Claim him. Say the words to bring him home. Say the words.
Fresh blood welled, and she clasped the medallion, mumbling, as if another voice spoke through her, “On your blood you swore your heart and bound your soul.”
Ibhraign looked at her, through her eyes to wherever it was she hovered, away from herself. A twinge of pain in her forearm startled her – the vague sensation of her own heartbeat returned to her, of breath, and voice.
“To…” She faltered.
Take him back.
“To the will of Father Earth,” she continued, words forming despite herself, like muddy puddles sucking at her boot, “and… and Mother Suns of Sky.”
Calvraign had stormed from the scurryway with a shout, and Reime followed, stepping out and to the left with the stock of his crossbow raised to his shoulder. Greycloak strained to join them. She could feel him pulling against her like a fish on a line, each word she spoke another twist of the hook.
“Please,” Ibhraign said. His voice was plaintive, distant, and hollow, but it struck her as infinitely more human than the whispers skittering through her head, pulling the strings of her will. “I swore an oath before all others. For him. For his mother.”
The raven spread its wings, preparing for flight.
There can be no oath before me, the voice raged. Not to place or thing or even a wife.
“With painted face to greet the dawn,” Callagh regurgitated the words, heaving. Pain traveled up her arm, spreading to her shoulder, her heart. Ibhraign faltered, and strength coursed into her, filling her. His strength. His essence and his power – hers.
Mine, reminded the dread voice, and a jolt from the medallion scalded like burning oil through her nerves. He cannot ungive what’s been freely given. He is mine, and mine alone. Bring him home, Callagh Breigh, and you will be first among mortals in the madhwr-rwn.
Ecstatic fire burned deep in Callagh’s center. She wanted it, needed it, hungered for it, even as she felt it devouring her in agony. But as the hot life permeated her, so did her anger.
No, she railed at the invisible presence. It is Ibhraign!
Ibhraign is dead. This is my Hand. Return him to me.
Callagh narrowed her eyes. “The gods’ own edge, the madh-” She bit down hard, slicing deep into her tongue as she cut the word in mid-syllable. She spat a mouthful of blood, and she shook as a choking rage from netherwhere drove her to her knees. The pain consumed her. The world spun, her head reeled, her chest heaved, but she dragged herself back to her feet, and she forced a smile. It was a practiced thing, a show of defiance rather than humor, and one until now she had reserved only for her father.
I am not a broken thing, she thought.
“Luadh má Ciaerhán!” she growled, the blood running out of her mouth like a feral animal. “Eahr macc-an-Cythe!”
And she followed Ibhraign the Dragonheart into battle.
“Keep your distance,” Vaujn ordered, mostly for the benefit of Prince Hiruld. No one else seemed at all interested in approaching the well-feathered corpse.
The glaring warface of Chloe’s helmet, discarded at her side, stared up at her as she sat deep in trance, her own eyes closed to the world around her. The gem in her bowl glowed in faint, sporadic pulses. She stopped chanting and now hummed and held a single note instead.
She’s close, Vaujn thought. He didn’t know much about his wife’s magic, even after so many years of marriage and squad life, but he knew that when she settled on her key note, she’d found what she needed within the gem’s lattice.
“I can’t abide this,” Hiruld said, his voice calm. “I truly cannot.”
Vaujn was disturbed by the prince’s shift in demeanor. The raging of emotion had its dangers, but he feared the peace of certainty all the more. He’s made up his mind about it. “A moment more, and she’ll draw it out. A moment more.”
Bellivue twitched. The temperature in the hall dropped to that of a chill-house.
Chloe spoke, but not in any mortal tongue – this was the language of the earth. Of rock. Of stone. Of mountain hearts beating deep in the breast of creation. Her eyes opened wide, rolling back into her head. Water boiled around the pulsating gem. She muttered the incomprehensible again, her empty, white stare fixed on Bellivue.
Vaujn grabbed the prince’s arm. “This is it.”
Bellivue quaked. His body shook in stiff tremors.
Hiruld let out a strangled cry. His proud face paled.
Blackness seeped from the pores of Bellivue’s skin, pooling around him. A low wheeze sputtered from his throat. His arm quivered, reaching up, hand grasping at air.
Hiruld dropped to his knees.
The gemstone flared, illuminating the concentric ripples that oscillated in the scrying bowl in Chloe’s lap – out to the edge and then back to the center, collapsing and reforming, circles in a circular dance.
Bellivue’s eyes opened. Black. Seeping tears like oil.
Hiruld’s eyes closed. His hand trembled as he drew his sword from its scabbard.
Chloe’s teeth ground together.
Vaujn stayed the prince’s hand, sword half-drawn. “Patience, Your Highness. We’ve everything well in hand,” he reassured, but Chloe’s struggle and the resistance of the shadowborn troubled him. “Kill it again,” he ordered. Another volley of bolts pierced the convulsing shadowyn.
“Back!” Hiruld yelled and pushed Vaujn away, freeing his blade and standing. “Stay back from me,” he snarled. He looked down with eyes streaked in black. His voice was husky and strained. “Well and truly back.”
“Ver… vershtig,” Vaujn sputtered, stumbling back from the force of the prince’s shove. Shadowyn could move between mortal forms, given time and ritual magic, like shadow-walking into a soul, displacing it. But to leap into another body without preparation, and while the host was stuck full of kinsteel – Vaujn had never seen anything like it. A lot of surprises, today. “Hetz ullak, Mueszner! Hetz ullak!”
The sergeant spun, and the prince’s sword scratched along the surface of his warface, scarring the grimacing likeness from cheek to cheek as he recoiled from the attack. “Sjart!” he cursed.
Vaujn took aim at Hiruld’s leg. “Bring him down, but don’t kill him, by the All-father. Don’t kill him!”
The prince stumbled when Vaujn’s bolt shattered his knee with a bloody pop, but his momentum carried him to his target: Chloe. Vaujn’s stomach lurched. He scrabbled to his feet, pulled back the arming lever and loosed another bolt. This time his hasty aim proved wide.
The prince’s blade split the air with a whistle.
Mueszner caught the downswing of the sword on the lath of his bow. It cracked, almost splitting in two. Hiruld bullied in close, while the old veteran was tangled in the remains of his weapon and off balance. The prince’s sword scraped through the seam of the sergeant’s faceplate, and one thrust ended him. One thrust, and Mueszner was limp and lifeless, bright crimson streaming over the gilt beard of his warface, bleeding out in the dirt.
“Blades!” Vaujn barked. “On the prince! Bring him down!”
The kin discarded their crossbows and advanced on the prodigal prince, melee weapons in hand. Hiruld stepped over Mueszner, kicking his corpse back into the chaplain. Water sloshed over the sides of her scrying bowl, and bright golden flame spiraled up from the lambent gemstone. Chloe’s eyes popped open in alarm.
“No,” she muttered, snatching the burning gem with a wince. Flames leaked from the cracks of her fingers, coiling around her fist like serpents. She rolled to the side, away from her attacker. Läzch, the fastest of the squad, raced to interpose herself between the prince and the chaplain, an axe in each hand.
From the corner of his eye, Vaujn saw a black shadow loom, arms outstretched. He turned. Bellivue was standing – or what used to be Bellivue. Any resemblance to its shed human skin had been consumed by the black iiyir of the being that stood there now. It was the size of a large man, its face empty and featureless but for eyes of smoke
and a mouth of smoldering embers.
Impossible.
“The shadowyn!” he screamed. “’Ware the shadowyn! The bloody thing’s in both of them!”
A blast of frigid air roared down the passageway, leaving a dusting of hoarfrost in its wake. Most of the squad was warily surrounding Hiruld, but Ouwd and Hæschp were the rearmost in formation, closest to the shadowyn, and as the wind blasted across them, they slowed to a stop. Ice formed around them, between them, freezing their limbs as well as their expressions of terror, under an etahr of clear blue rime.
The shadowyn’s talons plucked a kinsteel bolt from its chest and flicked it toward Hæschp with a gesture and a word. The bolt sped to its mark, and Hæschp shattered into a blizzard of bloody sleet and frozen flesh.
“Chloe!” Vaujn yelled, turning to face the shadowborn. He didn’t verbalize anything else. As his wife, and as his squad chaplain, she knew the subtext of that one cry. Now what?
Ouwd was next. With a crack like a mountain glacier sloughing a sheet of ice, the quartermaster burst into fragments, his prodigious bulk falling into a handful of frozen slabs. Vaujn avoided the chunks that rolled toward him, trying to keep his breath and temper even. It had been a long time since they’d suffered any losses in battle, and that interval had made it easy to forget how quickly it could all go to the Pits.
“The geas!” Chloe shouted, spreading her fingers into the packed dirt of the tunnel and then tracing runes that burned black at her touch. “It’s pulling Hiruld’s strings like a damn puppet,” she explained. The shadowyn advanced, extracting another bolt from its torso. It sent the projectile flying, but the shaft disintegrated in mid-air over Chloe’s hasty inscription, showering her faceplate with a fine mist of dust. “This ward won’t last long,” she added, and as if to accentuate her statement, another bolt exploded in front of her. The pieces that skittered across her helmet were larger this time, and carried more momentum through the barrier. “I can still trap him, but he disrupted the spell and severed the ley line. I don’t have much left to give.” Chloe raised her glowing fist. “If I’m to bind him to the lattice, I have to touch him.”
Vaujn was glad that his warface did not mirror his actual expression. “Who makes up these rules?” he muttered under his breath.
The possessed prince had been dragged down by half of his own guard. He fought wildly, and with more strength than Vaujn thought purely natural, but Daehl drove her blade through the tendon of his right leg and, supernatural strength or no, it hobbled him. Daính and Náinh sat on his arms. The shadowyn hung back, discarding the inconvenient kinsteel bolts one by one but avoiding close combat with the battle-hardened kin.
“We can’t wait for it,” Vaujn worried aloud. “Once the last pin is out of the cushion, we’re only in for worse.”
“Did Magliuk run from the wyrm at Dinnoch?” Chloe asked, her innocent tone a thin veil for her sarcasm.
“Right,” agreed Vaujn with a hollow laugh. Suicide and glory it is, then. “Squad, after me. Hildil, hildil dhûnorihm!”
Leaving the prince to squirm and flail behind them, the kin charged the shadowborn in a tight wedge.
“Verklämme!” Vaujn cried.
“Verklämme im mahr!” the squad answered.
They all knew what to expect from such a frontal assault. It wasn’t the first time the kin of Outpost Number Nine had engaged a creature of the Dark. Chances were that half the squad would die before even reaching the shadowyn. Those that remained would have to hope that they could put enough kinsteel into its ethereal heart to prove lethal, and do it quickly, with minimal support from Mother Chloe. It made the reality of it no less difficult to bear.
The shadowyn spoke, but like Chloe, not in any mortal tongue. The word was not even one that Vaujn could hear. He felt it, reverberating through his limbs like a bubbling lake of magma poised to erupt, but there was no comprehending it. The shadowyn blazed in dark fire and met the first rank without flinching.
Náinh screamed as its talons tore through the metal of her helm and ripped through the flesh and bone of her head. She stumbled and collapsed, writhing as the black flames spread from her mauled half-face down her neck and then to her torso. She screamed while she could, which wasn’t long.
Darrow tried to attack from the shrouding smoke of Náinh’s body, but the shadowyn twisted away and swatted the blade, and the corporal, aside. He hit the tunnel wall head first, and wobbled to his knees. Dáinh went for its throat. It launched him into the ceiling in similar fashion, but when he fell back to the floor, he didn’t move.
Läzch delivered a glancing blow with one of her axes, but had to shift her momentum to avoid a gout of black fire and lost much of the force behind the blow. She tumbled off to the side. Cuhrbern proved not as quick, and the shadowyn caught him square in the chest. The shadowfire melted through his breastplate and consumed him from within.
Vaujn could feel the cold heat of Cuhrbern’s demise as he slipped in low under the shadowyn’s guard. He drove his sword in hilt deep, up through its crotch and deep into its innards. The shadowyn roared, its maw opening like a forge stove, and Vaujn’s face blistered in the heat, even under his helm. It clawed at him, clasping about his midsection, wrenching him and his sword away. Vaujn tried to bury the blade in its chest, but it twisted him until his bones crunched and snapped in its grip. Fire hotter than the shadowyn’s magic seared up his spine, burned in his head, robbed him of breath.
Chloe screamed.
I should have let go of the sword, Vaujn thought as it threw him to the dirt. He crashed against the wall, legs over his head, upside down, staring back at the melee. Should have left it in him.
Vaujn’s left arm sprouted at an acute angle in front of his face, bent backward at the elbow. Oddly, aside from the million piercing needles that burned in his skull, he didn’t feel pain. He didn’t feel anything.
That should really hurt, he thought as the world spun away from him. The pain was fading slowly to numbness.
Chloe collided with the shadowyn. A fury of golden fire erupted in the corridor, swallowing the blackness like dawn subduing the night. Black flames and golden fire entwined. A blast of air, heat, and force knocked down anything still afoot, and the rumble of the explosion shook dirt loose from the walls and ceiling. Pebbles danced in front of Vaujn’s nose, hopping back and forth through the growing cloud of dirt that billowed around them.
Darrow crawled toward him, his helmet discarded, nose broken. Blood clotted the corporal’s beard. “Captain?” he groaned. “Captain Vaujn?”
Vaujn couldn’t move his head, but his eyes searched wildly for any sign of his wife as the dust settled around them. He could see Daehl and Läzch, still on their feet.
“It’s gone,” someone said. He thought it might be Thruhm. “The prince, too.”
“I think she killed it,” confirmed Läzch. She coughed.
“It may have returned the favor,” the other voice answered. “She’s in a bad way.”
Vaujn couldn’t cry. He couldn’t utter a sound. He couldn’t so much as draw a breath. His faceplate pivoted open, and a concerned face filled his view, even as his field of vision collapsed slowly into oblivion.
Chloe.
A hand touched his cheek, felt under his nose and lips for the passing of breath.
“Still alive,” Darrow declared, relieved. “He’s still alive.”
“Not by much,” assessed Daehl, kneeling next to the corporal. “Maybe not for long.”
Their faces faded to darkness. The sound of their voices lasted a few moments longer, as if he were listening to their conversation from the bottom of a well. Don’t worry about me. Chloe. Save Chloe.
Daehl wasted no time taking command, her voice raw but steady. “Läzch, go scout things out – see what’s going on at the field and make sure there’re no more surprises between us and the well house. Corporal, Thruhm – check on the wounded. I’ll stay with the captain.”
“Check on the dead, more like.”
“Just get to it.”
Vaujn heard a scuffling in the dirt.
“Damn shadowyn,” grumbled Darrow.
And then cold and dark, and a singular thought, a clinging hope the sole light flickering in the blackness.
Chloe.
Numbness crept from Osrith’s arms to his shoulders, a dull ache that throbbed with every impact of axe on sword. Pain lurked beneath, like a fire struggling to burn a sodden log. Osrith kept his focus on footing, balance and timing. His breathing was even and strong. He kept time with the beat of his pounding pulse, like a drum-sergeant’s cadence measuring each step, each swing, each parry. When skill could win a contest quickly, all the better – but Osrith never relied on that. Stamina and patience won the day more often than not, and though the hrumm had strength and stamina to spare, in battle they lacked patience.
Satisfied that he had provoked the beast’s rage, Osrith stepped back, and then back again, feigning retreat, drawing it from the shelter of the redberry trees and the shrouds of streaming dragonmist. Another step back. He felt suns-light warming his neck. Osrith caught a swing on his axe haft, kneeling as he absorbed the force of the blow to clear the line of sight to the crossbowmen on the steps.
The graomwrnokk emerged from the shaded canopy of foliage. It hadn’t taken two steps before a quarrel struck it high in the breast. It lurched, and Osrith sprang, splitting its skull with a powerful downstroke.
Osrith searched the trees for Calvraign, anxious to bring the boy back under his wing. Despite the lad’s inexperience, he’d proved both his skill with a blade and his head for strategy. Still too quick to leap and too slow to dodge, but that was evidence of youth more than ability. Osrith had never seen the boy’s father fight, but he’d been on the battlefield at Vlue Macc, and heard the stories the Calahyr told of the fated last stand of the Cythe stalwart, Ibhraign.
In Siege of Daylight Page 73