He was a seaborne storm!
His blade fell like glittering thunderbolts, coiled and snaked through the crackling air, herding his prey toward destruction. They snarled and crouched, festooned in fiery wounds. With every blow landed, they hungered less for his flesh and more for the soul of the one who dared command them—the horn-helmed warrior. The Lord-Inquisitor laughed, kicked one daemon back, then pinned the other to the wall with his blade. It keened, swinging from the sword buried beneath its chin. Its bright blood darkened, transformed into oozing tar, pregnant with the scent of rot.
His star inked tattoos twitched. . . .
He whirled, beheading the Soul Eater as he spun free of its spewing filth. The second daemon leaped onto the wall and scampered, waiting for a chance to strike. He watched it, his sword tracing its zigzagging path. Stone chips rained from where its talons clawed.
A roar built beneath Kalum’s boots, the roar of rushing feet.
Half a dozen horned-faced Peacebringers staggered onto the first gallery from below, their limbs slowed by the power of the plumes of Silver Dust. They shook their drowsy heads, lifted their muskets, trained them at Kalum. The daemon paused, its eyes flickering like twin bonfires.
The air cracked and hissed, disturbed by the fury of fired muskets.
Kalum flung himself off of the first gallery and whirled back, slashing his glowing sword at the leering visage flying toward him. Then he was falling, back first, borne down by a headless daemon.
■■■
Enk lowered his gaze from the festering hole in the sky, peered into Ilima’s heartsick eyes, hoping and waiting. Scarlet droplets slipped down the cylinder’s slick surface, pooled with the chill of endless waters at his feet.
Since the very beginning, Ilima had owned a certain quality of spirit, as if he alone possessed sight in a nation of blind mountain herders, always cognizant of those pitfalls that would bury others beneath crushing rubble and dirt. Yet the young scion’s betrayal seemed to have robbed him of this, to where he appeared no more sure of which path he should take.
“Please,” Enk hissed. He felt his imaginary fingers blur, sensed himself stir in another place.
Face contorting into a snarl, Ilima punched the wall of his prison once, twice, howled in a voice that ran through the very skeleton of existence, shaking the ground below them with earthquake-like spasms, broiling the falling droplets into a crimson smog.
“I deserve your hate,” Enk replied with a mournful smile, “but this isn’t just about you or me. It never was. It’s about all those who died because of Tizkar, all those who will die if we don’t stop him.”
The roar of panted breaths. . . .
The ebbing of roiling tensions, the relaxing of hunched shoulders.
Ilima glared at Enk with eyes made brilliant by tears, then gave a defeated nod. He pressed his palm to the glass, overlapping Enk’s own with his much larger hand.
The cylinder shattered, allowing their palms to meet, and, as bolts of white and black light, they surged upward.
■■■
Pain hammered Kalum’s back with great nailed fists.
He groaned, rolled clear of the headless corpse, fighting to stay conscious, hissing as broken glass jabbed into his chest. He jerked to a stop, his fingers searching for his lost sword even as he glimpsed the shattered vials scattered on the ground. His awareness of the Gold and Red Dust continued to dim, leaving him bloated with the emptiness of the once venerated.
Illusions and bloody imagery waned, their thin veneer pierced by reality’s ivory tusks. Once horned Peacebringers crumbled to the floor above, claimed by slumber, despite how they tried to resist its pull. The sullen-faced boy swelled into a young man, no less dour for his increase in years, and the wrought-iron helm of the warrior blurred—transformed into a dark-faced Clansman sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed.
An enraged howl knifed the air.
Kalum shook his head, caught sight of a green-eyed daemon charging toward him from beside the red-caped Clansman. His hand found the hilt of his sword and he lunged to his feet.
“Stop!” the Mindripper cried in a voice that made all else smoke.
Kalum growled, struggled against stiffening muscles, whirled his blade in a dizzying blur. The horror tied to his soul stirred, purred in a slithering voice only he could hear, helping fight off the Mindripper’s command along with the last remnants of Gold Dust in his veins.
The green-eyed Hellkin lurched to a stop just out of the reach of the Lord-Inquisitor’s sword, skipped left then right, kicking up curtains of billowing granules. Kalum staggered back, raising an arm over his eyes.
DROP YOUR SWORD!
And Kalum’s mind exploded upon a cannonball of light. Empowered words pried open his fingers. The sword slipped from his hand, flopped onto the ground. His heart leaped more than lifted into his throat.
KNEEL!
The screens of sand were torn apart by the daemon’s leering form even as Kalum dropped onto his knees. Hell-spliced eyes. Gleaming teeth, fishlike scales baleful in the uncertain light.
A distant cry rose from the abysmal depths within him.
His body itched, and flashes of purple unspooled from his skin.
No-no!
He clenched his hand into fists, shattered the gathering fragments of the Lesser Name’s totem. He would not break his oath to the Worship, not even to save his own life. He was a Warlock no longer!
The murmur of a Hellkin. Golden claws stampeding closer upon frenetic madness.
■■■
Enk listened through ears that could only twitch.
The coos of battle doweled the dark. The slap of boots moving across sand. The whistle of a blade doweling air. The growls of something unfathomable.
We have to do something, Ilima’s voice hissed.
Yes . . . but-but it hurts.
Blood spilled from Enk’s side, dampening the cloth of his coat, inking crimson pools across the soil, throwing his body’s precious warmth across cool regions.
Somehow, impossibly, Ilima stemmed the tide, took the agony of their shared body for his own. His presence warbled with the strain of it, left ripples of stress across their inner surface.
Hurry, Ilima’s voice cried.
Enk opened his eyes. A young girl with blonde braids lay slumped on the sand beside him, lit by an oblong ray that fell through the shattered ceiling. The sight reared a pang of animal wildness within him. He reached out to her—
“Stop!” Tizkar shouted from close behind him.
Enk stilled upon a ragged in-breath, then relaxed when he realized that the cry was not directed at him. He glanced over his shoulder, moving with incredible slowness. Tizkar stood with his back to him, glaring at the Lord-Inquisitor, who battled a snarling abomination.
I can’t for much longer. . . . Ilima whimpered in a voice that leaked agony back into their shared body.
With a trembling hand, Enk tugged Lulu’s garrote out of his boot, then leaped to his feet upon a harrowing cry. Tizkar spun, but it was too late, the wire was already around his neck.
Enk snapped it taut as they fell back together.
■■■
The Lord-Inquisitor opened his arms wide in welcome of his nearing doom. He could not look away from the fiery sockets that seemed to float toward him upon cackling neurosis, so potent were their lunacy. The curtain of whirling dust seethed with pent tensions.
A dark-haired boy cried out, rose behind the Mindripper like the jaw of a bear closing about the neck of a white-and-brown fawn.
How was this happening?
The Mindripper’s choking cry scarcely seemed possible. It came so suddenly, warbled with incredulity then died just as quickly.
And for an instant it all seemed a lie.
The daemon paused before Kalum. He watched the creature's eyes track the plumes of sand that rose where the dark-haired boy held the Mindripper trapped on his back. A girl child lay next to them, stiff and unnatural.
Closed eyelids fluttering, the red-caped Clansman’s dark face ran with sweat.
The Hellkin growled with knifing panic, turned. . . .
The Lord-Inquisitor enclosed it within his arms, slammed his forehead into its face, lifted it skyward, laughed, hammered it to the ground. And the world became rugged with pitched passions.
■■■
Enk slumped onto his back with a piteous grimace. Tizkar crashed on top of him, clawing where the garrote cut a grisly track across his throat. Cat lay sprawled beside them, her innocent face slack in the opened mouth horror of the recently deceased.
“Die!” he howled at Tizkar, his voice braided with anguish. “For Lulu and Cat! Die!” He blinked for the sting of splattering droplets of blood. “For Merka!”
Crimson ribbons ran down the young scion’s hands. Echoed gasps outran their origins, overcrowding the subterranean chamber, for every heartbeat added more to their number. Sheets of glistening sand plumed for the jolt and kick of Tizkar’s thrashing heels. The hanging granules seemed to wail and burn for the upwelling of otherworldly radiance.
“Diiiiieee!”
Even as exhaustion dragged Enk’s consciousness down into silks of rippling night, he could still hear his cry, a haunting madness to his voice, as if the only thing that mattered was that Tizkar was murdered.
As Tizkar’s struggles stilled, a crystalline shard thrust its way out of his chest. It seemed apiece with a starry void, a point of distant light, yet so vast as to give the sense of cosmic enormities.
Enk glimpsed it as environs of darkness enveloped him in full.
Not understanding why, he reached for it with a hand that was not a hand. A roaring swell rose to plumb him to the pith, a sound so immense as to make him seem the only pocket of gloom in a sunlit world.
The sensation of it struck him numb with recognition, even as the greater part of him balked. Then he was burning. . . .
Falling through nothingness. Screaming.
Chapter Forty-Four
A New Hope
Ruin is your birthright.
You stand at the center of noxious chasms, pitted eternities that your presence has rendered Holy, pawing at your tears with a hand inked black by betrayal.
There is a hole inside you.
“It hurts!” you scream in fury.
Your Conquered Sons regard you, a grove of twisted horrors crouched about oceanic lakes of fire. Their bestial visages hold only indifference, bottomless indifference. They dip lolling tongues into the bowels of shrieking souls.
There is a hole inside you.
You take umbrage at their display, seize lakes and endless skies, knot honeyed lamentations and untouched feasts about your knuckles. If all your Conquered Sons know is hunger, you will make them howl for the torment of their empty bellies.
They flinch back and keen, but it’s too late. It will always be too late.
Your wrath falls upon them, a whirlwind like a thousand snarling maws. You rip infinities, replace here with there, transform brimming sacks into sagging voids.
There is a hole . . . in your chest.
You can feel it, a gap along what can no longer be perceived, an absence in being itself. A part of you is gone, stolen.
There is a hole where your heart should be.
You scream, this knowledge piercing you anew. Tears hiss down your girl-skinned cheeks. Fiery distortions pulse about the remaining horizons. Blood spills like water from the perverted heavens.
Love is your damnation.
There is a. . . .
■■■
The thumbing of a human heart.
Eyes wide and bewildered, Enk lurched into wakefulness, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. His eyes swam with the remnants of visions beyond comprehension, visions that, even now, retreated into the brimming dark. He sensed the approach of dread realizations and fled from them.
NO!
He sat up from the bed, gasping, panting. His lung pinched in a way that was all too familiar. He peered down at his hands—his hands, not Ilima’s own. He was back in his own body.
“Did it work?”
Senet sat perched on the edge of the bed, ponytails draped over the arms that looped her shaking legs. Her eyes—so like Merka’s own—watched him with hawkish intensity.
“What?” Enk asked, knotting his trembling hands.
“Your plan. Did it work?”
The world swelled, invading the room with outside reverberations—enraged voices mingling with panicked screams and the much louder roar of cannon fire. The riots continued, though its passion had began to ebb, to go by the sounds.
Enk frowned. “What plan?”
“I’m not stupid.” Senet’s eyes narrowed and her rocking stilled. “I saw what you did to Apilsin, remember? I know about your power. You and your friend were trying to bring an end to all this, won’t you? Don’t lie—”
Enk lunged at Senet, pressed a finger to her forehead.
A stillborn scream.
Surprised, she peered up at his looming form. Her eyes held no judgment, only sadness. She throbbed at the other end of his finger.
“I would never tell anyone about what you can do,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you won.”
Enk smiled sorrowfully. “A lie.” He tilted his head, as if listening to an unseen voice. “You already have told.” He gazed upon the stake from which all Sentet’s words were bound, traced branching roots like strings. “You told as many of the girls as would listen, but . . . none of them believed you. They thought you were telling tall-tales as is your habit.”
Her eyes were tear-filled and expectant.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, her voice childlike for its lack of bluster.
Enk sighed. He had but to speak to yoke her soul and transform her into the perfect instrument, a walking and talking extension of his will. Yet he hesitated. . . .
His throat tightened, thrummed.
“Nothing.” He dropped his finger from her forehead. The price was too high. It would leave him a cripple. He had but to cast his mind back to the memory of what Tizkar had become.
Senet spasmed, as if freed from profound chains. Her cheeks colored, etched in relief.
Enk fell back onto the bed and touched his hand to his chest, all but deaf to the increase in the volume of the outside world’s discourse. The sounds lured Senet from the bed, drew her face to a curtain-covered window.
“The army has arrived,” she said in a tone tinged with pleasant surprise.
■■■
Salvation roars with a voice all its own.
The musing festered as Enk gazed out of his carriage window. He looked not at a city saved so much as warring passions tamed by things yet darker: rage and hatred giving way to fear; accusations and bombast consumed by self-loathing. Rioting throngs melting before the ire of the red-coated multitudes.
The 13th Regiment had come to Dilgan—the Undefeated themselves, back from the near Ancient East to return order to its rightful mantel. Their legend quelled more violence than the cruelty with which they treated lawbreakers.
Enk felt no approval at the sight of uncongested streets. Nothing moved him now but the rhythmic thump of his heart and thoughts of Ilima. He swung between these two obsessions. He dropped his hand from his breast and rested it on the window. A soft breeze stirred the hair on his knuckles.
He will live. He’s too strong not to—
A small spider crawled onto the back of Enk’s palm, interrupting the pattern that clasped him tight. He lifted his hand to his face. The spider froze under his careful study as the carriage slowed to a stop.
“We’re here!” Obares shouted from the front of the carriage.
Enk looked from the opened gates of his mansion back to the spider. Unwittingly, he found himself smiling down at it. The spider flicked a leg at him.
“Do you mine driving me to the door, Obares?” Enk asked.
“Ah . . . sure. It would be my pleasure,” came Oba
res response.
The carriage rode down Enk’s driveway, then came to a halt at his door. He lowered his hand to the seat and watched the spider scurry into freedom, awash in orange light.
For once not out of breath, Enk entered his home, strode through remembered halls, moving through aged decadence with the eyes of a stranger, walking as if loud footfalls might summon dead spirits.
He knew the place was empty—his power told him so—yet he still glanced into every room. The only surprise was the blood-stains that marred the dining room, the cudgeled pools that marked his crime.
Enk fled the sight, chased by phantom peals of Mother’s luminous screams. They dogged him, lashing his back as he trekked upstairs, coiling around his spine as he slammed his bedroom door shut.
“Coward,” he muttered between pants.
Errant sunbeams pierced the gloom that shrouded half the room, illuminating the shelves bulging with leather-bound tomes, touching the armrest of a plump chair, adorned with woodblock patterns.
Enk collected Inanna’s missive from his nightstand and collapsed onto his bed. His breath came in painful gasps, yet the letter made the agony almost pleasurable. He savored the feel of it, stared up at the hairline crack that threaded the ceiling.
Home. He was home.
He opened the letter. It began:
Dear, Enk. . . .
Epilogue
Another
A gushing geyser of scarlet, jetting, spraying.
Kalum wrenched his blade through the red-caped Clansman’s neck, beheading the fiend with a single blow. He collapsed to his knees. His muscles contorted and spasmed, hooked by the need for more Dust. A howl clawed its way out of his throat, a howl that seemed to echo endlessly. The craving for more Dust had never struck so fast—so hard. His bones squealed, hissed. He gasped.
“No!” he roared, dropping his sword.
Hands trembling, Kalum tore open his coat. He thumbed through the remnant of broken bottles and found a shard covered in Gold Dust. He inhaled its contents. The torment receded, but it was not enough. He needed more.
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