by Phil Tucker
“Come,” she said. “You need to rest. I’ll try to cleanse you.”
“Help me up,” he said, and when she did, he swayed. “Those demons. So weak. Their power was so wrong. Twisted. Listen: we need to convince the Ascendant to allow the Sin Casters to work with the Consecrated. To order them to do so. Pair up. Create conduits. We need them so we can fight the demons.”
“Is that your plan?” She stopped. “Was that what you were thinking?”
“We’re going to die. They’ve killed one of the dragons already.” Though he still sounded faint, his words came smoothly, almost calmly. “We need to fight with everything we have. Conduits, Kethe. The ancient pairings. We need their strength. We need the Consecrated and the Virtues to cleanse as the Sin Casters fight.”
She didn’t know what to say. Convince the Ascendant to pair Sin Casters with Consecrated and Virtues? “He’ll never do it. He turned down the medusa’s offer. He won’t destroy the Empire to save it.”
Asho laughed weakly, a sound so bitter, it chilled her to the bone. “Then, we’ll die. We’ll all die. Righteous, stupid, and dead.”
“Come,” she said, and slipped underneath his arm. “We’ll send word to my mother, and she’ll find a place for your Sin Casters to stay. And we’ll get you some help. A chance to rest.”
“Oh, Kethe.” He allowed her to guide him back out of the corridor. “There’s no rest any more. Just death. Just death.”
“Shh,” she said.
They emerged into the large hall, and the Sin Casters turned to regard them. They were a mutilated lot, the ragged remains of the people they had once been. Their scars were evident across their bodies and equally visible in the depths of their eyes.
“Tell me one thing,” said Asho. “In this battle – you’re going to fight beside me as Kethe, right? Not as Makaria, with them?”
“Come on,” she said, her throat closing.
She knew what she wanted to say, knew the answer she wanted to cry out to the heavens. But the duty and responsibility of being Makaria lay heavy upon her soul. She wanted to be both, do both. Pain tore at her heart, deep within her chest, like she’d never felt before, like she’d only ever heard told in the ballads.
“You have to decide,” he said, drawing back. “Kethe, or Makaria?”
She thought of Gray Wind, Dalitha and the others, of the good she could do leading them into battle. How Ankara had died to save her, sacrificing herself in a kinetic blast of white fire. How the people of the Empire looked to her for inspiration.
Could she disappoint them all? Crush their hope, spurn them to stand beside Asho as his love, his White Adept, his Kethe?
“How much longer are you going to live this lie?” he said sharply.
“They need me,” she said.
“I need you,” he replied.
The ground shivered.
All conversation stopped, and confusion flickered across Asho’s face.
“What was that?” Kethe wondered aloud.
“It’s begun,” Asho replied.
The ground shivered again, and dust sifted down from the ceiling. He reached out and took her hand, squeezed it tight.
“They’re here.”
CHAPTER 21
Tharok
They begrudged him every step of the way, but Tharok didn’t care. He barely registered their presence on the periphery of his vision. Each step felt fated. His mouth was dry. His hands kept opening and closing, almost of their own accord. He was moving deeper into danger.
Not that he cared about the knights with their swords who were escorting him. They were nothing more than chaff. No, he was wading into an apostasy of the soul that he couldn’t yet fathom, a danger to his very sense of self.
He’d walked these halls before, as a victor. He’d owned this palace, could have ordered any part of it defaced or destroyed. Now, he was moving as a prisoner. It made him want to laugh. Instead, he kept his gaze level, fixed straight ahead, focused on what he could sense through the walls, beyond the doors: a call that originated from his core and was answered by a great and burning presence.
The White Gate.
Gone were the shamans who could have advised him, offered him counsel and the inherited wisdom of his kind. Never had he missed Golden Crow as much as he did now. That wizened, cheerful, blind elder, whose lips were always greasy with chicken and curved into a wicked smile. Had his soul, perverted as it had been by Kyrra’s Kiss, found its way to the Valley of the Dead? He deserved peace. Deserved to be rewarded for the long life of service he’d lived before succumbing to the medusa.
Tharok didn’t know.
At long last, they reached the great doors. The knights pulled them open, swung them wide, then stepped aside to let him through. Their hatred and impotent rage made him grin. Some dark part of him wanted to insult them, clap one of them on the shoulder, provoke them, but no. He was no longer so petty.
Instead, he walked forward and gazed down the length of the hall at the burning white wonder, that conflagration of holy fire trapped within its mesh of silver, a great verticality that seethed and ebbed, an eternal flame.
It was here that he’d truly changed, when he’d approached it that first time, so foolish, so confident, wanting to immolate himself and destroy the circlet in the process. He’d climbed those steps, and perhaps he’d not returned. That Tharok had died, though he hadn’t known that then.
Tharok exhaled and looked at the floor. He’d come so far, done so much. Killed. Conquered. Led thousands to war. Destroyed and overcome. He’d etched his name on the bones of history, but that name no longer belonged to him.
Tharok the Uniter was gone. The Tharok who had lived before donning the circlet was also gone. Who was he, then? Who was standing here before this wonder, alone, cut off from both kragh and human?
He hoped to find out.
Taking a deep breath, he forged ahead through the empty hall. When he reached the base of the broad steps, he stopped again. He’d been attacked by the last of the White Gate’s devotees here and had slain them out of hand. Their corpses were gone; their blood had been scrubbed off the pale marble floor. But their deaths weighed heavily on his mind. He frowned and stared at the steps where they had fallen. They’d died for their faith.
What was he willing to die for?
Slowly, he climbed. He was in no rush. Fear – if he was honest – made his progress slow. Would he stop when he reached the top? Or would he continue, compelled by some ineluctable momentum, and pass through that white fire into oblivion?
He didn’t know.
He was being foolish. Both his kind and humanity faced an existential threat, and the attack could come at any moment. Yet here he was, losing himself further, seeking answers when he didn’t even know the questions.
He slowed, then stopped. A terrible, ponderous weight bowed his shoulders. Reflexively, he reached for World Breaker, for its endless strength, but it was gone. He could feel the fire imparted by Kyrra’s Kiss raging within his veins, but facing the glory of the White Gate it was insufficient. There was no overpowering this final miracle, no muscling his way through.
He was breathing in deep pants, as if he were high above the world, standing on the summit of one of the Five Peaks, where the air was thin.
Slowly, as if he were being pressed down by a huge, invisible hand, he sank to his knees.
He closed his eyes, hands resting on his thighs, and lowered his chin.
Memories came to him.
He was walking in the marketplace of Gold. There, on the slave stand, he saw Nok and Shaya, and the sight of them sent a chill through his bones. The crowd around him slowed, then stopped. He knew he would move forward next and free them. But in that frozen moment, all he could think of was how they would both die. He studied Nok’s broad, proud face and Shaya’s haunted, hollow expression. He felt a pang of pain and longed for their presence so strongly that his whole body ached.
His clan. Gone.
Other image
s flashed through his mind. His setting fire to the male medusa’s corpse so as to awaken Kyrra. Charging Porloc atop his wyvern, crashing into the Orlokar Warlord and ending his life in a shattering of bones. The sight of trolls falling from the sky onto Abythos. How he’d torn that human Virtue to pieces by wrenching her sideways off World Breaker. Shoving Wrok into the fire. Cutting Toad in twain. Giving his warlords over to Kyrra. Taking Aletheia.
Blood. Death. And for what?
The song of the White Gate was rising within him. He tried to shove it away.
Everything he’d done since his father was murdered and he’d fled his Orlokar assassins had been selfish and destructive. His desire to survive had molded with the circlet’s desire to conquer. It had fed him the truth of how humanity had manipulated the kragh and had awakened within him an outrage that demanded redress.
He’d never looked back. Everything had been permissible if it served his cause. Only two acts of independence had truly been his own: freeing Nok and Shaya, and allowing Maur to slip away from Gold with the shamans.
Everything else was a sham. A charade. He’d been as controlled by the circlet as he’d thought he was controlling the trolls.
What if he’d died in the Valley of the Dead, if he’d allowed the hunters’ hounds to tear him apart? The circlet would never have come down from the heights. He’d never have united the kragh and brought it to the Empire. Kyrra would have never wakened. He wouldn’t have lost the circlet to the magister, and it wouldn’t have fallen into the hands of the girl who had unleashed the demons.
This was all his responsibility, even if he had been only a tool. Even if he had been a puppet, dancing to the circlet’s tune.
His fault. His alone.
The thought gouged at him, tore at the fabric of his soul, and he worked his head from side to side, grinding his teeth, growling low as the pain brought tears to his eyes. Grimacing, he bent over, squeezing his eyes closed. What damage he’d done to his own kind! What irreparable damage. All because he refused to die. He had dared heresy and climbed into the realm of the dead. He had defied the Sky Father and brought ruin to the world.
If he could change the past, would he go back to that moment with the hounds and allowed them to kill him?
Yes.
With a snarl, he slammed his fist against the floor, and the White Song soared. He felt a shivering, dancing pressure over his skin, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that white fire was raging across his entire body and was spreading across the steps.
Sitting back on his heels, he watched the alabaster flames dance and spread. They climbed up the stairs, flowed down behind him, extended out toward the distant walls.
What did it mean?
He stared at the fire in his palms. His black skin looked gray through its leaping tongues. Was he blessed? Cursed? Why did he hear the White Song? Kragh could not Ascend; the first Ascendant had so decreed. So why was he burning?
Tharok raised his eyes to the White Gate and saw that great arcs of its flame were reaching toward him through the air.
What did it mean to be blessed by the White Gate? Was he forgiven? Was he being called to serve? Did the Gate mean for him to become a Virtue and bend knee to the Ascendant?
Never. He wouldn’t do that, not ever.
Tharok rose to his feet. He felt as if he were bursting from within, from that song that was rising higher and higher, all but splitting his skull. A tendril of flame from the White Gate arched down to him, a miniature tornado of fire. All he had to do was reach up and touch it.
People were shouting from the entrance. Their voices sounded miles away.
What was his future? Who was he? How could he pay for the damage he had done, to his own kind and to the world? He yearned for an answer, for a sense of purpose, a road to follow.
A voice to tell him what to do.
Tharok drew back his hand.
No, he had to discover this answer for himself. Whatever came next, it would be his path to walk, his future to live, his choice to be made.
The ground shivered.
The great tendril of white fire was sucked back into the White Gate.
Tharok looked up as the ground shivered again. Dust fell from the cracks in the masonry high above.
The demons had finally arrived.
Good.
Tharok inhaled a great lungful of breath, and the white fire that was cloaking the steps returned to him and sank into his palms. It was gone from sight, but he could feel it roiling, burning, churning within him.
He turned away from the White Gate and with grim purpose and a sense of relief strode toward the great doors.
CHAPTER 22
Tiron
Tiron strode out into the evening light. Above him, the clouds were a tumultuous expanse of endless gold and dusky crimson. He could vaguely sense Draumronin gliding through them, even when the dragon dipped out of sight below the lip of the great courtyard onto which Tiron had emerged. It was growing, he realized, this dragon sense: if he focused, he could pinpoint where the great black was flying with eerie accuracy.
Ramswold was standing atop a table, his back to the courtyard railing and the sky, clad in full plate and looking out over a crowd of knights. There had to be some forty of them, Tiron guessed, all in armor and listening eagerly to the young lord’s words. Drifting closer, Tiron reached the back of the crowd and listened. Ramswold nodded to him but did not stop.
“Hence why the primary duty of a knight is not to excel in force of arms – though of course that is to be sought – but rather to strive always to exemplify the best of Ascendancy, to be a paragon of all that the first Ascendant deemed holy when he set us Ennoians to our holy task. For we are the sword of the Empire, not the hammer, not the butcher’s knife. Our obligation is first and foremost to the highest ideal of an Ennoian knight, with all other loyalties being temporal or otherwise.”
A burly young man at the front raised a gauntleted hand. “What if the Ascendant gives us a command that we feel contradicts our principles?”
Ramswold smiled. “Your question contains a fallacy, Ser Bondos. By definition, the Ascendant cannot give such a command. But if he did, we would have to ask ourselves if that request truly violated our precepts as we understand them. And if we decided that they did, and that obeying that command would denigrate our Order, then it would be our moral obligation to refuse the mortal aspect of the Ascendant so as to obey his higher self.”
Ser Bondos kept his hand up. “So, you mean to say that an Ennoian knight can judge the holiness of the Ascendant’s requests?”
“I do,” Ramswold said, smiling coldly. “What distinguishes an Ennoian knight from a common brigand is not his skill in arms, his wealth, his holdings or his reputation, but rather his adherence to the truth of Ascendancy. We must be able to discriminate between a righteous command and a base one. In doing so, we concede that we can err, and if we do, then we will pay for our mistakes by being reborn as a Zoeian, or if our error be grave enough, an Agerastian, or even a Bythian.”
The crowd stirred uneasily, and Ramswold raised a palm. “Now, you begin to sense the true weight of what it means to be an Ennoian. The nature of our responsibility. Nothing is assured, and if we place our trust blindly in the commands of others, we are capable of committing far graver ills than if we seek honestly to follow the path of virtue.”
“What of that Bythian knight?” asked an older man, whose hair was salted and his armor functional and plain. “How do you explain him?”
Ramswold sighed. “From all I’ve heard — and Ser Tiron can attest to this — he is a good man. He has done great service to the Empire. But he is no Ennoian, and never can be. As such, I would not hold him to our level or require of him the same virtues.”
Tiron shifted his weight and crossed his arms.
“But,” the plain knight continued, “do you think it right that he bear arms?”
“My first impulse, to be honest, is to say that I do not,” Ramswold replied
. “At face value, the question is not whether he is capable of wielding them, or even to what end he fights. But…” Here, Ramswold rubbed at his chin. “Asho has done deeds that would do any Ennoian proud. That he is a Bythian is… perplexing. Is it possible that his soul is of such quality that even in his Bythian cycle, it shines through in his actions? I must admit that I don’t know. Further, he is a Sin Caster. He derives his powers from the Black Gate, and thus… well, you all know Ascendancy’s position on Sin Casting.”
Anger curdled in Tiron’s chest, but he fought for a calm tone. “I’ve fought beside Asho. He’s saved my life numerous times. Without him, I doubt Lady Iskra would be alive to serve as the Ascendant’s Grace. It’s hard to see him as evil for being a Sin Caster after all that.”
Knights turned to consider him, and many bowed their heads in deference or respect. Tiron ignored them and kept his gaze locked on Ramswold.
“I know.” Ramswold’s voice was soft. “As I said, he’s done great deeds. But he’s a Bythian, and a Sin Caster. I don’t know how to reconcile the quality of his soul with his station and magic.”
A pale, angular knight wearing ornate armor sniffed. “I believe it’s clear. Were he an Ennoian, he would be a hero. But he’s not. He did well, but in doing so, he violated the natural order.”
Tiron rounded on him. “You think the Ascendant would have been more pleased by Asho’s allowing the people of Ennoia to be massacred?”
“Ser Tiron,” Ramswold interjected, “the question of Asho’s virtues is complex. It is unreasonable to expect clear-cut answers.”
“Not complex,” the pale knight said in an icy tone. “Out of respect for your own accomplishments, Ser Tiron, I do not wish to argue with you. But I cannot help but believe that the Ascendant would have prevented Starkadr from falling if he had truly been pleased by Asho’s actions.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tiron said, pushing through the knights to confront the man. “Are you telling me that Starkadr fell because of Asho’s impiety?”
