“Argh!” I cried, toward the heavens — that’s mostly all I saw on account of suddenly finding myself on my back.
I threw a hand onto my chest, knuckling a hilt of smooth wood. Gripped it till my knuckles were white, held my breath and rocked that motherfucker as hard as I could.
The ax blade teetered in my flesh. The impetus of the bottommost edge sinking deeper, searing tissue and tendon, pushed the topmost edge up and out.
My hand trembled now. The pain — gnawing, boiling pain — made my teeth chatter. But I had to get it out. If I didn’t, I was dead.
A shadow loomed over me.
A scream from over a ways. Sounded like… Ka — no. Couldn’t think about that right now. Couldn’t even entertain the possibility.
I had to get this bloody ax out, before the…
The shadow enveloped me. She lowered herself to her knees, grinning like a skull.
I yanked, yanked, yanked at that bastard handle. Finally, there came the sucking sound of it lifting up and out of my flesh and blood. I thrust it upward, into the face of Lyria.
But her fingers slapped against my wrist, and the weapon fell to the ground beside me.
I thrust my knee into her gut, and again. And again, punching the breath right out of her mouth. She tried sweeping my legs between hers, to bind them, but that resulted in a momentary distraction.
A little opening for the Shepherd.
I picked up the fallen ax and swung it again.
This time there was no hand to stymie its momentum. Nothing to stop its arc from right to left. Well, unless you count Lyria’s face.
The goddess of war pushed off my chest, attempting to dodge the incoming flash of steel.
Then, she howled. And blood sprayed me in the eyes.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my ebon blade from the ground and ran at her with gritted teeth. Came down at her spine with an edge of ebon, determined to sculpt her torso into segmented shapes.
She rolled away, a rivulet of blood trailing her. Onto her knees, then up to her feet. She was grimacing, half her nose cleaved off, chunks of face flesh missing altogether. Her breaths sounded like snot being blown from nostrils.
Behind me, the sound of a stampede. I gave it no attention. My sole focus belonged to Lyria. It was time I added a goddess to my long list of assassinations.
I came to her with loping strides, slamming into her ax with the brunt of an ebon blade. The impact drove her back. She’d barely squared herself to me before another blow struck the crescent edge of her ax, whittling away at the steel, which broke off in chunks and fell into the gravel below.
She attempted a valiant pushback, shifting from defender to aggressor, but I kicked her in the ribs, and her brief offensive stalled.
A jab of my sword — fast as fucking lightning, if you ask me — caught the bitch in her belly. Didn’t sink in very far, on account of her lunge backward, but it was another wound that would slow her down. Cause confusion. Hasten the emptying of her stamina reserves.
She was stumbling now, unable to move fluidly.
I charged again. Cut her right across the arm. The pain elicited a yelp. Another chop of my blade, this one into her shoulder.
She dropped her ax. Then she dropped herself, onto one knee. Tried getting back up. She tried real hard, don’t you know? Grunted and swore and shoved a fistful of knuckles into the ground. But I booted her right in the jaw, collapsing her into a whimpering mess lying on her side.
I had tried so often since offering Amielle’s death to Patrick Verdan to ignore my pride and reputation as a brutal assassin when my targets came face-to-face with me. But now… I was hungry for that tasty, scrumptious pride. I was chomping at the bit to substantiate my reputation.
Maybe I’d regret it tomorrow, if tomorrow ever came. But on this day I would dine in the delight of Lyria’s painful death.
I first went for her foot. No, her toes. That was what I cut off first. The big toe, all the way down the line, to the little one. She cried then, but she wailed when ebon burrowed into the bone of her wrist and lopped off her hand.
She snorted blood and burbled sickeningly when I removed her sole remaining eye, plucked it right out of its socket with the tip of my sword. Now, she convulsed. And she trembled. And she continued trembling even as she lay there without her head. Dying nerves, muscles, tendons… they twitch for a little while without any conscious input from your mind.
I looked up from her body, into the battlefield. A sudden rushing of clattering steel and hoarse voices besieged me. Also, a thundering of hooves.
A contingent of horses barreled down the wings of the battlefield, giving the combatants a wide berth. Baldy headed the charge, bringing at least thirty soldiers to… me?
No, not to me. Their angle wasn’t right. They were coming my way, certainly not stopping to chop off some Glannondil heads, but their approach would put them about sixty feet off.
It was then I saw a little terror I did not appreciate witnessing. And by little, I mean large, meaty and frighteningly agile.
The Warden had pared the tree Kale had climbed into two halves, both of which lay on the ground.
The big bastard spun around, lowered his shoulder and mounted a charge toward the cavalry. In his wake lay my bloodied friend.
Dread stirred within me. I ran to Kale’s side, each stride feeling like Lyria’s ax slugging me in the chest again and again. I stuck my finger inside the gash, probing its depth. Went in halfway to my knuckle. Its length stretched from my shoulder to just below my nipple.
Lots of yelling in the background. Lots of disturbing noises: the crunching of armor, the whinnying of horses.
I came up ten feet short of Kale. I had this crazy thought that maybe I could’ve saved him. Maybe the Warden had severed a limb — I could’ve made a tourniquet out of something.
I could’ve saved him, all right? I could’ve bloody saved him!
But it wasn’t like that. That ship had sailed, and along with it most of Kale’s face. The flail had… well, you couldn’t tell where cheekbone began and nose had once jutted out.
Why was I staring at his eviscerated corpse? Just… staring, as if my eyes were stuck there. Fixated on the blood and displaced bits of bone.
Where was the nausea? The topsy-turvy feeling in the pit of my stomach? Should’ve felt… something. But a numbness squeezed me like a vise, deadening every emotion.
I’d fought depression before, and I’d basked in the glory of elation. Cried till my eyes burned and the tears dried up, and laughed till I couldn’t breathe. I’d smiled so wide and for so long that my cheeks ached, and I’d clenched my jaw in anger till a tooth shattered under the pressure. Through all those times I’d come to learn that you take the good emotions right along with the bad ones, because in the end — no matter if you find yourself buried under grief and anguish, or you stand atop the proverbial mountain and relish in joy and bliss — you feel alive, even if you’d rather not be.
But apathy? The absence of emotion? Makes you wonder — as it made me wonder while standing before Kale’s gutted corpse — if maybe this life finally did you in. If perhaps it broke you one time too many, and the pieces you’d always picked up and put back together… maybe they became lost, forever.
Couldn’t tell you how long I stayed there, watching over my friend’s body like a loyal hound. At some point, several men came to me on horseback, hollering to get him on a saddle, shouting that he needed to be bandaged.
Apparently I was the “he.” I found myself bouncing up and down on a saddle, hands around the waist of a portly man. The horse galloped past the Warden, who lay lifeless on the ground, stuck with a dozen arrows and etched with numerous gashes. Beside him and behind him and all around him were steeds and mares, bloodied, some disemboweled.
“Tough fucker, that,” my courier said, nodding at the bodies strewn alongside the horses.
I said nothing.
We edged along the face of the cliff, keeping a safe d
istance from the eruption of clanging steel and the baying of soon-to-be-dead men.
Eventually we arrived at the tents. Or rather, where the tents used to be. Most had been taken down in preparation for the retreat down the narrow pathway I’d spoken to Patrick about.
“Fuck the fallback!” a man yelled, riding down the slope from the battlefield. “The boys in crimson are fallin’ like an old hag’s tits.”
“What you talkin’ ’bout?” another said. “I was up there not twenty minutes go. Took eight fookin’ arrows to make one of ’em eat dirt.”
“I was up there not three minutes ago, and I’m tellin’ ya something’s bloody changed. Where’s Patrick? Hey, you! Unload those supplies. We’re stayin’ right here. We got ’em now, boys.”
My courier reached down and snagged the shirt of an unsuspecting woman carrying a bundle of stakes in her arms.
“I need a savant, now.”
“Um. Um. Savant Loric is over there a ways. I think. Her tent is still—”
“Show me!”
The woman bit her lip and nodded, shuffling her feet at a hurried pace toward what appeared to be a singular curtain of tents. Turned out it was one tent spanning fifty feet in width.
“Through there,” the woman said.
My courier grunted. He snatched a passerby and told him to help haul my busted ass off the saddle. The two carried me into the tent and out the other side, where a makeshift infirmary had been erected.
Empty eyes — quite literally in some cases — greeted me. Soldiers were lying on the ground. Blood streaked the bare bodies of men who’d been stripped from their armor and wrapped with thin linen bandages.
A woman shrieked as a saw bit into her wrist. One man held her down while another dragged the steel teeth across flesh and bone, till her hand fell away.
The lads ferrying me along sat me down. Muddled voices drifted all around me.
“Keep him still or he’ll bleed out,” said a woman.
“I’m tryin’!”
“Try harder.”
“Savant! Savant, eyes on me, now.”
“A little busy, Officer.”
“He can wait. Got a man who needs suturing at once.”
“Wonderful. So do a hundred others.”
“Get your ass over—”
“Hands off, hands off!”
“Orders from Lord Patrick Verdan. If he dies, you answer to the king of the North.”
There was a grumble or two, then a few moments later a woman knelt before me. She had no eyebrows.
“Consider yourself fortunate that your heart does not rest in the right chamber of your chest,” she said. She delved into the deep pockets of her coat, producing a pouch, then some string, then a needle.
The savant mashed up some wolf’s leaf in her mouth, then applied a thin film of it to my wound. As she stitched closed the flaps of flesh, she remarked on the impressiveness of my capacity for pain.
“Mm,” was all I said.
Few things could have enlivened me then. It just so happened that one of them walked into the infirmary about two hours later.
Her face jolted me upward, snapping a couple stitches in the process.
“Vayle,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Her nostrils flared, and she shook her head. “Ellie’s scouts were wrong.”
Chapter 32
“He punched you?”
“The swelling,” Vayle said, pointing to her eye, “is not happenstance. He begged me to land the phoenix atop a hump. I did. He climbed off, and so did I.”
“Then he… punched you?” I asked again.
“He punched me. And he took the phoenix for himself.”
I glanced at Patrick, who lowered his chin onto his knuckles. He had accompanied my commander to the infirmary and offered his tent as a place of seclusion where we could talk.
Mostly Vayle talked and we listened. She informed us Arken had arrived at Scholl a fortnight ago, one day after my departure. She’d scrambled to get Ripheneal and bring him through the tear as Arken set foot inside the city.
That went according to plan. And the god of Amortis predictably hunted them down, passing into the living realm as well. Again, all according to plan.
With mindful guidance, Vayle lifted the phoenix high into the air, spotted the shroud of mountains that enclosed Vereumene, and propelled the fiery bird that way, with Arken at their heels… or rather, at the phoenix’s feathers, far below — he’d apparently crossed the tear on a warhorse.
Then the plan rather unraveled. Ripheneal apparently took the phoenix for himself — after punching my commander — and… well, that was all we knew.
“Half day’s walk,” Vayle said, in response to Patrick’s question of how far away she was when the commandeering of the phoenix took place.
“Ten miles away,” I said. “Fifteen at best.” I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”
Patrick snorted. “You? Imagine hearing of gods and goddesses and the end of all life for the first time.”
“Been there already,” I said. “He has to have a plan. Has to have some sort of—”
A hand surged between the tent flaps, sweeping them aside. “Lord Patrick. There’s a, um… it’s a bird. Er, on fire.”
Vayle and I bolted, with Patrick close behind.
“Over there,” the man said. “It only just landed.”
The phoenix had touched down in the bosom of the mountains, near the walls of Vereumene. Vayle and I sprinted that way, stumbling to an abrupt stop as a horse blacker than the busted volcanic rock that carpeted the floor of this land trotted around the bend of the mountain that curled in toward Vereumene.
Its rider bobbed up and down as four hooves trampled over the choppiness of a scarred earth. A luster of gems dressed him, melted somehow into flexible platelike armor. He glistened with translucent violets, the deep reds of bloodstone, the warm gold of ambers.
“Astul,” Vayle whispered. “Astul!”
I ignored her.
“What are you — get back here!”
I found myself drifting forward, toward the inevitable meeting of horse and phoenix. Of Ripheneal and Arken. The former clambered down from the conjured bird, his lean, emaciated body standing tall and straight. The latter idled his warhorse, put a foot in the stirrup and landed on crushed rock, spewing forth a cloud of smog.
An imperceptible force urged me along. It felt instinctual, just as migration is to birds.
Arken carried in his arm a helm crafted of smelted amethysts. He turned his head toward Vereumene, then to the war camp. With a flick of his wrist, his helmet soared through the air, clunking across rocks.
“I don’t believe I’ll be needing that,” he said, his voice clear as a songbird’s melody in the silence of dawn… but lacking the distinct cheerfulness. If you had to imagine a bird when you heard Arken speak, you would imagine a crow cawing from a bare tree in the bluster of winter.
The sun chanced a passing glance, then withdrew into its bulwark of clouds just as the Vereumene portcullises opened.
Given the situation, the prospect of assistance from one Kane Calbid should have instilled within me hope. But gee, didn’t it seem like a big, wild coincidence that the seaborne fucker had finally decided to lend a hand?
And you know, if he had come to the conclusion that marching his woody-colored ass out here — or at least watching his devout protectors of the sea march out — would see his life expectancy surge rather than fall precipitously off a cliff, one had to ask why there wasn’t a single cherry-red tunic filing through the gates.
In fact, there wasn’t a single man filing through the gates. Unless you pervert that word to the extent that it encompasses Wardens as well. Because that was what pounded out from Vereumene.
Wardens.
Fifteen Wardens. Maybe thirteen. I didn’t have the wherewithal to make precise quantifications at that moment.
Frankly, I shouldn’t have had the wherewithal to move one foot in front o
f the other. Fear should’ve strapped my boots to the ground and made an immovable assassin out of me. But I forged a path ahead, determined to… do what, exactly?
Behind the Wardens came shields painted with the crimson wolf. Behind the shields fluttered crimson cloaks.
Obviously Kane Calbid hadn’t refused Kale’s message. And he hadn’t refused my entry. Because Kane Calbid was dead and his kingdom lost.
It seemed the goddess of war had outmaneuvered me in the end.
The Wardens fanned out into a wall of muscular knots of flesh and three-headed flails. Swords and pikes obediently rose into the air behind them as Grannen Klosh’s army stood at attention.
I continued walking.
“An attempt nevertheless,” Arken said, putting himself within arm’s length of Ripheneal. “I did not expect it, if that lessens the impact of failure. I predicted the trap would come in my realm, not yours.” He flashed that serpent smile of his. “But take note. My influence extends far and wide.”
I had stopped moving. For no good reason. The urge to continue simply wasn’t there any longer. Others joined my side. A whole slew of ’em. There were Northernmen and those born in the thickets and forests of the East. There were soldiers whose faces were wet with blood coming down the ramp from the battlefields, as if the fighting had suddenly ceased.
The two gods were so close I could almost touch them.
A sword scraped against a jeweled scabbard. Arken regarded the tip of the blade coolly.
“What did you think would happen?” he asked.
With a mouth that sagged and eyelids that drooped, Ripheneal tightened his lips and lifted his chin.
Arken plunged the summit of his sword into Ripheneal’s belly. A second thrust expelled the blade through his flank, and the god of life fell forward, into Arken’s arms.
A flicker of life, however faint, remained in those sour red eyes.
Palpable anger rose up within me. It seemed to infect others as well. Fists were clenched, and jaws were set.
“End the creator,” Arken said, “and you end his creations.”
Ripheneal smiled. He shook his head and labored with an uncooperative hand till he manipulated it into a single finger that jabbed at Arken’s breastplate of jewels.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 100
