Tern. Quin Tern.
The name fed the spark, the words like dry leaves over dying embers. For a moment there was only a building smolder, a realization of potential and existence.
Then, in one abrupt instant, fire engulfed Raz from the inside out.
For the first time in months, the animal returned.
Purpose came back in a rush. Awareness rocked through Raz like a cannonball, punching across the empty desperation Arrun’s tortured grimace nearly drowned him in. The abyss ripped open, and Raz felt himself falling, plummeting down into the dark.
He didn’t even try to slow his descent.
QUIN TERN!
Still on his knees, a snarl built up in Raz’s chest, erupting into a screaming roar of defiance that silenced every sound from the spectators. The attendant who had brought him the box squealed and stumbled backward, tripping repeatedly as he sprinted back to his master. Lifting Ahna from the ground, Raz stood slowly, setting amber eyes back on the group before him.
The somberness of the Northern winter was gone from the day. No more were the stands around him accented in white and gray, highlighted by snow and stone. Instead, the world had fallen into shades of dark red and darker black, swallowing the details of the scene. There was nothing left to see, regardless, beyond what was directly in front of him. Even the eight men and women between him and his goal barely gave Raz pause, because behind them, still leering with obvious pleasure, Quin Tern was bathing in his success.
And all Raz knew was that he was going to peel the man’s smile from his face with his bare hands.
The silence held its reign over the Arena for a long moment. No one spoke, no one cheered. Like the world itself had paused, holding its breath, ten thousand people watched Raz, waiting, wanting desperately to see what he would do.
When he finally moved, it was with such speed many would later swear the Monster of Karth became nothing more than a blur of black, red, and silver steel.
Zeko, at the head of the group, was the first to go down, and it happened so quickly the others barely had time to blink before the giant Percian was screaming. Raz hit him with the force of a bull, toppling him, while his free hand grabbed at the man’s face, a clawed finger finding each of Zeko’s eyes beneath the lip of his helm. The crowd barely had time to roar in thrilled amazement before steel buried into brain, and the man died.
It was the only easy kill Raz got, because then the rest were on him.
Raz ducked under the thrust of the spearwoman’s blade, then somersaulted backwards off Zeko’s body to avoid the simultaneous downward strikes of Pirate King Kehnt’s saber and the mace wielder’s morning star. Both weapons hit the dead man with echoed thunks, but caught nothing else.
Meanwhile, Ahna had begun her dance of death.
The dviassegai moved like a silver serpent about Raz, less graceful in his rage of insanity, but all the more deadly for it. She slashed left and right, up and down, striking with such vicious speed the men and women about him were hard-pressed to hang on to their blades as they blocked and deflected. They tried to press forward, tried to force him back, but Raz roared in defiance, the crest along the back of his neck flaring red, his wings whipping out from beneath the silver-and-black mantle to join the melee. As numerous as they were, the remaining champions could do nothing to get around him, nothing to position themselves to enclose him. Every time one tried, something knocked them back. It didn’t matter if it was Ahna, a mailed fist, a clawed foot, rippling wings, or even a lithe, scaly tail. Something was always there to block them.
After a minute of chaotic combat, someone shouted, and the seven fell back to regroup. Most at that point would have scattered to get around Raz, but it seemed they’d all seen enough of his fights to know that would only make it easier for Raz to break up their defense. Instead they stayed close, a living wall between Raz and the Chairman, unwilling to give him the man he so desired.
Well beyond reason, Raz simply followed them, barreling into the group as a tempest might strike at the mountains.
They let Helena and the second shield bearer take the brunt of his rage, trusting the pair of them to play the defense and leave the rest up to the others. It was a good plan, and Raz’s mindless assault cost him a deep slash across his abdomen and several nasty holes in his left thigh as the mace wielder’s flail came out and around, crashing into the armor there and perforating the steel.
The wounds he granted them, though, cost the seven much more than they gained.
Barely feeling the metal points in his flesh, Raz twisted his hips away, pulling the embedded flail with him and dragging it from its owner’s hand. At the same time, Raz grabbed the top of Helena’s shield and—as the woman yelled in surprise—hauled it down to the ground with one hand, dragging the woman attached to it along for the ride. There was a snap as the arm the shield was strapped to broke, and Helena’s shouts for assistance turned to shrieks of pain and fear. They were cut short when Raz’s foot caught the bottom of her chin in a ferocious kick, snapping her neck back.
The corpse of Helena, Shield Bearer of the Seven Cities, flopped to the ground chest first, her head dangling by nothing more than flesh on her back, dead eyes staring into the sky.
There was no pause in the fighting, though. On the contrary, the six left standing pressed their advantage, seeking to attack in the moment Raz was finally open, leaving himself vulnerable as he went for the kill. Raz grunted as the spearwoman’s blade bit into his side barely an inch below the old scar of a crossbow bolt that had punched through him not a few months before. The mace wielder acted fast, too, leaping up and swinging his morning star high for Raz’s head. Instead of the killing blow he’d hoped for, though, he met Raz’s outstretched hand, which caught him about the wrist and dragged him up and around, using the man’s own momentum to roll him over Raz’s back and slam him to the ground so hard it was possible to hear ribs break.
The man didn’t have time to do more than gasp in shock and pain, though, before Raz reached down, ripped the flail still stuck in his thigh free, and brought the spiked metal ball down on the mace wielder’s face.
Blood, gore, and bits of bone flew in every direction.
Raz tried to stand up then, but for once he was too slow. It had been a foolish move, leaving himself open to the five left alive, and even in the thrall of the all-consuming madness, Raz screamed in pain as what felt like white-hot iron was shoved into his back. A sudden weight seemed to collapse in on the left side of his chest, and Raz knew steel had nicked lung.
Reaching over his shoulder, he tried for a blind swipe at the offending attacker. His hand caught hair, and he had traction for a moment, but in the same instant whatever blade had taken him between the ribs was withdrawn, and his hold went slack. He whirled around to see the West Isler, Atheus, dancing back, a blade in each hand, his dark hair suddenly cropped short, leaving a handful in Raz’s palm.
The pressure of his leaking lung pulled at Raz’s chest, but it barely slowed him down. Taking a breath, he roared at the last of the champions, flecking the snow between them with blood that came up with the scream. Atheus, the shield bearer, the mountain man, and the spearwoman didn’t flinch.
The Pirate King Kehnt, though, took a single step back, and Raz had his weak link.
Bolting forward, he dodged a spear thrust, sent the shield bearer tumbling with a heavy kick, and rolled under Atheus’ horizontal strike. In a blink he was in the middle of them, the last place they would expect, and came up directly in front of Kehnt. The Pirate Kehnt shrieked, sounding unbefittingly womanish for his title, and struck blindly with his saber.
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.
XXXVII
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.
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.
The Warring Son (The Wings of War Book 2) Page 32