by Tim Akers
“She can speak for herself, when I find her,” Allaister said. He circled the trembling priest, stalking among the graves of the wardens. “Though if she continues along her current path, that won’t be necessary. She’ll find me.”
“Gods help you if she does,” Lucas said.
“Your gods won’t have anything to do with it,” Allaister answered, a cruel smile on his face. “Enough talking. Come, bring me your trick so we can end this thing.”
“I don’t have a trick, demon,” Lucas said. “I just wanted your blood. Allaister’s blood, actually.”
“Are you going to curse me, inquisitor?” the gheist said. “Scry my name?”
“Something like that,” Lucas said. He held the pendant in front of him. A crown of spinning runes formed around his head, etched in the air with naetheric power, glowing as it settled on his temples. His voice slowed down. “Something… quite like that…”
A look of understanding swept across Allaister’s face, coupled with newfound fear.
“Wait!” he screamed, jumping forward.
* * *
Time slowed. Lucas’s mind separated from his body, and the forest fell away. With the pagan pendant—an icon of summoning and perception used by the witching wives to sift the spirits from the material world—combined with his own talents, Lucas was able to observe and manipulate Allaister and his gheist.
Allaister and his bound god hung in mid-step, cloaked in circling runes of naetheric power, glowing as they rotated slowly in the air at the holy points of Cinder’s art—the heart, the head, the hands. Other, rougher runes, drawn black and flickering against the sky, hung above his shoulders like scrimshaw wings.
The gheist’s body was formed of greenish webs, bright lines of everam that were sharp at the bounds of the crashing tide, mingled with skeins of shadow at their core, tangled with the runes that circled Allaister’s spirit.
Indeed it was a guardian spirit, bound eternally to this hallow, feeding on its proximity to the everealm to strengthen the wards that kept the shrine safe. Lucas could see its relation to autumn, the aspect of a river slowly surrendering to ice, the final harvest before winter claimed its place. The spirit of the god was shredded, damaged both by Allaister’s rough binding and Lucas’s efforts to tear them apart. It was shot through with shadowy tendrils, the priest’s will bending the god’s spirit.
Whatever magic Allaister was using to bind the god, it was foreign to Lucas. It read like an ancient language, certain words and structures familiar, but the whole was incomprehensible. Elements of the casting reminded Lucas of Elsa’s blessings, binding the god’s power to the blood of the vow knight, and drawing divinity through her flesh. Yet it also had the taste and tremor of the pagan arts—some kind of blending Lucas had never before seen.
He did not need to understand it in order to destroy it. He raised his hands and drew on everything that remained—his heart and his mind, every scrap of blessing that Cinder had given him. Pushed all of that, his life itself, into the heart of the god and the mind of the priest.
The web of naether and everam frayed.
Lucas faded.
* * *
The Allaister-gheist slammed into him, sending Lucas reeling and his mind snapping back into his flesh. The shock of transition sent spasms through his bones. He lay on the ground, sprawled across the rough stones of the warden’s cairn, her cold corpse splayed next to him like a forgotten lover.
“A valiant attempt, priest,” Allaister hissed, “but you have failed, and now you must die.”
“A reasonable price,” Lucas murmured, barely able to raise his head, “but not one I have yet paid. Would you like me to shrive you, when you are gone?”
“I am not going to the quiet house today,” Allaister said, looming over his enemy.
“No,” Lucas agreed. “I don’t think they will have you.”
Allaister’s death first appeared at his heart. The color left his naked body, and a gush of water splashed out of his chest, beginning as a trickle that leaked from his skin, becoming a torrent that grew and grew as the priest lost control of the river spirit.
Lucas dragged himself back and up. The bowl-shaped clearing filled with water. At the center, Allaister struggled to regain control, unable to stand when the swirling maelstrom took his legs away. He summoned naetheric runes, stitched the air with dark invocations, but the god would not bend to his will.
The furious water churned the ground and undid the cairns of the dead wardens, releasing their limp bodies to float to the surface. Bleeding from nose and mouth, Allaister spat arcane wards and blasphemy into the air, then cried out as the currents smashed him against the rocky hillside, breaking his arm.
“It will do you no good, brother,” Lucas yelled. “That was your final mistake. The gods do not bend to us.”
“No, I do not—” Allaister fought to the surface one last time, fear and fury in his eyes, his skin already swelling. Each time he opened his mouth to speak, water crashed over him as if to cut him off. “It cannot end! I will—”
Then there was silence as the river washed over him, and he disappeared. The surface of the newly formed lake fell into a heavy chop. A dozen heartbeats later it calmed, choked with branches and bodies and other debris, contained by the will of the guardian spirit.
Lucas stood at the edge and raised his hands.
“I have no argument with you, goddess. Return to your banks and your purpose. The house of Cinder will trouble you no more today.”
The swirling pool of divine water waited for a dozen heartbeats, then sluggishly flowed into the forest, away from Lucas. The bodies of the wardens went with it, bumping lazily into trees, snagging in the underbrush before being carried by their god back into the hallow.
Of Allaister there was no sign.
The sky cleared, the storm melting away until only the sun and moon remained, and the stars pricked the veil of heaven to surround Cinder’s silver face. Lucas sighed, leaning forward on his staff. He was withered, his age fully claiming him. He turned and started the painful walk toward the shrine at the hallow’s heart.
54
THE HILL ABOVE the god was as smooth and green as a river stone, slick with moss and the cold current of the stream. The sky was clearing. The first light of an eternal dawn spread across the grass. The air was crisp as an apple and just as sweet.
In an instant it began to change.
The trees that surrounded the hill shifted in the breeze as their leaves slithered together, a velvet-smooth sound that rasped drily through the air. The colors of autumn appeared, radiating outward from the hill and through the forest. Greens became gold, red, yellow, and white with the last jubilation of summer’s warmth and the approach of wintry death.
A whirling breeze swirled through the grasses, twisting each blade into a pinwheel for a few brief seconds before rushing on to the next one, the next tree, and on into the sky. Then the breeze turned into a whipping column of air. It mounted the hill, bringing with it a hissing torrent of millions of leaves, painted like gems and freed from their branches.
Autumn roared into the world.
The hill itself split like an egg, rock breaking with deafening cracks, the grassy crown peeling back to reveal a heart of muddy roots and broken stone, grinding open like a tomb. From that tomb rose the god of the harvest, second holiest of the pagan rites, and the one true guardian of the everealm.
It shimmered in a cloud of golden dust, a vaguely human shape that towered over the hill, growing larger as it moved. Its face was featureless but for a pair of eyes that burned like twin suns. A wicker mask bristled around its face, rising from its head, composed of dry twigs wrought in summer’s light. The cloak of swirling leaves swarmed like butterflies around its shoulders. Even the sky seemed to dip toward it. The clouds rolled aside.
In the midst of the autumn god, there was a child—a girl dressed in leaves and grasses, in light and retribution. When autumn had erupted at the tip of her knife, Gwe
n lost her name, her life, everything that made her the daughter of Colm Adair, child of the Fen Gate, child of flesh and scion of blood. All she had now were her primal senses. The only things that she remembered were her title and her prey.
Huntress… and Sacombre.
Slowly, inexorably, she moved into the forest, already towering over the trees as they transformed. The butterfly cloud of autumn leaves followed. The first taste of winter’s chill wafted behind her.
* * *
Elsa stumbled from the wounded earth, her hair and clothes choked with leaves, sticks, roots, stones, and dirt. Her skin was crisscrossed by dozens of cuts. The wind that filled the tomb at the moment of the god’s release had blinded her.
Her last sight of Gwen was of the huntress spreadeagled on a pillar of leaves and amber light. When she had recovered, Gwen was gone and the sky was spilling into the chamber. The priests had been turned into ragdolls of flesh and tattered cloth. Elsa hadn’t given them a second look.
Now the sky was trailing banners of golden light flecked with amber. Both god and girl roared over the hallow with the fury of an autumn storm on their heels.
Elsa sighed.
“She came to a decision, then,” Frair Lucas said. Elsa turned to find the man, much reduced, leaning against his staff like the totem of old age.
“She did, or the god made it for her,” Elsa answered.
“And what of us?” Lucas said. “What is to become of us?”
The autumn god answered. Violent winds whipped at them, filled with leaves, dry and brittle. Elsa rushed to Lucas’s side, shielding the frail figure with her bulk. He clung to her as the fury grew and grew, the wind louder, the leaves sharper, until Elsa was sure they would die on that hill, far from the blessings of Heartsbridge.
Without warning, the storm abated. The god was gone, and Elsa and Lucas as well. The hill lay barren and empty. The sky was clear, the sun bright.
* * *
Maeve’s wretched shadow lurked in the darkness. The spirit of death had taken everything from her, her blood, her soul, even the trace remnants of her memory. She was nothing but a stubborn echo of pain and loss, drifting between realms.
The room that held her remains was dark and broken. The sacred lines that defined it were scattered. Abstractly she wondered what it had once been, before the spirit of death came. Before her undoing. She wondered how long she would be here before someone came and shrived her soul.
Even her lone companion had abandoned her. The shaman lay in a pool of his own fury, confused by the profane dimensions of their captivity. She tried to approach him, but the fool only lashed out. Finally, he gathered himself and melted into the rock, taking his anger with him.
Alone, she witnessed the first leaf fall, somehow visible despite the blackness. It appeared in the blood that streaked the ceiling, emerging damp and gory from between the stones, like a jester’s sleight of hand. It plopped to the floor. Another leaf followed, and another, each less bloody, more whole, until a cascade of autumn leaves tumbled from the ceiling. Something stirred in Maeve’s memory. Hope.
The floor opened, and a season breached the world. It grew in a furious tornado of autumn color, leaves and dripping sunlight, warm and amber. An entire column of leaves snaked through the shrine and up the stairs, twisting and wailing as it fled the profanity of its sacred heart. The sound was overwhelming.
When it was past, two figures huddled in the black. A man and a woman, shadow and flame, winter and sun. They exchanged frightened words as they hurried up the stairs, following the last vestige of light that had preceded them. The woman nearly had to carry the man. They both looked on the verge of death.
Maeve settled and waited. They would be back. Death would always bring them back.
* * *
The god that hung over the Fen Gate was unlike anything Ian had ever seen. It transformed the world in its wake. The forest stirred with gheist-ridden life, the trees groaning from their roots, their limbs uplifted in supplication, their leaves flying like flocks of golden birds.
In his limited time with the pagans, Ian had learned to sense the hidden spirits of the world, had grown accustomed to the subtle touch of their force. Now his skin was alive with burning swirls of energy.
From his position on the parapet he watched in awe as the god gathered into a storm above the castle. It loomed over the ruined village, bent, ran a hand the size of a horse over the wreckage of one building, then another. It seemed to be feeling its way forward, and as the god bent to the earth, Ian saw that there was a seed at its core, a human figure wrapped in light and curled into a fetus. It looked to be a woman, fists over her face, hair floating around her.
The god stood and roared, a sound that echoed through Ian’s bones and blistered his blood. The wreckage at its feet shuffled away like a pile of leaves scattered by a child, flakes of stone and timber drifting up into the air, and then disappearing completely. Wherever it moved, clouds of leaves spun in rings in the sky like multi-colored mist, pinwheeling around their host.
The wind tasted of dust and autumn.
“What in the sweet hells…” Sir Brennan muttered. He was standing near Ian, helping organize the defense. All around, men stopped whatever they were doing and stared, slack-jawed, at the gargantuan sight.
“Get everyone inside,” Ian barked. “Tenerran, Suhdrin, everyone.”
“But, the walls…”
“Forget the walls. Forget everything.” Ian grabbed the knight by the shoulders and pushed him toward the great hall. “Get as many people as you can into the crypts. Perhaps the stone will provide some protection.”
A tendril of swirling leaves spilled from the sky like a tornado, falling into a courtyard. Everyone it struck was ground into bones and rags of flesh. The courtyard filled with screams as all who survived—knight and priest and page and lord—ran for cover. Barrels of pitch overturned, wagons shuddered, and in places the walkways along the walls buckled at the violence of their retreat.
Ian waited until the worst of the surge had passed, then he turned to the walls and started to climb to the god above. Wind battered his face, and heavy, wet globs of sunlight spattered against him as he made his way up. Pausing at a landing, he looked down. The fields beyond the walls were in chaos. The autumn god was scattering the Suhdrin forces like leaves in the wind.
The war was over.
It was destroying Tenerran lives, too. The castle was coming apart in bits and flecks, jagged stones that joined the wind to cut flesh. Ian’s armor was tattered by the time he reached the highest tower in the Fen Gate. Shielding his face from the worst of the assault, Ian peered up at the looming form of the Fen god. It was massive, a pillar of divine light cloaked in bands of autumn leaves, its eyes as bright and amber as the setting sun. There were other figures, warped and strange, gheists moving within the body of their god, and…
His eyes went wide with surprise and recognition. From this vantage, he could see who hung at the center—who was at the heart of the monster.
“Gwen!” Ian bellowed, but his words were lost in the maelstrom. Clinging to the wall, he thought back to the way he had felt when the hound had passed him, trying to emulate the pagan unfolding of heart and mind that had led him to this point. He tasted the storm, and knew its fury. “Gwen!” he shouted again. “Stop! You’re destroying everything—your home, your family, those you love… you have to stop!”
Suddenly he went rigid, unable to move or speak.
Despite the roar of the storm, the Fen god had noticed him. It turned and bent toward him, and reached out with a huge, amorphous hand.
Then there was silence.
55
HIS EYES OPENED to a world of honey-smooth light. He was floating. Layers of amber clouds hovered in a sky flecked with brighter gold, and the endless sparks of butterfly-like life that fluttered through the yellowing air.
Gwen hung close by, still in the fetal position. Her hair had grown into a ragged bush twined with leaves and
pebbles and scraps of leather. Her skin was the color of beaten copper. Her fists were clenched and angry. Ian wasn’t sure she could hear him, wasn’t sure she was really here, really herself.
“Gwendolyn?” he said tentatively. “Gwen?”
“That name is dead,” the sky answered in a voice that was near and far, that echoed and came from inside his head. “The guardian house has fallen.”
Ian tried to understand, and suddenly he knew. Somehow Colm Adair was dead, and with him his wife and child. Yet…
Sacombre.
“Gwendolyn still lives,” Ian said. “The iron is still in her blood.”
“Iron is the earth’s harvest. Iron and stone.” Gwen shifted in her glowing nest of hair. “Iron does not bend to the barking of dogs.” At that Ian found himself floating away from the huntress. He bent his will and moved closer.
“What are you doing, Gwen? What do you hope to accomplish in destroying your home? Your people?”
Only silence. In the quiet, Ian could make out a distant, grinding roar, and realized that at the limits of his vision he could see the storm wall and its stone teeth, tearing through the castle. He tried to focus on slowing the destruction, and for a second he could feel the edge of the storm, but then lost it. He was reaching to try again when Gwen spoke.
“Do not,” she said, and she looked up. Her eyes were twin sparks of golden light, burning in her face. “You are here as a guest. Do not interfere.” Her mouth didn’t move, yet he heard her.
“There are people dying out there.”
“Are you one of them?” she asked, and the sky echoed her words.
“It’s your family that’s dying,” Ian said. “The people of Fenton, of the Gate. Your father’s loyal men. The people who left their hearths and homes to defend your name.” He paused, clenching his fists against the weight of wind that pushed him away. “The people your family betrayed, Gwen. We thought you faithful!”
The air tensed around him, and a wrinkle formed on Gwen’s brow. She turned to face him, and a storm arose at his feet.
