Allasakar.
When the creature stopped, Andaro stopped; they stood inches apart, but even so, Valedan could see the darkness that had been Carlo’s eyes. What Andaro saw in them, he did not know—but he must have seen something, if not in the eyes, then in the line of face, the twisting of muscles into familiar spasms of expression, that spoke of something other than the demonic, for he raised his hand, his empty shield hand, slowly.
Touched the face of Carlo di’Jevre very, very gently.
“Na’Carre,” he said, his voice a whisper. “How did this happen?”
“Pedro . . . gave . . . us . . . water.”
Andaro nodded gently. Carlo’s hand, shaking, rose to touch Andaro’s; they stood a moment in the darkness, and made of the darkness something other than the death and the terror that it was.
“I will fight our enemy,” Andaro said quietly. “For you. No matter what the cost.”
Complicated by shadows, Carlo’s expression shifted. Valedan couldn’t read it.
“Thank . . . you.”
Andaro di’Corsarro’s hand fell away from Carlo di’Jevre’s face. He stepped back, and turned toward Valedan kai di’Leonne, his expression shifting into lines as hard as his sword’s.
Valedan waited, thinking that the circle had become much smaller—and that the boundaries had been writ in shadow; there would be no crossing the lines without a death, no quaint surrender. This was real. This at last was the fight that he had been seeking.
And it was not.
He waited. Is this war? he thought, but there was no one to ask the question of, not here. He hefted his own sword, waiting for Andaro. Waiting for Andaro’s first move, just as he had done when the sun had beat down upon them.
Andaro di’Corsarro made that move.
Lightly, pivoting on his left foot. He swung round, his sword in motion, his face white as the Northern snows that Mirialyn ACormaris had given Valedan sight of as a gift in his youth. You see, she had said, how the snow reflects the light even in the darkness.
Yes, he said, silently, as he lost sight of Andaro’s face. Yes, I do.
The Southern swordsman thrust his blade into the waiting body of Carlo di’Jevre, piercing the heart.
They heard the roar through the veil of magic that gave them any vision at all.
It eclipsed the sound and fury of magery in all its glory, the chanting and the cries of the priesthood’s sons and daughters, as both magi and priest tried to break through the barrier that had denied them all so many years ago. Memory, in that frenzy. Had he been there, had Sigurne been there, they would have counselled reserve and caution.
“Was that ours?” Sigurne asked.
“How should I know? We see the same thing, you and I.”
“You are an expert on ancient lore; I am only an expert on demonology.”
He snorted. “If I had to guess, I would say that there is a fight of some sort beneath the barrier, and the creature has been dealt a blow.”
“Not fatal.”
“No.” If it had been, the barriers would fall. Power such as this, localized and brought into immediate existence, was commonly believed to require a physical focus, a living vessel.
Ser Anton di’Guivera crossed the field. He carried his sword; he wore his armor. He paused only once, when a man with long hair and Royal insignia knelt in bloodied grass beside the body of a young boy. Flashing at his neck, catching the sun in sharp, sharp relief, the Northern symbol of the healers.
He did not ask about the boy.
Did not, in fact, want to know.
The end was in sight, and he was not certain what that end was. But he knew that his place was there, by the darkness—or in it. His unnamed sword caught light just as harshly as the healer’s medallion had. Sun’s light. Lord’s light. He was a proud man. He knew what had happened, knew even what the role he had played had been.
Had never thought, not once, that it would come to this. The Allasakari and their pawns had been his means to an end.
Well, he had one. An end.
He did not pray. There was no point. He did not offer the Lord his obeisance, did not give any sign of his fealty. The Lord judged as he judged, after all.
The Kings’ Swords denied him access until Commander Sivari waved him through.
Even in Sivari’s face, accusation. Suspicion.
I owe you nothing, the swordmaster thought. But he found himself saying, “My apologies, my profound apologies. I did not know.”
It was truth. And because it was offered to a man who spoke so little of anything else, it was accepted.
“Tell us,” Sivari said, waving another man over. “Tell us what you do know.”
Valedan kai di’Leonne was already in motion.
The move had been made; his response had to be as fast, as decisive. No matter that it was not the move that he’d expected. Andaro had time to pull his weapon free and step back before the creature’s roar died into darkness.
“Don’t let it touch you!” Valedan shouted.
Andaro nodded.
The darkness shifted. Constricted. The creature snarled, and its hands became living fire. Red sword, red shield, sparkling with a brilliance that never truly alleviated the shadows.
It kept the wall at its back, and began to shift along its periphery.
Devon ATerafin nodded as the Southern swordmaster finished speaking. “Then he is . . . infested. We have some experience with that.”
He turned. Sivari caught his arm, turning him back. “ATerafin,” the Commander said.
“I don’t know,” Devon replied. “But if I had to guess, I would say that the creature that inhabits the body has not yet had the time it requires to fully absorb identity and therefore control.”
“And this?”
Devon stared into a darkness that seemed to devour all light cast upon it. Remembering. “He’s here,” Devon replied softly.
Silence, then.
“I would have spared you!” No hesitation in the voice; none.
“You killed Carlo,” Andaro replied, the anger buried beneath the cold edge of the words.
The creature snarled with Carlo di’Jevre’s face. But the face itself was changing slowly. Elongating. The jaw subtly widening. The blood splashed along his chest was red and dark, but the wound that had caused its flow was no longer visible.
Valedan stepped forward, coming in at right angles to Andaro di’Corsarro. He did not speak. His sword did.
The creature parried.
Andaro struck. Blade hit shield and, as the creature shifted weight to his shield arm, Valedan struck again.
Blood.
What had once been Carlo roared in anger, and then it threw the shield.
Valedan ducked, deflecting the flashing fire with the flat of his blade. Overbalanced, he fell.
His arm burned. And burned. Leather gave way to skin, and skin to bone.
But it was not his sword arm. Not that arm.
He rose, bloodied, barely able to control the spasms of the injured limb. Barely, but he managed. He had been waiting for this fight.
Andaro struck.
Valedan struck.
Although they had no time to speak, no space in which to exchange words or plans, they began to time their attacks, never moving in alone.
Ser Anton waited by the circle’s side. The grass, not surprisingly, had died, and a wave of slowly creeping brown radiated out from the centre of the darkness. Above, there was screaming and silence, a mixture of panic and fascination; the field itself was scattered with the men and women who defined power in the Empire, and the tourney had become something older than a game, something real. Something deadly.
Bards walked among the crowds, calming them; bards spoke and were spoken
to in a silence that brooked no eavesdropping.
He wondered what might have happened had this event, and this attack, occurred in the Dominion. Wondered, but distantly; his thoughts were turned inward and outward, and both inside and out there was darkness.
The darkness without shifted.
A great cry, some mixture of triumph and fear, rose from the priests, and they called for aid. For the first time, Ser Anton di’Guivera was privileged to witness the interference of Kings.
They came, golden-eyed, the demonic rulers of the Northern Empire. Avoid their eyes, and they appeared to be nothing more—although certainly not less—than men; not giants, but tall and of warrior bearing. But avoiding their eyes was not a simple task; where they looked, they saw, and he felt, as the eyes of the Wisdom-born King swept across him, that they saw much.
Much, in fact, that he himself was unwilling to see.
It had not taken Ser Anton di’Guivera long to understand that the golden-eyed were not the spawn of demons, but the spawn of Northern gods, weak gods, gods who would see their people ruled by women and half-men and the aged and feeble as their unnatural law demanded.
Before he had come to the North, he had memorized the stories—and they were legion—of Northern weakness, of Northern decadence; he had full expected to see sniveling excess acted out upon the corner of every street. But he had come for the Kings’ Challenge. And as a Challenger, he had met the Kings.
At that instant, kneeling in the formal Northern posture, his back straight, his sword at his bent knee, he realized that he could not—not then, and not ever—raise his sword against these men. Golden-eyed, enemies. The sun was high that day, the sky clear, and he knew then that the sun did not shine in the same way over lands that had never known desert.
The Kings had nodded; the moment had passed. He had thought that nothing could revive the sense of wonder and dread that the Kings conveyed that day, for even at closing ceremonies, his composure, his elation, his weariness, had robbed them of their grandeur.
But today the moment came again. He was young.
They shed their robes, their crowns, their regalia; they set aside the weapons that were part of their finery. But the one king retained the rod, and the other, the sword, and as they approached the struggling priests and the exhausted mages, they turned, one to another, and crossed the items they carried. Rod. Sword. Light flared at the intersection of metal and metal.
Wisdom. Justice.
The balance of an Empire.
He sensed it. He thought Andaro might. The creature shifted on both feet, swaying as the wall at his back seemed to buckle. Hard to tell with darkness, but it was there—a moment of weakness. A lessening of the power of a god.
Valedan kai di’Leonne uttered a single word and threw his strength into a frenzied assault.
Leonne.
They heard it. The word seemed to resonate in the air, witnessed by the open sky. The dark shield seemed to shy away from the combined effort of the Kings, casting groundward for death and lack of light. The light was golden; the blood shed to capture it, red. The Kings had joined the combat.
At just that moment, Ser Anton understood why the Shining Court, whose Lord claimed godhood, and whose generals were Kialli, feared the Northern Empire. He understood why they had chosen to ally themselves with the South, why they had promised aid, in war, against the Kings and their people.
And he understood what his own role in that must be.
A fire burned him, just as the Kings’ light burned at the darkness. But the darkness resisted.
She could not approach its shell. Could not approach the shadows, although the shadows had been her strength and her power—her survival—when she had been a Queen in waiting in the Shining City.
The Ospreys, Duarte, Alexis, Cook—the men and women she knew—kept a distance enforced by Kings’ Swords and magi. Only Auralis sought to break that edict, and he had been detained. There would be words and, if she was any judge of Kalakar, Auralis would lose a rank. Rank in the Empire was a concept she was only beginning to understand; it was like having power, except without any.
The darkness itself was heaving under the assault of Kings and magi, of god-born priests. She knew it; she could almost taste the way it snapped and struggled. Her mouth was dry. The Lord’s power was here; somehow, whoever had taken Carlo di’Jevre had formed a link with Allasakar across the distance between the isle and the Shining City itself.
If the vessel had been stronger, she thought no one would be able to stand against His shadow. No one but she, and she could not approach the darkness.
“Kiriel!”
She turned; all the Ospreys did.
Jewel Markess ATerafin, chest heaving, ran across the green, her domicis and Kallandras the bard at her side, her two den-kin, Carver and Angel, not far behind.
“Jay.”
But attacking together or attacking alone, they were losing ground. The blows they landed did less damage, caused less pain; the creature was gaining in power.
It became easier for Valedan as the demon’s face lost the last vestiges of Carlo di’Jevre’s; he wondered if it were easier for Andaro. But he wondered briefly; the creature’s strikes were still aimed at him, and he had now been wounded three times. Armor meant for the Challenge was not meant for a darkness and a demon such as this.
“Can you bring it down?”
Kiriel was silent.
“Kiriel?”
No one else had thought to ask her. No one else had thought of who she was, of what she could do. She had become, for the fight, an Osprey—half-twisted Houseguard with a past she didn’t want to own.
Jay caught her by both arms. She allowed it, meeting brown eyes with brown eyes.
“Kiriel, please. Valedan’s alive—but he won’t stay that way.”
“The Kings are having an effect.”
“I know.”
No doubt in the two words; she did.
“And I also know that they’ll succeed in the end; whatever the power is, it’s not completely connected to All—to its host. But that won’t matter if Valedan’s dead.” She met Kiriel’s gaze, her own unblinking, intent. “Tell me what you need me to do,” she said, her voice low and steady, “And I’ll do it.”
Kiriel knew, then, that Jewel knew she could take the shield down. Kiriel herself hadn’t known it for certain until that moment; the ring on her hand was throbbing as if it were a wound. She felt something ease within her; felt the dryness in her mouth catch her tongue, it grew so strong. But she managed to speak regardless.
“Tell them—tell them to stop.”
Duarte, present and silent, frowned. “Tell who?”
But Jewel understood her. Jewel almost always understood her. She swore. “All right. Can you—can you come with me?”
Kiriel gazed at the darkness and then shook her head. “I don’t—I don’t think so. If I can—if I can do what you’ve said, I don’t think I can be that close to their power without—”
“Never mind. I’ll get them to stop. But Kiriel?”
“Yes?”
“Be ready, and be fast.” She turned to the men who now waited at her back like a small army of a shieldwall. Taking them, Kiriel saw, for granted. Because she could.
“Okay, little bit of difficulty,” Jewel told them. “We need to call the Kings and the priests off.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
She caught his eye immediately, although later he wouldn’t have been able to say why—and Devon ATerafin was almost never at a loss for an explanation.
Maybe it was the cadence of her step; in the middle of this madness, surrounded by magical fire, smoke and golden light, facing a barrier whose strength and whose appearance they had encountered together before in the darkest Henden the Empire had ever seen, Jew
el ATerafin walked as if she were avoiding the market chaos on a busy Selday.
And she walked toward him.
Business as usual.
It was strange that after all their arguments and unease, that mattered. “ATerafin,” he said, as she came within earshot, having lifted her hand twice to show the House Council crest to waiting Swords.
She nodded. No formality from Jewel; she was all business. “The barrier can be brought down,” she said, curt and to the point.
“But?”
A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “But you need to get the Kings and the priests away from it.” She paused for effect. “Now.”
He turned, then; she followed him. Duvari stood not ten yards from the backs of the men he had made it his life to protect. “You realize,” Devon said, “that he’s not going to like this.”
“That’s why you’re going to ask. I don’t much like the idea of getting into a fight with him, and it’s all I can ever do to speak politely at him when he’s around.” She shrugged. “That, and he trusts you.”
“He trusts you, in as much as he ever trusts a member of the powerful patriciate. But stay here.” He left her then, and she obeyed, trusting him.
Three minutes later, the Kings put up their arms. The god-born priests, golden-eyed and weary, retreated.
Andaro cried out in pain; his leg buckled, flesh sheared to bone in an instant. Valedan cried out as well, but it was a war cry. His voice was hoarse with it. Not long now, and he would have no strength for words. But he was Southern-born, after all; a warrior’s heir.
Kiriel di’Ashaf saw the light fade. The hair on her neck stood on end, then. Jewel came back for her, and she caught her den leader’s hand in her own, squeezing it too tightly. Jewel said nothing. They crossed the green together, making their way past Kings’ Swords, past exhausted magi, past priests who had laid down the symbols of their Order and the foci of their power.
She saw all this, and more; saw the Kings as they stood back from the barrier, arms crossed in front of their chests, shoulders straight. The war was not over in their eyes, but she had joined it, and she guessed that they did not quite trust her. Which was well enough; she wouldn’t have.
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