She shrieked louder.
He dipped to his knees, forced himself back up, collapsed again. Vinegar swam across his eyes. An inferno cooked and steamed his lungs. He could almost taste his liquefied innards, but somehow he managed to climb to his feet, managed to tug and pull Lulu once more.
The clamor of her cries fell away, and she went still in his grasp, mouth fixed in soundless horror. Enk paused, gazed up at what held Lulu in unflinching terror. A segment of the ceiling slumped down toward them, robed in incandescent skirts, adorned in glowing coals. For a heartbeat, the sight of their doom arrested his faculties, then he threw himself into a roll.
Scintillation. The bright flare and loud concussion of a heavenly body meeting the hard earth. The renting of charred remnants into seething splinters and scorching shrapnel. Hope dying as tendrils of tar black smoke.
Enk staggered upright, turning from the hiss and pop of released phlogistons. Yet the memory of Lulu’s luminous prison knocked him to the ground, dropped him onto his belly, forced him to crawl toward the shrouded sunlight. Lulu screams rose behind him, so piercing they stabbed knifes into his loins.
The reek of burnt flesh. The horror of failure.
Tears streamed from the young scion’s eyes. He inhaled unpolluted air, felt the kiss of golden rays against his wet cheeks, heard the murmur of untold numbers. Rough hands jerked him to his feet. He blinked his stinging eyes, saw a sea of angry faces watching him with open malice. The same unwashed mob that had glared at him from the street.
“What did you do, thrasher?” one man asked. “What did you do?”
There was no space for a response, no space to gather his thoughts. A fist doubled him in two, stole what little air his lungs yet held. And the pain was almost a blessing; It took his mind away from the faint screams that still clawed his ears. This was what he deserved. He had left Lulu to burn.
I-I’m . . . sorry.
His legs gave out beneath him, and the men holding his arms lifted him aloft, leaving his feet to dangle uselessly under him. A fist struck his face and his head rang. Reeling, he wheezed, embracing torment anew.
If only he was—
They tossed him to the ground at their feet and his cheek clapped the earth, where the soil seemed to smolder for the presence of smoke. The world fell away, and all that remained was an inner light that reached for him even as he reached for it. Strength. Power.
Yet not even this had been enough to save Lulu.
Chapter Thirty-Five
World of Ash
Dilgan burned as he traveled unmolested.
Enk probed his ribs with a finger, then gritted his teeth as a sense of stabbing needles greeted the contact. He sighed. Perhaps unmolested was not the correct term? He sat in the boot of an ambling carriage, his feet dangling over its side, wild winds running fingertips through his hair, Lulu’s garrote wrapped about his wrist like a bracelet. Ebon plumes darkened the skyline, wafting from untamed fires. Harsh voices pounded the air, lifting from the throats of the discontented.
Dilgan tilted toward destruction. Like barrels of gunpowder ensconced within a burning wagon, it was only a matter of time now. Righteous flames would consume homes, would blacken roofs, would reveal the inner rot for all to behold. Then they would see what he saw, then they would. . . .
He clenched his jaw, touched his blood-stained bracelet. Shame swamped his rim, spitting and slobbering, and the long-drawn screams of the city’s howling victims pricked his ears anew.
A rioting mob besieged a passing carriage, tore a blue-haired woman and a weeping, boy child from its safety. Face painted crimson, the boy reached out to Enk from his place on the ground, pleaded for help with his eyes as behind him his mother was despoiled. Men and women alike, ripped pieces from her gown and laughed.
“Pl-please,” the boy whimpered. A cudgel struck the back of his skull, splattered blood and bone like egg yolk.
Enk looked away. The boy’s voice followed him even as it failed. He felt nothing. Nothing! But the prickling in his brain that let him know that his power was working to keep the mob from noticing him and his carriage. Pinpricks that grew into daggers as the mob’s numbers swelled.
He stared down at his hand. It lay curled, almost crap-like on his lap. Black with grime and flecked with spots of red. Defeat had never felt so hollowing. Tizkar had played him for a complete fool. The words Lulu had whispered to him while she strangled him made that clear.
Betrayer!
Mother’s remembered words cast anew in Lulu’s voice.
The depths of Tizkar’s intellect or planning—perhaps both—left Enk staggered. How was he supposed to fight an enemy that understood him better than he understood himself and win?
He shook his head.
The game was rigged. He barely knew the person he hunted. Nothing of what Tizkar had told him could be trusted. It was all an act. And that was the worse part, that he had so easily been led. He who trusted no one! No one but. . . .
The carriage sped, its horses howling as they were whipped. The young scion swayed, his feet lurching this way and that. A street over, a puff of gunpowder smoke retreated, disperse by the wind, and a squad of Peacebringers fled from a mob of rock hurling rioters. Innumerable members of their throng lay sprawled, leaking from foul, pulsing wounds.
Enk traced the deep grooves the garrote had left in his throat; they still bled, if only slightly. Lulu’s gifts. The memory of her shrieking voice rose within him, the smelting reverberations of her torment.
Was he actually going to let Tizkar get away with this?
He blinked the wetness from his eyes.
The assembly of bellowing malcontents thinned the farther the carriage fled from the Shade. But the sound of their fury seemed to fill every corner he reached, though the physical evidence of their anger grew less frequent. The blockades that had once helped quarantine districts stood overturned and set aflame, wagon wheels slowly spinning.
Enk watched gray tendrils swirl upward, watched them add their own particular hue to the others already pluming the heights. The sun stood a little closer to its zenith, a fat orb of yellow and red.
Chaos surrounded him, yet he felt alone. A part and a drift. He had no home, not one he could go to. He was a vagabond in all but name.
No.
His body flexed about a dawning realization.
He might not have a home, but he was not alone.
■■■
A susurrus of groaning timber flagged the enclosed space.
Enk descended another creaking step, gripping the wooden railing. Dark and lurching, the potbellied warden guided him into the basement of the madhouse, breathing loudly through his mouth. Fat beads of sweat sprouted from the back of the man’s neck like droplets of morning dew while the lamp he held aloft cast bars of skittish light across the cracked and soot-marred walls.
“I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon,” the warden was saying, dabbing at his face with a dirty rag. “Especially not with how. . . . Well, hopefully this time goes a little better.”
Enk grunted, said nothing. Something like terror clutched his throat, something that stabbed and pinched with every crawling flicker of the oil-fed flame. Despite all the calamitous grievances he had already suffered, this place loomed in a way those previous horrors could not.
Father . . . I come.
At the bottom of the stairs, the warden turned, lifted the lamp to Enk’s face and studied him. The young scion narrowed his eyes, half blind, half enraged. The flame bobbed within its glass prison, a supplicant bowing before the altar of cuckoldry.
“You don’t look well.” The warden frowned, as if seeing Enk for the first time. “And why are you wearing a. . . ? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Not knowing keeps me out of—”
“Have you not looked outside?” Enk asked in a wheezing tone. “Dilgan burns.”
The warden shrugged and returned his attention to their destination, strode across level ground. Dancing particles pa
rted before his lumbering form, golden for the wood furnace warring with the eternal dark.
Enk followed, grabbed the man’s arm. “Don’t you care? Hundreds die as we speak. Thousands. Women. Children.”
“This isn’t the first time, my Lord,” the warden said, freeing himself from the young scion’s grip, “and it won’t be the last. But these riots will pass as all the others have.”
“How? How can you be so sure?”
“Because the Holy Immortal-Emperor is the hand that guides our Empire. What is this to a soul such as his?” The warden resumed his trek, waved Enk onward. “Now let’s be about our business.”
Enk watched the man’s retreating figure, the whirling dust tickling his abused lungs, burning his eyes. The Immortal-Emperor! Here in spirit if not form. Implacable and adamantine. Even the man’s accursed shadow was enough to lull many into a false sense of security.
He sneezed, pitched himself away from the edge of another precipice, then chased after the warden’s disappearing form. The man led him to a now familiar iron-bound door. . . .
The clanking jiggle of keys.
The groan and screech of an opening portal.
The gagging reek of unwashed flesh.
Dread pulsed at Enk’s throat, tightening its hold upon blood-smeared skin. He gripped the lamp the warden pressed in his hand and stepped into the void, reducing the inky blackness before him with a baleful light. The door slammed shut at his back. He jumped.
A host of shadows deliquesced from the jounce of a caged radiance. For the shifting of Enk’s stance, it seemed time had slowed, watching wretched forms congeal from swaths of nothingness. A dozen variants of spiderwebs hung slack and empty from the ceiling. Soiled sheets lay tangled atop a dirty mattress. Father slumped upon an aged rocking chair, his greasy mane partly obscuring his emaciated face. Strange pictographs etched the wall behind him.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Enk said, moving closer to his father, but not so close that he could be taken unaware.
“Put it out,” the Lord-Marshal hissed, a string of saliva dangling from his lower lip.
“No. I’ve had enough of the dark, haven’t you?”
Silence, cut by ragged breathing.
Turquoise eyes narrowed before a jaundiced glow.
And so the young scion stood, tragic in heart, as one ruinous come to heal what once could not be mended. The Eerie Portal opened impossibly wide, a golden pool goring the pelvis of existence. Esoteric Light welled and roiled with afternoon brilliance, so intense as to lambent what lay below the surfaces of Men.
“I-I kn-know y-you. . . .” Father began.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Dwindling Light
Enk found himself elsewhere, standing upon different ground, spinning in a slow circuit. Dark mist broiled about his feet, roiled around his arms and chest, shrouded the heavens, reducing the sun to a dim orb at the center of the sky. The air reeked of gunpowder and viscera. The concussion of muskets and cannon fire rang out in a ceaseless song.
A battlefield. He was on a battlefield.
What else would this place be but this?
Yet . . . somehow he was disappointed nonetheless. Why could it have not been their erstwhile home? Why—
A howl pierced the veil of swirling vapor, a man’s anguished scream.
Father!
Enk paused, clutching his sword hilt, his ears straining. The cry came again, rising over the fury of cannon fire. He darted off toward his father’s fading shriek. The murky fog swirled, seethed, clang to him, flowing away from his pumping limbs. His lungs inhaled and exhaled the way they always should, without pain, without blistering hurt.
The ground exploded in front of him, ruptured by a hissing cannonball. He jerked to the right, weaved away from the gaping hole, lifting an arm over his head as moist dirt rained down upon him. He quickened his pace, running as fast as he dared.
The mist to his left flashed violet, and the vague outline of a horned visage appeared, hooked teeth gleaming. The young scion faltered, his eyes widening.
W-what—
Something unseen struck his right side, sent him reeling, kicking empty air. He slapped the earth, back first, and rolled, gulping, groaning. Confusion swirled like the vapor that retreated before his face. Pain—or its phantom cousin, he could not tell the difference—throbbed where he had been hit. He lurched upright, unsheathed his blade.
I-I can be hurt in this place?
There was so much he did not yet understand about his new powers, and no time for him to practice. He steadied his trembling hands. Horned horrors stalked the surrounding gloom, glaring with glowing eyes. Vague shapes, many limbed abominations with the hint of talons. The sight invoked recollection as well as dread.
Warlocks.
Or perhaps even daemons.
A scream, pregnant with blood-curdling anguish.
Blade whirling, Enk leapt forward, rose his voice to join it with his father’s own. Met another’s pain with rage. Shapes slithered at the edge of his periphery. Mangled limbs reached, clawed appendages shimmering with hellish lights. His sword chopped and hacked, danced the kind of dance heretofore only envisioned. Yet he drew no intricate patterns; There was no need nor time for such complex geometries. Bright blood painted the fog in billowing jets. Pink and purple hues. Agony-filled howls escaped from fanged mouths.
The young scion did not slow to process his slight successes, or the wounds inflicted, he kept pressing onward, his father’s cries calling him forth. He refused to retreat, refused to fail for a second time. Hope thumped in his breast, an organ that would not be stymied.
A claw tore at his back, and he lurched, staggered by the blow. His mind burned with fiery luminescence, seething lines sliding across something purely conceptual. He gritted his teeth, righted himself and kept pushing forward.
The unseen heavens roared, pounded by cannonballs.
Enk spun, swinging his sword in a full circle. He sliced through a barbed-thigh, glanced up. The sky whistled and hissed. The fog roiled.
Damn!
The young scion threw his sword at an approaching enemy and ran, his heart hammering his chest. The howl of plummeting orbs overpowered all else as they fell like droplets of rain, a seemingly endless deluge. The surrounding terrain rose, lifted into the air in little pockets of swelling dirt.
Enk was lunched skyward by the jutting soil. He flipped and spun through smoky plumes, landed on his back and grunted. The ground gave way beneath him, and he slid downward, feet first, trying but unable to slow his descent. The mist thinned, parted before him as a jagged line of brilliance appeared from above to knife the earth.
The world crackled and groaned, danced with electric sparks.
Enk screamed, blinded by the brief glimpse of ivory light. His feet struck what felt like the bottom of a slope and he flopped onto his stomach, wheezing.
The wretched howl returned to hammer the air, coming from mere steps away.
FATHER!
The young scion pushed himself onto his elbows, blinked the shimmering from his eyes, gulped. A thread of crimson ran along his skull, as if lava lay within it. As if . . . as if. . . .
He shook his head, forced himself onto his knees. His vision cleared, placing him at the edge of a bowl shaped depression. At its center, Alapar lay buried up to his neck, his shaved head embedded with large metal spikes.
“No,” Enk muttered.
He ran forward, his feet wobbling with every other step. Father writhed, shook his head back and forth, his sky-blue eyes manic. Manic with fear. With torment beyond knowing.
A tingle ran down Enk’s spine. He jerked to a stop, jumped back as another blinding bolt descended, connecting Father’s skull with the thing in the sky. A piercing shriek. The stench of ozone.
Enk collapsed onto his romp, swatted moisture from his eyes.
He turned his gaze heavenward.
A giant eye hung in the sky as a twisted sun, lidless and milky with cataract
s. Evil fingers crawled across his breast, a pederast’s caress.
The Lord-Marshal’s voice cracked, faltered as he gasped for breath. Tears streamed down his pale cheeks, slipped down his quivering lips. He wept the way a whipped child might, without thought or concern for propriety.
“Father,” Enk heard himself cry through the mouth of a little boy.
He staggered to his feet, yanked and tugged at the spikes jutting from Father’s head. All was crackling air, screaming voices, and snarling winds. His muscles strained. His insides roiled, twisted about a nebulous pang.
Unbidden, images rose to skitter across his mind, a memory that belonged to another.
The rage was in him. Alapar felt its acidic contours dissolve, eat away at something that once glittered bright. Love blackened with shame. A human heart blighted by cancerous sores.
His fingers tightened, compressed. He lay on top of another—on top of a man, his hands wrapped vise-like around the traitor’s throat. The effeminate man’s eyes watered. His feeble limbs fumbled for relief. His booted heels scuffed at the wooden floor. Blue hair clung to a sweat damped brow.
Soft. So fucking soft.
He squeezed harder, crushed another’s airways for the sting of betrayals made manifest.
Enk flung himself back from Father, breaking the upwelling of images and sensations. His body trembled on the ground, beset by remembered horror.
Lightning swam above, whirled around the milky eye. A lance of alabaster light slashed downward. Alapar howled, lashed anew, skull and metal spikes alight with a ghostly glow.
The heavens stilled.
The young scion regained his feet. Not understanding how, a part of him recognized that this was manmade, that Father’s current state had been constructed by a mind like his own.
The Lord-Marshal peered at him, uncomprehending but as if seeing him for the first. He blinked the slow eye blink of an invalid, drooled and sputtered like one frail and ailing.
“Father, who did this to you?” Enk asked.
He hesitated for dread of what he might experience next, then he flung himself forward for stubbornness as much for love of Father. The iron spikes felt like electric eels in his hands. Thoughts fragmenting, he welcomed the lash of descending thunderbolts as he wrenched at what refused to be moved. Radiance bloomed, glittered behind his closed eyelids, and he screamed as he had never screamed, a howl that rose from his pith, his very being vibrating like the base of a massive drum.
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