It wouldn’t erase any of it, but he wanted it—and today of all days, he was going to have it. He raised his hand and let himself feel the shift of the molecules a foot in front of him, and then two feet out, three, ten, twenty, thirty—further, until he could feel them like a thread spanning the distance between him and the manor, hooked deep beyond the foyer, taut. He pulled on the thread, and fire pillared out from his hand. It shot through the gate, across the dead yard, into that gaping red door, and exploded like a bomb. Wood splintered. Windows blew out. The ground rocked.
Naliah watched as the flames overtook the facade of the manor and curled his fingers, coaxing the flames higher and higher, until the manor was a beacon against the growing night. Smoke billowed in thick clouds, smothering the street and burning his eyes. The crackling heat grew, and ash fell like snow.
He could hear people stopping in the streets, could hear some of them approaching, could hear their shocked, wordless breathing and their frantic calls for water—and it was the realization that he was about to be discovered that jolted him.
He couldn’t be caught doing this.
With a wide sweep of his hand, Naliah extinguished the fire, and like a candle, it snuffed out. He backed away from the damage, looking down the smoke-hazed street both ways, looking down at his hands. It would only be a matter of minutes before the city guardsmen came running and found him here, and what excuse did he have? Vandalism? Revenge? Spite?
You have to be better than this, he yelled at himself. This isn’t who you are now. The Council elected you to be a Guardian. You’re a saviour, not another whip to dole out justice. Justice will always end in fire and blood.
Beyond the smoke, in the distance, Naliah could just make out his new home: the Guardian Tower that loomed over the haphazard houses of Anderton and their red roofs. The tower was silhouetted by the fading sunset and nearly obscured by the night fog that had begun to roll in. He needed to return. Janie and Rickard would likely have a stew going, and he’d already promised them a game of strip Fate Stones since it had been a slow prayer day. He still suspected the two were rigging the game to get him naked five hands in and had been since his su-lanah Artysaedra had visited and given them a few pointers, but he’d never been able to prove it.
He gave the charred manor one last look.
All I have left, after everything, is myself. I won’t let you take that, too.
He tried to hold onto that thought and let it buoy him, but as he sprinted through the shadows toward home, something settled in his stomach, something uncomfortable, something like shame, something like fear, something that intensified with every step he took. He had the sudden, unexplainable feeling that there was still a door open inside of himself, one he would never be able to close.
He ran faster.
BY THE SAINTS
_______________________________
If it comes by land, hunt it.
If it comes by air, ground it.
If it comes by fire, subdue it.
But if it comes by sea, fear it,
For it cannot be tamed.
saying common in southern Osnastedt of the Fjordlands, translated from Osnata
THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS
BALSCH STREET, REDLIGHT DISTRICT, NORTHERN LINDENNACHT
COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE
Lindennacht was coming down in pieces.
As Oliver and his sister rounded a crumbling brothel, a large portion of its roof broke off, stone shingles raining down on them like shale. They dodged most of the waterfall of rock by tucking-and-rolling forward, but when they righted themselves, the brothel gave another great groan. Oliver looked up just as a larger slab of roof broke free.
On instinct, he threw his hands in the air and, still gripping his revolvers, cried, “Åmnachteş jen’nė!”
He could feel the moment the multiverse decided to heed his call. There was a tug in his gut, and then to his surprise, the air above his hands shimmered and hardened like a sheet of ice. It stretched a wide berth over him and his sister as the massive slab of roof smashed against it, blacking out the night with a cloud of dust. Rock and wood split and splintered, then fell away. Debris clattered across the ground.
When Oliver’s shield vanished, he stared at the glittering remnants of it in the air before the wisps disappeared. I did that, he realized, wide-eyed. Magic answered me more strongly than it ever has. Why?
Through the dust, he turned to look at Lana, who was staring down at the chunks of stone around them. She clutched her pistol against the thick black scales of her breastplate, brown knuckles bloodless. Around the gun, her hands were trembling, and then all at once, they weren’t. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, then brought the pistol back to her side.
Looking at the gun, Oliver felt guilty. The only offensive weapon she had at her disposal was that pistol and its single bullet. He wanted it to be enough to protect her, but in this unplanned chaos, he knew it couldn’t be. He couldn’t be, not as long as they were stuck here. Taking a step closer, he flipped his left pepperbox in his hand and nudged her arm with its ivory grip. She understood after a moment of glancing between Oliver and the gun, and they swapped weapons.
The pistol was long and awkwardly balanced compared to the pepperbox still in Oliver’s right hand, but the wooden grip was warm and slightly damp from Lana’s palm. Something about it was settling.
“Look at me,” he said, and Lana did. She looked very small in that moment. “You stay close until we get to the mountains.”
‘It’s too far,’ she signed.
“We’ll make it.”
‘That monster is going to kill us. We’re going to die. There are too many demons, Ollie. We won’t get away.’
“You’re not going to die, Lana,” Oliver said. He crouched down to her height, boots creaking. Lana’s hazel eyes were bright behind her mask, but they were wide and riddled with barely disguised fear. Her whole body was shaking now, and Oliver knew it had nothing to do with the biting chill in the winter air. He watched her take another deep, centering breath. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Do you know why?”
‘Because you love me.’
“Because you’re my whole world, beshna. There’s no me without you,” he said calmly, and knocked the forehead of his mask against the smooth surface of hers. Her eyes darted between each of his rapidly before she threw her free arm around his neck and squeezed him tightly. He wrapped her in a hug, burying his mask against the riot of curls peeking out from her hood. “We’re going to be okay. We’ll make it. I promi—”
A shriek ripped through the night like knives on china.
It was close. Too close.
Oliver jumped up to his feet and pulled Lana into a nearby alley, both of them splashing through the half-inch of seawater in the street. He backed her up against the wall and into the shadows, then levelled a gun at each open end of the alley and waited. He listened. Drainage trickled through the gutter that bisected the slanted alley’s floor. Underneath the sound, fainter, was the distant roar of rushing water and the pop of gunshots, like the fireworks at Yule.
“Póveş jen seşta’nė,” Oliver whispered, directing his words at the multiverse again, like his father had taught him to as a child. Magic belongs only to itself, his father used to coach him. When you respect that, it will respect you. Oliver had tried to take those words to heart when he’d been forced to practice spellcasting in the dark or while running obstacles on the handmade training courses his father had built for him in the woods, Lana always watching from their father’s shoulders, begging to join in but never allowed to—but Oliver had never quite developed the respect for the art his father had. Oliver wanted magic to do what he said, when he said it.
After a moment, he felt another tug in his gut, and he thanked all four saints that magic was so forthcoming tonight. It was hard to elicit and even harder to control or predict, which was why he rarely relied on it. The amount of tim
es he’d conjured a physical, visible manifestation of it could be counted on one hand and one of those instances had been just minutes ago—and entirely on accident. Now, he could only hope that his command had been specific enough—that magic would keep him and his sister silent, from the slide of air down their throats to the elevated beating of their hearts to the faintest rustle of their clothing. All would tell a hollowsoul exactly where Oliver and his sister were.
The ground began to rumble again with another set of earthquakes, growing in intensity with each passing second. The crumbling sixth storey of the stone building in front of them trembled.
He needed to get his sister out of here—to safety—out of Lindennacht.
Fucking shame we can’t dimension-hop, he thought bitterly. The demons in the city were probably halfway across the multiverse by now, and he doubted they’d stopped long enough to ferry humans through the dimensions with them. Filthy creatures. Screw all of them.
When a hollowsoul failed to appear and the quaking of the ground lulled, Oliver guided his sister toward the northern mouth of the alley with a rough hand, away from the infested plaza on the other side of Lindennacht. Together, they ran into the slum districts on the outskirts of the city. It was the direction Druerr had made off for earlier at a terrified sprint.
Oliver’s and Lana’s footsteps made no sound as the two of them jogged through the damp streets, skirting around debris. With each step, Oliver’s heart slammed against his ribs. His lungs ached, more so than his thighs did, but he kept both pains in the back of his mind. They were a sign of survival.
In between surveying the streets, he watched Lana, who was running a few steps ahead, small and coltish. With a steady arm, she kept their father’s pepperbox aimed ahead of her like Oliver had taught her to. She didn’t even falter when the silver hood of her coat fell down, exposing the back of her head. Oliver itched to tug it back up but refrained. He turned to their surroundings.
She can handle herself. You trained her.
Abandoned laundry—strung up between the slender, gabled buildings of the district—flapped in the breeze. The sight sent a shiver down Oliver’s spine. Something about the emptiness of the night always burrowed under his skin. Street lanterns’ flames were snuffed out. Front stoops, windows, and ajar doors were all empty of the life that usually festered like a disease in these parts of the city. The emergency evacuation bell continued to toll in the distance in a high, upbeat clang, and distress sirens beat against each other and wailed out of tune.
Oliver’s eyes snapped around to each of the vacant buildings—shabby storefronts, wooden tenements that were painted grey to match the stone of the rest of the city, rundown chapels, distilleries, warehouses crammed between pubs and putrid livery stables like an afterthought. He’d expected the streets to be flooded with fleeing citizens, screaming and pushing at one another, but he found none of that. Instead, Lindennacht was a ghost town. He searched passing windows with his eyes, waiting for some glimpse of families who might have bunkered down to hide from the quakes and roaming hollowsouls, but there was nothing. He searched the streets as they flew by them, waiting to find evacuation parties or evidence they had already left the area. He found nothing.
He hadn’t expected any part of the city to be dead in the wake of its destruction. Carried by the wind, there were the far-off screams and gunshots of Quadrant Two. Here, though, underneath that chaos and the wail and toll of the emergency system, he could make out nothing but the raspy squeals of horses and the beat of their hooves against wood. A few stray dogs shot down the streets in the direction of the mountains. Cheap hansom cabs were abandoned along the roads, some overturned, sleek Fjordland horses crumpled against the cobblestones. Blood pooled black under their heads. There were other pools of blood—smeared trails of it—but there were no signs of what they might have belonged to.
‘There’s something up ahead on the right,’ Lana signed.
They rounded the next block together, guns raised, and then came to a complete halt.
The street was long and narrow—piled with more bodies than Oliver had ever seen in his life. It was a waist-deep sea of flesh, bone, and blood, carnage that stretched down the block with no end in sight.
Oliver struggled to take it in.
Limbs stuck out in awkward directions. Ribcages were cracked open like gaping maws. Slick innards spilled across cobblestones—across other bodies. People were ripped in two—in more pieces than that. He recognized the featureless metal masks of several Lindenwatchmen and the barrels of their issued rifles, all glittering in the moonlight. A woman lying across the top of one of the piles drew his eye. She was naked from the hips up, her head like an overripe pomegranate that had been stomped by a boot. A few feet away was a boy who couldn’t have been more than two years old. His bottom jaw was missing, his tongue flopped against his neck. Oliver ripped his eyes away, aiming them downward at the street drain bubbling up and overflowing with saltwater and blood that licked at his leather boots.
When the breeze turned, the smell hit him—brine, copper, urine, the sour of bowels and shit. He could taste it on his tongue, and bile teased the back of his throat.
“Stop looking at it, Lana,” he said, reaching for her. “Saints, don’t lo—”
His sister slapped his outstretched hand.
Oliver’s head snapped over to her, and when she pointed out at the bodies, he felt for a moment as though he’d gone back in time, as though they were standing near the harbour all over again, his sister pointing at that wolf. He could almost see the beast, almost feel the freezing saltwater rush around his legs; by now, the water must have been pounding the streets nearest the bay in massive waves. Their house, or what was left of it, was probably flooded, being swept away by the sea, stone by stone.
The city was so close to being demolished completely. They needed to run, while they had the chance.
“Lana, we don’t have time to—”
‘Look,’ she signed vehemently, jerking her elbow straight down and thrusting outward with two fingers. Then she raised their father’s pepperbox with both hands.
When Oliver turned back to the piles of dead bodies, he noticed something this time that he hadn’t before: in the carnage, something was moving, jostling corpses.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
He watched as a pack of hollowsouls rose from the piles of bodies and snuffled at the air. He could tell the moment they caught his scent, too, and he knew there was no fleeing now. His eyes snapped over to a set of yawning doorways, where two more of those insidious creatures trailed out into the overflowing street. They had the necks of dangling—what had to be—humans locked in their jaws.
All of the creatures were slick, drenched in blood that was black in the moonlight. Their faces jutted out in wet half-snouts. He could hear their quiet snarls.
Oliver counted at least six of the creatures. Unless the saints were smiling on him, he wouldn’t make it out of this fight alive.
Fuck.
Oliver had never hunted more than two rogue demons together at once, and during those hunts, he’d always had a unit of his brothers at his back, as protocol demanded no Lindenwatchman intercept a demon alone. Demons were too wild, too strong. They had too many strange abilities like turning into rats or bending nature to their wills—and even though Oliver had no practical field experience with what a hollowsoul was capable of, he knew from research that one of them alone could easily outmatch him.
Six, though—six of them were a death sentence, plain and simple.
Let it be my death then, he decided, and mine alone.
“Run,” he told his sister, swallowing hard. He raised his guns, fingers on the triggers. “Run, Lana. Don’t look back. I’ll find you later. I promise.” The hollowsouls were moving closer, and Oliver could still feel Lana lingering at his side. He snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, rvakanuneş’nė.”
She listened to him, her footfalls splashing through the street
behind Oliver until they were gone. Heart aching, he held his ground.
Three bullets, Oliver realized slowly as he watched the hollowsouls discard their kills and part through the bodies around them as easily as parting through water. Three bullets were all he had between his pepperbox and his pistol without reloading them.
He hoped they were enough.
Oliver sprinted around the corner of a building and whirled back as four hollowsouls barrelled into the shadowy street after him. They were sated on blood and lumbering half-drunk on it, but Oliver was still panting to keep ahead of them.
“Katchteş’nė!” Oliver yelled, magic tugging at his insides as he fired the last bullet in his pepperbox. This time, when the bullet left his gun, it was with a great flash of green fire. The bullet struck the nearest hollowsoul’s skull and blew the creature’s entire head off, brain and blood raining down onto the cobblestones in wet clumps. The shockwave rippled up Oliver’s arm.
The other three hollowsouls paused on their hind legs, bent twice like a dog’s. As they stood there, their claws fanned out and their wide nostrils flared. Only when their lips parted around fangs dripping with bloody saliva did Oliver mutter another incantation.
No magic answered back this time.
He tried again.
Still nothing.
Shit, he panicked. Shit. Shit. Shit.
The empty pepperbox in his hand clicked over and over as Oliver pulled the trigger, barrels revolving and snapping into place. He hissed incantation after incantation, but all went unanswered. When one of the hollowsouls lunged forward with a low growl, Oliver launched his pistol left-handed at its head out of desperation. The creature dodged the flash of metal, and the gun clattered far down the street. Oliver tripped back—and then in a lightning quick blur, he was being hoisted through the air by his neck and slammed against a wall. The hollowsoul’s hand was large enough that it stretched up from his throat and over half his mask. Its other hand spidered across his ribcage. He was pinned.
A Shard of Sea and Bone Page 4