Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  “A world your people left for a reason,” said Kit soothingly. “If you—”

  The claw-broker spat on the fire. “Kaksara!”

  Clay didn’t know many druic curse words, but he knew that one, and he took insult on behalf of Kit’s long-departed mother. Clay’s heart started to pound. The blood in his veins ran hot, and his right hand flexed, itching to feel the familiar weight of Blackheart’s grip. There was violence coming. He could feel it in the air, foreboding as clouds before a summer storm.

  The druin was still seated, but he seemed menacing nonetheless. The light from the fire seemed to throw his shadow in every direction. One of his hands, Clay saw, had curled around the haft of his whitewood staff.

  “Give up the sword,” said Shadow, “or I will take it, and do Lastleaf the favour of killing you besides. It may be that his vision exceeds our own. The Dominion had its time, and now the Courts. Perhaps the age of fey and fell things is at hand.”

  “Here we go,” said Matrick, groaning as he got to his feet.

  Moog was already rifling through his pack. “Friggin rabbits,” he muttered. “So friggin dramatic all the time …”

  Sabbatha’s gauntlets curled into fists. Ganelon remained where he was, patient as a mountain in the breath before an avalanche. Clay dipped his shoulder, and Blackheart fell into his right hand, while his left grazed the ice-cold haft of his hammer.

  Gabriel, finally, climbed wearily to his feet. “Listen, we don’t have to—”

  “Yes,” said Shadow, “we do.” He bolted upright, staff in hand, and Clay watched as a swirl of inky blue smoke revealed the wicked white blade at its head, concealed until now by what he could only assume was subtle druin sorcery.

  It wasn’t a staff, after all. It was a scythe.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The Spirit Beneath the Skin

  So the scythe was worrying. It appeared to be made of bone, possibly the wing of something the size of a horse. But more troublesome still was Shadow’s other, more unconventional weapon.

  He loosed a breath that tore like a gale through the smoke above the fire. It blew past Gabriel and took on a form of its own, the same shape and size as Gabe himself, also bearing a massive sword that looked solid enough as it arced toward Gabriel’s head.

  Vellichor came free of its sheath in a blur of starlit night, dispelling the shade-figure the moment the two blades met, but already the druin was gesturing toward one of the smoking wards he’d set up around the perimeter of the camp. It raked through Ganelon and coalesced into a murky double of the deadly southerner.

  Clay heard Matrick groan, “Oh hell no.”

  “He’s mine,” growled Ganelon, springing toward the shade of himself. It flew to meet him, and when their axes met the phantom not only remained intact, it chopped a grey hand into Ganelon’s throat and sent him staggering.

  Sabbatha dared a leap toward Shadow, ducking the scythe’s first swing and dancing wide of the second. Matrick lunged from the opposite side, but the druin turned and lobbed a plume of smoke straight into his face. Momentarily blinded, Matrick sketched a defensive skein between him and Shadow, which did nothing to protect him from the apparition behind him. One dark knife opened a gash in his shoulder, while the other barely missed his ribs as he twisted in pain.

  Clay saw the druin glance in his direction. Too late, he turned to see the smoke from another ward sweep toward him. Like an idiot, he braced behind his shield, and so managed to avoid being rendered blind by the gust. When he turned it was slowly, with a kind of shame, to face off against the spectre of himself.

  “Hi,” he said lamely. His shade said nothing as it unslung the hammer at its hip. Clay sighed. “It’s gonna be like that, is it?”

  Gabe, meanwhile, was fighting off phantoms as fast as Shadow could make them. Vellichor alone seemed able to dispel them with a single stroke. Ganelon was locked in a fierce melee with his own, while Moog, yelping and springing this way and that, had managed to elude the druin’s attempts to double him.

  But really, Clay had time to wonder as his spectre sized him up, what harm could a phantom-Moog do?

  Matrick was scrambling from his own doppelganger, entirely on the defensive, which left Sabbatha alone to deal with the druin.

  Or not entirely alone.

  Kit staggered toward Shadow, wielding the only weapon he had to hand: his precious batingting, the scourge of phoenixkind. The druin, whose innate ability to glimpse the immediate future would be infallible against something so slow as a lurching ghoul, dodged fluidly and lashed out with the scythe, severing all one hundred and four strings of the world’s only batingting at once with a sound like glass chimes shattering.

  “This is exactly why I don’t get involved in this sort of thing,” Kit grumbled before a kick from Shadow sent him sprawling.

  “Umbra,” said Shadow, tipping the scythe’s blade so it gleamed like pearl in the moonlight. “A less elegant weapon than Vellichor, perhaps.” He kicked one half of the destroyed batingting toward Sabbatha’s feet. “But it gets the job done.”

  Clay’s shadow-self finally summoned its courage and charged, leading with its shield. Clay met it with his own, swinging his hammer at the phantom’s left side. The phantom, unsurprisingly, did exactly the same thing, and Clay winced as he felt the blow land. The chain links of his armour soaked up most of the damage, but his ribs warned him not to let it happen again. He and his double each launched another strike—hammers bounced from the faces of black shields—and then stepped back to assess one another.

  “This might take all day,” Clay muttered.

  He saw Moog leap on the back of Matrick’s shade, buying time for Matrick to swipe the dust from his eyes. By the time he did the wizard had suffered an elbow to the face and a nasty cut on his forearm, which spurred Matrick into a rage. He attacked in a frenzy, and as Moog stumbled away Matrick and his phantom exchanged a flurry of swipes and stabs so fast Clay could see nothing but a blur of steel and shade between them.

  Ganelon grunted in pain as his shade opened a gash on his cheek. Sharp as Syrinx was, he was lucky to have kept his jaw at all. Beyond belief, however, he was grinning, and his expression only brightened as he and the illusory Ganelon hurled themselves at each other.

  Shade-Clay came on again, this time leading with the hammer. Clay’s first instinct was to offer up his shield, weather the blow, then try to counter with one of his own. It was what his double—being the pragmatic sort of doppelganger—would no doubt expect.

  So instead Clay swung his own hammer, striking the phantom’s weapon with a shrill ring that pierced his ears and sent a tremor up his arm. It was an awkward move, leaving them both unbalanced, but Clay, at least, had been expecting it. He recovered first, ramming Blackheart’s rim up beneath the phantom’s chin. Its head snapped backward, and Clay murmured an apology as he brought Wraith arcing down into the thing’s face.

  It broke like a log turned to char, and was gone.

  A yelp drew him round in time to see Moog trip over the ettin’s out-flung arm. Dane came awake with a snort, and Gregor mumbled groggily as they sat up. “Is it morning already?”

  Clay looked from the ettin to Shadow, who was already in motion. The druin tore open one of the sacks at his waist and lobbed a handful of grainy dust into the air. Thankfully, Moog had gained his feet and was standing between Shadow and the ettin, but when he saw Shadow take a breath he sprang out of the way.

  “Moog, wait!” Clay called, too late.

  Shadow exhaled. The dust-cloud enveloped the bewildered ettin, and Clay’s heart sank. It took an effort to keep his knees from buckling, to not simply close his eyes and wait for the world to bash his brain open—because it was oh-so-obvious that it wanted to, or else why in the Frost Mother’s unspeakable name did this sort of shit keep happening to him?

  The phantom that took shape behind Gregor and Dane was monstrous. The first thing it did was reach down and knock the two heads of the ettin together, rendering t
hem unconscious.

  Of course that happened, thought Clay sourly. He shook his head, trying to comprehend how a single druin had got the better of five men, one woman, a ghoul, and half a giant.

  “Clay.” Gabriel’s hand was on his shoulder. “I’ve got this.”

  Clay scoffed. “You’ve got that?”

  “Go help Lark—” Gabe stopped himself. “Go stop Shadow. Knock him out, pin him down—but try not to kill him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because once we kill Lastleaf he might be the only druin left alive,” said Gabriel. He took off running, leapt over what remained of the fire, and rolled beneath the massive phantom’s swiping hand. Vellichor hewed into the creature’s leg. It stumbled, but even the fabled blade couldn’t hope to dispel a shade so huge with a single slash.

  Clay spared a glance for Ganelon (forced by his shade through a gap in the outer wall) and Matrick (sweating and sparring furiously against his own double) before rushing to Sabbatha’s aid. The daeva was backed against the ruined fort, ducking as the bone scythe struck shards from the brick above her head.

  Shadow was turning just as Clay hit him from behind. The druin weighed so little Clay found he’d misjudged his momentum. They both pitched forward—which was fortunate, since Shadow hit the wall, spun, and brought the scythe across where Clay’s head might have been were he not facedown on the ground with a mouthful of dirt. Sabbatha seized the opening, stepping in to deliver a steel-shod punch that Shadow somehow managed to dodge. Her fist cracked stone as if it were dry plaster.

  “Fuck,” she swore, but before she could try again Shadow darted past her, shifting his hold on the scythe and levelling it for another swing.

  Clay surged to his feet just as the druin attacked. He thrust Blackheart toward the tip of the scythe and was relieved when it didn’t split the shield down the middle. It did pierce through, however: he could see the pale glint of its tip just inches from his grip. Clay tilted Blackheart abruptly, wrenching the scythe from Shadow’s grip.

  “No!” The druin dove frantically for his weapon, but Clay stamped down on the haft, grinning like a village bully as his enemy tried in vain to retrieve it.

  “Hey,” he said, prompting Shadow to look up at him. When he did Clay swung his hammer backhanded, catching the druin alongside the head and laying him out cold. Clay turned to Sabbatha. “You okay?”

  The daeva was leaning against the wall. Her eyes were wide with fear and fury. “Thanks to you,” she replied through gritted teeth.

  Clay nodded once, his feet already taking him toward the open courtyard, where Gabriel was giving ground against the ettin’s hulking shade. The thing was moving terribly fast, and Gabe couldn’t hope to keep up with it for long.

  Just then a heavy punch clipped Gabe and sent him stumbling into the rim of the ancient fountain. He inadvertently avoided the phantom’s next swing as he went spilling over the ledge. The statue shattered overhead, raining stones and dust.

  Clay raced past Matrick and his double just as Moog hurled a chunk of old masonry at the king’s shade. The shade used a pommel to smash the piece in half, leaving itself open to Matrick’s attack. The daggers darted in, staggering it, and then Matrick unleashed what remained of his energy, his hands a blur as he savaged the thing with a barrage of killing slices. It dropped a moment before Matrick did, and neither of them were getting up anytime soon.

  Gabe was on his feet, but barely. He managed to fend off one of the phantom-ettin’s attacks, but was grievously out of position as its other fist rose to pummel him.

  Clay decided to yell, but then realized he was already yelling. The phantom half-turned in alarm, so when he hurled himself into the side of its knee it toppled awkwardly, pinning him to the ground beneath one of its legs. He craned his neck in time to see Gabriel launch himself from the fountain’s edge.

  Vellichor was clasped in two hands, the stars of an ancient world visible beyond the blade. It came chopping down, and Clay felt the body above him jolt as both the phantom-ettin’s heads were sheared away at once. The hulking shade crumbled into an astonishingly small pile of dust, and for a few breaths Clay simply lay on his back without worrying whether or not something or someone was still trying to kill him. He heard a distant clang, then another, and suddenly remembered seeing Ganelon and his doppelganger spilling out through a breach in the wall. He forced himself to rise. Nearby, Gabriel was doing the same.

  His friend flashed him a jaded grin. “How’s your back feeling now?”

  “Broken, I think,” Clay replied, but still he staggered toward the sound of fighting. He heard Gabriel follow, clearly exhausted, his sword scraping on the ruined flagstones behind him.

  If Matrick and his double had looked like a pair of sparring cats, Ganelon and his phantom were tigers, prowling in circles, conserving their energy for brief, brutal attacks that left one bloody and the other oozing wisps of black smoke.

  Clay and Gabriel drew up short, neither in a hurry to enter the fray. You didn’t stand between the surf and the sheer cliff, did you? Or step between two charging bulls and pick a side. You simply stood and watched, because to intervene was pointless and very obviously stupid. Nevertheless, Clay hoisted his shield and prepared to do just that.

  But then Ganelon glanced over, stopping Clay in his tracks. Clay, in turn, held out an arm to stop Gabriel, and when his friend opened his mouth to ask why he told him, “Don’t bother. I think it’s over.”

  By the time he looked back it had already begun: Ganelon sprang forward, Syrinx chopping in sideways. The phantom matched the swing with one of his own; metal screamed and sparks bloomed like fireworks through which Ganelon was already moving, shouldering his opponent off balance as he whirled with the momentum of his deflected axe, slashing in from the opposite side. The double was already moving to defend itself—because it was, after all, a mirror of the man with whom it fought.

  But what does a mirror know? What can it show us of ourselves? Oh, it might reveal a few scars, and perhaps a glimpse—there, in the eyes—of our true nature. The spirit beneath the skin. Yet the deepest scars are often hidden, and though a mirror might reveal our weakness, it reflects only a fraction of our strength.

  Ganelon had been born into slavery. He’d watched as his mother was flayed to death, and had murdered seven men a day after his eleventh birthday. He’d crossed the desert on foot, without food or water, gorging himself on the flesh and blood of vultures foolish enough to think him dead. He’d hacked his way out of a sand maw’s belly and slashed his way into a castle guarded by four hundred men. He’d killed 2 gorgons, 4 giants, 17 harpies, 1,978 kobolds (which accounted for nearly 1 percent of the entire kobold population) and had slain an innumerable legion of awful things besides. Oh, and he’d killed a chimera pretty much by himself. Ganelon had spent nineteen years frozen in the dark, alone but for his festering thoughts, counting dust motes as a nomad counts stars on an endless journey.

  The phantom, however, had done none of these things, and so when Ganelon poured not only his strength, but his power into the blow that followed, Syrinx smashed through the southerner’s shade as though it were a spiderweb made of glass. It shattered into smoke and was instantly, utterly, destroyed.

  Which left Clay wondering why the fuck Ganelon hadn’t simply done that in the first place. He might even have been foolish enough to ask had Moog not shouted suddenly from inside the fort.

  “Larkspur, wait!”

  Gabe’s face went pale. “Did he just say—”

  “He did,” Clay confirmed, already slogging back through the breach in the wall.

  It was dark in the courtyard, save for the smouldering fire and the eerie blue light of the forest moon. Moog was sitting on the ground beside Matrick, and Clay followed the aim of his out-flung arm to where Shadow was awake and on all fours, spitting out blood and a handful of jagged teeth. To where, more worrying, the daeva stood over him with the scythe in her hands.

  Larkspur, or Sabbatha (Clay wasn�
��t sure which of the two he was looking at now), reached out and closed her metal talons around the druin’s sagging ears, yanking him upright. There was wild fear in Shadow’s face, the horror of an immortal gazing into the empty void of oblivion. He opened his mouth as if to scream, but only gaped in terror.

  “Sabbatha!” Clay shouted. He saw her hooded eyes flicker toward him for one instant, but in the next the wicked bone blade lashed out, beheading one of the very last druins the world would ever know.

  Chapter Forty

  Cinnamon Smoke

  Clay had endured a great many uncomfortable meals in his life, most of which had come during the past months alone: supper with Kallorek and Valery, breakfast with Lilith and Matrick’s host of illegitimate children, cold eggs and sausage on the morning Jain had robbed them (for the second time), not to mention a banquet hosted by cannibals. This particular breakfast, however, was chief among them.

  They ate dry biscuits and jam, though Clay suspected the biscuits had been made with salt in place of flour, and the jam was filled with bitter seeds, one of which had lodged itself between two of his teeth and was threatening to hang up curtains.

  Moog brewed tea and then settled down to pore over the contents of Shadow’s many pouches. Gregor and Dane sat together (as if they had any choice in the matter) and discussed the curious dream they’d shared the night before. Matrick wolfed down his food before promptly falling back asleep, while Ganelon didn’t bother to get up at all. Kit sat cross-legged beside the fire, staring down morosely at the broken halves of his batingting.

  Clay felt bad for the ghoul’s loss, but considering he’d discovered yesterday that the adversary against which the band had pitted themselves was in fact the Heathen himself, the loss of an instrument—even a rare one—seemed a petty thing.

  Gabriel had buried Shadow at dawn, using Vellichor’s rounded blade to dig a shallow grave in the crumbling earth of the courtyard. Clay wondered if Vespian would have minded the legendary sword being used as a shovel this one time.