It had to be Winter.
The lights moved about one another in a strange dance, sometimes colliding, sometimes weaving around one another, with Winter’s dark star always the catalyst, the center of everything.
A white mist outlined Cinzia’s hands, her body, her feet, even her dress; it was as if she was looking down at nothing but a glowing silhouette of herself. Instead of the gemstone she had been holding in the Sfaera, she now gripped a dagger, with a shining gold blade and bright red jewel in its pommel.
Take the dagger. Strike down your enemies. Let light back into the Sfaera.
Canta had told Cinzia those words, so similar to the ones she had heard when she cut her own hand, ridding herself of Luceraf.
But now, Cinzia’s hands shook as she moved.
For all her talk, for all her fear, she still hesitated now, when it came to the possibility of killing. Even if the being she was about to kill was a Daemon.
In her mind’s eye, Cinzia suddenly saw a face: her old Goddessguard, Kovac, the way she remembered him, graybrown beard and bright blue eyes, smiling at her. But, in an instant, that face changed. The eyes shifted into something horrible, something evil, leaking iridescent green smoke—how she had last seen him, possessed by Azael, trying to kill her.
A dagger appeared, protruding from one of Kovac’s eyes, and the light in the other went out—both the evil green light, and the calm blue that Cinzia had loved as much as her own father.
Do it for Kovac.
Cinzia stepped forward, finding the nearest glowing sun. This one was a black gaping wound surround by burning green light: Samann. Envy. All of the rage and loss Cinzia had felt in the moment of Kovac’s death came rushing back to her.
Gripping the dagger tightly, Cinzia thrust the weapon into the black center of the burning green orb. Just as she had thrust Kovac’s own dagger into his eye, killing him.
She had been half afraid the green light would burn her, but her ethereal limbs felt nothing as her hands passed through the flame, burying the dagger in the dark center of the light.
For a moment, nothing happened. Had Canta sent her on a fool’s errand? Or, worse, did Cinzia’s doubts hinder her ability to do what was necessary?
Samann’s light trembled, the movement increasing until it vibrated intensely, so quickly it almost became a blur. In a silent, fierce explosion, the light burst outward in an angry, flaming ring of bright green. Again, Cinzia felt nothing, heard nothing, only saw the light ripple outward. But the light did not return or reform; after the explosion, nothing was left. The strange sun-like light was gone, completely dissipated.
Cinzia stared at the space where Samann’s light had been.
Had she just killed one of the Nine Daemons?
45
THE SNAGGLE-TOOTHED OUTSIDER smashed into the tiellan forces, sending men and women flying as it rammed into them with its head, then swept up a good half-dozen at least in a single chomp of its jaws.
It roared again, and even from behind the sound was devastating. Cova covered her ears, cringing until the roar died away and the monster swiped at the tiellans’ front line with one of its massive clawed arms, taking out another dozen soldiers. A group of Rangers rallied, throwing spears at the beast, but their weapons had little effect.
“Your Grace, we must get you away from the battlefield,” General Horas said. “You cannot be here, not with a monster like that. I recommend a full retreat.” He nodded to his second, who turned, about to relay the order, but Cova stopped him.
“No,” she said, with as much confidence as she could muster. Horas was the better tactician by far. She had little experience at all in the matter. But she knew what they needed to do. “We press on. Form up archers, and have them concentrate all fire on that Goddess-damned snaggle-tooth. We are going to help those tiellans.”
“But, Your Grace—”
“If we don’t take care of that mammoth creature now,” Cova said, meeting her general’s gaze, “it might come after us next, and then we will have two thousand fewer allies to fight alongside us. It is now or never, General. If you don’t agree with me, you can leave.”
The general opened his mouth, but Cova spoke right over him. She was not about to let him off that easily.
“And if you choose to leave, I’ll have you executed on the spot for refusing to follow orders, and desertion.” She raised her sword. “I’ll do it myself if I have to.”
The general, face pale, looked from Cova to the Snaggletooth, then back to Cova again. Slowly, he nodded.
Before Cova could say anything more, a very different sound echoed through the night. A single, all-encompassing thump, like the boom of thunder but louder and felt in the chest and bones far more than heard by the ears.
Canta Rising, what was that? Was there not enough going on already? The sound seemed to have come from the light-battle ensuing to the south.
General Horas, also shaken by the strange blast, nevertheless saluted. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Press the attack.”
“Right away.” Cova’s army reformed, focusing on the Snaggletooth.
She hoped to Oblivion she did not live to regret her decision.
* * *
Winter did not know what had happened. One moment, she was fighting the Nine Daemons, hundreds of weapons at her disposal. Fighting the Nine, even with the arsenal she controlled, was like attacking wisps of smoke. Literal smoke, in Hade’s case, but no matter who she attacked, they managed to evade almost every strike.
Strangely, the Nine did not seem focused on attacking her, only on defending themselves. As they entwined, Winter noticed they had begun to look more human. Their forms diminished, their monstrous features fading. Samann’s wolf-like face softened, shedding some of its hair, the nose shortening and ears shifting and shrinking.
When Winter first attacked, the Outsiders seemed surprised. It did not take them long to recover; Iblin barreled forward, but his actions were strange. He didn’t try to crush her, or pummel her to death. Instead, he seemed more interested in stopping her, grabbing hold of her, although Winter could not imagine what he would do to her if he was successful. Similarly, Samann and Luceraf sought to disable Winter with their claws and talons, but never attempted a killing blow.
Winter found it far too easy to avoid all of them.
Bazlamit, on the other hand, tried a much more roundabout method. Her bulbous, globular form shimmered and vibrated, and then split into two separate halves, and suddenly Winter faced her old mentors, Kali and Nash.
“Stop what you are doing, Winter,” Kali said. She wore what Winter always recalled her wearing: black leathers, tightly fitted, with her curved Nazaniin sword at her side. This was the version Winter had best known her as, the tall version with dark hair and striking blue eyes.
“We only want to help you,” Nash said, and the emotion that bubbled up at seeing him surprised her. He looked exactly the same, including the scar on his cheek, the circular blades at his belt.
With an effort, Winter ignored them, fighting on.
Hade and Estille evaded her advances, but didn’t attack at all.
Nadir’s onslaught worried Winter the most, though it, too, seemed far from lethal. Winter could not see the Daemon’s attacks, but she felt an immense pressure in her mind, building and building and building, as if her brain were expanding in her skull and there was no way to release the force. As if her own blood were boiling her brain alive. As if she were losing control not only of her grip on reality, but on herself and everything it meant to be her.
Fortunately, Winter discovered that her acumenic tendra came in handy when defending herself from Nadir’s attacks.
Azael was the most mysterious of all of them. He simply stood still at the center of it all, unmoving, as the fight blazed around him.
Something is not right. Winter could feel it in her marrow. The Daemons should be trying to demolish her, send her to Oblivion, but they seemed far more interested in something
else, something Winter could not discern.
As she fended off Nadir’s attacks with her acumency while simultaneously keeping up her telenic offensive against the others, she noticed new arrivals getting closer.
Her eyes focused immediately on Knot, walking up toward the Daemons as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Winter’s heart twisted in her chest—he would be crushed before he even understood what was going on. Winter fumed with fury, concern, and confusion all at once. What in Oblivion had brought him here, anyway?
Jane, the priestess’s sister, was with him, an almost blindingly white light bursting forth from her hands. Stranger still, she caught a glimpse of something else: a flash of movement, a trick of the eye, a woman who was there and then was not there, and looked vaguely familiar.
Finally, as Samann twisted his lupine form to swipe his large paw at her, something else happened.
The Daemon disappeared.
The battle all around her stopped, the Daemons turning to stare at the place their brother had been in confusion.
Winter was sucked toward the space Samann had once occupied, as if his sudden absence pulled everything around it inward, desperately trying to fill the space that was now empty. A peculiar sound accompanied the shift, a soft, grating pop, the way her ears had popped when she had climbed the Sorensan Mountains.
The power of Samann’s disappearance—his death?— affected the other Daemons, as they skidded toward the vacant location until the power dissipated.
In that moment, Winter saw another shady flash of movement, as if the falling snow had settled on someone’s head and shoulders for a brief moment, and then rethought the fact that there might be a person there at all, and continued drifting toward the ground.
Winter closed her eyes, and let herself fall into the Void.
* * *
In the Void the woman sees the sun-stars, the residue of the Daemons in the space she has come to know and love. But there is something else there, too, unexpected.
A woman.
The priestess, Cinzia Oden.
Is she a psimancer? No. Cinzia Oden drifts through the Void, not as a typical star-light, nor the ersatz version of herself, the way the woman or Kali or other psimancers appear in the Void, more or less similar to how they appear on the Sfaera but ever so slightly transparent, with footsteps echoing ripples of light with each step.
No, this is like looking at a sketch of the priestess, of pale white light, stuttering through the Void, on occasion not even visible at all.
The priestess moves toward one of the nine—eight remaining suns, and suddenly the woman notices her dagger of gold and crimson, almost giving off its own light in the Void. Unlike the priestess, and even unlike the woman herself, the dagger looks real; not a sketched outline of light like the priestess, nor a projection of itself like the woman, but something that exists completely and wholly.
With a lunge, the priestess thrusts the dagger into one of the dark suns, and for a moment nothing happens. Then, in a bright explosion the sun sends out a shockwave of silvery burning light.
The silvery sun is gone. Bazlamit is gone, just like Samann had gone before her.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asks, and the priestess turns to respond, the white outline of her face fading in and out of the Void.
“I am killing Daemons,” the priestess says, her voice echoing as if she were speaking from the bottom of a long, deep well. “Keep distracting them, and I will kill them all.”
But how? the woman wants to ask. And with what?
But there is not much time. The priestess, it appears, has the same goal as she does. They must end the reign of the Nine before it begins. They must save the Sfaera.
So, she nods to the priestess. “Work quickly.” And then she goes back to her body, battling Daemons.
* * *
Urstadt blinked into consciousness.
It was night. It was snowing. Cold bit at her face, pain split her skull and burrowed through her shoulder. She tried to move, but something held her down. Snowflakes drifted down, the shimmering darkness straight above, and over an unmoving hump a massive shape roared, the sound piercing through the already loud cacophony of battle.
The damned Snaggletooth.
Urstadt’s head cleared, and she remembered the monster’s mouth gaping before her. How was she still alive? She tried to move the dead weight on top of her. It took her just a moment to realize it was Rorie, or part of her at least, torn in half at the waist by Snaggletooth’s teeth or claws or Oblivion knew what.
Rorie must have been, at least in part, why Urstadt was still alive.
A very different pain pierced through Urstadt’s body, more acute than the pain in her head, and far deeper than the pain in her shoulder. Rorie had been a good soldier, but more than that, Urstadt had grown fond of her.
With an effort that sent a jolt of fresh pain through her shoulder, Urstadt rolled Rorie’s torso off of her, and kicked away another tiellan corpse on her feet. Urstadt struggled to stand, breathing in the fresh, cold air, in time to see Snaggletooth’s huge foot stomp down on three mounted tiellans, crushing all of them at once, and then swiping at another squad advancing on it.
Canta Rising, the Rangers did not stand a chance against that thing.
Urstadt had to regroup the tiellan forces, but the battle had moved north of her, where Snaggletooth now dealt with more tiellan squads. In the distance, a small ray of hope showed itself in the form of the Rodenese Reapers, now advancing on Snaggletooth in a loose formation, archers continually peppering it with arrows that glanced off its hide. They could likely overwhelm the gargantuan beast eventually with sheer numbers, but that assumed very little intervention from other Outsiders, or the two—no, Urstadt realized as she looked south, five more towering dragon-like beasts lingering around Litori. Three more must have dropped while she was unconscious.
Urstadt swore, looking about for her glaive, but found nothing. Her sword rested intact at her hip, but that would do little good here. She needed something else, something…
Her gaze found what she sought. When making the war machines to assault Triah, the tiellan engineers had made a few ballistae as well. After dismantling the War Goddess, the tiellans had left most of the other siege engines intact; they’d posed no threat to Triah from atop the cliffs, anyway. This ballista still appeared operational.
The bolts were scattered across the grass, knocked flying by a dead tiellan Ranger. She picked up one and carried it to the ballista, then lined up her shot.
Snaggletooth twisted around to claw at a group of approaching Reapers, snapping its tail out behind it at the same time and cutting through a line of tiellans.
Urstadt pulled the ballista’s trigger.
With a deep snap of the drawstring the bolt shot forward. Urstadt squinted but lost track of it in the night. For a moment she thought it had hit Snaggletooth but had no effect; then, an Outsider behind and to the side of Snaggletooth shuddered and fell, the bolt protruding from the side of its head.
Urstadt cursed, and retrieved another bolt. This time she waited until Snaggletooth turned sideways, swiping its tail at a squad of Reapers, and then she fired. The bolt plunged into Snaggletooth’s shoulder.
The colossal monster snapped its jaw down on a group of Rangers, leaving shredded body parts and horses where tiellans on horseback had once been, and Urstadt was worried the bolt would have no effect, when Snaggletooth shuddered and craned its massive head around to look at the wound. Upon seeing the bolt, Snaggletooth snaked its head upward toward the stars and roared so loudly the snow seemed to stop in fear.
Snaggletooth’s head lowered, and its gaze scanned outward from its wound, settling on Urstadt and the ballista.
Urstadt swore and cranked the winch lever as fast as her fatigued muscles would allow. She slid a new bolt into place as Snaggletooth thundered toward her, its giant maw open.
“Rot in Oblivion, you son of a bitch,” Urstadt muttered, then pulled the
trigger mechanism.
The bolt shot up and forward, but did not have much room to travel. It embedded itself in Snaggletooth’s eye the full length, only a few fingers of wood and fletching protruding from the now rapidly leaking gooey surface. The gargantuan beast fell to the ground with the sound of a deafening thunder clap; Urstadt only just managed to leap out of the way as it slid to a stop, and was still.
* * *
Between Jane’s cascading beam of white light, Winter’s onslaught against the Nine, and Cinzia as she wove in and out of reality, assassinating Daemons, Knot felt incredibly useless. He attempted to attack an Outsider once that got too close to Cinzia’s position, but Jane’s beam of light had swept over the beast before Knot could get within reach.
And yet, he had never been more proud.
Jane’s power mystified him. He had no inkling of how she did what she did, but she clearly wielded great power. He and Jane had certainly had their differences, but he was grateful to be on her side.
Winter’s power astounded him. He knew of all she had done, knew she was behind the massacre in Navone and the destruction of the imperial dome in Izet, but she had to be using not just dozens, but hundreds of weapons at the moment. More than any living psimancer could conceive, let alone control. But Winter’s attacks on the Daemons were both fierce and masterful.
What Cinzia did made his hair stand on end. He only caught glimpses of her, but her shadow moved from one Daemon to the next, and the orange, yellow, and red lights winked out, one by one. Each imploded in another reverse thunderclap, drawing everything near it inward before it collapsed into nothing. At times Knot glimpsed the gemstone Cinzia carried around in both hands, but at others he could swear she held a dagger, bright golden blade glinting.
“Enough!” Azael shouted, his voice burning deep. “I thought you were going to save the Sfaera. Instead, you have doomed it.” The Daemon turned to the remaining three. “Hade, Estille, Luceraf. We must regroup. Salvage what we can.” The black, hooded figure, once so imposing, seemed hardly more than a man in a dark cloak, now.
Chaos Queen--Fear the Stars (Chaos Queen 4) Page 42
