The Archon's Assassin

by D. P. Prior

  Nameless sagged, caught himself, and thumped the Liche Lord in the back. As Blightey pitched forward, Shader hit him with a thunderous chop to the skull—

  —but the gladius rebounded.

  Shader glanced at the blade, not quite believing it.

  Blightey gave a slight shrug and clacked his jaws.

  Galen snatched up his saber and flung himself at the Liche Lord, striking glancing blow after glancing blow.

  Shadrak fired repeatedly, not caring if anyone got in the way. He was beyond that. Things were too desperate.

  Blightey ignored Galen, and his eyes blazed carnadine.

  Shader must have been expecting it, for he tipped his hat to cover his face, and spun a web of gold before him with the gladius.

  Nameless wrenched the Liche Lord away from Shader, bashed him skull-first into the floor, over and over and over.

  Galen hacked uselessly at Blightey’s back with all his prodigious strength. Anyone else would have had a thousand broken bones, but not Blightey. The Cynocephalus had made his armor too well.

  The air above the Liche Lord was rent, and a black-garb materialized. Shader cut him down, but instantly, another appeared, then another.

  Galen stopped hitting Blightey to defend himself, as dozens of black-garbs appeared out of thin air.

  Shadrak shot one, even as he realized the futility. They had to stop them coming. Had to—

  Two black-garbs ran at Bird. The homunculus was still hunched beneath his cloak, oblivious. He seemed focused on the floor, which was once again vibrating amid a fearsome din.

  Rhiannon stepped across him and cut both black-garbs down. She moved with skill and agility, as if she’d taken courage from Shader’s arrival.

  Shader, though, was on the back foot, pressed hard by a swell of black-garbs. A group of them buried Nameless and pulled him off of Blightey. The dwarf flung them from him with the giant’s might, but that was all the time Blightey needed to resume his feet.

  More and more black-garbs appeared around the Liche Lord, smothering him in a protective phalanx.

  A lightning bolt streaked from within the press of bodies and struck Shader’s sword. The gladius flared golden, and the lightning rebounded, arcing from black-garb to black-garb and dropping them in smoldering heaps. For an instant, Blightey stood exposed—

  —and Bird thrust out a palm.

  The ground at the homunculus’s feet ruptured, and thousands of silver beetles swarmed toward the Liche Lord. Not beetles, Shadrak realized: stone-eaters.

  Blightey stiffened as the swarm reached his armored feet and rolled over him in a seething carpet of argent. As he vanished beneath the tide, the remaining black-garbs winked out of existence.

  Bird stood, directing the stone-eaters with sweeping motions of his hands. More and more poured from the fractured floor, swelling the mass that covered Blightey. Shadrak could do nothing but watch with bated breath. Would it work? Had Bird found a way?

  Slowly, one step at a time, Bird advanced, until he stopped before one of Blightey’s solleret-clad feet protruding from the mound of insects. He kicked it, and nothing happened. Satisfied, he lowered his arms, and the stone-eaters drained away from the Liche Lord’s prone body like water. Within moments, they had swarmed back through the fissure in the floor.

  Shadrak stepped in for a closer look. The others did the same.

  Blightey’s skull was rocking gently off to one side. It had been separated from the neck of the borrowed body. Then Shadrak saw that there was no neck. The stone-eaters had devoured it, along with every other scrap of flesh and bone beneath the invulnerable armor. They must have squeezed through the gaps, gotten within and did what only moments ago had seemed impossible.

  Even as the others let out a collective sigh of relief, Shadrak saw the danger.

  The skull lifted into the air and came straight at Bird. Its ruby eyes blazed like hellish coals.

  Shadrak fired, but his bullet ricocheted off.

  Bird screamed as his eyes began to smoke. Shader stepped in, but Blightey’s skull flared incandescent, and he was driven back, shielding his face against the glare.

  Bird flopped to the floor beneath his cloak of feathers, and Blightey’s skull pivoted toward Nameless.

  Rhiannon swung for it, and where the sword’s black flames touched, the skull’s conflagration went out. But still it came on unperturbed, and Nameless had no choice but to back away.

  Shader darted between the Liche Lord and the dwarf, held up the gladius like a talisman. The skull veered around the blade, swooped under the brim of his hat. The glare of gemstone eyes bathed Shader’s face in scarlet.

  Rhiannon stopped swinging. She looked lost, devoid of hope, paralyzed by the inevitability that the rest of them would be next.

  Galen dropped his saber, tried to grab the skull, recoiled with singed fingers.

  But he had the right idea.

  Holstering his pistols, Shadrak pulled out the never-full bag from his pocket, opened it wide, and brought it down over the skull.

  There was no resistance. Nothing. And the bag remained flat, as if the skull were no longer there. He clutched it tight and held it at arm’s length.

  “Laddie?” Nameless said. “Is it—?”

  Shadrak handed him the bag and knelt beside Bird.

  Immediately, tears spilled down his cheeks. Warm tears. Hot. Any other time, any other place, he’d have knifed anyone who saw, but he couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t want to. He didn’t care.

  Bird had carried him as a child. That much he’d learned, but there must have been more. Bird had deemed him worthy of being saved, and had disregarded the homunculi’s desire to throw him to the seethers in the chasms of Gehenna. It was Bird who’d taken him to the snake-man in the plane ship, and so it was Bird who had ultimately sent him to Kadee. For that act alone, he deserved to be eternally thanked. And yet Shadrak hadn’t thanked him. He’d barely had time to process what little Bird had told him. And there was so much more to ask. It was the same with everything in his life—his blood-drenched, throat-slitting life: everyone he should have cared about took second place to the task in hand; then second place again to the next task. And it never stopped; he just kept on doing what he did, as if stopping would be the death of him.

  Metal fingers pressed down on his shoulder, squeezed with a gentleness that belied their strength. He looked up into the eye-slit of Nameless’s great helm. He didn’t need to see the face to know what the dwarf was thinking, what he was feeling, what he was trying to offer.

  Shadrak put his hand on top of Nameless’s gauntlet and nodded that he understood, that he was grateful. And in that moment, he knew beyond all shadow of a doubt, the Archon could go shog himself.

  The agonized moan Shader let out opened Shadrak to pain that was not his own. It was something he’d not felt before: a bond of suffering, the disturbing clutch of empathy.

  Shader’s hand hovered over Ludo, as if touching the adeptus might infect him. But then Shadrak realized he’d been wrong: it was horror that made Shader falter, not fear. Horror bordering on despair.

  Nameless let go of Shadrak’s shoulder. Rhiannon drifted to his side, as if she had no place at Shader’s, or didn’t have the stomach to stand with him, feel what he felt.

  “Ain,” she breathed. “Oh, Ain.”

  Galen lurched to the other side of the rack from Shader. His chest rose and fell with suppressed sobs. His fists clenched and unclenched, and his face was hot with blood.

  Ludo’s hand twitched, and he touched Shader’s lightly.

  Galen’s shoulders slumped, and he stooped against the edge of the rack.

  Shader leaned in as Ludo gurgled around the spike sticking out of his mouth, but he was beyond all speech.

  Two days, Blightey had said. Maybe even three.

  Shadrak pushed himself to his feet with a wispy streamer of rage. He took a step toward the rack. Then another.

  Shader whispered to Ludo, but the room had grown so stil
l, Shadrak heard every word like he was hearing voices: “A life is an orchard.” Shader paused to swallow. “You told me that once, after a lecture. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember my frustration, the way that I could never settle.”

  Ludo tapped the back of Shader’s hand, telling him to go on.

  Shader looked into his bloodshot eyes for a long moment, then nodded.

  “Perfect fruits come like gifts. They ripen, they fall, but they do not linger.”

  He stepped back and raised the gladius.

  “No!” Galen yelled. “What are you doing?”

  Shader froze, looked helplessly at the dragoon.

  Rhiannon rushed to Shader, reached out a hand, but he shrugged it off.

  “How?” Shader asked Galen. “How did he come to be here?”

  “Because he helped you, that’s how,” Galen said. “He was exiled because of you.”

  Shader’s sword arm dropped.

  “That’s unfair,” Rhiannon said. “This is Aristodeus’s doing. He sent us all here. This is down to him.”

  “For me,” Nameless said. He trudged to the foot of the rack. “For my sake.”

  Shader’s face furrowed in confusion.

  He turned back to Ludo. “He was my teacher.” The timbre of his voice said the adeptus was so much more to him, a part of who he was.

  “No,” Shader said. It sounded like a refusal of what was before his eyes, but then it became clear he was talking to Nameless. “You are not to blame, my friend.”

  “I was sent to protect him,” Rhiannon breathed.

  Galen glared at her.

  “Pete is dead,” Shader suddenly said.

  Rhiannon reeled. “Pete?” She supported her weight on the black sword.

  “He came with me,” Shader said. “Blightey—”

  “And Sandau?” Rhiannon asked.

  Shader shook his head, and she hung hers.

  “We lost Bird,” Shadrak said, like they didn’t already know. Maybe he just needed to say it.

  “And Ekyls,” Galen said, but his eyes were rooted to Ludo, to the gore-drenched spike the adeptus should have been choking on.

  Rhiannon straightened up with a start. “And where the shog’s Albert?”

  “So, you noticed,” Shadrak said. He should have been angry about it; should have clung to his anger over Bird, too; but like Galen, he was powerless to avert his gaze from the abomination on the rack.

  “Are you sure?” Shader said to Ludo, as if they were holding a private conversation only the holy could hear.

  Ludo tapped the back of his hand again, and Shader closed his eyes. This time, when he raised his sword, Galen stared at him blankly but did nothing.

  Shader’s arm shook. He licked his lips, opened his eyes, blinked rapidly.

  Shadrak pushed past him, palmed a pistol, put it to Ludo’s head, and pulled the trigger.

  The crack of the gun was a deafening roar that echoed off the walls, fled through the ruined door Nameless had smashed apart, and reverberated down the corridor in muffled retorts. Finally, it found its peace in the cold air outside the castle.

  “Come on,” Shadrak said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He turned toward the doorway he and Blightey had entered by, the doorway Shader had appeared from like an avenging angel.

  Shader’s fingers clamped around his arm. Shadrak spun on him, ready to fight, but the look he saw in Shader’s eyes gave him pause. He saw sorrow there, but more than that, he saw gratitude.

  “What about the armor?” Rhiannon said.

  Nameless handed Shadrak the bag containing Blightey’s skull and ambled across the floor to where the plated mail lay. “Go on ahead. I’ll bring it.”

  Numbly, Shadrak headed for the door. When he reached it, he looked back.

  Nameless began to remove his hauberk, like he intended to put the Liche Lord’s armor on there and then. He caught Shadrak watching from the doorway. “Don’t worry, laddie. It’ll be all right. Can’t have all this sacrifice in vain now, can we?”

  Shadrak wasn’t so sure. As Nameless started to buckle on Blightey’s breastplate, he suspected the Archon was right to be worried. More and more of his old friend was being hidden beneath craftings he could only guess the nature of: first the scarolite helm; then Sartis’s gauntlets, and now the Liche Lord’s armor. Would that cling to him like the gauntlets did? Would he be unable to remove it, like the helm?

  Bit by bit, Nameless was becoming as obscured as his name.

  As Rhiannon went to help the dwarf with the backplate, Shadrak knew it would be his last opportunity for a shot, before Nameless was as impregnable as the Liche Lord had been.

  What if Aristodeus was wrong, as the Archon believed? What if this was just another trap, a deception of the Demiurgos?

  After all, the armor and the gauntlets had been forged by the Cynocephalus, and he was the Demiurgos’s son. And the scarolite helm: had Aristodeus designed it, or had he borrowed from the lore of the homunculi, who now seemed to serve him, as they had once served Sektis Gandaw? Children of the Deceiver, they were. As riddled with deception and betrayal as the Father of Lies himself. But wasn’t Shadrak the same? Isn’t that what Bird had tried to tell him?

  His gaze wandered to Bird’s corpse on the floor, eyes no more than burnt-out cavities. Maybe Bird would have known what to do, because he was shogged if he did.

  He shouldered the bag rather than fold it and put it in his pocket. Although there was no bulk, no indication of the monstrosity it contained, he wanted it where he could see it.

  As to what he was going to do with the skull, he hadn’t thought it through yet. All he knew was he couldn’t leave it here. Last thing they needed was for someone or something to set Blightey free so he could come looking for them.

  Galen had his head bowed in prayer beside the rack.

  Probably, Shader should have been doing the same, but he was already striding toward Shadrak as if he couldn’t wait to leave this place behind; as if there were nothing here to detain him. His eyes burned with a purpose Shadrak had not seen in them before. Purpose, or anger you’d not want to be on the receiving end of.

  Shadrak turned and left the room. He didn’t need to see Nameless armored head to toe. Didn’t need to see his friend lost behind all that eldritch metal.

  He heard Rhiannon call out, “You know he sent the wolves, don’t you? Aristodeus sent the wolves.”

  “Yes,” Shader said from close on Shadrak’s heels. His voice had the cut of cold steel. “I know.”

  A LIFE LIVED TWICE

  The Perfect Peak, Aethir

  The stench of Ludo’s death clung like gall to Shader’s nostrils. Even the astringent air of the Perfect Peak did nothing to assuage it.

  Sektis Gandaw’s control chamber, now Aristodeus’s, was somewhere Shader had vowed never to return to, and yet here he was. If it weren’t for the armchair, the footstool, the other assorted pieces of furniture, the china tea set, and the background odor of pipe tobacco, it would have been easy to imagine Gandaw was still alive, still in control, and still a threat to all the worlds.

  Aristodeus looked up from his book as Shader entered. Conflicting emotions crossed his face, and for a moment he looked flustered. But that was quickly exchanged for a self-satisfied smirk.

  Shader glared as the others trudged into the room behind him and began to find their own spaces in which to grieve. After what they’d witnessed, what they’d been through, proximity to each other brought the threat of cross-infection. It was enough to deal with one’s own tattered emotions, never mind empathizing with someone else’s. They had triumphed, in a way; defeated the Liche Lord. But too much had been lost. Shader’s only wish was that he could have exchanged his childhood teacher for the man he’d loved and respected above all others. That Aristodeus was impaled on a stake in place of Ludo.

  Some sixth sense told him Shadrak was watching him, but it wasn’t criticism he saw in the assassin’s eyes. There was no irrit
ability, no anger, and certainly no hint of a threat. If anything had alerted Shader, it was the intensity of the assassin’s guilt. Complicity was written all over his face, even though he’d had no choice. Blightey had controlled his limbs, he’d told them, and no one had contradicted him. They had all experienced the same impotence under the Liche Lord’s theurgy. Shadrak had scrubbed at the bloodstains until his skin was chafed raw, but he still wrung his hands in the shadows beside a bank of screens.

  Aristodeus chewed his lip as he studied Shader, then having apparently made up his mind, he approached Nameless and made a show of examining the Liche Lord’s armor.

  Rhiannon glanced at Shader, but he looked away. He had no comfort to offer her. No words that would have been genuine.

  His eyes found Albert, instead. The poisoner had been waiting for them inside the plane ship, and no one had said a word to him on the journey back to Aethir. He appeared to be watching Shadrak discreetly, all the while fidgeting with discomfort. He looked every bit a man who needed to make his confession, but Shader doubted he was the type.

  Galen, the dragoon Shader had beaten in the tournament for the Archon’s sword, cut a forlorn figure. He seemed diminished by Ludo’s death, stooped to half his size. The most he’d done since Verusia was stable Caledon alongside his own horse in a room off the plane ship’s control center.

  Aristodeus allowed the tension to build to a pitch, but before its bubble burst, he turned away from Nameless and pivoted on the spot to take everyone in. He said, “I can see this has been hard for you all, and that some of you…” He paused dramatically and drew in a long breath through his nose. “Some of you did not return. At times like this, it is usual to have a debriefing, then a period of mourning, but these things must wait. One more quest. One more, and then Nameless will be free, and we will be that much closer to turning the tables on the enemy.”

  “Your enemy,” Rhiannon said. “Not ours.”

  Galen grunted.

  “Everyone’s,” Aristodeus said. “This is not just about me. The Demiurgos has his claws into everyone in this room. Everyone in all the worlds.”

  “Sound familiar?” Rhiannon said. She directed the question across the room at Shader.