by J. M. Frey
“Forsyth, the last Word!”
“Buy me time!” I shout, and yank the Shadow’s Mask from my jerkin. But I do not have the time to don it. The Viceroy, watching me, screeches in fury and throws bolts of magic from his hands, intent on stopping me.
I expect Pip to try to manipulate the magic to give me space. What I do not expect is a literal volley of spells to spring from the ballroom door and surge toward the Viceroy. He throws up a quick shield and dodges just as much as he is able. Stunned, I look toward my benefactors.
The magic-users have gathered together, talking rapidly and chanting. Spells pop around the Viceroy’s head, flashbangs and flares of fire that have him distracted and dazed. The Kintyres and Bevels work to cover the gaps my brother and his trothed leave when they duck and weave around the Viceroy’s vicious magical defense. Some swords bounce off his invisible shields, but they do so less and less often, until the Viceroy’s arms, and torso, and face are covered with gashes and scratches and slashes, each bleeding freely. The blood pools under him, and the Viceroy is slipping in the gore, losing his footing and straining for the sky.
“He’s exhausting,” I say rapidly. “Pip, he can’t sponge up enough magic. He’s going to make a mis—”
Before I can even finish the word, it happens. The real Bevel gets in low beside the Viceroy and slashes viciously at the back of his knee, hamstringing him. The Viceroy shouts and crumples, and instantly the other two Bevels are on him, each of them kneeling on his arms, holding his hands still so he cannot cast.
“Ha!” our Bevel cries, triumphant.
“Forsyth, find that Word now. I need you to—” Pip shouts, then she stumbles forward, a grunt tugged from her chest as she claps her hands on her sternum.
The Viceroy wriggles his hand free. He flings his open fingers at Pip, then fists them hard, and Pip stumbles again.
“Oh no you don’t, asshole,” Pip snarls through clenched teeth, looking up. I follow the line of her glare to see that the Viceroy has his hand flung at her chest, and he is trying to . . . to suck the magic back from her. “You’re not getting this back. This power is mine now.”
Closing her hands on what appears to be utter nothingness, Pip yanks.
The Viceroy makes a shrill, keening cry. “Stop, stop!”
“No, no,” Pip says with a grin, and yanks again. “This is my magic now. This is my power. My strength. You may have wounded me, cut me, scored me, scarred me. But you have brought a kind of magic into this world which makes the inherent, the inborn, the innate manifest. And what I am is a fan, Viceroy. Varnet, son of Solinde, weather witch and Deal-Maker. I take things, and I appropriate it. I borrow the voice of another to speak my own truths. I clothe myself in another’s power until I have grown steady on my own legs, and have learned to wield my own. You may have put the vines in me, but they don’t belong to you, not anymore. You can never control the interpretation of a piece of art once you release it into the world. You cannot control the way it affects others. This interpretation is mine now.”
Pip yanks a third time, and then, whatever it is she is grasping gives way. She jerks back, and I rush to get behind her, to hold her up, to keep her from crashing into the ground. Her eyes roll up in her head, her whole body slack, as the ivy scars wriggle and writhe all over her body, purple-swirled green glowing out from under her eyelashes.
The Viceroy spasms and jerks, his own eyes rolled up in his head and his mouth foaming.
“He’s having a fit!” one of the Kintyres shouts. “Get off him! You don’t hold down an epileptic!”
The fans scramble away, even as the real Kintyre says, “No, don’t—” and surges forward to pin the Viceroy in place. It is too late, though. The seizures have passed, and though he is dazed, the Viceroy is present enough to slug Kintyre in the face and kick him back. My brother grunts, surprised, and rolls back, flipping with the momentum of the blow and regaining his feet.
Even without the magic to bolster him, the Viceroy is quick. He skitters across the floor. Something glitters in his fist, and I realize that it is that damned dagger again.
“I wish I hadn’t bought that fucking thing!” I snarl, chasing after the Viceroy. He crawls away as fast as he is able, leaving a bloody smear in his wake.
“I won’t live without magic again. It hurts,” he cries.
“I . . . I never . . .” Pip says, all confidence and color draining from her expression. She stumbles back against my chest, and I wrap my hands under her elbows to hold her upright. “I never meant to . . .”
The Viceroy bares his bloody teeth at us. “You tortured me!”
“You started it!” Pip snarls back.
A woman dressed in light armor, carrying a staff and a pouch of what looks like tiny phials of potions skids to the floor, kneeling in Ahbni’s blood and pressing her hand firmly against the wounds of one of the Bevels. It is the healer. The real healer.
“Healing spell, healing spell,” the woman mutters to herself, digging through her satchel before crying out triumphantly and dumping a viscous teal liquid onto the bleeding gash. A quick glance around the room shows me that there are other cosplayers dressed similarly—paladins and clerics and holy druids—all performing the same office. Healing what can be healed, saving those who can be saved. I am grateful, suddenly, that the magic has spread so far that their potions and spells seem to be working. I wonder what had really been in those phials before the leaking magic altered them. And then I have no more time to wonder, for my attention is wrenched back to the battle before me.
The Viceroy dodges around Kintyre and lunges for Pip. “Give it back to me!”
But I am there first, Smoke swift and sure, to hamstring his other leg. The Viceroy howls as he collapses, hands barely catching him and palms already slick with blood, so that he slides forward onto his face. It becomes clear to me that the Viceroy will not be escaping this encounter alive—not because any of us will kill him outright, but because he is bleeding to death in small, ghastly increments.
Crumpled on the ground in the center of a spreading pool of ichor, the Viceroy peers up at Pip with pleading eyes. “Please,” he says. “Please, it hurts so much.”
“No,” Pip says back, crouching by his side. “No, I won’t give it back. But I’ll help the hurting. I’ll make it quicker, if that’s what you want.”
Ah, damn my wife and her compassion, anyway. She is too close to the monster, and before I can say much more than, “Pip, move back—” the Viceroy’s got one hand clamped hard on Pip’s wrist.
She screams like she’s being scalded and tries to jerk away, but her boot slips in the puddle of his blood and she lands hard on her arse. Bevel grabs her by her shoulders, and a hard stomp from Kintyre’s foot snaps the Viceroy’s wrist instantly. The villain grunts, and curls in on himself.
We are not fast enough. The magical, watercolor ivy has leapt off of Pip’s flesh in tangible, glowing vines, and is curling around the Viceroy, lifting him from the ground. Like its real-life counterpart climbs a trellis, this magical ivy curls up his body, straightening him, supporting him. Pip, limp and panting in Bevel’s arms, can only watch in horror as the ivy growing at a rapid, unnatural pace from her own flesh pierces and digs under the Viceroy’s.
“No, no, no, no,” Pip moans. I can see her growing weaker by the moment. Something cracks and snaps, and the Viceroy’s wrist straightens and pops back into place. He flexes his fingers, grinning as his yellow eyes take on a greenish hue.
Desperate to sever them, I slash Smoke through the vines. They part like fog around the blade, unharmed, and coalesce again like nothing happened. Kintyre copies my actions, but his magical sword is no more effective than mine.
“Ah, that’s better,” the Viceroy sneers as the cuts on his face seal up slowly, red gashes becoming pink scars, white tissue shriveling up and flaking away in a matter of seconds. “Stand, woman. Come to me.”
Pip does stand, but it is under her own power. Bevel helps her to her fee
t, tucks an arm around her waist to keep up her upright. “This isn’t going to end the way you think it will,” Pip gasps. “You’re the villain. You can’t win.”
“Can’t I?” the Viceroy spits back at her. “What was it that you said earlier? You all have heirs, don’t you? That makes you disposable, in the narrative. The horrible father that pushes the hero out the door, wasn’t it, Forsyth Turn? Or perhaps the tragedy that the young protagonist needs to avenge?”
Kintyre turns to look at me, poleaxed. “How does he know all that?”
The Viceroy scoffs. “Kintyre Turn, do you think that I cannot read?”
“The runes of Hain differ from the alphabet here, though,” I say.
“Juan was an excellent teacher,” the Viceroy sneers. He makes a motion quite like a shrug, and it sets the vines rolling and dancing happily around his frame.
“And what did you read, then?” Kintyre asks, stalling as his eyes dart over the writhing foliage, looking for a gap in the arboreal armor.
“Why, only the very best academic material,” the Viceroy says. “From the very cleverest of scholars this Overrealm has on offer.”
Pip understands what he means a moment before I do, and she lets out a choked cry of horror. “I put it on the Internet,” she hisses. “The full text of my dissertation.”
“What?” Bevel asks.
“Her thesis,” I answer grimly. “Pip’s entire treatise on how the stories in Elgar Reed’s world work.”
“Hundreds of pages, too,” the Viceroy says. “So long-winded, my dear. Took me simply ages to work my way through it.”
Pip’s mouth is working, gawping like a fish, but she says nothing. Fear prickles the underside of my skin, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. Our one advantage, and the villain has been cheating with it the whole time.
“Do you understand now?” the Viceroy says, raising his arms and summoning another wind to lift him off his slowly healing legs. “I know everything you know. You taught it to me. You have been stymied at every turn because I knew before you did that you would make it.”
He turns a grin toward Kintyre. “And now, I think, it is time to do that one thing that Our Glorious Creator would never do, would never have Written. You say I have doomed myself by killing him? Fine—but now he is not here to undo my actions, either.”
The Viceroy raises his arm, and the ivy around it swirls and spins tightly into a cone—no, a lance! The grin on his face splits wider, and the Viceroy giggles in delight as the wind around him picks up to cyclone speeds. I am thrown sideways, struggling to stay upright where I slip in the slick blood puddled on the ground, and Kintyre raises his arm to keep the wind out of his face, out of his eyes, to keep the Viceroy in his view.
“Kin!” Bevel bawls over the rattling hiss of the wind.
I slam against one of the nearby piles of rubble, Smoke flying from my hand, a sharp crack reverberating in my side as one of my ribs snaps. Pain, burning and sudden, paints the edges of my vision black, sets stars dancing in the middle. I suck in a breath to scream and something in my chest clicks. I cough, but no blood comes up—there’s a mercy!—and struggle to my knees, struggle to breathe around the pain and the way the air seems to be snatched away from my lips by the Viceroy’s building tornado.
“Die!” the Viceroy shrills. “Here is your Final Chapter, Kintyre Turn! The End!”
Kintyre, spun about by the whipping wind, his hair blowing in his eyes, cannot seem to get his bearings. He swings Foesmiter wide and high, but he is too slow.
Too, oh Writer, too—
The Viceroy’s ivy lance slams into Kintyre’s gut.
“No!” Bevel screams, and leaps into the wind to shove Kintyre away. It seems like only a second later, a microsecond, but the damage is done already. I don’t know how deep the wound is. I don’t know how . . . how . . .
I struggle to my feet, hands clutched over my side, breathless and . . . my heart has stopped, I’m sure of it. The fierce ache in my chest is cardiac arrest.
Bevel spins Kintyre in midair, and my brother falls on his trothed, limp-limbed and flopping. Bevel scrambles out from under him, blood already splashed up his chest. The cyclone approaches, and Bevel wraps his hand into Kintyre’s belt, determined not to be ripped away. He is pressing on a wound in Kintyre’s stomach, but the force of the gale is so strong, it keeps pushing his shoulder back. Blood spins into the air in tiny droplets, like morbid rain.
Cement dust and splinters of broken furniture swirl up into a deadly cloud. It swallows my brothers, and my enemy, and my wife, whole, obscuring them from my gaze.
“Pip!” I cry. “Pip!”
Another sound shatters the keening scream of the wind and the high-pitched whine of the Viceroy’s laughter. It is a deep, dark thrumming, like drums, and motorcycle engines, like angry cats. A throaty boom shakes the room, and cuts through the Viceroy’s cyclone like the fallout from an atomic bomb. The wind stutters to a stop, and I stagger, wincing and grimacing as I try to keep my feet under me. I had been braced against the push of the wind, and must reach out to the rubble to steady myself. Another boom, and the dust and blood fall to the ground, revealing a grisly tableau.
Kintyre is sprawled on the ground, spread-eagled, his hair a tangled mess. But I can see his face, and he is . . . thank the Writer, he is blinking, he is blinking. He is still alive! Legs thrown over his hips, straddling him, a half-naked Bevel presses his own shirt against the wound, packing it as best he can and leaning down low over Kintyre, Speaking Words of Healing straight into his ear. And Pip . . .
Oh, Pip, I think, stumbling forward a few steps before the cutting pain in my side forces me to stillness with a frustrated grimace.
Pip is flying.
The ivy is doubling back, surrounding her, answering her call now. Her fury. Bending to her will. Behind her, over her shoulders, the vines weave together, leaves flaring bright, into a pair of violently green wings. Green . . . and violet.
I had once compared Lucy Turn Piper to an angel. We had been in the Lost Library, and she was standing in a shaft of light that struck her at such an angle it appeared as if she was wreathed in wings made of golden light. Seeing her now, hovering a few handspans above the floor, glaring down at the Viceroy with all the holy fire of the righteous in her eyes—eyes that glow completely green, the color blotting out the iris, and whites, and pupils all—I am reminded that, in the Overrealm, angels are creatures of fury and terror. Angels avenge.
“Enough now,” Pip says, and the boom is in her voice. The Viceroy, too shocked to even speak, crumples to the floor and gibbers.
“The Author is Dead,” she intones, “but Authorial Intent lives. I control the afterlives of the characters, not you!”
The Viceroy wriggles and writhes like a worm on a hook, pleading, slurring.
My wife turns her powerful gaze on me, and holds out her hand. Who am I to disobey the command of such a creature? I stumble forward and take it. As soon as our palms kiss, the pain in my side eases. I can’t decide if it’s terrifying or arousing that my wife has become some sort of emerald valkyrie. I simply feel lucky.
“How lucky am I that I got to fall in love with you twice?” I say, and lift Pip’s hand to my mouth, kiss her knuckles softly once, twice . . . and a third time, because there is magic in threes.
And then I don the Shadow’s Mask for what I know will be the final time, and turn to face what is left of the Viceroy.
The truth of being a spymaster is that sometimes, one must do terrible things in order to preserve peace. To keep the kingdom healthy, one must sometimes wield a surgical knife. While I preferred to run my network from the warmth and safety of my private study in Turn Hall, there were those of my predecessors who were more inclined toward getting their hands messy.
Reaching deep into the magical memory banks of the mask, I pull up and download into my mind the most terrible and dark deeds of those who came before me. Until now, I had avoided filling my head with the
horrible knowledge they had amassed, content with fooling myself into believing that I could preserve the freedom of my kingdom without recourse to dark deeds and darker spells.
But now?
Now, I tumble every Word ever Spoken, ever Heard, ever learned, ever developed by a Shadow Hand—Bevel included—into my mind, and soak them up, eager and parched.
The Viceroy doesn’t even look up at me, doesn’t even consider me a threat, until I am standing directly over him.
“What are you—?” he begins, and then realizes I am wearing the mask. “N-no!” he stammers. “You can’t!”
“And yet,” I say softly, memorizing the way the smooth, cool silver of the inside of the mask brushes my cheek for the last time, “you are the one who named me more threatening than your archnemesis. You were the one who acknowledged me as such. Not I. You are the one who claimed the Shadow Hand as your great enemy. And by the rules of the narrative, that makes it so, does it not, Reader?”
“It does, Main Character,” Pip intones solemnly.
Words have always been my power. Words have always been my domain. So I slip up to him and whisper Words of Unbinding, Words of Unraveling, Words to Loosen Knots. Words that, backed with my newfound understanding of physics and biology, I can use to not only Reverse, but also Unmake.
“Oh my god,” Pip breathes, her face taking on a beatific expression even as the tears slip down her cheeks. “Forsyth, the Words. They’re so beautiful.”
At first, the Viceroy simply stares up at me like a trapped prey animal. And then he grimaces. The cuts on his face reappear. His legs jerk. His wrist breaks. His eyes fly open as he understands what is happening. He begs mercy; I ignore him. I tell his joints to dissolve, his bones to liquefy, his cells to let go, his protein strands to unravel.
His final scream of defiance ends in a whimpering pop as all that the Viceroy was froths into nothingness and boils away.
Silence, glorious and pregnant, fills the room.
