by Tim Akers
She crushed his skull, a fracture that traveled through his body, collapsing bones into dust and flesh into splinters. Aedan cracked down the spine, chest bursting, arms twisted, legs and lungs wrung out until his screams were freed into the air. He fell like a bundle of sticks cut loose, a hundred pieces, each broken and brittle.
Gwen brushed off her hands, chuckling to herself. She breathed in the bloody air. The field was an open grave, and death stirred all around her. She lifted her face to the heavens and slowly, slowly, rose off the ground. The armies of Tenumbra had brought her a mighty feast, and the spirit of death in her was starved. She opened her jaws and felt something tickle its way up her throat, a damnation slithering into the world. She yearned to give the world the death it deserved. And she would. For their betrayal, for her family, for the suffering these people had caused and the destruction they deserved for it. Gwen would burn all of it down. She was the grave.
Naetheric bands twisted across her chest. She glanced down at this inconvenience, and laughed. Turning, Gwen saw Ian Blakley staring at her, and Frair Gilliam at his side. The priest was struggling to contain her. The sweat beading on his forehead turned to blood as she casually shrugged against the bonds.
“It will take more than the powers of Cinder to contain me, fool,” she growled. She focused on the Orphanshield, thrilling at the fear in his blood, the failure leaking from his flesh. “You will fail at this, as you failed your children. Your wife. Those who depended on you most.” Gwen grabbed the band of naetheric energy tying her to the frair and gave it a tug, pulling Gilliam to his knees. “Failure is all you know. Cinder is not enough.”
“Which is why Strife and Cinder travel together.” Elsa drew her sunlit blade, bathing the field in holy light. “I am sorry, Gwen Adair. I counted you a friend.”
“Vow knights have no friends. Only people who pretend to not be horrified in their presence,” Gwen spat. She lifted a clawed hand… her body was changing, even beyond her awareness. No matter. “I could have killed you at any time. I will not hesitate now.”
Elsa swung, and the blade met Gwen’s gnarled talons, striking sparks. Gwen held the coruscating blade in stone-hard hands. It cut slowly into her flesh, black blood hissing as fire claimed it, the sword edging forward a tiny bit at a time.
“You cannot save him, Elsa. The god you wield is just another corruption, another tool of the void. Halverdt has deceived you. The flame will answer to my call!” Gwen reached out with her will, grasping at the spirit in Elsa’s blade. The flames guttered, but her will slipped off the fire’s gheist. Gwen frowned, but Elsa beamed.
“I have found my way back,” she said through gritted teeth. “And now you must do the same. I don’t want to kill you!”
“You will not have a choice,” Gwen snapped. Her mind raced, the corruption in her bones mingling thought and fury. She could taste the death in the air. All she had to do was reach out and grasp it.
But she didn’t. Gwen held back. The gheist raged against her, but she held on. She endured.
The two priests were faltering, though. The blade burning through Gwen’s talons was scorching Elsa’s hands. Streaks of charred flesh twisted down the vow knight’s arms, and Frair Gilliam’s eyes were closed and his face smeared with blood. Despite her will, Gwen drew on the spirits of the freshly dead that swirled through the air. They filled her with power, power enough to break these two without thinking.
Gwen pushed Elsa aside. The vow knight spun to the ground, dropping her sword. The Orphanshield rolled back, like an old man falling out of his chair, but the second he hit the ground he was up again, reweaving the naetheric bonds Gwen had just broken. She turned on him, grinning, wings flapping. She lifted off the ground.
“My children are dead, and my wife, and my wards. I have no one else to disappoint. I cannot fail, because there is nowhere lower for me to go,” he spat. Resetting the bonds, Gilliam hurled them at Gwen. They closed across her chest, her legs, anchoring her to the earth. She hissed in frustration, but deep in her tumultuous heart, she felt a surge of relief. Not long. Not long now.
“This can’t be the end of your journey, Gwendolyn.” Lucas finally appeared, his shadowform twisting up out of the ground to hover in front of Gwen’s twisting face. “I can feel you inside this demon, fighting. Don’t surrender.”
“That you live is all the fight I can promise, frair,” she said. “And I can’t promise it for long. The corruption has me. End it.”
“But I can’t—”
“End it!” Gwen howled. Her fury blew Lucas’s shadowform into pieces. Frair Gilliam fell again, his hands curling into spasming fists as his eyes rolled back in his head. The bonds shattered over Gwen’s ridged chest. Elsa charged her, but Gwen swept her aside, both of them screaming in pain and frustration.
Ian’s blade pierced Gwen’s back between the shoulder blades. Her wings, full of biting mouths and screaming souls, battered his head, but he held on, driving the black feyiron deeper and deeper. She twisted around, knocking him off his feet, but he held on to the sword as it slipped free of the wound. Gwen scrambled at Ian, but he rolled into a guard, dashing aside her talons with his father’s sword, fighting feverishly to keep her claws away.
Shadows formed around her, wisps at first, then hands. Frair Lucas appeared, an enormous, shadowy figure made of ribbons the color of night. He wrapped naether around Gwen, pinning her arms. She struggled, but her face relaxed. She locked eyes with Ian.
“I have held it as long as I can. Death has me, but it is the corruption that drives me. Destroy me, and the corruption ends. Let death slip back to its home, but I can keep the corruption with my flesh. End it.”
Ian didn’t blink. He lunged forward, burying his sword in her belly. It passed through and into Frair Lucas’s shadowform. The priest gasped, but the flimsy image of his face screwed tight with concentration. “Elsa! Your sword!”
“Frair, the naether cannot bear—”
“I know what I am asking,” he snapped. “For your vow, and the sun rising in winter. You must!”
Ian flinched aside as Elsa’s burning sword punched through Gwen and Lucas both. The flaming edge singed Ian’s cheek, but he bore down on his blade, holding it in Gwen’s writhing body.
Gwen screamed, threw her eyes to the heavens, and died.
A wave of black energy gathered in the air, not around Gwen, but at the edges of the horizon. It rolled toward them, snatching shadows from the ground as it passed, roaring louder and louder until it reached Gwen’s dying soul. The moon blinked out for an instant, replaced by a gaping void that held the whole world in its emptiness, and then was gone. Cinder’s pale face returned, brighter than ever.
Morning broke, unnaturally early, in the east. Frostnight had passed.
Lucas’s shadowform evaporated, drifting in flakes of ash to mingle with the snow. Elsa stared down at Gwen’s still form, then threw her sword to the ground and ran back toward the Reaveholt. Ian knelt. He took Gwen’s cold hand in his own, pressed it to his chest, and waited.
The battle raged on around them, but it was a battle of flesh and blood. The war was over. It was finished.
EPILOGUE
THEY BURIED GWEN where she fell, a woman without a tribe, a house without a name. She had given herself in the last moments that Tenumbra might be freed of the void corruption, which had been claiming the gods, pagan and celestial, for some time. By binding the corruption to her flesh, she had drawn the poison out of the world. Scraps remained, but only a few, sheathed in the bones of distant adherents to the void heresy.
Malcolm Blakley received a hero’s funeral beneath the walls of Houndhallow. All the nobles of Tener and Suhdra, whether they had raised arms against Malcolm, fought at his side, or stayed out of the war completely, came to honor his passing. Promises were made, and honors given, but they were just words, and Tenumbra was not a land of quiet peace for long.
On the morning after they buried his father, Ian stood in his rooms in Houndhallow and prepared for his
new life. His sister, grown so much since the start of the war, found him there.
“They would crown you, you know,” she said quietly. Nessie lingered at the door, watching as her brother filled a light pack. Their father’s sword lay on the bed.
“They would. Which is why I’m leaving,” he said without turning around.
“Mother does not want you to go.”
“Mother has a duchy to govern, and a daughter to raise,” Ian said. He had rearranged the items in his pack a dozen times, and would a dozen more if time allowed. But it didn’t, and he was only making excuses now. “The two of you will do Houndhallow proud.”
“You didn’t fail him.”
“I did.”
“No, it was—”
“Nessie, please. I wasn’t there, and he died. There’s no changing that.” Ian smiled weakly and shrugged. “Someday I may learn to carry that, but not here, not in these walls.”
His sister fell silent for a while. Ian finally threw the pack over his shoulder, snatched a walking stick from the wall, and made for the door.
“The sword?” she asked. Ian paused.
“It’s yours. You’ll have better luck with it than I will.”
“This isn’t what he would have wanted, Ian.”
“No. But it isn’t his decision to make. It’s mine. Take care of Mother, sis. She’s just strong enough to break.”
They embraced, and then he was gone, out the door and down the road, to disappear over the horizon.
Nessie watched him from the window of his room until he was a speck, and then nothing. Then she went to find her mother. There still had to be a coronation.
* * *
The inn was a narrow building, barely room for the bar and three stools. The innkeeper hustled back and forth, unusually busy even for a market day. Another customer came in, a nervous, stooped, skinny man in robes that might once have been black, but were now the color of the mud; it looked as if he had slept in them the night before. He made his way to the bar, ordered a beer and a room, and avoided all other eye contact. His feet were caked with dirt, as though he had been traveling for months. Or running for longer.
Night fell, and the tavern got louder and louder. The man stayed at the edge of the bar, nursing his thin beer and watching the other customers. One of them would have to do; he just couldn’t decide which one. A stranger in a rural town like this would pass unnoticed, but a stranger in a town dealing with a murder would stand out like a sore thumb. Best to wait until morning, then. But he was so hungry. He hunkered down, cursing his luck and hoping one of them would slip.
So consumed with his hunger and dark thoughts was he that the stranger didn’t notice when the bar went utterly silent. He was muttering into his beer when the chair next to him was pulled out, scraping loudly against the floor. He looked over and dropped his beer, gaping.
Henri Volent sat down next to the man. He was dressed in simple clothes, a chain shirt, his sword as plain as a butcher’s knife. Volent laid a dagger on the bar and nodded to the innkeeper.
“Two more; one for my friend. Whatever you have that isn’t complete shit,” he said. His soft voice carried through the silent tavern. Patrons started filing out. Volent ignored them. The innkeeper brought their beers and then disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Volent alone with the man.
“You know, I’ve been looking for you for quite a while. Harder and harder to taste your lot in the wind. You might even be the last. Wouldn’t that be something?” Volent asked. He took a deep drink of the beer, ignoring the thin swill, tasting only his own words. “The last one. Hm.”
“I… I don’t know—”
“Oh, let’s be honest with one another. We can do that, at least.” Without looking, Volent reached under the bar and twisted the dagger out of the man’s hands, breaking his wrist in the process. He threw the blade away, set down his beer, and then started spinning his own knife on the counter. “Gwen did a mighty work. Tore most of you from the world completely. Even I felt it. That’s when I knew. All this time, I was one of you, a fragment of your great work. Hilarious, isn’t it?” The man didn’t laugh, so Volent shrugged and continued in his quiet, echoing voice. “Sacombre must have known. Probably why he tried to kill me. But here I am, still alive, still infected. But after Gwen’s sacrifice, I could still feel you, some of you. Distant, hidden… but there. And so I have been finding you, one by one, and putting an end to this little corruption.”
“You’re mistaken. You’re mad. I’m not… I’m nothing. Nothing!”
“Yes, you are,” Volent answered. “You know, I really think you’re the last one. Once we’re finished here, I can go away, someplace far, someplace I can’t hurt anyone. That will be marvelous.”
“Finished?” the man asked nervously.
“Yes,” Volent said. He picked the knife up from the table. “Finished.”
* * *
Years passed. The pain of Lucas’s death haunted Elsa. They had found him sprawled on the floor in the Reaveholt, his soul driven from his body by her own blade, nothing but a shell of flesh and blood. But the church needed priests, and she was among the few to survive Halverdt’s corruption with her faith intact. She returned to Heartsbridge, then the Lightfort and Cinderfell, when she found the warmth of Strife’s embrace too bright, and now she roamed the forests of the north once again. No longer hunting. Things had changed.
She rode that old familiar road, thinking about how everything had started here. As she came over the hill, the town of Gardengerry spread out before her, peaceful and prosperous once again. The doma had been repaired, the nightmare of the hunter gheist driven from the minds of the people by a new shrine, and a new theology. Tenerrans no longer avoided this place, walking the streets openly with their shamans and their ink, even as the evensong rose from the doma. She wondered what had become of the girl, the one she and Lucas had met on their way here, so many seasons ago. She might never know.
“Hard to imagine,” she said quietly. “So much has changed.”
“And yet, so much is the same,” Ian said. He rubbed his nose impatiently, his freshly shorn hair still glowing in the evening light. She looked over at him and laughed, causing him to wrinkle his nose. “What?”
“You’ll have to learn how to cut your hair better than that,” she said. “You look like a shorn sheep.”
“Can we get on with the job?” he asked. “The elders will already have gathered. Wouldn’t want the prayers to go on without us.”
“Of course, of course. The impatience of youth, it will damn us all,” Elsa answered. She lowered the deep cowl of her black hood over her head, swallowing her face in shadow. “Look stern, young man. The villagers have certain expectations of an inquisitor and her vow knight.”
Ian laughed, but by the time they reached the city gates, his face was placid. The setting sun glistened on his golden armor, and when the witches greeted him, Ian raised a sword of steel wrought in his own blood, runes of gold chasing up and down the blade. Elsa sat at his side, and remembered, and mourned.
They went into the village together, Cinder and Strife, to lay a memorial at the shrine of the hunter in the name of their friend, Gwendolyn Adair. Always to be remembered as the huntress, and never the heretic.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT TEN YEARS ago, I called up my agent and said “I’m thinking about doing something a little different. Something rather epic.” This series is the result of that conversation, and while it has gone through more revisions than even I would believe, The Hallowed War has lived up to that original premise. It is different than most fantasy, and yet is more than a little epic. It’s strange to close a project that has consumed so much of your life, but I’m satisfied with it, more satisfied than I thought possible. I did what I wanted to do with it. And now it’s done.
None of this would have happened without my agent, Joshua, my editors Steve and Sam at Titan, and the enduring love of my wife, Jennifer. Thank you all. And, as always, to God be
the glory, and the honor. Amen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIM AKERS WAS born in deeply rural North Carolina, the only son of a theologian, and the last in a long line of telephony princes, tourist-attraction barons, and gruff Scottish bankers. He moved to Chicago for college, and stayed to pursue his lifelong obsession with apocalyptic winters.
He lives (nay, flourishes) with his brilliant, tolerant, loving wife, and splits his time between pewter miniatures and fountain pens.
Tim is the author of the Burn Cycle (Dead of Veridon, Heart of Veridon) from Solaris Books, as well as The Horns of Ruin (featuring Eva Forge) published by Pyr Books.
His website is http://www.timakers.net/.