“Lir! Lir, what’s happening?” Etain’s sword is out, blazing.
But she can’t stop what’s about to happen.
Nothing can.
I rise, stagger forward, know what I’ll find. Walk a street, feeling the same horror and shock I did the first time, a year ago, a lifetime ago.
Etain trails after me, turning, looking for our enemy, sword in one hand and flame in the other.
At the end of the street, we turn, clear the broken buildings. Somehow, the hot spring where I found Freya and Meridiana rests under the awning of a cobbler’s shop. Next to that is the corpse of a butcher I knew, bought venison from for Esmanth’s birthday, pinned to the wall by a spear of magical light that blinks in and out of existence.
The Oryllix are close. I grit my teeth, confusion and fear forgotten, and draw my blades.
We clear the street and bump into the tail end of a frothing crowd, roiling with rebellion. Above them, the walls of my family’s keep. I breathe deep, know what I’ll see what I raise my eyes.
My father, in chains, bent over the edge of the wall. His face is peaceful, accepting, dignified in the face of imminent death. My mother is next to him, pale, hands clasped before her, her golden hair framing a face drawn with sorrow. Next to them, my brother strains at his bonds, a face that is a mirror of my own shouting words lost in the noise of the crowd.
And over them stand the Oryllix and Mynogin. One holds my father’s chains, his arm raised high, waiting to deliver a sentence already determined. His blade, Bloodmoon, is a curved length of crimson that hisses and steams in the sunlight. Two is behind them, a spear of reality warping magic in her hand, face impassive. Mynogin stands on the other side of my father, proclaiming something to the crowd, but I can’t hear him over the blood pumping in my ears.
My father’s steward surges from the crowd, shouts something about the rightful rulers of Loria, something no one else dares voice. He rushes the wall, fist raised, spittle flying from his lips.
I strain, try to stop him, push against the crowd. I know his fate, have seen it in my dreams.
He’s already dead.
Two doesn’t even look at him. Her delicate finger raises, and even as he clears the edge of the mob, he stumbles, falls to the street, and starts to scream. Screams that no amount of liquor will ever help me forget. His skin melts and his flesh boils, his body convulsing and unravelling against the stone as his wails echo against the walls of my keep.
My fists lights with fire, weak but still deadly, and I reach forward to push my way through the crowd.
Etain’s grip pulls me back. I turn, mindless, ready to kill whatever is between me and my vengeance, but the terror in Etain’s eyes stops me, makes me realize what I was about to do, brings me back to reality. “Not yet. Not now,” she says, voice urgent. “Not against them.”
And then she looks up, eyes wide with sorrow.
I turn, already know what she’s seen.
At the edge of the wall, in the doorway of one of the battlement’s towers, is my sister. Esmanth, her face pale, shouting, straining against a guard. His fist raises, lowers, impacting the back of her skull. She falls, boneless.
I move, my blades hissing from their sheaths, Etain’s gift lighting them with fire.
This time is different.
This time, I’m ready.
PART FOUR
-The Garden-
Echoed of the Past
My blade bites the neck of the first guard to block my path. It sings a gritty note through the trunk of his spine. Blood sprays in a fanfare. Drops paint my face and lips, salt and copper. I lick them greedily, feeding my soul.
Etain guards my flank and we charge on. I meet the empty gazes of the Oryllix above.
They loom, frozen. Perplexed or dismissive? It doesn’t matter; I’m not powerless this time.
The crowd parts like water, flowing away, shrinking from my surge of artifact power. Flame-wreathed blades weigh nothing in palms capable of crushing stone. My feet dance through the tumult, avoiding tripping legs and fallen bodies on instinct. Poison resistance purges my lungs of smoke from a razed city.
A knife thrust from behind kisses my neck with a sharp sting. It doesn’t stagger me; the wound is gone before my boot strikes the ground again. I reach out with my mind, shove the mob away. They obey my will, my compulsion washing over them buoyed by rage.
I am a weapon of vengeance.
Etain and I pass beyond the crush of vicious figures. They disappear, misting away into shards of memory and faraway bloodlust chants I hear in my nightmares.
For a moment, the world shimmers, dreamlike. The Garden, swaying trees and ivory columns, is visible through the walls of my family’s keep.
This is real, and it isn’t.
My father kneels above at the bailey wall, eyes closed, sad but serene as he waits for death. Mynogin holds the chain collared at my father’s throat and the pair fade in and out of existence.
And the Oryllix wait. One stands over my father, his blade still upraised. His eyes are lock with mine, still expressionless. He doesn’t speak, just watches, sword above my father’s neck.
Expressionless but hesitant. The message is pretty fucking clear. Black satisfaction spurs my run.
Two hovers behind her hideous twin. Her pale, androgynous form is swallowed in the ivory silk of her robes. It flows over the small withered sacks of her breasts. Like One’s tunic and pants of the same material, the robes reveal a weak, skeletal shape. Their lack of armor chills me. They don’t need protection.
That’s why, perplexed as they are, they haven’t tried to stop my approach.
Etain hunches, turns herself into a springboard that lands me on the battlement. I haul her up and surge.
She grabs a handful of leather and flesh. “Wait!” Her eyes never leave One. “Don’t be an idiot and get yourself killed just when I’m starting to like you. You don’t know their game yet.”
Two frowns at this. More guards appear, Mynogin’s men trooping at us across the inner bailey beyond the battlement’s arch. A score, then two, then three; crimson tabards flutter in a warning. Pike heads and swords glint even in the smoke.
I tense, both blades ready. Etain crouches in a warrior’s stance.
Tension snaps. The soldiers charge, bellowing war cries, losing formation as they lumber forward. Armored feet beat the earth, jarring my teeth.
My swords burn, hungry. Etain’s blade lights with emerald flame.
A row ten abreast reaches us before less fleet companions, axes arced high, pikes held level.
“This part is real,” I mutter, gritting my teeth for the armored wave.
“Memories, shadows, but a shadow can kill under the influence of the Oryllix.” Etain throws me a glance. “It’s nothing we can’t take, so don’t annoy me by dying. If you make me stitch you up, I might trade out some parts.” Her eyes drop low. “Or add a few.”
“Rude.” I laugh. What else is there, when the end feels close? Death laughs at us our whole lives; might as well join him.
I fill my lungs as the men descend, and I let them come.
The captain reaches us, overconfident, doesn’t bother with sword forms. His blade falls, overcommitted. I weave to the side, and it passes finger’s width from my face that may as well be miles.
I thrust between the thick-stitched seam of his chest piece. Breath and blood escape from the hole in his heart. He falls dead without so much as a gurgle.
The rest of them aren’t as stupid, or at least, aren’t as eager to die. They ring us, tightening.
Solid plan, if not for Etain. She huffs a wicked laugh as flame surges from her hand. Four men reduce to columns of oily ash clinging to parched bones.
The rest grow brave, or desperate. Forward ranks surge in and more pile into the square behind. Etain and I move as one, back to back.
Four men splinter, come at us. They don’t fumble, don’t shout or grunt. Veterans, battle-hardened. The old guard Mynogin brought to raze my city. Flint
and stone.
It won’t help them.
I parry a blow, swinging up so sharply, with so much power, that it rips a blade from the man’s fingers. My sword stabs his mouth like a lover’s tongue, shattering teeth. He folds to the stone, screaming and spitting blood, fragments of his face. Two more come on behind, and more.
Etain’s blade fills the hazy air with a sharp sweet odor of cauterized flesh. Her victims don’t have time to cry out.
Two swords strike for me. I can’t dodge without taking one to the gut. Sometimes I still forget that mortal laws don’t apply.
At the last moment I drop to a crouch faster than they can track, swing, and impale both in the groin. Twin crimson geysers underscore their howls. I bathe in the spray, revel in it. But I’ve left myself vulnerable, and my posture makes me a target for the next man.
I’m not worried. I can feel, through Meridiana’s gift, what’s about to happen.
A slender flaming hand passes over my head. Superheated light takes my attacker in the torso, blasting him to char. His hammer melts, spattering the ground with hissing slag.
Even as he melts, she turns her blade on the bowels of another, effortless, as I rise and my blade takes the head of another. We could go on like this all day.
One and Two must finally have picked up on that.
The rest of the guards halt, hold; some draw back.
The Oryllix betray nothing more than raised brows. What are they waiting for?
Etain’s voice in my mind is one grim word: That.
Three soldiers dart between the joints of a shield wall, crossbows levelled. Etain spins, wraps me in her arms.
Three bolts fire in unison, a deathly snap.
Etain spins us with speed and grace. Bolts thunk into her back, staggering us.
“Etain!”
She releases me, raises from her crouch, grin fierce. “It’ll take more than that.”
Will it? The bolts jut from her chest crimson tipped. She winks and turns to the phalanx. She reaches behind and pushes. A shaft slides free and the she catches the bolt before it can fall.
Etain holds it above her head. It ignites in her hand, an offering of flame.
Weapons clatter against stone in a dull symphony. Soldiers drop to their knees. Some raise hands in surrender; others cower, heads cradled in folded arms.
Etain stands, wisps of flame trailing from her fingertips, auburn hair spattered with blood as it blows in the light breeze. Two bolts still jut from her chest. She pulls another free, still grinning.
She’s fucking incredible.
Flatterer, she answers silently.
Corpses ringing us shudder, fragment and disappear. The world inhales, and the garden is visible for a moment. When the memory reasserts itself with a snap inside my brain, the soldiers, living and dead, are gone.
Mynogin has disappeared, though my father and his bindings remain.
The wall is different, too. Esmanth is gone. My mother, Tagan. Their executioners, the guards that held them, the crowd below; all faded into the mist of time.
All that remain are the Oryllix, and my father.
Two extends her hand. Light and shadow pull from the air and twine, forming balls of crackling darkness. They rotate in the air, hovering above her extended palm, and eat the light of the day. It casts her in unnatural shadow.
The darkness absorbs into her, leaving three bright spinning orbs.
They have an aura, a feeling that reaches into my chest.
They’re screaming.
Etain curses in her native tongue. “Unnatural harvest,” she spits.
I know what I’m seeing, know she’s right.
The souls of my parents, my brother, gifted my Mordenn.
One’s blade lays slung over a shoulder. He doesn’t move as I approach, ten steps that feel like a lifetime.
What am I doing? What is there to do? I won’t kill him here, let alone the pair.
But I won’t die here, and I won’t let this end without teaching them a slow-healing lesson.
My father. He kneels still. He can’t see me.
Unbidden, a memory intrudes. My seventeenth birthday. The day I left for university. It was autumn, the forest of our estates a blanket of crimson and roan, its canopy spun gold. We’d sparred, my father and I, in between the boles of oaks older than my family line, giants watching as our practice swords shattered the brittle morning cold. “You’ve grown too much for children’s games,” my father praised on a warming sip from his flask. He set it on a stump where our horses shuffled impatiently, and from inside drew two blades.
“Honor and strength are the forces of government, Lir. But should the day come…” His face said the rest; that evil, a hatred that only grows the hearts of men, was insidious, eternal, and far too often, victorious.
Standing over him now, looking into the eyes of the monster who murdered him, I know he was right.
I raise my cold iron and swing away. Two flinches at the motion, raising a hand. And One, that dead-eyed fucker, flinches when my father’s head rolls to a stop at his feet.
My father’s shade explodes into fragments of light. I couldn’t save him, but I freed him. His essence wisps away.
An orb in Two’s hand explodes. The concussion shatters stained glass at the tower tops.
Etain and I are tossed like ragdolls against a tower.
Two shrieks; fury but something more. She clutches her hand, slicked with black beads of whatever powers her dark machinery.
One hunches, braced against the impact, arms shielding his face, face spattered by the same substance. His, his sister’s. Both, I hope.
Etain groans beside me, working to sit.
I struggle to my knees. Freya’s gift rages, repairing mortal wounds. My armor is shredded, torn free, swords lost somewhere in the rubble.
Two is worse. She staggers to her feet, nose dripping blood, hair and clothes burned away, emaciated body charred.
Her wounded state reveals something curious and awful.
Her nude body is a roadmap of scars. Not the slices and stabs of battle. Tissue mutilated, healed, and mutilated again in runes that make my gorge rise. They feel wrong, sinister, a curse being chanted by her flesh. I stare at them, try to decipher their meaning, my body rebels. I shake, and a pain splits my head so deeply I retch.
“Don’t,” Etain gasps from behind me. “Don’t look. Those runes are the language of the Depths, where not even Heijl’s sight can penetrate.”
I scramble through the chunks of stone, digging for my swords. Mordenn? Who did this to her?
“We did it to ourselves.” One’s voice is a millstone, echoing across eternity. Can they read my thoughts? He comes, one step at a time, murder in his eyes. Two follows behind, wounded and timid, a hand on his shoulder. He voices the words, but it’s Two who speaks through him. “Eons ago. And do you know why?”
My hand finds a hilt in the debris.
“We were meant to rule.”
They’re close now. Through the tears in his clothes, I see scars on One’s body. Runes of his own.
“We have travelled worlds, bargained with gods, and suffered pain you will never understand. And we have killed. Millions of souls, a legion of death.” He stops, Bloodmoon perched, its slate-dull blade a length of crimson over his pale shoulder. Two removes her hand, and now he speaks. “An army to be raised against the Pantheon’s obsolete functions.”
Etain curses, getting to her feet. My hand finds sword number two.
I bring them forward and stagger up behind her. I will not die on my knees.
One’s mouth twists. “You are meaningless. Do what you will here. A pointless interval of a mortal life.” His blade flicks, a cut so fast that I don’t see his wrist move.
Bloodmoon arcs, striking my blades.
Both shatter. The last gifts my father gave me ping in pieces off the blood-smeared stones.
I magnify every black feeling inside; fury, wrath, jealousy, deceit. I draw them in like a
tide and focus on my hand. Consume.
One is closest, but not my target. Two has lingered further and further behind, not managing to recover her dispassionate, hollow-eyed expression.
It’s her I paint with a column of flame so intense it lights the bailey like midday.
One turns, grabs his twin, who slaps blistered skin between keening wails. He tries to trace the runes of her flesh in a pattern, but she writhes, crazed with pain. I shouldn’t be able to hurt them so, can’t understand. The loss of my father’s soul?
Andraste materializes down in the courtyard. The moment the Oryllix are struggling and distracted, she raises a hand.
Her gesture radiates power.
A hammerblow of unseen energy strikes the twins. It doesn’t seem to wound them, but they move so quickly and with such force that air screams, the illusion ripples, and their bodies are hurled through a dark tear in the garden’s fabric.
Andraste glides forward in a way eerily reminiscent of her statue form. She raises her other hand. Her fingers tremble and then her body. Blood trickles from her nose.
Everything pulses, inhales, constricts. The sky darkens to night at midday. A black vortex swirls inside the tear. Trees bend, buckle, threaten to collapse. Then, with a crack like thunder, the vortex lifts, taking the blackness with it. All that marks the departure is a patch of flattened grass.
Tension releases on a sigh of wind, and the garden is restored. Trees whisper in the breeze, the scent of their dark red blooms heady over the odor of smoke and death.
Andraste exhales. “Much better. Perhaps they’ll send their master next time. It’s been so long since he paid a visit himself.”
What?
I fall to the grass, winded by more than the fight, rest elbows on my knees and bury my head a minute. I try not to think about what happened, and it’s all I can think about.
Voices of the women reach me, and fade. Our bond, the Gardener; somehow, they know I need a minute.
Andraste sits beside me.
“How many days have passed?” I ask, meaning more than just my time in here. Not enough. In my heart no amount of days will soften this. But I have other things to worry about.
Temple of Cocidius Page 29
