Tirielle made to argue, but Renir stilled her objections with a gesture. 'It's true. He will.'
Roskel stood aside from his friend, the ages-dead man who had, for a short time, been the Outlaw King. Renir stepped forward, to the place where Roskel had stood. He reached down to the corpse's head in the heart of the black stone wonder beneath the dirt. His legs shook from fatigue. His hands, his arms, too...though he didn't know why.
Before he could think better of it, he took the crown from the blackened, desiccated body and placed it upon his head.
*
Chapter Thirty-Two
Shorn was in a different kind of dark place to Renir. Dark has degrees, it has weight, value, just like coin.
It wasn't as dark as the black-stone cube through which Renir and Tirielle travelled. Compared to that place, this was summer-sun, dozing on your back in long grass. But dark has weight and value and this, somehow, was worse.
He found himself in a tent. Thick hide for walls with wooden poles holding the thing together. No fire burned and the smoke-hole at the top of the tent remained covered. Daylight, obviously. He could see shards of light slicing across the interior. Little dust, but then there would be...the Draymar travelled. They were a nomadic people, with no time for their possessions to become dusty. If it was not used, it was not useful, and therefore discarded.
Had to be a Drayman tent. Had to.
He was still thinking, which was good. Didn't really matter, but it meant he wasn't dead yet, nor mad. Not completely.
Hurt, yes. Hurt very badly...but not mad.
Not frightened, either. Shorn didn't scare easily. He wasn't sure he was even capable of fear anymore. He'd seen such terrible things, done plenty of bad things, too. Killing was part of war, but Shorn hadn't always killed for such simple reasons. He'd killed in anger, killed men hard and slow. Tortured a few, even, if he was honest with himself, and only a fool would lie to themselves.
Fear wouldn't help him now, and because he was honest with himself, the best he could hope for was a quick death. A quick death would be just fine.
Probably, that had been the intention. Shoot a man in the chest with a poison arrow, you're more than likely aiming to kill. But he'd fallen forward, jarring the point of the arrow through his lungs and out his back, taking the worst of the poison with it.
Which left him helpless, rather than dead. But then he'd been taken by some foul magic to this place...which he was sure was not quite so lucky.
Mostly, he looked down. On occasion, he glanced around, but he was so tired, so hurt, he could barely lift his head to see straight. When he looked down, and when he could bear to open his eyes, he saw the ragged mess of his chest. The feathers jutted from just above his right nipple. The shaft was still in him. The arrowhead still proud of his back. The skin around the wound was puckered. The flesh was trying to heal around the object, but failing. His skin had black tendrils running across the surface.
I imagine it looks a far sight worse inside.
His right arm wouldn't respond to his commands at all, but it didn't matter much - he was bound. Trussed, ready for the slaughter.
Doesn't matter much, does it? Dead either way. Quick or slow, hard or easy, the end's the same.
The wound in his chest was dirty, too. It started to smell almost immediately. If they didn't get on with killing him, the arrow's poison, and the infection, would finish him soon enough. He wasn't a fool, and he wouldn't lie to himself. He wasn't getting out of this alive.
And what good would it do him, anyway? What use would he be anymore, now that he was a man with nought but thumbs left on his hands?
*
The tent flap didn't open. It hadn't opened since he'd been brought here. Magic, for sure. His sword Faerblane wept at the sound of it, and even drifting from unconsciousness the sound of his sword's song in the presence of such dark magic hurt his heart.
Shortly after he first arrived, his captor woke him with the first blow. The hood was taken from his head and there before him was a demon. He looked down and saw that his index finger on his right hand had been neatly severed. The wound was burned closed, as though with a great heat.
His hand was numb, and it hurt him not at all. But would the demon merely attempt some other, worse means to cause him pain?
Shorn screamed with gusto, like a man in agony would. The idiot, shifting tormentor merely told him its name, shifting endlessly and sickeningly in Shorn's vision.
'Guryon,' it said.
Faerblane sang so loud at the thing's magic that it shook right across the floor, even though it was in its scabbard. Shorn spat on the demon. The thing laughed and took the next finger, simply slicing it away. Instantly cauterised, and Shorn was two fingers down.
The thing stayed all day, took its time. Shorn wasn't afraid, but in the end he even cried, just because of the pain and the shock, not because of fear. He wasn't afraid. If he was honest with himself, seeing his fingers disappear from painlessly wasn't pleasant. When the creature started in on Shorn's left hand, he screamed for real. Wasn't ashamed of it, either. He wasn't trying to impress anyone.
Maybe it was true that he wasn't afraid, but he was dying, too...he found he was sad to die. Sad about many things. Never knowing his son, never saying goodbye to the people who mattered to him. Bourninund, his friend for years...Wen, once his tutor, once his enemy, but always close to his heart. The priest...and Renir.
I'm sorry, Renir, he thought. I am sorry.
The thing hurt him badly, then, by pushing against the black arrow shaft in his chest. Shorn's thoughts fled and he gasped, sweat suddenly pouring from his skin and a burning heat throughout him.
'You haven't even asked me anything!' he shouted, spat, shaking against his bonds. But the thing laughed again, a sickly sound. Shorn didn't speak again, nor did the monster.
He was dying. Question was, could he do anything about it?
So thinking, he heard the flap to the tent shift aside and a burned, horrid thing entered, grinning. The thing was worse than the Guryon. The Guryon didn't care. This thing did. Pain suited it.
It barely had a face at all, and when it spoke its name, Shorn knew the best he could do was die and not shame himself.
'Klan Mard, mercenary...remember me?'
Klan Mard...Shorn remembered well enough.
The Protocrat knelt before him. 'Guryon,' said the burned thing. 'You served well. The price...the sword. It's yours. Leave us.'
And like that, Faerblane was gone and Shorn was alone with the real monster.
*
Chapter Thirty-Three
'Outside,' said the monster kneeling down before Shorn, 'There is such an awful cacophony. The wailing of dead souls. My magic is fuelled and formed by pain, mercenary. This, you know. But I do know a man needs his peace. I know this...I know many things. So I make this little tent a haven for you. A small magic, to keep it quiet. A place of calm. For you. And yet you mewl and bawl like a little baby.'
Shorn hadn't been aware he'd been crying, or mewling, but now, he realised he'd been making the noise in the back of his throat all along.
For how long, now?
He wouldn't let the bastard see him hurt again.
Shorn sniffed, spat to one side, like Klan Mard was nothing. He didn't reply.
I won't speak, he told himself. No matter what. Best I can do. If there's nothing left for me, least I can do is be a stubborn bastard in death.
'Hmm, stubborn,' said Mard, but Shorn did not believe the creature read his mind. More, his face.
'Nothing more to say? Good. I like that. Once, you know, I would have taken your face. Simply lifted it from your skull. I tired of it, though. To collect things you need a home. I have no home. I am...what...a rogue? A man alone. My kind are all dead, Shorn. Rather like your kin. The Island Archivists. Such knowledge they had, no? Now...that is within me.'
Shorn closed his eyes. He almost wished the beast would just kill him, rather than torture him with boredom.
But he would not deign to reply to the monster's prattle.
'The Sun Destroyers killed the last of my brothers, I think. Now...there is just me. Not Protocrat...not human...something else. The Myrmidion, I am now. The crossroads of all knowledge.'
'You're still an arsehole,' said Shorn, despite himself.
Mard smiled.
'Yes. That's it! Irk me and I will kill you? The wonder of man.'
'You'll kill me either way.'
'Oh, yes, of course,' said Klan, pushing himself easily from his knees. He walked behind Shorn, and Shorn couldn't turn his head to follow the monster, but then did it matter if death came from back or front? Same result, either way.
'The thing is,' Klan said, placing his hands almost tenderly either side of Shorn's shaking head, 'I don't need answers. I already have them all inside me, written upon my bones. I don't need your pain, or your suffering.'
Klan lifted Shorn's head up, so that the mercenary was forced to look straight ahead. He was too weak to fight.
'I just need your head.'
Klan kept right on, pulling Shorn's head up, until he pulled it free. No more difficult than tearing the head from a flower. The mercenary had no time for last words or thoughts. Klan turned the head round in his palms and looked into the dead mercenary's eyes but the light had already faded.
'No matter,' he said to himself. He took the bag that had been placed over Shorn's head upon his capture, and this time when Shorn's head was in the bag, Klan was able to pull the drawstring taut.
As he stepped outside, bag in hand and nothing else, the ranks of Draymen were everywhere, and the noise outside the small sphere of silence around the tent was so powerful it hurt even Klan's ears, which in turn made him smile.
All across the Drayman steppes, the disparate nations waited. A nation who warred constantly, with one thing only in common. A hatred of the Sturmen that was thousands of years strong.
The harsh, hard sunlight beat down on Klan's naked flesh. It made Klan's charred skin tickle, another small torture which Klan enjoyed enough to smile, though his smile was a hideous thing, a toothy rictus only, as he had barely any lips remaining to his ravaged face.
Before him and the might of the Draymen the portal he'd conjured with a thousand dead souls stood, a black rent in the country, a soul-forged void, waiting to serve Klan's towering will.
On the other side would be the endless grass, the chill autumn, and the battle for Sturma.
Klan nodded to the first Drayman he saw, and in the Drayman's harsh language barked his command. He stepped into the portal and walked through the darkness of the void, carrying his dead prize, heedless of the screams of the tormented ghosts that powered the magic. After a short time, his foot landed on soft grass and wet earth.
Naeth, the city and castle both, lay ahead. The Draymen poured through behind him.
*
Part III.
The Lord of Light and the Lady of Dark
Chapter Thirty-Four
A thousand years and a thousand years and time beyond counting before that. Myriad threads of fate that Caeus had woven into such a great tapestry...more power, perhaps, than any living thing ever held...
And, he thought, I missed this?
Caeus' stepped down from his travels to the still surface of the new lake of glass that spread for miles in all directions. The centre was where the greatest concentration of dread power had been unleashed. He strode toward it, feet sure on the glass lake as the surface was already being blown over with the dust and sands of the plains around Arram.
My Lord God was right. In my hubris, I have already failed. So much did I see that I was blind to other facets of the future, and in my blindness the world is doomed...
The red wizard, red-eyed and red-robed, walked between mounds of Protocrat dead. In some places even bone melded together from the heat blast. Steel and burned flesh were contorted into nightmare sculptures, either standing proud of the glass, reaching to the skies, or sometime beneath, visible through the murk, like they'd drowned, or been sucked into the heat.
Such things as Caeus had never seen.
His bloody eyes blazed.
Maybe Rythe is doomed...but I am not done.
Slowly, precisely, he knelt down and touched the sea of glass with his palm, his long, pale fingers splayed against the smooth surface. It was warm, still, there under the sun. Would no doubt feel warm forever more.
He poured his power and rage into it, until the thing became a bubbling, roiling lake, molten, as it had been when...
Caeus allowed his vision to travel back along the pathway, to the event itself. He felt the heat, heard the screams and the pleas...and saw them.
There...shimmering, even within his vision of the past. The size, shape, build, even of Hierarchs...each one protected by sentinel armour. Impervious to heat or any harm, and the red storm from the skies pounding into them, as though the storm-light was ecstatic at the release of pain unlike any ever known...
I have been a fool.
All along, he'd been a fool, hadn't he? There, he'd been assuming human kind, spreading across the face of Rythe throughout the millennia, would be the fuel for the return.
How could I be so wrong?
It was the protocrats that had been sacrificed to bring back the Elethyn. Their pain had called down the Sun Destroyers from the red light in the sky and into the Hierarchs...
They were willing vessels...
And had waited millennia to host their forefathers.
The protectorate was no more, and the Hierarchy, too, no more. Now? Only the Elethyn, bolstered with the sentinel armour, like an offering from their children. They'd taken it, but the Elethyn always wanted more. They'd destroyed the Hierarchs and taken their gifts of armour and their bodies and souls, too.
Human kind, the rahken...they were less than nothing to the Elethyn.
Caeus stepped forward, shaken, away from his vision of the past and the slaughter, to the present. Still, he knelt, palm splayed on the lake of glass, but it was warm, only. It did not scorch his skin.
Then I will...do what I must. What I am, I will do. With my death, perhaps, I can...
He stepped above the lake, onto the hot air, basking in the heat of the sun and lake both. To him, it was like the kiss of the sun. His anger began, slowly, to fade. Heat calmed his mind and heart. Caeus started to think once again.
With my death I can give them a chance.
Such chance as it was. The Elethyn were more powerful than he...more wily, it seemed, than he had assumed.
Maybe she was right, he thought. Selana always thought me a fool to deny the world of the dead. The dead would have seen this...could have made a difference...
The thought was uncomfortable for a creature possessed of such power, but it was true, wasn't it? He could have had an army here, dead-warriors plucked from this new-sea, flesh in armour of glass. Could have called forth the dead might of the entire Protectorate and taken his unholy allies to battle the Elethyn once more.
Maybe I was always a fool. Hubris ever makes idiots of great men.
Caeus' calm wavered, but once more he turned his face to the warmth of the two suns, still high in the skies, pounding heat into the desert that had once been Arram, reflecting upward from the wide, shining new lake. His anger would avail him nothing. Stop him thinking straight, maybe, but little more.
Should I hunt them down, he wondered, how long would it take?
Could I stand, alone, against so many of the mighty?
The returned ones, encase in their sentinel armour...perhaps even invincible, now.
But I'm no hedge mage, am I?
For some reason his sister's voice, so long lost, echoed down the past in his mind. Beware your pride, Caeus. It was ever your downfall.
But his sister was gone, long gone, and he was all that remained to fight for the light. And he would fight, win or fail. He would do so because there was no other who could do what he could do.
Agains
t sentinel armour? Again, his sister's voice, echoing from the distant past, like she were beside him, still.
Caeus shook his head. She was not here...there was only him.
He closed his eyes for a moment and with his will alone sent out a blast of power to search them out.
North...destruction...pain, still. A feast of pain...
He closed his heart to the vision, waited a beat for his magic to return tenfold, as he knew it would. When it did, the power of it threw him crashing to the glass, cracking it.
But he dusted his robe with his long fingers and smiled. Now that they knew where he was, they would come to him. He crouched, and leaped into the sky and travelled fast as the flame far across the sky to the south, to draw them away and save who he could.
He thought it might well be too late to save himself.
*
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Elethyn were not great in numbers. Many of their kind had been lost between the stars, drifting off in fascination at the endless void of space, lost forevermore to the wonders of the paths of light.
More, still, had found their Hierarch hosts incapable of containing their form and their power. Those were left behind, dead and burned and no more than husks, dying in a gout of fire so hot that it destroyed the vessel, the Elethyn's soul, even the armour itself before the blasts reached out further still and destroyed swathes of countryside, or whatever village or city happened to be nearby.
As the Elethyn tore their way to the north, their numbers lessened...but those that remained became stronger, still.
Enough remained. They stayed together yet, while they became accustomed to their new forms. Lesser forms, not as versatile as their own bodies, but bodies were nothing. The soul was all, and the soul would learn. The soul would make the body work for them.
Rythe Falls Page 14
