Russ grunted against the ground fifty feet later, cushioned in the giant’s hand, and Uniquity tumbled from his grip. Grenn lifted the arm off of him; how the younger man had already stood, Russ found beyond him. Maybe you have gotten old in your age, he thought as he took Grenn’s hand and righted himself. He looked toward the nearest giant, the one Barius fought.
“Ha-ha!” the Lycan yelled, his words gleeful in their shape. Barius held its arms behind its head with tethers of Light. A Leynar stood below, channeling into the mad wolf, and the behemoth’s eyes bulged as it pushed against the Priestly restraints. “Nlinda-bjon! Slice its neck and rid the world of this munsch!”
Barius’s squire leapt through the air and drew her blades across the demon’s neck in sanguine arcs. Blood rained upon her, and Barius laughed while the demon dropped to one knee, then fell. It landed with reverberating solidity, twitching in its final moments.
The Lycan leapt from its back and picked up his hammer from where it had fallen. “Where is the next?” he asked. He turned, and where his eyes set, a Priest fought alone. The beast atop which he stood swiped and missed, gurgling against the drowning current of power the Priest channeled into its mouth. His target, too, fell, but around them, the giants performed their duty well, tearing through armor and Ley-Light, mashing and stomping their ways across the battlefield.
“This could be going worse,” Grenn said. The young knight sounded hopeful.
“Could be going a hell of a lot better, too,” Kendra snapped. She appraised Grenn, who had already turned to fight the next. Then she turned her attention toward the portal that still hung in the air. “Russ.”
He followed her gaze. A lone Leynar dropped through and landed with crackling eminence, his eyes burning bright gold. The Mesiter righted himself as a shockwave knocked across the battlefield and staggered the demons it met for half a dozen seconds.
“Grand Master,” the Mesiter said. Russell heard him as though the man stood next to him, then the Leynar disappeared.
“Do not retreat.” With M’keth’s voice, an ecstatic moan sang across the battlefield.
From behind them, a man spoke against M’keth’s shadow, and a monsoon of energy centered on Itharin as he incanted.
Russ felt his power; titanic magic for the Titan of the Ley. “What in the hells is he doing?”
“Showing off,” said Kendra, unimpressed.
The ground shook, and from the dirt and grass and mud rose mammoths in towers higher than the trees. They shook their bodies while they formed and quaked the land where they stomped. Their trumpets filled the air with gravelly horns, and around the battlefield, Karlian, Priest, Leynar, and battle-urlan looked toward the tremor of vitality that pulled toward the Mesiter, who, at their attention, spoke a final whisper.
The beasts charged, their hooves thunder underfoot, their tusks crashing rams as they wrecked into the demons’ host. Commands flew through comm lines to “Prepare for funnels,” and “Forward groups fix up for demon retreat.” The Mesiter disappeared and ported from here to there, storming across the battlefield in echoing fulmination.
“They’re pulling back,” Kendra said. She sounded expectant. Large groups of Fel-beasts sped toward the smoldering forest against their master’s order as the tide of battle turned. The Leynar and the Order gave them chase into the wood.
Russ at last came to his day’s juncture. They would win this battle, but he would lose his own war if he allowed the bitch to make away. Neither could leave this day without facing the other—either of their plans depended on it.
A terrified scream came from behind them, far away, and the stone found her for him. The world became a tunnel, Russell Hollowman on one side, this M’kethian lieutenant on the other. D’niqa smiled at him, using that grotesque grin in the likeness of her hostage.
“Go help the others,” said the Grand Master. “I’ve got her.” Russell picked up his hammer and threw it away from him like a missile. It landed with a crashing resound at D’niqa’s feet.
“Russ”—Kendra said before he threw himself to it, and in the next instant, he swung Uniquity over his head. The engine on its back ignited and blasted its heft toward the demon’s face.
She dodged and phased from him. Russ turned, following her movement in his gut, and he raised his hammer in defense against her. But when he had turned fully, she stood over a man, his neck under her arm, waiting for the Grand Master to see. A smile crossed that mouth that held too many teeth, and her arm swept through the air toward her prey’s face.
Russ moved and slipped his hammer between them. “You’ve killed your last, bitch.”
Her smile turned deadly, and D’niqa dropped the man, who crawled away on three limbs, his left hand clenching his wrung neck. She lashed toward Russ, and Fel magic curved around his hammer and latched onto his back. His armor didn’t want to let him go for his instinct to fight, but the stone in his pocket told him, She’ll put you right where she wants you, and that’s exactly where you want to be. So he let the energy fling him, and a blink later, D’niqa stood over him, her arm an arcing mace of her own. The Grand Master hopped backwards, and they danced.
Russ called the Light to him. It would never be enough now, but the holy energy muted her as she attacked and dodged and disappeared and flanked. Each time, the soul stone gave him an edging insight into her process. He felt for her, pulled her back through the nether to him, and her counterpart held her in place as he swung his hammer. Quick as though it weighed a feather, Uniquity bolted downward in deadly arcs that missed her by barely an inch while she squirmed under his grasp.
Concern replaced the glee that had filled her face moments before, and the demon phased from him, out of his reach. She held her hand in front of her, gauging the distance to hold Russell at length. The fur on her thighs stilled. Her breast heaved.
“Daddy M’keth can’t save you, can he?” Russ’s armor whirred, anticipating where he’d move.
“He doesn’t need to,” D’niqa said, her words toxin. “We are made in the foulest of galaxies, brought here by the will of a god to serve He who will wrought destruction to this and all places.” She looked upon him with a deadly gaze. “Who are you to speak against Him? To profane the will of the highest god. How do you stand against Him?”
“I serve the highest god, and Hers is a power unmatched in this world. Each time your master fights us, we grow in strength. Your demise is not of our making, but of your own. And though you may hurt me and many others, your kind lost its crusade before the first defender of Coroth even drew breath.”
D’niqa laughed. “Your mistress can’t even save you, her champion.”
“And your master can’t even use you, his new weapon.”
Her mirth evaporated. “Then if we can’t hurt you, we will maim what you love instead.” With her off-hand, she tore a chunk of meat out of her left thigh and screamed an ecstatic laughter that screeched over the din of retreating shouts and shrieks and orders.
“No!” Russ yelled.
D’niqa cooed when she saw Russ, her jaw set against the damage she’d dealt her body. Fel leaked from her wound and floated on a meager breeze. “Are we working now? Can He not use us right?”
Russ didn’t move. If he did, she would dodge or use whatever depraved trickery she knew from where her god had made her. He’d had the answer in his grasp before he even saw her the first time a week ago on his farm. How far away that life felt, so far removed it might as well have been a different reality. This only ended one way, and he lamented now that he’d not done it sooner. Goddess give me strength.
“Must be an odd feeling for you,” she said. “Losing when you expect to win. We know it, if by no other way than proxy of our master. Turns you into a sniveling halfling of the person you think you’re supposed to be, unmakes all the plans you’ve had for how you think your life should have gone.”
Russ’s voice came from him as a boar’s snarl. “Nearly nothing in my life happened as I wished.”
D’niqa ho
wled, a sound between anguish and true mirth. Her form morphed, and the dirty vision of Lillie appeared before him, her eyes black puddles the same as her hair. The chunk from her thigh pulsed with red as fat and muscle and bone exposed themselves to the open air. When she spoke, her voice came laced with M’keth’s: “The deal is still open. There are no strings, Grand Master. Join me, and we can rule this world, the three of us.” She smiled at him, her gums rotting and black, her hair pulled back from her face with grease and dirt and blood. Fel tinged her eyes, smoking orange.
“Nothing you say or do could convince me against your treachery,” said the Grand Master. “You’ve not learned about humans, despite your time here, M’keth. Once you take away anything we have to lose, we’ve no reason to fear death. We’ve beaten you, at least a gross times in recorded history, and this will be no different.”
Russ smashed his hammer to the ground, and as he chased the Light that snaked through the dirt, D’niqa cackled and morphed into her hellish self. She caught the blow he’d aimed at the back of her head.
Quicker than he could track, she lunged, and in the next instant D’niqa held Russell’s neck in one hand and lifted him off the ground. She squeezed and damaged the armor under her fingers as the tracker had done to Grenn’s. The metal smoked against her touch, dinging and crackling and tinkling from within, and his protection unfolded from his face. Against her other palm, she held Uniquity at bay. The hammer recoiled against her touch, and when she channeled Fel against it, it hurled itself a dozen feet from them and crashed on the sodden dirt.
Russell’s breath caught in his chest when she thrust her free hand toward his body, and her claws pierced his armor in a quick jab. A tedious pain spread through him. An alarm honked somewhere behind him.
“No!” came Lillie’s voice past the lieutenant’s, and Russ crumpled to the ground when D’niqa dropped him. She tittered while he turned over and tried to get his legs under him.
He coughed, and from his mouth sprayed blood and Fel, the latter of which floated into the air and made away.
“So what, Grand Master?” said the bitch. “Are we to fight forever, locked in an eternal struggle that inevitably kills you?”
“No.” Russ’s voice gurgled in his throat. He hocked a mouthful of blood and blackness onto the ground before he stood. His armor aided his laboring chest, balanced his ailing body in his final stand, and he reached toward his hip for the soul stone Lillie had given him at Arnin. He’d tried to save them both, but the Goddess wouldn’t let it be. “Both of ours. You told me this world burns.” He swallowed. “You’re right. But it is with holy Light, and from my ashes the world will rebuild itself anew. Free from you.” Russ knew M’keth heard the words, and he reveled for a fractioned-second in the effect he had on D’niqa’s master.
He raised what he held and waited.
M’keth’s black eyes replaced D’niqa’s long enough to see. “No!” she screamed, suddenly fearful. Recognition phased her spirit, and it lunged before her and joined her soul. She snapped back and let out a cry that pierced through the blasts and shouts and commands far away from them. Then she leapt toward him in a flash of movement.
Now, Russ thought, and the stone understood. He squeezed his fist, and the soul stone shattered. Surprise snapped the master’s face when she stopped, suspended in air, her eyes wide. A massive strike from outside their plane exploded the left side of her chest, and the lieutenant’s gaze became not her own—Russ recognized at once Lillie’s eyes of brown and stepped toward her. D’niqa’s disguise fell away, starting with her horns, then the fur and scales on her arms and body, and she shrank and slumped to one side as her hips unflared and her hooves became bloody feet.
He caught her just as she fell, and he spilled to his knees, his wife’s naked body in his arms. The dirty woman faced away from them just a few paces away. She turned, her visage a panicked smudge as she gazed at Russ from one sea-gray eye between drapes of pitch-black. Fel flaked from her, and her paper-thin frame blew away with the wind when she reached for him.
The Beast, D’niqa, that dirty woman, whatever she’d been, haunted Coroth no more, and with their master gone, Russ watched the last of the hell-spawn that hadn’t retreated into the forest simply ash into the wind with her.
“Impossible!” M’keth yelled. His basso voice boomed across the plain.
At last, Russ turned his attention to his wife, holding her in the Goddess’s Light. His gaze met Lillie’s of chestnut. “I’m sorry.”
Lillie coughed when she tried to speak, and she screamed when she tried to raise herself in Russ’s arms. She grabbed at her left thigh, then cradled the same arm against her chest. Her pained voice filled the quieting air around them, and an untold sadness welled within Russ for her anguish.
“No,” she finally said, her voice a whisper as she regained a modicum of control. “Don’t apologize. Death is not the end.” Slaver and blood leaked onto her left cheek. “It’s just the return.” Then she smiled and laughed, a dull thing that caught in her throat. “You look scuffed as fuck.”
Russ laughed too, against all his agony. “Not doin much better yourself.” From his pocket he pulled the scarf Alpha had made for him and wiped Lillie’s face. “Gods, I’ve missed you.”
“Love.” Lillie raised her right hand to Russ’s face and caressed it with her palm, ran her delicate thumb over his cheek. Russ savored it, the best thing he’d felt since before the War’s end. She looked to his breastplate, and sorrow joined the pain on her face. Though his suit had done what it could in first aid measures, D’niqa had rent open his flesh and pierced his bone.
Russ’s helm hung on a hinge off the back of his neck, from which a warning still blared, the kind that informed its wearer of a grievous error, either on their part or that of their armor. Wawr, wawr. Lillie’s fingers came away red from where she touched. The wound stung, and a weight finagled further into his chest.
The air smelled of copper and smoke, and blood caught in his throat, along with the grief of holding his dying beloved. He beheld how crushing his final shot had been. Shards of white poked through red meat and mottled flesh beneath her left arm. He removed his gauntlet, let it fall to the ground in a puff of dirt, and glided his hand over her hip to her torso.
“Goddess give me strength,” he said in the language of the Light. In his final try at reconciling this life for itself, he pulled upon the Goddess’s power. The Light answered his call, but his own wound beat heavily and robbed him of his breath. His head pounded, and both he and Lillie quaked against the effort. He let it go, and tears welled in his eyes while he watched her, unable to do anything to ease her pain, unable to heal her or himself.
Lillie’s lips reddened when she coughed, and a cloud of currant misted into the air, where it floated on the mid-morning breeze to darken a distant ground. Her right arm shook from holding her hand to his face. Still, she smiled. “Rest now,” she said, her voice weakened and stretched for her emotion. “Rest now, love. We earned it.” She sniffed. Tears ran freely down either side of her face.
Russell shook his head. “None of that, not now.” He kissed her forehead and whispered: “Rest is it, you’re right. I love you.” On the back of her left hand near the wrist, he ran his thumb over her birthmark as he had so many times when they’d been together, as he’d imagined doing so many times in his solitude. “Goddess alive.” This would have to suffice.
While he rocked her, Russell hummed a song he’d sang to her their first night together, an old rhyme about a babe serren not listening to his mother.
His wife giggled. “I love you. Ah”—her voice caught in her throat. Fright masked her face. No more sound came from her body as she heaved against her suffocation, and her eyes quickly darkened. Their lids crept lower until finally they fluttered shut. Her hand fell from his face and hung loose over his arm.
She moved no more.
A deep melancholy befell Russ, and tears rained from his cheeks as the tumult of War echoed, reac
hing him in whispers from far away.
Russ kissed his wife a final time, then leaned back and raised his face to the heavens. The light of his world had gone out, and though he wished he had more time with her, a world’s-worth of burden unhinged from upon him.
His own world dimmed. A dizziness plagued him, and his mind became bereft of thought. Yet as this world turned to black, another opened before him, one where a woman, perfectly ordinary in her appearance, gladdened at his arrival. A gossamer gown clung to her body, her golden-saffron hair hung on either side of her freckled face and down her back, and a flower wreath rested around her head. Relief scoured her eyes when she saw him. Russ reached for her, and behind Lillie, another woman appeared, magnificent and terrible, a pontificated vision of a woman if he’d ever seen one. Words couldn’t rightly describe her beauty, though light of hair and lithe in form. Her eyes burned bright gold.
Karli offered him the Light, and for the last time, Russell Hollowman accepted its Call.
6
A woman he’d never met performed the convocation for the fallen. Tanvarn had no Chantry, so leadership elected to hold the ritual in one of the city’s temples—not the one near Rhine’s; one in the Upper City instead. They’d sent Russell’s body straight back to Karhaal. A convocation for the Grand Master required special preparation, a joint session-conclave among them.
Grenn had somehow felt remiss in allowing it.
“Just the way of it,” Pender had told him. He’d stood with his arms crossed as a group of Karlians carried a sarcophagus through a portal that connected to Karhaal. “Gonna need a new Grand Master now, and Goddess knows what that means, our new relationship with the Leynar being what it is.”
“Priests,” Grenn had said as he watched the pallbearers, each in enameled white dress-armor and matching cloaks that shawled over their shoulders and trained on the floor behind them. They all looked so beautiful, even the men, and Grenn recognized none of them. A vacant thought that one of them—as those chosen for this honor often became Grand Masters themselves—or anyone else rising to the highest Seat conferred upon him latent envy. He had never known anyone else as Grand Master, at least that he could remember, and right now he didn’t want to.
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