Dropping the sword that failed to kill the man, the soldier turned tail, running for the main door. The corpse dropped his kill to the ground, finally rising on steadying legs just as one, and then another, fell from their ladder into the courtyard.
Marciano heard the main door slamming in place and turned from the frontal assault. "Muster every man you can find. Get them armed, get them prepped," he ordered to the two guards beside him.
"You can't kill what's already dead," the pale one mumbled, his eyes not leaving the man with the crushed larynx.
"We can bloody well try," Marciano said, "now go!"
He threw open the doors to the disturbingly happy scene before him and cried, "We're under attack!" The men dropped whatever they'd been eating and tried to rise, their knees banging against the tables in excitement and terror.
"I need one of you to find boiling oil," he ordered.
"There ain't none in the keep," someone responded back.
Marciano paced, trying to steady his jangling nerves at the idea of being attacked by the corpses of his own men, "Then find something, anything that burns. I don't give a shit if it's this morning's spackle oatmeal."
"Sir?" The men didn't move, registering the terror in their General's face. This was a man who faced down a pair of Dunlaw assassins wearing nothing but a towel and armed with a straight razor. To see him shaken was to break every man there.
"Go!" he ordered, pointing towards the door. The men scattered, afraid to look back. There was no way, no time to explain to his men that they'd be fighting unblinkers. Gods, how...
He squared his shoulders, anything that can die once can damn well die again. They'd find a way and they'd tell tales of this for decades to come. Marciano stalked across the small hall to the stairs, when a blast shook the entire tower. Feet failed to find purchase and he stumbled hard into a candle alcove. The ringing ricocheted through the stairwell, every stone echoing a piece back. His vision blurred and for a second he could taste purple.
As soon as the moment came, it passed. The ringing faded to nothing and the world slipped back into focus. Marciano dashed back to the balcony, his eyes hunting over the unblinkers -- now numbered in the dozens -- pacing below, trying to claw and bash their way into the door. Then a strange light pulled his eyes heavenward. Craning his neck out over the edge, he struggled to find the Tower's crest and a haunting purple light blazed from every window in the observation tower.
"Vasska," he muttered. It had to be him, the one behind walking dead and shaking towers. Unsheathing his blade, he climbed up the stairs while the rest of his platoon raced down, trying to barricade the buckling door. The Emperor had much to answer for that night.
"Behind you," the voice called cryptically from the shadows as a blade sliced across an unguarded throat and tossed the body down the stairs.
"Oi! Watch it!" Kynton hollered up as the heavy corpse smacked into his rising head from below the assassin. "Do you have to kill every person we pass?"
Taban grinned, "I suppose not. I could let a few get past to you if you'd prefer."
Kynton opened his mouth and shut it, climbing overtop the third guard they passed. "Far be it for me to tell you how to do your job."
Taban placed his ear against the wall and held up a finger to silence the priest. He got a glower, but merciful silence. "Your Albrant is doing his job as well, the hornet's nest has burst. We should hurry."
"We must be near the top," Aldrin muttered, coming to a stop above the corpse whose eyes he feared to look into.
"How do you know, oh King, my King?" Kynton asked.
"He's been counting the floors," Taban said to the priest, "and he is correct. Another flight and a half."
"We should strategize," Aldrin said, closing his eyes in thought.
"I believe we shall open the door and kill everyone inside, yes?" the assassin said bluntly. "Not much to strategize when attacking a room you have never been in."
The boy King looked down at the two women climbing together beside each other. Isa was a bit slower on the stairs, unable to skip a few at a time the way the lanky ones could. Ciara moved with her, as if in a haze. Her eyes trailed across the corpse, but didn't register it.
"What are you waiting for," the witch huffed, waving her hand about as if she weren't the one holding them up.
Kynton cracked a dangerous smile, but Taban cut him off, in no mood for the delay. "Nothing, come priest." And he turned back to the stairs, flying towards the top with the priest trailing behind. Isa cursed their over extended limbs and inched past Aldrin, muttering under her breath. She seemed to be taking as much of her time getting to the top as she could.
Aldrin glanced over at the girl who'd lost not just her past but possibly her future. She was watching the corpse still bleeding across the stairs.
"I could have slain him," her voice trilled across the cramped staircase. Aldrin looked down at the body and knew she didn't mean the nondescript guard. "Sliced right into his meat and let it come pouring out like a pigs."
He walled up those memories of his brother so fresh he could still taste them, but dared not open his mouth for fear it'd all come gushing free. Ciara decided to do the talking for the both of them.
"I've done it before. There was a merc, an ugly troll of a man, and we were warned, oh we were all warned, don't be alone with him. But he caught me in the barn, tending to the few horses after the twins had knocked off early. I shouldn't have done it," she was shaking now, her hands rising as she mimicked the stab of her dagger into the never forgotten merc's exposed belly.
Her head hung as she whispered to the thin air, "Can a good person do bad things? Does anything justify the means?"
Aldrin grabbed both his hands around her invisible dagger and crumpled it as he cupped her hands. He wanted to ask her the same thing, but he knew that was one confession he could never make. Instead, he sighed and said, "I suppose we could ask Kynton."
She snorted at that, a cruel one, "The gods care little for what we do scurrying beneath their feet."
"Probably why we're more concerned with what our fellow scurriers think."
"There's a scholar hiding beneath that crown," she said, and smiled sadly.
"Oh Princeling!" Kynton's voice called down the stairs, "the party cannot start without its guest of honor!"
Aldrin scowled, but he was right. Unpleasant noises broke from the stairs below as feet trampled back and forth across floors previously silent. If they dallied much longer they risked capture. He nodded to Ciara and she grabbed the wall, rising up after the others. The king turned to follow, failing to notice the dead guard's leg beginning to twitch.
Taban had half his torso pressed against a wooden door in the ceiling, counting the footsteps above him. Or trying to, as he lost his place every time the cursed priest opened his gob. After the third occurrence, he stopped bothering and looked down from his perch at the witch glowing enough they didn't require a torch. Not a heartening omen.
Aldrin finally appeared upon the stairs, pushing past the priest and witch each leaning to the sides. He nodded at the assassin who in turn nodded back. "Gird yourself," Taban ordered. With as much force as he could muster, the assassin threw open the attic doors and dashed through.
He rolled to a crouch and looked up at a flaming stone pillar, the light echoing an eerie lavender across the walls of the open air Tower into the night's sky. A gaggle of noises whipped his head to the back wall where a handful of men, dressed in those not so ivory robes dashed about stringing beads and stripping leaves from a branch. It looked like one of those "fertility rituals" women started to get out of the house and away from the menfolk for a few hours.
And there, in the middle of the ivory men, dressed in elaborate robes the color of freshly spilt blood, stood the Emperor. He continued to watch the fire even as the dark assassin rose to his feet. Behind Taban, the girl and the boy emerged, each brandishing their swords. Ciara's gleamed in the haunting light, Aldrin's probably rusted a bit
more at all this excitement.
Ciara looked at the mad man smiling beatifically upon the fire as if it were a babe about to be blessed into their flock. He still took no notice at the three armed people trespassing upon his little ritual. Taban unsheathed his own sword, but it was Aldrin who rose up to his full height.
"I command you, step away from the fire...thing." Well, he'd have a few years to work on the commanding.
Finally, the Emperor turned to the boy waving his rusty sword at him as if he were an obstinate piece of unsliced bread. A darker smile pulled back the mad man's lips and he raised up the sword he stole from Aldrin's fingers.
Kynton climbed out of the hole and, looking over at his fellow men of gods, waved meekly. He despised staff meetings. The witch's head popped up behind him, surveying the room far quickly than the others and screeched, "Stop him!"
Aldrin walked steadily forward, his sword leading his steps, around the stone fire towards the Emperor. "I said, step away from the fire," his voice grew as cold as an Ostero winter.
Vasska looked upon the child he dismissed so readily and bowed his head, the sword still high above him, "Very well." And the Emperor took one step back just as his fingers released the blade.
"No!" was as far as Isa got before the steel hit the lavender fire.
It flared and burst a deadly blue, burning off some of the priest's eyebrows, and the entire keep twisted from the power. Aldrin slipped and fell, his face crashing hard against the fire's stone edge. Taban tried to flatten his body out, but another shudder of the tower sent his feet gliding along the smooth surface. Ciara lashed her hand out and grabbed his coat, keeping him from tumbling a very long way down. Isa screeched as the ringing hit, her own voice intermingling with the amplified sound of metal clanging and burning against fire. Everyone stumbled as their senses over stimulated, struggling to find an off switch.
As hearing came back, the ringing was matched by a giggle, quiet at first but growing in strength. Slowly, a few heads rose as steadying legs got under foot. "What have you done?" Aldrin demanded, still trying to find his balance.
The mad Emperor's hand grabbed the child by the back of his head and lifted him up. Aldrin scrabbled against the pain, his sword torn from his hands in the fall. But Vasska didn't let go, instead he leered across the boy's upturned face. His breath reeked of garlic. "Argur's work," he whispered. "I have done Argur's work and freed us all from the horrors of magic!" he shouted to the still partially deaf masses.
Isa rose to her limited stature and cried through the buffeting winds, "You bastard!"
And her anger rose to such a dangerous crescendo, an arc of light crossed from her accusing finger and right into the stone pillar behind the Emperor. The mad smile fell off Vasska's face as he turned from the smoldering hole behind him to the witch cackling, "You have done nothing but doom us all."
"No," Vasska looked back at his priests, still bowled over from the keep's twisting and turning, "This is not how it is to go!"
He spun about, trying to find a single supporter of his magic destruction theory, when Aldrin sunk his elbow deep into the side of the Emperor. Vasska gasped, and released his hold on the boy. Aldrin rolled away, grabbing up his sword in the process and landed beside the assassin.
Isa rose up, the blue fire unable to mask the magic shrouding her and she pointed to the courtyard below, "The dead are coming."
Everyone broke from their stand off and turned to the mercifully stable tower's edge. They all looked down upon the carnage as bodies, and pieces of bodies, seethed deep below. It was like watching an anthill with a morsel of food tossed on top, an order in the madness as each body broke against the buckling doors. It wasn't a matter of if, but when.
"The prophecy was clear!" Vasska shrieked at the corpses below, as if he could command them to go back to the dirt, "Destroy the sword, destroy the evil in the world!"
Whatever shell he'd maintained cracked fully at his long term plans coming undone. He dashed about, slugging each of his priests in the arm, trying to get one to back him up that all this shouldn't be happening. Ordering the world to shape to his words had always worked before.
Aldrin looked over at Taban, who had his sword out but made no move on the mad man running about, trying to tear his scalp off in frustration. "What are you waiting for, assassin?" he shouted above the cacophony of raging fire and madness.
"He is not my target," Taban said, and took a small step back, careful to not fall off the edge.
"Wonderful, glad you told us that now!" Aldrin was getting a bit testy, and wobbled on unsteady legs towards the Emperor who still had tufts of his own ice blonde hair clinging to ancient Avar rings. "Vasska!" he shouted, but didn't get a reaction. The Emperor continued to throw a fit, tossing some more leaves, a few beads, and one of his priest's shoes into the fire, hoping to change anything. Each time he dashed back to the edge to check on the state of the dead.
"Hey! Hello," Aldrin looked over at Ciara, who kept her eyes glued to the witch about to reach critical mass. "I say, you, crazy man."
The eyes stopped and turned to the child waiving his dilapidated sword about as if it were a dousing rod. Each of the priests shuffled away from the Emperor at the c-word. The crackling air around him seemed to pause as his whole body faced the boy. "Do you know what happened to the last man who called me crazy?" Vasska asked, his voice losing all panic.
Aldrin stopped and looked back at the others. Ciara shrugged and Taban rolled his eyes. This is why he preferred to work alone in the dark. Hard to monologue when your throat was already slit.
"He wound up neck deep in a pit of honey!" Kynton's voice carried across the winds. "No? Um, you poured lemon juice into a nasty paper cut? You sent him a very passive aggressive letter?"
Both King and Emperor snapped to the priest who bowed under the intensity, "Wait, I know, you made him scrub the pots with the old brush that only had a few bristles left because Brother Balm never takes care of the damn thing!"
"Anyway," Vasska stretched out each syllable, showing a rare glimpse of humanity beneath that crimson robe, "child of snow," he looked over at Ciara, and her skin crawled under that stare, "child of sand," finally he landed upon Isa, whose mouth sparked when she moved, "and child of the devil. All together in one place," the crooked smile tipped those cruel lips up, "it is a test of Argur's faith."
"To hell with your Argur," Ciara cursed at him, "You'll pay for every life you and your 'god' took."
"Your blood shall bind the evil," Vasska said, re-writing the prophecy he'd been following since he was a young man watching from the eaves as uncles slew aunts, and sisters dropped catapults on brothers. It saw him through every false alliance, every impure soul trying to claim Argur's glory, and - here and now - he wasn't about to let a little thing like getting it all completely wrong stop him.
"You, child of sand, will be the first to die. Kill her."
A hand reached out of the open trap door and grabbed onto Kynton's ankle. The priest only managed a "Hey, what…" before he fell down the ladder, landing in a quiet pile at the bottom. He was replaced by the exhausted face of the General, his sword out.
In the commotion, Vasska zipped around the fire. Ciara raised her sword, but backed up, afraid the mad man would recognize the etching upon the blade and realize he'd been played for the fool. Still he advanced, gazing only upon her eyes as his soul mentally ticked over another dozen or so prayers needed to expunge that stain. Perhaps less.
Aldrin shouted at Isa, but as the witch raised her palm overloaded with magic she couldn't control, a heavy hand grabbed her wrist and yanked back. The snap echoed across the stone pillars as Isa screamed, her arm flapping uselessly to its side. "I have another," she screeched into the General's face even as he kicked her legs out from under her.
"Vasska!" Marciano shouted, his eyes tracking the dark man inching around the edge, as well as the boy who flared in rage.
"My favorite," Vasska crowed to his General, "You are in time. Sl
ay them all."
"There are dead climbing the walls!" Marciano continued, not about to break at his Lord's words.
Vasska nodded as if he told him the bathroom taps had burst again and no one could find the mop. "Yes. Yes. I am seeing to it. Now please, do away with these...miscreants."
"The dead are killing my men!"
Taban inched closer to the Emperor, watching the mutinying General carefully. Ciara was only three strides from him, four if he was slow.
"Is that not the point of soldiers? To die?" Vasska asked, confused why his favorite was ignoring very explicit instructions. It shouldn't take him much to kill these children, only the hired blade of the Dunner's would prove bothersome.
Marciano stared deep into the mad abyss of his Emperor's, his Lord's, his Bosses eyes, and finally saw what he most feared; his own soul, rotted and twisted upon the vine, burst open with maggots crawling free. Without turning his gaze away, Marciano carefully laid his sword down upon the ground.
"I see," Vasska hissed, "Then I shall finish this with my own hands," and he turned back to the girl, a sacrificial dagger slipping into his palm.
Taban launched from his crouch, his foot falls carrying him one step, Vasska deflected Ciara's blade skittering it across the floor, another step, the Emperor grabbed her arm, and the final step, as the blade raised back. The assassin's hands shoved the girl away, breaking Vasska's hold upon her. But the Emperor flipped as his prey was torn from him and slashed madly and deeply with his dagger.
The assassin staggered, blood gushing off his shoulder as he fell to a knee from the pain. Vasska raised his blade for another stab when a heavy stick smashed into his head. He raised a bejeweled hand to his bleeding head and reeled about to spot Ciara heaving up Isa's dropped staff for another go at beating out his brains.
Vasska got a single step towards her before a blade, rusted from a few centuries of neglect, burst through his kidney, spleen, and some intestine. Aldrin gripped the sword tight, sagging with the falling Emperor, unable to pull the tetanus infested thing out. Ciara watched Vasska fall to his knees as he tried to look behind at the boy that bested him.
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