by Tom Lloyd
Zhia gave him a coquettish smile. ‘Just a little reminder of me, and something for me to remember, too.’ Before he could say anything, she added, ‘Don’t worry, sweetness; a scar will be the only gift you get from that.’ She gestured. ‘I think someone is getting impatient to be off.’
Doranei saw Mikiss glaring at them. ‘Are we sure we can trust him?’ he asked.
Zhia waved a hand dismissively. ‘They’re always a little excitable in the first few days. Mikiss will be close to his old self soon enough.’ She pointed to his sword, still resting against the tree trunk. ‘Come on, sweetness, we’re not finished tonight yet.’
They set off again as a brisker pace, moving as silently as possible, Mikiss still in the lead. The vampires were the only ones with their weapons still sheathed. Doranei had yet to see Zhia draw her long-handled sword. The only person who’d managed to slip past the acolytes to reach her had received a casual backhand slap for his trouble. Afterwards, when none of the attackers had been left standing, Doranei had knelt with his knife to finish the boy off. He guessed his age at fifteen summers, but it was hard to tell as he flailed weakly on the ground, the left side of his face smashed beyond recognition.
The fires had raged unchecked, and Doranei could still feel heat stinging his exposed cheeks whenever the gusty air switched direction, which it did with treacherous frequency. King Emin had travelled in a wide circle to avoid still-blazing areas, and no doubt the ground he was moving over was as hot and cracked as the earth under Doranei’s own boots. He didn’t know how long it had been since the fires had hurned out here, but there were still puffs of smoke here and there, and the stones scattered all around were blistering to touch, as Sebe discovered. He’d shared a nervous grin with Doranei at that, wryly acknowledging that his foolishness had been observed.
Sebe had kept his distance from Doranei since Zhia had joined them. Usually the two were to be found side by side; they’d grown up together, from the orphanage to the Brotherhood. They were brothers, in both senses. Now Sebe watched the lovers, trying to fathom exactly what was between them, and what it meant for the rest of the Brotherhood.
Doranei wasn’t worried; Sebe had instinctively moved into his lee at the last attack. They fought well as a pair, and whatever private thoughts Sebe had, they would be shared only with the king, and only if he asked.
Not even Beyn would take action, not unless evidence was produced, and Doranei knew he’d not be alive now if that had been the case. Usually a corrupt or traitor Brother was left thinking himself safe, until the day Coran appeared behind them in some deserted street … at which point the king’s justice would be done.
Only llumene had expected that moment, and only llumene had survived. Doranei sighed. llumene, the son King Emin had never had. He had been friends with llumene from before he first became a true member of the Brotherhood. The man had been easy to like; almost from the outset it had been clear to all that he was first among equals, yet even the veterans had not begrudged llumene that. With his easy smile and sharp mind, llumene had quickly become the heartbeat of the Brotherhood, the one man untouched by the requirements of his job. Perhaps we should have thought harder about that. Doranei grimaced; those had been Sebe’s words when llumene had betrayed them and gone on his killing spree, taking out the king’s allies in Narkang.
Charisma been replaced with contempt as llumene grew more and more resentful that he would only ever be a member of the Brotherhood. He’d never spoken it aloud, but there’d been no need: everyone knew he wanted the king to name him as his heir. He had refused to recognise that it was too late for such a thing. By the time the relationship between llumene and the king had collapsed, llumene had been twisted by his own anger. As king he would have been a despot; desperate to surpass his adopted father’s successes and uncaring of the suffering others would have to endure to achieve it.
A stone caught under his boot and he stumbled, earning reproachful looks from his companions for being so careless. The clatter had echoed as loud as a whip crack in the unnatural quiet of the empty street. Zhia gestured and they all stopped where they were.
‘Our goal is just down there,’ she said to Doranei softly, pointing to some burning remains about a hundred yards away.
‘Are you certain?’
‘No doubt. If you had any magical ability at all your head would be buzzing with the energy around that place.’
‘It looks like the building exploded.’
‘I suspect it did. Your king’s mages both felt the Skull’s use so clearly, and at such a distance that indicates a vast amount of magic unleashed in one moment.’
‘Enough to kill you?’ Doranei asked anxiously.
Zhia nodded. ‘With ease. Our biggest problem is that this abbot of yours has lost his mind. He was lucky not to burn up that first time, and as it is he will have only hours left to live. A human body cannot survive such recklessness, but if he does not care for his own survival, he can negate my own skill through sheer raw power.’
‘But you have a plan?’
She smiled, one long canine hooking her lip for a moment. ‘Of course, sweetness-‘
Zhia stopped as a pile of rubble exploded on Doranei’s right and a figure burst out towards them. Axe raised, Doranei caught the impact before he’d even turned, but the force of the impact was enough to drive him back as he twisted his body to deflect the person. Something solid, a rock, maybe, caught him a blow on the back of the head, but it glanced off the steel band of his helm and in the next moment he’d come around to hammer the pommel of his sword into his attacker’s skull. There was a dull crack and his attacker crashed face-first to the ground and went still.
Doranei’s heart was still racing at the unexpected attack, but he straightened up and kicked the prone figure onto its back.
‘Damn, a woman,’ he muttered.
‘She’s still alive,’ Zhia said, staring intently.
‘How can you-‘ Doranei began, then, ‘no, no I don’t think I want to know.’
He put the tip of his sword to her throat, but the sight of her face stayed his hand. She was tall, as tall as Doranei, with strong healthy limbs, but even covered in the grime of weeks living as an animal he could tell she was young. ‘Gods, she’s hardly more than a child,’ he muttered.
‘Hardly surprising. The young will be the strongest,’ Zhia commented, walking around him to look down at the woman. ‘But they’re mindless creatures now, however young they are.’ She looked up at him. ‘Shall I finish her off? It’s a kindness.’
Doranei stared back for a moment. ‘Can you be certain of that? No, she’s already unconscious. We’ll be gone by the time she comes around, and who knows? Perhaps after tonight her mind will return.’
‘She has lost her mind,’ Zhia said gently. ‘She has lost everything that made her a person. I’m certain of that.’
‘You said yourself that you have never seen this spell’s effects before,’ he said heatedly. ‘You can’t be sure. They’re innocents, all of them - as long as she’s no danger to us, what harm is there in a little hope?’
Zhia opened her mouth to argue, but the words died unsaid. She looked around at the blasted landscape. She could see no hope here; it was as ghastly as the battlefields she remembered from her youth. It had a dead air about it: this was a desolate twilight world halfway between the Land and the Dark Place.
But perhaps hope is all that remains? Without the hope burning still so fiercely in his eyes, perhaps he would be just like them, an empty vessel. I have been so long without my humanity it shocks me to see it undiluted in those around me. Suddenly Zhia felt a stirring at the back of her mind, streams of magic shifting like some great beast lifting its head and testing the wind.
‘Oh Gods,’ she breathed, turning back to the fiery ruin up ahead just in time to see a sprawl of energy rise up in the air like tentacles spreading out from a nest in search of prey. ‘He’s discovered us,’ she shouted.
Without waiting for her com
panions, Zhia ran for the house.
Doranei stared after her for a moment and felt a fierce glow of heat as she drew deeply on the reserves within her own Crystal Skull. With a cry he set off after her, Haipar at his side and Sebe behind, headed for the rapidly growing storm up ahead. The light from the fires shrank back as whipping cords of spitting energy flooded the area with a greenish glare that made Doranei’s eyes water. He stumbled on, almost not seeing one of the bodies littering the ground lurch unexpectedly upwards, slashing wildly with dagger. He checked his stride and fell sideways, out of the dagger’s reach, and caught a glimpse of Sebe at his back, axe raised.
Scrabbling to his feet, Doranei looked for Zhia. She was heading for the burning light of magic, running headlong into the centre of the wrecked house. She flashed from sight and something else caught Doranei’s attention, a creature of some sort, indistinct through the haze, although he could tell it was massive.
A blind fear rose inside Doranei, but from somewhere he found new reserves of strength. With a howl he too dived over the barrier of flames and surging magic, trusting Zhia to have chosen the safest path. He rolled as he landed and jumped up, swinging both weapons. From the corner of one eye he glimpsed a long limb snapping out at him and something connected with his axe shaft. He caught sight of a hooked talon snagged on the axe before it was driven back into his chest and he was swept off his feet.
As he fell backwards, one of the Jester acolytes breached the fire and flew past him towards the creature. Bone rang on steel as the acolyte parried with greater finesse than Doranei had shown, but in the next instant he heard the wet slap of flesh being cut open. All his senses were screaming out in panic, but Doranei forced himself upright and away from where he’d landed, just as Mikiss cleared the flames, closely followed by Sebe and another acolyte. The vampire had a savage look of glee on his face, and both axes held out wide. With a swift blow he severed an arm reaching out towards him.
Doranei cried out in alarm as an enormous lioness flashed past him, only realising when it tore a great chunk of flesh from the creature that it was Haipar, rather than some new enemy. As the shapeshifter darted back out of range, Doranei slashed at the creature again, then flung himself to one side as a trident nearly impaled him. Sebe hacked at the shaft to try to break it, but was rewarded only with clang of metal as a feathered wing swept him off his feet.
Doranei jumped forward to defend his friend, fighting with reckless desperation, hitting out at the only part of the creature that was in reach. He was rewarded with a screech of pain, but the wound didn’t slow it a fraction; he turned in time to catch a taloned limb just before it eviscerated him, turned again and hacked wildly up behind him to save Sebe from the stabbing trident.
The impact knocked the sword from Doranei’s hand, but the moment of distraction proved enough. Through the flurry of feathered limbs, Doranei saw Mikiss attacking the creature from the other side, just before Legana jumped smoothly into the arena, throwing one of her swords straight at the body of the creature. As it struck home, the beast reared back, and Legana pressed forward fearlessly, slashing with all her strength into the creature’s body. Mikiss joined her and Haipar buried her huge canines into one reaching arm, using her weight to pin the limb down and create an opening for the vampire. Doranei felt the splatter of gore on his face.
At last they stopped, each one of them gasping for breath and the massive lioness shaking ichor from her muzzle. In the next moment the raging streams of magic swirling and dancing all around them winked out of existence. They blinked at each other, half-blind in the sudden darkness. Doranei began to cough, but felt down for Sebe’s arm to help him up. They stood for a moment, supporting themselves on each other as the glare slowly faded from their eyes.
‘Congratulations, children,’ came Zhia’s voice from the darkness. ‘You’ve killed your first God.’
They looked up blearily, searching in vain for the vampire until she used her Skull to cast a pale light. Doranei looked at his fellow victors. Legana looked unruffled, almost pristine, barely breathing hard, while Mikiss beamed with pleasure at the corpse at his feet. In the blink of an eye Haipar appeared as her more usual self, fully dressed, with a blade on her hip. She glared at Doranei when she saw him staring and he quickly turned away.
‘God?’ gasped Sebe, ‘that was a God?’
Even dead and motionless at last, the creature was so unnatural, so bizarre, that it took him a while to identify the beak and face within the mess of feathers and angular limbs. It looked like nothing he’d ever seen, not even on a temple wall. In the weak light what he could make out of the mess looked daemonic more than divine.
‘Erwillen the High Hunter. His Aspect-Guide,’ Legana answered. ‘The novice, what was his name? Mayel, yes, he told us about that. I should have realised it would have incarnated, given so great a source of magic’
‘We’ve just killed a God?’ Sebe moaned as Doranei retrieved his sword, trying not to look at the sticky mess coating the blade.
An insane one, if that make it any better,’ Zhia said soothingly, looking around for any further dangers. Her strange sword was dripping blood onto the remains of the minor God: rich, red blood that certainly was not ichor. ‘The High Hunter was as crazed as the abbot.’ She gave him a wolfish grin. ‘Don’t worry; the first one is always the hardest.’
Doranei ignored that last statement. ‘You killed the abbot.’ it wasn’t a question; the evidence was dripping onto her toes.
‘Oh yes, I know a few little tricks, and once he realised I had a Skull too he simply raised his shields against me.’ She shook as much of the blood off her sword as possible. ‘He forgot that shields to stop magic cannot stop steel, and his reactions were as slow as one might expect of an elderly monk.’
‘It was really that easy?’ Doranei asked in disbelief.
‘Not entirely,’ Zhia admitted, ‘but it was always going to be very quick, or slow and completely awful for everyone within half a mile.’ She gave a cold laugh. ‘And, of course, he wasn’t my first.’
The conversation ended as they saw one of the acolytes still on the ground, a huge gash pouring blood just below his ribs. Mikiss stood a yard away from the injured man, his attention alternating between a bloodied tear in his sleeve and the widening pool on the ground, as though he couldn’t decide which fascinated him the most. Another acolyte, almost identical in both dress and build, was kneeling at the injured man’s side. He had drawn a long dagger and for a moment Doranei wasn’t sure if it was to threaten Mikiss.
Then the kneeling man put the dagger at his friend’s throat, wrapped his hands around his friend’s and drove forwards. He watched as the legs spasmed once, then went still, waited a moment longer, then let go of the dagger, still buried in his friend’s neck, and slid the mask up over the pale cropped stubble of his head, revealing a young face, still ill with puppy-fat cheeks, and a flattened nose that looked like it bad been more than just badly broken. The tribesmen from the Waste didn’t resemble any of the original seven tribes; the dead acolyte’s skin was grey, as though dusted with ash. Doranei thought this no tribal custom, but a sign of how the Waste changed its inhabitants. They had been luckier than many; Doranei had spent a little time in the Waste, long enough to know that humans didn’t survive there unchanged. It was for good reason that there were no cities on those verdant plains where once the ancient Elves had built their civilisation.
‘Zhia,’ he said suddenly, dragging his eyes away from the dead. The vampire was crouched down in from of the dead Aspect of Vellern; she turned her head and gave him a quizzical look. ‘Can you sense the minstrel? He must be here somewhere.’
‘Why are you so certain?’ She finished cleaning her sword on what looked like a wing and sheathed it, then stood up.
‘Because he will not-‘ Doranei stopped dead. ‘Where’s the Skull?’
She nodded towards what was left of a cellar entrance. ‘Down there, with the abbot.’
‘You didn’t b
ring it with you?’
Zhia scowled. ‘I told you, I do not care for it, and frankly, I’m disappointed in your king for wanting it so badly. Aryn Bwr gave it to his son because he knew Velere lacked the strength and majesty to rule after the war. It is a gift for the weak.’
‘And what if it falls into the hands of the powerful?’ Doranei asked angrily. The kneeling acolyte jerked his head at his tone, but Doranei ignored him.
‘I hadn’t thought you such a fool,’ Zhia snapped in return. ‘Your friend Rojak has orchestrated all this destruction, and still you don’t see?’ She swept her arm out wide to take in the ruins of the city in the distance.
‘You think he’s lured us here?’ Doranei almost shouted his reply as he felt the smoulder of frustration and anger inside him suddenly ignite. ‘Do you honestly think he would sacrifice the Skull of Ruling and hand it to his greatest enemy before an ambush?’
‘I think we have all been blundering in the dark,’ Zhia spat, shooting a warning look at Mikiss, who’d begun to edge towards Doranei. ‘I think Rojak has been ten steps ahead for months, perhaps years, and underestimating him will get you killed. And yes, I think you have walked into an ambush.’
‘Then what in the name of Ghenna’s deepest pit are you doing here?’ Doranei yelled, his temper boiling over.
Zhia’s face softened and, quite unexpectedly, she smiled at him. ‘Your simple-mindedness is rather endearing,’ she said. ‘I’m here because I knew you’ll follow your king wherever he goes, and he will not be dissuaded in his pursuit.’ She reached out and tenderly ran a gloved finger over the exposed skin of his cheek. And because I seem to have not learned from past mistakes, I find myself trailing along after you.’ Zhia paused and gave a sad smile. ‘Still, I doubt there’s much left for me in the way of punishment this time round.’
She stepped away and pointed out over the wreckage to the south.
Doranei followed her finger and looked through the waning flames to see a group of figures advancing on them. ‘Here come your Brothers,’ she said breezily, drawing her sword once more. ‘I presume Rojak will consider that his cue.’
