“Aye.” The sheriff licked his dry lips and closed his eyes against the pain in his arm. “Unless…”
“Unless?” Renda watched the cardinal step slowly toward Pegrine, watched her last opportunity slip away. “Unless what?”
“‘The pith, the blood, the heart, the glow.’” He opened his eyes again. When Renda looked down at him, he shook his head. “Not the virtues, Renda. Real blood, real pith.”
“What?”
“Trust me.”
She frowned, watching Pegrine and the cardinal circle each other with their weapons.
“Bits and pieces, I’ve found over the years, hints, references to lost texts...” The fingers of his good hand opened and dropped one of the empty leaf-sacs. “A lost science of bloods and saps,” he sighed, marshaling his strength to say more. “Lost since antiquity to all but the gods.”
But then comes an old, forgotten god, a god who sees my pain, a god who grants me a tiny fragment, but the barest splinter of the gods’ own knowledge for my own!
She nodded uneasily. “Magic, then?” she asked. When he made no answer, she pressed him. “Magic, like Dith’s?”
The sheriff craned his neck to watch his granddaughter attack, not the cardinal, but the bone spear he thrust at her, as if the dried marrow inside were more precious than her very life. Finally, Pegrine’s sword smashed through the cardinal’s spear, and he blew out sharply. “Draw a cart with horses, or push it down a hill.” He swallowed painfully. “Both move the cart, aye?”
Inside the cardinal’s dome, Pegrine’s hemlock sword was dipped in the blood of a priest and flecked with dried marrow. But at the same time, the cardinal’s bone spear was splashed with the priest’s blood and splintered with hemlock. If her father was right, both had the pith and the blood. Both were capable of completing the rite or whatever it might be called.
“What will happen?”
But the sheriff did not answer. He only stared at the dawning sky.
Chul rose to his feet, his whole body shaking with the rage of his fifteen years, all the abuse, all the betrayal, all the pain. Scars he’d thought healed burst and bled in his mind, and his throat tightened with horror at what he’d seen.
Before his eyes, Dhanani families ran screaming from the Knights of Brannagh and their armies. He saw farms burned, men cut down as they ran away, women, young girls and even boys raped and beaten to death, little children spitted and flayed alive. He watched the Invaders feed the Dhanani dead to their dogs.
“How dare You?” Nekraba’s voice bristled with anger. “You caused this, not B’radik! They fell in punishment for Your rebellion! This was justice!”
“Does this look like justice?” Xorden shrieked. His voice turned outward, horrifying, deafening inside the boy’s mind. “Does it feel like justice to You, B’radik, to see Your own priests and warriors die like so many diseased sheep, to watch Your temples fall, to watch Your people’s world fall to pieces, and stand helpless against it?”
The ground rumbled angrily at Chul’s feet. The two Dhanani who gestured and shouted at the edge of the glade were too far away for him to hear, but in his mind, the gods shouted at each other in a whirl of angry voices.
“Once Your pet, Damerien, and his insipid knights are dead, no one will remain who remembers Your doctrines. How long, then, before they forget Your name, Your realm? Just as they forgot Ours. Tell Me, does that feel like justice, B’radik?”
Nekraba shook her head. “Do not blame B’radik. You led them to it.”
“Me?” His attention turned to Her, and His tone softened. “Noti was the leader—”
“The god of entropy?” Anado laughed bitterly. “He was a lazy, incompetent fool, unambitious in every way! He kept no temples, no followers, even then; what had He to gain from rebellion?”
“Or lose. Hence Our surrender.” Xorden laughed crazily. “Noti was a poor choice to lead. Now, Kadeta, or even Pildaro—”
Anado was horrified. “You would loose the gods of war?”
Suddenly Chul understood much more than he had. His eyes played over the crumbling, decaying deadfall and the fallen leaves, over the two Brannagh knights at the edge of the cardinal’s dome, and he understood. He knew what he had to do.
His father had been right. All his stories from the Before Time had been true, whether Vaccar had known it or not, as true as if they’d been spoken in the Old Voice by the Storykeepers. The Invaders and their gods—these same Knights of Brannagh—had taken everything his people had ever had, destroyed them, banished them to the Kharkara Plains. Stepping forward with all the stealth and silence Gikka had taught him, with a single stroke of his blade, he could return his people to—
Welcome.
—their proper—
Of me, lad, you’ll have your honor, or you’ll have your death.
—glory.
And no mistake.
Another flash of light from within, but this time the wall did not seem to weaken. Pegrine stood then, for she had fallen to the ground, and now the light seemed to expand around her.
The cardinal bowed graciously with his shattered bone staff in hand, and reached behind him to the altar without taking his eyes from the child.
Renda blinked at the wall, looked away a moment, then looked back. Yes, the rift in the wall was widening slowly as the power at the edges cooled and dissipated; he was turning more and more of his energy toward completing his rite. Through the widening rift in the dome wall, she saw the drops of sweat on the cardinal’s brow, but his expression was calm, controlled.
Light blazed through the dome again, a blinding white light that left no shadows.
“You cannot hope to stop me now,” Valmerous crowed, blotting his brow with his sleeve. “I’ve won. Your avatar shall fall, and so shall You.”
But neither Pegrine nor the goddess made answer. They seemed most intent on filling the dome with light to drive out all the shadows, especially those beneath the cardinal’s mantle on the altar.
The glow, perhaps, but—
Smoke rose from the altar where the cardinal’s hidden implements had been touched with white hot light, and in only a few moments, the cloak covering them fell flat. But Valmerous did not seem to care. He whisked it away to bare the steaming stump. Then, not waiting a moment longer, he raised what was left of the bone spear high above the bloody wooden altar—
“Alder’s heart!” The sheriff surged up, his eye gleaming. “But what of the glow—” He looked up to see Chul standing over him, knife in hand.
“Chul Ka-Dree.” The new voice in his burning, anguished mind seemed at once to seep in under the others and to drown them out. It was deep and rough, crumbling like an old wall but full of vibrancy and life, and even before he turned his eyes to look, he knew who had spoken to him. At the edge of the glade, a new presence had joined Anado and Nekraba, a hideous, pale giant who rose from the soil and towered over Them. It was the most feared of the Dhanani gods, Mohoro of the Underground. And he spoke only one more word: “See.”
Suddenly, Chul was standing alone on a mesa overlooking the dusty Kharkara Plain. This place was called Hawk’s Perch, a favorite lookout for the hunters. For the first time in a season, he could look across the vast distance from one low, curving horizon to the other, breathing deeply, freely, without trees or clouds or stone houses to hide the length and breadth of his world from him. By the gods, he missed the plains. Over time, he’d grown used to waking up inside stone walls, but at night, before his eyes closed, his soul still cried for the soaring depth of infinite starry sky.
Below, familiar animal skin tents and huts lined well worn paths, landmarks he’d held in his heart since he was a toddler, and his whole being ached with memories. The sun had not yet risen; no one walked outside the tents except the healer, Aidan. Chul watched him move from tent to tent to cast Anado’s blessings over those within. A young mother coughed in her sleep, a hard, dry cough, and the shaman paused, concerned. He searched the small pouch he carried and
found a small vial, which he left at the threshold for her. Then he moved on.
No one saw him pass, and by day, no one would pay him much notice. No one bowed to Aidan or carried him through the camps in a great curtained palanquin. No one felt compelled to give him their children. No one in the tribes feared him.
Of course not. Chul stared down at the warm dust on his feet, unsure what he was feeling.
By the time the warriors stirred from their beds, rising and stretching, some disentangling themselves from their wives’ arms, Aidan was in his own tent again. Soon, all the men of the tribes had all come to the doors of their homes and were facing the rising sun with their knives in hand.
Then Chief Bakti came out carrying the Verge of Anado. At the sight of him, Chul’s hands flew reflexively to his forehead, back to back, even though no one could see him. He remembered the awe he’d always felt in the presence of the hunters, especially the chief. He’d always envied them their sleek muscles and sharp eyes, their hardness, their confidence in the kill. Their pride.
His eyes ran with hot tears of love and loss. These were his people, these proud, beautiful survivors, not the soft, flabby creatures he’d seen bowing and smiling, groveling and sacrificing their children to their political god. Everything he was, everything they were, everything that was Dhanani, was here now, in this place, in these people, harrowed out and made lean by hardship. He could not take that from them or from himself.
And though the warriors could not see him, exile of the exiles, for the first time, he raised his knife with them to meet the sun.
“Ge jhombra ri tanara Xorden!” Throwing back his head to cry out with triumph, Cardinal Valmerous crashed the splinters of bone down into the very heart of the alderwood stump. “I feed this life to Xorden!”
The first ray of sunlight splashed angrily over the Dhanani blades; the plains predator bared its fangs in defeat. Then, the morning joined, ten thousand hunters stretched and yawned in the doorways of their tents before they turned away to face the business of the day. But in another place, a small clearing far to the east of the Kharkara Plains, a single tiny burst of Dhanani sunfire flared from one bloodstained knife and bit through the last shadows of dawn to flash away the heart of an ancient altar.
“Mohoro!” Xorden’s voice was furious. “What have You done?” But he was speaking to empty air. The three Dhanani gods were gone.
In the heartbeat that followed, Renda threw up her visor and squinted into the intense heat. Her eye darted from Chul to the empty glade to Valmerous to Pegrine, trying to see what had happened, what had changed.
Then horribly, Pegrine’s eyes began to dull and fade. She stumbled, unable to keep her balance, and a flash of fear crossed her features. Then, without a sound, she collapsed to the floor of the glade. The light that surrounded her was gone.
“No!” Renda shrieked, all but hurling herself toward the dome wall in spite of the heat. “He has destroyed her!”
“Peace,” her father gasped, his eyes closed against the terrible scene. “One thing more remains.”
“To what?” She glared at him and rose to her haunches, once again ready to spring through the nearly open wall. “Pegrine is gone. It falls to me, now.”
His eyes looked up into hers, stony, gray, the walls of Brannagh itself. “Wait.”
Valmerous moved cautiously inside his dome to stand beside the child’s body. He nudged at her with his bare foot, joggling her where she lay until he was satisfied that she was indeed dead. Then he threw his head back and laughed, a hideous, Hadrian laugh that chilled Renda’s soul.
He had won, the laugh said, as he had known he would. But he was not finished yet. One thing more remained. Finally, having seen to Pegrine, he would be able to obey Xorden’s command: he would destroy Duke Trocu Damerien.
Through the corner of her eye, Renda saw the sheriff’s slow nod. “Father?”
“The glow of light is no blood,” he murmured. “The glow of a killer…”
Valmerous turned back to his work, his hand absently flicking away the sweat collected at his brow and showering it over the burned altar. From his mantle, where it lay upon the ground, he brought out a small cache sack and took from it several bottles of oils and salves and little trinkets, those that could not possibly have withstood B’radik’s light, and set them upon the altar.
Beyond the cardinal, a small wretched form rose from the ground where she had fallen, dark, with no light about her. The beautiful white gown she had worn was now dingy gray and stained with blood, and her hair hung in damp black strings, bloodclotted strips that lapped at her face to leave clumped red-brown streaks.
Renda drew breath at the sight of the hideous creature. This was Pegrine, a true vampire now, no longer needing the goddess to sustain her and drive her. But alive, or at least, not dead. Not destroyed.
Her teeth were bared, long and sharp, and her neatly manicured little girl nails had grown into hawklike talons. But all these observations were made in an eyeblink. At once, she was upon the cardinal’s back, chewing and clawing at him, tearing his flesh and shredding his back and shoulders through his cassock.
The cardinal stumbled back in shock at her attack, but he quickly regained himself. He turned and twisted furiously until he managed to loose Pegrine’s grip on him. Then, hands free, he began gesturing and muttering against her, abandoning one prayer for another and another, trying to find the one that would work.
She dropped lightly from his back and circled, snarling like a great wolf.
“Child of darkness,” he intoned weakly, staggering back in agony, “I, Valmerous, Cardinal of, of Vilkadnazor the Unshod,” he smacked dry lips, “I pray your god Verilion, in good charity, receive you and speed your spirit through the stars.” But still the child circled him, eyeing him darkly and growling. “I thus consecrate your...your place of death and your flesh, and commend your spirit skyward.”
“Commend your own spirit skyward, Valmerous,” the little girl hissed. “You and your god have no power over me.”
“Depart, Undead!” he cried, raising his hands only as far as his shredded shoulders would allow to ward against her. “In the name of …Vilkadnazor the Unshod.”
At once, a glow of white light showered down over Pegrine, a brilliant blaze of fury. “I doubt even Vilkadnazor has charity enough to grant you this boon,” spoke a new voice, a woman’s voice, B’radik’s voice, sweet and clear, with a touch of amusement that instantly gave way to rage. “Not now that He and so many others lie deceived and bound at your hand!”
So many others. Only three gods besides B’radik had come to fight Xorden, the three gods of the Dhanani. The thought that only these four of all the gods of Syon had escaped Xorden’s bindings left Renda’s heart cold. Her hands twitched around her sword, but she could not see her opening. Not yet.
“In Xorden’s name, then, depart!” The cardinal thrust his hands out toward the little girl. “I abjure thee, Pegrine of Brannagh, in the name of—”
“In the name of Xorden,” the child mocked. “I did not die for Xorden before. I shall not die for Xorden now!”
“No?” Valmerous gestured, and suddenly the wall, the dome, collapsed away, taking its heat with it. But just as suddenly, it reappeared, surrounding his body like armor, moving when he moved. “Perhaps you will die for B’radik, then. Or the creature Damerien.”
By the time the wall disappeared, Renda was already moving, leaping through the brush.
“Renda, no…” her father gasped. “You can’t help her.”
“Chul,” Renda called over her shoulder. “Stay with him.”
Even when Valmerous raised the fiery wall as a shield around himself, she kept coming. With the wall as far away as it had been, she could not have reached him before the heat of it killed her, but with it wrapped around his very body, she had a chance.
“Stop!” Valmerous outstretched his hands menacingly, and the heat around him seemed to swell. “You cannot touch me, Knight, not if y
ou would survive.”
“My life means nothing while you live, Valmerous.” Renda raised her sword and prepared to charge through him.
“Perhaps, but what about their lives?” He nodded toward her father and Chul. “Or the girl? The sheriff is injured, the child trapped in the shadows.” He shrugged, his whole form rippling beneath his searing armor, and lifted his hands toward his hood. “And as for the Dhanani…”
“Chul, look away!” Renda shouted back to the boy. “Trust, and do not look, no matter what you hear!” She gripped her sword and ran straight for Valmerous. But instantly, she was hurled to the ground by a terrible explosion. In a blur of heat and light, Valmerous, his hood thrown back, had flared into a giant whirling, thrashing fireball. But he was not alone. Someone or something was inside, grappling violently with him, burning and smoking, the two bodies tearing each other apart.
She spared a glance at her father, at Chul, who sat beside him with his eyes carefully turned away from the scene—no, her heart whispered, not Pegrine. She turned to the spot where the little girl had been standing, creeping back away from the sunlight. But as she feared, the girl was gone.
The cardinal twisted and turned, uttering prayers that spattered feebly against Pegrine while she scratched and bit and tore at him.
The two bodies inside the inferno fell to the ground, still battling while their flesh burned. But when the agony of the flames and her vicious attack left him unable to fight her anymore, Pegrine lifted herself up from the burning mass, up out of the fire of his shield into the lethal daylight, to raise a taloned hand above her head. Then, with a final shriek of victory, she raked her talons through his throat.
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 42
