“And she always keeps her promises,” Iccylus said.
Aurelia smiled. “Always.”
“You might to tell that to the god of wisdom. He’s existing… somewhat.”
Aurelia freed another skull and slung it at Gynoth. It too smashed into the rock behind him.
She’s playing with me, he thought.
“Quarth is still alive?” Iccylus questioned, astonished. “I promise you that old bag of crazy is not a god. Mutations don’t make you a god, you silly necromancer.”
“They do make you seem like one,” Aurelia said. “And looks can be deceiving.”
“That’s very true, sister.”
“Take us, for example. We look like two happy, friendly girls, right?”
Gynoth sighed. “You look like evil incarnate.”
Another pouty face, this one from Aurelia. “That’s quite mean. The point I was making—”
“Sister,” Iccylus said, “let me.”
Gynoth felt the eyes of Iccylus weighing on him like boulders. Actually, no. She wasn’t looking at Gynoth, but rather beyond him. When he came to this conclusion, he heard a slight but perceptible crackle.
Move, Osseus said. The mountain is falling.
Gynoth turned, completely devoid of urgency. He tilted his head up and watched as the face of the mountain more or less exploded and vomited up jagged blocks of rock that rained down on him. He closed his eyes then, not to prepare for death but to infiltrate its realm.
When he opened his eyes, the rocks—some as large as dragons—were approaching rapidly. Had they fallen slightly faster, and had Gynoth reacted passively, they would have crushed and impaled him.
Instead, a diseased and rotted tree thrust forth from the frozen soil. It punched upward, expanded into an umbrella of bone and pulverized the rock. Bits and pieces of stone sprayed outward, away from Gynoth.
He patted the tree appreciatively, his hand touching the dampness of rotting bark and the sliminess of grubs. “Death,” he said, turning to face the Twins, “keeps me alive. Ironic, isn’t it? What were you saying, now?”
The tower was empty.
“That’s sinful,” said Iccylus, her voice nearer.
“Very sinful,” agreed Aurelia. The two stood together, beside Osseus.
“You put me to rest five hundred years ago because I was weakened and tired and didn’t expect you. I’m not tired now. I’m not weak now. And, sadly for you, I’ve been expecting this—looking forward to it, you might even say—since Baern breathed life into my bones once more. It’s a good day to kill a god. An even better one to kill two.”
Aurelia lifted her chin reproachfully. “We’re not gods.”
“Call us creators if you must,” said Iccylus.
“That would be closer to the truth,” Aurelia said. “You”—she stabbed a finger at Gynoth—“exist because of us. We’re the mothers of sin; it’s our duty to purge our corrupted offspring.”
“It’s the least we can do,” Iccylus agreed.
Gynoth had met plenty who’d been taken by madness. The Twins seemed mad. They fit the very description of madness. But something—he couldn’t put his finger on it—made them sound sincere. He felt as if they were murderers who were desperate to confess their crime, if only to rid themselves of the crippling and insidious guilt.
He had to keep them talking. “Creators, gods… no difference there.”
“There is!” argued Aurelia. “We’re among the Children of Coraen, not gods. We helped create sorcery. Don’t you see? It’s our fault. Sin is here because of us!”
“Sister,” Iccylus said, a hand on Aurelia’s arm.
“No,” Aurelia snapped, wrenching her arm away. She returned her attention to Gynoth, her face fixed in a scowl. “Soon we’ll have our mutations again, all of them. A woman is helping us. She thinks the mutations will help save her world. But we’re going to destroy them. And then we will kill every sorcerer and finally put an end to this madness.”
Iccylus put a hand on her hip and shrugged. “That means you have to die, Gynoth. Again.”
He heard a snap and dashed behind the rotting tree. A disc of rock shot off a ledge and fwhipped right past where Gynoth’s head had been. It stabbed the tree, lodging itself in the bark.
Gynoth grabbed a tree limb and hefted himself to his feet. He peeked out this way and that, looking for the Twins. He couldn’t see them. He did, however, see black crumbs tumble down from a hump of slate directly in front of him.
They seem to look at the objects they move, he thought. That didn’t mean much in an open space, but if they weren’t to the left or right—and he couldn’t find them there—that meant they had to be behind him.
Shielding himself with the tree, he wheeled around. A flash of red from the Twins’ blood circlets caught his eye. Before he had the chance to call upon death to decay the very ground on which they stood, he heard a hiss in the air. When in a fight against gods—or creators or sorcerers, whatever the Twins were—who can fling rock at you with a mere thought, hissing air is not a sound you want to hear.
He barely shifted toward the noise when the barbed end of a triangular rock sliced deep into his shoulder. He cried and clutched his wound, collapsing to a knee. A second rock whizzed by; had he not fallen, it would have knifed his jugular.
Grimacing, he took a couple deep breaths to calm himself and then searched for the Twins with vigilant eyes. A puff of snow billowed up before him in a loud puff.
“For you,” said Aurelia, atop a plateau.
Gynoth leaned forward. A glint of steel greeted him. It was a dagger, its hilt buried in the snow but within reach. That was good. Also, it was shaking, as if attempting to free itself from the snow.
That was bad.
Aurelia gazed at the dagger like a woman possessed. It rose from the snow hilt-first, then straightened so the tip pointed at Gynoth’s throat. Aurelia grinned and with a silent goodbye leaving her lips, she flung the dagger forward.
Snow spewed into the air, and old, grimy roots punched up from the soil. They wrapped around the dagger and dragged it beneath the ground, into the maw of death. Gynoth nodded appreciatively at a looming pine tree nestled against the mountainside. Its branch drooped, as if in acknowledgment.
“You can’t win,” Iccylus said, from somewhere behind him.
A second rotting tree surged up from the ground, and a third. Gynoth was making himself a wall of rotting bark, which isn’t particularly durable, but it proved handy at deflecting hurtling stone. His knees went wobbly as he hid behind his bulwark. His unrelenting reaches into the realm of death were tiring him.
The Twins, he wagered, must have been on the precipice of exhaustion.
“Just give up,” Aurelia said. She didn’t sound very exhausted.
“I can keep this up for a while,” Gynoth said. Even he didn’t believe those words. He was almost gasping for breath now.
“Mm. We’ll see.”
Crouching behind his barrier of death, back against the bark, he considered his options. Rock pelted the trees; he could feel each blow in his shoulders.
The tunnel, he thought. He had an idea. Whether it was a good one or not… time would tell, as it always did in these situations.
Gynoth sprung to his feet and ran as fast as he could toward the tunnel. His arms were flailing out of control, his feet punching and smashing through thick snow. He tripped several times but kept himself upright with reflexive hands in the snow. Each stride stretched and ripped the gash in his shoulder. Each forward swing of that arm felt like a skinning knife thrusting in and out.
He was almost there. Fifteen paces away, maybe even—
“Ah!” he cried. A fist-sized chunk of slate struck the back of his knee, right in the bend, where even a little jab will collapse your leg. This was not a little jab. This was a walloping uppercut. The pain was such that Gynoth could feel it on the other side of his knee.
He tried to stand, but his leg crumpled. He could possibly limp on hi
s good leg, but the Twins would cut him down before he could make it halfway.
He threw his face into the cold snow and cursed loudly. When he looked up, he saw through cloudy, snowflaked vision a pair of serpent smiles.
The Twins stood at the entrance of the tunnel, beneath its craggy awning.
“Aww,” said Aurelia, her lip folded down like a sad infant, “did we hurt you?”
“History repeats itself, Gynoth,” Iccylus said. “We thought you knew that.”
Gynoth had half a mind to smile, but no. No, instead he closed his eyes and pushed away all senses that served as distractions: smells and sounds and the cold embrace of snow.
The realm of death is shadowy and misty to those who do not belong there. It’s a dim, sightless world to the foreign, but Gynoth had long ago learned to navigate its murky lands and knew precisely where to locate what he sought.
The realm is not only populated with the forgotten and the bygone, but with the very vestiges and harbingers of death—disease and rot and plagues, bones and skulls and empty eyes: the core of a child’s nightmares, the terrors you tell them not to fear, for they aren’t real.
Gynoth’s eyes snapped open. He smiled. A wall of bone surged up from the soil, slamming against the overhang of the tunnel. Another erupted from behind the Twins, pinning them between the two walls, trapping them inside.
An insipid, tarry residue dripped from the bones like syrup from a bottle. Gynoth stood on one leg, limped ahead. He infused souls into the old crumbling roots far beneath the soil, enlivening them. They burst through snow and ice and flailed around him like the tentacles of an octopus.
Then, one by one, they shot forward like arrows. They punctured the wall of bone, wrenched themselves out and stabbed through again and again, till every morsel of bone had been pulverized, till the entire wall was obliterated.
Gynoth released his servants of death and limped into the tunnel. Blood had sprayed the walls and ceiling. The Twins lay there, as dead and motionless as the bloodstones embedded in their circlets. Each sister was more holes than solid tissue.
Gynoth thought about saying some final words, but he chose not to. He simply turned, limped out of the tunnel and climbed upon the now-free-to-move Osseus.
How is your leg? the dragon asked.
Gynoth struggled to get on the saddle, but managed to pull himself up. He looked to the tunnel, at the slain Twins one last time. Then he shrugged. “I’ll live.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lavery didn’t hate the cold anymore. Well, maybe he did. But he didn’t express it, either internally or externally. He more or less gave up hating it, much like the victim of an abuser often succumbs after years of torture.
He’d been in the Ancient Lands for a month now. He’d walked countless miles under an almost always oppressive sky of grays. Different shades of gray, sure, but variety didn’t lessen the depression.
Thankfully his boots held up. Gloves too. Without those and all his furs, he would have been… well, he didn’t want to think about it. What mattered now was that he was only a day from Coraen, the City of Ice. He could see it. It sat upon a low mountain plateau like a bastion of hope, beckoning him in, promising rest for his weary bones.
It was a sprawling city of sculpted ice. Maybe rock too, but all he could see from his position low in the flattened terrain was ice. Ice pillars, ice roofs, ice gables—everything slick and sleek and blue.
He’d hoped to see people moving about, but he didn’t.
Maybe I’m still too far away, he thought. That had to be it. This city must have attracted people from all over. He remembered what Ereni had said, that nothing would await him there. But she was in a bad place. She’d endured a thousand years of torture. He’d have lost all hope in the world if that happened to him.
As the sky brightened from muddy gray to smoky gray, the terrain began sloping upwards. Lavery could feel it in his calves. He stopped frequently, to rest and to inspect the artifacts that were appearing with increased frequency.
He found the bearded face of a slate statue sticking up out of the snow. A little digging with his foot revealed a neck, but he couldn’t find the body. He came across some chain armor a ways farther up the mountainside. He thought it could be useful, either to wear or to sell when he got back home, so he stuffed it in his bags.
Those types of finds were strange enough, but as evening settled in, they turned from curious discoveries to concerning ones: swords and shields, boots and gloves. Helmets too. And then there was a body. A perfectly preserved body, flesh and all.
Lavery didn’t look at it long. It didn’t frighten him, exactly… but he preferred not to look at dead things. So he moved on, but crossed paths with more corpses. These ones strung up on signs that were painted in bright red.
GODS DON’T LIVE HERE
I KILLED THE GODS
BREAK EM HANG EM KILL EM
CITY OF BLOOD
The last one faced Coraen, as if displaying a threat to the city’s inhabitants. Also, three skulls were nailed into the thick post, straight between the eyes. Unlike the others, these faces weren’t preserved. They were empty-eyed, white-boned skulls with some teeth remaining.
Lavery found himself curious about all the death that surrounded him. He thought it should make him queasy and ill, but when considered it from a neutral perspective and shook away his biases that murder is evil and terrible and morbid, he became inquisitive.
Who were these people, and what was this place? Something had happened here long ago that was so horrific men had turned to killing one another. Lavery had once believed murder was common and an everyday occurrence, and maybe it was, but it never happened without reason. And while some people needed less of a reason to stab, maim and slice throats than others, Lavery held the world was full of good people who had to be broken and beaten and shoved to the edge of despair before they’d ever contemplate such savagery.
Lavery walked over to the signs and the skulls. He touched both and examined the dead with the thoroughness and care they deserved. The signs spoke of gods, so one religious sect pitted against another could have led to this outcome. He looked to Coraen, high upon the plateau. Was the City of Ice a place of worship? Had they worshiped gods that some people thought evil?
Lavery’s arms pimpled with excitement as he ran his fingers over the painted letters on the signs. Knowing these same letters, these same signs had been touched by hands from years ago, centuries ago, generations ago… how thrilling! The past was compelling and fascinating, and he yearned to learn more.
But he did not dare Walk into the past, not here. Curious as he was, as much of an adventure as it’d be, the risk was too great. Coraen was this close now. What a shame it’d be if he’d come all this way only to perish in the past, solely because his curiosity had gotten the better of him.
He had to be strong. He had to be logical. Mature. I’m twelve now, he reminded himself. Almost thirteen. I’m not a child anymore.
As he shouldered off his satchel and rummaged through it for some wood he’d collected on his journey, he felt unabashed pride. Lavery had always wanted to be as strong and courageous and iron-willed as his father had been. For the first time, he could say that he was.
He struck a chunk of flint with his dagger and eventually, and after much fuss and throwing his head up to the heavens, sparked a flame that caught and warmed his frozen toes and fingers.
The next morning, he got up before the sun, eager to start the last leg of his journey. The climb up the gentle sloping mountainside proved harsher and more exhausting than he’d expected. But some hours after midday, he crossed a gouged road in the mountain and took it all the way to the plateau.
With the sun having turned pink and leaky across the pomegranate sky, like a drop of water on stationery, Lavery stood before a huge-bigger-than-any-gate he’d ever seen. It was made entirely of ice, as blue as sapphires. It must have been a hundred feet tall. Lavery couldn’t guess how wide; it wrapped around
the city like a curtain crafted from winter itself.
He had a smile on his face as he looked up and up and up, the back of his skull touching his shoulders. He had arrived.
The square gate, black and grated and ugly and not, in Lavery’s mind, deserving of servicing such a grand wall, was open. He tepidly poked his head through, looked this way and that. No one seemed to be manning the gate, so he walked through, ready to announce himself as a peaceful visitor if pikes and arrows were brandished.
No such weapons made an appearance.
Lavery noticed the roads were unkempt, piled with snow. In some places, stone edging was visible, but mostly he walked in ankle- and shin-high snows, shuffling as he went.
He didn’t mind the slow going of it all. It allowed him the opportunity to really, truly take in this majestic city. He wondered who had built these immense structures of pure ice. Their walls were slender and curved and arched and contoured with precision and expertise. Each building shimmered, as if the ice was melting and water slowly drizzled down.
This is all beautiful, he thought, but where is everyone? The mountain summit slung down a gusty draft, as if punctuating that alarming question.
Lavery continued shuffling through the city, peering into the gracious spaces between each building, glancing up at the curved balconies, looking through windows into empty rooms.
“Hello?” he called, tepid at first. Then with some more oomph to his voice, “Hello? Does anyone live here?”
The wind picked up some fine snow dust and threw it into his face. “Thanks,” he said aloud, wiping his eyes.
The roads eventually looped Lavery back to the front of the city. He put his hands on his hips, wrinkled his nose and decided he’d have to rest here for a while. Haren, the Wraith Walker who’d told him to come here, would arrive soon. Lavery didn’t doubt that. Until then, he’d make himself comfortable and warm and search for some—were those footprints?
Etched in the snow-covered roads, beside the prints his small feet had made, were wider and longer prints. They followed parallel to his for as far as he could see.
A something-is-very-wrong shiver crawled across the back of his neck, pricking his hairs. He was being followed.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 21