War of the Bastards

by Andrew Shvarts

  “That’s…the plague?”

  A variant on it, the Nightmother said, with a definite hint of annoyance. Modified to target your delicate human physiognomy. Take it to the Heartstone in Veshtanar, little Queen, and channel its power. The rest is up to you.

  “I don’t understand,” Lyriana pressed. “This crystal will kill the bloodmages?”

  No. That won’t be enough. It’ll kill every single magic user. The Nightmother’s hands waved again, pulling a glowing pane up in front of her with images of Lyriana, Syan, and Ellarion. Don’t worry. I crafted it so that you three would be immune. Consider it a gift.

  “A gift? You’re talking about killing thousands of people!”

  They will die anyway. Within ten years at most, the Heartstone will burst. And everything will burn. Your people. Mine. Everything. She jabbed the crystal forward, this time more aggressively. You kill a few to save your whole race. That is the cost of survival.

  Lyriana rose to her feet, eyes burning, hands balled into fists. “I refuse it,” she said. “I refuse you. I refuse all of this!”

  The Nightmother stepped forward, and the light around her seemed to bend, creating a massive shadow behind her that reached up to the ceiling. It was like she grew ten feet taller, like the world was shrinking behind her, like everything was trembling with the thunder of a gathering storm. I jerked back, we all did, except Lyriana, who stood proud and strong. You do not speak like that to me, little ape, she said, and now her voice was deafening, a roar in my skull so loud it hurt. I gave you an offer. Now I give you a command. Do as I say, or I will…

  Then she stopped, her shadow shrinking, that rumble and roar vanishing. She just looked at us, perplexed. The craft outside. More of your allies?

  “What?” I said. “What craft?”

  The Nightmother stared at us like the answer was evident. It landed a few minutes ago. She flicked her hands through the air and one of those panes stretched out huge in front of us, like those massive tapestries that draped the walls in Castle Waverly’s Great Hall. But this pane was moving, showing us an image like we were looking out through a window. There was the building we were in, the second Godsblade, jutting out of the desert sand. And next to it was something else, something big and gray, something it took my eyes a moment to recognize.

  The Skywhale.

  “Is this real?” Zell demanded. “Is this happening now?”

  Of course, the Nightmother said, and now I could see lots of figures moving in the image, armored men rushing forward to the Godsblade’s side, to the wall of the rounded dome we were standing in. There were at least two dozen of them, maybe more. And behind them, at the ramp leading down from the metal ship’s maw, a man in a long black coat, with a shimmersteel circlet resting on his curly blond hair.

  Miles.

  I looked around wildly, from wall to wall, my body torn between the desperate need to start running and the understanding there was nowhere to run to. My legs felt weak, and my breath caught in my throat. Next to me, Zell clenched his hands into fists, and Lyriana’s fingers bent into a combat form.

  This was happening. This was actually happening. Miles had actually followed us all the way across the continent, had somehow landed his ship just outside the walls.

  Miles was here.

  What is the meaning of this? the Nightmother demanded. On her pane, the men came up to the side of this Godsblade, right up to the wall of the dome at the top. The room we were in right now. I turned to the wall with horror, the wall they were just on the other side of, and then I staggered back. Now I knew where to go: as far from that wall as humanly possible.

  “Those are our enemies!” Lyriana exclaimed. “The ones who are using all the magic! The ones we need to stop!”

  Why have they come here? she asked, and like, good question, lady. The soldiers were doing something, pressing something against the wall, I think, and then they ran back the way they’d come, sprinting away and ducking low in the sands.

  “What is that?” Zell demanded, pointing at the pane. The Nightmother pinched her fingers, and the image expanded on the side of the building’s wall, where the men had been pressing their hands. They’d left something there, stuck to the surface. A disc in a leather case, like a compass. With a burning, dancing, flickering light behind the glass.

  A mage-killer.

  Oh no.

  “Run!” I screamed, and the wall blew open with the roar of thunder.

  THE BLAST HURLED ME OFF my feet and sent me flying, slamming me hard into the wall at the chamber’s end. My vision flickered yellow and red, and pain shot through my spine. Dust billowed into the room, a thick cloud that stung my eyes and burned my lungs. I pulled myself up onto one hand, trying to take stock of what was happening.

  There was a hole where the wall had been, a massive hole maybe five men wide, looking out into the sprawling black sand beyond. Chunks of shimmersteel debris lay on the ground around it, sparkling and twitching, pulsing with magic, like snakes writhing in the sun. Flakes of ash fell like snowflakes, and embers smoldered all over the ground. I squinted through that haze and I saw them, waves of soldiers drawing their blades. And beyond them, I saw that same shape, that figure in the black coat, that shadow that filled me with equal parts fury and fear.

  Then I heard his voice, loud, clear, unmistakable.

  “Kill them!”

  With a roar, the soldiers charged forward, sprinting in through the hole, their swords shining in the wan light. I jerked back, scrambling for anything I could use as a weapon, but before I could react, the Nightmother let out a horrifying noise, a bellow that scraped like a shard of glass on the inside of my skull, a howl that ripped at my bones from within. She flailed out her hands, all fourteen fingers twisting like they were grabbing invisible clouds out of the air.

  Something was happening to her. Something awful. She dropped to her knees with a thud that rattled the floor, and let out a choked gasp all the more terrifying because her face was still smiling. With one clawed hand, she pulled at her throat, even as her veins throbbed within her skin, as her eyeballs quivered and melted away.

  The magic plague she’d released. The one that had killed almost all of her kind. She’d been safe before because we’d passed through that locked room, the one that had burned away the traces on us, but with the wall gone, she was exposed….

  She fell forward on one hand, and the skin on it cracked with deep bleeding rivulets, rotting on the bone. NO! she howled, deafening in my head.

  That was all the wave of soldiers needed. “Get them!” Miles shouted, and they rushed forward, through the breach.

  Zell was the first to strike. He lunged forward, bouncing off a wall with a leap, and caught the first soldier right in the side of the neck with his knuckle blades. The soldier collapsed with a gurgle, spraying crimson everywhere, and then Zell was up and moving, catching the next soldier under the ribs and dropping the one behind him with a bladed punch to the face, stabbing four clean holes into the center of his forehead. Then the others were getting up all around me, bellowing as they rushed forward: Lyriana surrounded by pulses of blue light, Ellarion with his hands floating over his shoulders, Syan and my father with nothing but their fists and howls of fury. We were really doing this. We were fighting it out.

  One way or another, it ended here.

  I leaped to my feet and ran forward. One of the Western soldiers charged right at me, a small man with a pointed beard and a short sword in each hand. He swung the right one down in a chop and I weaved effortlessly around it, streaking behind him and delivering a spinning elbow to the side of his head. He stumbled away and turned back to me, wobbling on his feet, dropping one of his swords with a clatter. He reached for it, but he was too slow, too disoriented. I rolled, plucked it off the ground, and brought it up in a sweeping slash that slit him open from belly to chin.

  Thirty-one.

  Then the others were moving, too. Lyriana sprang forward, hands outstretched, and shot out a b
last of rumbling force that sent soldiers flying. A soldier came up behind her, blade drawn, but before he could strike Syan tackled him to the ground. She didn’t have her zaryas but that didn’t stop her from smashing his head once, twice, three times against the metal floor. Ellarion’s hands streaked through the air, carrying a ribbon of flame between them that cut through the charging line like a hot wire, decapitating at least four of them in one go. And Zell was a blur of nightglass fury, bounding from one enemy to the next, effortlessly dodging their attacks, leaving only slumped bodies and streaks of blood on the walls.

  “Tilla!” my father’s voice yelled from behind me. I spun and there he was, on his knees, with a meaty Westerner holding him in a headlock, huge sweaty bicep clenched tight around his throat. With one hand, my father clawed at the man’s arm, and with the other he reached out toward me, grasping, begging…

  This time, I didn’t hesitate. I tossed him my sword effortlessly, an underhand lob. He caught it and jabbed it back over his shoulder, driving it up to the hilt into the soldier’s chest. The man let out an aggrieved noise, blood bubbling out of his lips, and then he let go of my father and crumpled back and lay still.

  My father sprang back up to his feet, gave me an appreciative nod, and tossed the sword back to me. I shot him a smile, a wild-eyed combat smile, and let myself, for one second, taste the rush of victory. The soldiers around us were all dead or dying. Had we won? Had we actually won?

  Then I turned back to the hole in the wall, to the Skywhale beyond, to Miles at the top of the ramp. I saw the confident grin plastered on his face. And I saw the force massing behind him, charging our way.

  Bloodmages. At least two dozen of them. Their bodies crackling with energy, their bloodshot eyes throbbing with magic, their hands clouded in fire and ice and shadow. The soldiers we’d fought were just the disposable infantry. This was Miles’s real power. And there was no way we could take them.

  “Get back!” Lyriana screamed, throwing up her hands to cast a rippling purple membrane across the hole in the wall. And not a moment too soon, because the first few bloodmages were already attacking, slamming Lyriana’s shield with jagged husks of rock and swirling blasts of light. She strained, gritting her teeth, but her Shield buckled and rippled, already fraying at the ends. There was no way it would hold. And when it fell, we’d be trapped with nowhere to run. I looked to Zell, to Ellarion, to my father. All their expressions said the same thing.

  We were dead.

  Help me, the Nightmother’s voice cried, at once behind me but also still in my head. I turned back and there she was, lying on her stomach by the foot of her throne. She looked awful. Her skin had melted into a liquidy gray goo, hanging off her bones like wet paper on a stick. Her eyes had leaked out of her skull, streaking down her cheeks. Her whole body was shaking, like there were a million tiny insects burrowing in her skin, just trying to tear free.

  And it wasn’t just her. All the Titans, the dozens and dozens sitting in rows around us, were doing the same thing, writhing and flailing and gasping as their bodies dissolved around them. My stomach twisted as the enormity hit me. Miles hadn’t just killed the Nightmother. He’d killed all the Titans, for good.

  Take it, the Nightmother said, and reached out her hand, well, what was left of her hand, which was mostly a bony claw with a few ragged strips of skin dangling off it. That thing was still hovering above it, that slowly-spinning yellow crystal.

  I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because I didn’t want to close off the option, no matter how unthinkable. Maybe because as terrifying as she was, there was something still pitiable about her, dying all alone on a cold floor. Maybe it was just the desperation of the situation. Whatever the reason, I ran forward, kneeled down on the shimmersteel floor and grabbed that crystal out of the Nightmother’s hand.

  I figured it would be, I don’t know, solid. Instead, it crumbled instantly in my palm, vanishing into my skin. I let out a gasp, and then…

  I don’t really know how to explain this next part. All I can say is that in that moment, everything changed. I changed.

  The second that crystal absorbed into me, it was like I became…someone else. Became the Nightmother. It was only a second, a single moment, but that moment stretched out across eternity. A current surged through me, like I was being struck by lightning from within, like every cell in my body was vibrating and pulsing. My hands tingled with fire, my stomach lurched. The world flashed and throbbed a rainbow of impossible colors, the floor bleeding magenta, the walls writhing pink, every surface shimmering like a fish’s scales in the sun. I tried to look at my hands, but they were simultaneously my hands but also a baby’s hands but also an old woman’s hands and also just bones and also a floating web of veins pulsing with blood. The way the Heartstone changed and shifted, somehow many different shapes at the same time? That’s how the world had become.

  And then there were memories. They weren’t mine, but they were in my head now. I remembered staring at the cold vastness of the stars. I remembered the piteous mewling of the hairless apes as they beheld my visage. I remembered standing here, on this very spot, holding a yellow crystal, feeling the weight of the knowledge that I was going to kill thousands.

  It was too much. Too many thoughts, too many memories, too many sensations. My head throbbed, my eyes burned, and I felt like my brain was going to explode. Panting, gasping, I jerked away toward the rest of the room. That just made it worse.

  It was still the same hall I’d been in. But it was so much more. Ribbons of energy danced all around us, green and purple and white. Blue panes, the kind the Nightmother had been using, hung all around me, thousands and thousands of them, all flickering and pulsing with information. I could see my friends up ahead, frozen in place, blades drawn, as Lyriana’s Shield cracked and shattered, but I could also somehow still see them everywhere else in the room at once, ghostly afterimages of where they’d been, trails of movement that showed them running and fighting and killing. I could see the Heartstone, could see all the magic within it, so much raw power still trapped within that smooth glass frame.

  And I could see the bloodmages marching down toward us, twenty-seven of them in total. I could see the pulsing energy around them, could see their sick, polluted blood sizzling through their veins, could see the gathering storm that was their attack.

  But I could also see how fragile they were, the weakness of their little hearts. The frailty of their brittle bones. Tiny little sacks of flesh, barely held together by tendon and sinew, so small and weak.

  The Heartstone pulsed, and I could see lines, like arteries, leading from its frame to the bloodmages. Each was connected to it by this invisible strand, a conduit for magic. And all it would take was the simplest push.

  Lyriana’s Shield burst apart, the membrane ripping open like a cloth stretched too thin. She screamed. Zell gritted his teeth. My father closed his eyes.

  Without thinking, without even really understanding what I was doing, I stretched out one hand and drew from the Heartstone. Just the tiniest bit. Just a drop. I pulled just the teensiest bit of that energy out of it and then with my other hand I hurled it out, sent it out to the bloodmages pulsing along those tendrils.

  They burst apart. Every single one of them. One moment, they were there. And the next they were gone, violently exploding into clouds of misty blood and bone.

  For one long endless moment, everything was still. No one moved. No one even screamed. We all just stood there, rooted in place, my friends on one side of the hole, Miles on the other, and a stretch of sand stained red with the remains of the bloodmages in between.

  “Wh-what?” Lyriana stammered. She hadn’t seen me do it. None of them had. They had no idea I’d taken the crystal. No idea that I’d just singlehandedly killed all of Miles’s best men.

  Thirty-one plus twenty-seven is fifty-eight.

  My number was fifty-eight.

  Miles was the first to react, the first to break that lingering stunned impas
se. “No!” he screamed, and turned to run back into the ship. But before he could, my father wound up and threw his sword.

  It whistled through the air, spun over once, and then plunged right into the top of Miles’s left shoulder. He screamed and toppled back onto the ramp, and then we were on him, all of us, sprinting out through the hole and across those black sands and up the ship’s ramp. Miles staggered to his feet, trying to run, but Zell slammed down on top of him with a knee to his chest and some knuckleblades to his throat. I reached the base of the ramp just in time to see Miles throw up his hands, gasping. “Surrender!” he screamed. “I surrender!”

  Then it was silent and still. All of his men were dead or bleeding out. All of the Titans had dissolved. And all of us were there, at the base of the Skywhale, standing together, panting, staring down at Miles Hampstedt. The Inquisitor. The Regent of Noveris. The man who had brought so much harm. The boy who had cost me so much. And he just lay there, hands up, eyes winced shut, begging for mercy.

  We’d won.

  Holy shit.

  Holy. Shit.

  We’d actually won.

  I looked to the others, from face to face, as all of us took in the enormity of what had just happened. They still didn’t understand it, didn’t know that I’d been the one who’d killed all those bloodmages, but in their defense, I didn’t actually understand it, either. Standing by the Heartstone, surging with its power, I’d felt like a god, seeing the joints of the world exposed, capable of anything. But now, even twenty feet away, all of that had faded. I didn’t see beating hearts or ribbons of energy or…any of it. I felt like myself again. Mostly.

  Ellarion slumped down, his hands hovering over his shoulders. Lyriana glared with a look at once triumphant and furious. Zell was all business, keeping Miles pinned, but there was a hint of something else, the tiniest curl of a smile. My father just shook his head. And Syan…

  Her face was weary, streaked with blood, gaze a thousand miles away, but she still moved with an incredible speed. She bounded past me, over Zell, and lunged toward Miles with a dagger drawn.