The line of her jaw whitened. Her hand became a fist around the crystal, and her robes billowed, flying higher and higher as she stood her ground. He did not want to stand beside her while cloth flew in that wind, because the twisting of cloth suggested life where life shouldn’t be. But that was fear, and fear could feed either caution or hysteria. Rath had never had any use or respect for hysteria.
“Whatever lives in the undercity,” she told him, “will hear those horns. Hold your dagger,” she added, “and wait; we will not, now, travel to Cordufar.”
“Evayne—”
“We will not, now, have any reason to do so.”
As he listened, he heard one note above the horns; it was not a horn call, but sounded instead like the low peal of a great bell. And in the distance, against the fallen walls and the standing facades, he saw a flicker of red that suggested fire.
Chapter Twelve
THIS HAD BEEN A CITY OF GHOSTS, of things dead and absent, the detritus of history preserved beneath ignorant streets above. It had suggested, the way a dignified age suggests, the passage of a beauty that, at its height, must have caused men to stand for a moment, awe-struck and shorn of words, because words would never be equal to the task of describing what was seen and felt.
Rath had never paused to imagine what might have dwelled here, because he assumed that he knew: it was a city, and a city meant a press of huddled people, some too poor to survive long, and some too wealthy to fall. He had imagined, in the shadows of privacy and the almost smug sense of ownership he had felt in the undercity, how those distant—and long-dead—people had lived, where they might have worked, what they might have eaten. He had guessed, haphazardly, at who they might have worshiped, assuming in the end that that worship would involve the gods in their Weston guises. It made sense, after all; the written language that was left along the base of pedestals, broken walls, and the small bowls and household items that occasionally remained was the precursor of the Weston that traveled through the city’s halls, high and low.
But he knew, as the flicker of distant red grew longer and deeper, that he had been wrong. What had walked these streets, when the city was open to sky and knew sun and rain and sea squall, had not been some simple variant of what walked above them now.
“Ararath, stand.” Evayne gestured, and light, a pale blue strand in the shadows, scrawled a brief, hasty circle across the ground; it encompassed both of them. “Stay your ground for as long as you can.”
“Lady.” He watched light grow in the streets, red light, dim and visceral, like a heart exposed to sun while flesh still clings in places. “Against what comes, I do not think I will stand for long.”
“Against what comes,” she replied, “you will not stand at all, but it is not, in the end, for you that they come. You will see Dukes, here, Ararath, and a brief, brief glimpse of the whole of Winter.
“They will be weakened by this,” she continued. “They will be weakened enough that we will still have time.” But the words lent her no hope, and no peace; her lips were a thin, white line.
Who are you, Lady? He did not speak her name because of a sudden the syllables seemed too insignificant to contain her.
“Evayne,” she whispered, indicating that he must have spoken aloud. “But I know the old and hidden ways, and some part of the Winter road is in me. Some part, as well, of the Summer Road, but it has not been traveled for millennia, and even were it, it is not to be feared. Hold your dagger, and if the light gutters, wield the other. Do not touch me, or I will devour you, and we will fail.”
Snow came from the shadows. Snow and silvered light. What it touched, it transformed, briefly, in his vision; he saw forest, trees as thick as columns rising, black, into the sky, branches splayed like gnarled, ancient fingers. Nothing grew on those trees but ice; nothing sheltered beneath them.
But through them? The notes of the horns, louder now than wind, but wilder in their keening.
Snow lay like shroud across the stone of the undercity, piling in drifts, but its reach was not the storm’s reach; it was bisected by a single line, invisible but present. On one side, forest continued to unfold, and on the other? The familiar: the columns and walls, the facades, the fallen rock. But these, too, were transformed by burning light. Not Summer light to Winter, but fire to ice.
Out of the fire came living flame. Tall as the buildings from which it seemed to emerge, it gestured and wings rose, pinions stretching between facades, which crumbled at the casual contact. The air around its body eddied as it moved. Rath did not step back, but it took effort. This death was not the death he sought, and it was death. No weapon—no meager dagger with its engraved, pale runes—could touch the creature that stepped through these streets, dragging in its wake the smaller and paler demons that had, until this moment, been the whole of his experience.
But he came to the snow, to the sharp edge of it, drifts piling against unseen wall, and he gazed across it to where Rath stood. If he noticed Rath at all, he gave no sign; he noticed, instead, Evayne. He stepped across the snow line and raised his arms, dropping them suddenly as if tearing at the very air. Snow evaporated, rising from his feet as sudden clouds of steam. Where he walked, snow melted, and if he did not walk quickly, it mattered little.
“Stand,” Evayne commanded again. She lifted her arms, crossed them above her face, and spoke three sharp words. The texture of those syllables hung in the air, but Rath could not grasp them, could not even repeat them seconds after they left her lips.
“Do you—do you know this creature?”
“Yes. I saw him once, when I was younger. We will not defeat him tonight.”
Fire flew through the air, like the lash of whip; it banked the moment it hit Evayne’s arms; she did not even tremble at the impact. Fire struck again, and again, it fizzled.
The demon—and the word felt wrong to Rath, because it felt too small—roared. It was not rage; it was laughter. It was brief, savage joy wrapped in the crackle of heat and power.
Evayne’s arms came down in that instant, and light flared in her empty palms, traveling the length of the snow-strewn street. It struck creatures too small and too slight, and the laughter was joined, for a moment, by twin cries of pain. Creatures such as Patris AMatie, creatures who might have been twin to Lord Cordufar, strode the ground by the winged demon’s feet in the wake of a fire that did not burn them. They were not human in seeming, but taller, darker, possessed of arms that glistened like polished obsidian; some had jaws the width of a shark’s, and some, eyes the size of fists. They walked on two legs, or four, or more, and they carried no weapons; nor did they require them.
The winged creature barely seemed to notice them. For a third time, fire raced above the snow, and for a third time, it faltered.
There was no fourth.
The demon paused, and snow melted beneath his feet, turning to ice at the edges of his steps’ imprint. He lifted one arm, and he spoke a single word; the earth rumbled with the resonance of that voice, and the winds banked, for just a moment, as a shield came to his left arm, and a sword to his right. The sword was red, and long, its hilt obsidian. The shield, glowing red, was rimmed with runes that were the color of Evayne’s eyes.
“Karathis, Duke of the Hells,” Evayne said, and her voice was carried by the wind, strengthened by it. “You are far from home.”
He raised the sword.
But horns sounded again, and they came not from the light that had birthed this living fire, but rather from behind the seer, and this time—this time the notes were accompanied by the sound of light hooves, the clatter of armor.
In the light of silver moon—a moon that could not shine, did not shine here, but was nonetheless evident by the artifacts of light—the Wild Hunt rode into the streets of the undercity. They rode past Evayne, streaming out of the shadows beneath her cloak to the right of where she stood; to the left stood Rath. He noted that nothing touched the circle she had sketched in the ground; they moved to one side of it,
although some leaped above its arc. But they rode through the snow, and above it, weightless and terrifying.
Armor gleamed in the impossible light; helms, with long, narrow visors, pauldrons rising in exaggerated domes. Falling away from the shoulders, lamés narrowed to stylized points that echoed the rise of the helms. The riders bore spears and lances, slender and thin. They did not ride horses; they rode great stags, tines gleaming at the height of antlers that seemed like crowns.
But one rider stopped a moment, by Evayne’s side, and she raised the visor of her helm, for they were all helmed. Her hair spilled down her back, silver in the moonlight; her skin was the color of snow. Rath, who had danced with Sor Na Shannen, fell into a silence that was not interrupted by something as petty as breath: He had never, and would never again, see a woman so beautiful.
A woman so beautiful, and so cold.
“Little sister,” she said quietly. “How long will the road last?”
“Not long,” Evayne replied, although she did not look up, did not meet the rider’s gaze.
“Then we will ride while we can.” She lowered the visor, and from no sheath that Rath could see, she drew a blade. It was blue, a thing of cold, cold light.
“Karathis!” she cried, and the demon of fire and flame turned in that instant toward her. “Have you slipped your leash?”
He hissed, and he spoke, but the words, harsh and guttural, were not in a language that Rath understood.
The Winter Queen laughed. Her answer was the cold tinkle of bells, and just as unintelligible to his ears. She rode toward the Duke of the Hells, then. Toward, and not away. She was not half his height, but Rath understood, as they closed, that here height did not define power; the snow followed in her wake like a cape.
He watched in silence as the woman suddenly vaulted off the back of her mount. The mount reared, leaped, avoided the downward arc of the great, red sword. Ice cracked beneath its blade.
The Winter Queen did not land; instead, she rose, and the air held her, buoyed her. Her hair flew back, against the wind; her cape, which was silver and black, flew with it, as if it were the only standard she required.
And thus, Rath thought, the answer to the question the heights that this city had once possessed posed. What need had they of something so trifling as stairs? The wind obeyed her.
To her side, left and right, the riders crested the surface of drifts, and where they met demons, they clashed; blood fell, darkening snow and freezing against it.
But Rath, who had seen battles large and small, watched in a silence of snow and wind and fire, seeing the undercity, for the first time, as it might once have been when gods walked the world. He did not flinch when riders fell, or demons lost limbs; there was, about the fighting, an orchestration, a choreography, that none of his battles had ever had. Nor would they; he fought like men fought: to survive. If it was graceless, if it was lucky, if it was underhand—in the end, what mattered was that he walked away.
But to the riders, to the demons, the simple consideration of life seemed no part of the engagement, no part of the swift and elegant dance.
“Ararath!”
He could not look away, but nodded.
“Ararath, they will close the road. Not all of the Kialli here fight. Look.”
He forced himself to look beyond the body of the fighting; to look beyond the armored Winter Queen and her clash with the creature that Evayne had called a Duke of the Hells.
There, in the open and empty streets, two demons stood. One, he did not recognize, and one he did: Sor Na Shannen. Lightning struck from above, shattering stone.
“Fools!” Sor Na Shannen cried, and even at this distance, he saw the flash of her eyes, the moving strands of her midnight hair. “Do not die on the road! Do not give them that purchase!” She lifted her arms in a wide sweep, and threw not light, not fire, but shadow.
Evayne lifted her hands and caught it between her palms, staggering at the contact.
“Run,” she told Rath.
He understood, as she struggled to straighten her arms, that she spoke without thought; that she intended to stand, and fight. It almost made him smile. But he turned again to the streets of a city made forever alien, and he bore witness. It was all he could do; the demons and the riders were well beyond him, and he did not think the dagger that he held, runes dark and almost sullen, would be of use should he choose to abandon Evayne’s side.
Blue sword clashed with red above; below, blood spread as the cold yielded to heat.
Rath was beneath their notice, beneath their contempt. Whatever existed in the streets and the mansions of Averalaan, whatever plots or councils Sor Na Shannen took with her allies, had ceased to exist now. The kin—the Kialli—could fight like this for eternity; if the world died around them, they might not even notice.
They would certainly not notice the deaths of tens of thousands of people whose lives, measured in a handful of years, would amount to nothing. This was how beauty was defined in this place. This was what they faced. The wild, inhuman creatures fought, Rath thought, as if this might be their last chance to fight; as if this dance, this death, was all of their desire.
Sor Na Shannen shouted again, raising her voice above the gale. She strode across the cracked stone, toward the border beyond which Winter ruled.
At her back, a lone demon stood. He might have been a man, a slender, tall one. He might have been a rider. The form and shape the other demons took in their graceful savagery was not his. He might have been, as Rath was, a forgotten, inconsequential observer; he even lifted a hand to his chin, resting his elbow upon his palm.
And then he smiled. He did not stride toward the snow. Instead, he bent to ground as casually as a man might who has dropped an item of little significance. But instead of straightening again, he placed one palm against the surface of the stone causeway. He spoke no words, made no gestures, but he lifted his head, hand still splayed against ground, and his eyes traveled past the battles, large and small, to rest a moment upon Evayne.
“Evayne, be wary,” Rath said.
Evayne glanced at him, and he lifted an arm.
She frowned, a counterpoint to the Kialli smile, and then her eyes widened.
“Ararath!”
He saw her double over. The robes that had billowed above her like a standard in a gale fell suddenly, heavily, toward the ground.
“Ariane!” she shouted, as she lifted her head and her arms in one sharp, jerk of motion. Her hands were entwined in shadow that writhed even as it coalesced.
The Winter Queen danced back a step in the air and turned slightly to see the woman who had called her name. Evayne, still crouched upon the ground, pulled her arms back awkwardly against her chest. Her brow creased and her eyes narrowed; she threw her hands forward. Shadow leaped from them toward Ariane, the Winter Queen.
The Queen of the Wild Hunt. Legend, Rath thought. Of course.
Ariane threw back her head and laughed as the darkness swirled around her, melting into the gleam of her perfect armor.
Evayne stood, staggered forward a step—and vanished.
With her went the snow, the trees, the moon’s light—and the riders.
But Ariane remained.
She did not stay to fight, although it was clear to Rath she desired as much. Instead, still carried by a wind that no longer howled, she swooped toward the ground, and toward Rath. He had not, until that moment, been certain she had been aware of him at all. Her gauntlets upon his arm, however, were proof, if it were needed.
He had no time to brace himself, no time to speak; cold, metal fingers closed round that arm and bore him up, where he dangled like a mouse in a hawk’s beak. Fire singed his cloak, and a roar of fury followed them. So, too, did flame; the Kialli’s wings were not decorative. But he was hampered in this wind; it was hers.
“Come, mortal. We have the gift of my sister’s shadow, but it is fleeting. Let us see what she hoped we would see ere it passes and the Winter Road is closed once ag
ain.”
She flew through the city as if she knew its streets. Rath fumbled with his magestone, but she seemed to require no light by which to navigate, and if he was not a graceful burden, he hit no walls, no outcroppings, no broken remnant of bridges. Nor did he fall.
But she came to rest, at last, upon the steps of what, to Rath’s eyes, seemed an open coliseum. He could not be certain, and he whispered light to its brightest. The steps formed benches where he stood; they both ascended and descended. She alighted beside him, and drew blade. It shone far brighter than the light in his hand, but conversely, it did not illuminate.
“So,” she said, softly, and leaped. She did not take to air again, although he thought she tried. There was no wind at all in this place, and very little sound. The magelight had difficulty piercing the darkness, and he unsheathed the second of the two daggers that Sigurne had given him.
There would be no report tendered her, for these.
He followed the Winter Queen down the steps; heard, at his back, the cries and commands of those demons who had not been slain by her riders. But the cries themselves failed to move him here.
She ran across the even floor of the coliseum; he hesitated at the last stair, remembering the glory of her aerial battle. Aware of how little he might add to it, or to her.
But she stopped; in the distance, which was not so very large, he could see her by the glint of armor and the blue light of the sword she carried. She drew no shield, but stood a moment, and he chanced death, leaving the dubious safety of this final ring of stone. Beneath his feet, where dirt should have been, the ground was hard and smooth, and it glinted as if it were polished. He cursed, and whispered light from stone—but this time, the light did not come; whatever magic the stone contained was not equal to this place. He knelt briefly and saw that he stood upon a smoky, marble floor of a kind that might be seen in ornate temples and grand foyers.
He glanced back, and saw the concentric ovals in which spectators might sit, and frowned. The magelight illuminated them faintly; it provided nothing for what lay upon the ground in their center. This was—or had been—an arena; of that, he felt certain. And Ariane stood at its center.
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