Then another source of smoke joins it. Thick. Ink-black.
I swallow down the acid rising from my stomach.
I’d heard Luz’s reciting of the legend of the Shadow Wars. I’d heard tales around the fire from my father’s old army comrades. I remember Ash talking of them in reluctant snippets. Even after witnessing his power in the throne room in Ekasya, on the training ground or at the height of the temple in Aphorai, I wasn’t prepared for this.
The sky turns black. The screams from the battlefield intensify. But I can’t see anything except a dark cloud of terror and confusion.
“Do you have any yeb balm left?” my mother asks. She’s keeping her voice light, but there’s a determined, almost resigned expression on her face.
“A little.”
“Give it to me, would you?”
I do as she says.
“Now, leave me. Go to your father.”
“And then where?”
There’s nowhere to go. The shadows on the battlefield writhe and contort. It’s hard to tell the difference between them and the roiling black smoke. The only thing I’m sure of is that all of it is getting closer. To our reserve troops. To the Prince. Barden. My parents. Almost everyone in the world I care for.
One of the shadows breaks free from the main battle, angling towards where we stand. Yaita opens the jar I’d given her and drips dark liquid from a vial into it. The all-too-familiar sickly-sweet scent of overripe fruit reaches me. It’s Scent Keeper elixir.
“Get back!” she shouts.
Before I can think to stop her, she lights the jar and tosses it to the ground. Flames burst over the sulphurous dust, licking into the air. The nearest shadow dips and weaves, lunging towards us. Yaita steps between it and me, so close to the burning path of earth I’m worried her robe will catch alight.
The shapeless shadow seethes towards her. Or maybe it is drawn by the new source of smoke.
When it’s close enough, she lunges for it, sinking her hands into it like it’s something solid. I know that experience. I’ve done it before. But only with Nisai’s poison – a bare fragment compared with this – and then with Ash – someone I knew and trusted. Never with something this big, and determined to do violence.
The shadow writhes, bunching darker. I cast about. Consider the contents of my satchel. Luz left me Scent Keeper elixir.
Yaita’s feet almost leave the ground for a moment as it tries to wrench free of her grip. She holds fast. I should try to help her. How do I help her?
And then, like something snapped, the shadow turns back on her, going slack like it’s giving up. It sinks into her skin. She collapses to the ground.
I scramble over to her still form, gently rolling her on to her side.
No.
She coughs, and black blood-bile dribbles from her lips.
Not again.
The awful sounds of the battle keep raging, but I can still somehow hear my heart pounding in my ears.
For a moment, I’m back in Aphorai, in the terraced gardens of the Eraz’s estate, surrounded by smoke as Sephine lays dying. She’s sacrificed herself for Nisai. She couldn’t save him.
Could I save my mother? Do I have enough strength? Enough ability?
Asmudtag is all. Light and dark. I consider the vial of Scent Keeper elixir in my satchel. I’ve learned what channelling the will of Asmudtag means. Am I willing to sacrifice that much of my light? Even my own life?
My mother stares up at me, or is it the shadow-filled sky? I thought she’d despair at my hesitation. But there’s no accusation in her eyes. “To sacrifice yourself for another is to betray yourself,” she manages. “I would not have you do so for me. No parent should.”
There are so many things I could retort. How can she call herself a parent when she wasn’t there for all those turns I needed one? I know now why she did the things she did. It was a strange, cruel kind of mothering. But maybe it was the only way she knew how.
Maybe I would have done the same thing in her place.
I take her hand in mine. My throat tightens, a deep-seated part of me fighting tooth and nail not to give quarter. But I force the words through. “Go by the grace of Asmudtag, Mother.”
The barest whisper of a smile curls her lip. “You’ve never called me that before.”
I shrug.
Shrugging at a time like this? Say something meaningful. Something good. “I…”
“May the Primordial watch over you, daughter,” she whispers.
Her chest stills. The life goes from her eyes.
For the second time in my life, my mother is dead.
The chaos of the battlefield intrudes again and I realize I’ve been sitting, staring and stung, focused only on the body of the woman who gave me life. A woman I barely knew.
I give myself a shake and drag my fingers gently over her eyelids to close them.
Barden appears at my side, one of his large hands gently squeezing my shoulder. “We need to get out of here,” he says, looking warily to where shadows writhe above us, blocking the sun one minute then diving into the Losian and Aphorain forces the next, cutting the soldiers down like a scythe to barley.
There’s no way they can hold out much longer.
Then up on the bluff, I catch movement. A lone figure in a hooded cloak. It could be anyone, but for that familiar gait.
“What in the sixth hell…”
Barden rubs sulphur-reddened eyes.
I rummage for the spyglass. “Stenches, Bar. It’s him. It’s Ash.”
“Last time you had anything to do with him, I almost lost you.”
Ash is heading towards a dead end. Towards the cliff. He can’t be running away. And I won’t believe for a moment that he’s going all the way up there just to choose his own end.
I gesture to the shadows above. “Nothing is stopping them, Bar. My mother is gone. Luz is gone. I’m out of tricks. Ash wouldn’t be going up there for no reason. I have to believe that. And if he’s got a plan, I have to try to help.”
Barden stares at me, stone-faced. “You’ll never make it up there through this. Leave him. He’s made his choice. You don’t owe him your life.”
“I’m doing this for me. For us. For everyone.”
His expression turns pained. Finally, it softens.
I look to my mother’s still form. “Please. Take care of her?”
“I will,” he says solemnly.
I give him a quick, fierce hug.
Then I shoulder my satchel, and run for Lil.
CHAPTER 42
ASH
When I reach the top of the rock formation, I notice a strange cloud on the south-western horizon. It’s pale grey, but almost uniformly so, not the patchiness that comes with normal rain clouds. And it’s nothing like Zostar’s hurricane of darkness.
There’s no time to contemplate why. Below, the battle rages. Zostar’s command of Del, Mish and the others’ shadows has them tearing through the ranks of the Losian and Aphorain contingents. If I don’t do something now, there won’t be anything left to save. Zostar will plunge the Empire back into a cycle of war until there’s nobody left to stand in his way. In his god’s way.
I never thought I would do this.
I’d tell myself there’s nothing else I can do.
But since we were young, Nisai said we always have a choice.
Now, I make mine.
I search for the part of me I’ve always avoided. The part I’ve kept suppressed with drugs or discipline. Sometimes only with sheer, white-knuckled desperation. And now, I seek it willingly. Invite it to come out.
The pain is welcome.
The tearing free is catharsis.
For the first time, I see the winged lion for what it is: my darkness, my shadow, but also my loyalty and my love.
It isn’t a formless curse. A Lost God’s amorphous malevolence. It is me.
All of me.
The beast leaps from my shoulders, claws raking my flesh. Its great wings beat the
air, buffeting me as it grows larger and drives higher.
My knees buckle and I crumple over. I half feel, half observe from above as my head lolls to the side, watching with something akin to fascination as crimson soaks into the sun-baked rock beneath my prone body.
My energy drains with my blood and the connection with my shadow begins to fade. I force myself to bring it back into focus. Below, Zostar is puppet master to those poor, wretched souls. He must be stopped.
I send my shadow up, up, high over the battleground, keen eyes scanning for its target. I feel a strange wonder course through me at a high, pale grey cloud drifting ever closer to the Wastes. And then … there. The wagon belching smoke as thick as tar.
As if he felt me watching, Zostar looks up, so I’m looking through my lion’s eyes and into his.
My shadow banks, wings beating silently, then gliding in a spiral lower and lower. I could dive upon him, but I want him to watch my approach. I want him to have the chance to recall, if only for a few heartbeats, what he and his men subjected me to. I want him to know me as his end.
Something hits me, the impact snatching my breath. Except my shadow self doesn’t breathe – the attack hurt my prone body back on the rock.
Only then do I realize my mistake.
Zostar has recalled Del and the others from the battling mortals. The children I promised to save, and failed. Now they and their powers are Zostar’s puppets. Their wraith forms are solid to my shadow where everything else passes through.
He’s using them to protect him.
Darkness whips around me. My shadow tries to fly free but the others are circling into a vortex. Every time they touch me, my human body jerks with the infliction of another gash or bruise. I can’t sustain much more of this on top of my own shadow’s rending from my flesh.
I have to get to Zostar. And soon.
I angle straight towards him. A hawk in a dive. The children’s shadows give chase, but they’re smaller, slower, their forms not as solid as the winged lion.
My claws are outstretched. They puncture the zealot’s torso as easily as fingernails sink into ripe fruit, then lift him up, for one, two, three wingbeats.
Until I let him go.
His black robes billow out for a heartbeat, almost as if he’s going to float to safety. But he’s falling, not flying. He lands with a sickening crack into the wagon carrying the giant brazier.
And begins to burn.
Black robes disappear in the column of foul, black smoke.
He’s dead.
Or if he’s not dead, he very soon will be.
But the shadow children are too far gone into their rage. They keep harrying me. I fly higher, ever higher. If I can just make it to the pale grey cloud, maybe I can lose them long enough to come back to my mortal body unpursued.
My shadow whirls in the air, wings pumping.
The others follow. Searing. Lashing out. The pain like nothing I’ve experienced since leaving Ekasya Mountain.
It’s a fight to maintain consciousness. I must persevere. Higher. The cloud is close, now.
I vaguely register a lion’s roar of frustration and pain. But the sensation that runs through my body on the ground is vastly different. Not like the torment of the other shadows. It’s a kind of relief, like the lifting of a weight.
Somewhere in the final struggle of my rational mind it registers: the cloud. Wherever it’s coming from, it’s somehow antipathy to my power. I vaguely register the scent of sulphur. Water steaming on rock. Other minerals. The perfume of the world’s core.
It will be the scent of my final breath.
Something gently brushes against my cheek.
In the middle of the arid Wastes of Los, of all places.
Snow.
And through the pale drifts rides a girl on a black horse.
Or perhaps that’s only my weakened heart’s last wish.
CHAPTER 43
RAKEL
Lil had never better lived up to her name to when she bore me through the battle like a demon from the stories.
We wove between skirmishes. Past horrors I’ll never truly wipe from my mind. And, finally, we made it up to the bluff, where Ash lay. Helpless. His life ebbing from him. Lil knew what I wanted, folding down on to her knees so that I could somehow get Ash on to her back.
When we finally emerged on the Losian side of the battlefield, Barden was there to greet us. “You look like a trio of ghosts,” he said.
And no wonder. The pale grey cloud now covered the sky as far as we could see, and with it came a steady fall of ash, covering the world and everyone in it in drifts, like ethereal snow, scented with the barest hint of sulphur. Soon, that was all I could smell. A strange mix of minerals and char and sun-heated rock before rainfall.
With both Iddo and Zostar dead, the larger army lost its focus. The discipline of the Aphorains and the home advantage of the Losians soon forced the others to retreat. Many surrendered in the name of the rightful heir.
It took days to gather our dead, but in the darkness beneath the ash, who could say where night ended and day began? Thanks to Asmudtag, Ash was not one of them. He would have been, if he’d been left any longer. And he almost still was, because all I could do was treat his wounds the traditional way, finally accepting that he wouldn’t want me to sacrifice myself.
Now, a great row of funeral pyres is piled high with the ingredients for sacred smoke, carried overland from the Losian serpent boats. Cypress would be the strongest scented among them all, invoking Azered to guide the souls of the fallen to the sky. But for the life of me, I can’t separate out a single note.
There’s carefully shipped krilmair oil, too, making sure there’s all the heat we need and the flames won’t stutter halfway through the ceremony. With the ash cloud now spreading to every horizon, who knows if this is going to have an effect, but we do it anyway. Maybe back when this all started I wouldn’t have cared. But now it seems important to at least try for those of the fallen who believed.
I nod at the others down the line, holding their torches. We bend and touch the flames to the pyres. They ignite in a wave that leaps to the sky with a roar. I hope for all our sakes that it’s the last battle cry of our lives.
Soon, the larger logs begin to catch. The heat intensifies and I’m forced to retreat a few steps. Along the line, I see the others do the same once, twice, three times as the fire grows hotter and hotter.
After some time, the others along the line retreat and turn away, off to make whatever final preparations they need to leave this place.
Barden stays.
We stand, shoulder to shoulder. I look up to where the light of the flames gild my oldest friend’s features.
“Do you think you’ll go back?” I don’t have to say where. We both know I’m talking about our village.
He glances back to camp. “You know what they say about home being where the heart is.”
“Or where the heart can find a princely standard of living?”
He laughs, gently shoving me with an elbow. “I offer him something, too, you know.”
I give him an appraising look. All those times I found him in quiet conversation with Nisai, I thought it was Barden’s ambition-fuelled charm that had caught the Prince’s ear. But then I think of how Barden always used to keep something aside for those who needed it most. He’d send his pay home to support his sister and her baby. Every time we’d ride into Aphorai City he’d take honeybread or dried rock figs for the poor children. When we filched oranges from Old Man Kelruk’s, he’d only eat one, and share the rest around our village.
Barden has his faults, we all do. But he’s always had two admirable qualities: loyalty and generosity.
“Will you go back?”
“No.” I smile. “I’ve got somewhere much more me in mind.”
Quiet footsteps approach from behind.
Ash still limps, and his side is bandaged. The wounds from the shadow tearing free have healed, but everything else
is taking longer. It seems the cloud dampens everything about him that’s more than human.
Barden excuses himself, passing Ash with a wary look. He may have turned the tide of battle, but that doesn’t mean Barden will ever fully trust him.
“Did I hear you say you’re leaving?” he asks.
“Soon, yes.”
His expression might seem stoic, but I know him well enough to see the sadness beneath.
“You know I will face all kinds of dangers with you. We’re a team.” I take his hand. I hope it’s not for the last time. “But there’s only one person who can truly heal you. And I think we both know you need to focus on them for the time being, not on me.”
“Who?”
“You.”
CHAPTER 44
ASH
The pyres burn all night.
If merciful Azered still has any sway over the afterlife, may she guide the souls of the fallen to their final rest.
On the edge of camp, I greet the first dawn beneath the volcano’s spreading cloud. For that’s what we finally recognize it for: Ekasya Mountain has erupted. And if the strange letter that arrived with a rogue Losian serpent boat after the battle held any truth – it had a little help.
Seated cross-legged, I carefully infuse each braid of my prayer band with the essence favoured by each of the Younger Gods. Perhaps what Rakel thinks is true – prayers will no longer reach them through the ash cloud. I’m no longer sure they ever heeded my devotion. But neither thought is going to stop me from praying. Some actions you perform in the hopes of a subsequent outcome. Some acts are their own reward.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
I don’t turn. I don’t need to. I know that voice better than my own. “A creature of habit.”
Nisai lowers himself slowly beside me, grimacing as he sets his crutches down. “These cold mornings aren’t going to get any easier.”
A pang of guilt aches in my chest – only a turn ago I would have been at his tent to aid him at a heartbeat’s notice.
Crown of Smoke Page 33