The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  “Open your arms, Shaidaxi.”

  He shook his head. He'd seen the first blast: the Portal exposed at last, its two-inch aperture enough to blow any living thing to ash. He survived by virtue of his fire-blood, but even then he couldn't fully hold it back. With no wall to disperse its energies, it would annihilate the Guardian on its next assault.

  The Emperor sighed, and he felt the strands around his arms flex, trying to pull them apart. “Why must we do this? If you were discontent, you should have told me instead of starting a spiteful little war.”

  Enkhaelen tried to give him the pike-hand, but his nails had grown into such horrific curlicues that he could barely move his fingers.

  “I admit, I do like you silent,” the Emperor mused.

  Here came the Guardian again, bounding up the steps like a thorny puppy. The Emperor leveled a chest-sized blast at it, but though it fell back, the swarm of crows descended in even greater numbers. No matter how they tore, they did no lasting damage to the Emperor, but they were enough of a distraction for Enkhaelen to struggle again.

  From within the cloud, the Emperor said, “Truly, I do not understand. I gave you what you wanted, yet you unceasingly spit in my eyes. All I desire is a world remade for me and a people to replace my own. You seemed happy to make them. What has changed?”

  Me, he would have said, but it didn't matter.

  “Once this is done, we will talk. But do not fear that I will relinquish you to the haelhene; they have earned even more of my ire than you. No, I shall put you back in the wall until I've claimed the world, and then you will help me reforge it. I will find other ways to pass the time.”

  Then the Guardian was back, snarling, rending futilely at the Emperor's inconstant shape. Enkhaelen read fear in its essence; it could not sustain such a conflict for long, and there was no end to the energy that flowed from the Portal, no way to wear the Emperor down.

  His gaze fell to the prism and, further, the knife.

  *****

  Through the open doors, Dasira had watched it all fall apart.

  Now she looked up, because Cob was rising.

  He hadn't changed. His eyes were still empty, dark water seeping from his mouth and nose and sweating from his pores. Though she'd seen it before, this time it seemed that there was nothing left inside him but the water, his body a thin membrane holding back the Void.

  On his other side, Arik straightened from wolf to wolfman. The bleakness on his bloodied face echoed her own, and as she grabbed for Cob's arm, he did too.

  “It's over,” she said. “We've lost. We need to run. There's nothing you can do, Cob—nothing we could ever do. We were wrong.”

  He gave no sign of hearing, just broke their grip and advanced into the throne room at the head of a slow black river. Looking around, she found the water up to her ankles, the hallway already filling, the walls' light gone.

  Something slid past her feet, sending a shiver through the shallow surface. Then came another, and more, like eels or snakes or smooth musculature rippling under skin. She glanced to Arik and saw his jaw clench. He nodded, and she returned it.

  Drawing Serindas, she followed in Cob's wake.

  Chapter 35 – Gate of Fire

  He floated on his back with her above him, close as a lover—close as they'd been in the cave when he was young. That last sad smile lingered on her lips, and though her eyes were glassy with death, when he inhaled he tasted the chill of her breath. Her fingers had rigored into his hair; his were locked behind her, the dress beneath them slick with moss or silt—something that sloughed away at his touch. Something disintegrating under pressure, succumbing to time.

  The darkness curled around them. Pervaded them, held them.

  It was a comfort.

  In the distance, far beyond her, hung a star. He felt like it should mean something to him, but he couldn't remember—only knew that it was an irritation to his mother and an insult to the darkness. A breach of its eternal peace. He should snuff it, but he didn't want to move.

  It was so quiet here. The silence swallowed up his thoughts, leaving him calm. Though there was nothing in this world but her and the dark and the light, he didn't mind; he'd never needed much.

  Her lips moved against his cheek, voice muted by the water. Still, he knew the word.

  'Revenge.'

  A shiver went through him, lighting up lattices of pain in his limbs. He didn't want her to speak. He just wanted to stay here.

  'Revenge,' she said. Behind his eyes, he saw the shadow swinging from its rope.

  He opened his mouth slowly, but couldn't answer. His lungs were full of water. It didn't hurt; in fact, the weight in his chest felt soothing, like a child's swaddle. He belonged here beneath the ruins, amid the pressure and depth, where nothing could disturb him.

  'Revenge,' she repeated, and the light grew dimmer.

  Confused, he shook his head and felt his longish hair drift like seaweed around his face. Revenge meant going up, didn't it? He didn't want to—up was air and noise and pain and anger, dissonance and struggle. He just wanted to rest.

  The light faded until it was no more than a halo around the dark starburst of her hair. As her face fell into shadow, old memories encroached like biting insects. The cave-mouth, the lightning-stitched sky, the quarry, the women's bunkhouse. The figure being flung from the entry; the figure at the end of the rope.

  No, he tried to say, but his mouth wouldn't move. His lungs ached around their load. She was pure darkness now, eclipsing him. Had it always been this way?

  I can't avenge you. You killed yourself.

  Though they'd never parted, suddenly she was upon him, adhering like clay, the tendrils of her hair everywhere. Her cold arms locked around him, cold lips at his brow, and he was too small to fight—too twisted by fidelity and confusion. Fabric tore away beneath his hands as if rotten, and on icy skin he felt the map of scars he'd always known were there, no matter how modestly she dressed.

  He'd stayed away because he couldn't bear it. He'd broken rocks in the quarry tirelessly because it was better than thinking—than seeing the truth.

  Her nails dug into his nape and back. Her hair was at his neck, in his mouth, choking, smothering, and suddenly he saw himself from above: tiny and red-faced, bawling in his blankets while somewhere nearby the door-flap fell closed. Footsteps receded up the trail outside: Dernyel, leaving again with the Guardian heavy on his shoulders, and her alone with the baby. Bereft and hollow and questioning her choice.

  At his back, he felt the Void yawn wide, a doorway she had passed through first.

  A door she held open for him.

  Lucidity brought fear. He knew what would happen if he crossed that threshold because he held an example in his arms. For all his weariness and gloom, his suicidal push toward the Palace, he didn't want to die; he just couldn't see a way out. As his fingers curled, he felt the red cord still bound around his hand, connecting him upward to a different life. If he pulled, he would bring it down with him, and he didn't know how to rise.

  I can't

  do

  what you did

  to me.

  The light was gone now. He tried to struggle but even the pins-and-needles were fading, his senses losing cohesion in the dark. The thread burned in his fist, the only thing he felt keenly—even her body just a black pressure now, smothering, crushing. Too late, he understood that she hadn't been asking to be avenged. This was her vengeance.

  You can't

  blame

  me

  for your

  mistakes.

  But she did. And he knew that all his life, he had too. He was just an extension of her, a flawed copy that had been unable to rescue the original, and he deserved to meet the same end.

  No.

  No.

  You don't

  control me.

  I did

  this

  to

  myself.

  His shoulders pierced the thin membrane of the thr
eshold. Beyond, there was nothing—not even cold. He tried to spread his arms in the hope that this 'door' had a frame he could catch himself on, but they wouldn't respond. It was like the muscles had been severed. As the null crept up his neck, he lost track of his legs as well.

  Above, the red cord rippled as if in a soft breeze. Unable to see his hand or feel his fingers, he couldn't tell whether he still held it or had let it slip free. The Void slid into his chest, filling his lungs with nothing and rising through his throat to bubble from the corners of his mouth. In a flash, he understood that it did not need to pull him in. It could just hollow him out, keeping his body intact to protect it from the sunlit world.

  Like Enkhaelen with the Imperial Light, he would become the aperture. Unlike him, he would have no control. Once his self was gone, it would pour through him unstoppably.

  Grimly, he pressed his lips shut to cut off the stream of bubbles. He couldn't escape, but at least he could resist.

  The emptiness strained against his teeth, demanding release. His tongue went numb, then the roof of his mouth, then his sinuses; dimly he felt threads of Void emerge from his nostrils, and struggled to pinch those shut too. The red cord flickered and twisted just above, and he knew that if he let the emptiness go, it would be the first to suffer.

  Then something shifted. He was not rising; the Void still clasped him in its cold embrace, pervading his insides and seeking escape. Yet somehow the light bloomed above him again, and as it brightened, the water shivered, roiled, boiled—burning shallower with each moment. His mother's silhouette scattered into rags and tatters like the remnants of a dream.

  Jaw fixed, he watched in dazed fascination as the light approached.

  *****

  Dasira circumvented Cob at a fair distance and moved ahead, because even though he terrified her, she couldn't let him go undefended. Gaze forward, eyes full black, he walked as if in a trance, indifferent to the priests who swarmed toward him with hands and eyes aglow. White Flames bracketed each like honor guards, a few wild-eyed pilgrims following in their wake, and as she watched, one raised his hand to project a beam of searing light.

  It hit the corona of darkness that radiated from Cob's lean frame and went out with a sizzle. His attention never shifted.

  Ahead, dark water poured into the great hole like a waterfall, no end in sight. This entire side of the throne room was awash with it, every door disgorging a new flood, and the enemies didn't approach so much as they waded in through knee-high blackness. Shorter, Dasira was nearly up to her hips in it, and bitterly regretted not stealing a taller form. The Palace threads in her gut and chest felt heavy as lead, but at least she'd been around the Guardian enough to know how to compensate for it.

  Her opponents didn't. The first White Flames moved slow as syrup, and Serindas carved through their swords and armor in quick red slices. The priest, less fettered, scorched her shoulder with a line of light and crisped her knuckles as she stabbed him in the face. She was gratified to learn that the Emperor's favor could not repair an akarriden blade through the eye.

  The next ones learned from their fellows' mistakes, but they could only compensate so much. Light-bolts stung her as she advanced low, half-swimming among the sinuous shadow-shapes; the water stole the burn from those blasts but could not snuff Serindas, who cut through legs and groins as easily as shields. She felt like a crocodile at play, red-toothed. Even when her enemies struck back, they caught her on the Palace threads as often as flesh.

  The shadow-shapes twined around her as she moved, but she made herself ignore them. They were far more drawn to the radiance of her enemies; now and then she saw a white sword flail at the water ineffectually, or a pilgrim get yanked down. She advanced in slashes and hacks, lunges and dips—a slow but ferocious dance.

  On Cob's other side, she glimpsed Arik's progress. He held his broken arm close to his chest but the other tore red-and-white gashes through armor and robes, and those he couldn't claw, he grabbed. She almost laughed when she saw him fling a White Flame into the pit. His skin was no barrier to their blades, but he seemed to have accepted the pain; his fur waxed and waned as he shifted, mouth bloody and chest heaving, face determined.

  Between them, Cob moved inexorably forward.

  A stripe of pain crossed her cheek, and she recoiled and sliced her enemy's sword in half on the backswing, cursing her lack of focus. She blocked another with her bracer, the hard black shell repulsing the stiffened threads with ease, then caught a burst of light from the corner of her eye. It didn't fly toward her or Cob, instead striking something slightly ahead.

  She risked a look and saw a bridge of ice lancing out across the emptiness of the pit. Water sheeted from its edges to create a network of supports, and as its fragile point extended toward the other side, all Imperial eyes turned toward it. Priests aimed their channeled bolts at its trusses; White Flames moved in to prevent its use.

  On the far side, a figure with a black sword planted itself where the end would anchor.

  Festering fuck, she thought. The bridge was terrifyingly narrow; if Cob got on it first, she'd never get past him, and no matter his Dark-wrought defenses, he couldn't fight an akarriden blade.

  There was no choice. Backpedaling from her foes, she ignored a slice to the shoulder and made for the bridge.

  The closer she got, the shallower and faster the water became, until it tore at her like grasping hands. The floor beneath her was frozen slick, and with a grimace she toed off her soggy boots and awakened the rarely-used spurs in her feet, pushing them out to grapple for purchase. On her arm, the bracer burned, its toxins kicking her bodythief system back to life.

  She reached her goal a half-step before Cob and fairly leapt ahead, frostbite snapping at her back. If he noticed her, he didn't show it. The ice shrieked under her spurs but held, and as she started across the span, she willed the Palace threads to unreel from her gut and start winding down her thighs to build a facsimile of the White Flame armor. It wouldn't stop Erevard's blade, but it would keep her muscles from freezing.

  Ahead, the bridge reached the far edge and began to broaden. Her enemy stomped on it, then stepped out when it didn't break. His sword trailed dark mist in its wake, a counterpoint to Serindas' bloody light-trail.

  Steeling herself against haste, she examined him as they closed the distance. He moved purposefully and fluidly, unbothered by the ice, and with none of the unhinged rage she'd hoped to see. His helm prevented her from gauging his moves by his eyes, which was a worry. He'd been a soldier before his enslavement, and still had the skills—in addition to his reach.

  Caution told her to position herself like a fencer, left arm back so that he couldn't lop off her bracer. But any hit from the rotblade had the potential to kill, so...

  Wait, how about I just cut through the bridge! He might fall—

  But then it was too late, his blade carving the air toward her face, and she raised Serindas to smack it aside and step in. He withdrew at the same moment, breaking the force of the parry and then lunging again; she shifted just enough for the tip to shoot past her shoulder. Beneath her ribs, the Palace material moved smoothly in its muscle-mimicry, letting her surge forward and cut up at his extended sword-arm.

  His boot caught her in the gut first. They both staggered back, wary.

  She started the next pass, coming in low like a shoulder-rush then dropping into a slide as he chopped a diagonal through where her chest had been. One foot slipped between his, and she planted the other to lever herself up under his guard, the red blade tearing through armor, thigh and pelvis. Blood spurted for an instant, trailing Serindas' sweep.

  Then the armor bound tight and he slammed his forearm into her jaw, tipping her toward the edge. The foot she'd hooked between his staggered him too, giving her a moment to recover and react before the black blade came down again. Sideways and already bent, she bobbed so low she nearly kissed the bridge, losing only the tip of her ponytail to his cut, then dropped back on one hand as his
up-swing nearly sheared off her face.

  From that position, she had enough leverage to kick his legs from under him, but he saw it coming. She managed to get one, but he hopped back on the other, arms windmilling.

  That gave her a nice opening, and she shifted her weight onto the tripping foot and lunged low to try another up-sweep and hopefully nail him under the chin. He managed to brace himself and bring his sword across just in time to parry, vermillion sparks flying everywhere.

  As their hilts locked, she grabbed his right wrist and tried to force the bodythief needles out from beneath her nails. Her bracer spasmed, unprepared for the spur-of-the-moment act, and they only extended halfway—enough to slip through the armor but not enough to sting.

  He tried to backhand her with the sword, failed, then punched for her throat with his offhand. Hardened ridges cut in like razors, and she reeled back as the blood began to flow. Threads immediately squirmed from her neck to bind the wound, and an effort of will sent more Palace material to reinforce it.

  Advantage lost, she spent several moments backpedaling from his pursuit, until a chill went up her spine—not fear but proximity. She dared not look back, but knew Cob was only a few steps away. Rallying, she swapped Serindas to her left hand and slapped Erevard's next cut aside, then moved into his advance, slamming her other hand into the joint of his shoulder.

  He teetered sideways, caught himself and tried to withdraw, but her heel found the back of his knee and bent it. Unwilling to tip, he flung himself violently away, crashing down onto the bridge with one leg off before managing to haul himself to safety. She skittered after him and managed to stick him opportunistically in the knee, but had to pull back as he regained his feet.

  For a moment, they stared at each other from just beyond sword-reach. His armor had sealed his wounds but his shoulders hung heavier, a sign that he was in pain. Adrenaline had numbed her own injuries but they couldn't make her dagger longer. With that armor and his skill, she couldn't cut him fast enough to kill him; either she got a lucky hit between his eyes, or she stuck Serindas in him long enough to suck him dry.