Darksoul

by Anna Stephens

  If there’s no one there to stop them, they’ll be running up our arses in minutes. We’ll be caught between two forces, like the fucking Blood Pass Valley all over again. Need to shut this gate.

  The Mireces were piling through the breach, driven by the scent of victory and outnumbering the Rankers and Wolves opposing them. Crys ducked an axe and chopped his sword into the man’s ankle. He went down howling and Crys finished him with a hurried, graceless stab and rip to the belly.

  A soldier went down to his left, screaming, pleading, ‘No, don’t, don’t!’ but the Raider’s spear tip took him under the chin, nailing his tongue to the roof of his mouth and punching through into his brain. Quick death, anyway. He didn’t see his killer killed, or Roger Weaverson, for all his youth and spots and inability to grow a beard, performing a lethal dance in between three attackers and ending them all.

  ‘We can’t hold, sir,’ Captain Lark gasped, grabbing Crys’s shoulder. ‘For every one we kill, three more pour through the gate. We can’t hold.’

  ‘Course we can,’ he said, tone cheerful despite the situation and the hot swelling of anxiety for Ash and the breach at their backs. ‘We’re going to drive these bastards back into the Gil and drown them. That’s what we’re going to do, because we don’t have any other choice.’

  ‘A controlled retreat—’ Lark began, breaking off to sidestep a spear thrust and punch the man wielding it in the face. Crys followed the punch with a lunge, sheathing his sword in the man’s groin and twisting as he ripped it back out.

  ‘You ever heard of a controlled retreat being a success, man?’ he snapped, eyes roving the battlefield. ‘Get in line. We hold.’

  A howl rose up behind them and the attacking Mireces faltered. Somehow the Wolves had extricated themselves from the fight and formed up into two columns blocking the roads to either side of the square. Mireces weren’t getting any deeper into the city, at least. They had a chance now.

  ‘To the gate,’ Crys roared. ‘Palace Rank, wedge formation.’ The surviving Rankers, their number dwindling every minute, fought their way into a wedge aimed at the gate. Crys was the point, head down, scavenged shield on his arm. ‘On the double, ad-vance!’ he screamed and set off, driving through the Mireces. Right now it didn’t matter if they sealed a hundred Raiders in here with them, as long as they sealed the gate.

  The Mireces understood what they were about and charged, the men on the outside of the wedge flinging up shields and poking out swords, anything to hold them off long enough to reach the opening.

  ‘Drive,’ Crys yelled, putting his shoulder into the shield, ‘drive on, bastards, or we all die.’ They responded, locking shields on the outside, the inner ranks linking arms to stiffen the spine of the wedge. They slowed but they didn’t stop, blows raining on shields and helmets, wounded men held up by their mates and still pushing, those on the outside falling and being replaced by the next man in. The Wolves split in two again, leaving only a thin line cutting off access to the city while others flanked the Mireces, distracting them from the wedge, giving the Rankers time and space.

  They reached the gate and threw themselves at it. It shifted in a few feet and they yelled, straining, pushing harder. It closed a little more and then there were dozens of Wolves surrounding them, hacking down the Mireces with a savagery Crys had rarely seen.

  There were more Rankers, more Wolves, falling to the blue-clad fuckers. They were all slowing, the days of attrition, the nights of fighting, combining so that the battle was more a lurching melee with edged weapons.

  The gate slammed and was immediately jolted as those outside threw themselves against it. Bolts were hammered across and the wedge sagged for a few seconds, just breathing, but then the Mireces trapped inside lunged for them, knowing they’d never get out alive and determined to take as many defenders with them as they could.

  Crys got into step with the soldiers to either side and set out to stop them.

  There was still a score of Mireces fighting back to back to the death when another force came charging around the corner and Crys thought they were all dead. Then he recognised Major Carter through the smoke and soot and tears streaking her face.

  She slowed out of her laboured, wheezing run and lowered her shield. ‘Heard there was a breach,’ she croaked.

  Crys waved behind them. ‘Sealed, just finishing these last.’

  Tara nodded approval.

  ‘Look, have you seen Ash? No one’s seen him for hours and—’ But Tara wasn’t looking at him, too busy staring past his shoulder away from the trapped Mireces’ last stand. Crys felt awareness crawl up his spine, the back of his neck and across his scalp. He turned, slow as sunset. Someone stood in a shadowed doorway and Dalli was leaning against the wall next to it, puking.

  The awareness crawled on, down his face so that his eyes stung and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a feral snarl. The shield fell from his hand and he walked across the square, ignoring the fighting only strides away. Tara yelled something; he ignored her.

  Dalli put her hand on his arm and tried to stop him. He pushed her gently away and stepped up to the door. It was Ash, as he’d known it would be.

  Ash, whose face was a mangled ruin.

  Ash, who’d been nailed to the door with a spear through his chest.

  Ash.

  The blood was rust-brown, puddled and smeared below him and streaked across the cobblestones of the square; he’d been dragged here, put up on display for Crys to find him. Part of him knew who must have done this, but the knowledge was distant, unimportant.

  ‘No.’ His voice was a whisper.

  The curly hair was matted with blood, plastered to the skull.

  ‘No!’ Crys threw himself at the figure, wrestling with the spear. Ash’s face was gone, teeth visible through the flap of flesh hanging from his cheek and jaw. His eyes were open, staring up at the sky just past the lintel, unblinking.

  ‘No!’ Crys screamed, every muscle rigid with grief. Something shifted inside him. In his mind, in his body. Silence fell across the square behind him as he wrenched the spear free and pulled Ash into his arms, lowering him on to the stone, hands finding a second wound, deep and ragged, in his back, a third inside his left elbow.

  Crys rocked back on to his heels and roared at the sky and the thing inside him roared as well, fury and pain and loss and a terrifying triumph that made no sense.

  The scream shattered every window in the merchants’ district.

  Glass blew out and fell, razor sharp, winking as the early sun caught it spinning in the air so that it fell like a splintered rainbow. Crys got his arm beneath Ash’s knees and rose to his feet, legs trembling. Clouds boiled overhead and the thing inside shifted again, flowing into every limb until Ash’s limp weight was easy to hold and Crys stood straight as an arrow and just as deadly.

  He walked away from the shade of the building into the centre of the square, to the small patch of sun just peeking over the rim of the wall. Rankers melted from his path, hauling their injured and the Mireces dead out of his way; Crys had no eyes for them.

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ he screamed at the sky when the sunlight was on them both, its rays too weak to warm the pale dough of dead flesh. ‘Dancer! Help him!’

  Crys sucked in air and sobbed it out, his heart on fire, sucked in another breath and pressed his mouth to Ash’s slack, mangled lips, and exhaled into him. ‘Come back to us, love. Come back, heart-bound. We’ve got you; we’re here. Come back.’

  Nothing.

  A hand touched his back and then fled when Crys roared again and cracks zigzagged across the square from beneath his feet, the thing within shifting, growing until it pressed against his skin from the inside. He let it come, embraced it, pulled it close.

  ‘Save him. Save him and I’m yours. The godlight will lead them, to death and beyond. I swear I’ll do it, I’ll be it, whatever it is. Please. Just save him.’

  Crys bent his head, tears falling on to dead flesh and gaping
ruin, and he kissed Ash again. Kissed him and felt something, a stir, a movement, the bird-fragile beat of a heart, delicate as a wren’s wing. He slumped to his knees amid the cracking flagstones, right hand on the devastation of Ash’s face, left pressed to the hole in his back. Silver light flared around them, so bright against his eyelids as he breathed into Ash’s mouth.

  A twitch.

  A ripple.

  Breath.

  All around them in a wave of movement, men and women fell to their knees, wondering. Some touched fingertips to hearts, others made the sign against evil, but all watched, all bore witness.

  Ash opened his eyes, blinked.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said the Fox God. He smiled, and His eyes flared yellow.

  MACE

  Fourth moon, afternoon, day forty-one of the siege

  Main hospital, Second Circle, Rilporin, Wheat Lands

  ‘Stop your bloody fussing, Hallos. You’ve said I’ll live, so let me up.’ The words would’ve carried more weight if they hadn’t been wheezed through an airway that tasted of soot and cooked meat and hurt more than the rest of his wounds combined.

  Hallos’s eyebrows bristled and a hand the size of a ham pushed on Mace’s chest, sliding him effortlessly back on to the bed. ‘No. You need to rest. You have extensive, though superficial, burns.’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that, Hallos,’ Mace croaked, ‘as I can feel each and every one of them.’ In truth, the burns were a hot, burrowing madness tickling constantly at the edges of Mace’s mind, flaring with every movement, impossible to ignore. It was taking all he had not to let his officers see the pain he was in.

  ‘Then take the opium,’ Hallos snapped back, echoing the little voice in Mace’s head that was pleading for pain relief.

  Mace clenched a fist. ‘Opium? Are you insane? My men have been holding that fucking breach for three hours now without my aid, we’re losing more to fatigue than wounds and my father is still missing. I don’t have time for opium. I don’t have time to be injured.’ He made another effort to get up, the skin on his arm and chest and belly crimping and screaming as it shifted and rubbed. Hallos shoved him down harder this time.

  ‘And yet you are injured,’ Hallos retorted, ‘and I thank Major Renik for alerting me to that fact, as you clearly had no intention of seeking treatment. You cannot help the men defending the breach or scouring the wall for your father. He is no doubt in one of the towers, bleeding from a minor wound and hiding there so he doesn’t have to face me. You, however, do, and that means you will do as I say, general or not.’

  Mace was silent and mutinous and so, so tired and the shameful weakling part of him gloried in Hallos’s order. ‘Hallos, step back from this bed or, so help me, I will make you step back,’ he said quietly.

  Hallos stared intently at him for an uncomfortably long time, and then he threw up his hands. ‘Fine,’ he bellowed, ‘go and die somewhere in some futile, heroic gesture that does nothing but leave us without yet another officer.’

  The door burst open and cut him off, much to Mace’s relief. Major Tailorson with a body in his arms.

  ‘Please, you have to save him. You have to,’ he said desperately. Mace slid off the table and Crys placed the body down with exaggerated care. The Wolf. Ash.

  Hallos made soothing noises and bent over the table, a wet cloth rubbing gently at the blood. He grunted and moved on, peeling off Ash’s chainmail and then his shirt, rolling him this way and that, cleaning at the blood. So much blood.

  Mace watched Crys watching the physician, noting the pinched expression on his face. Tara appeared on his other side. ‘We really, really need to talk,’ she murmured. ‘Really.’ Mace nodded but Hallos spoke before he could gesture her to the exit.

  ‘There’s nothing to do,’ he said and Crys let out a strangled groan. He lunged for Hallos, a knife pressed beneath the physician’s beard and into the soft skin of his neck.

  ‘Save him or join him,’ he growled. Mace and Tara yelled and reached for him, but Crys pressed the knife tighter and cursed them away.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Hallos tried.

  ‘No, it’s you who doesn’t understand. You will save him, you will save Ash or I will kill you and every last man in here. All of you.’

  ‘I can’t save him—’ Hallos tried and Crys’s growl deepened, an animal threat that would’ve made the hairs on Mace’s neck rise if they hadn’t been burnt away. The knife cut deeper, parting skin, and Hallos’s voice went up an octave. ‘I can’t save him because there’s nothing wrong with him!’

  Crys paused; they all did, eyes swivelling to the body on the table. ‘What?’

  ‘He has no visible wounds. Several newly healed, but nothing that needs treating. Look at him. He’s breathing, man.’

  ‘What?’ Crys whispered again. The knife came away from Hallos’s throat and the physician stepped hurriedly away as Tara twisted the blade – not unkindly – out of Crys’s hand and palmed it to Mace.

  Crys ignored them, drifting towards the table. ‘If this is a trick …’

  Mace took a step closer. Ash lay half-naked and still, eyes closed, chest moving slowly. His face bore a thick purple scar through the jawbone and up across the cheek; his jaw was dented, but there was no wound, just rusty stains where Hallos had wiped away the blood. There was another purple wound, healed, in the middle of his chest.

  ‘But he was – there was blood everywhere. He was dead. He was dead.’

  ‘Did you find him like this? Unconscious, I mean?’

  ‘I found him pinned to a door with a spear through him.’

  Hallos coughed in surprise and Mace turned to Tara. Incredibly, she nodded.

  ‘I see,’ Hallos said carefully. ‘Then he’s extremely lucky to still be alive, isn’t he? We’ll keep him here until he wakes. Why don’t you stay with him?’

  Crys didn’t acknowledge the words; he sat on the edge of the table and took Ash’s hand in both of his, pressing kisses to each knuckle. Hallos gestured for Mace and Tara to precede him through into the next room; then he closed the door after him with a click.

  Mace rested a hip against the wall. ‘That’s it,’ he muttered, ‘we’ve all gone mad. All of us.’

  ‘If only, sir,’ Tara said quietly. ‘It’s true what he said. Ash was … clearly, definitely dead. I know a corpse when I see one pinned to a door by a spear, and he was. His face was ruined. Barely recognisable. Crys … brought him back. Because he loves him, as you’ve probably worked out.’

  ‘Crys what?’ Mace asked, dismissing the second part of her statement because under normal circumstances he’d have to execute them both for their actions and he couldn’t afford to. Funny how necessity breeds contempt for the rule of law. And let’s fucking face it, who are they hurting? And why am I even thinking about this now? He focused on Tara again, noting Hallos’s brimming curiosity. The physician’s eyes were alight.

  ‘Brought him back. I know how this sounds, but it’s true. There are about three hundred witnesses, Rankers from the West and Palace, plus Wolves. We all saw him do it.’

  Hallos pursed his lips and blew air. ‘General Koridam tells me you assisted him in Last Bastion, which means you inhaled rather a lot of smoke. That can affect a person’s comprehension of events.’ He put a hand on her forehead. ‘Tell me, have you hit your head recently?’

  Tara slapped his hand away. ‘I know what I saw, and it wasn’t influenced by smoke inhalation. Look at him.’ She beckoned and opened the door a crack. ‘At Crys. Look at him.’

  They crowded behind her, peering over her head. ‘What are we looking for?’ Mace murmured.

  Tara shut the door again. ‘He doesn’t have a single injury,’ she said in a low voice. ‘When he healed Ash, when the silver light rose, it covered him too. He healed himself.’

  ‘Silver light?’ Mace asked, nonplussed. He wondered if he was the one who’d hit his head.

  ‘Preposterous,’ Hallos said, but Mace could see the fascination gleaming i
n his face. He realised he had absolutely no idea what to say next. Officer training had never included dealing with things like this.

  He was spared having to think about it when the door slammed open again and Colonel Edris and Dalli burst in.

  Dalli hurried to his side and winced when she saw the extent of his injuries, her face sliding over his skin with worried intensity. She settled for putting her filthy hand on a small patch of unbroken skin on his shoulder.

  Edris saluted. ‘General Koridam, I am glad to find you in … health,’ he faltered. ‘We still hold the South Gate, General, and we still hold the breach, though barely. And—’

  ‘Mace, love, we found your father,’ Dalli interrupted. ‘I’m so sorry, but he’s gone. Fallen.’ Her hand tightened on him as Mace’s vision contracted down to a narrow tunnel of light with her face at the end.

  ‘No.’

  Dalli was ashen, but her voice was steady. ‘He was crushed when the wall came down. It’s likely to have been very quick.’

  Mace’s mouth was open. ‘That can’t be right,’ he whispered. ‘My father was the greatest soldier in Rilpor; he wouldn’t just … he wouldn’t just die under a pile of stone. That’s not how men like him die.’

  ‘It’s him, love,’ Dalli said softly. ‘It’s him.’

  Mace turned at a noise and saw Hallos with his hand over his eyes, shoulders shaking. ‘Hallos,’ he tried, crossing the room. He put his hand on Hallos’s back. ‘It might not be—’

  ‘Forgive me, lad,’ Hallos said, his eyes wet. ‘You’ve more cause to grieve than me. It’s just … I’ve known that man for forty years. To think he died under a wall is … it’s just wrong.’

  ‘It might not be him,’ Mace tried again, but Hallos’s expression silenced him. He clenched his fists as a wave of new pain surged through him, obliterating the petty sting of his burns. ‘Take me to him. And Tara? Bring Crys. In chains if needs be. I’ll believe anything you like if he can repeat the miracle.’