by A. C. Cobble
“It will stand because of me!” he shouted, drawing his broadsword. “I will pull you from that throne. You’ve no right to it.”
“Pull me from the throne, will you?” cackled the king. “Your powers are weak, undeveloped. You have no strength to challenge me, Oliver.”
“Remove your mask,” commanded Oliver. “Show yourself, Mother.”
The king, grinning madly, curled his fingers beneath his goatee and then peeled it back, his flesh pulling away like the skin of a snake. Inch by inch, the old man’s countenance was shed, and a cold-eyed beauty was left in his place. Lips curled in amusement, she looked much the same she had in the Darklands. She had not aged a day. Her features were the same as he recalled, but her eyes were black, filling the sockets like terrible pools of endless night, like the dark of the underworld.
“Spirits forsake us,” muttered Sam.
“I am sorry, my son,” said Lilibet Wellesley, her voice strong, powerful. “If you will not join me, it is time you join your father in the underworld.”
His mother, wearing the king’s ermine and red velvet cape as she stood before the throne, was the embodiment of royalty, but she did not belong. It was not her throne to sit upon. She’d murdered her husband, sacrificed him and herself, and had taken his body. She’d ruled the empire for twenty years, guiding its expansion with her bloodstained hand. She’d sat the throne, no one knowing, no one realizing the awful presence in their midst.
Oliver growled low in his throat. “You’ve no right to that throne.”
His mother snorted. “Try and take it from me, then.”
Several things happened at once.
Oliver and Sam surged forward, charging Lilibet. The doors to the throne room burst open, and a score of royal marines rushed inside. The air between Oliver, Sam, and Lilibet split, tearing four rents into space through the shroud. From those holes emerged the creatures of the underworld. Shambling monsters, twisted and deformed, roared their rage as they entered the world, physically manifest.
“Hells!” screamed Sam, evidently still unable to utter anything other than a curse.
From the corner of his eye, Oliver saw her dodge to the side, narrowly avoiding the sweeping claws of some malformed creature but then crashing into the thing’s spiked tail with her legs. The monster turned and swept her feet from beneath her, and she flipped into the air.
Oliver had no time to look after Sam, though, as two of the summonings closed on him, one tall and lean with ghastly yellow skin, the other squat and a sickly shade of green. Bristling spines covered its body, black ichor oozing down its vomit-colored skin.
Without thought, Oliver hurled his broadsword at the face of the shorter, fatter one. The steel spun end over end. Miraculously, the tip thudded directly into the center of the fiend’s face, punching half its length into the monster’s skull. Gurgling blue blood poured from its mouth, and the creature collapsed.
Oliver stared at it in shock and then nearly lost his head as the taller of the two circled its dead companion and lurched toward him, bony arms extended, clutching fingers grasping for him. He staggered away and drew his katars from beneath his jacket.
Behind him, firearms exploded as the marines discharged their weapons. Pellets whistled by Oliver, most of them scattering harmlessly against the walls of the room, a few tearing into the howling monster in front of him. Meat, torn from bone by the force of the shot, hung bloodlessly on the monster’s frame.
A royal marine, brave and foolish, charged past Oliver, a smoking blunderbuss in one hand, a short sword in the other. The lean monster caught the man before he could close with his sword. One long arm gripping his shoulder, the other his skull, the summoning tore the marine’s head clean off with a sharp twist of its wrist. Blood sprayed across the room as the monster tossed the dead man’s head at his companions, and then it shoved the body aside and continued to advance on Oliver.
More firearms cracked, but none of the shot struck the approaching nightmare.
Oliver risked a quick glance behind him and saw blue-coated royal marines pouring into the room and contending with another half-dozen creatures emerging from open rifts in the shroud. Blocked by those foul apparitions, they would be of no help. Not to Oliver.
“We have to kill your father— your mother, whoever that is!” screamed Sam from across the room. “Kill her, and they lose the bridge. It’s the only way to close the rips in the shroud.”
Oliver ducked a lashing arm and lunged forward to bury a katar in the abdomen of the creature in front of him. He tore upward with the sharp blade, eviscerating the summoning, and then he ducked, avoiding a flailing arm that swept at his head.
The creature staggered away and collapsed, twitching, clutching at the gaping hole in its stomach. Beetles spilled from the wound, small and black, and they scurried across the floor and over Oliver’s boots.
Eyes wide in horror, he looked to where Sam was surrounded by three new monsters and where more emerged from the openings his mother had torn to the underworld.
The Priestess XXI
Cold power surged through her veins and scalding heat burned her flesh where her tattoos ignited with fury. Patterns, designed and inked by Kalbeth and fueled by the seed of kings that she’d used in ritual to activate them, drew power directly from the open rents Lilibet had left to the underworld. The torrent of raw energy was unlike anything Sam had ever experienced, but it paled in comparison to the strength it would have taken to rip open the shroud.
Lilibet Wellesley wasn’t dead. She’d been right. They had understood nothing. She’d been playing with them the entire time. Hells.
Monstrosities, huge, misshapen, and strong, stumbled into the world, disoriented and hungry. Sam had to banish them back to the place they came from, and she had to close the openings in the shroud.
She shouted to Duke, “We have to kill your father— your mother, whoever that is! Kill her and they lose the bridge. It’s the only way to close the rips in the shroud.”
She tried to charge the dais, to reach Lilibet, but shuffling figures closed around her. Pale skin covered taut muscles. Open mouths slavered, displaying jagged rows of wet teeth. Claws flexed, glistening and sharp or dull and bone white.
Power surged through her, making her giddy and strong. She launched herself at the nearest creature, seeming to fly into the air, her sinuous daggers held wide, slashing like the teeth of the beasts she faced.
Carving hunks of flesh off of the monsters, she twisted and spun through the crowd. Like her training in the barn so long ago, she dodged and weaved, using her daggers where she could, her feet where she couldn’t. Flesh parted from the swipe of her blades, bone shattered beneath her supernatural strength. Half-a-dozen of the monsters fell before her in seconds, and then she attacked, rushing the dais, her daggers raised to taste Lilibet’s blood.
She faltered, the unnatural power draining from her like water from a broken pitcher.
In front of her, smiling, Lilibet lowered a hand that had traced a burning pattern in the air. She tore off her cloak and the formal suit of the king and stood before Sam in a bright, red leather bodysuit. It was sculpted to the woman like a second layer of living skin. Skin that Sam had seen, but it had been that of an old man dressing after his bath. The woman’s face, her body, was a mask that she’d worn for twenty years. It was as changeable as the clothes she’d thrown aside.
Lilibet Wellesley could be anything she wanted. She had achieved the peak of dark power. She was the ultimate sorceress. She’d bound and controlled even the great spirit Ca-Mi-He. Lilibet had reached the end of the dark path.
Lilibet launched herself at Sam.
Ducking, the priestess tried to slide beneath the queen, but Lilibet caught her shoulder with a hand and twisted in mid-air. The sorceress flung Sam like she was a rag doll. Tucking into a roll, Sam tumbled across the carpets and tile to land in a heap.
Lilibet brushed aside her summonings, shoving them out of her way, rending their flesh
if they were slow to move. A royal marine, somehow broken away from the tumult at the back of the room, charged the queen.
The sorceress held up a hand and caught the man’s face. She squeezed, crushing the flesh and bone as easily as Sam would squeeze the juice from a lemon. The man’s head burst in a sickening shower of gore. Lilibet tossed him away and kept advancing.
Duke appeared as if out of nowhere at her side, thrusting at his mother with a katar, but she did not even look at him. She kept advancing on Sam, and Duke was swarmed by a dozen indistinct shadows before his blade could reach the sorceress. Shades swarmed over him like ants on sugar. He thrashed impotently with his katars, each strike banishing one of the shades, but two more would pile onto him, forcing him to the floor and grasping him with their insubstantial hands.
Sam surged off her knees and attacked, whirling her daggers in front of her in a complex weave, trying to draw Lilibet’s eye. Then she tried to surprise the other woman with a quick slash toward her neck.
The sorceress lifted a hand and brushed Sam’s dagger from her grip with the ease Sam would disarm a child.
Sam’s wrist was numb where Lilibet had knocked against it, her fingers twitching spasmodically. She stabbed with her other dagger, but Lilibet caught her hand. Brutal cold crept down her arm, and Sam couldn’t move it. Her muscles were paralyzed by the strength of Lilibet’s sorcery.
Sam flung her head forward, the crown of her skull catching Lilibet square in the face, ripping open the other woman’s skin above her eye. A trickle of blood leaked down the side of Lilibet’s face.
Lilibet shoved her back, and Sam tripped over her own feet, falling to the floor, her numb arms hanging near useless at her side. The wind burst from her chest as her back slapped against the polished stone beneath her.
“Priestess, you surprise me,” admitted Lilibet. The sorceress held her hand up to her brow, and before Sam’s startled eyes, Lilibet’s flesh knitted back together. With a touch, Lilibet had healed herself. The sorceress frowned at Sam. “The patterns on your body are clever. They are not inked by that corpulent seer who helped break the binding to the great spirit, she did not have the talent. Tell me, who inked those tattoos?”
Sam, feeling returning slowly to her arms, did not respond. She scooted herself backward, franticly scrambling for a plan, but coming up with nothing.
“You should have joined me,” declared Lilibet.
Then she strode forward and bent, grasping Sam around the neck and lifting her one-handed. Fingers, cold as ice, hard as iron, closed around Sam’s throat. As the other woman lifted her, all Sam could do was kick her feet. Her boots thudded harmlessly against Lilibet’s leather-clad legs.
Sam called upon her markings, trying to infuse her body with supernatural power, but every time she activated the designs and called to the spirits to fill her, her strength ebbed and then quickly waned.
Lilibet smiled at her, one arm raised, holding Sam by the neck. “True power requires true sacrifice, girl. You’ve clung to life when you should have embraced death. Now, you will die anyway. Pathetic. I will bind your shade in my thrall. Whoever inked those patterns, whoever gave of themselves to help you, will be mine as well. Everything you know, everyone you love, will be mine.”
Sam struggled, thrashing against Lilibet’s impossible strength, unable to summon her own. The woman controlled the shroud, as William Wellesley, Yates, and Raffles had merely dreamt of. The sorceress could pull strength from that barrier, and she was able to block Sam from doing the same.
Lilibet was impossibly powerful. She was invincible.
Specks swirled in Sam’s vision, making the other woman look splotchy and strange. Embrace death. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She kept fighting, and she clung to life, but she knew she could not win.
The Cartographer XXVI
Shades piled upon him like a suffocating blanket, dozens of them, the ephemeral bodies smothering him, forcing him to his knees. He struggled to free his arms, and he lashed out with his katars at his invisible tormentors, but as the blades passed through the shades, banishing them, more came. They poured from the rents in the shroud. Unimpeded, they spilled into the world.
He watched as Sam attacked and was easily repelled. He watched as his mother advanced on Sam and began to choke her. He could see the panic in Sam’s movements, see that there was nothing she could do. He struggled, but the weight of the shades on top of him increased, threatening to shove him down onto the floor.
Balance. Control. The blood of kings. His mother. Ca-Mi-He. Sacrifice. The bargain.
His thoughts, like cold-numb fingers, scrabbled against the words, trying to make some sense of them, but he found no purchase. None of it arranged itself into a pattern that he could comprehend. He had no ideas. Nothing he could have done would have prepared him for this moment. He and Sam were as his mother said — ignorant. Like babes, they’d stumbled into the room, thinking that they knew what they faced, but they couldn’t have. No one could have.
He pushed against the floor, heaving himself a hands-breadth higher, shrugging off shades, and banishing them with his punch knives, but more came.
Dark mirth filled him. Had they known, would it have made a difference? He still would have come, whether he thought he was facing his mother or his father. Had he known, he still would have been woefully unprepared. He and Sam could not combat her strength. They could not match her power.
As he fought against the shades, he saw flashes of Sam still struggling impotently against his mother. Around them, battle raged. Royal marines from all over the palace rushed into the room and then quickly died. Creatures from the underworld appeared, crawling through the rents in the shroud and falling on the warm flesh of the marines. Blunderbusses discharged with thunderous booms, and the steel of pikes flashed, but the men were no match for the nightmares they faced. The marines could do nothing against the cold, white fire of the underworld.
Oliver suddenly freed an arm and whipped his katar around, banishing half-a-dozen shades with the strike, but another of the apparitions wrapped around his wrist. He struggled against it, cursing under his breath.
The cold white fire of the underworld.
The shades he’d seen in his vision of the underworld had told him they were waiting for Lilibet, waiting for her to complete the bargain. They were looking for her.
But she’d offered the sacrifice. Lilibet Wellesley had been the one who offered the souls of Northundon to Ca-Mi-He. She’d given up her city, her home, for unrestrained power. The souls searched for her and had asked Oliver to find her, to complete the bargain, but she’d done her part. She’d made the sacrifice. Would she have sacrificed her own soul to seal the bargain?
He realized suddenly that the bargain the marching spectres told him about was not with his mother. It was for his mother.
Oliver fell back to his knees, another surge of shades toppling and overwhelming him. He reached out with his mind. He could feel Sam, her life force fluttering and fading rapidly. Like one of the fae, she burned but not for long. He could sense it, could sense that her end was near. His mother, she was there too. He could feel her now that he was aware. He cursed himself for missing it earlier. It was her. How could he have not felt her?
She burned. Cold bled from her in waves. Terrible, sorcerous strength, like the power of the shroud itself was invested in the woman. In his mother.
Oliver fell to his face, shades piling on top of him, breath wheezing from his lungs as the apparitions clustered on his back. He felt the spark of his mother’s life. It was there, deep inside. She’d hidden it from him somehow. From everyone. For twenty years, she’d been hidden. She’d hidden from him, and who else?
He could not kill her. It was not his way. Not the way to balance.
He was a druid. Druids fostered life. They grew it.
He grasped for her spark and poured life into her. He made her life burn bright, shining like a beacon from Southundon’s highest tower. He made her life force
cry out and demand notice. Shining like a spotlight, it blazed forth, illuminating the throne room to his supernatural senses and sparkling through the open rents to the underworld.
The creatures of the underworld looked to her, sensing the blaze of her soul, but they were in her thrall. They could do nothing to harm her. Lilibet was death. She cloaked herself in it. He was life. He ripped away her cloak and forced her to shine.
The shades were crushing the breath from him. He couldn’t draw air. He knew he had only moments. With his last, fleeting heartbeats, he grasped his mother’s life and amplified it. Poured energy into her, drew strength from the forest outside, the people in Southundon, the spirits in the stones of the airships. Even the tiny fae. He drew from them all and cast her presence as hard and as far as he could.
Her soul radiated like the sun.
His face was pressed against the floor, but with one eye, he could still see his mother and Sam through the murky haze of the shades. Sam’s kicks were slowing, her eyes looked vacant, blinking slowly. Sam was dying.
Everything Oliver had, he pushed into his mother’s spark, igniting her like the fire he’d seen on the other side, the fire that had consumed Northundon. She was that fire. She consumed the spirits of the underworld to fuel her power in the world of the living, and she would burn them until those souls were freed. The price of the bargain? Her soul for theirs.
Oliver let her blaze, let her mirror that impossible vision from the other side of the shroud. Balance. She was death. He was life. He put his life into hers, magnifying it, blasting it through the open rents to the underworld until, through the tears in the shroud, her presence was felt.
The slow trod of marching feet, tens of thousands of feet, boomed through the openings to the underworld. The sound of marching filled the room with palpable dread.
