The Iron Hound

by Tim Akers

  “Hard to call it justice when—” LaGaere started.

  “Cinder’s reason is absolute. Cinder’s will is pure,” the high inquisitor said. “If you truly believe that I am innocent— that I have been wronged by Frair Lucas, and Malcolm Blakley, and all of Tener—then you should have let these men deliver me to Heartsbridge.” He stood, unfolding like a siege weapon to loom over the campfire. “Do you believe in my innocence, Duke LaGaere? Or do you side with the likes of Colm Adair, and name me heretic?”

  “If we believed that, we wouldn’t have risked our lives to save you,” LaGaere growled. He remained seated, though, cowed in place by Sacombre’s strange presence. “If half of what they say about you was true…”

  “And what do they say? What has Lucas whispered behind my back, to poison the minds of the timid and the broken?” The circle was quiet, the men staring down at their mugs, unwilling to answer. Sacombre studied them each in turn, finally settling on LaGaere. “Do you fear even to speak it?”

  “I would not give words to their lies, your holiness,” LaGaere said meekly.

  “No? Or are you afraid they might be true?” Sacombre asked with a strange grin. He raised one bony hand and pulled back his sleeve. The knotted scars continued down his arm. “You have seen the marks left on me by my battle at the Fen Gate. And you have heard the words of Malcolm Blakley, a man you trusted before he raised his banner in defense of House Adair.”

  Sault spat. “House Adair lied for generations to protect their pagan god,” he said. “They and all the Tenerrans. Why should we take the word of a hound over that of a priest?”

  “But what of Frair Lucas?” Sacombre asked, wheeling on the knight. “He is blessed of Cinder, is he not? And he swears I am a heretic. What if he’s right?”

  “Years in the pagan wilderness have twisted his mind,” another knight answered. “He made his allegiances clear, there in the Fens, going with the Adair bitch to the witches’ hallow. Gods know what happened to him there. What promises he made, or betrayals he committed.”

  “Yes, but how are you to know anything when the priests of the god of reason disagree?” Sacombre asked. “You, mere mortals, benighted by the flesh, driven by the madness of Strife.” He turned in a slow circle, his grin cracked wide and wild. “Why, you’re hardly more than animals, howling at the moon!”

  “Now, just a second,” LaGaere said, standing up. “We risked our lives to bring you away from that priest. And we risk our souls defying Heartsbridge. We believe you, man. You don’t have to belittle our honor!”

  “It is not your honor I am belittling,” Sacombre said, “but your wisdom. Think on how this looks. Fleeing into the moors at the first opportunity. Hiding from a priest of the inquisition. If I am not guilty, then I must submit to Cinder’s judgment. How am I to do that here?” Sacombre threw his arms wide. The shadows swirled around him, the flickering light of the fire growing sharp against the darkness. The men cowered away from the gaunt form. “What justice is there in the wilderness? Where is the judgment of winter?”

  “I am here, Sacombre,” Lucas said.

  * * *

  He emerged from the shadows, his form wrought in ribbons of purple light. Some of the soldiers sprang to their feet, drawing steel, while others pushed back with a cry of surprise. “Surrender, and I will spare these men. They cannot continue with us south, but they will be free to return to their homes.”

  “Mercy,” Sacombre growled. “That’s something not in the canon of Cinder, Lucas. Perhaps Sir Sault is right. Perhaps you have been too long among the pagans.”

  “If I have learned anything of mercy, it is from Sir LaFey, and not the gheists that she and I hunt together.” He turned his writhing form toward LaGaere. “Be wise, Warhome. I believe you have done this out of faith for the church, but I promise you that this man has left behind the celestial path. Take your horses and your knights and return to your keep. Let Cinder judge him.”

  “If Cinder’s judgment is to come from cowards like you, I’ll have none of it,” LaGaere said. He drew his sword and took a step forward. “Bring your threats, shadow, and we will see who is favored of the gods.”

  “Don’t do anything foolish,” Sacombre said. Raising a hand, he twisted his fingers into a strange knot. The shadows thrown by the campfire took form, creeping across the grass.

  Lucas saw this, and started to try to untangle the spell that the high inquisitor was casting. Sacombre continued. “Lucas doesn’t want to kill you, obviously. It would look bad if people kept dying at his hand—especially faithful Suhdrin lords. How will Heartsbridge see that, Lucas? If these honest servants of the gods are murdered by your hand?”

  “Listen…” Lucas started, but he was too late.

  Sacombre’s eyes turned dark. Inky tendrils bled down his cheeks, and then he stretched his arms toward the ground. The shadows on the ground grew solid, those nearest the fire shying away. Those at the feet of the half-dozen men who stood around the fire rippled with unnatural life.

  They turned to blades and rose up from the ground, piercing foot and leg and chest and skull, a quick spindle of bloody violence that pitted each man like an apple. One man twisted away from the piercing shadows, his feet and legs already locked in place by the barbs, but the tendrils of night crawled slowly up his chest until they reached his head. He let out a scream as shadowy hooks sliced into his mouth, his eyes, piercing cheek and jaw bloodlessly.

  Another soldier, who had been watching Sacombre closely, managed to dance out of the way of the first grasping tendril, only to trip across the twisted roots of the growing darkness. He fell and was met by a blossom of shadow that punched through his chest, sprouting from his back in a dozen cruel blades. His fingers trailed across the ground.

  The rest died in seconds, their blood sluicing down the shadowed blades of the night to pool on the ground. They hung in the air like corpses left out to dry.

  Then Sacombre dropped them. The shadows dissipated, the blades evaporating like fog. LaGaere fell heavily to the ground. Sacombre stood still in the circle of the dead, a smile on his face.

  “And now you must explain this, as well, Frair Lucas. To the council, to the celestriarch, and to their families. All of Suhdra will want to hear why you butchered these men.” He sat cross-legged beside the fire, folding his hands in his lap. “All of Tenumbra will know of your violence, and your evil.”

  “You’re a devil!” Lucas spat. “A murdering, demonfucking, godsdamned devil!”

  “No,” Sacombre said. “I am something much more than that. A prophet, maybe. Or a new kind of god. The kind of god that bends other gods to his will. Yes. Yes, I think I like that.” He closed his eyes and leaned forward, as though in prayer. “Now bring your servants, and let them bind me again. Heartsbridge is waiting, after all.

  “Heartsbridge, and judgment.”

  39

  IT WAS A long, jagged inhalation. As though Gwen had been holding her breath ever since the goddess of spring abandoned her at the witches’ hallow. She was finally able to breathe again, but the air had turned to broken glass, and she felt as if her lungs were starting to bleed.

  Whatever it was that came out of the ground beneath the shrine at Greenhall, it was far from holy. A lacework of sick yellow light the color of bile erupted from the mud. It thrashed in the air, whimpering and screaming without a voice, cutting through the darkness. A spindle of it clipped Folam on the shoulder, burning through his robes and sending the voidfather sprawling into the storm. The winds picked up. The air crackled with electricity and sulfur.

  Gwen was alone at the center.

  She knelt in the mud. Her clothes were soaked from the damp and the unnatural storm that whipped through the chamber. Her bound breasts ached, and her fingers were bloody from dragging herself across the ground against the winds. Then a deeper pain joined the chorus, something stitched into her bones—an emptiness that had carved a place for itself in her spirit, and was only now apparent. She felt herself falling d
own a steep incline in her soul, toward a cliff that tumbled off into darkness.

  Gwen struggled against the fall. She cried out for an anchor, a rope, anything that would keep her upright. For a moment she had it. Her blood stiffened, her veins tightening like steel cord, the muscle of her heart pumping hot and stony through her body. She became hard, but she was already falling, and the vernal god was falling with her. They came together with a crack that split the air and the earth and the stone. It nearly split Gwen, but her blood just shuddered and shook off the impact.

  The twisting matrix of yellow light wrapped itself around her.

  She rose, and the god of spring consumed her.

  * * *

  Horold woke where Noel had laid him down. His head hurt. His whole body hurt, the way it sometimes did when he hadn’t eaten for a few days and his breath would stink and his belt would come loose. It hurt deep.

  Then he remembered the blind pagan and the light, and Horold lurched to his feet. He fell straight back down, his joints howling. In the dim light of the corridor, two hands lay in front of his face. He moved, and both hands moved with him. They were his hands, but they were different.

  He twisted to a sitting position and looked at them, though his vision didn’t seem quite right. On the right, familiar skin and bone, the nubs of his fingernails grimy and pink except for the dead nail on his little finger, as black as night.

  His left hand was dead. No, he thought, watching his fingers wiggle, just like the fingers on his right. Not dead. Old. Old and withered, like his grandmother’s hand. He stood up, and the pain in his joints came back. The tunnel was choked with debris, as though the ceiling had shaken free a generation of dust and loose trash. Horold shuffled through it, his feet heavy, his legs unwilling to lift. There was light ahead. He went toward it.

  * * *

  The street was crowded with people rushing around. Everyone looked scared. Baskets had tumbled off of carts and lay on the ground, their contents spilled out on the hard-packed stones. Plaster lay like snowdrifts around the buildings. A silver vendor, her face set in a harsh line, was gathering up her wares and piling them into a pouch she had made with the hem of her robes. But no, not the vendor. Horold knew the silversmith who worked this street, and this woman was not her. He came closer, and the woman glanced up at him. Horror filled her face.

  “What is happening?” Horold asked. His throat was choked with dust. He sounded like a pauper, his voice rattling drily through his ribs. The woman swallowed hard, dropped one more silver bracelet into her pouch, then ran down the street. Horold reached out for her, but the woman was gone.

  The ground shook, and strange gusts of wind puffed out from the broken corridor he had just left behind, along with every window and door along the street. It felt as if the city was coughing. Horold’s withered hand came down on a silver plate, and he almost snatched it away before curiosity filled him. He picked up the plate and looked at his face in its reflection.

  Half of his face looked like a fruit left to dry in the sun. His hair had gone white, and the sunken pit of his eye was black and glossy. His lips peeled back. Horold’s teeth were sharp and long, fitting together like a jigsaw trap. He nodded.

  “Of course,” Horold said quietly. “A curse. I have been cursed.” He turned his head to get a better look at the wicked teeth sprouting from his jaw. “Cursed by a pagan witch.” It all made sense.

  A lilting shiver of screams broke from down the street, reaching Horold in echoes. He looked in that direction. A flock of mocking-doves scattered from the rooftops, mingling with the smoke from what appeared to be a large house fire. What was going on?

  Snapped out of the shock of his own appearance, Horold spun in place, taking in the view.

  Towers leaned like drunken guards, their roofs crooked and on the verge of toppling. Flames licked through the slums downhill, where he had first led the pagans into the Curse. Incense had filled the air ever since Lady Sophie returned from the south, but now it mingled with black, oily smoke that stank of burned trash. As Horold watched, an avalanche of plaster slid noisily down the side of a warehouse. It was followed by bricks, and then the whole building deflated, sending a plume of dust into the sky.

  The ground shook again. This time it felt closer, like the street was a harp string, humming under Horold’s feet. Behind him, the buildings started to dance together. They were falling.

  “Gods in heaven, spare your servant,” Horold whispered under his breath. This was the prayer his mother had taught him on her deathbed, the one his father hissed into her grave, the one Horold prayed every high day and low holiday. He took a step backwards, stumbling into the silversmith’s wares, toppling the rickety stall and sending priceless platters and dishes and other finery clattering to the ground.

  Horold clutched the cheap linen the woman had used to cover her stall, holding in his tiny fists—one young and pink, the other withered, the color of snow. He willed the prayer out of his forehead and into the heavens.

  “Gods above, spare your servant. Spare me!”

  Another building split like an egg, then another, then another. A storm hatched from the shattered brick, tearing into the sky like a thunderbolt wrapped in wind. The wreckage of the buildings went up with it, spinning slowly into the air like a wind chime, rotating slowly around a pillar of flickering light.

  Then he saw it.

  A god stood in the middle of this chaos, its head crowned in lightning. A cloak of endless flowers swirled around it, their petals washing down the length of the cloak to shower onto the ground. Each petal burned, like a curl of charcoal, its edges tipped in bright embers. Among the swirling folds of the flower cloak, Horold caught glimpses of ruby dark fire, churning like the heart of a kiln. The face of the gheist was blank, a silver mask that flickered with the lightning that arced around its body.

  The gheist horn sounded from the high towers of Greenhall. The choir, safe in the doma inside the castle walls, began singing the rites of coming dawn, beginning with the one that burns away all darkness. The gheist turned its flowering head in that direction. It walked through the city, its passage heralded by the sound of whispering petals and scouring wind. Lightning played against the castle walls. The horn sounded again, and again, a strident call to battle.

  The gates of the castle boomed open and a stream of knights flowed out. Their column bristled with the dull red shimmer of bloodwrought steel. They flew the banner of the gheist hunt, an arcane eye pierced by silver spear, the tri-acorn of House Halverdt fluttering beside. Horold caught his breath at the sight of it.

  Abruptly he was shoved aside by the blind pagan, no longer blind, his robes white with dust. Blood leaked down the side of his face, turning the dust there to dark paste. The man didn’t spare Horold a second look. He ran down the street, away from the gheist, away from the castle. He ran for the gates.

  Horold lay on the ground and whispered his prayer, as the city came apart around him.

  * * *

  Noel fell to her knees. The center of the chamber disappeared in a cloud of dust, carried by the gale force winds summoned by the voidfather. Cahl disappeared into the squall, trying to push his way forward even as the storm took him. Of Gwen and Folam there was no sign.

  The archway at the entrance to the buried shrine offered some protection. Noel huddled in its lee, covering her face with the folds of her robe as the storm rolled toward her. There was a brief moment of howling violence, then she was buried beneath dust and debris. The storm’s violence continued, but it was muffled and distant.

  The weight of the wreckage crushed down on her. The shock of what had happened clouded her mind. Noel lay there, wondering what she should do next. What she could do.

  Had the voidfather betrayed them?

  The thought crept into her mind like a crack in the foundation. Folam of the empty tribe had kept the pagans together for so long, insisting on maintaining communications with the few faithful in the south, wrangling the anger in the no
rth, keeping things from getting out of hand. Maintaining balance. She had trusted him to end this threat, as well. They all had.

  The sound outside her little shelter changed. The storm seemed to have passed, to be replaced by a low, throaty rumble. The debris that piled on top of Noel’s head began to hum and vibrate. She pushed against it and something shifted. A beam of light fell against her cloak, and she shoved the cloth aside.

  She was in open air. The sky above was blue, a thin sliver of sapphire set in a ring of hard iron. Noel coughed, and heard someone call her name.

  Cahl stood in the middle of a debris field. It was more than just the collapsed chamber of the hidden shrine. Bricks and mortar, broken cobbles, vast piles of shattered slate tile, as sharp and jagged as swords. There was a clear space around him, held at bay by a shivering ring of everic power. The shaman stood with his hands spread, sweat turning his face pale and bright.

  “Again!” he said weakly. “I can hear you, but…”

  “Cahl!” Noel shouted. The man’s head turned toward her, and she saw how drained he truly was. He shouldered in her direction, his every movement banded by the lines of everic power that he was channeling. A path cleared in the rubble. Bricks and stone shuffled aside like playing cards. Noel pushed toward them, finally stepping free of her bondage, limping toward the shaman of stones.

  Once she was close enough, Cahl released his binding and collapsed to the ground. The stones shifted dangerously around them, a few tumbling down to form a scree at their feet, but most of it held. Noel knelt, putting a hand to his forehead. He was burning up. She started to wick the heat away, untangling the weakness from his flesh and bleeding it off into the air. Smoke wafted up from her shoulders.

  “What happened?” she asked while she worked.

  “Folam…” Cahl gasped. “He… he must have lost control.”

  “That is not his way,” Noel said. “That is never his way.”

  “I just can’t believe he would do this,” Cahl said, shaking his head. “Any of this.” He looked up at the wreckage that surrounded them. They lay at the bottom of a crater, its sides carved out from the buildings and walls of the city. The castle was perched at the edge of the wreckage. Whatever wards Halverdt maintained, they had been enough to protect against Folam’s spell.