He dropped back a step to bring the hammer up, striking Fury beneath the jaw and sending the wolf-Guardian reeling backwards. Wall seemed barely winded by it all, feeding off his own anger. She knew he was supposed to be the strongest of the Guardians, but even Fury didn’t seem to be making a dent in his reserves of power.
Too late for that kind of revelation, though. She tried to stab him in the face, given it was right there in front of her, but barely scratched his cheek and half-severed his chinstrap before he slapped her to the ground with bone-jarring force. He had her in the shadow of his hammer instantly, even as she was pulling her wits together, but Amkulyah shot him right in the eye, the cleanest and most perfect piece of archery she had ever seen
She heard Kul’s yell of triumph: the shaft had gone deep. Wall threw his head back and howled, as bestial as ever Fury was, but he didn’t fall. Blood coursed down the jutting shaft, and surely the eye was a ruin, but he was still on his feet, practically burning with divine strength.
“I judge you all!” he bellowed at them. “The world will know that you fell to evil!” And he was running towards Amkulyah, feet shaking the earth and bringing rocks down from the canyon walls.
The Aethani’s round eyes went as wide as they had ever been and he fumbled the next arrow, letting it fall from the string. Fury came up suddenly from Wall’s left to crash into him, but Wall took his charge and threw the wolf-Guardian past him, sending him rolling in the dust. Celestaine was already running, knowing that she’d never get there in time. The one thing between Kul and annihilation was Ralas, a flimsy barricade at the best of times, and now long past his best.
Then Wall was down, something erupting from the very earth to tear into his legs. Celestaine could see nothing but dust and teeth at first, and then Wall had lurched back to his feet, one shin bloody and torn, the mail peeled back like paper. There was a creature still trying to get its jaws about him, a hunched shape as big as a man, its blunt, vicious head striped black and white, dappled red with Wall’s blood.
A badger. She was looking at a badger.
Deffo?
He looked rabid, and for a moment Wall backed off, trying to keep his legs out of reach of the badger’s jaws like a squeamish Cheriveni confronted by a mouse.
Amkulyah had put more distance between himself and Wall. He must have been rattled, though, because his next shaft struck Wall’s helm, wedging in the crack Celestaine had already cut into it and skewing the entire helmet sideways. Celestaine stepped in and lashed at Wall’s throat, hoping to catch him while his head was canted up, and instead severed the chinstrap entirely, the helm spinning away.
Even in the heat of the fight, she had time to stare and shout, “Oh you turd!”
Across Wall’s brow, driven into the flesh of his forehead where the helm’s confines had pressed on it, was a creation of gold and iron, set with mismatched, garish gems.
“All that talk, and you’re wearing the damned thing?” she shrieked.
“Lies!” Wall boomed. “I am the strength of the Temple! I am the righteous, the only true voice. I am the only one to be trusted with power! I! You cannot judge! You…” He sputtered over the words, foam spraying her, and then he had kicked the Undefeated aside and drawn his hammer back for the killing blow.
The huge badger was not to be brushed away, though, clinging to his leg, gnawing through his mail in a frenzy of desperation, and Fury had come up behind Wall to wrestle for the hammer again. Even then, he shook them back and forth, strong beyond mountains, strong as the bones of the earth.
The crown… She saw the gems blazing, all that stolen power feeding Wall’s battle rage.
She lunged for him, trying to leap up and cut his unprotected throat, but he twisted so that she ran into his elbow and shoulder and sat back down hard, feeling at least one tooth loosen. Another arrow drove into his jaw, but Wall barely seemed to notice. He shook Fury off him at last, then picked up the squalling, snarling badger like a disobedient dog and threw it aside.
“Right,” he told the world, and then Nedlam hit him.
She was holding her ironbound club one-handed, awkward and fumbling, but she had come in with all her weight, all the speed she could muster, stopping to let the head of the club whip forwards with the force of a battering ram. Any real wall would have had cause to feel the impact, and Wall took it straight to the forehead.
Nedlam let out a whoop, the old Yorughan battle cry, and it eclipsed Celestaine’s cry of loss because her club struck the crown, cracking the gold across, sending a bright blue gem spinning loose from its mountings, ripping the whole band from Wall’s head. There was a flare of spoiled power, magic twisting and writhing in the air.
Wall took Nedlam by the throat, his ravaged face purple. If he had any more bombast, it was strangled by his own rage.
Amkulyah shot him. The shaft went up under his chin, all the way to the fletchings. Celestaine, already on her way in herself, skittered back as Wall led Nedlam go and swayed, one gauntleted hand reaching up to the wound. He made a sound, then. A sound of utter grief and betrayal, and of pain, because the crown was gone from his head, and he must have been leaning on its power to overcome all those wounds. Blood abruptly gouted from his eye-socket and his jaw, a single convulsive pulse.
He fell to one knee, leaning on the haft of his hammer, mouth working but nothing coming forth but blood. In that moment only, he looked truly penitent.
Chapter Thirty
“YOU’VE THOUGHT OF the possibilities, of course?” Doctor Catt was sitting up in bed, a tray on his knees as he tinkered with the pieces of the Kinslayer’s crown.
Ralas raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“In respect of your own individual predicament,” Catt added; clearly Lord Wall had not quite beaten the long words out of him. “Assuming I can get any semblance of this contrivance into functioning order.”
The crown itself had seen better days, but then Nedlam had not been gentle, and just being an artefact of making and unmaking did not apparently confer any unusual durability. Ralas would have expected the Kinslayer to have wrought it better, and perhaps had it encased in iron spikes and mounted on a huge skull helm or something similarly tasteful. As it was, it had been a delicate piece of work, not intended to be used for target practice by a big, angry Yorughan woman.
“You want to give me wings, too?” Ralas asked, watching with interest as Catt’s clever fingers—the ones not still splinted—worked the blue gem back into its socket. Little wisps of magic danced about his hands, worming their way around his repairs and holding everything in place.
Catt would walk again, so said the camp surgeons at Kait Hegumen’s outpost. He would need a stick, but Ralas had never seen him without a stick as it was, so that would likely pose no great inconvenience to him. Tenet’s Warding Amulet had not survived its encounter with Wall’s hammer, but it had just about kept body and soul together for its wearer. After that, Catt’s ongoing survival had come down to Heno’s craft, which had never really been intended for long-term healing. It had sufficed to get him out of the Unredeemed Lands and into the Templar outpost, where there were a number of surgeons and healing magicians to take up the slack.
“I was given to understand by Celestaine that you were in rather a lot of pain,” Catt observed. “Pain which, moreover, was beyond the reach of healing magic, because the spell that maintains your unnaturally robust existence returns you constantly to the recently beaten state in which you originally expired? Or was I misinformed?”
“Sounds as though you’ve got it down,” Ralas agreed. “You’re saying that trinket will patch me up, then?” He asked the question as a formality, already guessing at the answer.
“Ah, well, unfortunately I don’t think the crown, even in its perfect state, would have been able to so amend the enchantment woven through you. But it could simply undo it, cut through its strands. Whereupon you’d…”
“Die.”
“Peacefully,” Catt protested, setti
ng down the twisted crown so that he could gesticulate. “Only, I was thinking, there are certain other items I have access to, back in Cinquetann. There’s the Branch of Ygstermandt, which could take your spirit and—I think, anyway—send you out into the world, make you one with all things. It’s how I intend to go, when the woeful day finally arrives.”
“But you’d test it on me, just to make sure there are no side effects?” Ralas suggested.
“You wrong me,” Doctor Catt told him. “The offer is genuine, from one invalid to another, as a token of my thanks in, well, not actively killing me, and in recovering me to here so that I might convalesce.”
Ralas gave him the side-eye for a while, but then shrugged. “Maybe I do wrong you. It’s a kind offer, and that whole one-with-all-things business is a nice thought. And I do hurt, doctor. And when you’re back on your feet and hobbling about doing mischief to the world, I’ll still hurt. Everything’s an effort, you know. Even just sitting here talking to you. I want to be like Wall, sometimes, so big and strong I can just break anything I don’t like. But I’m not. I’m beaten and half-starved forever, and all I can do is use my voice for what little it can achieve. But it’s a ‘no,’ nonetheless.”
Catt raised his eyebrows. “You surprise me. If they told me it would hurt like this forever, I don’t think I’d want to live.”
Ralas shrugged. “There were times I didn’t. This isn’t one of them. It’s life, Catt, it’s my life. It hurts, but at least I’m not locked in a dark hole forever. Not much of a motto, but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”
Someone coughed awkwardly at the doorway, and Ralas looked up to see Doctor Fisher standing there.
He had been back in his familiar shape by the time they set off for the outpost, wearing one of Heno’s spare tunics, which hung on him like a tent. He had driven them all in a sheep-drawn cart, Catt and Nedlam jolting on the bed. Nobody had dared speak much to him. The thunderous expression on his human face had been as daunting as the snarling beast’s muzzle he had worn.
Catt had been out cold for most of that, and since he had awoken—and been put to work by an extremely sharp-tongued Celestaine—Fisher had stayed away. Now here he was, courage plucked up. Catt, who had been reaching for the crown again, paused.
“Ah,” he said. “Hello.”
“Hello, Catty,” Fisher said quietly.
“Top marks on the keeping-secrets front,” Catt said faintly. “So, what now?”
Fisher approached his bedside, hands gripped together before him. “I… want it to go back to how it was, Catt.”
Catt raised an eyebrow.
“You can’t understand,” said Fisher, said the Guardian Fury, pillar of the Ilkand Temple, savager of the unrighteous. “I was sick of it. After the first time round with the Kinslayer, I couldn’t do that again. I was sick of the faithful, sick of the gods, sick of all the others, so much babble, so little purpose left to us. And you mortals, you had lives and not just duty. I wanted a life. Catt, Catty…” Fisher got to the bedside as though the intervening space had been a great desert. “You’re greedy, frivolous, flighty, you don’t care about other people, you’re… fun, Catty. You’re just fun to be around, to be part of all your schemes, to watch you waste expensive words on people who can’t give you change for them. I just… want that again.”
Catt looked at him for a long time. “That may be quite difficult, given what I now apprehend of your true nature, Fishy.”
Fisher nodded mournfully. “But I was thinking, back home there’s Perinable’s Bauble of Obfuscation…”
“To delete the memories, yes,” Catt finished for him. “That would seem to be the most reasonable solution to this impasse.”
Fisher paused. “You’d… do that, to yourself, then?”
Catt shrugged, then plainly regretted doing so. “My dear Fishy, I admit scooping out parts of my own brain isn’t exactly my first recourse when faced with a quandary, but I honestly don’t see another way around it. Just keep the redaction to a minimum, when you perform the procedure. Because I rather want things back the way they were, too, and it’s not too great a price.” Ralas saw a new thought strike him. “This is… the first time, isn’t it? We’ve not been baubling my brain every couple of years since we met, have we?”
“Of course,” Fisher assured him. “The first, and let’s make it the last. Too much like hard work.”
But Ralas wondered.
CELESTAINE HAD A new sword. Kait Hegumen had provided it, one of the Templars’ stock. It felt clumsy to her, for all that it was a solid, functional weapon, as good as any soldier might require. But I’m a hero. The plaintive thought made her sick at herself. What, precisely, did you do, that might be called heroic?
“Prefer mine.” Nedlam had been watching her try out the new blade on the fort’s muster ground. She had her arm bound up, and it would be a while before she could play with her toy, but Wall’s huge hammer was slung over her good shoulder. Celestaine wasn’t sure that the world was ready for that combination, but Ned’s were probably safer hands than those of the original owner.
“Smile, won’t you?” Nedlam suggested. “We won.”
Celestaine nodded glumly. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
“You want someone to give you a medal?” Ned asked.
“I want… to feel like the world’s better for what we did. Lord Wall is dead. That’s… it won’t mean much to you, but he was one of the great Guardians.”
“Great tucku zaran,” Nedlam said with emphasis, which Celestaine knew meant a pain in the arse. “Anyway, we got your man Silvermort. Won’t be liberating anyone any time soon.”
“Hrm.”
“What? He was a great thingummy too?”
“No, he was a bastard. The world’s better off.” Celestaine shook herself. “I’m sorry, Ned. I wish I could just… enjoy life, like you do.”
The Yorughan made a rude noise, audible across the breadth of the fort. “No trick to it.” She pulled a face at the handful of Arvennir and Kelicerati, midway through some deal, who had stopped their talk to stare. Olastoc, the Oerni Wayfarer, drew them back to their negotiations. He had come back from his shrine able to communicate with the spider-people a little, and there was talk of getting some Sheliac to teach them hand-sign. All good news, Celestaine thought, except…
“When we killed the Kinslayer,” she told Nedlam, “most of the rest were happy. Garenand had all the free beer and women he could ask for. There were crowds, cheering, songs. But some of us aren’t built like that. Roherich couldn’t take joy in it, because he was already drifting away from us, from humanity. And me… I just remember the bad, Ned. I remember the battles we lost. I remember the people I had to leave behind. You know why I wanted to save the Aethani? Because I thought that might be the thing to make me feel content, for a moment, with what I’d achieved. And now I can’t have that, and I’m just sat here thinking, what was even the point?”
“Ask the others,” Nedlam suggested. “Me, I had fun. Made new friends. He did all right, too.” She nodded to where, across the muster ground, the Undefeated was talking with some of the Templars. He had taken a great heroic-looking form, with a huge beard and golden, flowing hair. He had been talking about going back to the Temple in Ilkand, setting up as their resident Guardian. No doubt he would ride the wave of Ralas’s promised ballad and the news of the gods’ last message to their creation and do very well out of it. More sour taste for the tongue, Celestaine thought. I preferred him as a badger.
He’d helped, though, she had to admit. He’d gone against Wall, risked the balance of his immortal life. Perhaps a second chance would make something worthwhile out of him, restore him to the paragon he had once been.
But the world moves on, and most of the Guardians don’t. They tarnish, they retire, they die. And where will we be without them? A little-child-thought, wanting the unreasoning security of a world with protective parents.
She sheathed her sword. It would never be ri
ght, she knew. She could try out a hundred mundane blades and never be satisfied.
Nedlam whistled piercingly, waving with her good arm. Amkulyah was picking his way around the muster ground’s outskirts.
“Doctor Catt’s done,” he told them when he arrived. “As best as he can, he says.”
She followed him into the infirmary, returning Ralas’s nod as she entered. Catt had something in his lap that was not particularly crown-like any more, or not for any head that Celestaine was familiar with. She had assumed that remaking the crown would involve reforging, hammering it out on the edge of a lake of lava, something like that. Catt had mostly used wire, as far as she could see. He grimaced apologetically as he proffered it.
“A lot of the potency has leaked out, I’m afraid. It was rather a delicate thing, all told.”
Celestaine’s heart barely sank. She had been expecting some new impediment. “So it won’t work. It can’t do what we want any more. Fine.”
Catt hesitated, and she saw quite clearly the thought Maybe I can talk her into letting me keep it creep into his mind and be embarrassedly shooed out again. He glanced up at Fisher, who was standing at the head of his bed looking reassuringly surly. “Well, it will, probably, a little. Its reach isn’t changed, but you won’t get much out of it before it’s just scrap gold with a few nice stones. At which point the stones can still do some of their old tricks, I’d suspect, but it won’t be an artefact of making and unmaking any more, and that, I’m afraid, is what you’d need to help out your Aethani.”
“How much,” Amkulyah interrupted him. “How many?”
“Four, perhaps. Six?” Catt shrugged carefully. “Keeping doing it until it falls apart, as the doctor said to the gigolo. Not quite what you were expecting. I really am very sorry.”
“Six,” Celestaine echoed, waiting for Amkulyah’s reaction.
“Perhaps,” Doctor Catt repeated. “And there’s some other bad news.”
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