Raz caught the curved blade in a mailed hand, feeling the edge split through the thick leather that shielded his palm and bite into flesh. In the same instant, though, Ahna jutted forward. The dviassegai’s twin blades took Kehnt through the chest and abdomen, spitting him like meat on a fork.
Without pausing, Raz roared and whipped Ahna around. Using the Pirate King’s corpse like the heavy end of some great grim hammer, he slammed her into the first person he found. Atheus went flying, tumbling away across the dirty snow.
Ahna, though, her grip slicked by the blood flowing from Raz’s slashed palm, went with him.
There was a moment, a tiny instant where triumph flared in the eyes of the two left closest to him. The mountain man had leapt back at Raz’s charge, but the unnamed spearwoman and shield bearer roared in victory. They pounced forward, one from either side, intent on meeting Raz’s unprotected body with cutting steel.
What they met instead were the war ax and gladius, drawn with such speed many of the spectators could only claim the Monster of Karth had simply magicked them into his hands.
Blade met blade, pushing aside the shield bearer’s sword so that the man stumbled past Raz, off-balance and taken by surprise. The ax, though, wooden haft gripped in Raz’s wounded hand, slickened and slipped. The spear Raz had intended to parry didn’t go wide enough, and the keen tip of the blade caught a lip in the armor of his shoulder, piercing the thick muscle of his arm.
The gladius, though, free of its own responsibility, was more accurate, and came around to take the spear’s owner through the throat.
Raz left his blade there, thrust halfway to the hilt in the woman’s neck as she fell, intent on other things. Tugging the spear from his arm with a grunt, he turned to meet the lumbering form of the mountain man, the claymore thrust forward like a lance, unstoppable behind the heavy rush of its wielder.
Unstoppable, that is, until Raz’s thrown war ax took the big man between the eyes, ending his charge so abruptly he might have hit solid wall.
As the claymore and its owner fell to the earth, Raz turned to find the shield bearer struggling on all fours to get back on his feet, burdened by the weight of his armor and slipping in the bloody slush. He didn’t even see Raz come up behind him.
Nor did he see the clawed foot come down on the back of his head, slamming him once more into the muck, crushing the fragile bones of his face and neck against the frozen earth.
The last one died almost as suddenly. Sury Atheus had just freed himself from the tangle that was Ahna and the still-speared Kehnt, pulling himself to his feet on the crossbeams of the portcullis behind him. He looked dazed, stumbling to and fro as he cast about for his swords, lost somewhere in the snow.
Twirling the borrowed spear in his good hand, Raz set it, aimed, and launched the thing like a javelin.
It took Atheus in the chest with the force of a ballista. The blade punched clean through his body, lodging itself in the wood of the gate behind him with a thunk. Atheus’ limbs spasmed as it hit him, and he looked down in confusion at the five feet of shaft protruding from his furs, impaling him standing up. For a few seconds he wailed in terror and disbelief, his arms attempting to work through the shock, swiping at the thing, trying to get a grip. His fingers had just found the spear, though, when he died, and they dropped to his sides even as the man himself fell silent and slumped forward, still upright, like some grisly life-sized doll that had been nailed to the wall.
He was the last to stop moving, and the stillness of the pit, scattered now with bodies thrown about the bloodstained snow, matched the awed silence of the stadium around him.
Slowly, Raz staggered towards Atheus, distantly aware of the ten thousand eyes following his battered form. The heaviness in his chest was greater now, and he could hear the wheeze of air bubbling through the wound in his back with every breath. He limped as he moved, too, favoring the leg not lacerated by the flail. His left arm, skewered by the spear, ached like he was holding it in scalding water, and he held it close to his chest as he reached down for Ahna’s haft. Putting a foot on Kehnt’s chest, he ripped the dviassegai free of the man.
Then he turned to face the last figure standing with him in the pit.
Had he been in his right mind, Raz might have thought the smile on Quin Tern’s face peculiar. The scattered corpses of the best he’d been able to offer lay about the Arena floor, and yet still the Chairman looked serene, long hair twisting about his face in the wind. His hands were in the deep sleeves of his robes, and he seemed not to have a care in the world. Even as Raz began advancing on him, Ahna in one hand, red wings and crest extended to their greatest extent. Even when Raz began to run, screaming his fury in the raging roar of his kind. Even when the attendants behind him abandoned him, running for their lives.
It was only when Raz took a step to leap, preparing to bring Ahna down on the man’s head in payment for a murdered boy, that Tern moved at all. From within the sleeves of his robes he pulled something small, and held it aloft for Raz to see.
Between his fat fingers, Tern held the bloody form of a simple cloth doll.
CHAPTER 37
The sight of the thing might as well have been some titanic hammer fallen from the sky, shocking Raz back into reality. He felt himself go limp mid-leap as the world rocked back into color and shape. Ahna fell, useless, from his grasp, and he tumbled to the ground at Tern’s feet, barely managing to stumble to two knees and his good arm.
His golden eyes, though, never left the doll.
“Where is she?” he croaked, finding it hard to steal enough breath to speak. “WHERE IS SHE?”
Tern leered down at him in response, clearly pleased with himself. Not bothering to answer Raz, he looked up into the stands.
“My lords and ladies!” he bellowed, sweeping a hand around him at the strewn dead about the pit. “Behold! I promised a fight unlike anything you’d ever seen, and you had it! I promised a beast unlike any you’d ever imagined, and you found him! ARE YOU PLEASED, CITZENS OF AZBAR?”
The cheer that greeted him, for once, was not an immediate torrent of pounding applause and screams. Instead it was more like water flowing through a crumbling dam, more and more coming with every second the levees fell apart. As though the crowd needed to shake itself from whatever hypnosis the butchery of the last few minutes had dragged them into, the noise built up slowly. At first it was little more than a rumble, then a roll like approaching thunder.
Then it was an earth shattering, looming outcry unlike any Raz had ever heard within the Arena.
“WHERE IS SHE, TERN?” he screamed again, trying to be heard over the noise as he pushed himself into a half kneel and felt every inch of his battered body seize in protest at the motion. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?”
Again the Chairman ignored him, basking once more in the glory of the crowd’s praise. Clearly he knew he was untouchable. Until Raz found out what had happened to Lueski, the man might as well have been on the other side of the world to him.
“But I have done more even than I promised!” Tern continued as the tumult finally ebbed. “Yes! Much more! I have brought your champion, your god of war, to his knees! See him?” He swung a hand to point down at Raz. “See how he grovels! It was wanted. It was needed! Your Monster is made man, my friends! It may take time—years, even—but he will fall. If I have to go to the ends of the earth to find the slayer of Raz i’Syul Arro, I will do it for you. If he can be brought to his knees by a mere servant of the city, then it cannot be doubted that one day he. Will. FALL!”
The crowd whipped itself into a frenzy again, caught in the Chairman’s bloodlust, entranced by the idea of fights even bloodier and grander than what they had just witnessed. None seemed to care that Arrun Koyt’s head lay among the others, desecrated and tortured, sawed clear of its body even as the boy still lived. None seemed to care that it was a child’s toy, bloody and foreboding, that had brought the Monster to his knees.
They only cared for more.
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In that instant, Raz bore witness to the mistake he had made. He saw, in the faces of ten thousand people what he had offered everything for, been willing to give up his life for.
Nothing. Nothing worth ever saving.
Grief and shock ripped through him to mix with the pain of his wounds. He felt himself slipping, felt his conscience slide back down the hill towards the abyss. This time, though, he scrambled not to fall.
No, he told himself, the snow shifting around his hand as he clenched it into a fist. No, there are some worth saving. There’s at least one worth saving.
With a pained groan Raz pushed himself agonizingly to his feet. Before him, Tern hesitated, looking around at him. The man’s face still framed no concern, looking more annoyed than anything that Raz was being rebellious in this moment of triumph.
“Where is she, Tern?” Raz breathed, feeling searing heat along the wound in his back as he brought Ahna up with clear intent. “I’m not going to ask you again.”
Tern frowned, studying Raz as though to deduce whether the threat was worth even considering. Then he raised a hand and gestured. There was a clunk of wood and the sounds of shifting chains, and with a grinding screech the portcullis began to lift. Raz turned in time to see Atheus’ body being lifted off its feet. It climbed higher and higher until the spear couldn’t bear the weight anymore, and dislodged itself from the wood.
As the West Isler fell to the ground, a score of figures appeared from the dim glow of the underworks, stepping out into the pit. Most of them were members of the city guard, pouring out to line the wall, blades drawn and clearly ready for a fight. One was Alyssa Rhen, looking shaken and distinctly not herself as she cast around at the bloody results of Quin Tern’s finale.
And one was Azzeki Koro, a black shadow as always in his darkened leathers, his curved blade drawn and resting across Lueski Koyt’s thin throat.
Raz’s heart fell as he saw her. She still breathed, that much was obvious, but the girl clearly hadn’t walked away from her captor’s clutches unscathed. Her face was bruised and beaten, and her clothes were torn and disheveled. Her black hair, usually so straight and well cared for, was matted with drying blood and stuck to the wounds of her face.
But it was the stillness of her form, the quiet in her eyes, that disturbed Raz the most. Something had been taken from the child. Something had reached in and scarred the delicate pattern of her soul, leaving a silence in her body that was akin to living death. Raz was familiar with it, or at least some form of it.
Lueski had the same look about her he had witnessed for all too many years in the bearing of the Grandmother.
“Lueski?” he asked tentatively, taking a step towards the girl.
At once several of the guard on either side of her converged before him, partially blocking his path to her. He could still see her between them, though, and as he watched, Lueski seemed to shiver, shaken by the sound of her own name. She blinked and looked around at him, and the tears in her eyes flooded Raz with a mixed wash of relief and new grief.
“Raz,” she whimpered. “Raz… They killed Arrun. They made him scream, and when he wouldn’t stop they sewed his mouth shut. Then they killed him, Raz… They took a saw and they held him down and they… they…”
She blinked and reached up to wipe away her tears with the back of her sleeve. Then she looked back up at Raz with red eyes.
“Why would they do that, Raz?” she demanded of him, a child begging for an answer that made sense in the small world she knew. “Why would they kill him?”
“Because Raz didn’t do what he was told,” a voice cut in before Raz himself could respond.
Tern was walking around the ring nearby, picking his way through the carnage as the attendants stumbled behind him, doing their best to keep his long cloak off the ground. He seemed to be looking for something, eyes scanning the snow as he spoke.
“Arrun died because your oaf of a hero didn’t do what he promised, little girl,” Tern said. “He was killed because Raz didn’t stick to our deal.”
Raz shivered at the words, feeling the falling snow drifting around him as he listened.
“I’ll bet anything he’s made promises to you, too,” the Chairman continued, coming to a halt over whatever it was he’d been searching for. “Did he give you his word, hmm? Did he swear he would look out for you? Look out for your brother?”
Stiff in Azzeki’s grasp, Lueski hesitated.
Then she nodded slowly, and Tern smiled in wicked smugness. Toeing something loose from the snow, he kicked it over to the girl.
“And how did that work out for you, child?”
Lueski looked down at the thing as it bounced and settled at her feet. For a moment she seemed not to recognize it, staring at the object with watery eyes as though unsure of what it was. Then she made out of the face behind the snow and mud, filling in the missing pieces of the disfigured features.
As Arrun’s dead eyes looked up into hers, blue meeting blue, Lueski opened her mouth and screamed.
She screamed and screamed, delirious in her horrified fear, trying to scramble away but barely moving as the Captain-Commander held her where she was. The sound echoed about the silent Arena. Though he didn’t look up from the girl’s face, Raz knew that ten thousand stares were fixed on them, avid in their attention. This was what Tern had wanted all along. This had been his grand plan for the day. He thought Raz had betrayed their contract, so he wanted to regain control in one fell swoop. With one act of unfathomable cruelty, witnessed by the packed stadium, the Chairman had brought Azbar back under his fearsome control.
And there wasn’t a damn thing Raz could do about it.
“Lueski!” he shouted over the girl’s pained screeches, ignoring the pressing guard and taking another step towards her. “Lueski! Child! Look at me! Look at me!”
The girl didn’t so much as pause in her screaming. She fought Azzeki’s grip even as her eyes remained fixed on her brother’s head, completely ignorant of the blade at her throat.
“LUESKI!”
Raz roared her name, ignoring the pained weight in his chest. This time the girl heard him. Her shrieks stopped abruptly, but she still didn’t manage to pull her eyes away from Arrun’s.
“Lueski,” Raz pleaded in quieter tones. “Lueski, please. Look away, child. Look at me.”
Lueski’s gaze didn’t budge. For a moment she was still, her body quiet again, and Raz thought she had lost her mind to the darkness again.
Then she spoke, her words barely distinguishable, whispered to the winds.
“You promised.”
Ice washed over Raz, cold as the snow that had long numbed his feet. He fought it off, though, desperate to keep the girl from falling away from him, from disappearing into a place she couldn’t come back from.
“I know, Lueski,” he said. “I know I did. I tried. I’m so sorry, I—”
“Kill them.”
Raz stumbled on his words as Lueski cut him off. Though she still hadn’t looked up, her face had suddenly hardened.
“What?” he asked her tentatively.
“I want you to kill them!” Lueski shrieked, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. “I want you to promise you’ll kill them! I want you to promise and keep it, this time! PROMISE!”
Raz hesitated.
“Lueski…” he said quietly, shaking his head. “Lueski… I can’t. I can’t promise that. They’ll hurt you if I try. They’ll kill you if I try.”
Lueski said nothing in return. For a time she just stood there, tense in Azzeki’s grasp, wide eyes ever meeting her brother’s. Then, all at once, she seemed to calm. The stiffness left her, and for a moment the little girl Raz had found in the woods returned in full. At last she looked away from Arrun, turning to Raz.
For a moment she just stared at him, taking him in, as though trying to fix him in her memory.
Then she smiled a sad sort of smile.
“I’ll miss you.”
And before anyon
e could so much as think to stop her, Lueski brought her hands up to the bare steel of Azzeki’s blade, pressed the edge to her throat, and jerked it hard to one side.
CHAPTER 38
“NO!”
Raz’s screeched roar ripped through the sudden hush of the stands. Blind to the guards in his way, he hurtled for Lueski, Ahna falling to the ground behind him. So shocked were the men around him that no one so much as moved to block his path. To a one they stared in horror at the little body tumbling from Azzeki’s grasp, leaving a trail of red along the man’s blade as she dropped.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 68