by Tim Akers
“Oh, I’ve never wanted to kill you, you fools. You’re too useful. Without inquisitors to scare the pagans, and vow knights to be horrified at Sacombre’s betrayal, and loyal Suhdrins to accuse Tener of heresy… where would we be?”
“Well, I’m still pretty committed to it,” Elsa said.
She swung at Bassion, chopping down with the flame-cracked steel of her bloodwrought blade. The tip bit into the stone transom of the door, sending sparks flying, doing little to slow the blade. But Helenne was far from helpless. She drew a mercy dagger, its barbed hilt made to break blades, and blocked Elsa’s swing. With a twist, she jerked the blade away, forcing Elsa forward into the room. She didn’t lose her sword, but she did stumble past the duchess. Bassion’s blade slipped along Elsa’s ribs as she passed.
The room was a mess. Once a solarium, it was scattered with dead bodies wrapped in silk, young hands and soft faces twisted in the final moments of their death. Tall windows looked out onto a balcony, one of the few viewing platforms other than the tower heights. Beyond the windows, the battle raged.
Elsa pivoted to face the door, but Bassion had already fled to one of the windows, chalice in one hand, knife in the other. Lucas rushed in and looked around with wide eyes.
“What have you done?” Lucas whispered.
“We are uniting the ways, inquisitor. Ending the church’s terrible reign, and with it the cowardice of the tribes. They were always afraid to claim the powers of the gods, both of them. But we have found a better path. An older path.” Bassion picked her way through the corpse-filled room. Elsa kept her sword on the duchess. Bassion laughed.
“Fight me, if you must. But it doesn’t matter now. We already have our victory.”
Elsa gritted her teeth and struck. Helenne blocked easily enough, her hand too strong, the speed with which she riposted too fast. The tip of her dagger tickled Elsa’s neck, then withdrew. Elsa touched the wound, and her fingers came away bloody. Helenne was watching her through cloudy eyes.
“Just a girl with a sword now, aren’t you, Sir LaFey? Hardly a match for the likes of me.”
“If I may interrupt,” Lucas said. He drew a strong bolt of naether out of the shadows, holding it in the air between his two hands while it grew. “I am not so limited. And you—”
Helenne said nothing, just motioned with her hand. The bolt of naether shattered, and Lucas screamed. He tumbled back on the ground, hands going to his face. Black veins popped out on his skin, then skeins of shadow twisted out of him, drawing into Helenne’s chalice. She drew it out like a fisherman playing the line. When she was done, Lucas lay on the ground, gasping for breath.
“You are no less vulnerable than dear little Trueau, or any of the others. Your god isn’t special, Lucas. Just another demon, waiting to be tamed.”
Elsa screamed and charged forward. Bassion twisted away, and the two women came together with a crash that seemed to shake the castle. The duchess stumbled back, falling hard against the wall. The foul liquid in her chalice splashed out, turning the stone into a tapestry of ropy blood and oily darkness.
“You will pay for that. First with your life, and then with your soul,” Bassion growled. “I will not be stopped by a couple of priests too damned foolish to see the enemy right in front of their face!”
“You were never a good celestial, Bassion. Your mistake shows that,” Lucas growled. He got unsteadily to his feet, hands shaking with rage and fatigue, one bony finger pointing at the duchess of Galleydeep. “You have forgotten the date.”
“The date? How in hells could that matter?”
“It is Frostnight, child. Stand before your judge!”
The air turned brittle with cold. Waves of purple energy rose up from the floor, filling Lucas’s hands, twisting around his fingers in rings of runic light. His eyes deepened in his skull, leaving nothing but pits of swirling darkness, an emptiness that fell through for eternity.
Bassion laughed. “Have I not proven the worthlessness of your power, Lucas? Do you need another demonstration of my—”
“The cup!” Lucas howled. Bassion’s forehead creased, then she snatched the chalice closer to her body, just as Elsa struck.
Elsa’s steel fist came down on the duchess’ delicate wrist, snapping bones and sending the chalice flying. It fell, shattering on the stone. As it broke, an incredible light filled Elsa’s soul. Her bonds were cut, the gates between her and Strife torn open, like a dam breaking under the deluge.
“My lady,” she whispered, speaking to Strife. In her heart, Elsa felt the goddess of summer smile, and her power filled Elsa’s veins.
Throwing aside the corrupted steel of her sword, Elsa grabbed Bassion by the throat. Fire surged around her hands, fed by Elsa’s fury and Strife’s blessing. Flames rose up around Bassion’s face like a crown of rubies. The duchess screamed for a brief second, before the heat cooked her windpipe and turned her hair to dust. She continued kicking as Elsa lifted her off the ground. Elsa poured more and more fire into her hands, drawing on Strife’s blessing, turning months of frustration into a jet of purifying flame. Eventually, Bassion was still. Elsa dropped her.
Helenne Bassion’s head was a gleaming white skull, burned and baked in Elsa’s fury. When she hit the stone floor, a crack formed around her left eye, and black liquid leaked out. Lucas stood and rushed to the dead woman’s side.
“The same, the same,” he said. “It’s the corruption I saw, oh so long ago, in the spirit bear, and the hunter gheist. In every feral god we’ve faced since the Allfire!” Lucas passed his hand over the darkness, binding it in naether. “This was the source of her power, the thing that cut us off from our gods, and with which she and the void priests have enslaved the gheists. But what is it?”
Elsa glanced out the window, then backed away.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think we’re about to find out.”
58
SHADOWS STREAMED BEHIND Gwen as she flew through the air, streamers of black moths that fluttered in her wake. Night fell like a banner dropped, turning the dusk into midnight in the beating of a heart. The air, already cold, froze in the lungs of every man and woman watching. Breath turned to frost, blood turned to iron, skin became as chill as snow. But not Gwen. Gwen was burning alive.
Aedan towered over the battlefield. His cloak of leaves transformed into a mantle of skulls, his arms were shot through with seams of black light, sprouting from his flesh into tendrils that whipped through the air, striking and killing friend and foe alike. His head split and split and then split again, a puzzle box of gaping jaws and leering eyes, teeth cracked from top to bottom and filled with swarms of screaming mouths. He was nightmare, and the world couldn’t wake up.
Gwen arced out of the sky, her spear aimed straight at Aedan’s heart. The air rippled around the course of her descent, drawing luminescent lines against the stars. A swarm of tentacles shot out at her, writhing liquid and black, blotting out the moon. She dodged through them, landing lightly on the largest, sweeping her spear through the veiny mass of its grip, dancing away as the severed limb tumbled from the sky. A dozen more chased her, but she skirted around the attack, slashing through those she couldn’t avoid, leaving a shivering forest of black stumps in her wake.
Aedan bellowed in pain. The forest of his scream whipped Gwen’s hair and stole her breath. It was nearly enough to knock her from the sky, but the everic power woven into her spear, laced through her blood and bolstered by the stolen energy of the corruption she had taken on, kept her moving. She landed at his bulbous feet. The ground cratered under her boots.
“No one defies death, huntress!” Aedan shouted. “All submit to the grave!”
“You lie to yourself, and to your followers. You are no scion of death. I have seen you, in the iron, in the hound, and in the vow.” Gwen danced aside as Aedan slashed out at her, coming down in a squat on the ruin of a wagon. “You are nothing more than corruption, a sickness that must be purged. Tenumbra will be free of you, at my
hand, and by my spear!”
“You are nothing, huntress, and will become nothing more,” Aedan spat. His voice boomed over the fields like a collapsing tower, felt in the bones and the earth, leaving devastation behind. Those closest to him fell to the ground. “I am the god of the grave and forgetting. There will be no memory of you, now or ever!”
“I kill gods,” Gwen shouted, then leapt once again into the air.
Aedan twisted to follow her ascent, crushing frozen bodies under his lumbering legs, his multitude of black eyes flickering as he watched her arc away. Her spear was only a splinter of light against the sky when she threw it. So focused on the huntress was Aedan that he never saw her weapon as it flashed through the air. The bloodwrought tip buried itself in his massive shoulder. It stung, but the true pain was to follow.
Still dancing through the air, Gwen drew the spear back to her hand. Long streamers of corruption grew out of the spear, blossoming like vines and slithering through the air to Gwen’s hand. Once they were taut, she pulled the spear free and reeled it in like a harpoon. The wound it left in Aedan’s flesh bled corruption, hooked on the spear’s barbed head, drawn in by the blood woven into its steel. The black, viscous oil followed the spear to Gwen, lashing around her arm like a scarf before sinking into her skin.
The dark whorls on Gwen’s face and neck grew, burrowing deeper into her body, spreading like frost on a window. The black pit of her eye deepened. Distant stars glimmered in its depths.
As the corruption slopped out of Aedan’s wound, the massive body of the god shuddered. Pustules burst across his shoulder, spewing webs of darker fluid into the air, strands of darkness that dissolved into fluttering bats, flapping membranous wings into the night. Aedan howled, grabbing at the wound and spitting fury at Gwen.
“Do you think such trickery can save you, Gwen Adair? No spear formed by mortal hands can break the heart of a true god of Tenumbra!”
“I have no interest in saving myself,” Gwen said. She clenched her fist, a fist now consumed by the dark corruption of the gheists. She was losing control, and could feel it. Best finish this fast, she thought. Before it finishes me.
The corruption gheist wearing Aedan’s body gripped the ichor pouring from its body and wove it together, creating a net of ropy blackness. He threw it at Gwen, creating a wave of dark liquid that rushed across the battlefield. The ranks of celestial warriors, those few who had not fled at the sight of Aedan’s ascension, were enveloped by the rising tide and transformed. Their skin pulsed with streaks of purple light, and their eyes disappeared into their skulls, sockets filling with a slithering mist. They screamed, and then fell.
“It is already changing you, huntress. I can feel it. I can taste it. Soon, you will fall to my power,” Aedan purred. The rumbling tide of shadow rolled toward her. Gwen cowered, wanting to leap away, but rooted in place by the magnetic force of the corruption boiling through her bones. She braced herself for impact.
Not ten yards in front of her, the tide suddenly parted, slicing in half like a sail torn by the wind. The black flood crashed to either side of her, peeling back, revealing faces and grasping hands in its depths. She stared in wonder, then turned to look at the place where the tide had broken.
Ian Blakley stood in the gap, both hands wrapped around his father’s blade, leaning into the dark current. His face was splattered with spider-thin seams of corruption, the flesh hissing, eyes clenched tight against the pain. When the flood passed, he dropped to one knee, arm thrown over the hilt of the blade, gasping for breath. He glanced back at her.
“Get to killing gods, will you? Or that one, at least.”
“Find the priest,” Gwen growled. “Bring him. He follows in my wake.”
“Which—?” But Gwen was already gone, arcing again into the night sky. Ian turned back to the battlefield, squinting at the dimly lit ranks of soldiers that were still fighting, the flickering light of burning wagons and Cinder’s pale face the only light in the sudden darkness. He shivered. “Very well. The priest. He must be somewhere.”
* * *
Gwen was breaking apart. The corruption was growing through her skin, leaving scar-like ridges on her arms and face, black seams that formed strange and disturbing patterns. The haft of her spear was crooked, the wood given new life by the endless stream of corruption that it had absorbed, the once straight shaft now squirming beneath her fingers like a snake, barely contained. And there was something living in her shadow, seen out of the corner of her eye whenever she landed close enough to a burning wagon or toppled brazier to cast a shadow at all. Gwen tried to not look at it, afraid that attention would give it voice.
But if she suffered, then Aedan was in agony. The towering gheist was slowly toppling. Dead tentacles dragged in its wake, and the massive arms and legs that supported his engorged body had splintered into smaller and smaller forms, leaving shells behind. Aedan’s attacks were sluggish, his defenses more and more stubborn and frustrated. He refused to yield, was maybe incapable of giving up the fight that had consumed him, but he was failing. Gwen danced around him in a dizzying pattern of spear strikes and barbed jabs, bleeding the corruption from his swollen, stunted body.
I must do this, before I lose control. I must, Gwen thought. There is no one else who can face this creature and live. Not even Aedan could survive his own ascension.
But the corruption was quickly overtaking her ability to absorb it. It was now or never.
Planting her feet, Gwen drew all the energy of the corruption, laced through with the everic powers that still lingered in her bones, and prepared to charge. The earth cracked under her feet, the air fell into the vacuum of her lungs, the stars themselves seemed to lean closer to the earth. Shouting, she dashed across the battlefield, straight at Aedan.
The sound of her passing was like a thunderclap. Aedan’s sluggish response was to draw elephantine arms across his face, shielding the gruesome fissure of his jaws from Gwen’s charge. She led with the spear, slicing through air and shadow and flesh, until it struck bone and shattered. The splintered shaft broke apart in Gwen’s hands, bursting with the light of a thousand stars, disintegrating into a cloud of sparks that rolled across the frozen ground of the field like a tidal wave. They lay in the snow, hissing and steaming, an angry mirror of the starlit sky above, before fading slowly out.
Gwen and Aedan lay still in the center, nearly touching, flat on their backs. As the mists cleared, Aedan got stiffly to his feet, drawing new daggers from his ribcage. He was nearly himself again. Only the wicked bone of the daggers, leaking blood from their new birth, marked him as fey. He stood over Gwen and smiled.
“Is that all, huntress? You have given everything, and still I stand. Do you have nothing else in you?” He squatted over her, crossing the knives at her neck, pressing them against her throat. “Or are you finished at last?”
Gwen’s body was a ruin. The corruption covered her skin, leaking out in a thin mist that had a mind of its own, shadows of dark limbs caressing the ground, battering helplessly against Aedan’s wrists. She stared up at the sky and was silent.
“Very well,” Aedan said. “Good night, huntress. And well fought.”
“There is no god of corruption,” she whispered. “No spirit of the debased gheist. You are a lie, Aedan Spearson.” She lifted her head, one eye as black as the ocean depths, the other bloodshot and crying. “A lie we tell ourselves.”
“The gods are the lie, huntress. We are merely the liars.”
“No.” She shook her head, and the movement opened her skin under Aedan’s blades. Blood flowed freely down her throat, to soak into the snow under her head. “I have seen the power of the gods. I have felt their fire and their fury. You’re a fool to try to bend them to your will. It will end in nothing but misery.”
“My end may be misery, but your end is now,” Aedan snapped. He drew the blades together, sweeping them through Gwen’s neck, the tips clacking against her spine as they passed. He grinned down at her as her li
feblood bubbled up.
“You’re missing something, elder,” Gwen said. Her voice was quiet, as though shouted from a great distance. “Your god. Your death. It is mine now.”
Aedan frowned, spun the blades together and buried them in Gwen’s chest. Her laugh was hollow. The light in her blackened eye was a red spark, bright in the night. She grabbed him by the chest and pushed, sending him flying.
Gwen stood, breaking the daggers off in her chest, leaving the blades to grind against her ribs, throwing the shattered tangs aside. Black webs formed above her shoulders, a mantle of diaphanous wings that shivered in the breeze. Aedan lay on his back, staring at her with horror. He scrambled to his feet as Gwen stalked closer.
“The god of death you accepted, the one Sacombre bound to his flesh and corrupted with the void priests’ rites… it is mine, now. So thoroughly interwoven with the corruption, it could not help but leech out with the darkness. My darkness. My corruption.” Gwen held her hand out, palm up. A shimmering fog clung to her fingers. “You cannot kill the grave spirit. No more than you can drown fire. And now it answers to my will.”
Aedan clasped his hands together, drawing on the everam of his tribe, the elder of hunters sending one last prayer to the old gods. But nothing answered him. He was too far gone for the gheists to pay him heed. He spat and produced two new daggers, spurs drawn from his forearms that twisted in his hands to form blades.
“You must be careful with that, elder. You’re going to run out of bones,” Gwen said. She gestured, and Aedan’s breath caught. His skin grew tight, like leather at first, pulling his bones, then harder. Leather to sun-caked mud, mud to stone, stone into steel. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. Aedan stood there, eyes wide with terror, as Gwen drew near. “Know this, Aedan Spearson. Death does not like to be tamed. It will always slip the leash, and when it does—” she placed a hand against his forehead like a benediction “— Death’s bite is harsh.”