Truth be told, it wasn’t the worst helmet Clay had seen. He might even have said it suited the druin in a splendid-sylvan-prince sort of way.
“Gabriel,” Lastleaf called down from the wyvern’s back. He gestured with a pale hand at the battle raging everywhere but their immediate vicinity. “I assume this is your doing?”
Gabe shook his head. “I wasn’t the one who summoned an army in the first place,” he said. “I didn’t lay siege to Castia, or threaten the Courts with annihilation if they dared to intervene. This is your doing, Lastleaf. Or would you prefer I called you Heathen?”
The druin’s air of conceit vanished like that of a debt-ridden king confronted by his creditors. He opened his mouth to speak, but then his mismatched eyes fell upon the scythe Larkspur had planted like a flag in the blood-soaked earth. Clay saw a slew of emotions warring beneath the Heathen’s calm façade, but they remained below, subtle as sharks in shallow water.
“Ashatan,” he said, and the wyvern bowed beneath him. The druin dropped to the ground, ducked beneath the arch of a leathery wing, then reached behind him and withdrew the topmost sword from its scabbard. Clay had seen this one before, at Lindmoor. Scorn, Shadow had called it: obsidian black, laced with molten fissures, so hot it folded the air around it with shimmering heat. In the same moment the matriarch loosed a screeching roar that reeked of rancid blood and made Clay’s skin crawl with primal fear.
While her thralls rushed Lastleaf all at once, Larkspur looked to the sky, which was Clay’s first clue that it was about to come crashing down upon them.
A brood of black wyverns was plummeting from the grey clouds above, a twisting, shrieking spiral of wings and claws and snapping jaws that touched down like a cyclone in their midst. The daeva sprang away as one hit Ganelon with the force of a collapsing roof. The warrior let go his axe and howled as the raptor’s clenching talons tried squeezing him to pulp. Larkspur came out of a roll near her planted scythe, tore it free, and leapt to Ganelon’s defense.
Thankfully, the spectacle drew a whole company of mercs to the clearing. Vanguard was among them, and so were Barret’s sons and the other Wight Nights. Aric Slake, who Clay had last seen losing a card game in the Riot House, rammed his spear, Hawkwind, deep into a wyvern’s breast. Jorma Mulekicker, whose right eye was now a bloody hole, charged into the fray, and May Drummond, who had apparently survived being trampled by a boar after all, limped by his side.
Clay returned his attention to Lastleaf in time to see the druin plunge Scorn into the earth before him. The blade’s bright fissures drained to black, and the ground beneath the charging thralls detonated. Slabs of stone and red-robed bodies exploded skyward on a swell of splashing magma. Those who weren’t thrown clear staggered, some pitching into pools of molten rock. One monk tried without success to escape his burning robes, while another floundered helplessly in foot-deep lava. Clay swallowed a surge of bile as he watched the man disintegrate before his eyes.
Lastleaf left the searing sword buried in the ground and was reaching for Madrigal’s scabbard when one of Larkspur’s more dextrous thralls got close enough to throw a punch aimed where the druin’s throat should have been. There was a warbling sound as the second sword sang loose, and the monk was rewarded for his effort with a cleanly severed arm.
The man tottered, not quite dead, until the Heathen shoved him backward into the molten pool.
Matrick was on his back beneath another of the matriarch’s brood, squirming from its talons, rolling clear of its stabbing tail, and jamming his knives up into its belly every chance he got.
Clay spotted Moog retreating from a trio of yellow-eyed orcs. He almost headed over to help, but the wizard pulled a weapon from his bag that looked like a blue staff and a white staff had been locked together in a closet with the lights off. Clay recognized the Twining Staff immediately as one of the few magic items Moog had crafted himself and could have pitied the orcs for what was about to happen. The wizard gripped the staff with both hands, shouted a string of esoteric gibberish, and then held on for dear life as the Twining Staff began beating the living shit out of the three unfortunate orcs.
Larkspur, meanwhile, relieved the wyvern attacking Ganelon of its head, shearing through its neck with Umbra’s sickle blade. The warrior rolled free of its grasp—dazed, but not outwardly harmed—and scrambled to retrieve his axe.
Mere heartbeats had passed since the black brood attacked, but Clay felt exceptionally useless for squandering them, so he was almost relieved when Lastleaf’s voice demanded his attention.
“What else did Shadow tell you?”
The Heathen was stepping slowly around the glowing pothole between them. His eyes never left Gabriel, even when Deckart Clearwater came out of nowhere and swung his double-hafted hammer at his head.
He’s got a chance, thought Clay, since surprising a druin was the only sure way to offset the prescience, but Lastleaf stepped just ahead of the blow. In one fluid motion he turned, long blade whistling, and chopped Deckart into halves.
For a moment it looked as though Gabe might rush him, trying (likely in vain) to catch the Heathen off guard, but Lastleaf was too far away still, and Gabriel had never been one to shy from a little prefight banter if it meant a chance to mentally unbalance his opponent. Clay wasn’t confident that was an option here, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
“He told me about your mother,” said Gabriel. “About the sword your father made to bring her back from the dead. He said you stole it from him.”
Clay’s eyes wafted to the bone-white scabbard on the druin’s back.
Tamarat.
“I nearly killed him with it,” said Lastleaf. “You’d think he’d have happily given his life for that of the woman he claimed to love. But instead he fled and found you.”
A snuffing sound urged Clay to look past Gabe’s shoulder. A minotaur had found its way clear of the larger melee and into the clearing. In paintings such monsters were always rendered as huge, hulking beasts, but in truth they were a head shorter than most men, which was probably why they had such famously short tempers. They also, for reasons even a scholar like Moog could only speculate on, intensely despised the colour red, which just so happened to be the colour of Clay’s armour.
This one was missing a horn and sported a wound in its abdomen that would probably kill it within the hour, but in the meantime it appeared to be sizing Clay up for an attack. With nothing but a shield to hand, there wasn’t much Clay could do but watch his friend’s back, so he edged nearer to Gabe’s shoulder and kept an eye on the beast in his periphery.
“The truth is,” said Lastleaf, who was getting dangerously close now, “Vespian didn’t make the sword for my mother’s sake. He made it for his own. So he wouldn’t be alone. So he wouldn’t have to—”
“Shut up,” said Gabriel, deliberately provoking. He inched his left foot ahead of him, turned his right boot outward. His knuckles went white on Vellichor’s grip.
The Heathen, just strides away now, looked suddenly irritated. “It wasn’t Tamarat my father was after. It was me. If he had taken it from me—”
“Shut up,” Gabe repeated, smiling now.
“He would have killed me with it,” the druin sputtered, “to bring her back.”
“Nobody cares,” said Gabriel, who was better than anyone Clay had ever known at pissing people off—and sure enough, Lastleaf’s affected cool dissolved in an instant.
Clay was (yet again) trying to wrap his mind around the fact that the Winter Queen was real—that she would have been resurrected if Vespian had actually managed to kill his son with Tamarat—when the druin surged forward, and the fight that could very well decide the outcome of the entire battle—and possibly the fate of humankind along with it—began in earnest.
Which was, of course, the same moment that stupid runt of a minotaur lowered his head and took a run at Clay.
Chapter Fifty-two
Sheer Dumb Luck
Vellichor carved a swathe of
waist-high, windblown grass as it rose to meet the druin’s singing sword, and the two blades met with a sound like glass breaking. Clay moved into the space behind Gabe, aware that several more blows were being exchanged just beyond his shoulder. When the charging minotaur was just strides away he stepped out to meet it, angling Blackheart so the beast bounced off and went careening toward Lastleaf.
The Heathen leapt out of its path, muttering a curse in druic as his sword quietly echoed at his side. The minotaur’s stumbling momentum took it right into the lava pit. It succeeded in getting an arm down before falling in, but bellowed in wordless agony as the limb turned to char and its mane caught fire.
Gabriel blinked, sparing a glance at Clay. “Thanks.”
Clay shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“Did you know,” said Lastleaf, as casually as if the three of them were rocking in chairs on a sun-dappled porch, “my father told me once that to die by Vellichor’s blade is the only way our kind can return to our own realm.”
Clay recalled Shadow saying something to that effect back in the Heartwyld. It is a key, he’d told them, without realizing the only door it opened was death itself.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” said Gabriel.
The Heathen’s harsh laughter pealed into the air above the battlefield. “I think not,” he said liltingly.
Gabe feinted low, drawing Lastleaf’s blade humming toward his knees, but when Vellichor stabbed suddenly high the druin turned so the edge missed his face by inches. By then the Heathen’s own weapon was slicing toward Gabriel’s side. Clay managed to get Blackheart in its path, and gasped when Madrigal sheared a corner of his shield right off.
“Son of a bitch,” Clay swore, and then yelped as Gabriel shoved him hard.
The Heathen’s sword went shinging through what would have been Clay’s neck had Clay not been tumbling backward onto his ass.
A thought struck him suddenly, for no reason, and was of no use whatsoever except to explain why a piece of his most treasured possession was lying near his feet: The noise his sword makes … it’s cutting the air. His next thought was more of an observation, really: Gabe just saved your life.
Currently Gabriel was trying to save his own. With no one else to steal his focus, Lastleaf was pressing the attack, using the prescience to anticipate his rival’s every move. The Heathen’s sword was a howling blur, ringing in rapid succession against Vellichor as Gabe relied on instinct alone to defend himself.
From the ground it was hard to tell whether or not the battle was going in their favour. More than half of the matriarch’s brood were dead, but so was Aric Slake, whose head was admiring his body from several feet away. He saw May Drummond die (again) on the tip of a wyvern’s tail.
An unfortunate side effect of Moog’s Twining Staff was that once it was done clobbering one’s enemies it more often than not turned on whoever was holding it, at least until its enchantment wore off. The wizard was currently locked in mortal combat with his own weapon as each of them attempted to throttle the other into submission.
Matrick had somehow got himself onto the wyvern matriarch’s back. He was straddling one of Ashatan’s wings and attempting to push a dagger between her black iron scales. Ashatan herself was preoccupied by Larkspur, who scored a deep gash in the matriarch’s head before taking to the sky. The wyvern roared again and vaulted up after her, forcing Matrick to abandon his efforts to harm her and simply hold on for the ride.
Clay didn’t see Ganelon until Syrinx was cutting a seemingly inevitable path toward the Heathen’s midsection. Warned by the prescience, Lastleaf turned at the last second and brought his sword chopping down with enough strength to spin the axe sideways before it hit him.
It still hit him, though.
The blow drew a breathless grunt from the druin. He lost his grip on Madrigal and was thrown several yards through the air, yet somehow managed to land skidding on the soles of his feet. His helmet had been knocked askew, so Lastleaf tore it off and tossed it behind him.
Watching it bounce away, Clay was shocked to see the minotaur who’d charged him earlier climbing doggedly to its feet. Its mane was singed to stubble, and its left arm fizzled at the elbow in a cauterized stump, but it seemed hell-bent on getting back in the fight.
Clay was more immediately concerned by the fact that Lastleaf was pulling the straps of all three scabbards over his head. He let the two empty scabbards fall and curled his long fingers around the hilt of his third and final sword.
“The gorgon told me why you’ve come,” he said to Gabriel, who was using this brief respite to try to catch his breath. “If I kill you I will find her, this daughter of yours. I’ll make certain she suffers.”
It was Ganelon who answered, green eyes glaring over the edge of his axe. “If,” he said.
The Heathen’s sneer wavered, but so far as Clay could tell it had less to do with the warrior’s remark than with the prospect of unsheathing Tamarat. Lastleaf’s hands were trembling, his white-furred ears pressed flat. He seemed genuinely reluctant to draw it, and Clay wondered if he’d had cause to do so since the day he’d used it to defend himself from his even more monstrous father.
But then Ganelon took a step toward him and Lastleaf had no choice but to pull Tamarat out for all to see.
Except that Clay couldn’t see it—not really.
His mind told him the blade was black, a colourless void, as empty as a sky without stars. But when he looked into it there was simply … nothing there. Whereas Vellichor served as a window to a realm beyond this one, Tamarat was a fragment of utter oblivion.
Clay hoped to hell Ganelon could see it, because the Heathen took two running steps and leapt, snarling, at the warrior, his blade a black smear against the sky. Gabriel moved to Ganelon’s left side, leading with Vellichor’s bright edge and forcing Lastleaf to fight on two fronts.
Let’s make it three, thought Clay, surging to his feet, determined to help in whatever way he could. He hoisted his shield—
The minotaur hit him like a wagon full of rocks rolling downhill. Clay saw the battlefield blur, and the next moment he was slewing sideways on the ground. His ears were ringing, his jaw ached, and Clay wondered whether or not he’d hit his head—he couldn’t remember, so probably yes.
“You fucking—” he managed to say before his assailant fell on top him. The beast was surprisingly heavy for something half his height and missing most of an arm. Its bloody snout pressed wetly against his mouth, and Clay’s nostrils filled with the scent of burnt fur and overcooked cabbage.
Groaning with the effort, he used Blackheart to shove the minotaur aside, and then continued to hammer it with his shield until all but its twitching hooves had stopped moving.
He sat up, disoriented.
Saw Gabe and Ganelon trade strikes too fast to follow with the Autumn Son and his near-invisible sword. Saw Moog holding his staff by the tail as it walloped a flock of reanimated skeletons into ash. Saw Barret stomping on an orc’s head and Tiamax the arachnian cracking a wyvern’s jaws with the strength of six hands.
The stitches in Clay’s face had come open again, and his left cheek was scraped raw. He climbed groggily to his feet, trying to reconcile in his head how he’d spin this story to Tally if he lived to tell it.
What’s that, honey? What was I doing while Uncle Gabe was duelling a god with all of civilization at stake? Why, I was wrestling in the muck with an exceptionally tenacious cow.
He hefted his shield again and hobbled as fast as he could toward the only fight that mattered. He could hardly believe it was still going: Gabriel was among the fastest, most cunning fighters Clay had ever known, and Ganelon was the strongest, fiercest warrior … well, maybe ever.
But Lastleaf had been alive for more than a millennium, and had spent the majority of those years skulking in the Heartwyld, evading the pursuit of his father and imposing his will upon creatures that would give even the most stalwart hero a lifetime of sleepless nights. He wouldn’t go dow
n easily.
He might not go down at all, Clay was thinking, when a rough snort behind him made him turn to see the world’s most obstinate minotaur attempting to rise.
“Oh, c’mon,” he moaned. “Stay down. Just … please, stay down.” He took an involuntary step toward it and the beast whirled on him, glowering with bulging, bloodshot eyes. It snorted again, louder this time, and distinctly more threatening. In another world Clay might have offered to buy it a beer and call it a draw, but it was stamping one cloven hoof and weaving its fire-scarred head from side to side, so instead he squared himself to it and sighed.
He thought briefly of Ganelon and what the warrior had done to those men in Mazala; of Larkspur’s revenge upon the children who’d made her childhood a living hell; of Lastleaf and his war against a Republic built on the blood of so-called monsters; and of himself, who would likely have died a monster if it wasn’t for one woman’s love.
Two women, actually.
“You know what?” Clay said. “Never mind. You are what you are. So come at me.”
Whether the minotaur understood him or not, it charged: broken horned and burnt, one-armed and weaponless; its hooves churned the bloody earth below as it bowed its head.
It would occur to Clay mere moments later that the fights that seemed to matter most weren’t always the ones that did, and that sometimes the fate of worlds was decided by something so arbitrary as sheer dumb luck.
He dropped as the minotaur rammed its hoary head into Blackheart, then rolled onto his back and let the beast’s own impetus propel it into the air, whereupon it, quite unintentionally, blindsided Lastleaf and sent them both pitching headlong into the magma pool.
Clay scrambled onto his stomach just as the druin began screaming, and an instant later the corpse of the wyvern matriarch slammed into the ground nearby like a giant’s hammer. A veil of dust roiled out from where the creature landed, forcing Clay to squint as he rose and shambled over to where Gabe and Ganelon were standing.
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