An opaque shield smashed him across the room, crushing him into bristly human paste against the far wall.
Gunshots sounded. I wasn’t sure who they came from, but I raised my gun and fired at the next in line until he went down. By now more had emerged from the tunnel, maybe a dozen total. The man behind the one I’d shot took aim at me, fired and missed.
I flicked a hand at him. “Míilé brihs!”
He screamed and crumpled to the ground as a thousand cuts split his skin.
“Gideon!” Taeral was right next to me, gun in hand. He shot and dropped one of the growing crowd who’d drawn a bead on him. “Have you gone mad?”
“Mad. That’s a good word,” I said as bullets sprayed all around us. “Not quite strong enough, though.”
“What—” Taeral broke off with a pained snarl and clutched his thigh.
“Goddamn it, did they hit you?” The fury blazed through me, and I dropped my gun and stepped forward, sweeping both arms in front of me. “Ahmac àn beahlac!”
The rest of the soldiers were jerked into the air and slammed against various surfaces. Ceiling, walls, floor. One of them hit the wooden frame at the mouth of the tunnel they’d come through, and I heard his neck snap.
Taeral stared at me in shock. “It was only a graze, you know.”
“They’re not hurting anyone else,” I spat. “Ever.”
His expression grew solemn. “Understood.”
I scooped the Uzi back up. Just as I tensed to run at the recovering soldiers, something furry and snarling blurred past me — Sadie in full wolf mode. She pounced on the first black-clad figure she came to, her teeth headed for his throat.
Taeral and I were right behind her.
The rest was a blur of bullets, blows, and crushing shields as I surrendered to the Fae side, the part of me that craved battle and bloodshed. My heart pounded, my blood roared, and the sounds of the fight faded beneath the memory of all those screams and gruesome flashes of death.
I was about to crush a bloodied soldier who looked like he might be able to draw another breath or two when a hand grabbed my arm. “Gideon,” Taeral said in an oddly gentle tone. “Stand down, brother. It is done.”
“Right. Okay, I can do that. I think.” I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, willing the rage that still flooded me to ease off. There was pain somewhere beyond the anger, and I figured I’d probably taken a bullet or two at some point. But I’d live.
They wouldn’t.
Finally, I blinked my eyes open and looked around slowly. Fourteen or fifteen bodies, all of them Milus Dei. Taeral and Sadie a few feet away from me, on their feet and mostly unhurt. Sadie had changed back. Holdrun still in the cage, his red eyes fixed on me, and Calla half-blocking Rex and Chester from rushing across the room. I was grateful for that. At the moment, I didn’t think I could speak to anyone civilly.
I was still feeling too much like a Fae to be polite.
“All right, let’s get the dwarf out,” I said, half-pivoting to head for the cage.
Holdrun tilted his head slightly as I approached. “That was interesting,” he said. “Quite the entertainment ye’ve provided, halfling.”
“Yeah. You’re welcome.” I stopped in front of the door and the five locks holding it closed. “Those aren’t cold iron, are they?”
“Nae, but ye’d best let me take care of them,” he said. “The locks have a powerful warding.”
I frowned. “They can cast wards?”
Holdrun shook his head. “Cast ’em myself. I’d planned to have a good laugh when they tried to open them.” He took a few paces toward the door and stopped. “Ye may want to step back a bit, child.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, shuffling back a few feet. “How’s this?”
“That’ll do.” Holdrun drew in a huge, gasping breath, pursed his lips like he was sucking through an invisible straw — and then spit out a stream of roaring fire that almost instantly melted the locks and the bars they were attached to.
Oh, good. A fire-breathing dwarf.
“I’d no idea they could do that,” Taeral muttered from beside me.
Holdrun stretched his arms behind his back and ambled through the cage door as it creaked open. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “I’ll lead ye up there, but ye’d best hold up your end of the bargain, Unseelie.”
“Aye, you know I will,” Taeral said with narrowed eyes.
Chester cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Did he just … breathe fire?”
“Hey, look who’s caught up!” Rex laughed and clapped him on the back. “Have to say, I don’t think I’ve seen that trick before. And I’ve seen a lot.”
Holdrun glanced at them and shook his head. “Humans. So easily impressed,” he said. “Are we going, or what?”
“Hold on. There’s something I have to do first,” I said, remembering the conversation I had with Calla last night. About wanting to know why.
I’d planned to ask over their dead bodies. Now I had plenty of them.
I walked to the nearest corpse, a soldier who lay facedown in a pool of blood soaking into the ground — the first one Sadie had gotten to, I thought. It only took a few seconds of focusing to cast a glamour, draw his soul into my head and push it back onto the projection. The dead soldier seemed to stand. He shook his head once and looked at me without expression.
“What devilry is this?” I heard Holdrun grate somewhere behind me.
“Don’t worry. He’s still dead,” Calla told him.
I tuned them out to focus on the soldier, who hadn’t even tried to speak. He looked maybe forty, with a clean shave and a no-nonsense buzz cut. His stare was rock-solid, unblinking. “What’s your name?” I said to him.
There was a strong tug in my head as he tried to resist my question. Unfortunately for him, that was impossible. “David,” he finally said.
“Okay, David. Did you help kill the people in Basin Springs?”
More struggling. His lips strained to stay closed, but eventually he spit out, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t understand.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
“I don’t understand.”
He rolled out the words robotically, like he was reading them off something, and it was my turn to stare. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The dead couldn’t lie to me, and they had to answer when I asked a question.
I decided to try again. “Why did you kill them?”
“I don’t understand.”
Frustration spiked through me, and I almost grabbed for my gun to shoot him on general principle. How the hell was he doing this? I forced myself to think, to replay the conversation, and remembered a previous interrogation with a Milus Dei soldier who’d managed to duck a few questions — because I hadn’t been specific enough. He’d found a loophole.
And it seemed like these men had been trained to exploit that loophole a lot further.
I blew a breath out through my nose. “Let’s put this another way,” I said. “Why did you kill the people in Basin Springs?”
This time he struggled, sending sharp needles of pain through my head. He lasted almost a minute before he said, “Orders.”
“Whose orders?”
“I don’t under—”
“Who ordered you to kill people in Basin Springs, goddamn it?”
The soldier grimaced. “The Hand of the God.”
Yusef, then. I stared at him for a minute, trying to formulate my next question so he couldn’t dodge it. “All right, David, here’s the million-dollar question,” I said. “For what reason did the Hand of the God order everyone in Basin Springs killed?”
The pain in my head flared bright, and blood dripped from a nostril. “The pilot,” he gasped. “Told someone about … the mission. We didn’t know who. So we killed … all of them. Secured our location.”
My gut plunged, and I glanced back at the rest of them. I really hoped Rex hadn’t heard that. There was a chance it wasn’t true, that it
was only what this soldier had been told. The dead spoke their own truths. But even if they really had done it because he’d told someone — that someone likely being Chester — Rex didn’t need to feel like the slaughter of his whole town was his fault.
“Those people were innocent,” I said. “Tell me this. Did you want to kill them?”
He didn’t even try to resist. He just grinned. “Yes.”
At least I was justified in what I’d done to them in return. But it didn’t make me feel better, about any of it.
“Enjoy the rest of your death, asshole,” I grated as I pulled his soul back and released him. His ‘body’ shivered and dropped to the ground, and as I turned back to the others, their faces told me they’d heard. And understood.
“It wasn’t your fault, Rex,” I said.
His face twisted. “Think I don’t know that? It’s their fault, sick bastards.” He stalked past me, jerking one of his guns out as he went, and stood over David’s corpse. “Die some more, you fucking human stain,” he growled, and proceeded to plug an entire clip into the dead man.
No one tried to stop him.
When Rex finished, he turned around calmly and replaced the gun. “Let’s grab their gear before we head out,” he said. “Guns, ammo, any keys or badges or swipe cards they might have on ’em. I want this whole place smashed flat by the time we’re through.”
“Good call,” I said. “Do it.”
Chapter 21
“So,” Holdrun said, “what was that business with the dead monkey?”
The dwarf had brought us into the tunnel across from the one we’d used to get there. Not the one the soldiers had come from, he’d said, because there would only be more of them waiting. So we were taking the back way. Even though part of me still wanted to bash through the front door, wherever it was, and slaughter everything that moved.
Now he was staring at me, and I realized I hadn’t answered his question. “Oh, right, the soldier,” I said. “I’m the DeathSpeaker.”
“Aye. Of course.” Holdrun frowned. “That’d be what, then? Are ye Sluagh, or maybe some kind of necromancer?”
“Uh, no. Just the DeathSpeaker.”
“Heard that the first time. Doesn’t make any more sense, just because ye said it again.”
I almost laughed. I’d never had to explain what I was, since everyone seemed to know that the DeathSpeaker was a thing. Now I knew how Holdrun felt when we failed to recognize his name. “It’s kind of a title. Like a job,” I said. “I can talk to the dead and compel them to answer questions.”
“But ye can’t bring them back?” The dwarf made a face. “Useless, then. Bit of a shite job too, if ye ask me.”
“Yeah, it can be sometimes.” I glanced over my shoulder at the line behind us, trying to gauge how everyone was holding up. Mostly they were worried, angry, and exhausted, and we still had a long way to go. But before we got to the base, there was something I wanted to ask the dwarf. “Hey, Holdrun. Got any idea why that sword is called the Answerer?”
He looked thoughtful. “Well, it’s not my weapon,” he said. “No dwarf truly understands a weapon that isn’t his own, and we’d certainly never use one that belonged to another.” He shuddered, as if picking up some other dwarf’s sword was as disgusting as refusing to bathe for the rest of your life. “But there is a verse about Fragarach in the ‘Ballad of Kharzal Gorm,’ somewhere.”
“Ballad?”
“Aye, that’s right. Dwarf, remember?” He hooked a thumb at his chest. “We write bloody great songs about everything. Now, be silent and give me a moment. Kharzal Gorm’s got six hundred and four farkin’ verses to go through.”
He started humming under his breath.
From just behind me, Calla whispered, “Did he say six hundred and four?”
“Yup. He did.”
“That’s gotta be, like, ten hours long,” Sadie said. “At least.”
Taeral grunted. “We do not have ten hours to spare for a dwarf song.”
“Hush, ye babbling fools!” Holdrun’s red eyes flared, and smoke steamed from his nose. “Do ye want to know the verse, or not? Now I’ve got to start over.”
Everyone hushed.
After five minutes or so of silent walking punctuated by tuneless humming, Holdrun stopped and held up a hand. “All right. I’ve come to it,” he said. “No one speak, or I’ll lose the thread again.”
We all bunched up in the tunnel and stared at the dwarf, who cleared his throat and started to chant.
“Never flame nor forge ’twas set,
But hammer and might, and sweat of brow,
And sharp of stone, the true edge cleaves.
A single blow destroys the spark,
The Answerer defends the just,
But will not strike that which is stilled.”
There was a long pause after he finished, and then Rex broke the silence. “That was a song?” he said. “It doesn’t even rhyme.”
“Well, it rhymes in dwarvish,” Holdrun snapped. “Anyway, that’s all I know about the Answerer. If ye want more, ye’d have to ask my grandfather. Except he’s dead.” He looked at me. “But ye could ask him, couldn’t ye? Being the DeathTalker and all.”
I didn’t bother correcting him. “It doesn’t exactly work like that,” I said. “I have to be near the dead person to contact them. So unless your grandfather is buried around here somewhere, I can’t talk to him.”
“Huh,” he grumbled. “Like I said, useless.”
“Dwarf. Your verse says that Fragarach destroys the spark,” Taeral said. “That must be how it kills in one blow, but even cold iron cannot do that. Is it enchanted?”
“How should I know? I’ve told ye, I didn’t craft the damned thing,” he said.
“But you claimed you could replicate it.”
“Aye, and I can,” he said. “No doubt I could copy the spellwork, too, if it’s there. But it’s the form they’re after, not the function. That’s all these monkeys want — something shiny to fawn over, hang on their walls and impress each other. They know nothing.” His slotted eyes rolled in a disconcerting circle. “Why, when I first met this lot in the Old World, they didn’t even know to use cold iron and mandrake against the Fae. Had to teach them how to work with the stuff.”
Taeral stiffened and went pale. “You did what?” he whispered.
“Showed ’em a few things,” Holdred said with a dismissive shrug, apparently unaware of how much he’d just pissed off my brother — and me. “I mean, really, look at the poor weak bastards. If ye were them, wouldn’t ye want to know how to defend yerselves from the likes of … well, you?”
“Defend themselves!” Taeral roared loud enough to force everyone a step back. “You ignorant, self-important, bloated sack of filth. Have you any idea what these ‘poor weak bastards’ have done to our kind? To all of Otherkyn, no doubt including your own people? They do not defend. They destroy.”
Holdrun looked startled, but he recovered fast. “Oh, save it,” he said. “I’ve just seen yer DeathTalker here drop a dozen of them without so much as a hard breath, and he’s only a halfling. What does a Fae have to fear from humans?”
“You really want to know?” I stopped Taeral with a hand on his shoulder, before he could lunge at the dwarf and rip his heart out like he probably wanted to. “How about nine months of torture and losing an arm, and having to give your infant brother to strangers to keep him safe, because these guys were really itching to murder a baby? Or how about being forced to kill your own mother, because they wanted to know if one werewolf could take out another?” I moved toward him, my throat clenching. “How about twenty-six years locked in a cold iron box, tortured and starved, broken again and again, slowly reprogrammed to murder your son the next time you saw him? And if that’s not enough … how about the slaughter of hundreds, thousands of Others, with the ultimate goal of exterminating every non-human on the planet?” I glared at Holdrun. “So yeah, we have a few concerns about humans. At least the ones who
call themselves Milus Dei.”
“And you have helped them refine their ‘techniques’,” Taeral nearly growled. “Gideon spoke of our father, who endured all those years at their hands. Keep in mind, dwarf, that it is my father’s lodestone I’ll be forced to give you once you’ve upheld your end of the bargain.”
There was a long, heavy pause while no one spoke, and I kept my gaze on Holdrun. I felt awful bringing up Sadie’s mother, but I wanted to make sure he understood exactly who these people were, and why bringing them down meant so much to us. Why they had to be stopped.
Finally, Holdrun drew himself up to full height — which wasn’t much, considering. “I’ll concede that I might have been somewhat remiss in sharing knowledge with the humans,” he said with something that approached sincerity. “But I won’t be held for what happened to yer father, or that one’s mother, or anyone’s baby brother or bloody arm. Ye hear? If not me, they’d have only found it somewhere else.”
I nodded reluctantly. Though I was still pissed, I could see his point.
“By the bye,” Holdrun said, his gaze flicking to the bloody arm in question. “That’s a fine piece of craftsmanship ye’ve got there. Ciraendyl’s work, isn’t it?”
Taeral blinked. “Who?”
“That ungodly conflagration of metal and madness in that castle up the Highlands,” he said. “’Twas Orlon Frostbeard concocted the whole mess. Named it after his dearly departed wife. Dotty woman, loved her tea.” He looked from Taeral to me. “Surely ye’ve heard of —”
“The mirror mender?” I blurted.
“Aye, that’s what most call her now. And this is her work.” Holdrun stretched a hand in the direction of the gold prosthetic. “I may be persuaded to take that arm in trade, rather than the lodestone.”
Taeral jerked away before he could touch it. “Absolutely not.”
“As ye please, then.” The dwarf shrugged, pivoted on a heel and headed further down the tunnel. “Come on, you lot. We’ve not much longer to glorious battle.”
Hand of the God Page 11
