Blades of the Demigod King

by James Derry

  As the catapult arm clanked into place, the zebra-striped hump elongated and twisted until it had separated itself from the rest of the Un-God—like a piece of clay tugged free from the whole. The pale-and-dark hump formed a ball and rolled into the bucket of the tensed catapult.

  “Hey…” Pawn started.

  “It’s them!” the hooded man said.

  Urr-Ogshoth shuddered again. A moment of hesitation—of prayer? Then it fired the catapult.

  The ball of flesh soared through the night sky, lit from underneath by campfires, then by the greenish glow of witchfire. Its apogee was higher than the tower itself. Then the ball changed shape again, flattening into a sort of bowl. It instantly slowed, filling with air, and Pawn was reminded of Sygne’s story about floating to the bottom of the Slash on a sail of fabric.

  “Sygne and Jamal were… melted into a monster…”

  “…and still,” the hooded man said, “they’re doing better at adventuring than we are.”

  The malleable projectile—scientician and Singing Swordsman—descended gently toward the observation deck of the Tower of Rotutta. Pawn didn’t wait to see if it landed safely.

  “Come on!”

  ***

  A soldier stopped them as they reached the barricades. “Your Majesty! Can I come with you? I’ve been applying for the redshirts but my sergeant—”

  Pawn cut him short, “I’m probably going to disband the redshirts. A friend of mine recently convinced me it was a bad idea.”

  The soldier seemed crushed. He glanced to the hooded man with a look of surly disappointment on his face.

  As if in response to an unasked question, Pawn said, “This is another of my friends.”

  With that they bounded over the barricade and sprang toward the ring of fire that was acting as the witch’s own, more impressive barricade.

  The hooded man asked, “You think your sword…?”

  “...Will cut through this ensorcelled fire? It’s done it before. Follow close behind me when I do...”

  “...because the fire will close up behind us as we go,” the hooded man said. “I better lose this cloak.”

  Pawn said, “Be careful, brother.”

  Pawn’s brother, who was also named Pawn, pulled off his hood and let his cloak drop to the ground.

  “Don’t worry,” said the second Pawn, “I won’t let anyone see my face.” He grinned confidently, and the first Pawn grinned back at him. It was infectious to see his own dashing arrogance reflected back at him. The second Pawn’s face was an identical copy of the first, right down to the hairline scars that ran down their cheeks. The second Pawn had suffered that original injury in a fierce battle with the Mad Lamassu of Xhoera. Then the first Pawn had carved the same mark onto his face so that they could avoid suspicion when they swapped roles.

  The aspiring redshirt was still gawking from the other side of the barricade. “Your Majesty! Will you run into that fire? How will you possibly survive?”

  Pawn flashed his grin at the soldier. “Watch us!”

  He leveled Endbringer at the green flames, and without a single nod between them, the brothers charged forward. White, crystalline light fanned out from the tip of Endbringer. For a moment, the witch’s flames were swept back, as insubstantial as sea foam, and they raced through the gap, blackened grass crackling beneath their feet. In the next instant, the emerald flames had closed up behind them.

  19 – The Royal We

  Hit the deck! Hit the deck! Please let us…

  Sygne was vaguely aware of the urgency of having her own thoughts, passing through her own brain. Compared to the placid, radiant pool that had been the Urrists’ group mind, Sygne now felt like her thoughts were rushing through a tight, winding ravine. Fear, loss, guilt, anger. Her individualized stream of consciousness was more like whitewater rapids.

  Her mind had actualized, but Jamal was still merged to her physically, melded together in a wobbly sail of vitiligo skin. Her aim had been true. They struck the observation deck on top of the tower, and because they were still melted together in a blob, the impact did not kill them outright. They had no bones to crack, no arteries to smash open.

  Sygne did have eyes, though, and they swiveled to see Nyfinein stationed in a lotus position in the center of the observation deck. The stolen Endbringer sword was stabbed into the wooden planks so that it stood like a lectern in front of her. She was surrounded by a sphere of swirling gales of wind—air moving so quickly that it was hard to see through them—like trying to pick out details in a monsoon. She couldn’t see her mother’s face, but she could see Nyfinein begin to stand and raise her arm.

  Move! The thought was panicked, emphatic. Jamal was right there in her ear—or he was part of the part of her that used to be her ear.

  Go left! He commanded.

  No! Break right! She thought.

  A beam of green energy burst from Nyfinein’s hand and cleaved Sygne and Jamal in two.

  There was an eruption of brutal force. And intense pain. Then Sygne felt herself rolling and flopping along, propelled across the plank floor of the observation deck in a wholly unnatural way. Ungainfully. Painfully. She did not move like a soft blob of flesh would move.

  She struck a low parapet wall that ran close to the edge of the deck, and instead of absorbing the impact like a pliable ball, she crashed and yowled out in a painful collision of bones against bricks.

  Hair hung down over her face. Her fingers—fingers!—scrabbled against the wooden floor. Wrinkled, shearable flesh, already seeping blood from a scrape across aching knuckles. Brittle fingernails. Rigid bones bounded by joints that only moved in one direction.

  She was human again.

  Someone grabbed her under the arms—arms!—and hauled her away over the parapet. Her skin grated against the floor. Gusts of wind raised goosebumps on her bare arms. She was aware that she was naked, but she did not care. She was glad. This was a more natural state, a more accepting state. She nestled her head against a strong bicep.

  “Oh, Jamal. I love you.”

  The man said something, but Sygne couldn’t understand it.

  “I forgive you. I accept you.”

  “Okay. I get it, you have strong emotions for the Gjuiran. But then what was last night?”

  Her mind snapped back to reality. It was Pawn’s face that floated above hers. Pawn was the one dragging her to safety, setting her down gently behind a low barrier to protect her from the maelstrom of her mother’s cataclysmic spellwork.

  “Pawn? What?”

  “Take a deep breath, Sygne. I think you’re experiencing some kind of transcendent withdrawal. Perfectly reasonable, considering your physical form and your psyche were merged into a ten-ton divine monster. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Where’s Jamal? He was merged with me.”

  “Jamal? Let me handle that. I’ll be right back.” Pawn pulled off his cloak and swept it over her naked body. He had to awkwardly shift something from his shoulder. Sygne’s brain was working at half its normal speed, but again her synapses finally clicked and identified the image before her. A heavy tome on a leather strap. She grabbed at it.

  “My pocketbook!”

  The alpha-protagonist flashed his wolfish grin. “I found it on the ground floor of the tower. I suppose your mother took what she wanted from it, and left the rest of the book behind.”

  Sygne clutched the pocketbook to her chest.

  “Maybe you can find something useful in there?” Pawn asked.

  “Where’s Jamal?” Sygne countered.

  Pawn’s eyes moved away from her, taking in the apparent dangers of the scene. “Sorry, I’ll go fetch him. To fix this problem, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  The Demigod King dashed over the parapet wall, and then he was gone. Five seconds later, he appeared again, from the opposite direction. Sygne blinked at him, feeling even more confused and slow-witted than before, as Pawn h
auled himself up from the edge of the tower. Had he fallen off of the observation deck when she wasn’t looking?

  “I just…” she pointed vaguely toward Nyfinein. “You just went that way…”

  Pawn shrugged apologetically. “We need everyone’s help on this. Sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “What? Find out what?” She glanced over the parapet wall and saw that the first Pawn hustling across the observation deck.

  “Wait… Are there two of you?”

  “No time to explain now.” The second Pawn sprang over the low wall and charged toward Nyfinein. The sorceress was knotting the very fabric of reality into a ball—a spherical nest from which she would incubate a whole new world over the tattered scraps of the old. Pawn’s sword cleaved the night air with white light. The light punctured the outer edge of Nyfinein’s maelstrom, but then the light seemed to wither and lose its shape, like moonlight briefly reflected on the crazed surface of a whirlpool.

  Maybe Pawn’s attacks did touch Nyfinein, if just for a moment. She opened her eyes and peered through the turmoil of her mystical orb, searching for her latest assailant. Another blast of green light erupted toward Pawn, who performed a flawless back-handspring to evade it.

  In the meantime, Pawn’s doppelgänger had dragged a naked and half-conscious Jamal into a safe spot by Sygne’s side. This version of King Pawn had the same inscrutable smirk on his face, like he was reveling in this clever surprise, sprung on her at the most dramatic moment possible.

  Jamal seemed blissfully woozy. He grinned. “I knew Pawn was a twin. I’d just figured it out…”

  Pawn’s brother—the one who had climbed up from the edge of the tower—leaped over the parapet wall and ducked down to avoid another spout of green flame. “Endbringer can’t touch her!” he said.

  “I could have told you that,” the other Pawn said. He waggled his sword as if it were a useless, wooden practice sword.

  Sygne asked, “Will someone explain what this is?”

  Jamal’s smile faded as he seemed to realize that the two demigods were holding identical swords. “Wait a minute… One of you lost your sword.”

  “No. Wait,” Sygne demanded. “You were twins? This whole time?”

  She pictured her evening with the Demigod King, just last night. And how many evenings had she spent with him when they were younger? She had been a lowly, starstruck student with dubious origins. And he—supposedly—had been a lonesome prince with his own mysterious past. More than anything, they had bonded over their shared rootlessness—their loneliness. Then they had banished that loneliness together. Had that all been a lie?

  The nearest Pawn was still smirking, but one corner of his mouth fell a bit—angling toward remorse. He shrugged. “This whole time? Yes. Twins? No.”

  “Not twins?” Jamal was slow and dulled with confusion.

  Then, somehow, it all clicked for Sygne. The old legends. Pawn’s uncanny knack for seeming to be in multiple places at once. Studying with her at the Academy. On a far-flung excursion to seize some mystical artifact. Training with the generals. Whispering conspiracies with two or three courtiers at a time. Dabbling in mysticism. Sygne had always wondered if there was some sort of temporal magic at play that allowed him to do so much. It seemed too much for even two brothers to accomplish. Then she remembered the legends. They said that Pawn had the strength of eight men. His mother had been a wolf goddess, and Ithjzur had gone to her with the goal of siring an entire litter of princes. The old story had said that King Ithjzur had named his son Pawn to remind him of his place in Ithjzur’s game. And yet a chess match didn’t start with just one pawn on the board. It didn’t start with just two…

  “Not just twins…” Sygne said in the same dull, bemused voice that Jamal had used.

  And with that, the night erupted with spears of white light. Five of them in all, converging on Nyfinein’s swirling seat of power.

  The fury of light struck like hammers through the wide gaps of Sygne’s dilated pupils. She shielded her eyes, and still she could see more faces that matched Pawn’s. Pawns at every direction of the compass, all glowering at the witch, all holding their own copies of Endbringer—and all of those blades streaming white-hot eldritch light.

  Not just two brothers.

  Eight brothers.

  This time the barrage of light did have an effect; Nyfinein gnashed her teeth and wailed in agony. Her concentration was broken, and her orb of gusting energies began to shred apart, losing cohesion under the speed of its own relentless spinning.

  The eddies of magic withered and dashed away from each other, and a fine powdering of ash fell to the floor, forming a rough ring around Nyfinein. That was the dusting of coral that Sygne had gathered from Tallasmanak. Of course those vestiges of the Lurker had been a key component in her mother’s spell. The eighth Endbringer sword stood before Nyfinein, pommel up. That was her piece of the Strider Between Worlds.

  Her sudden, unhindered view of the purloined sword reminded Sygne that somewhere there was an eighth Pawn brother who was missing his sword. That was the man whom she had seduced last night. As if on cue, a gloved hand clawed at the precipice at the edge of the observation deck. The interloper clambered up from the same spot where the other Pawn had appeared, just a few moments before. He had Pawn’s face. Or they had his face. He was the final octuplet, and he was, indeed, missing a sword.

  Sygne pulled her outrider’s cloak tight around her neck and huddled against the parapet wall.

  “Sygne?” Pawn said. “Are you all right? When we realized you had been absorbed by the Un-God…” A blast of green flame roared over their heads, like a cloud of bats on the wing. Pawn swallowed and restarted. As some sort of oblique apology, he offered, “I’m glad to see you whole again. Back to your true self.”

  “I wish I could say the same. There are eight of you?”

  “Yes,” Pawn said.

  “Are you all named Pawn?”

  The demigod nodded. “As if this wasn’t confusing enough. Right?”

  Another Pawn slapped the shoulder of his swordless brother. “You stay with them!” he said. “And find that one some clothes!” He pointed to Jamal; then he leaped over the low wall and into the fray.

  The other Pawn—the one who had dragged over Jamal—followed his brother into battle. Now there were seven demigods fighting against Nyfinein—and one demigod sharing an awkward shelter with Sygne and Jamal.

  “Here. This will help,” Pawn undid his belt and pushed his pants down past his hips.

  Sygne shielded her eyes. “No! Wait!” The Demigod King wore a breechcloth over his trousers, so he was not exposed, even as he sat down on the floor and rolled his pants off of his knees.

  He frowned at her. “For Jamal.”

  Jamal, naked and still slightly damp from his time inside the Un-God, seemed unfazed. His hand trembled—just a little—as he reached for the sovereign’s trousers. “Can I have your shoes as well?”

  Pawn chuckled. “No. I—”

  His words were cut short by a peel of thunder. A section of misty night air had cracked open over the head of one of the fighting Pawns. Ghostly shapes fell from the rent in the sky, pelting the octuplet like hailstones. But the pale ovoids clung to the demigod’s shoulders, crawling and jittering and intertwining together with glittering silver threads following behind them. Spiders. Pawn spun in a circle, slashing with his sword, but already his head was wrapped in a cocoon of webbing. The other Pawns did not have a chance to help. They were busy fighting off Nynifein’s onslaught of green fire. She had lured the octuplets into complacency by only using one type of attack. Then, just when they least expected it…

  One of the Pawns was down, incapacitated. Seven more to go. Six, if you counted the brothers who had weapons.

  The pantless, swordless Pawn pointed to the center of the observation deck. “I have to retrieve Endbringer!”

  Jamal nodded, but Sygne said, “Do you think one
more sword will make a difference?”

  “I have to try… My brothers… We’ve never fought together before, all at once. We can’t lose…”

  Sygne couldn’t tell if this last phrase had been an expression of certainty, or a flash of impotent denial. Nyfinein had unleashed another new salvo, a blizzard wind, sparkling with hundreds of needle-sharp icicles—an arctic counterpoint to her unearthly fire. One Pawn cried out, and Sygne thought that he had been skewered by the icy projectiles, killed instantly. But no. The icicles turned semisolid as they struck him, forming silver puddles that quickly froze solid again. He fell to the ground, as rigid as a statue. Six Pawns left.

  “I see what she’s doing,” Jamal said. “She’s using the one type of attack that can take down an alpha-protagonist.”

  “What are you talking about?” Pawn shouted. “She’s using all kinds of attacks!”

  “No,” Jamal pointed his finger to the sky, as if signaling that he was about to point out a bit of Gjuiran narrative logic. “They’re all non-lethal attacks. How many times have you or your brothers been hit by the business-end of a battle axe, or caught in a blast of dragon-fire? Obviously never. But how many times have you been clocked across the back of the head by a bludgeon? Or snared in a net or a web? Or tricked into drinking a sleeping potion? Dozens of times? Maybe hundreds?”

  “Enough! If the witch is using non-lethal attacks, then that makes me more cowardly for avoiding the fray.” Pawn lunged toward the parapet, but Jamal clutched the demigod’s wrist. Sygne imagined that it took no small effort to hold the hero in place.

  Jamal said, “We need to think this through. If Nyfinein knocks you all out, then she can complete her spell. Then we all die.”