Reckoning (The Amazon's Vengeance Book 5)

by Sarah Hawke

  “Time grows short.” The words came from Marcella’s lips, but they were no longer hers. Her wounded body lurched to its feet seemingly of its own accord, and she stepped in front of the sanctuary doors and stretched out both her hands. A storm of energy gathered at her fingertips—

  “You won’t…”

  The Godsoul turned Marcella’s head and glanced down at the knight sprawled at her feet. The smoldering black hole in Crowe’s breastplate was even larger than she had realized; she couldn’t believe he even had the strength left to speak.

  “The dragon…will…” Crowe’s lips bubbled over with blood, and the life drained from his eyes.

  “The dragon will die,” the Godsoul said. “And this world will once again bow before its rightful god.”

  ***

  Yet another brilliant gout of flame lit up the night sky as the dragon pursued a pair of wyverns attempting to drop troop crates into the harbor. At least one of the beasts was caught in the blast, and even through the storm, Serrane could see the crate slip out of its talons and crash sideways into the streets below. Whether the soldiers inside survived the impact was an open question, but she didn’t feel the need to wait for an answer. Kicking her heels into Garadros’s flank, she ordered the wyvern to swoop down low enough for her to take a shot.

  “Caro nin ilindyth thand!” she cried out as she summoned a magical arrow to her bowstring and fired. The glowing projectile only missed the crate by a few feet—a bloody miracle considering her speed and the wind—and the resulting explosion engulfed half the street in a brilliant but short-lived fireball.

  And then she was out of range again. Gritting her teeth, Serrane hunched even lower in the saddle as she slowly swung Garadros in a wide, low arc around the harbor. She already felt like they had been fighting all night, though the battle had probably been raging for less than an hour. Her arms tingled from the early pangs of the Flensing, though that was mostly because she had been forced to shield herself from the cold this entire time. This really did feel like she was back in Icewatch again.

  Still, at least this time they were winning. Between her, Jorem, and their soldiers on the ground, they had mostly been able to contain the enemy troops, and the storm was putting out the fires for them. If she and the others could keep this up, the Inquisitrix might be forced to—

  “Faarea…” Serrane breathed when Garadros finally swung all the way back around to face the Iron District and the wall beyond it. For an instant, everything seemed fine—a half a dozen shimmering blue barriers were spread over the battlements like interlocking domes, protecting the walls and the troops stationed upon them.

  But then, without any warning whatsoever, they all disappeared.

  “Oh, gods…” Serrane whispered, her head immediately turning northwest. She couldn’t even see the Silver Temple through the fog, but something must have gone wrong. None of the barriers reappeared, and dozens of tiny lights across the city—the faint glow from paladins shielding themselves in the Aether—were all snuffed out like tiny candles.

  Tahira. The Huntresses must have found Tahira.

  Serrane choked up on the reins and pushed Garadros hard toward the battlements. Without their powers, Julian and his men would be completely defenseless. She had to try and—

  She felt the surge of power in the Aether before she heard the sizzling crackle of a lightning bolt, but by then it was already too late. The stroke of lightning seared through her mount’s wing, blinding her and stunning Garadros. Her stomach dropped when he abruptly lost altitude, and if she weren’t strapped into the saddle, she surely would have plummeted from his back entirely. An enemy wyvern screeched somewhere behind them, though she could barely hear anything over her own mount’s agonized cries. In desperation, she tried to blink the afterimage from her vision and steady her grip on the reins…

  Too late.

  Garadros clipped the edge of a tall building with his wing and spiraled out of control. Serrane leaned forward and grabbed onto the saddle with both arms, her gut churning and her head spinning as they careened toward the ground. She channeled as much power as she could muster into her own defenses, praying it would be enough—

  And then they crashed. Her vision went black, and Serrane lost all sense of time and place. She didn’t even realize she had lost consciousness until her eyes abruptly shot back open. Her head was spinning so violently she nearly retched, and while both of her arms were free, she couldn’t move—or feel—either of her legs.

  A wave of cold dread shuddered down her spine, but Serrane clenched her teeth and forced herself to stay calm. She could barely see anything besides a few thin strands of light filtering in through a ruined wooden ceiling. The air was as frosty as ever, though it was so filled with dust she could barely even breathe.

  “Escar’s mercy,” a deep male voice gasped from somewhere nearby. “Just hold still, General! We’ll get you out of there.”

  Serrane craned her neck to try and see the speaker, but she couldn’t seem to break free no matter how hard she wriggled. It only took a moment to realize why.

  She wasn’t buried beneath rubble—she was buried beneath Garadros.

  Hissing through clenched teeth, she placed her hand flat against his scales and reached out through the Aether. But when she tried to soothe his mind and keep him calm, she realized he was already gone.

  “Le’thos,” she swore, closing her eyes and balling her hands into fists. A knot filled with rage and pain and sorrow twisted in her stomach. She had only known him for a short time, but he had completely changed her perceptions about wyverns. They were dangerous and deadly, yes, but they were also far smarter than everyone believed—and fiercely loyal when given the chance.

  She wanted to scream. At the very least, she wanted to take the time to mourn. But then she remembered that Julian was still out there, probably stripped of his power…

  “Just hold still, General,” the deep voice repeated. “I have you…”

  Serrane felt a firm grip take hold of her right arm a moment later, and she pushed off with her left to try and break free. Her legs began tingling the moment her rescuer pulled her clear, and the uncomfortable pins and needles of blood rushing back into her legs promptly followed. She grimaced and swore under her breath again, struggling to concentrate through the pain.

  “Gods, I thought we’d lost you,” her rescuer said. “Everything’s going straight to the bloody void…”

  Serrane’s eyes fluttered back open, and her vision finally cleared enough to make out the middle-aged human crouched over her, helmet askew. His face was covered in blood and soot, but she still would have recognized him anywhere.

  “Mannick?” she breathed.

  The constable nodded as he tried to help her sit up. “I don’t know what you saw while you were up there, but we had to abandon the wall,” he told her. “The knights…something happened to them. They lost their magic again.”

  “I know,” she grunted, bracing herself upright on an elbow. They were clearly somewhere in the Iron District, though she wasn’t sure what street. The building Garadros had crashed into looked like one of the many old smithies, though there wasn’t much left of it at this point.

  “That beast twisted in midair a moment before you crashed,” Mannick said, following her gaze. “It saved your life.”

  Serrane swallowed heavily. As much as she wanted to lie here in the falling snow and cry, they simply didn’t have the time. “We have to find Commander Cassel and figure out what happened,” she said, holding out her arm so he could help her up. “Without the barriers, we can’t hold the walls.”

  Mannick nodded. “I already ordered my men off the wall,” he said, hauling her upright. “They were too exposed on the battlements. At least they’ll stand a chance fighting in the streets.”

  Serrane braced herself against his arm and took a few tentative steps. Aside from a few nasty scrapes and bruises, she appeared to be fine. Her legs still hurt like hell, but the constable was
right that she should have been dead. Only luck had saved her.

  Luck, and the loyalty of a creature she had promised to set free.

  She turned and glanced at the wyvern one last time. Considering how many knights and soldiers might die today, it almost seemed foolish to shed a tear on a mount. But she felt one slide down her cheek nonetheless.

  “The last I saw, Julian was busy fighting near Aisling and Sutherland,” Serrane said, gritting her teeth and grabbing the handle of the slender sword at her belt. Her bow had fallen from her hand during the plunge, as had her other blade.

  “That isn’t far,” Mannick said, pointing. “This way!”

  They rushed across the street and through an adjoining alley. More wyverns roared overhead on their way back to the fleet, presumably to retrieve more troop carriers, while others strafed by and ignited the rooftops. The nighttime air, once frozen but clean, now reeked of sulfur and death; the streets, once empty but safe, were now littered with corpses and painted with blood. Serrane didn’t even want to imagine the devastation in other districts where their forces were thin…

  “Sutherland is just ahead,” Mannick said as they twisted through another unfamiliar alley. Glimpses of the main thoroughfare told a grim tale of recent carnage. The adjoining street had clearly been the site of a major skirmish; dead Vorsalosian soldiers were everywhere, most riddled with arrows from her rangers.

  “Julian must be close,” Serrane said as they reached another intersection. “We should—”

  The sudden click of a distant crossbow was her only warning. A barrage of bolts shot out of the fog to their left, pelting Mannick in the chest and shoulder. He crumpled to the ground with a choked-off yelp, and if Serrane hadn’t reflexively ducked and rolled, she would have suffered the same fate. Her ranger training took over: she hopped back to her feet and charged into the fog, knowing she only had a moment to reach her attackers before they reloaded. There were three of them crouched behind a toppled merchant cart, all regular Vorsalosian soldiers armed with the heavy, armor-piercing crossbows the City of Ravens was famous for. Serrane had no idea what their orders were aside from spreading mayhem, and at this point, she frankly didn’t care.

  She killed one of them from a distance with the throwing knife on her belt, but the other two had a chance to recognize their killer before she pounced upon them. Her slender elven sword, Gwathren, drank deeply of the first man’s blood when she slashed open his throat, but the second finished reloading his crossbow and leapt back before she could strike him down.

  A more seasoned soldier might have had the poise to fire and kill her, but this man looked as terrified as if he were fighting his first battle. His hands trembled as his fingers searched for the trigger, and that heartbeat of hesitation was all Serrane needed. Lunging forward, she smacked the oversized weapon at its base with the flat of her blade, shifting his aim and forcing him to fire uselessly into the sky. His jaw sagged in horror when he understood his fate, but she was long past the point of offering mercy to the Inquisitrix’s toadies. She plunged Gwathren straight into his gut, stared into his eyes as blood frothed over his lips, then kicked him away and sprinted back to Mannick.

  The constable was barely moving. Her free hand flashed with Aetheric energy as she called a healing spell to her fingertips and crouched over him, but by the time she touched the quarrels jutting out of his heaving chest, she knew it was already too late.

  “For…Highwind,” he gasped, clutching her arm with the last of his strength. “It was all for…”

  The magic dissipated from Serrane’s hand when the constable’s head slumped limply to the ground. She swore under her breath, an elven prayer escaping her lips as she gently closed his eyelids.

  “For Highwind,” she whispered, balling her empty hand into a fist. Another wyvern roared overhead a second later, blasting the roof of a nearby building with a salvo of fireballs. This battle was far from over, and if she couldn’t find Julian soon…

  Leaping back to her feet, Serrane dashed off down the street to join the fray.

  ***

  I did this. My thirst for vengeance did this. The Fount was never meant to be opened. The power inside was never meant to be unleashed!

  Inquisitrix Marcella’s gauntlets crackled with electricity, but she was no longer in control of her own body. The Godsoul she had freed from beneath Nol Krovos—the Godsoul she had once commanded—had swept her consciousness aside and claimed her body as its vessel. She could feel its hunger and desperation to feed upon the Eternal Priestess; she could feel its rage at the mortals who had dared imprison it within the walls of the Pale.

  She could feel its exhilaration that now, after an eon of darkness, it was finally about to be free.

  The Godsoul thrust out her hands and unleashed a burst of Aetheric energy that blasted apart the sanctuary doors in a single strike. Grinning, it summoned her fallen blade back to her hand as if her gauntlet were a magnet, then strode through the cloud of dust and smoke. Marcella wasn’t the least bit surprised to see that the sanctuary on the other side was completely empty aside from a single feminine figure wrapped in a scant black robe. She was cowering behind the altar on the elevated stage at the far end of the room.

  “The child who dares to call herself a priestess,” the Godsoul said through Marcella’s voice. “You have something that belongs to me.”

  “Stay back!” the girl shrieked, her dark green eyes glancing past Marcella to the bodies strewn across the hall in her wake. “Or I will—”

  “You will do nothing but cower and die,” the Godsoul said, striding forward past the empty rows of polished wooden pews. “Your knights are all but broken, and the dragon will soon be consumed by his own fury. There is no one left to protect you.”

  Her back to the wall, the girl glanced back and forth across the chapel as if searching for something—anything—she could possibly use as a weapon. Her fear seemed to feed the Godsoul’s hunger, and it summoned another surge of Aetheric energy to Marcella’s hands as it stepped up onto the elevated stage. Marcella’s hand flicked to the side, smashing the altar with another burst of telekinetic force and ripping it out of the floor like a tree torn from the ground by the winds of a hurricane.

  “You don’t even understand the nature of what you carry inside you,” the Godsoul sneered. “You honestly believe you’re the chosen vessel for some goddess of whores?”

  The girl’s face twisted, and she finally squared her shoulders as she realized there was nowhere to go. “I am a priestess of the Eternal Lady,” she said defiantly. “When she returns, she will purify this world of evil and—”

  The Godsoul laughed: a harsh, hollow sound that echoed unnaturally. “The ‘Eternal Lady?’ If only you could hear yourself. You are a tether to this world for a shattered soul, nothing more. I can feel her consciousness inside you, broken and twisted and corrupted from an eternity locked inside the Betrayers’ prison. Only I can restore her mind and her memories—only I can make the gods whole again.”

  The girl shook her head. “You’re mad.”

  “Madness is a world that grants mortals the power to rule without cost or consequences,” the Godsoul said. “Madness is allowing sorcerers to reign unchecked. Do you not understand? These knights you empower—they owe you their unquestioned fealty. If they misuse their magic, you can strip it away. You can ensure their righteousness and punish their sins. That is the world I am going to rebuild—a world of justice and temperance where the virtuous rule and the wicked suffer.”

  “But the men you’ve butchered were honorable and just!” Tahira growled. “And you slaughtered them!”

  The Godsoul scoffed. “The Silver Fist has been a blight upon the Reaches for generations. Do not mistake their lust for power as virtue. Their Order is decadent and corrupt, and they know as little about the being they claim to serve as your pathetic sisterhood. These ‘paladins’ must be purged in righteous flame.”

  The girl shook her head and set her jaw. “No. I w
ill not let you destroy them. I will not let you destroy this city!”

  The Godsoul paused and smiled. Even trapped behind her own eyes, Marcella couldn’t help but appreciate the priestess’s resolve. She had expected a weak, waifish whore, and the girl certainly looked the part. Her slender arms had clearly never lifted a sword, and she had the pale, unblemished skin of a noblewoman who rarely set foot outside. Yet somehow, she had defeated two Senosi Huntresses, and she was showing more of a backbone in the face of death than most of the paladins Marcella’s forces had killed these past few months.

  “If you had lived in Vorsalos, you might have made a worthy Senosi,” the Godsoul said. “You are stronger than I expected. It’s almost a shame the harvest will kill you.”

  “Stay back!” Tahira hissed.

  The Godsoul stretched out Marcella’s left arm and opened her hand. Aetheric energy crackled across her claws. “I doubt it’s much consolation, but your power will save more lives than these knights ever could. I will try to make this as painless as—”

  The Godsoul never finished the sentence. The red tattoo on the priestess’s bare stomach began to glow angrily, and her feet suddenly lifted off the ground. She hung suspended in the air, the Aether swirling around her like an invisible tempest. Her eyes exploded in green light as if she were a Senosi—

  And then she struck. Two brilliant beams of energy erupted from her eyes and blasted Marcella’s body. The Godsoul controlling her barely had time to conjure a barrier before the scorching rays could incinerate its mortal vessel, but the blast was so powerful that it still struck the magical shield with the force of a ballista bolt. The Godsoul planted Marcella’s feet and tried to hold its ground, but her boots still slid across the stage inch by inch…

  Just as the barrier threatened to shatter, the beams vanished. The priestess dropped to the ground in a breathless heap, and when her eyes returned to normal and locked onto Marcella, they widened in existential dread.