“You enjoyed it, didn’t you?” he asked, and it sounded like he was speaking in her mind.
Nora shook her head to be rid of him, unsure whether Bashan really was moving around her like the fog, or whether that was simply her split mind playing tricks on her again. She was bursting to the rim with the torrent of images and sensations.
“When you tore down the Temple of Arrun, what did you feel? Triumph?”
She had to leave.
Fast.
“A tremor of lust, perhaps?”
She pushed him to the side and clomped down the narrow path, trailing mist and smoke. But he was still right there, hissing in her ear.
“You killed Diaz, you know?”
No.
Don’t say his name. Don’t think of him. Don’t even think his name, she told herself. If she didn’t think of him, he wouldn’t be dead. Right? This was all just her mind. All just another trick.
The ground shifted. The sensation of falling. She was hurtling down the curved set of stairs, plummeting towards the sea of broken black shards. The darkness gaped open and she was screaming.
No.
She plunged into the icy cold ink black sludge. Knees high, she tried to run away from the sucking emptiness below her. But it lapped against her, rising to engulf her. She was trapped. She was drowning.
“No,” she gasped. “Get away from me!”
“Oh yes, ripped him apart, you did. It was awful,” Bashan’s voice drawled, seated just behind her brow. “His blood was everywhere.”
There was only blackness all around now, smoke scratching in her lungs with every breath, sparks jumping from her feet wherever they touched the parched sand. Everything closing in on her like quicksand. She was sweating. Trails of fire licked against her. Had she reached the burning gates of the fort? Was she on her way out? The voices of the Blade were like the hollow whistling sound of a crack in the hard-baked clay of a charcoal clamp. Heat was escaping. The burn was incomplete.
The children, Nora thought, I need to be far away from them. I need to get out of the fort.
“He called for you,” Bashan’s voice echoed inside her skull, making her teeth chatter. “But you were gone, girl. And you’ll never come back.”
No.
She opened her eyes, and saw nothing but darkness. The screaming, whirling black souls of the Blade flapping their wings with leathery sounds, the roar of a thousand voices drowning everything. She was back in the black sea, pinned to the spot by the twisted Whisperers.
A faint silver glow emanated from the spade she had summoned, grasped tightly in her hands as the creatures tore her to pieces. With her last strength, she raised it above her head and stabbed down into the middle of the cracked clamp below her, and
she
blew.
Chapter 11
The Blade took his arm, and Diaz toppled to the ground, life spurting out of him. He tried concentrating on his ragged breathing, tried not to think of the PAIN or the SEARING HOT PAIN that left him curled up on himself, whimpering away his last shreds of consciousness.
He saw the Nora-shaped thing leave the throne room, ripping through the small crowd that had gathered by the entrance, through Empress Vashti’s guards, with a mere flick of the hand. Like brushing aside a curtain to peer beyond, a blood red curtain smeared on the white marble walls.
He gasped for air one last time, his remaining hand stretched out toward her parting figure, calling out to her not to go, not to leave him behind where the darkness was folding in on him. Panic clawed in his throat like a trapped, wild animal, strangling him, and then he fell into the warm, waiting darkness below.
* * *
The pain had blossomed across his entire body. Everything hurt. The dust settled on his face, stung in his dry eyes, and took his vision. His parched lips had cracked, and the thirst—the thirst had its own blunt edge that hurt whenever he tried to swallow. The stump where his arm had been burned and pulsed, and when he turned his head to look down at his loss, he saw charred meat. Someone had cauterized the wound. Recently. He gagged at the scents assaulting him. Where was the healer? He blinked repeatedly to see better, but the film of dust only clumped together, covering parts of his vision.
The world around him was gray with dust, making it seem flat and unreal. He was in a wide hall of sorts, only a thin sheet of cloth separating his back from the cold stone floor, a vaulted ceiling above like the dome of heavens full of the sounds and smells of human suffering.
Someone was crouched low next to him, with their back turned towards him. A man. Diaz saw the orange glowing tip of the branding iron in his hand, and frowned. He could make out the curl of the cattle merchant’s sign. How odd. Why were healers using cattle brands to cauterize people’s wounds?
“Nah.” The man spoke softly to someone Diaz couldn’t see. They both rose quickly, and started walking away. “Even if we amputated the legs, it won’t save her. Nothing we can do.”
Diaz turned his head even more, and in the wake of the boots, he gazed into the breaking eyes of a young woman. Her gaze locked onto his, and he saw the fear just before she died.
Fear of him?
He nearly laughed. There was nothing left to fear about him.
Instead he retreated to his memories.
Suranna held him close, her touch light and comforting. Gentle. The way it had been at first, when he welcomed her under his skin and into his heart. She whispered something into his ear, her breath warm. The words tickling him as much as her lips.
“What did you say?” He closed his eyes to listen more intently.
But she drew away from him, her face changed.
“Suranna.”
He couldn’t feel her close anymore. He couldn’t feel her in his memories and in his soul. She had been disconnected from him. He was alone. He was free. He was panicking.
His heart beat furiously as the delayed pain slammed through him. He was on fire. His skin was burning, the tips of open nerves withering in the white heat of the branding iron. He choked on a scream. He hadn’t been aware when it happened to him, so now his body thought to remind him.
Suranna was fading into the darkness. He couldn’t reach her anymore. He had no arms to hold her tight to him. He wanted to hide away from the pain, buried deep into his memories. But the hurt broke all thought, crashed through any defense he could have made for himself.
And it went on.
Forever.
Oh goddess, let me—
Awake, again. Breath rattling in his chest. His skin burning with fever, and the thirst—the thirst was still so painful he wanted to cry.
Why had he woken? Why hadn’t the Dark One taken him? He heard someone calling his name, but his eyes were caked shut with gunk, shards of light making it through the lashes when he pulled his eyelids as far open as they would go.
“Diaz! It’s me, old friend. Can you hear me?”
The voice. Male. Bashan.
He’d rather just fall back into the eternity of—
“Telen!”
A sharp tone, used to command. A wet rag was pulled over his face and one eye was thumbed open. Diaz shied away from the aching brightness.
“It’s him,” Bashan snapped. At someone else? “… didn’t think …”
Diaz heard a hissing sound nearby, and was surprised that it seemed to be coming from his mouth. His eye was allowed to fall shut. Mercy.
“… aware of his surroundings,” Bashan’s voice rang through all the other sensations, but it was so hard to focus on what was being said.
Being awake was painful. Diaz wanted to go to sleep.
“… there’s no place in this whole damned city. The palace is ruined, the temple destroyed. Where do you propose I take him, fool?”
Someone answered something, but it wasn’t good enough for Bashan. He shouted a bit longer, ordered and bossed the other people around.
Movement.
Diaz cracked the single eye open. He caught the passing of the va
ulted dome and looked above into the gray skies. Dust lingered in the air, changing and muting the colors. Like after a sandstorm, only gray. He saw Bashan’s dark hair whitened with the stuff. One hand holding a cloth over his mouth and nose, the former prince looked like a bandit. Bashan saw Diaz looking at him, and bent over.
“I’m taking you to the Wards, my friend. Don’t you die on me before we get there.”
Diaz’s eye fell shut. The movement shook his pain awake again, and he clenched his teeth to keep silent. Nora was gone. His arm was gone. Suranna was gone.
It seemed only Bashan remained.
Chapter 12
Nora fell through the world, a short drop with a jarring stop. Shards of glass rained down upon her, tinkling against the cobble stones. She rolled over her shoulder and hip, and came to rest on the cold ground, staring up at the star-filled sky, clutching a spade to her heaving chest.
She was back on the town square of Owen’s Ridge, her eyes on the shattered window of Owen’s room. A broken eye, dark and empty. Like the sky above.
She waited for a moment, waited for the voices to start their whispering, for the monster people to catch up with her and start their abuse, for Bashan to mention Diaz one more time.
He called for you, but you were gone.
She closed her eyes, the tears hot in the corners, but she would not allow herself to cry. She didn’t deserve it. Instead, she waited for someone, anyone. But she was alone. Trapped in the landscape of her mind. What had she done? She had lost it. Oh gods, what had she done?
She rocked to and fro for a moment, hugging her knees. “I am still me.”
But was she, though?
The voices. The Whisperers. They were gone.
It was deathly quiet.
She rose to her feet and looked about the destruction of the Ridge. This was the way she’d always remember it. But beyond the square between the smithy and the inn, where the Ridge took a sharp dip down a steep hillside, and the heights of the trees were even with her feet where she stood, the world was changing.
It started with an acorn wedged between the cobblestones. It broke open next to her and a wiry green sapling grew from it, pushing aside two weathered cobblestones to make room for its roots. The trees around the Ridge were growing rapidly, too. She heard a faint rustle of leaves, a rumble deep in the ground. A green scent of moisture and mushrooms arose around her, of hidden life. Then she realized that the trees weren’t actually growing, the ground beneath them was rising up until it was level with the town square. Until she stood at the threshold of a dark forest.
A hush fell upon her ears. Like a moment of stillness between the lightning strike and the roll of thunder, it was as if all the small sounds of growth held their breath, waiting for a loud sound to eclipse them.
But nothing came.
She turned to look back at the Ridge, and saw the shadow of the forest fall upon it. The black gathered its strength, pooled and coalesced, and started swallowing the farthest burned out houses, edging closer and closer to where she stood. A wall of midnight inching forward.
Nora fell back before it and made a winding path through the woods, crashing through the new growth while the soil rose and fell beneath her quiet tread, moving like a living thing as she walked uphill. The hush followed her under the trees. There was no bird song, no rustle in the undergrowth, no sign of life. Only stillness and silence.
“Owen?”
She called for him, but there was no answer. There was nothing here … except a girl and her spade.
Behind her the first line of trees were lost in the dark wave hounding her. She climbed past the pine trees where she had first met Diaz, and came upon the hillock overlooking the Plains, and paused there to catch her ragged breath. And in the silence, under the black, starless sky, she saw that the plains themselves had been transformed. Where before there had been grasslands for miles around, now a dense forest grew up the slopes of a large mountain. She saw saplings grow like blades of grass, bushes unfurl alongside ferns. The new born forest engulfed large white ruins that stood out among the green turf like splintered bone. Before her a sharp angle of a broken aqueduct rose like a giant’s knee, higher up the mountain a large domed roof had caved in, and yet farther up still, she saw four spires rise above the dark tree line. If she shuffled a little to one side and tilted her head, the rolling slopes took the shape of a sleeper, curled around the mountain, which was crowned with a white-towered pinnacle, the Temple of the Wind.
The wall of darkness lapped onto the hillock and flowed like water around Nora’s feet. She leaped out of the enclosing black and ran on through the growth. She held the spade at her side, clutching it tight, whacking creeping roots and brambles out of her way with it. Colors bled out of the world. And warmth. The sky was black above her, the earth was black as the shadows between the trees grew longer, casting deep lines onto the stark white structures.
Once, long ago, the grass plains had all been dark forests. Then the wights had come and cut the trees down, made clearings, built houses in the sun, then villages, then a city. The city of Vellen. And the old forests died. In those ancient days, the city had been the final battleground for the warrior woman Scyld, the first wielder of the Living Blade. Here she had fought against the God of Air, Tuil, and smote him on the mountainside. The land had flattened beneath his fall into the bowl Nora knew, and nothing had grown under the god’s body except the grass and the flowers in the summer sun. But now the dark forests remembered and were coming to take over. Once the tree trunks closed in, they blotted out the light, so that in the heart of the forest there was only darkness and silence and the forest. When their ranks had closed, the ruined city hidden below the turf would be swallowed forever.
Nora ran up the mountain. She climbed until her calves burned. The shadows rose like water around her, and she found herself hopping from one ruined flagstone to the next, scrabbling up the side of the aqueduct, and then skidding down it again to get away from the wall of night closing in behind her.
Occasionally, the ground still shuddered under her feet, faint upheavals upsetting the rhythm of her footfalls, making her stumble and miss a beat, splash into the inky black. It was abrasive, skinning her hands and knees. It stung like a thousand cuts. Like ice. Gasping, she waded and splashed onto the next island of white stone, following a crooked line to the heart of the city, its bone white towers jutting out of the woods like ribs. She scrambled over and under and through the vestiges of a civilization, abandoned and torn to pieces, destroyed and eroded over time. Her beacon was the lonely tower of the Temple of the Wind.
Because there, in the upper courtyards of the Temple of Tuil, was a statue of Scyld. The beginning and the end. Scyld raised the Living Blade high into the sky, and from that metal tip a silver light was cast upon the eerie black-and-white world, the only light Nora could see by. But it was flickering, sputtering. Her world was dying. It was shrinking under the onslaught of the blackness, and soon there would be nothing but the darkness and the hush. That solitary beam drew her upwards. If she could only get to the statue…
Nora moved through the silent ruins with the speed of a thought. She leapt higher and farther, from the top of one spiral tower to the next, the darkness rising like a flood beneath her, until she dropped down into the lower courtyards of the Temple of the Wind. She stood at the foot of the long staircase, the seven-flighted one to the upper courtyard, and braced herself for the ascension. Around their edges the steps broke apart and crumbled into the blackness. Cracks appeared in the white stone where the black touched them, dissolved them into the incoming void.
When she stepped onto the first stone step, the ground creaked and groaned behind her. She whipped around to see the skeleton like white structures sink into the blackness. The dark land below her rose in a deafening roar. The hush was broken. Everything was broken. The ground shook, and the silvery light died, and the darkness rushed towards Nora with a chorus of voices.
But only one o
f them made her turn her attention back to the staircase. A whisper so close to her ear, she could nearly feel the lips against her lobe.
“Nora.”
“Owen!”
Darkness flowed onto the stone steps above her. It swirled and sloshed into the shape of a man with four arms, a gleaming dagger of obsidian in each of his hands. His face was a sheep skull that wavered and quivered with heat, the darkness steaming out of its dead eyes.
He attacked and Nora dodged, then struck out wildly, the clang of her spade hitting the thing’s leg. His thigh fractured into black shards and tried to reassemble, but before her opponent could regain balance, Nora struck it again with the spade, digging the metal edge into the gleaming skull. She heard a satisfying crack, and leapt over the fallen man-shaped thing to bound further up the stairs.
“Look out!” Owen’s voice was an echo in her mind.
She ducked, and felt the ghost of a blow where her head had just been. Strong enough to have swept her off of the long staircase and into the shrieking void.
Another large warrior coalesced out of the churning black and swung a double-headed axe at her. The upper half of his body was covered in what looked like a fungus that split his face into flapping tongues of thick, quivering flesh. No eyes, no nose, just soft gray fruit bodies overlapping like bracket fungi that grew on trees, and below them a Whisperer’s stained maw.
Nora grabbed her spade tightly and sunk into a fighting pose. The warrior came at her with incredible speed, swinging with mighty blows. The axe whistled past her neck, terrifyingly close. She stepped aside, dancing on the edge of the steps. While he was on the backswing, she maneuvered herself behind him, and brought down the sharp metal of her spade right between his shoulder blades. Silver light pulsed from the spade, disrupting the darkness, eating away at the warrior’s chest. He still managed to turn, but she had the higher ground and kicked him in the mushroom flaps of his face. He tumbled back down the steps into the black.
“Behind you!”
Mother of Slag Page 9