“Die beautifully, my love,” he said with gentle remorse.
He crossed the distance between them—several lengths of his body—in a breathtaking heartbeat, open hand slashing out directly at her face. If she had been one wit less ready, even slightly out of balance or position, the fight would have been over there and then. But her hands were perfect and she reacted the instant his body moved. Her blades scissored across her body with his striking arm between them; he should have lost his hand.
The tip of a severed talon spun up into the air as Sequa all but fell backward, away from his hand. There had been a brief tugging sensation at her scars and when she swiped the back of her hand over her cheek, it came away coated in fresh red. He had reached in, carved her skin and pulled his hand free before she could strike.
Motion in the corner of her eye and he passed her on her left; that tugging sensation again and now her leather armor gaped free all down her side. This time his talons had struck unmarred flesh. The pain flared as the blood flowed.
Oh Gods, he was behind her now.
She drove her right foot into the blood-soaked stone and dirt of the rooftop and pivoted, hacking wildly at the air without intent. He swayed back just out of the reach of the blades.
Sequa instantly lunged, letting her foot turn onto its side in the suicide strike that left many fighters with a broken ankle.
The extra finger lengths proved worth the risk; the tip of her left blade touched and pierced flesh at the very end of her strike, grating to a painful stop on his chest plate. He snarled, the noise making her ears ring.
His arms flashed out, swept down, and he took to the air.
Sequa gasped out held breath, pitifully pleased with herself. At least he would wear a mark of hers.
All done, she could that see now.
She did not just lose this fight; he played with her. Her honed skills could not be enough to make up for his sheer physical presence, his speed, his astonishing strength, his agility. His wings.
He had been playing with her since the Temple, when she surprised him for the first and only time. If he’d wanted her dead quickly he’d have ripped out her throat the last time he had his hands on her.
So he wanted her alive. As his mate?
No.
As his sacrifice. She had deprived him of the Shadow. Done playing with her, when the blood loss and exhaustion ground her down, he would pick her up and fly her to the water tower, hold her head under, long, thin fingers tipped with claws digging into the back of her head as she drowned on her knees, screaming silently. He needed her to die by his mad ritual.
Stratagems slipped and slide across her thoughts, considered and rejected even as she struggled to remain alive long enough to implement one of them.
From the air, he touched down to her right side and slashed her face again, the scars still resisting pain even as they parted under the razor edges. She turned toward him, slashing, and he flurried forward on his feet, arms moving in smooth precise strikes that she could barely perceive in motion.
He backed her and backed her again, pressing in with contempt for her blades. She caught another swipe of claws across her chest piece and it finally gave way with a rending noise, hanging half off her torso. The next swipe a second later made shallow skipping grooves through cloth from chest to stomach. Sequa windmilled her arms in panic and pain, spraying blood from the old wounds and new; that blow had been a hairsbreadth from disemboweling her. Only the remnants of her armor and her speed had turned the blow from mortal to superficial. She would not be able to dodge another strike like that.
Feathers flashed, and he soared up for a heartbeat to mock her from the air. The water tower wall swam clear into her vision, still marked with bloody footprints from her last run up its side. That had almost worked.
Cramped with agony Sequa charged forward to attempt the exact same maneuver. Two faltering steps up the sheer surface, he responded in the exact same way.
The Goddess had not deserted her after all.
Her third step she planted hard, and in the instant she had purchase on the wall, she pushed off straight at him, face to the Feathers and blades extended. In the shocked second he had to react, he made his second mistake in as many heartbeats. With a great sweep of his wings he surged upward, twisting his body out of the way of her blades.
The god-forged metal—not this time aimed at his body—sheered through the feathers of his right wing at the very end of her desperate swing. They both tumbled to the ground, Sequa landing on her old-injured shoulder and rolling away from the mass beside her till she struck the wall. Dragging herself unsteadily to her feet, she rounded to face him in the exact moment he—already standing—lifted up his arm to assess himself.
Winded and weeping, Sequa half crouched, terrified that she had done only cosmetic damage, that he had fallen from the sky in shock alone.
Silhouetted clearly against the flooding silver Ladylight, the ruin of the wing sprang into sharp relief. She had taken out most of the great gorgeous feathers on one side.
He would never fly again.
His scream struck Sequa in the chest like a blow from a mailed fist, punching her back into the wall and bringing up a spray of blood from her lungs. Her swords clattered to the ground as she fell onto all fours, retching, unable to breathe. If he could recover himself, she was dead.
Force of will could only go so far; she could not move save to struggle for breath for long heartbeats, expecting all the while to feel those claws on the back of her neck again. Well, at least she already knew what it felt like to die. The scream still reverberated in her ears, in her chest, in her head, in her soul.
No mortal blow fell. Her aching lungs refilled, and her hands found her swords on the ground still on their tethers. Rising to her feet, she saw him huddled in a ball in the midst of the carnage, trembling.
Never in her whole life—a life more than filled with shameful deeds—had she felt more ashamed of any action than the deliberate choice to destroy his wing, to knock this god-like creature from his sky and force him down to earth with the rest of the mortals. She could have done this on their first airborne pass. She should have.
Bile rose in her blood-clogged throat to think that it had only been the threat to her own life that had brought her to it; she had valued his wings over the lives of the men and women who had followed her into this battle. Sequa coughed up a foul mouthful of blood and vomit, grateful for the distraction, unable for the moment even to look at what she had done.
“You. One of us, it had to be, I thought he—but, no. You.”
Her head whipped around at the sound of his voice, horrified beyond measure. He sounded happy.
Indeed, he smiled at her from his curl on the ground, and seeing her facing him, he struggled to his feet. His eyes bright, manic, shone with that same unholy light she had seen in the air above the temple and in her bed that night.
Strands and tendrils of sheer power, tangible like a cold breeze across her soul, warped and twisted in the air around them. The Ladylight, bright as it ever could be, grew dim and pale in her sight. Sequa staggered back a step, hands going to her temples. The hilts of her swords rapped painfully against her skull; the sharp shock silenced the lingering echo of his shriek and cleared her head a little. She remembered that they had been the gift of the Great Hawk.
He spoke again, in a husky croon, like a man interrupted in an act of carnality. “Beloved, all this is destined. This moment, this conflict. The power I have so diligently gathered should go to the strongest of our blood, and it could have been me. But you instead. I am filled with joy.”
He opened his arms to her, his shattered wing hanging askew. She shivered and the bile rose in her throat again as her mind strobed with the image of him naked and rampant reaching out that night.
Her recoil shadowed confusion across his face, but it cleared back to that sick, mad smile in a breath. “Come my love, my sister, my champion. Come complete us both.”
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nbsp; She stared at him in frozen horror as he walked toward her. Even now, she would not have chosen his death if he had not moved toward her like that. If he had turned and run away, she would not have pursued him.
His eyes. In the end, his eyes made the decision for her. Nothing like sanity in his gaze. If he lived this night, he would leave the city, yes…and go elsewhere and commit this carnage again in lockstep mimicry. On and on and on until someone braver and kinder than herself put him out of his misery like a foaming dog. Even if it failed, he would never stop.
Worse, he might succeed.
Sequa took one light step and struck, her blades stabbing forward to puncture his lung. To drown him in his own blood.
Drown him.
Variegated creature not one thing or another, blood of her blood, his life stood forfeit to this great scheme of his, sixteen Turns in the making. Death after death until this death, not perfect but enough.
It might have been the gathered arcane potential writhing around her; it might have been some deep perversion in her soul. Within the thickness of a knife’s edge, something drove her forward to complete the ritual and swallow the power as she swallowed her own blood.
In the life of any fighter, there are instants of true purity, when focus and skill and body and mind join as one. The universe slows. Grows as clear as still water. All details spring fresh to the eye as though seen for the first time; no motion is wasted or unbalanced or wrong.
Impossible good fortune to fall into such an instant at this crucial moment or she stole some small sip of the potential surrounding her and made one occur. But even then she barely had the time or space to change that last fateful strike. Even as the connection was made, she was not even sure she had wanted it to change.
The blades struck low, of their own volition it seemed, scissoring across his stomach to nip at the skin in a long straight line from navel to hip. He fell heavily to his knees and the impact shook loose the coils of his guts into a sloppy heap on the ground.
The sound he made as she killed him sounded a pale echo to the one he had made when she took his wing. He never spoke again.
It can take a gutted man hours to die, if none of the great blood vessels are cut. He still lived as the Goddess rose higher above them to bath that unholy scene in her silver benediction. For the rest of the night, they stared at each other, him in a heavy heap next to his own guts and she coiled in on herself, knees to chin. Her blades, clotted and black with his blood lay on the ground between them.
Strange hope filled his eyes, as the Feathers wheeled and sparked above them, moving in their slow sweep through the night. Perhaps he hoped she had not chosen some swifter death for him because she still intended to complete his mad, little game, drown him in the reservoir or his own cooling blood herself and take all that accumulated power like a thief.
She did not move, but still he hoped, and still he stared.
Breathing deep, Sequa could draw the fruits of his profane labors into her lungs along with the reek of death, blood, dirt. Sorrow. Regret. Vengeance. Her fingertips tingled as though deprived of blood; she thought sparks flickered here and there on the edges of her blades.
Did it comfort him in some obscure way, to know that he had been right and all his slaughter well-purposed? Did the comfort outweigh the perfect failure of his plans?
The power hung in the air like steam over a scented bath, like smoke from a sacred fire, like a fine mist of blood from a mortal wound. It enveloped them both; perhaps it helped keep him alive as the night wore onward to its inevitable end.
Not until the Godslight reached over Sequa’s shoulder and touched his face did he turned his head away and sighed.
And died.
The others found them there. Anem and Parri, followed by a heavily bandaged Cur and a handful of limping Iron Guards—none of her companions on the nightmare Run—came up the stairs in a rush that turned to a slow pace.
They drew abreast of her in a lump and wisely no one tried to touch her or speak as she unwrapped her arms from around her legs and rose, shaky and stiff. It took her several tries to pick up her swords and even then she could not sheath them, covered in brown and stinking blood. She hung them from their wrist chords and looked over at Anem. Cur’s peasant-open face bobbed back and forth over her shoulder and noble-closed expression.
Anem, visibly appalled, by what she saw stared in silence. Looking around again, Sequa saw the scene on the roof through their eyes. A massacre, twisted bodies scattered like leaves, pools of blood and at least one detached limb appearing unreal and pathetic in the mellow, golden light. Over them all, a light dusting of severed feathers added to the sense of ludicrous theatricality.
Sequa turned her back on it all and walked over to his body. His drying eyes stared outward at the God he despised. She closed them with gentle if trembling fingers and murmured the old benedictions in a choked voice.
The looks she received from the watchers for doing her pious duty were variously approving or disgusted. Beyond her to care about either sentiment, she would simply have exited the roof in silence but for Parri—predictable Parri—and his indignant snarl.
“And what is he to you then, that you sing him to the Gods so nicely?”
Sequa glanced at the body of the man she had killed, whose name she had never learned. Incontrovertibly and irrationally, she felt convinced he was her brother in flesh and blood as well as mind. His death had taken with him all those tantalizing glimpses of an unseen past he had baited her with just by existing. Fatherless daughter of a slave, did she want to know what had fathered both of them? The monster and the winged man? He left behind a towering shadow, tinged with blood, whispering even now in her thoughts. Beware, for this madness is in you too.
As if she had not already known that.
“He is nothing,” she lied. To Anem, still pale and silent amid the bodies of her people, she added “Burn the body here, and let those who speak of a man who flew in the darkness seem crazed in the light. Let the city know it is over. Lay them all to rest.” To Cur and his anxious jittering, she said nothing.
The climb down the stairs to the Peasant’s Road below was nearly as taxing as the fight had been. She walked barefaced and bloody-handed through the city. The gathering crowds of people, looking so odd on the streets after the desertion of the last few days, parted before her in a smooth wave.
Amazing how quickly the news had spread through the city of the disruption of the Dance, the attack on the Shadow, the bloody and deadly chase through the streets below and air above. Her nightmare countenance and naked blades would have been enough to scatter people before her in panic but some garbled tale of her deeds, in defense of the Shadow and the city’s children, made them stop, and stare, and move aside as though backing away from a wild animal.
Quiet, respectful, but they still judged. Peasant postures eloquent with fear, nobles’ faces equally eloquent with distaste. She had saved them by being as terrible and ruthless as the monster who had terrorized them for so long. Ressen could be no refuge for her now, another silver path fading from her plans, as the blood on her soles grew tacky, ripping each step from ground by force.
Sequa walked without pause straight to the Shadow’s private chambers, near the top of the Temple. The inhabitants of the lower floors fled in front of her as though from a wild fire. When she reached the polished and elegant realm of the high clerics, figures moved to bar her way at least once. She did not push them aside, nor speak, nor touch, simply weaving deftly past. After a few attempts, she became vaguely aware of some buzzing discussion behind her and the pressure of constant attention. So they followed, close but did not interfere. Good enough.
Sequa checked before the closed door to the Shadow’s sleeping quarters, dull and stupid, unable to comprehend what to do next. Her whispering tail milled and swayed behind her, equally at a loss.
By some miracle, it opened from the inside and the Shadow stood framed there in the early Godslight. Her thin fram
e draped in white looked made from sticks and cobwebs against the brightness, her face a blank swathe of darkness.
Sequa collapsed to the floor in front of the living avatar of the Great Good Goddess, pressing her bloodstained cheek to the stone and babbling a river of soft words, almost inaudible even to her. “Help me, Mother. I dared not wash in any fountain, help me, I am unclean and damned, and I do not know what to do, I am…” The very air failed in her throat, lips brushing cold rock that burned her bruised flesh.
Kinslayer.
Peremptory words snapped out over her head, the Shadow ordering cloths and hot water, soap and a wicker-offering basket, a whetstone and sword oil…and privacy. Somehow, Sequa found herself on her feet and inside the Shadow’s chambers, standing in the middle of the wide room pierced on three sides by tall windows. The door scraped shut behind her and the Shadow’s voice followed, gentle as a woman soothing a frantic child. The God full risen, He poured into the room, centered on where she stood, transfixing her like so many arrows of heat and light. Sequa closed her eyes against the blinding radiance, shivering under His touch. As far from her element as she had ever been, covered in her brother’s blood, the stink of flesh and stolen, unholy power rich in her throat, riveted by the light of a God she had never understood. A God she had always feared.
Only Jesan had ever brought the God near to her without exposing the amorphous shame now welling up beyond her control, bastard slave-child without a father. Only Jesan had ever made Him seem like a loving parent and not a stern judge, quick to condemn her darkness, harsh in his summary.
Now she faced Him alone, soul flayed raw with death and potency both, and she trembled like a leaf under His gaze.
Oh, but not alone, not here, not now.
The avatar of the Goddess stood close behind her as she quivered and wept. A gentle hand reached out to cradle her cheek and a voice as soft and irresistible as spring rain sounded in the God-soaked air.
“Remove your armor, your weapons. Children of the Goddess as we both are, yet He is still our Father. Stand bare before the God and let His light cleanse the darkness from your heart. You are not impure—what does not stain your soul can do no lasting harm to the rest of you. We will cleanse you in light and water, and burn what cannot be cleansed and you will be whole again.” Under the calm, relentless words, Sequa’s hands reached for buckles and straps, the fouled leathers and cloth dropping from her body heavy as stones. The gore had soaked and dripped and migrated beneath her coverings till her skin seemed painted in a great brush stroke of wet red and flaking black.
As A God Page 29