by Morgan Rice
Anger lent him strength, and Thanos bucked, rolling Irrien over to land beneath him. It was Thanos’s turn to strike out then, pinning Irrien’s knife arm with one hand and all the weight of his body, while his other fist slammed down into the First Stone again and again. Irrien scrambled back to his feet, but Thanos was already moving, diving for the sword he’d dropped.
Thanos could hear Irrien advancing on him, probably hefting the knife to finish the job he’d started. It didn’t matter. Thanos didn’t even try to stand then; he just spun, cutting out and feeling the sword slam into Irrien’s legs. The First Stone fell, collapsing to his knees with an expression close to shock.
“That is for killing my friend,” Thanos said. He lifted the sword and plunged it deep into Irrien’s chest, dragging it out again with a bellow of effort. “That is for all the people you’ve killed and enslaved, not just Stephania. And this…”
He lifted the sword then, feeling the weight of it as Irrien stared up at him, still trying to threaten with his long knife even now.
“…this is for my son!”
He swept the great sword down in a wide arc, striking Irrien’s neck cleanly and cleaving through it through sheer momentum. The First Stone’s head came away from his shoulders and rolled, and his body toppled to one side.
Thanos struggled to his feet, using the sword for support. A part of him thought that he should be rising to cheers, because when a man like Irrien died, surely everyone should rejoice? Instead, he found himself staring at a wide circle of Felldust men, all standing over the bodies of the islanders they’d killed. They stared at him with awe at what he’d just done, but also with hatred.
Things were still for a moment or two, but Thanos knew it couldn’t last. Sooner or later, one of them would move, and then they all would, crashing down on him like some tidal wave of violence. He was dead; it was simply a matter of moments.
Thanos thought of Ceres again then, and all that they hadn’t had together yet. He thought of the child Irrien had taken from him, and the friends he’d lost. Then he lifted the sword he’d just used to kill the First Stone, and he did the only thing he could think to do.
He charged.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Jeva saw the danger from the far end of the docks. She saw Thanos fighting, saw his men falling around him as he cut down the First Stone. She saw him raise his sword as enemies surrounded him, and she guessed what he was going to do even before he did it.
She saw Thanos charge, and it was glorious. It was stupid, but it was glorious.
Perhaps that was why she gathered her people to her, or perhaps it was just that she wasn’t going to stand by and let the man who had saved her life fall. Thanos was too good a man for her to stand by while he died, so Jeva didn’t. She charged instead, and her people charged with her, shouting battle cries that would have chilled any sane man.
It meant that the enemies attacking Thanos turned to face them as they charged, but Jeva didn’t care. She could kill men as easily from the front as from the side. She sprang forward, her bladed chains lashing out to create carnage around her. She spun and struck, attacking every enemy who came into range, drawing foes around her like a flame drawing moths.
The more who came to her, the fewer there were to attack Thanos. Her people fought alongside her. Jeva saw them cut at the invaders with axes and curved blades, strike them with staves, strangle them with chains. They sent foes to the dead with all the fury that they reserved for war, bringing chaos to the enemy’s lines as they killed them.
Jeva saw them fall too, because in a battle, in life, there was no real way to avoid death. She saw a man brought down by an axe through his shoulder, and killed the wielder with a sweep of her blades. She saw a woman killed as a spear thrust through her stomach, a pile of dead foes already around her.
As Jeva continued to fight, she found herself wondering what would become of her people after this. They were already changed beyond recognition. Now they were dying around her. There was a time when she would have seen that as a good thing, or when she wouldn’t have cared enough about the living for it to matter. Now she wept for them as she fought, continuing to slice and move, killing and cutting.
Even so, she kept going, trying to fight her way to Thanos. She tore a foe’s weapon from his hand with her chains, then broke his arm over her leg as she threw him to the ground. She pushed past two more, then ducked under a sword blow.
Thanos was ahead, fighting with all the skill and power Jeva had come to expect from him. It was astonishing that he’d survived this far, and now that her people were there to help hold back the tide, it seemed as if he might actually be safe. Jeva saw him push a man back with the cross guard of his weapon, striking him down with a two-handed blow. He parried a sword stroke and thrust through another man, planting his foot on his opponent as he tried to drag it clear.
Jeva ran in beside him, fighting to clear the space around him. There seemed to be so many enemies there: a whole boatload, in a space otherwise clear of defenders. Jeva felt her left-hand chain give way under a sword stroke. She drew a punch dagger and kept going.
“You saved me,” Thanos said.
Jeva forced herself to smile. “You sound surprised.”
She’d done it without dying, too. Maybe the dead had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t the place where she and her people lost everything.
Then Jeva saw the warrior coming in behind Thanos, sword already raised. There was no time in which to shout a warning.
There was no time for Jeva to do anything except throw herself forward blindly, hoping that it would be enough. She felt the impact of a blade hammering into her side, but her own weapons went out to kill the attacker in the same moment. He fell, and even as he did so, Thanos cut down the other men around him.
Jeva leaned back to back with him then, his strength the main thing holding her up, and they continued to fight together against the foes surrounding them. Jeva saw more of her people falling, and even though each one died with a heap of foes next to him or her, it didn’t seem like enough of a trade for a life.
She knew she shouldn’t have thought like that, that the ancestors would probably be roiling in disembodied disgust at the thought of it, but still, Jeva hated the waste of it all even as she knew that there was no other choice. She struck out at the next foes to come at her, and the next.
More figures ran in, and briefly, Jeva thought that she might have to fight off another wave of Felldust’s warriors. Then she saw their uniforms, marked with the colors of Haylon, the Northern Coast, and the Empire. All three had come to Thanos’s aid, and now they cut into the remaining invaders, pushing them back toward their ships and killing any who tried to stand.
They’d done it. They’d held against Irrien’s assault, although Jeva could hardly bear to see what it had cost her people. So many of them lay dead, and the wound at her side would need stitching soon before…
Her knees gave way with almost stately slowness, and Jeva collapsed to the ground. Thanos was there to catch her, pressing a hand to the spot where she’d been struck by the sword. It came away coated in the kind of dark blood that meant this wasn’t just a case of sealing the wound with honeyed silk.
Thanos stared at it. “We need to get you to a healer. We need to find someone who can help you.”
Jeva could hear the hope in that, but she could feel the truth too, running out of her with every drop of blood that fell. Life was fleeing her almost as quickly as the last of the enemy troops on the docks were running.
“I’m dying,” Jeva said.
For what seemed to be an eternity, Thanos ignored that, pressing down on the wound as if he could hold Jeva’s life in with his bare hands.
“I’m dying, Thanos,” she repeated. It was better to be honest about these things. That was what she’d always been taught, wasn’t it? So why did it all seem so hard now that she was the one whose spirit only seemed bound to her by the slenderest of threads?
She saw Thanos weeping then as he looked down at her. He knelt there, holding onto her. Jeva could barely feel it now.
“Promise me, Thanos,” she said. “Promise me that my people will be well treated. There are so few of them now, and everything is changing for us.”
“I promise,” Thanos assured her. Jeva knew that he would keep to it. Thanos was a man who kept his word. Jeva wondered how different things might have been if she hadn’t met him.
She might still have been alive, but somehow, that distinction didn’t seem like one that was worthwhile. She didn’t regret what she’d done, even though this was the outcome. When it came to it, all roads led to this point. It was simply a question of what you managed to do along the way.
Jeva had changed her people beyond recognition, saved a prince, and, she hoped, helped to win a war. How much more could she ask for? She laughed to herself.
“What’s so funny?” Thanos asked her.
“I’ve made it so my people won’t be ruled by the dead, just as I’m about to become one of them,” Jeva said. She laughed again at the irony of it.
“Perhaps I should tell them to listen to you,” Thanos suggested, with a smile of his own.
That turned Jeva serious for a moment. “Don’t you dare. They can’t be allowed to go back to what they were. It can’t happen.”
“It won’t,” Thanos said. He was still smiling, even though tears were falling as well. Maybe that was what death should be, sadness and joy and more, all wrapped up together.
It wouldn’t be long now. Jeva could feel the darkness coming in at the edges of her vision. She could hear the whispers of the dead, and this time it wasn’t because they had a message for her or a task. There was a place waiting among them.
Jeva hoped it would be a good one. There was just one more thing that she needed to do.
“Thanos,” she said. “I need you to promise me one more thing.”
“Another thing?” Thanos said.
“When you saved my life, I owed you my life,” Jeva said. “Now you owe me yours.”
“What is it, Jeva?” Thanos asked. “You know you just have to ask.”
“Live, Thanos. Stop fighting against your own happiness. Live a good life. Live a full life. If I see you on the other side too soon, I will be very angry.”
As last words went, Jeva thought those were probably good ones. She looked up into Thanos’s face until it started to fade, and she took her hands away from the wound she’d suffered.
The dead reached out for her, and Jeva went to them willingly.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Ceres stared up in fear at the beast above her. It reared, its claws ready to crush her completely, its bulk greater than half the houses around her. The sun shone from its spines, and its single eye burned with malevolence. With the speed a thing that size shouldn’t have had, it brought the claws thundering down toward her.
Ceres rolled, and even that movement was agony as her body struggled to heal itself. She felt the rush of air as the claws passed close to her, then an impact like an earthquake rumbled through the ground beside her.
She came to her feet, pushing aside the pain, pushing aside the fear of this beast filled with death. She had to find a way to stop it. If she didn’t, who would? If she didn’t, then the fight for Haylon was as good as lost, regardless of what else happened.
The question still remained of how she could hope to fight something like this.
Ceres dodged aside from another blow as it struck, hard enough to bring a wall down when the creature’s claws thudded into it. She didn’t try to grab a weapon and strike back, because there was no weapon there that might hope to harm it. She didn’t lash out with her powers, because she had already learned that the beast could absorb what she sent it, feeding on that the way another animal might drink water.
The most she could do right then was try to keep its attention on her, and hope that she could keep it from the rest of the battle while she tried to think of something that might work. Even that was hard. It meant trying to dodge and keep moving, all the while trying to keep in the sight of that single, baleful eye. Ceres jumped over a swipe, dodged back from a sudden charge, and ran along a row of awnings, trying to lead the beast away.
A soldier stepped into its path and stared up at the thing as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The beast stared down at him as well, regarding him the way a cat might have looked at a mouse before it pounced. The soldier screamed a battle cry and tried to stab at it, but it made no difference. The creature’s jaws snapped down, snatching him up and tearing him apart while he screamed.
Ceres could see that it wasn’t swallowing any of what it chewed on. Instead, she could feel it drawing in the man’s life along with his pain and his fear, dragging it down into the great empty pit that seemed to form the heart of the beast. It was a thing of death, and the energy of that death seemed to spur it on to greater power.
That gave Ceres an idea. A dangerous, probably stupid, idea.
She threw power into it, not even caring about the form that it took. She flung raw, killing force into the creature, feeling the moment when it started to absorb it. Ceres kept pouring power in, letting the beast’s malevolence pull her down toward the brink of the space where it stored the energy it had taken from the deaths it had brought. Ceres could feel herself on the edge of a precipice there. Any further, and she might find her own life force dragged in with the rest to be lost.
Instead, she pulled back.
She pulled the way a fisherman might have hauled in a catch. She pulled with her thoughts and her power, dragging at the death power she could feel in front of her. Slowly, aching with the effort of it, Ceres pulled the power out of the thing.
It tried to pull back, but Ceres clung to its power, dragging energy from it and pulling it back into herself. She could feel the remains of lives there, and Ceres thought about trying to throw those scraps back where they had come from, but she didn’t know how. There was too much of the death power to even begin to separate it all out.
Coming back to herself, Ceres saw the beast advancing on her now, and there was a jerkiness to its movements that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t as unstoppably fast as it had been, and now she was able to dodge back from it, still pulling on that thread of dark power.
The creature started to unravel in front of her eyes.
It started with patches of the papery skin, which fell from it in drifts and sloughs, tumbling to the ground so that it continued forward as a thing of bones and spines. Then the bones started to collapse, tumbling and falling in a clatter onto the cobblestones. Some of the smaller bones even turned to dust.
The last thing remaining was that single, hate-filled eye. It glared at Ceres with an abiding hatred of all life until finally, the last glimmers of power winked from it.
The thing died, and Ceres stood there, brimming with a power that was as unlike hers as anything she’d felt. The power of the Ancient Ones was a great and terrifying thing, but it wasn’t this emptiness, this coldness. Ceres shivered as she held it, because this hated life even more than the power she had contained within her for so long. She felt cold, her breath coming out as mist even on the warmth of the island.
She couldn’t hold it for long. Even though she had the strength of the Ancient Ones, there was no way that Ceres could hope to contain this for more than a few minutes. Already, she could feel it trying to eat through her, the sheer force of it threatening to burst her apart. This was a force that was designed to kill Ancient Ones. It was pure, concentrated death, and Ceres couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t release it either, not without killing everyone around it.
There was one place, though, where that might be a good thing.
Ceres balled up the energy she’d stolen. She held it for a moment, the way a child might have held a stone ready for skimming. She flung it, using her own power to make sure it traveled straight and true, right into the heart of Felldust’s fleet. It spread
out in ripples, and Ceres was glad that she’d flung it so far from the island, because wherever that power touched, men died.
There was no spectacle to it, no breaking of ships or burning of flesh. It was far more terrifying than that. Men stood, giving orders or firing arrows, and then they fell, the life wiped from them as if it had never been. A death priest standing at the prow of one of the boats froze in the middle of an exhortation to his gods and fell backward, dead. Two crews engaged in mortal combat collapsed, silence spreading out where there had been the clash of blades before.
It was a terrible power, and there was no way Ceres could control it. Chained oarsmen died alongside the most evil of their captors. Small boarding crews from the island died along with the crews of the ships they assaulted. There weren’t many of those, thankfully, because Ceres couldn’t take it back, and couldn’t hope to protect the people out there. The best she had been able to do was fling the power where it would strike the invaders, rather than waiting for it to burst out from her on the island.
Ships started to crash as their helmsmen and rowers fell dead. A galley ran onto the island’s rocks, creaking as they tore it apart. Other vessels drifted aimlessly, ghost ships now in every sense. In a matter of heartbeats, the silence of the grave reigned over the water.
Ceres stood there for several seconds in silent memorial to the dead. She felt as though she owed them that much. She owed the living more, though, and below, she could still hear the sounds of fighting from the city and the beaches around it. She charged down, snatching up a sword from where it had fallen and plunging herself back into the battle.
The defenders rallied around her then, and Ceres pointed to the bulk of the foes still remaining.
“Charge!” she ordered, and the men there went with her, slamming into their foes, cutting them down, fighting and killing. It felt like a continuation of the thousand other small battles that had been taking place on the island, but Ceres could feel the difference with this one. There wasn’t an entire armada of new foes waiting after these. The city still swarmed with enemies, but their fleet was gone, their leaders defeated.
