by Kari Cordis
And she turned her eyes to him. It was the brightness of a thousand campfires, her face, a cleanness so piercing that he felt his knees buckling in shame at his own lack, a vast, timeless, holy power so huge that the petty plays of realms and gods were…nothing… child’s play…
The incandescent power of Il.
“You must not leave my side,” she said, voice throbbing through him like a lance of light.
“I promise,” he whispered brokenly. He would never leave that glory, could never be happy again without seeking it; it captured him with its utter beauty, with its purity and strength. To what else would he go?
Dimly, he felt the hot pain of steel slashing into his left arm, and drew himself reluctantly back from that fountain of life. It took him a minute to clear his head, his body tossing his sword to his freed right hand and beginning to parry strokes without any conscious input from his brain. But he was different, now, changed forever. He had seen such light, such life, such soaring sanctity, that he would never be the same. The carnage, the malice, the evil, the necessity of having to inflict such pain to counter it…sickened him. They were all filth, even him, slimy as mindless worms, imprisoned by their own petty graspings for power and pleasure.
When he was free once more to look around, things had changed in the Hall. There were noticeably less Tarq, for one…but there were hardly any Whiteblades either. Now, just when he could really understand them, they were irrevocably disappearing out of his life.
A few yards to his right, past a quavering Rodge, the Queen of the North had been revived. She was weakly sitting up, struggling to get water swallowed from a skin Cerise was holding. Relief surged through him.
A streak caught his eye and he turned barely in time to see Verrena pelting toward the Triele behind Voral. Her black suede breeches were shiny with blood the entire length of one leg and her pale green blouse had been slit under the black vest. It gapped as she ran, revealing a long, scarlet, globby gash from ribcage to hip on that side. He forced himself to watch, hating it, hating what they were doing, but mostly hating that there was no purpose to it. It might momentarily distract Raemon, but it wasn’t like that served any greater good. The god was still raging at Selah, who was forcefully answering his accusations a few incomprehensible inches from Ari.
But as the Rider vanished forever, Ari noticed yet another development through his sharp sorrow. The steps had been cleared by a conscientious Voral, and he could see that a little pile was forming under the Triele. Dust? Ash? The poignancy of it made him turn his head and look desperately for something else to focus on.
The Hall had been turned into a slaughterhouse. Blood and gore and unseemly parcels of humanity almost obscured the floor—it was a grisly nightmare of man’s best. The room was clear enough that he could pick out individual Whiteblades by the pockets of bodies that still moved, and these were dispersing one by one as the girls began to race for the Triele in a steady stream. There was a pause now, when those bloodied hands grabbed the lethal surface of the stone, a delay before they were incinerated to nothing—and a growing pile of ash. With each one, it took longer and longer, and Ari’s curiosity was morbidly aroused despite the agony of watching each bright, bloodied, beautiful Follower perish.
Finally, when the Tarq numbered no more than a few dozen, Rheine, gloriously and dazzlingly alive, dashed past Voral, the only remaining Whiteblade. Ari’s throat squeezed shut as he watched. But Raemon, who’d been screaming invectives at the Empress, suddenly faded into almost silence as the Chieftess clung to the Triele. The lurid red light slowed, flickered, winked in and out before she vaporized to ash.
Quickly, as if afraid she would lose him, Selah cried, “Where art thou, mighty Raemon? Do you not admit now the folly of this gambit? Will you not—”
“NO!!!” he roared suddenly, back to full life and sounding as formidable as ever. “Do not drive me to ruin thee forever with thy taunts!”
“Now, Warrior!” she cried, her voice a crystalline, clarion trumpet across the horrendous carnage of the battleground. And Voral, slashed with crimson in a hundred different places, pivoted instantly and leaped up the steps to that malignant stone, backswiping the opposition as she went.
It took a long time for her to go, so long Ari had time to pray she felt no pain. She went down on one strong leg, her shining white blade slipping from nerveless fingers, her sweat-soaked, carrot-colored head bowed. It seemed she was keeping her hand in place on the Triele only by great effort; it kept slipping down. Raemon’s voice was completely silent. Ari held his breath. Whatever was happening was momentous; he could feel it shivering up and down his spine.
Then the Ruby Triele of Raemon gave one last, brilliant flash and was black forever. And Voral, last of the Legends of the Swords of Light, vanished into dust.
The ring of Sheelmen gathered around her, afraid to touch her—well, for obvious reasons—looked at each other, then uneasily at the quiescent Triele. Far above their heads the roaring furnace built into the rock fluttered as if in a strong breeze—and unexpectedly went out. A low rumbling began slowly to fill the chamber, and for a minute Ari thought it was Raemon coming back. But it was not an angry black voice that filled the air…it was rocks. One or two at first, seeming to fall from the sky, then a steadier rain of them, some of them as big as a man’s head, accompanied by a shower of finer dust.
“Now, Ari!” the Empress cried victoriously and grabbed his arm, leading him along the rock wall closest to them. She was searching it as if looking for something, peering high and low, fingers brushing it here and there, then moving on. Ari, looking with her, felt the familiar dread rise again. There was nothing here. There was no door, no way out of this chamber. After surviving the onslaught of all those Tarq, after all the Whiteblades—and Rach—that had died to save them, were they to be crushed to death now? Buried under rock and Sheel, lost to the ages? It seemed like the whole ceiling was coming down.
“Here!” she cried, pulling Ari over. He’d seen it—a brief, mysterious red light had flashed across her face, and when he stepped into the same spot, it blinded him for a second, too. But then something else happened. Through all the falling debris, he saw a blackness appear in front of him. A door.
She was shouting to the others; her search had carried her almost up to the steps to the altar at the front of the Hall, and several of the northerner party needed help getting up to where they were. Behind them, the remaining Sheelmen, looking a little lost, got refocused at the sight of the enemy sneaking away. They came in a rush, and Ari sprinted back to help with the rearguard.
Fighting, they backed toward the door, the steelsong muted with all the crashing of rocks and distant bass rumbling from underground. Banion squeezed his bulk through the door with a heave and a grunt, then Melkin, then it was Ari’s turn, Kai snapping at him out of his impassive face, “Go!”
The door opened into a narrow passage, and while Kai dealt with the Tarq close on their heels, someone yanked Ari farther back. The brief, blinding flash of light seared his eyes again, and the door ground gratingly closed. And it was finally, blessedly, quiet.
Melkin was coming towards them from up the passage with a torch, and in its thick yellow light Ari looked at what was left of them. Next to him, Kai was crosshatched with bloody streaks where steel had gotten through the twin blades of his defense. Banion and Melkin and Traive were all scored and bleeding, but moving as if unhurt. Loren leaned weakly on Rodge, right arm heavily bandaged and blood starting to seep through. Cerise, a few feet away, was looking at Ari with wide, traumatized eyes red with weeping. Hardly aware of what he was doing, he gently wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face in his chest, hands pulling his shirt into wads.
After a second, she pulled back, wiped her nose and turned back to the weary monarch sitting at her feet. Ari just shook his head; women were amazing creatures. A man in that state of emotional distress would have been incapacitated for hours. She was back to full efficiency, composedly su
pporting Sable and murmuring soothingly.
It wrenched at Ari’s heart to see Queen Sable. He knew she could walk, but she was painfully thin, her drawn face a parody of the fresh-faced, snapping-eyed sovereign he’d met in Archemounte. At first he thought she was weeping just from her traumatic experience, but in a second, he realized she was sobbing over the body of the Rach leader, who alone of all the bodies had been brought with them.
In the few seconds it had taken for him to assure himself everyone was there, Melkin had reached the group, the acrid reek of the torch covering the stench of sweat and blood.
“Can you Heal him, Empress?” Melkin said. His rough voice was hoarse, raw from smoke and shouting.
Sable, more alert than Ari would have thought, raised her head as the Empress knelt down across from her. Gazing at her with wide eyes, the Queen murmured, “You found her…” then, to her directly, “I thought you were a Statue.”
“It was temporary,” Selah said in her calming voice, fingers flying over the Rach’s muscled, mutilated chest. Peering closer, Ari saw that the ribcage was still lifting, that he still breathed, though faintly. He looked ghastly, the healthy brown skin a sickly grey and the lips purplish blue.
“Please heal him,” Sable pleaded, tears starting afresh. “Please,” she whispered. “It is my fault that he is here.”
“Heal him?” the Empress said. “He shouldn’t even be alive. He’s ruptured a lung, amongst other things.” Her fingers flew over the wreckage of his chest, tearing off strips of cloth from the hem of her tunic, stuffing wounds, binding.
The Rach’s eyes fluttered, shocking them all, and when they opened, Sable leaned over him in a rush, sobbing out words so uncontrollably they were barely comprehensible.
“Kore! Kore!” she cried, “Forgive me, my friend.”
Slowly, out of a very dry-sounding mouth, he formed barely audible words. She went quiet instantly, tears dropping on his lean face.
“He couldn’t come,” he whispered.
Sable bit her lip, whispering back, “Please don’t talk.”
“No, don’t,” the Empress agreed.
“He gave his word…”
“It’s all right, Kore, please save your strength,” she sobbed. He faded into silence, though the chest still moved.
“Please heal him,” she said again, claw-like hand grabbing Selah’s wrist. “You are the Empress.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Selah said gently. “Il heals who He wills. He is not a box we reach into and pull out power to do whatever we want, whenever we want.”
“I know He can do this!” Sable cried. “I have seen His power—felt it! He must…” she choked on her sobs, convulsed suddenly with weeping.
Selah took the hand clutching hers and held it. “We do not demand from Him,” she said, soothing as a mother with a child, “We submit. For love of Il, we submit to His greater wisdom.”
The Queen stopped sobbing like she’d been slapped, slowly raising her head, rank with grease, until her pansy blue eyes were staring into Selah’s.
“We should move,” Kai said restlessly from the door. “They will be searching for us.”
“For love of Il,” Sable whispered brokenly, unwavering gaze still on Selah.
“Let’s make a litter for him,” Selah said, looking pointedly at Banion’s oversized tunic. He began to slip out of it, revealing his shockingly hirsute pectoral region, damp with sweat and blood.
“For love of Il,” Sable said again, sounding stunned. “You’re the Empress,” she murmured, and a suddenly worried Cerise began to say something comforting in her ear, gently rubbing her shoulder.
Selah glanced at her. “I have many names.”
Ari sighed.
“No,” the Queen said, strong enough that everyone glanced at her. “I mean, you are the last Empress, the Empress Karmine, who gave up her throne 2000 years ago…for love of Il.”
Selah paused in sliding Kore onto the makeshift litter, green eyes flying up to meet swimming blue. For a moment their eyes locked.
“I am.”
There was no more time for talk. Melkin and Traive took first turns at the litter, and they all hurried down the passageway. It was immediately apparent that they were in a maze of them, a confusing, directionless web of identical intersecting hallways. Sometimes rooms opened off them, and Selah would poke her head in, give a brief glance around, and then move on. Ari began to worry about getting out. The Rach Kore and Loren were getting weaker all the time. When he relieved Melkin at one end of the litter, the Wolfmaster grunted wearily, almost stumbling as they traded places.
Once they turned down a hall and almost instantly saw torchlight and heard shouted commands from down its length. They turned and rushed back barely in time to avoid being seen—it was only one of several close calls.
They were trapped under leagues of Sheel, in a swarming beehive of angry Tarq, with no idea how to get out. They had traded out at the litter twice more when Ari saw Loren stumble and called out, “Selah, we have to rest!”
She paused in her headlong flight, turning back to scan the bloodied, panting group behind her, and then her face froze, eyes fixed on an open doorway behind Kai. Slowly, mesmerized, she moved towards it, and when everyone moved to see what she was staring at, a half-dozen breaths were sucked in at once.
It was a big room, heated (were these people really that chilled all the time?) and lit by the standard seething red brazier. An enormous table took up most of the room, covered in papers and styluses and measuring sticks. A few chairs had been overturned and the walls were covered in papers full of a weird, angular script in thick black ink. And on the big wall opposite the doorway hung a map that needed no translation. There were a few odd marks on it, a few wooden pieces impaled on key areas, but what lay in the center was what had captured everybody’s attention.
Clearly running from thousands of different sites in the Sheel, joining at the Ramparts, and plunging right into the center of what was obviously the Imperial North, streamed a great, thick, monstrous red arrow.
Ari swallowed, mouth dry.
“Well,” Traive said portentously, “now we know.”
“This is what we were seeking,” Selah said quietly.
“I thought we were seeking a way out,” Rodge muttered, shifting Loren’s weight around on his skinny shoulders.
She turned to look at them all. “And this is no doubt why you all are here. This information must get to the Realms. There may still be time.” She hurried quickly out, but the rest paused for one last look at the violation planned for them before following, Kai grabbing maps off the table as he went.
It was not five minutes later that the passageway dead-ended into a wide, open hallway. Ari and Melkin, who found themselves suddenly out in the middle of it, shrank quickly back to the shadows.
“There!” Melkin said, pointing down the hall. Huge doors gleamed in the reflected light of braziers, a scant two guards at post. The sounds of shouting were everywhere, but none close, and the guards were craning their necks and walking around restlessly, obviously wanting to be part of something a little more exciting.
“I’ve got one,” Cerise said grimly, and pushed through them all, notching an arrow. Kai left with the arrow, reaching his man before the Enemy had even realized his companion had grown fletching.
There was no time for good-byes, for thank-you’s or good-lucks, or for Ari to explain that, by the way, he wouldn’t be coming with them; it was just a rush for the doors already creaking open, Banion and Traive running as quickly as they could with the awkward litter between them. Ari stood desolate as they all left him, feeling maudlin and abandoned until the Empress called him softly from the cover of their narrow passageway. He was standing at the edge, fairly completely exposed, but she only said, “Whenever you’re ready, Ari.”
He was almost thankful to have something to do, his mind a chaos of impressions and sorrows and tragedies and triumphs, crammed full of things he’d never th
ought he’d know. They pelted back down the narrow halls of their secret warren, unencumbered now by those weary from heavy fighting. Selah was looking for something again, dashing down different hallways until Ari was sure they were going around in circles. But she came to a skidding halt at the doorway to a room he knew they hadn’t been to before. A kitchen.
Suddenly ravenous, he dashed into the room, stuffing a fresh-baked roll into his mouth and following it with as much sausage as would fit. His stomach cramped resentfully at his neglect.
“Water, Ari,” Selah whispered urgently, “as much as you can carry.” He followed her pointing finger to a whole rack of waterskins hanging from their straps. He started filling them at the spring in the corner of the room and hanging them around his neck and shoulders until he couldn’t fit anymore. When he stood, thunking like a drum set, Selah was waiting for him with two enormous, bloated bags of food over her shoulders.
He raised his eyebrows and she said, “We’ve got a long way to go.”
He grabbed another roll.
CHAPTER 37
Ari didn’t know how long they walked that first day. There was no way to judge time in the lightless, hewn-rock passages. They were not long out of the kitchen when another red light flashed across Selah’s face and she stopped like she’d run into a wall, eagerly pulling Ari into the space she’d been in. When that door closed behind them, the last sounds of the Sheelmen were left behind. So was any other whisper of life, the silence so deep and pervasive and the passages so empty and echoing that they seemed more like a tomb than a refuge.
It was immediately apparent that they were in a whole different part of Zkag. The walls were not blackened with soot, the charnel smell was all but gone, and the floors were evened and smooth. Very few passages led off of theirs, and soon none at all. There was only the sound of their breathing and Selah’s faint scent and the motion of their bodies in all that endless underground stillness. They saw no one else.
Once the adrenaline wore off, he was exhausted. He could not believe things could change so radically in a day. Last night the Followers had danced a dance of transcendent joy, today they had danced death, and now they would never dance again. Selah, the one bright, happy constant in his life, had become the Legendary Empress of the Ages of War and silenced the Ruby god.