Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  The bridge was directly ahead, a depressingly vivid manifestation of everything Clay feared it would be. Broad at the base, it tapered at its highest point to a strip so thin they would need to cross in single file. The mountain opposite, whose name Clay hadn’t bothered to ask, was wreathed in white mist.

  “Shall I remind you this was your idea?” Moog asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” said Clay, as they caught up with the others.

  Kit started up it first, creeping despite the fact that a fall from several thousand feet would be little more than an inconvenience. Gabe and Ganelon put their backs to the bridge, ready to hold off the pursuing rasks.

  Gabriel waved behind him. “Everyone over. Quick but careful. Very careful,” he added, looking up at Gregor and Dane.

  Gregor nodded gravely. Dane giggled, likely having been convinced they were playing some childish game. “I’ll race you, Gregor!” he shouted.

  “I’ll race you both,” said Matrick, jogging toward the summit. Moog and Sabbatha started up after them, making as much haste as they could before the bridge narrowed dangerously and forced them to consider every step.

  “Clay—” Gabe started. “Good gods, your face!”

  Clay touched two fingers to the gash across his nose. It hurt, and they came away bloody. “Is it bad?”

  Before Gabe could answer Ganelon flexed his fingers on the haft of his axe. “Here they come.”

  The rasks exploded from the tunnel mouth, yelping and screaming, dismayed that most of their quarry was getting away, giddy that three were still within reach.

  Ganelon killed the first with a sideways chop. Gabe stepped in with Vellichor—the sharp scent of lilacs filled the air—and two more fell. Clay was ready at his shoulder. A thrust from Blackheart snapped the fingers of a grasping hand, a blow from his hammer cracked the skull above it. Gabriel’s blue-green blade flickered out to take a rask’s head off before Ganelon moved in again. He impaled one, kicked a second, punched a third in the face with a dragonscale gauntlet. Vellichor cut a rask into halves, and when another lunged at Gabe he dodged, tripping it toward Clay with an outstretched boot. Clay dropped, ducking beneath his shield before the thing landed on him, and then, every muscle in his back protesting, he stood and flung the creature off the precipice behind him. The look of grudging respect he earned from Ganelon made the pain worthwhile—for the moment, anyhow.

  We will speak of this later, his lower back promised. Oh yes we will.

  The next clutch of rasks were notably less enthusiastic about rushing the bridge, their hunger tempered by the only instinct that mattered more: self-preservation.

  Ganelon turned on them. “You two go. I’ll hold them here.”

  From anyone else those words would seem loaded with the dreadful freight of self-sacrifice. From Ganelon they were simply a statement of fact. He might have said I’ll put the kettle on with the same casual certainty.

  Gabe hesitated, torn between wrath and reason, then finally nodded. He and Clay started up the bridge, legs pumping, breath gusting white from their mouths. Matrick was over the arch and had turned to wait for Gregor and Dane, who were shuffling carefully along the thinnest stretch of ice. Clay might have prayed it didn’t break, but he reckoned the gods were already watching and had placed bets on who would fall first. Safe money was on the eight-hundred-pound ettin.

  Something lunged from the mist behind Matrick, a rask much bigger than any of those they’d faced thus far. A chieftain, Clay supposed, noting the loop of broken skulls slung around its neck. Its hair was spiked with frost, shorn to a strip down the centre of its head. It was on Matrick in an instant, tackling him and pinning him to the ice with a strangling claw. It raised the other to strike—talons splayed like a fan of knives—and Clay heard Kit’s warning words echo in his mind.

  The Cold Road takes its toll. Always.

  Chapter Forty-four

  A Grave in the Clouds

  Gabriel swore. Moog was yelling something, but the wind was in Clay’s ears and he couldn’t make it out. Sabbatha stood at the centre of the bridge, not moving, not trying at all to save Matrick before the rask killed him. And it would kill him, Clay was sure.

  And then suddenly the ettin was there. It snatched the chieftain’s arm and yanked it into the air. The rask took a swipe at Dane’s head, but the ettin caught its other wrist as well. The two monsters wrestled one another, arms outstretched, thrashing like something pinned to a crucifix.

  Dane turned to ask something of Gregor, but they were too far away, the wind too loud, for Clay to hear. The rask curled up on itself, lashed out with a clawed foot, and opened a wide red gash in Gregor’s throat.

  The ettin teetered for a moment, then toppled from the bridge into white oblivion.

  Clay’s heart fell with them, but there wasn’t time to grieve. The rask landed in a crouch. It began scrabbling toward Matrick again when Sabbatha’s voice brought it up short.

  “Come to me.”

  The creature turned its curdled gaze upon the daeva.

  “Come to me,” she repeated, so quiet the wind stopped to listen, so compelling the mountains strained against the shackles of their roots.

  In thrall to a will stronger than its own, the chieftain shambled over to crouch at her feet. The skulls around its neck clattered against one another, grinning like fools. Its expression twitched between fear and reverence, as though Sabbatha was the Winter Queen herself, dark and divine beneath the pale moon of her scythe.

  Umbra came down like a guillotine, shearing away the top half of the rask’s head. It managed something like a whimper before it died. It tumbled from the bridge and was swallowed by cloud.

  Clay found himself a step away from the narrow span without knowing how he’d come to be there. He dragged his eyes from the sickening emptiness below. The daeva was turned away from him. The wind had returned, ruffling the plumage on her back, lifting her long black hair like a pennant.

  Clay swallowed. “Sabbatha—”

  “Sabbatha’s dead,” she said. Her right wing snapped out, scattering a handful of black feathers into the air. Clay was watching them whirl away, transfixed, when a shadow fell across his face. He raised his eyes slowly, slowly, like a man condemned gazing up at the executioner’s axe, as the daeva’s supposedly injured left wing extended into the sky.

  Fuck, he thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “Larkspur,” he said gloomily. “Welcome back.”

  She turned on him. “Thank you.”

  Clay pulled his gaze from the not-at-all-injured wing and looked across at her. “How long?” he asked.

  The grin that split her face was a feral thing, terribly beautiful. “Longer than you’d think,” she said, which wasn’t really the answer he’d been hoping for.

  All that pointless deception, all those lies we told …Clay’s mind was reeling, struggling to grasp the implication of what she was telling him. All this time she was playing us, patient as a circling vulture, waiting for a moment like this.

  “And now?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

  Larkspur’s gaze drifted beyond his shoulder. Ganelon had not only held the rasks at bay, but had driven them off altogether. He arrived short of breath, but otherwise unscathed, and the daeva’s smile broadened as her eyes met his. “Now I take your king,” she said.

  The southerner made no reply. Even Gabe had been rendered speechless, though Clay assumed his next words would be I told you so.

  Something behind the daeva drew his attention: He saw Kit emerge from the fog on the far side of the bridge. His arms hung limp by his sides, and something—the rask chieftain, probably—had savaged his throat. He appeared lucid, however, and one look at Larkspur told him all he needed to know. The ghoul started up the bridge at a jog.

  “So what now?” Clay asked, playing for time. “You’ll fly him to Agria all by yourself? That’s a long way, and dangerous.”

  “You’ve seen my ship in the sky, Slowhand. My real
ship,” she emphasized, “not that floating brothel you stole from Kallorek. Where is he, by the way? His wife said you brought him along. You didn’t leave him on board to burn, did you?”

  Clay mulled over a few lengthy explanations, none of which resembled the truth. He settled on “No.”

  The daeva’s smirk returned, tugging at something in his chest. She’d been suppressing her allure, he realized. Smothering it so she would seem like less of a threat. But now it burned, and it was all Clay could do not to offer himself up to the flame.

  “My men will find me,” she said. “I’ll make sure of that. Now step back, Slowhand. I like you, but if you try and cross I will cut you down.”

  Her threat drew a sour laugh from Gabriel. “You are un-fucking-believable, do you know that? You’ll cut him down? He saved your bloody life, Sabbatha.”

  The daeva snarled, “Sabbatha’s—”

  “Yeah, Sabbatha’s dead. I heard you the first time. It’s a pity, really, because this Larkspur character is a real bitch. I mean, honestly, how evil are you? After all we’ve been through, you’d really kill Clay? You’d drag Matrick all the way back to Lilith for a fucking payday? She’ll kill him!”

  Kit was edging around Matrick’s prone body. Clay had no idea what the ghoul could do if he managed to reach Larkspur, but he hoped it would be enough to distract her, if only for a moment.

  “He’s doomed already,” said Larkspur. “You all are. Because of you, Gabriel. Because you haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “What’s that?” Gabe asked.

  “That this isn’t a story,” she told him. Her eyes climbed the cloud-mantled mountains around them. “There is no happy ending. And you aren’t a hero. You’re just a deluded old mercenary who—”

  Clay started running the moment Kit hit her from behind. Larkspur stumbled forward, nearly falling from the bridge, but she beat her wings once and managed to stay balanced. She drove the butt of her scythe into Kit’s chest, propelling him back, then launched an attack at Clay.

  He dropped into a slide, arching backward on his knees with his arms flung wide as Umbra carved the air mere inches above his nose. Clay heard the vertebrae pop down the length of his spine, and all the pain in his back vanished in an instant. He sprang up to his feet, launched a savage punch with his shield arm that knocked the daeva onto her back. A step, and Clay was directly above her. Wraith was in his hand, so cold it seared the flesh of his palm, and he brought the hammer—

  “Wait, please,” begged Larkspur.

  There was no power in the words. No compulsion. Only fear. A woman’s desperate plea for mercy. And had the man above her been anyone but Clay Cooper it would not have been enough.

  But it was.

  He wavered, but Larkspur didn’t. The scythe tore an arc between them and Clay watched, uncomprehending, as his hand fell off.

  His jaw dropped as though it were cast in lead. He was dimly aware of someone yelling his name. He blinked, trying to focus, and saw blood on the pale skin of Larkspur’s face, blood on the pure white snow, blood frothing from the stump of his arm with every slow beat of his heart.

  His hand was gone. His hammer was gone. They slid over the edge and vanished from sight.

  “Clay …” He saw Larkspur mouth the words, but it was Ginny’s voice he heard. She made to rise and he staggered away from her, except one foot slipped on the ice and the other stepped onto nothing at all.

  Clay fell headlong into white cloud.

  And so the Cold Road took its toll.

  Chapter Forty-five

  A Song for the Dreamer

  The end of Clay’s childhood came suddenly, a wildfire that reduced the brittle forest of his youth to char. It began as such things always begin: with a seemingly innocuous spark.

  Reaching across the table at breakfast Clay accidentally upset his father’s cup. Even so early in the morning it was filled with wine, which splashed into Leif’s lap. Clay had barely opened his mouth to apologize when the blow came, knocking him to the floor. There was a shrill keening in his ears and the taste of blood on his tongue. Tears boiled in his eyes, threatening to shame him.

  “Don’t you ever lay a hand on him again,” his mother said. Her voice was quiet, but fierce. Clay had never heard her use that tone before. Even Leif looked stunned, but then he barked a harsh laugh and sneered.

  “Or what?” he asked.

  “Or I will leave you. I will take Clay with me and you will never see us again.”

  His father’s ugly grin remained in place, but his eyes went slack. He said nothing, just got up and went out the door. He was gone all day, and when Clay went to bed that night he wondered if maybe his father had left instead. To his surprise, the thought of life without Leif was a pleasant one.

  The sound of the door slamming jarred him awake. His father was home, and drunk. Clay could hear his ragged breath, the heavy tread of his bad leg as he tramped across the house. There was a hush, and Clay listened as his heart counted slow seconds in the dark.

  Then it started.

  Screams. The muted thud of pounding fists. Clay pulled his blanket up over his head, trying not to listen as the screams became sobs, as the sobs became muffled whimpers. He wanted to shout, to intervene on his mother’s behalf, but he couldn’t find his voice, let alone the courage to share the brunt of his father’s wrath. So instead he huddled in his bed, paralyzed by fear and berating himself for a coward.

  “Leave me, will you?” he heard his father ask.

  “Wait, please,” his mother begged. Words that would stop her son cold so many years later.

  “Take my boy away?” Leif growled, and Clay realized that the voice in his head, the one that condemned him and cut him down, was not his own. It was his father’s.

  There was a wet crunch—a sickening sound—followed by another awful silence. Straining his ears, Clay heard the sound of his father weeping quietly, and then another voice spoke in his head. It was unfamiliar, quietly ominous. It reminded Clay of a forest cloaked in the deep snows of winter. This voice, he knew at once, was his own. Or a part of him, anyway.

  “Rise,” it said. And he rose.

  When Leif finally stumbled, red-handed, through the bedroom door, his son was waiting for him. Clay had planted his feet and set his shoulders, just as he’d been taught. His grip on the axe was low, and he swung with all the strength he could muster.

  Hit it like you hate it, Leif had told him, and that, Clay found, was the easiest thing about killing his father.

  Come home to me, Clay Cooper.

  He wasn’t dead, apparently. And even if he were, Clay knew, those words would bring him back. Over mountains, through swamp and field and forest, across an ocean if need be, to her. Because home, for Clay Cooper, was not within the boundary of any realm. It wasn’t Coverdale, or a house at the end of a long road. Home was where Ginny was, its boundaries defined by the circle of her arms. Hers was the hearth in which his soul burned, unquenchable. She was, quite simply, the only reason he was still alive.

  Well, that and an exceptionally durable suit of armour.

  Clay lost count of the times he hit the mountain on the way down, though to be fair he stopped counting after being rendered unconscious. The first impact, which came long seconds after he fell from the bridge, broke his left arm—which might have bothered him more were there a functioning hand at the end of it, but there wasn’t. The second time he landed hard, but the Warskin was famed for being impenetrable, and so Clay hit the mountainside like an egg in an iron shell. He half-slid, half-tumbled down a long slope and then, after spilling over another sheer drop, cracked his head against stone and slipped into blackness.

  Despite this, his prejudice against helmets remained unchanged. You had your pride, Ganelon had told him once, or you had nothing.

  He awoke buried in a tomb of snow and wriggled free, since his right arm was strapped to Blackheart and the stump of his left wrist was shit for digging. The cold, at least, helped to slow the los
s of blood to a survivable trickle, like sap oozing from an elm in winter. When he was free of the snow, Clay slung his shield over one shoulder and tore a strip from his bearskin cloak. Between his chattering teeth and a near-frozen right hand it took him forever to tie off the wound.

  Afterward he spent a few minutes staring at his mutilated wrist, repulsed because it looked so grotesquely surreal, fascinated because how had he not known there were two bones in his forearm? He was pondering this when the faint sound of singing pricked his ears.

  It’s the concussion, he told himself. You’re delirious, Cooper.

  But then the singer coughed, fell silent, and started up again. And what was more: Clay didn’t know the song.

  He stood, fell sideways, and stood again. He tried to swipe the hair from his eyes but only clubbed himself with the stump of his severed hand. It was extremely painful and only slightly less embarrassing because no one was around to see.

  Clay began walking toward the sound. After five or six steps he stopped, fumbled right-handed into his breeches, and relieved himself into the snow. No blood, he noted, admiring the stream. That was good.

  His gaze scaled the wall of the Defile before him, the top half of which was stained red by the setting sun. Or the rising sun. Clay honestly had no idea how long he’d been out, but judging by how full his bladder was it had been several thousand years, at least. When he finished he ambled on, following the drift of song down the shadowed corridor.

  He found the ettin lying among a heap of rubble. Its limbs were askew, Gregor’s head was wrenched to a crazed angle. The wound in his throat had torn during the fall; his chest was stained by blood.

  Dane, miraculously, was still alive. He’d been singing softly to himself, and when he heard the scuff of Clay’s approach he raised his head wearily. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dane.”

  “Clay? Did you fly here, too?”

  Clay might have laughed if his ribs didn’t hurt so bad. “I did,” he answered finally. “Bit of a rough landing, though.”