Oriana had never wished to be queen of Haeglin. She’d wished to be queen of the world, and now—for all intents and purposes—she was. She would decide if an entire city under Haeglin’s banner would perish mercilessly from the riving jaws and eviscerating talons of demons and the crushing blows of colossi, or if those people would come to Haeglin and serve their final day of life as sorcerers who’d burst into flames moments later.
This is the life of an executioner, she thought. For the first time, her resolve to make her world a better place weakened.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Gynoth remained seated on the saddle of his dragon. The earth no longer trembled. It seized. It heaved.
Osseus burrowed his talons deep into the permafrost, but even the might of a dragon could not withstand these blows. He wavered under the percussionial assault, his calcified frame oscillating like a boat on the waves.
Before Gynoth lay a divided frozen landscape, halved perfectly by an abyssal gorge whose depth seemed endless. It was known as the Ripper, and it was here that Gynoth would make his first and final stand.
His army of risen had mobilized here, an immense curvature of bone forty-five thousand strong. They did not wield weapons; those were unnecessary. They would overwhelm their enemy, swarm them like ants on a worm.
Lairn Prinus, Gynoth’s designated Lord of the Risen, approached on a skeletal horse. Oval sapphires glinted in place of the usual emptiness of his eye sockets. He always wore the sapphires to battle, though they served no functional purpose.
“Sixty-two self-professed gods in total,” Lairn said, stabbing an obsidian pike into the snow. “I welcomed them to take shelter in the nearby cave, but they declined.”
Gynoth stifled a chuckle. “For a dead man, you’re quite the prick.”
“Your fault entirely.”
“Maybe. Where are the dragons?”
“They’ll return shortly. I sent them to scout once again. They last reported more than we’d anticipated.”
Gynoth, staring straight into the heart of the Ripper’s gulf, white-knuckled Osseus’s reins. “How many more?”
“Fifteen thousand in all.”
Gynoth flexed his fingers, having lost feeling in them momentarily. “We were off by a third.”
“We have gods on our side of the Ripper,” Lairn said.
With a long, slow draw of bitterly cold air, Gynoth released the reins. He swung his leg over the saddle, square to Lairn. “So they call themselves.” He dismounted Osseus as the earth heaved once more, and his knees buckled. On his rump, he watched his army teeter and totter with each seizure. “Their footsteps will kill us before their fists ever have the chance.”
“Do you take them as false gods?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Could I kill a god, much less two at the same time?”
“The Twins?”
Gynoth nodded. He set off toward an encampment of crude tents erected from nearby pines. They reminded him more of canopies than proper tents, but they served their purpose as organizational repositories for armor and weapons.
“You’ve long desired to part the Twins from this world,” Lairn said, uprooting his pike from the snow and clicking his heels, sending his horse into a slow walk at Gynoth’s side.
A furious wind, well known to the Ripper, slung Gynoth’s silver-streaked hair into his face. It felt thick and matted, and the oils stung his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he had rinsed it.
“I’ve long desired many things from this world,” Gynoth said. He side-eyed Lairn. “Many of them I know I cannot have. I do not think these are gods. They’re something I am not, but gods? I’ve my doubts, Lairn.”
“I hope,” Lairn said, “they are closer to godhood than the giants bearing down on us.”
“We have forty-five thousand risen and sixty-two strange but powerful… beings. What could possibly go wrong?” He flashed a serpent’s grin and took off to a nearby tent, where several self-professed gods stood.
“Hum!” squeaked Heinla, goddess of water. “There he is, Mister Necromancer himself.”
“The man of the dead!” shouted Evrus, god of hail.
“Mm-mm,” said Sarilee, goddess of the heartbeat. “The promises I make and to the men I make them, would any of you have thought I would be seen with a man of the dead?”
Heinla jumped up, clutching her thick yarn-like hair without reason. “Hum. What about me? Water is the essence of life.”
“I’m glad my presence spurs discussion,” Gynoth said. He reached for the bark of a tentpole as the ground shook and leapt up at him, spraying snow into his face. “Tell me something, will you?”
“You own us,” Heinla said, lunging forward as she verbally and physically put emphasis on own. “We’ll tell you anything.”
Gynoth smiled, concealing the discomfort budding within. “Why did your souls remain in this realm? Why did you not go to rest in the realm of death?”
Heinla shrugged. “I dunno.”
Gynoth looked to Evrus, who responded likewise.
We’ll tell you anything, Gynoth thought, so long as you don’t ask the wrong questions.
“If I knew,” Heinla said, “I promise I’d tell you, Mister Necromancer. I wouldn’t withhold anything from you.”
Gynoth nodded, said his thanks and moved on. He wondered for a very brief moment—brief because the thought brought him angst, and he did not enjoy courting that emotion—if Heinla could hear his thoughts. If all the so-called gods could hear them, see them.
Was it that far-fetched? No, not when you considered their ability to bring the elements and so much more into this world.
Dozens more gods acknowledged him as he walked by, perhaps thankful he had freed them from the Obviators. Briskly passing through tents, he cursorily examined barrels of crude swords and dented iron breastplates, greaves with missing rivets.
The weapons and armor were of little use in hand-to-hand combat, but that wasn’t their purpose. The dragons who had sworn fealty to Gynoth would take the barrels and slam them into the colossi, staggering them or—ideally—striking blows that would floor the giants.
Swords and shields and breastplates and greaves and helmets were easy to come by in the Ancient Lands, if you knew where to look. The extinction of various societies over the years allowed for easy pickings.
Everything looked to be in order. All Gynoth had to do now was—
Screams. Gynoth wheeled around. His eyes opened wide and he reflexively ducked and covered his head.
A dragon hurtled through the air, its usual elegant form of flight reduced to a graceless tumble. It sped toward the cliffside behind Gynoth. The cliffs received it like a log receives an ax; the rocks burst into shards of stone, spewing over tents and into the snow below.
Crushed bone from the dragon mixed with the stone, clattering into barrels of weapons and armor, tinking off iron.
All told, the shower of earth and osseous matter lasted mere moments. Gynoth felt like he’d been hunkered down for far longer. He stood, running a hand through his hair to dislodge bits of rock and bone, and looked to the Ripper. The horizon, close and gray and muddied as always, had shifted from a benign and depressing canvas to one that was alive.
Colossi marched into view. From one side to the other, for as far as Gynoth could see, the huge creatures of stone formed a wall of immaculately sculpted legs and arms, of bodies that defied what life was supposed to be.
One of the giants held a dragon by its neck, dragging its writhing skeleton across snow and patches of built-up ice. As more colossi poured into view, several more dragons appeared as well, each being hauled like hunted game by the behemoths. Each still alive.
Gynoth composed himself. He’d begun preparing for this reckoning six hundred years ago, and now that it had come, he would vanquish it with the unflappable demeanor that comes with supreme confidence.
He walked slowly through the tents, barely paying the advancing giants any mind. He only noti
ced when they came to a stop because the ground no longer shifted violently beneath him.
Gods, or whatever they truly were, regarded him with interest as he shuffled through. Halfway across the encampment, he took a crate of weapons and overturned it. He crouched down, hugged the crate, and waddled with it out into the open. Lairn jogged up then, flecks of snow on his gemmed eyes.
“They’re waiting for those to bring up the rear,” the Lord of the Risen said.
Gynoth figured that was probably true, though he seemingly had no flying scouts left to confirm it. The earth still trembled, after all—it just didn’t fissure anymore. He placed the crate firmly in the snow, then climbed atop, facing the tightly packed tents.
Facing the gods. He looked into the eyes of each and every one. At least those who had eyes. They were all ruined, in one way or another. All of them decayed and in disrepair, stripped of scalp or limbs, eyes or lips. Some of them were missing ears, others half their jaws.
“I’m not a prescient man,” Gynoth said, head slowly arcing from left to right, spanning the encampment in its entirety. “But I imagine these misbegotten creatures will, in short order, attempt to impale me with my own dragons.” He paused for effect, taking in the cliffs that anchored the tents. The so-called gods rose, as if one mind controlled them all, and they came forward, eager to listen. Or at least their curiosity had been piqued.
“Allow the impact to kill me, if you wish,” he said. “You are all unlike the risen behind me. I do not believe I’ve captured your will. Still, I trust you.” A chill raced across his neck and down his spine as he heard a deep, bellowing. “I believe I’ve earned a favor for having freed you from your torture. Have I?”
Gynoth fought the urge to turn, to see with his own eyes the hurled dragon racing toward him. He needed to prove a point if he wanted these gods’ full cooperation. He just hoped that need wouldn’t kill him.
A fast-approaching wind, bitter and unnatural, nipped at his neck. His body wanted to go rigid, his fists wanted to clench. He refused them the desire.
The necromancer stood lax and composed. Unfazed by the prospect of death pitching toward him.
The wind at his back ceased.
The biting doubts in the back of his mind ceased.
The roar of a soaring dragon, flung from the hands of a giant at impossible speeds, ceased. In its place came the roar of water, of an ocean full of hatred and anger.
Gynoth smiled, watching the intense concentration tighten the face of Heinla, the goddess of water. She had placed herself at the forefront of the encampment, mere feet before Gynoth.
The necromancer turned, chin high. A cresting wave had plunged from the heavens, entirely vertical. It looked as if all the oceans in the world had coalesced into a single, tremendous torrent. It idled in place, suspended, churning a dragon’s skeleton in its waters.
“Ah!” Heinla cried. The wave gushed forward, its crest folding over. It surged around the gorge of the Ripper, curving and sloshing its way to the front line of the colossi.
The giants hunkered down, but big things often move slowly, and colossi were no exception. Before they could get solid footing, the wave crashed into them. Dragon bone shattered into tiny projectiles, clacking off stone heads and limbs and faces.
The colossi staggered. Some fell, sending shockwaves across the Ripper. Others stood tall, barely moved. None seemed—
“That didn’t kill a single one,” Lairn said.
Gynoth jumped off the crate. “Death wasn’t the intention.”
“When is it our intention?”
Gynoth finally allowed his fists to clench as he watched several colossi punch the frozen ground in fury.
“Now.”
The earth buckled immediately in front of those blows, and like a snake skittering beneath the sand, it continued to buckle outward. Chunks of ice split, and snow poofed high into the air.
“Go,” Gynoth told Lairn.
The Lord of the Risen kicked his heels into the ribs of his skeletal horse and hurried to the battlefront, where the army of risen had gathered. He barked out orders, and the horde of corpses formed well-defined ranks: flanking foot soldiers at the wings, cavalry in the rear to be deployed when necessary, and a boulder-shaped battalion of tightly packed risen at the forefront to serve as the army’s living siege machine to break the colossi’s ranks.
“Hum, Gynoth!” Heinla cried.
He spun, saw her pointing her finger, and spun back around. While he was busy watching his risen split off into various battalions, the colossi were charging. Running, really. Sprinting.
I was wrong, he thought. They can move fast.
Coruscated bolts of lightning stabbed down from the sky like fiery spears. They struck the skulls of colossi, flaring in explosive wonder. The giants kept coming, not one of them worse for wear.
They shrugged off small meteors, staggered but uninjured. They ignored swords and axes crafted from the air itself, the weapons guided by invisible hands and shattering into dust immediately upon slashing into colossi.
Gynoth faced the gods, his hand in the air. “Wait,” he barked.
The sorcery ceased.
He looked across the Ripper, his eyes meeting Lairn’s. They two nodded, acknowledging the failure of their initial plan.
“Back!” roared Lairn. “Back! Pull back!”
Gynoth jogged to the tents, ushering in the gods. “Enough with—” He threw a hand out, reaching for a post as the earth heaved him upward and outward. “Enough with the elements,” he said. “It’s not working.”
“Hum!” Heinla said, furrowed brows. “Water slows them.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Nollis, the god of fire, who had only half his jaw. “And did you see, did you see the way they looked to the heavens as fire rained down upon them?”
“I don’t care if they’re distracted,” Gynoth said. “I want them dead. Let’s—”
“What about being slowed down?” Heinla said. “Methinks that helps a whole lot.”
Gynoth took a breath. Anger won’t help. “Good. Fine. Slow them down. But we need to kill them. Plaviss, why are you still here? Go!”
The goddess of illusions rubbed her hands before her tiny, pockmarked face. “Sssssorry,” she hissed, “It ssssslipped my mind.” She grinned and flicked her tongue out like a snake, then ran off in the direction of the retreating risen army, where she was supposed to have gone if the initial strategy had failed.
Of all the gods, Plaviss made Gynoth the least comfortable. He had found her in an Obviator filled with snakes. Thousands of snakes. She considered herself their mother and indeed a snake herself, born in the wrong body.
Several tents collapsed as the icy soil beneath the snow shattered, under assault from the heavy, racing strides of colossi. Gynoth chanced a look behind him and swore. The first few giants had made it to the other side of the Ripper already.
“Shall I make you invisible, necromancer?” asked Haechus, the self-professed ethereal god.
“Soon. Trill—” Gynoth swiveled around in attempt to pinpoint the goddess.
“I am here,” Trill said, sitting in the cupped hands of Roose the Maddener like a teapot on a plate.
Trill was a dwarf of a woman whose legs had been chopped off. Somewhat ironically, she was the goddess of the aegis. Roose, meanwhile, stood eight feet tall, five feet wide, and called himself the instiller of nightmares.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Gynoth said. “Get to the risen. They’ll need you more than I do. Shield them during their first engagement and, when you’re able, thereafter. Roose, take the minds of as many as you can.”
The square-faced, broad-nosed Roose nodded once. He secured the tiny Trill against his chest, preparing for a hasty run to the risen army.
“Excuse me,” Trill said. “Would—” She gasped, wobbling suddenly in Roose’s arms as part of the cliff behind them fell away, plummeting to the ground.
Gynoth backed away from the still-standing overhang of the cliff and
urged the gods to do the same.
A heavy percussion that had been building for a short while had reached its apex. It boomed in his ears so loudly it was all he could hear. His thoughts seemed so small and insignificant compared to the drumming that thundered behind him.
“Move, you twit!” cried Voss, god of strength. He shouldered right through Gynoth, flattening the necromancer and stepping across him like a doormat.
Gynoth shook the snow from his eyes and looked up. His world had turned upside down, which made the scene before him—or rather, behind him—all the more discomforting.
Dozens of colossi had veered off their set path toward the risen. Their eyes, huge and round and white like sun-blanched rock, were aimed at Gynoth and the gods. More worrisome, they were only twenty feet away. Each stride closed that distance by five feet.
Limbs of stone swinging furiously, the colossi made it to within ten feet of Gynoth when a mountain of a god bore down on them.
Voss scaled the first giant he came to, using the colossus’s coarse frame for grip. The creature swatted at Voss like he was a pestering ant, but the god dodged and ducked with precision and quickness.
Gynoth was vaguely aware his hands were turning numb, buried in the snow. But the show he watched was too exciting to consider moving.
Voss leaped from the giant’s chest and landed on its arm. From there he scurried upward, climbing atop a bulging shoulder, chipped and sanded down like an eroded hillside.
The colossi attempted to pluck him off. To flick him. Voss weaved in and out of the creature’s fingers, cutting a path toward its face. He grabbed onto its ear and jumped. Onto its stiff brow that resembled a smelted beam.
Voss vaulted onto the giant’s head. On his knees, he raised his fists and pounded. And he smashed. And drove his knuckles hard and furiously into the colossus’s skull.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 34