Olroth gathered a mob of rested thanes who had all seen better days. Blood matted their hair, and mud caked their faces. They appeared more animal than man. Many had sharpened their blades, and the gleaming metal was the only clean thing they possessed.
Olroth said, “Tomorrow, the wall will fail, and we will defend our camps.”
Tyrus said, “If we let them inside, they will divide us and kill us all.”
“Soon, they will give up. They always do. They lack the heart for longer fights.”
“Their masters don’t.”
Olroth shrugged. “One battle at a time.”
“Agreed.”
Tyrus led the men through the gate. The thanes plowed into the ranks of demon spawn with a vicious efficiency. The purims fell back, and more Norsil poured from the gate. Arrows blackened the sky, and thousands of purims howled in pain. Fresh purims charged the hill—the enemy horde produced an endless supply of fresh monsters to fight—and the two armies clashed yet again. Tyrus targeted the largest of the bulls and cut them down with cold professionalism.
He lost count of his kills.
For the first time in a long time, Tyrus enjoyed the battle. When he had been alone on the plains, he fought from a place of self-loathing, but the highland defense was about families. He fought to protect Brynn—as he had long ago when he guarded a young prince. He enjoyed defending good people. The Norsil knew this brand of savagery well and kept the monsters from surrounding Tyrus. He often found a pike in his periphery, keeping smaller monsters from clipping his knees or dragging down his sword arm.
The battle became easier when they pushed farther out in the plains. They took care to avoid overextending, but the even ground provided better footing than the bloody mud and carcasses at the gate.
Tyrus ducked under a bull’s battle-axe. He disemboweled the creature and kicked it into a group of smaller purims. He spared a moment to check the gate. Breonna pulled back, and Olroth waved the banners for the clans to withdraw. Horns sounded the orders. Under cover of a rain of arrows, Tyrus and the thanes withdrew.
Enraged, the purims gave chase. They ran blindly into the arrows to catch the Norsil from behind. The fighting became chaotic, and the archers hit Norsil as often as purims. Horns blew, and more Norsil charged from the gate. Tyrus and a small knot of champions fought as they retreated. Purims tried to keep them on the hill, fighting with reckless abandon. The Norsil lost more warriors than they had during previous sorties, but they managed to withdraw and keep the gate.
Tyrus lost count of the days. He had never witnessed a more barbaric siege. Both sides lacked engines to topple walls, and they replaced tactics with fangs and blades. Rampaging bone beasts left less of a mess in their wake. The clans took shifts at the gate, but everyone was wounded and tired. The gate widened into a burning mess of piled bodies that should have given way to a full charge, but the dead clogged the entrance.
Tyrus sat on a stool as his wives mended rents in his mail. When he had rested long enough, he led the next wave through the gate. They pushed the purims back, hoping to release pressure on other parts of the wall, which was cut to the point of forcing the clans back to their camps. If the purims entered the highlands, the larger battle would replay itself a hundred times over as each clan was slaughtered.
Tyrus fought through a fever. His runes burned along with gashes all over his body. The pain no longer made him angry. He had reached a point of numbing exhaustion.
Then, for the first time, he spotted brown grasslands in the distance. He saw an end to the purim horde. Other warriors noticed it too. The knowledge sent an electric current through the Norsil. They were still outnumbered, but the throng thinned.
Tyrus tasted victory.
A light shimmered, far above the clouds. Thunder followed. The constant roar of the purims dimmed as another flash of light distracted everyone. Tyrus shielded his eyes. The entire battlefield, both armies, flinched and searched the heavens. Past the clouds, a falling star cut through the blue sky. A trail of white smoke followed it toward the highlands.
Tyrus grabbed a warrior. “Tell Olroth to signal the retreat.”
“Why? We are winning.”
“Shedim. Warn Olroth!”
The distance to the star was hard to gauge. Tyrus fought off more purims as the thing plummeted toward him. Norsil horns sounded a retreat, and the thanes withdrew, but not quickly enough. Too many would be caught out in the open. More falling stars joined the first, all targeting the highlands.
The purims’ snarl faded as many watched the skies. Tyrus took advantage of the distraction to hack apart larger packs. With the Spear of the Warlord, he cleaved two more bulls. He intended to draw the shedim as far from the highlands as he could. Before he made it very far, the ground shook, and the air heated. He winced and shielded his eyes. Bolts of lightning struck first, then the star smashed into the hillside and sent Tyrus tumbling.
He blinked ash out of his eyes. One of his arms and several ribs felt broken. Blistered, the skin on his face tightened, and his mail smoldered. The sounds of battle muted. For the first time in days, the purims were silent. Tyrus’s ears rang. In the distance, he heard another impact and another. The air shifted, like a warm wind.
Tyrus groaned and cast about for threats. The purims burned alive. Their bodies became black ash held together by disc armor. His runes protected him from some of the heat, but blisters covered him. In the center of the blast, a large figure with black wings stood. Burning eyes and a smile of fangs turned toward Tyrus.
“My general.” Mulciber’s wings snapped open like a vulture’s. “Nisroch gave you up. No one protects you now.”
Tyrus struggled to his feet. His wounds, like his nightmares, held him back, and Mulciber laughed at him. Tyrus fell into a fighting stance with the spear. Mulciber smashed into him and kicked him across the burning field. The speed of it left Tyrus gasping. Mulciber was the strongest demon he had ever fought. With dread, he remembered Marah’s warnings to run.
I should have listened.
“The Deep is being overrun, my general. Soon, the White Gate will be mine. It took years to clean up your mess—years that I’ll strip from your hide.”
Tyrus decided to die fighting. He pulled himself to his feet in defiance. He charged and swung, but his body fought him all the way. The Spear felt heavy in his hands. Mulciber deflected the attack and backhanded him into the ground.
“You won’t die today.” Mulciber kicked him again. “I’ll drag you through each of the Nine Hells. Overlords will take turns ripping you apart, and my runes will pull you back together again. Your death will be my masterpiece. All of creation will sing songs about the price you paid for betraying me.”
Tyrus fought for air as he stood. If he were at full strength, he might have had a chance. The battle and the explosion had sapped him, though. Mulciber knew it too and gloated with a toothy grin. Outmatched, Tyrus realized he wanted a different death. Mulciber was toying with him, and Tyrus despised the mockery. Too beat up to fight back, he glared instead.
“Grovel,” Mulciber said. “Beg for mercy, and I might take pity on you.”
“You’ll have to kill me.”
“You think you know pain? Come, I’ll show you what we did to Ishma.”
Tyrus screamed and swung. Mulciber chuckled and knocked the blade aside. Behind him, in the clear blue sky, Tyrus spotted white wings in a dive. Sunlight shimmered on spear points.
“I expected more,” Mulciber said. “This isn’t as fun as I’d hoped.”
Tyrus swung wide, and Mulciber blocked with a lazy parry. Tyrus dropped his spear and jumped at the demon’s forearm. He wrapped himself around it so the wrist was behind his armpit. Mulciber raised a massive fist to belt him in the face.
“What are you—?” Mulciber glanced over his shoulder and fought to free his arm. “Let me go.”
Tyrus growled an answer. Through the
haze of smoke, the sunlight caught his eyes, and they flashed gold like a hound’s. He put everything he had left into trapping the arm—he dug in with his toes, tightened his core, and pulled at Mulciber with all his might—yet Mulciber still dragged him across the ground. Mulciber punched and clawed Tyrus’s face. Though blinded by blood, Tyrus refused to release him.
Like a sparkling raindrop, Archangel Ramiel fell upon Mulciber’s back. His spear tore deep into Mulciber’s shoulder before a blinding explosion sent Tyrus flying. Mulciber roared, and more blasts followed as an unholy storm seared the battlefield. Wind howled. The ground cracked. And sorcery tore the sky. Cries of pain from purims and Norsil were silenced with a deafening thunderclap. Tyrus curled into a ball. He cradled his face and waited to die.
PART THREE
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
—Julius Caesar
WINGLESS
I
Marah struggled to read one of Dura’s books. Her left eye had better focus than her right, but after a couple of hours of reading, it became blurry. A dull pinch pushed into her eye socket, and she rubbed her face. The tome was a heavy beast with wood bindings and a large stand, so Marah kept shifting her head and leaning in closer to the script, trying to decipher it. She should have called for Larz to read to her, but she hated listening to words. He read too slowly.
A tingling started at her shoulders and slithered up her neck to tickle her hairline. Marah backed away from the book. She sensed powerful sorcery, and she let the eerie feelings guide her to a window looking west. Darkness grew. The sun set. She hoped Tyrus survived. She had only sensed such power once before, when she was a toddler and her nurse died.
The sarbor fought again.
The scrape of a walking stick announced Dura. Marah didn’t look back because the sound saddened her. Dura seldom picked the stick up and struck the floorboards. She dragged it more often of late. Marah struggled to admit Dura was dying. She refused to believe such a woman could die.
Dura stepped to the window and rested a hand on Marah’s shoulder. “You sense the battle?”
Marah nodded.
“Longer than before—and more of them. The stalemate draws to an end.”
Marah finished the thought. “The Third War.”
“I’m glad I won’t be around to see it. The prophets claim there won’t be a fourth.”
A voice whispered, There will always be war.
Marah squeezed her eyes shut. If she fought hard, she could force the voices away, but they often took her by surprise. She didn’t want to know the world’s secrets. Not that day. Tyrus was fighting, and she didn’t want to know if he lived or died—not yet. She thought of him as an uncle, the last bit of her family. If he died—and Dura followed—Marah would be alone with the ghosts and the darkness.
Most of what she knew about Tyrus was gossip, but he had defied an empire to save her. In a land where everyone wanted to use her and her own father had tried to kill her, Tyrus offered protection. That meant everything to Marah. Tyrus and Dura and Chobar: Marah could count her friends on one hand.
Dura asked, “Why so tense?”
“Tyrus is fighting Mulciber.”
“You can’t know that.”
“He’s still out there, with the barbarians. They’ve been fighting for weeks, and now the shedim are angry.”
Dura grew silent for a time. “Then he is lost.”
“The seraphim help.”
“Why would they help the Norsil?”
“I asked them to.”
“If that’s true…” Dura squeezed her shoulder. “Child, do you want to start the Third War?”
Marah fought the temptation to parrot the voices. She could tell Dura that the First War—the shedim rebellion—had never ended or that Mulciber had attacked the Deep Ward or that the seraphim wanted to end the stalemate. Instead, she watched the dusk deepen and wondered whether Tyrus could survive.
“You are too young to worry about such things,” Dura said. “Edan was similar. The world was thrust upon him. He never had a chance to be a child. It’s the curse of the Reborn.”
“Did he hear the voices?”
“Thankfully, he was spared from that. Your father had the talent, although he needed sorcery to talk to them.” Dura patted her shoulder. “You are the first person I’ve heard of to speak to them without runes. It is your burden to bear alone.”
“My burden?”
“I don’t know how to help you.”
Marah leaned into Dura’s robes and wrapped an arm around her bony legs. They watched the dark horizon, and as sorcerers, they sensed powerful spells more than anything else as the otherworldly forces collided. The hugging helped ward away a creeping despair. When Marah sensed the power of the angelic host, her instincts screamed at her to flee. She felt the same terror in Dura’s shaking hands.
II
A strange silence, punctuated by the hiss and pop of smoldering rubble, startled Tyrus awake. For days, he had been listening to snarling animals, and the absence of sound felt unnatural. He opened his eyes to darkness and felt a heaviness in the air. He tasted ash in his mouth and realized he was buried alive. Kicking free of the rubble, he groaned and climbed to his feet. White light blinded him, and he blinked away afterimages. Caked ash fell from him like skin from a shedding snake.
The landscape was a blackened, smoldering wasteland. Gray smoke filled the sky, and Tyrus thought he might have gone to the Nine Hells. A great fire had cleansed the battlefield. A breeze irritated his scalp, and his fingers found blistered skin instead of hair. Pain seared him as he tested his limbs. Many of his bones were cracked or broken, and open wounds bled all over his body. Walking made him gasp and stumble.
Like an old friend, pain returned to torment him. He had spent too much of his life writhing in agony. Had he known the price of his runes, he would have run away from Rosh as a small boy.
His armor hung in tatters. He vaguely remembered a blast ripping most of the mail from his body. He searched the hole he had climbed out of for the Spear of the Warlord but found only dark ash. He cast about for the weapon and saw nothing. The spear was lost. He flexed his fingers, amazed that he had not lost any. Aside from broken bones, blisters, and burns, he felt intact.
The smell of burnt fur drifted across the plains. Through the smoky haze, he spotted the highlands. The gate was ruined, but farther up the hills, many of the camps looked intact. In the other direction, he saw the abandoned camps of the purims. Dust burned his eyes as he shuffled through the smoldering landscape.
Not far from him, in a large crater, the Archangel Ramiel lay in a heap of burnt robes and charred armor. Soot stained his blond hair, and several wounds bled gold. Tyrus slid down the wall of the crater and dragged himself to the angel.
Ramiel’s eyelids flickered open. “How are you not dead?”
Tyrus’s throat burned, and his raspy voice croaked, “Why?”
“Marah asked me to protect you. I thought I’d failed.”
“Marah?”
Ramiel nodded. Tyrus didn’t understand how a little girl could command angels, but the idea made him feel small. He struggled to believe that Ishma’s daughter had caused such devastation. She asked the angels to do this?
“Is Mulciber dead?”
“Do you know where angels go when we die?” Ramiel closed his eyes. “The heavens and hells are not for my kind. We return to chaos.”
Tyrus worked his tongue, trying to swallow and soothe his cracked throat. Talking made it worse. Ramiel spoke of strange things. Tyrus could not imagine worlds beyond the afterlife. The idea made his head throb, and he had more immediate concerns.
“Who won?”
“Mulciber retreated,” Ramiel said. “And I am dying.”
“He lives?”
“He’s hurt and angrier
than before, if you can imagine such a thing.” Ramiel coughed a laugh. He grew quiet, exhaustion in his voice. “He was always stronger. The best of us. My pride ruined me.”
“But where is Ithuriel?”
Ramiel’s eyelids drooped. Only his lips moved. “He wouldn’t protect Nisroch’s children. They hunt his elves.” The angel lay crumpled and stained with ash.
“Tell me how to help. If I can survive, so can you.”
“My brother was always a bastard.” Ramiel lifted his chin to reveal a black gash on his neck. “He infected me with the Blight. It’s eating my flesh.”
“There must be a cure.”
“There is. Death,” Ramiel said. “We die with honor or become one of them.”
Tyrus sat there, watching the breeze stir up dust and ash. From inside the crater, the world looked like a burnt hole under a smoke-filled sky. He wanted to do more, but fatigue dulled his mind and pulled his chin to his chest. Ramiel’s eyes became vacant. If he were a man, Tyrus would say he bled to death.
“We don’t have much time,” Ramiel said. “Nisroch will be angry.”
“I know.”
“He will try to best you with steel first, in front of his children. He fancies himself as the father of war. When he realizes you can fight, he will use sorcery.” Ramiel tore a medallion off his belt. “The aegis will protect you. He knows how to counter the sorcery, but it will surprise him. You will have precious moments to act, or you will die.”
“I can’t fight him. Not like this.”
“Look what he did to God’s children, Tyrus. He needs to be killed.”
“Then why not kill him first?”
“Ancient rules—from the Second War. God spared what remained of the wingless—Nisroch and his two brothers. We only hunt the shedim.”
“So you want me to break the rules?”
Willing to Endure: A Dark Fantasy (The Shedim Rebellion Book 3) Page 33