The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  “We’re close,” Addam said. “That’s Peat’s Swimming Hole, past those trees. We need to get to the other side.”

  The safe path veered north. The swimming hole was straight ahead.

  “When we leave the path,” I said, “release your spells, and move fast. I’ll scan left and forward, you scan right and behind. Look up and down, not just eye-level. Be prepared for an ambush at any moment.”

  “We’re going to empty our sigils? All of them?”

  “We can fill them again at your compound. I want to cross that hundred yards like gods, Addam. I want our footsteps to be like thunder. I want to show that miserable creature what it means to interfere with an Atlantean scion. Are you with me?”

  His lips curled into a sharp smile. The thought didn’t scare him, which was good.

  I touched my white-gold ring, then Quinn’s platinum disc, and then pressed a hand against my thigh. The Shield and Fire came first, a fractal, pulsing high; followed by the release of Bless-fire. For a moment, until the spell equalized, globules of white, holy light drifted up from my lips and nose, like underwater air bubbles.

  I felt the push of Addam’s own released magic. A veil of distorted air appeared around his hands and sank into his fist. The dirt near his feet trembled and distended, as if fingers were pushing from beneath. He pulled out his sword, and a thin rim of Bless-fire licked up the edge. He’d created his own abbreviated version of a Bless-fire spell after asking my advice, which made me proud. It was not an easy magic.

  “Ready?” I mouthed.

  He stared at me and dipped his chin. His knuckles were white on the sword pommel.

  “Showtime,” I said, and ran toward the swimming hole.

  Rurik sprang his ambush immediately.

  Fog rose from the ground with unnatural speed, fast as steam from a hot skillet. In the near distance, bruised shapes formed in the face of the mist, metastasizing into a small band of skeletons led by Rurik himself.

  I spotted the animated bones of a bear and a wolf, and two upright human skeletons with rusted rifles in their fleshless arms. Behind them was a wyvern made of tree bark—a gargoyle-construct not unlike the one that had been set against me days ago. It reared above the other skeletons and thrashed its head. Its rotating neck sounded like falling logs.

  “You have no idea,” Rurik said loudly from his linen cowl, “what forces are marshaled against you. I will bring everything I have to bear on—”

  “Fuck that mastermind chatter,” I said, and hit him with a surge of fire that blackened the grass under his feet. “Addam, take the summonings! Rurik is mine.”

  I flung myself forward, using my Shield like a scythe and bringing it hard against Rurik’s ankles. When he staggered, I launched a barrage of fireballs. Rurik windmilled back into the fog.

  I raced forward to keep him in sight. Passing under the ring of elm trees, I saw the swimming hole. It was a perfectly round, gray-green body of water the size of a small house. Lily pads and rotting vegetation floated across its surface.

  I’d already transmuted my sabre from a wrist-guard into a hilt; now, with a burst of willpower, I formed a garnet blade in a molten flurry. I infused it with Bless-fire, making the blade brighten with searing orange-white flames.

  Rurik recovered from the stumble. I went at him with the blade. Diamond fire crystalized into armor up and down his arms, which he used to block my swing. It created a shower of sparks so bright that, even in daylight, we both flinched.

  Reality shimmered around Rurik. I knew that trick, and had no desire to see another parking garage pulled down on my head. I threw a blossom of Fire at his eyes and slammed out with my Shield. He went sprawling.

  He spun up from the fall—not a movement, but an adroit display of levitation. He hovered above me with his diamond-encrusted arms outstretched. Reality shimmered again, but instead of pushing his willpower into the world, he pulled the world into his willpower.

  Grass withered under his feet in a ten-yard radius. A sparrow dropped from the sky with a twig in its mouth. Where the decay touched the swimming hole, frogs and eels bobbed lifelessly to the surface. The stench was appalling, like sewage and burning compost.

  I didn’t wait to see what he’d do with the energy. There were small patches of fire on his linen cloak from my fireballs. I sent Fire into them, twining the spell among the flames. The threads burst into bright lines and spread to his chest and hood.

  Rurik growled and ripped the cloak from his body, revealing rotting, old-fashioned undergarments. I had a glimpse of his fun-house mirror face, and then a wash of fog came between us. I lost sight of him.

  In my peripheral vision, Addam whirled into sight with sword extended. The bones of the bear and wolf were at his feet. He lifted a hand, and sharp mineral spikes erupted from the earth, shattering the manlike skeletons.

  I turned back to see Rurik leap from the fog and point to the forest behind us. Earth and wood groaned and splintered as he pulled on the environment for more ammunition. I lifted my burning sabre blade and threw all my Fire into it. The garnet blade turned into a solar flare.

  I lunged and brought the blade down on Rurik’s outstretched hands, severing them at the wrist.

  Rurik laughed. Power exploded from him. A wave of unfocused telekinesis threw me off my feet. I soared backward into the swimming hole.

  My sabre blade hissed as foul-smelling water closed over my head. I sank a good ten feet without hitting bottom, flailed, stroked upward. Weeds hung over my ears as I spit and spun on the surface.

  Addam was surrounded by pieces of wet bark. He’d engaged Rurik, keeping the lich’s attention from me.

  Rurik’s entire body danced with glittering, black gems. He’d formed dagger-like blades where his hands had been. He caught Addam in a stumble on the uneven ground, and Addam cried out as a dagger laid open his cheek. He fell to his knees.

  I reached for the vegetation-choked edge of the swimming hole, pulling myself toward it so hard that I tore a muscle in my shoulder. I slapped the elbow of my sword arm onto the ground and brought the hilt into aim. Rurik spared me a glance, and as I fired, a wall of mud rose between us. My firebolt thudded into its side and sent boiling muck back in my face.

  I grabbed the shore with my other hand and pulled myself from the water. Rurik had done something to Addam. Addam wasn’t defending himself; he was on both knees, head thrown back, throat exposed. Rurik’s arm went up, then sped down for the killing blow.

  I heard the crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier.

  Rurik’s head snapped sideways.

  Two more cracks. Rurik’s head jerked again. Addam trembled and broke free of whatever spell had him immobilized. He rolled to the left, braced, sprang up.

  Brand—my Brand—was lying on the other side of the swimming hole, his rifle on a bipod in front of him.

  He caught my eyes. We had a moment. He said, thoroughly exasperated, “Get the fuck up and hit it!”

  Triumph flooded my arms and legs like a drug. I strode from the water’s edge and sent my willpower into my sabre, manifesting a garnet scimitar as bright as sin. Whatever Brand had shot Rurik with weren’t normal bullets; the edges of the entry holes glowed like lines on burning paper.

  My Aspect ascended, a predator’s response to weakened prey. Flames began to lick at my bangs.

  We threw everything into the moment that Brand bought us. Addam reached an arm toward the ground under Rurik. Water frothed to the surface, turning the dirt slick and muddy. Rurik lost balance and went down on one knee. I sent Fire into the mud and made it boil. Rurik screamed, fell back on his hands-less forearms, danced from stump to stump. Addam called mineral blades from the earth. A stalagmite went through Rurik’s chest.

  The lich’s power surged outward, a gasp of dying energy. Addam and I were lifted off our feet and tossed away. I ended up in the water again. I flailed back to shore just in time to see Brand walking up to Rurik with a short, bulky gun. He didn’t waste breath on a quip;
he simply aimed and pulled the trigger.

  A flare arced at Rurik, slow and brilliant. It broke into powder burns on impact. Pinpoints of savage light appeared on Rurik’s body—first dozens and then hundreds and then thousands, and then Rurik was a single, roaring mass of flame.

  With a final wail, Rurik exploded. Chunks of him shot outward. One landed on my cheek. It smelled wretched, and there were moving, wormlike pieces in it. I ducked clean under the water, and then shook my head like a wet dog.

  None of us talked for a good ten seconds. The only sound was the crackle of flame from Rurik’s empty clothing. Finally, Brand stepped up to the edge of the swimming hole. He said, “Looks like them Duke boys have done drove Roscoe into the pond again.”

  “I was standing in a bad spot,” I said. “This could have happened to anyone.”

  “And yet, twice,” Brand said.

  I stared at him until he held out a hand and pulled me out.

  I got my footing and hugged him as hard as I’ve ever hugged anyone in my life.

  THE COMPOUND

  In soaked clothes, I was cold enough to make my teeth chatter. Brand took off his coat and gave it to me.

  My smile was filled with pure, stupid pride. “Let’s play a game. Raise your hand if your name begins with a B and you killed a lich today.”

  “Killed it?” Brand snorted. “In our fucking dreams. It’s just decorporealized. We still need to go to that imbued circle so it doesn’t get summoned again. We’re supposed to wait at the Moral Certainty compound until the Tower gets permission from the Magician to enter his estate.”

  Addam stepped up to Brand. His face was covered in bloody scratches, a deep cut, and pieces of dirt. He held out a hand and said, “Thank you. Thank you, Brand. You saved my life.”

  Brand shrugged and shook Addam’s hand. “We lose our bonus if you get gutted,” he said, but I could tell he was pleased. “We need to go. The lich isn’t the only thing that could fuck us up. Let’s get behind the compound’s wards; it’s not far.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re here,” I said as Brand went to retrieve his rifle. “Quinn set this up, didn’t he? He came to you in a dream?”

  “He came to Max in a dream,” Brand said.

  I realized, then, that Quinn couldn’t have come to Brand in a dream, because Brand hadn’t slept at all since I left. He had dark bags under both eyes.

  Brand went on. “He told Max—who apparently Quinn has been famous friends with, and I quote, ‘for many years in the future except that one time we were mortal enemies and you rubbed a ferret in my hair’—that you’d stopped off at the Hierophant’s compound last night.”

  “We got stranded,” I said. “We fought Rurik, and then got caught in a blizzard.”

  “Which makes absolute sense,” he said, staring at the allegedly summer sky. “I fucking hate the Westlands.”

  “Brand, did Max say Quinn was okay?” Addam asked anxiously. “Do you know if Quinn is awake yet?”

  Brand hesitated. “I got the idea that he might have woken up already if he didn’t feel it was so important to be in people’s heads.”

  Addam closed his eyes. With a grim look, he set off for the nearby compound.

  We followed. At first, Brand asked me questions about everything that had happened in the forest yesterday. I didn’t want to talk much about the fight with Rurik, though. And I was more interested in how Quinn had arranged this.

  Brand’s eyes, bodyguard-serious, were moving between eleven and one o’clock, a trick to increase the width of your peripherals. He said, “So, Quinn told Max that you and Addam were going to step off the safe paths this morning. That’s smart stuff right there, by the way.”

  “We did not have a choice,” Addam said from in front of us. “Rurik broke the road wards. We weren’t safe anywhere.”

  “Just busting your balls. Quinn told us that. He said you were going to step off the paths, and that there’d be a fight. He told Max where I needed to be. He said first I had to go see the Tower and get a bunch of ingredients from a cemetery—cemetery salt from old gravestones, cemetery rainwater, cemetery grass, and . . . do I really fucking need to go into the recipe? Mayan helped me put the paste into bullets and the flare.”

  “And then you walked here?”

  “It was just three miles,” Brand said with a shrug. “The Westlands didn’t go bat-shit crazy and make me walk through 1989 or anything.”

  “Three miles is still a decent hike.”

  “Sure it is, and I run ten of them a day in that murky period you sometimes call morning. Rune, you better fucking not be thanking me. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, you are.” I smiled at him.

  The climate changed again as we crossed the warded boundary onto the Moral Certainty grounds. Late winter leapfrogged into spring, where flowering trees and plants were releasing thick, noxious waves of pollen. It was so pervasive that caretakers were swarming the lawn with leaf blowers, their sweating skin caked gray-green.

  The compound’s main building rose above us. It was a sprawl of marble and stained glass, topped with a massive pitched roof. Defense magic hummed through the ground underneath me. It was much stronger than what I had felt on the Hierophant’s estate—not surprising, considering the compound was jointly owned by the power bloc formed by Justice, Strength, Temperance, and the Hermit.

  Addam led us toward the closed doorway of a glass-walled solarium. “Maybe we should clean off first?” I asked, peering at the stretch of glistening white marble on the other side.

  “There are showers outside the pool area, if you wish,” Addam said.

  “We should have someone tell Max and Ciaran we’re here,” Brand said.

  “Max is here?” I asked, startled. “Ciaran is here?”

  “Quinn told us to bring Max. And Ciaran volunteered, once he was done shipping Quinn around people’s heads.”

  “Ciaran has been a good friend,” Addam said. “He is fond of Quinn. True seers are not so common a community.”

  “Really?” Brand said. “Rune can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a fucking prophecy.”

  “But Quinn said to bring Max?” I persisted.

  “Quinn said a lot of things,” Brand said. “Some of them were about tactics, and some of them were about weird seer shit, and some of them were about bubblegum. And he also said you’d need this—though he specifically said not to use it until you really need it.”

  Brand lowered his rifle bag to the ground and pulled out a small, handkerchief-wrapped bundle from a vinyl pocket.

  “A cookie?” I asked hopefully.

  Brand stuffed it into my hand. It was round and palm-sized, but hard. I folded back the checkered plaid and saw the edge of a clay disc.

  I sucked in a breath. “Brand. This is my mass sigil.”

  “Good eye.”

  “This was buried. In the foundation of our house.”

  “On the plus side, the girl at the hardware store where I rented the jackhammer is real fucking cute, and she said cement mix is going on sale next week.”

  I gaped.

  He rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t pay to argue with true seers.”

  I folded the handkerchief and, almost skittishly, put it in my jacket pocket. My imagination tripled its weight. Mass sigils were very, very powerful devices. They were flamethrowers to a standard sigil’s blowtorch; and it wasn’t every magic-user who could easily wield one. I used my mass sigil—the only one I had; the only one that had survived the fall of the Sun Throne—for an emergency defense of Half House. I’d been charging and recharging its stored spell for years now.

  Brand said, “Look. There they are now.” He tilted his chin to our left.

  And there they were. Max was eager and vibrating, like a young hunting dog. Ciaran sat on the waist-high branch of a chestnut tree, swinging his legs idly. His reality-shifting powers had turned the grass underneath him a shining yellow, mimicking a sphere of s
tage light.

  I set my eyes on Max, remembering that he and I were due a talk. When he caught my expression, he gave a guilty start and ducked his gaze.

  “Hullo, hullo!” Ciaran said. He slipped a cigarette from his breast pocket and began to field strip it. “I see our intrepid young Quinn was right. You did venture off the safe paths. Risky tricksy, Sun.”

  “It’s been that kind of morning,” I said. “We—”

  “That’s Rune’s,” Max said, pointing at Addam’s neck. “That’s his sigil. Why are you wearing his sigil?”

  “For the love of—” Brand said.

  “Max,” I warned.

  “And that’s my grandmother’s ring! You gave it to him? The one you took in exchange for me? You gave it to him?”

  “Godsdamnit,” Brand said. “No arguing. We just fought something that even Lord Tower calls a monster. None of us are in the mood for giving each other shit. Addam, who’s that?”

  Addam followed Brand’s finger. A man was hurrying across the lawn with a wooden box in his hands. “I believe it’s the compound chiromancer. To heal us, I assume.”

  “Well, I’m assuming my rifle in a firing position. It’s a bad day for people to come running at me.”

  Addam beat a path to the man who was, in fact, the compound healer. The box was filled with antiseptic, bandages, pain-killing ward stones, and two sigils loaded with healing spells. The sigils were made from Victorian cravat pins in the shape of caduceus staves.

  Addam insisted that the chiromancer tend to me first. I insisted that he move fast enough to heal both of us with a single spell. I wasn’t entirely convinced we wouldn’t need the second healing spell later.

  While my various cuts itched closed, the chiromancer turned and ran pale fingers over the gashes on Addam’s face. He lingered at a slash that ran from Addam’s ear down the back of his neck. The blood had clotted Addam’s hair into a dreadlock.

  “I must use the second sigil,” the man said in a strained voice.

  “No, it’s healed,” Addam said, touching his neck.