The chamber was a tangle of bodies. Ten or so Coalition militia moved systematically along the ledges, covering the exits and setting up overlapping fields of fire. Impressive unit, well-trained and experienced.
‘The leech lives.’ There was a smugness to the voice behind him. A self-satisfaction that made Cole’s blood simmer. It growled. He turned to find Cruickshank standing with gun in the ready position. Cole ignored him. Beyond, Nessie climbed the short steps leading to their platform. ‘Ethan, my boy! You’re alive.’ And he was still himself, and not a slavering, Murk-spawned nightmare. The subtext was loud on his mentor’s face.
Nessie came forward and embraced him, then held him at arm’s length. ‘How have you survived intact? I believe that’s a Crucible, hanging over our heads.’ The lines on Nessie’s face expressed joy and confusion, and he peered as though seeing Cole for the first time.
Natalia paced, her shield and spear braced for action. ‘The Mother, she’s getting away.’
Cole rubbed the back of his neck. ‘It would be great to fight with you again, but we’ve got a much bigger problem to deal with.’
Cruickshank swung his rifle up and pointed it at Cole. ‘No one moves. You’re my prisoner now, leech. You’re coming with me.’
Cole bit down frustration, glancing into the heat and fumes belching from below where the First was paused mid-climb. He moved toward Cruickshank. Nessie shot him a look and stepped between them. ‘The armiger is only your prisoner after the threat is neutralised.’ The price of the Northern Lodge’s co-operation became clear. Cruickshank took in the room with a sweep of his arm. ‘Looks pretty neutralised to me, Commander.’
‘Listen, the lot of you, there’s no time. Nessie, Nat? The vampire progenitor is coming. I can see it climbing from the Pit. I think the Anvil has been pulling it out.’ Pain stabbed his face with sudden agony. He bled and saw the others’ eyes leaking red tears like his own. Cruickshank’s open mouth was testament to his bitten-off reply, then the lieutenant’s radio exploded in chatter. He moved away, voice edged while he called on the radio for order.
Nat stopped pacing, wiping the blood from her face as she spoke. ‘Mixcoatl’s grace! How long do we have? What do we do?’
Henry got a wild look in his eyes. Cole stooped and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s okay, kid. The First has stopped for now. I think he needs the Anvil powered up to climb.’
Nessie’s face was a mask of blood. ‘This is how beast vampires hunt. They exsanguinate their victims.’ Cole had seen this, once before. It was where the common modern myth about vampires sucking blood came from. Nessie stroked his chin. ‘This is why the beast vampires have been escaping the Pit. They’ve been driven before their father, like rats abandoning a doomed bolthole.’ It was a sobering thought.
Henry looked wild. Cole squatted beside him, and the kid gripped him. ‘Is that the thing under us, Cole? When the Anvil hit me, I saw it. It looked right through me, but I can’t see it anymore. Is it still there? You’re calling it a god – does that mean it’s omniscient? Omnipotent? Omnipresent?’ Millar’s pitch was too high. He gagged, blood fountaining from his gut. Cole doubled over, retching stinking iron onto the floor. The building around them rumbled and creaked, pink dust floating down from above. The fractures from the stress of the weight below widened. Cole looked down. Had the First crept closer? It couldn’t. The rope wouldn’t hold it. Surely, it couldn’t?
Cruickshank had been returning to the group when he doubled over too, vomiting blood. His radio exploded again, and he barked commands, stumbling away across the room’s other thin bridge, toward the west side of the chamber and the door his men had gone through. Millar stopped vomiting and screamed. Cole gathered him up, ‘Put a sock in it, Millar.’ He squeezed the boy to his chest. Millar quieted.
Natalia frowned at Cole. ‘So what the fuck do we do?’ Her question was edged like it was his fault, spiking his blood. It watched.
Nessie was grim, white and shaking with fear. Cole had never him scared. Not really. He shivered, quelling his own rising panic. The First loomed below, still a long way from the top. Was it closer, or did he just imagine it was?
Nessie looked at his shaking hands and put them behind his back quickly. ‘We move the Anvil. We cast it into the Pit. Cole, can you tell where we are, relative to the Pit?’
He nodded. ‘Above it, in the sky, somehow. A long way up.’ Nessie’s face was blank as he turned from them and looked to the Anvil above. The temperature plummeted. Cole slid back, keeping Henry close. Poor kid had seen a lifetime’s badness in a few days.
The old mage poured an ocean of black water around the Anvil. Natalia started invoking. Gods knew what she was adding to that flood, but the pair pulled the power of the literal heavens into the chamber.
‘Cows o’ God! Yer pals are heathens!’ Cole knelt, then lay down. The force was incredible. Hurricane winds pounded, pressing Cole and Henry flat to the floor like reeds. Nessie and Natalia wrapped their magic around the Anvil. Yet the Anvil spun, unmoved.
Nessie tottered on his feet, freezing the water and flinging it in a pillar of ice the size of a ship. It shattered on the Anvil, the wind whisking the shards of ice around, making a whirling blender of ice and wind and water. Nessie threw it all at the Anvil, but where his power hit the Anvil’s surface it just stopped, robbed of strength.
Nessie coughed and knelt for a moment, breathing heavily. Natalia threw spears of sunlight straight into the Anvil’s central mass. The spears shattered in rainbows of light that bounced through the conjured ice of Nessie’s magic.
It stirred, watching. Nessie inhaled deeply, and the temperature plummeted further as he opened a portal, yawning below the Anvil, while it continued to spin with malevolent disinterest.
‘I cannot open an exit.’ The old man looked like he might give up, but then steel seemed to set his jaw, and the room roared with winter magic. Cole and Henry were pinned helpless to the floor by forces that had shaped the world.
Finally, Nessie buckled, staggering. ‘I can’t move it.’
He was exhausted, defeated, his shoulders slumped. Natalia bore his weight down to sit on the floor.
Cole came to his feet, as the winds died down. ‘It’s immovable. An actual immovable object.’
The Anvil would have to go into the Pit itself, anything short of that, and the First would still be able to leverage itself out. This would be a one-way trip. A chance to die right. He glanced at Millar, who looked at him oddly. Brude marched around inside his mind. ‘Nah, dinny be daft laddie; it’s no the time for that sort of stupit.’
Millar frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
Cole pointed up at the Anvil. ‘It’s an immovable object. I’ve waited for one of these all my life. I just hadn’t expected it to be so literal.’ The building shook again, trembling like a dying beast.
Brude tutted. ‘Nae need fir us tae dae onythin. The heathen couldnae move it, whit makes ye think ye can?’
He thought he could, because he’d seen Its power. It could move the Anvil. It could make portals, and not just entrances. It had made an exit too.
‘I can move it.’
Brude thumped ethereal fists inside Cole’s skull. ‘Ye daft bastard, ahm stuck in here with ye; ahm a king! It’s up tae me how I die!’
The others looked at him, blood smearing their faces. The floor rumbled. Nessie’s voice was frail. ‘How, boy? How would you move what Natalia and I cannot?’
That was the crazy part. ‘When the wytches were separating me from It, I sort of met It. It can move the Anvil; It can open its own portals. It showed me how, I think.’
Natalia tutted. ‘Great, so you siphon, let that thing take over while you try to move the fucking Anvil, and Nessie and me have to …’ She raised her hand, palm flat toward him. ‘I can’t, Ethan. I can’t kill more people who deserve better today.’
The walls rattled as a spasm gripped the castle. Cracks hairlined across the stone, which oozed a pale pink liquid. The rope
of the Anvil plunged into the dark below and shone briefly.
‘Nat, I don’t know what else to tell you. There’s no plan B here. If I can move the Anvil, I can stop the apocalypse. It’s what I’m for, isn’t it? To do the things you mages can’t do. See the things you can’t see?’
Nat shook her head. ‘The Anvil could free you, you know.’
Her words were loaded with a dream he’d never dared have for himself, and somehow, it sparked his hotwires. ‘Yeah, and then the vampire progenitor god climbs from the Pit, and what do you think happens next?’
She flashed him a look. ‘So, the answer is for you to become that thing and try to move the Anvil? And when you fuck it up, as usual, we’ll have to pay the bill?’
His blood got hot, he wanted to batter something – anything – to let out the sting of her faithlessness. It writhed, coiling within the prison of her protection.
‘That’s horseshit, Nat. I’ve been trying my best.’
Her face creased, hot and angry. ‘Yeah, look around, Ethan. Your best is dead bodies, all over the place. They’re all dead, because you fucked up. Because of your swearing and threatening, I got locked up. They lost my protection.’
His mind reeled. This was where she had been while he was alone? Was she right, was this his fault? ‘I’m talking about dying here to save the lot of you, and it’s not good enough for you, Natalia?’ Control groaned, a moment from being lost.
Natalia stepped up to him. ‘If you’d just done your job right, instead of fucking up, these women would have had my protection. I killed them to get to you. I thought I’d have to kill you too, but you’re alive.’
Tears ran, blood mingled with grief. ‘Well, maybe if you hadn’t left me to it, instead of getting into bed with these fucking maniacs.’ His body was wild. It swam, warm and ready.
‘Well, maybe I’m tired of the Ethan fucking Cole show. Maybe it makes me sick that I have to care about a man I’ll have to kill one day. Maybe it’s time to change all that now. You could be free of it, Ethan – you could put it behind you.’
She didn’t get it; she wasn’t hearing. It rose up his spine, as his rage volcanoed inside. The connection between It and his rage was so blatant to him then. He fought to stop the explosion. She didn’t want him to die. That was what all this was about. He ground his fists, words he’d never said cracking through the gaps.
‘I’ve never lived up to you or the things you want, Nat. The Ethan Cole show, my arse. It’s been the Natalia Torres soap opera, living in your shadow, never getting it right. Always fucking up, constantly a disappointment to you. And to you, Nessie.’
Nessie chopped with his hands. ‘Enough! You two will stop this. Now.’
Nessie’s tone cut him down to nine years old. ‘Ethan. We got into this mess because you refused to feed a child to a vampire. When Bernard Ancroft threatened the child, you acted, even though you knew what it meant for you. How could we be disappointed in a man who would do that?’
The world got blurry, and his chest ached. ‘I can do this, Nessie. I think I’m the only one that can.’
Brude piped up. ‘Eh, where you go, I go. Dae I no get a vote, no?’ Cole’s head was no democracy.
‘Let me do this. I made a mess, and I’ll clean it up.’
Nat snorted. ‘And how do you intend to keep your parasite from taking over?’
He paced. ‘I’ve been caging it with my mind.’
Nat laughed. ‘More like a ton of whisky.’
He rounded on her. ‘Yeah, that too. And my mind.’
Henry walked up to Nat then, all attitude. ‘He has been; he’s been holding it off. Where have you two been, eh? We’ve been neck-deep in terror, trying to stop this stuff from happening. And Cole’s been doing his best, man.’
Nat ignored Millar, who seemed to take that as a sign to keep going.
‘He’s been fighting that monster in his gut, trying to figure out how it works alone. Where were you lot? Eh? He rescued me, and he’s tried to keep me safe. He fucked up, yeah, fine; but you try having to drink all the time to stop a parasite taking you over. See how long you make great decisions for.’
Something uncomfortable glowed in Cole. Natalia stepped into Millar’s space, sending him stumbling back to get away from her. ‘Don’t talk shit about things you know nothing about.’
Nessie flashed Natalia a warning look. She pointed in Millar’s face. ‘I won’t be lectured by a fledgling vampire.’
Millar looked at Cole with big eyes. ‘I know. I remembered. Cole, you were right, about what you said before. I’m sorry.’
They’d sort that out another time – vampire-god paused in his ascent or not, they had to get a fucking move on. ‘It’s the way it goes, kid. It’s a shitty world, shitty things happen.’ The end of the world was no time for I-told-you-so. Henry Millar, ex-vampire turned human, and refugee of the forgotten nineties; sticking up for Cole, after everything he’d put the kid through. It was almost too much.
Men flooded back into the chamber.
‘That doesny look good, laddie.’
It didn’t. The men moved past and around the platform, covering the four of them with their rifles. They were leaving. Cruickshank, managing a swagger even while he picked his way along the ledges, shouted up to them. ‘Me and the lads had a vote. We’re not dying here to keep a few wytches penned in. You can deal with them. We’ll get you, Cole – but on the other side of this.’
Natalia moved to throw her spear. Guns barked, peppering bullets above their heads.
‘Don’t make this personal, princess.’ Cruickshank jogged on, his grin ghoulish from the blood that matted his face. ‘Your woman’s being irrational, Cole.’ The stream of words coming from Natalia would have made a prison warden blush.
Nessie pointed to where the Mother and four of the sisters emerged, magic flared and ready to fight. ‘We have more immediate problems.’
The old man looked unsteady as he got to his feet. A dread emanated from beneath, rolling up in fresh waves. Nessie and Natalia locked eyes and seemed to come to a silent accord. Nessie looked at Cole and nodded.
‘You can do it, man.’ Millar darted away. Hopefully, the kid would find a good place to stay hidden. Nessie came forward and crushed him in wiry arms. Neither could speak, too much passing between them in that instant. Nessie withdrew.
‘Ethan …’ Natalia’s face and stance were in conflict.
‘I know, Nat. Now go and kick that fucker’s arse.’ He wished he’d smiled then, but he worried about what might come out if he did, so he kept his fighting face on.
Nat touched his arm, unable to look at him as the plates of her grace – his gut armour – dropped for the last time.
Chapter 28
What he wouldn’t have given for some whisky. Indolent power vibrated through the floor, shaking the walls. If even just the aura of the god below rose up into the city, the devastation would be immense. The only chance was to stop the First escaping, before a fate worse than death could haul itself from the bowels of a man-made hell and subjugate the world.
It tested Cole’s mind-prison, coiled with violent potential.
‘Ah hope ye ken whit yer doing, shagger.’ Cole ignored the old king. He couldn’t fail. This was it. The chance to do something and get it right. The floor cracked beneath his feet and began to sag. Battle broke close by. It would be so simple to join that fight – the thing he was trained for, good at. Keeping his friends safe. He was at his best and most savage when he fought for those he cared about. Now, he couldn’t worry about them. He had his own job to do.
‘It’s all on us, laddie!’ Cole hoped his passenger enjoyed the ride. The Anvil spun above him. He could only hope he was right; that he could move it. He pushed It into his legs, the cage coming to his mind easier. It struggled, testing, shocking against the walls of the mind-prison. There was no peace between them; It would try to win out, as It always had.
As reality bent and dragged toward the weight of the god below, C
ole saw the fabric of the fortress. All of it was pure Murk energy. He pulled a trickle from the floor, connecting to the living centre of the fortress in the briefest flash. In the depths of the fortress foundations, he saw bones and tattered clothing. Bodies the fortress had pulled in through the floor and walls for nourishment. He wondered who they were.
His legs sang with power as It fed on the trickle. The tension in his body broke just before he burst with it, and he sailed through the air, arms windmilling as velocity shot him toward the Mournanvil. Then gravity began to pull him down, causing his stomach to drop when the apex of the leap passed, and he began to fall toward the Anvil. He crashed into the Anvil and held on for all he was worth.
It spun, its terrible weight holding him in place like gravity. For the first time, he could see a dense, bright, white spot, at the centre of the Anvil’s form. It looked just like the hole It had made to portal back inside Cole’s gut. He pulled power from the air, trying not to overdraw. It swam to his arms, a strange symbiosis in Its movements. Symbiosis went two ways. He would worry about what It was getting in return later.
As It reached his arms, his shadow gauntlets extended, longer and sharper than they’d ever been before, and the air was full of cracks. Reality was shredding, falling into the terminal density of the escaping god below. It was time to move his immovable object.
The air sang around him with the bitter vibrancy of the Anvil’s power while he punctured a fault line in reality, seeking to make a portal entrance. The effort it took, there was no way he could have punctured the hole if reality hadn’t been stretched so thin. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t be able to make portals without siphoning suicidal amounts of black magic.
A tiny ball of black absence – a portal entrance – burned fiercely on the end of his gauntlet, haloed by burned-green.
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 31