the ring hand, the ring arm, as he did.

  He spoke words he had not spoken since his youth. Quick words, fierce words. They were unnecessary; the bard couldn’t hear them. He could fight what lay behind them, of course. He could fight what was a momentary binding; he had the will.

  Or would have, had the wind not absorbed so much of his attention. So it seemed, until the binding spell took effect.

  It cut. It cut the mage. The bard’s pain and loss were strong enough that he didn’t even notice. They had to be. The song that he sang, the words that he spoke in silence, could have been Meralonne’s words.

  But he knew how to call him, then. Not by name—not by that name. Lifting his voice, forcing it to be heard in spite of the wind, he shouted a single word.

  Brother.

  The god was gone. Their enemy had fallen.

  Only the Hunter God remained, and it turned, now, into the ranks of those closest: the demons. The Allasakari. Meralonne’s report—where was he?—had made clear that the god had killed friend and foe alike in the Terafin manse, and Sigurne sent urgent word to the Kings and to those men she could reach, all but ordering them to withdraw, to retreat where they could in safety do so.

  She turned then to see the distant Northern Lord for a moment, no more; he had joined in the battle against the demons that remained, and he wielded the only weapon that had any hope of injuring his
god. It was his, now; the battle was his.

  The Hunter Lord struggled, as they all did, with the unnatural storm’s fury. One man approached him as he stood, his gaze fixed upon the Hunter God.

  “Lord Elseth! Lord Elseth!” Devon ATerafin shouted. He had to shout simply to be heard. If Lord Elseth spoke at all, his words were lost. Devon’s, however, were not; he, like so many of the men and women who served the Kings in their various guises, had been trained to pitch his voice a great distance at need.

  “The beast is at our flank.”

  The foreign Lord nodded grimly. “Get out! All of you, get out!”

  “We can’t! The wind blocks the exits—we’ve lost four mages against it.”

  “Then stop the wind!”

  Assassin. Kovaschaii. Sworn and bound to the Dark Lady. This was the Master Bard who had been sent, time and again, by the Bardmaster of Senniel into the thick of war and intrigue; this was the man who against all hope always returned to her side, bearing the word she desired or the word the Kings sought.

  No wonder, then. No wonder that he had been able to sing a song of death and killing so compelling that the torture of innocents had become, for moments, the mercy of their painless, quick slaughter.

  Meralonne felt no horror and no disgust. Had he not, in his youth, done the same?

  Kallandras turned to face him, his eyes pale and shining, his lips turned up in a smile that was so open, so uncharacteristically joyful, Meralonne almost turned away. The wind did not tear him down or drive him forward, and Meralonne, understanding some part of the why, chose to mirror his stance: He spread his arms, slowly, to either side, and his hair, long and unbound, swirled around them both.

  But the smile the bard offered dimmed and changed. What was left was bitter self-knowledge.