by Matthew Ward
Black clouds dissipated, leaving weariness deeper than any Malachi had ever known. He stumbled away, bleak satisfaction fed by a rising growl: the sound of men and women pulling free from conjured fears and finding courage in the striving. The sound of hope renewed as fear bled away.
The resurgent mob reached Anastacia, Josiri at their head. Robes slackened as vranakin fell dead. A Lancras knight withered to dust in an elder cousin’s grip. Anastacia ripped free of her remaining ropes, light bleeding from her brow, and snapped the cousin’s neck with a gristly crack.
“This… changes… nothing,” gasped Krastin.
“Oh, but it does,” said Malachi. “I’ve made many mistakes this past year, but my worst was fighting you alone. I’m not alone. I never was. My daughter understands that. The more I tried to hold Sidara back, the more determined she was to help others. Her courage shames me. The future belongs to her kind. It will do better without you and I.”
“Father!”
Fear ebbed at Sidara’s desperate shout. The afterimage of his own father’s pyre fading, Altiris lurched upright to see her staring off into the mists. For a heartbeat, he glimpsed a swaying Malachi Reveque standing over Krastin’s hooded form. Beneath the Shaddra, Shurla thrashed in the spoil of the new-dug grave and spasmed to one knee, snarling as reknotted muscles dragged broken bones back into place. Then the mists shifted, and all were gone from sight.
Altiris grabbed Sidara’s shoulders. “Hawkin? Where is she?”
“She ran,” said Constans. “I hope a prizrak gets her.”
The lad was pale, but had a crooked sword half his height gripped tight in both hands.
Greenish-white mist turned filthy grey with vranakin garb as newcomers stalked eastwards across the grove.
“Altiris! Sidara! Move!”
Drawn by Lord Trelan’s beckoning hand, they ran headlong through the mist, ushered into a circle of worn and filthy faces. Other voices ringing through the mists spoke to a battle still raging – close or near, Altiris had no way to tell.
Sidara embraced Lord Trelan. “Uncle Josiri, my father—”
“I know,” he replied. “We’ll help him if we can. He’d want you to be safe.”
“You two are no end of trouble, you know that?” said Kurkas.
“Sorry, captain,” said Altiris.
“Eyes and sword outward, and we’ll call it even. This ain’t done. Constans, you stay close to me, or I’ll hand you over to the vranakin myself, you hear me?”
The boy paled and took up position at the captain’s side. Altiris made no move to obey, his attention stolen by Anastacia’s plight. She lay awkwardly against a ruined wall at the centre of the ragged ring, wings crumpled beneath her. Light streamed from her brow, and through rents in armour and gown.
Sidara crouched beside her, and yelped as Anastacia’s hand clamped her wrist.
[[Take the light. Make it yours again.]]
She blinked. “I don’t understand…”
[[That first night we met. I stole a piece of you. I couldn’t help myself. A moment of weakness, but I felt stronger than I had in years. I took more the night your mother died. It’s why you can’t hear the light. It’s why it doesn’t come at your call. I told myself I’d no choice. That I needed it to hold back the roof. But then I awoke in the rubble, as close to my old self as cold clay allowed, and I realised my want was greater than my need. Take it back.]]
Lord Trelan knelt beside them both, his eyes never leaving Anastacia’s. Her fingers brushed his cheek and fell away. He bowed his head, hand shaking as it took hers. “Do as she says.”
Sidara hung her head. “What happens to you?”
Anastacia hesitated. [[It doesn’t matter.]]
“It matters to me.”
[[Then you’re a fool. Give me your other hand.]]
Sidara clasped her hands tight about Anastacia’s. A burst of blinding light rushed outwards. Altiris shied away, dark spots dancing before his eyes. When they cleared, Anastacia lay still, her wings and hair faded to nothing. Sidara knelt beside her, motionless as the statue the other resembled. Eyes closed, she gathered up the broken, darkened body into embrace, tender as a girl with a favourite doll, or a mother with her child.
Altiris swallowed and reached for her. “Sidara?”
The mist thickened with vranakin. Crow voices screeched to cacophony.
Elder cousins circled, tattered grey robes dancing through the mist. Black blood welled from Krastin’s eye sockets and hissed away silver.
“You think this will kill me? I walk with death! Even the Tyrant Queen feared us!”
“Feared you?” Malachi stumbled back, laughing without humour. “I’ve read the histories. The Undawning Deep. Scattered fragments of Malatriant’s own Testament that generations of provosts failed to destroy. She didn’t fear you. You depressed her.”
“She abandoned the city to us! She fled to Darkmere!”
“And you made Tressia an open sewer. A rotting nest built on false promises of family and eternal life. Preying on desperation because you’re numb to all else. She needed you as a cautionary tale, Krastin. That’s all you ever were. Something to make a Tyrant Queen seem a saint.”
Krastin’s shaking hand ripped the paper knife from a ruined eye and hurled it away.
“Malatriant is dead,” he spat. “You will beg for that same mercy.”
Exhausted, Malachi sank to the ground. “You’ll have nothing more from me.”
Crow voices cackled to a crescendo. Bells chimed out. Malachi’s skin crackled with cold as the elder cousins drifted closer.
The ground shook.
The ring of vranakin shrank inwards around Josiri’s mismatched band, their confidence growing as more came shrieking to their ranks.
Josiri kept his sword steady, and his eyes forward… anything other than think on Ana’s lifeless body. Why hadn’t she told him? Pride. Selfishness. Shame. All and none, knotted deep about her soul. For all her divinity, Anastacia had always been more human than she’d cared to admit.
“She knew what was at stake,” murmured Kurkas. “She made her choice.”
He swallowed back bitterness. They’d failed. Tressia would fall, and the Raven perish. That the divine war would claim the vranakin soon after was of sparse comfort. “That’s just it. She didn’t know – not about the rest. I’d no chance to tell her.”
Kurkas grimaced a reflection of Josiri’s swirling emotions. He raised his voice. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sah… but retirement’s looking damn good right about now.”
Nervous laughter rippled at the poor joke. Josiri cast about at worried faces as the tremors quickened. Brass, lugubrious as ever. Jaridav, her hand shaking but eyes steady. Constables. Knights. Citizens with bloodied swords and filthy faces. Even a handful of vranakin, their masks torn away to mark forsaken allegiance. Rallied to the cause of light by a serathi’s example. Bound to it still despite her fall. Even Constans, the boy standing straighter than some of the men, the sword steady for all it was too large for him.
All looked to him for hope. Not because he was the son of the Southshires’ Phoenix. Not out of authority borrowed from Viktor, or granted by Malachi’s friendship. But because he’d led them to that place. Because for all that he was a southwealder, he was one of them also, and the city his home. Strange to recognise that in the same moment all was to be stripped away.
[[Well, this is all very morbid.]]
Josiri’s heart leapt. “Ana?”
He turned, and there she stood. Cold and dark – diminished by the light’s departure, and tottering on the point of collapse. A hand glinked against a porcelain cheek. It traced the crack along the gold and alabaster brow and the hairless pate behind. A hollow sigh flowed.
[[So this is selflessness? I hate it.]]
Josiri embraced her amid another ripple of laughter. They didn’t understand, as Josiri understood, what she’d given up. But she was alive.
“I thought I’d lost you.”
[[It wasn’t mine, Josiri,]] she said wearily. [[I couldn’t keep it, however much I wanted to.]]
He glanced at Sidara, still kneeling motionless in the mud. Breathing, but otherwise lost to the world. “And now?”
[[That’s up to her.]]
A bleak shadow loomed beyond the curtain of mist, hunched and distorted by bones not yet fully healed. A crooked arm reached out in accusation.
“I want their eyes!” screeched Shurla. “The girl for the grave and rest for the Raven! Let them taste his holy wrath!”
The vranakin quickened to a run, more afraid of their pontiff than the foe. Elder cousins kept pace, tattered robes streaming behind. Kernclaws flickered between the trees and over ruins, borne aloft by squalling bird forms. Fade-curled leaves fell like umber rain, shuddered from the branches by thundering feet.
Josiri turned about. “We give them nothing!” he shouted. “Not the girl! Not our fear! Nor satisfaction!”
Altiris pushed his way to the front, sword aloft. “For the Phoenix!”
“No. Not this time.” Josiri laid a hand on his shoulder and raised his own blade high. “For the Republic!”
“For the Republic!”
The mist came alive with golden eyes.
The elder cousin froze, its rag-draped hand inches from Malachi’s face, then jerked upward into the mist. Bronze arms flexed, and the kraikon ripped it in two with a sound like tearing cloth. The construct strode on, another cousin falling beneath its implacable tread.
More gathered behind, some bearing two-handed swords, others with no weapons save ponderous bronze fists. Some staggered along, mangled legs dragging behind and golden light cracking across rents in unrepaired skin. Others were more shell than sculpted form, lattices of metal bones with the barest “flesh” to hold them together. Simarka darted between. Screeches died to dust as vranakin perished beneath fangs and claws.
The broken and the unfinished, the unloved and the bleak, striding through mists that should have robbed them of life and purpose. Pulverising all in their path.
Krastin sagged against the impaling sword, his efforts to pull it free sapped by aghast wonder.
Malachi stared, his jaw slack, recognition creeping through paralysed thoughts. “Blessed Lumestra…”
Constructs couldn’t function in the mists. That truth had made the depths of Dregmeet and the Forbidden Places of the south havens for fugitives of all creeds. Mist swallowed the light. Or at least, a proctor’s light. But a proctor’s art was but an echo of the divine. A sheen of sunlight. A memory.
Had Malachi ever doubted that Sidara wielded something more, he did so no longer.
“The foundry,” gasped Altiris. “She’s roused the foundry!”
The foundry, lost in the mists, its keepers slain and its children paralysed.
Until now.
Dumbstruck, he watched as the vranakin assault broke apart, shattered by the onset of sparking, lumbering kraikons, and the sleeker forms of simarka rushing beneath.
A kernclaw ducked a kraikon’s pulverising fist and was dragged away screaming by a simarka’s fangs. One vranakin – a vast brute of a man with a long-handled Thrakkian hammer – brought a kraikon to hands and knees with a whirling, booming blow. Another, its face an empty iron skull, scooped the fellow up without slowing and flung him from sight.
The crow-born ebbed, their anarchic right flank swept away by the half-forged horrors come lurching out of the trees. A handful fought on until Shurla fled, her cadaverous form swallowed up by the mists.
Altiris joined his voice to the rising cheer. Jaridav sank to the ground, overcome by disbelieving laughter.
“It’s over,” said Brass, his hand twitching to the sign of the sun even as he mopped his brow. “We damn well won.”
“Not yet.” Lord Trelan ran a short distance into the mists, then cried in frustration and cast down his sword. “She’ll have fled back to Dregmeet. We might never find her. Not in time to break the Crowmarket’s hold on the mists. We’ve taken back the city, but the world…?”
The words, bleak as the tone that delivered them, shivered Altiris to his core. “My lord? I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it’s better that way.”
“Where’s my sister?” piped up Constans. “Where’s Sidara?”
Sidara strode into sight moments after the final kraikon had faded. Golden light played about her shoulders, and a pride of simarka loped at her heels. She walked slowly, carefully, as if a single misplaced step would pitch her to the ground, never to rise. Her right hand was clenched to a fist, blood dripping from the soiled bandage about her wrist. A battered sword hung loosely from her left, its tip trailing in the mud.
“Sidara!”
Turning his back on Krastin’s sullen, pinioned form, Malachi held his daughter tight. A heart dragged down by fear and worry ached anew with unbearable, perfect joy. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought…”
Words slipped away. He let them go.
“It’s all right, Father,” she replied. “I’m all right.”
He stepped back, and felt no shame at tears cuffed away. “It’s over. It’s finally over.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Something else has to happen first.”
He narrowed his eyes, suspicion dispelling happiness. Up close, Sidara looked older, so much older than when he’d seen her last, three days and a lifetime ago. And her eyes… So hard to see those of his little girl through the gleam of gold. “What? What has to happen?”
Another simarka drew up beneath the Shaddra, this one dragging a thrashing bundle in gilt-edged robes, the flesh about her eyes torn ragged by parallel claws. Shurla. She bolted as soon as the lion opened its jaws, and crumped again as its weight bore her to the ground. Then, to Malachi’s utter amazement, the simarka planted its haunches on the small of the pontiff’s back, and purred.
“Thank you, Fredrik.” Sidara smoothed the simarka’s sculpted mane, her attention split between the captive pontiffs. “I’m going to kill them, Father. For Mother. For you. For everyone they’ve ever hurt, or ever used. But that’s not enough. I don’t want either of them to meet the Raven believing that the other has escaped. That their squalid cult endures.”
Golden light rippled along her sword. Shurla screamed as it stabbed down through her neck. The mists guttered.
Krastin glared through eyes not yet fully healed, and grappled with the sword buried in his flesh. It seemed to Malachi that he should have been able to free himself long ago, until he remembered that the Shaddra was blessed, and that a divine hayadra might not be as passive as other trees. That perhaps Krastin remained trapped because the Shaddra refused to let him go.
“I curse you, Sidara Reveque,” he croaked as she drew near. “In the name of the Raven and the deathless Dark that sired him, I curse you and your line to its last generation. Let them always be apart, distrusted. Alone, even in a crowd.”
She smiled sadly, as if in recollection. “You threaten me with what I already have.”
Her hand brushed the pommel. Light rushed across the hilt and along the blade, crackling across Krastin’s flesh and severing his bond to immortality. A rush of black blood slicked the hayadra’s alabaster flank and gushed away into the mud as the wound at last came due. A last stuttering, pained wheeze, and the last pontiff of the Parliament of Crows was gone. Just one more corpse in a grove strewn with them.
The last of the mist faded away, colour rushing back in as the Living Realm pulled free of Otherworld’s mists. In the distance, rooftops gathered beneath watery skies.
Sidara staggered and sank against Malachi, her bloody right hand easing open and her halo fading. Her eyes dimmed, the gold become shards amid blue the mirror of her mother’s. Malachi knew he should have been scared of her, and a part of him was, but the greater part was proud beyond words, and knew without doubt that Lily would have been too.
He held her close, lost in wonder to have been so swiftly and completely outgrown.
�
�Now is it ended?” he asked.
“Now it’s ended.”
Sixty-Two
There wasn’t so much a threshold as a thinning, the mist gate bleeding away into the diffuse vapour Apara knew all too well. The only clue that they’d passed from Otherworld to somewhere else was that the somewhere else was nearly pitch black, and thick with a bitter, metallic scent. A mineshaft’s metal rails led away into the tunnel’s gloom, hazy light a dim prospect beyond the drifting etravia. Their soft, mournful song teased forth memories of happier times, insofar as Apara had ever had any.
The princessa missed her footing in the darkness, and leaned against the curved tunnel wall for support. “Where are we?”
“Dregmeet.” Apara forced confidence into her voice. No sense letting the princessa see her uncertainty. The place felt familiar, but just astray enough that none of it felt quite right. “The tunnels beneath Tzalcourt. There are mine workings from the old days. They flood when the tide comes in, but they’re useful for those looking to hide things. Maybe for the Raven, too.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t flood while we’re down here,” the princessa replied. “I don’t swim well in the dark.”
“It won’t.” Ashana remained a pale presence in the gloom, lit from within by moonlight while all else was dark. “We’re further afield than you think. We’ve no choice but to be. Jack’s heart is the stuff of folklore, spoken of in a hundred tales. The difficulty lay in retrieving it. The Raven is more guarded. The only piece of himself he’ll let us find is one he doesn’t yet know exists.”
Apara swallowed a pang of frustration. Her saviour though the Goddess had been, her oblique speech was too much like that of the Crowmarket’s pontiffs for comfort. Especially with the prospect of crossing paths with the Raven drawing ever closer. Nor did it help that the shadowthorn princessa seemed incapable of hearing the contradiction in the Goddess’ words. Still, there was pride to be taken in the business. The Silver Owl stealing from the gods – a claim worth coin, though she’d never prove it.