Lysa attached herself to my arm. “I’m coming.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Yes, I—”
“You can’t, Lysa. It’s that simple. You literally cannot come with me. If you pass through a tear, you’ll become a reaped. There is no Amielle to save you from that outcome this time. Stay here.”
Ellie took Lysa’s arm. “I could use another conjurer. Bringing down a mountain is no small task.”
“You,” I said to Vayle, “are now the escort of a god. Bring Ripheneal through when Arken arrives. Lure him onto the battlefield. Ideally the goddess of war will be the goddess of particles and fragments and whatever dead things are made of by that time, and I’ll have Patrick and Jesson redirect their armies’ focus to Arken. The god of the dead might be powerful, but in a realm that isn’t his and chased by thirty thousand plus sword-wielding cutthroats… I like our chances.”
“I assume,” Vayle said, “that Ripheneal will not be available to sprint onto the battlefield upon his immediate return to the living realm, given your description of his current state. It will be difficult to outrun Arken while I am dragging Ripheneal’s deathly sick body along.”
“You’ll need the phoenix. Take it through. Actually, I’ll take it through and leave it beside the tear for you. Don’t want Arken getting cold feet about chasing his pal Ripheneal through a tear into the living realm. He’ll know it’s a trick, but the less prepared we seem to be, the more willing he’ll be to risk it.”
“And Lyria?” Ellie said. “How do you propose to stop her? Attacking her head-on will not give you an advantage.”
“Yes, it will. Because I’m going to slide a dagger across her throat while she’s lent all the pretty pieces of her existence to her soldiers.”
True enough that I had never sliced and diced a goddess before, but I had also, in the not-so-distant past, never killed a king before. I enjoyed crossing off items from my assassination bucket list.
I said my goodbyes and exchanged see-you-on-the-other-sides with Vayle, then got myself on a boar and trotted toward the invisible tear my commander said lay at the foot of Rovid’s cottage. After sending the boar through, I went back and rounded up the phoenix.
Lysa sprinted after me, catching me before I vanished from her realm.
“Astul, wait,” she said, breathing heavily. Her eyes fell to her feet, then slowly rose back up, culminating with a pained look as she gazed into my face. “If this works… I mean, if you succeed… I don’t know what will happen.”
“Well, I’ll come back here and we’ll drink honey mead till we fall over, get up the next morning and do it all over again. Sounds like a proper celebration, yeah?”
She swallowed a smile that encroached upon her lips. “If… I mean, if you can’t make it back here, maybe… I don’t know. Maybe the tears—” She moved her mouth, but only silence came out. “Maybe they’ll malfunction when Arken dies, you know?”
“That seems unlikely.”
“But it could happen. And if it does, if anything happens that doesn’t allow me to see you again, I just wanted you to know that—” She rubbed at her fingers, took a big sniff. Her eyes were glossy and wet, and a tear fell down her cheek.
I wrapped her up in a hug, clutching the back of her head.
She sniffled and snorted and coughed. And she wept, and amid that weeping, she said, “I love you. I don’t care if it’s a daughterly love, or a love that a girl feels when her greatest friend in the world is leaving forever. I just… I love you, Astul.”
She buried her face in my chest, and she sobbed.
And it hit me. The flushed face, hot eyes, sweaty hands. Yeah, that all hit me, smacked me good and smacked me true. I didn’t know if I was proud or foolish for letting Lysa Rabthorn find the way to my heart. It had afforded me great joy but equally great anguish, in the end. Love does that to you, doesn’t it? Punches its bloody hand inside your chest, strokes your heart like it’ll be there forever. Then one day, it up and leaves, and with it goes a piece of you. A piece of your soul.
Mm. I never was very good at sharing.
“I’ll see you soon enough, Lysa,” I said, kissing her head.
And into the tear I went.
Chapter 31
Plumes of noxious soot billowed up from beneath me as the back of my head was driven into the ground of pulverized volcanic rock. Seconds earlier, a hand had clasped my throat and lifted my ass three feet into the air.
A pair of arms lurched through the grimy haze. I rolled onto my side, scurrying to my knees.
“Might’ve fuckin’ known!” said the voice, distorted and raspy.
He came at me again, this time with a black blade, charging headlong into the lingering film of soot.
I’d freed my dagger and threw it up against a very familiar ebon blade. The clash of ebon rang like the hot strike of a blacksmith’s hammer into an anvil. With the sword redirected, I scrambled to my feet.
Ran toward the hillside, then gave a tug to the hilt of my blade, freeing it from its sheath. Spinning around glimpsed me two pieces of information: my surroundings, which did not include the walls of Vereumene but must’ve been nearby to have sliding hillsides of volcanic rock on either side of a narrow path, and my attacker.
I had not expected to see Rovid quite yet. Nor had I expected him to look any different.
I’d expected—
“Hold on!” I hollered, retreating from the crazy fucker as he screamed unintelligibly and ran at me with a cocked sword. “Just hold on, all right? Let me — fucking Rovid!”
He dashed at me again. This time I met him halfway. The clangor of our blades saturated this pitted land in shrill cries. I tried giving him a solid boot to the ribs, but he caught me with a quick jab in the jaw before I had the chance.
I stumbled back, spat into my hand. Bit of blood, but no teeth.
“Had me half a mind,” he said, tongue flicking between his lips like a snake. “Thought you might be playin’ me. Thought you might be uuuuuuusin’ me.” He broke into piercing laughter. He clapped his hands maniacally. “And I was right. I was right, right, right!”
He laughed again, then scraped his nails across his face, along newborn gashes and threads of skin that were barely hanging on. “See here, methinks… I thinks” — he pointed the sword at himself, in case I wasn’t certain who he was referring to in this conversation — “you had yourself a big, elaborate idea goin’ up in your head to get me — me! To open a tear. And boy oh boy, you got what you wanted, didn’t you? Sundered my loves, my loves… oh, my lovies.”
Clearly, something perverse happens to a broken reaper’s mind. This man bore no semblance to the Rovid I knew.
“They’re not sundered,” I told him, hoping to restore at least a smidgen of sanity.
It didn’t work. He tilted his head to the heavens and cackled. He whooped a few times too, throwing his hands wildly about.
“It’s true,” I said. “I got new bodies for them from Fragment Four. Preen. You’re right that I wanted to trick you. We needed this tear open, Rovid. It was the only way—”
He flexed his fingers, dragged his nails down his face again, flicking away flesh, till only blood and bone remained. He cackled all the while.
Then he patted his chest and said, “I! I, I and me and me. Oh, little, little Shepherd in the field, I’ve got me a little Shepherd in the field. Who’s the trickster now, Ass…tul?” He laughed at this joke, the chuckles quieting as the seconds passed. Blood streamed down his cheeks, into and out of his mouth.
“I win,” he declared. He swished two fingertips into the ponds of blood that spilled from his eviscerated cheeks and then stabbed them into his eyes. “Ha ha!” he screamed, and charged me.
I stepped forward and plunged ebon into his belly. He didn’t flinch. His hand came down all the same, hilt of his sword crashing into my shoulder.
I grabbed his wrist, twisted it to redirect the blade away from me, and pushed my own deeper into his belly.
The tip thrust through his spine. Still he stood.
His eyes, wet with the color of fresh blood, had a wild look to them. Then everything rather faded away.
First, his hand opened, and the sword fell with a clunk onto crushed rock.
And his gaped mouth shut, and he tried to swallow. But he couldn’t.
Then his head twisted slightly, and behind the blood that drenched the whites of his eyes, a familiar look returned briefly to his dusty blue lenses.
His skull rolled forward once, then back. Almost as if in acknowledgment.
And he collapsed. Not a breath to be had.
I reached down with trembling fingers, picked up the blade I’d lent him, and went on my way, just as I had sent Rovid on his way.
No time to think. No time to entertain the morbid thought that I had changed Rovid permanently, fractured his soul… turned him to a wraith in the living realm and sent him to Amortis just the same.
I had to go. Had to haul ass. Streak toward Vereumene on the saddle of a snorting boar who trudged through ancient volcanic rock.
But where exactly had the tear led? Did Vereumene lie straight ahead? Or the opposite way? Over one sloping hillside or the other?
Taking the wrong path could mean the difference between warning Patrick Verdan and the others about Lyria and having Lyria herself warn them; the latter would involve lots of blood.
I suddenly regretted not pursuing a career in cartography. But I did have a good memory when it came to familiar sights. Vereumene lay nestled in the foothills of an ancient mountain range whose peaks time had worn down into flat butts of gleaming black rock. Not as tall as they’d been in the stories of yore, but they sure as shit weren’t these wimpy sloping hills, either.
Which meant I could eliminate climbing over the aforementioned hills in either direction and focus on tracking a path straight ahead or spinning around and going that way instead. Unfortunately, the stocky shoulders of mountains who appeared as faint apparitions lay in both directions.
So my potential existence in the living realm came down to a coin flip, basically. Lovely. Taking flight on the phoenix I’d come through on would have simplified this decision, but that pretty girl needed to stay put for when Vayle brought Ripheneal into the living realm.
I climbed onto my boar and clicked my heels, aiming him straight. Had to go with your gut in these situations, even if your gut grumbled with uncertainty.
Rovid had a vague idea of Vereumene’s location, thanks to his passing through when bringing me buckets of black powder from Rav’s abode in Amortis. But the map I had given him, along with instructions on which routes to take, would have seen him probably upwards of seventy miles outside the kingdom’s walls at his closest pass.
So that was likely where I was, given a wraith can only open tears to places he’s been to. Seventy miles from my destination.
Travel was slow. Boars are valiant beasts, and they do well enough transporting you from point A to point B without complaint, but their legs are short and stubby, and their flat snouts don’t lend well to sucking in great big breaths of air as they bound across the landscape at a horse’s gallop.
As the hours passed, the air became colder, slapping against my skin. I was getting closer to the mountains, which slung down a temperamental wind. Whether those mountains embraced the walls of Vereumene or not… I’d find out soon enough.
The sky above looked ripe for war. Thick clouds the color of ash swam from one end of the world to the other, it seemed. Occasionally they’d spit out droplets of rain, but they mostly hung there listlessly, a foreboding curtain reminding me of the stakes.
The ash of the clouds darkened into the midnight blue of evening, and before long the moon arced up and sent the sun to bed. Saw it for a couple minutes here, couple minutes there, as it winked in and out of the gloomy sky.
Dawn came and brought with it a tremble. An almost imperceptible quake in my feet as I climbed off my boar to take a piss.
The subtleness of thunder rippling along the gravel of volcanic rock scared all the piss right back up inside me. I couldn’t go. Tried shaking it. Tried sweet-talking it, but it’d become shy, it seemed.
Another ripple. And then… what? A squeal? No. Not quite a squeal. A yelp, maybe. But it wasn’t the yelp of an animal who’d gotten his paw caught in a trap or his throat in the mouth of a predator. This was a yelp I’d heard often throughout my life as an assassin.
A yelp of steel.
I squirted out a few meager drops, then stuffed myself back in my pants and jumped onto my boar.
“No resting, boy,” I told him. “Sorry.”
He must’ve understood the situation, because he wiggled his butt and charged headlong into the horizon, which soon lit up into the slopes of withering mountains that arranged themselves in a wide circle.
I couldn’t see inside the circle, but unless another identical formation lay nearby, Vereumene was within my reach.
That realization put a smile on my face. But the yelps of steel and the thunder enlivening this quiet morning wiped it right off.
Picture this. You’re in the wilds. Some stubby trees here, bushes there, anchoring themselves into hillsides of black bits of crushed rock. You take a step forward and the percussions of war fling themselves at you. Another step, and you can hear fifty thousand rumbling boots, fleeing, fighting… whatever they’re doing. Or is that the sound of bodies hitting the floor, knees collapsing?
Funny thing is, all fifty thousand of ’em rely on you. And your heart’s beating in your ears. Throat’s gummed up. All you wanna do is fuck off and get out of there. You’re brave. You’re courageous, you tell yourself. But in the end, instincts win out, not your desires to imprint your reputation on the history of the world.
So you entertain the thought of running. You think about it. Hell, maybe you turn around, take a look back. But you steel yourself, you force a swallow down, punch that thumping heart of yours back into your chest where it belongs. You’re not prepared to die. And that’s precisely the reason you abandon all logic and forget the limits of what one man can do. If you run now, you know you’re dead. Maybe not physically, but emotional death ain’t no fuckin’ walk in the park, either.
This was what I feared. That war had already begun. And what did I find as I rounded the outer edge of a mountain whose curves led into the range’s expansive bosom?
A kingdom whose gate was closed and whose battlements crawled with soldiers. And far in the opposite direction, beneath the haze of a morning sun, a horde of tents bustling with busybodies. And beyond, concealed behind a steep earthen ramp and the distant horizon, yelps of steel and roars of thunder. I could feel ’em pulverizing my skull.
The distance to the tents was such that identifying colors of tunics and patterns emblazoning shields was nearly impossible. But as cavalry was deployed up the ramp and the horses ran beneath the burnished glow of the sun, a golden glint flashed, framed as a trio of swords: the North.
At the very least, it seemed they were surviving. It’d also seemed the South huddled within its walls. Had Kane Calbid fucked me over once more?
A chop of my heels sent my boar lurching toward Vereumene. The South needed to intervene, if only to soak up the slaughter.
With a snap of my dagger, I sliced off a chunk of my white undershirt. Held it high in the air and waved it around as I neared the kingdom. Didn’t need a nervous archer letting his finger slip and impaling what he thought was a lone attacker.
As I got closer, the hooves of my boar slammed into flesh and bone. Crimson cloaks were strewn across the fragments of black rock. Red Sentinels. The plan had been carried out as discussed, up until Kane Calbid apparently withdrew, the snake he was.
Hmm. Actually, it wasn’t crimson I saw. A shade lighter than that. Perhaps… was it cherry red?
A man hollered at me from the battlements. “Gates are closed till the war is finished!”
“Are you seeing this fucking war?” I yell
ed back. “Give me a bloody audience with your king.”
“Gates are closed!”
At this point, I had a breakdown driven by a burning hatred for all things Southern. I got off my boar, jogged to the portcullis and began driving my boot into the latticed steel madly. “Let me see your fucking king! He’s a goddamn snake of man.”
A few moments later, a familiar voice called out to me.
“Shepherd! Holy shit-tits. Thought that was you.”
I turned to see a welcoming face sitting atop a horse who galloped in from the sounds of war.
“You’re not gonna convince him, Shepherd,” Kale said. “He’s holed up in there. I think he’s gonna come out soon as the victor is apparent, then use his fresh forces to mop ’em up. Couldn’t even get the letter to ’im.”
“Then who are all these dead fuckers out here? Not Red Sentinels?”
“Beats me,” Kale said. “Looked like a graveyard when I got here, which was sometime before the North came barreling down. Soon as they got into position, everything went to hell, and… well, now they’re getting the shit beat out of ’em by the East.”
“We got big problems, pal. You up for assassinating a goddess?”
Kale blinked. “Er…”
“Let’s go. Take me to Patrick Verdan. I’ll tell you about it as I ride.”
“A boar? Where the hell did ya get a boar?”
“Just ride, will you?”
“I really think I ought to be done with you, Shepherd. First conjurers, then reaped, now gods and goddesses? You’re like a… a curse, man.”
We rode up to the rear of the tents, where tunics of all colors and shapes and coats of arms awaited us.
There was much hollering and pointing and shuffling about. Horses were mounted and stormed forth up the ramp, onto what I assumed was the battlefield above. Officers ducked into and out of tents, shouting orders and hollering fucking this and fucking that.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 98
