The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  The rest of our party rounded the corner. Geoffrey released a spell, and faceted light brimmed over his skin. It distracted the draug long enough for one of the armed servants to stick a sword in the creature’s ribs.

  Draugs were not undead, not the way recarnates were, so vulcanized coal wasn’t a special threat. The draug spun around and caved in the guard’s head with a backhand. The man barely twitched for a second before dying.

  Since Geoffrey had made himself so nicely invulnerable, I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him at the draug. The draug swatted Geoffrey away. I funneled willpower into my sabre hilt, making it blaze with garnet light. The hilt boiled outward into a blade as long as my forearm.

  “Save your sigils!” I shouted, while bringing one foot back and my hip forward. I took two quick jabs at the draug’s eyes. It stumbled, buying me room for a cross punch. The blow made its head snap back. I shrugged up my shoulders to protect my neck against its flailing claws, and stabbed it through its arm. It tripped and went down on one knee. I hacked downward and tried to behead it.

  Its skin was too tough. The draug dropped to all fours and shrieked. Then it realized it was next to a bleeding food supply, in the form of the guard that had run ahead of me. Quicker than thought, it had its claws in the man’s throat.

  I saw the servant die. Saw his spirit shudder free. Three men entrusted to me for a simple walk upstairs; three men dead.

  My Atlantean Aspect rose at my command. In a way I’d never done before, I called on it. I brought it to my skin, let it flare like fever. I became the brightest thing in the hallway. The brightest thing in the world. When I opened my mouth to speak, my words were like the flame of a blowtorch.

  I whispered, “Burn.”

  The draug’s face began to smoke. Patches of skin peeled away from jawbone and incisors. Its hair clumped and curled into tight, foul nubs.

  It died into a blur of smoldering darkness.

  Everyone went quiet.

  As the light dimmed—my light, the light that was me—it took conscious effort not to sag. “Just curious,” I said in a shaky voice. “Were my eyeballs burning?”

  “Yes, they were burning,” Addam whispered in awe. “You were burning.”

  “Very impressive, Sun,” Ciaran said. “More interesting, however, is that draugs travel in shoals.”

  I said, “Shit,” and pulled out the handheld radio. “Brand?”

  “I’m heading towards you. What happened?”

  “No, don’t come, stay there. We fought off a draug, it must have come in under the cloud cov—”

  The penny dropped. It wasn’t a coincidence that the storm blocked the sunlight. Cloud cover allowed draug to move in daytime.

  I said, “This must be part of Ashton’s move. He’s working with draugs, too. If there’s one draug, there’s a group of them. Pull the patrols back, we’ll sweep the building when this is over.” If there is an over. “You pull back, too. I’ll meet you at the barricade.”

  Brand said, “McAllister, recall basement patrols. Rune, switch to channel four.”

  I switched to channel four.

  Brand said, “Shut the fuck up and start yelling ‘Polo.’ I’M COMING TO YOU.”

  I smiled and said, “Meet you in the middle.”

  We ran for a long time, behind the bobbing blades of cantrip light. We slipped on wet tile, squished over wet rug. Broken windows hissed and spit rain. An office smelling of stale cigar smoke transitioned into a room ringed with barre bars and mirrors. A trick of the cantrip lighting turned our party infinitely smaller in the facing mirrors.

  “Rune, you’re close,” Brand said through the radio. The words were tight with tension. Before I could reply, I heard him suck in a breath. “There are six of us. I don’t think we’re alone. We’re on an outside patio—your spell cut across the mouth of it. The flagstones look orang—”

  The reception cracked. Through the Companion bond, I felt vibrations of surprise and adrenaline.

  “Addam, where is he?” I said. “Where!”

  “It sounds like the rear patio of this wing. It faces the back lawns. That way.”

  I spotted the door from his finger-point and bolted for it. It opened into a rotunda, a wide, octagonal space done in starburst tile. A shallow dome, only a single story overhead, revealed a writhing sky.

  Halfway across the rotunda, a full-sized tree shot through the dome. Everything became a roar of falling glass and metal struts. Sleeves were grabbed, arms were yanked. I was pulled out of the path of a crystal shard as long as my thigh bone. Someone shoved me into a hallway, and his body plowed on top of me.

  Through all of this, Brand’s alarm sang through me. He was fighting.

  “Where—where are we?” I said as the noise died. I snarled a light cantrip and pumped it with so much willpower that my eyes ached. There were only two of us—only Ciaran and myself. No Addam. The mouth of the hallway was blocked by what appeared to be the roof.

  Brand was fighting, and now Addam was gone. The sensation of being pulled in two directions was exquisitely painful. But Addam was closer, for now.

  “Addam!” I roared. I ran up to the blockage. Through gaps, I saw rainfall and darkness. As I started yanking on a razor-edged length of metal, Addam shouted, “We’re okay! We can go around this way. You go through the storage rooms. Look for a window that opens onto the rear patio.”

  “Are you okay to move?” I asked Ciaran.

  “I cut myself when I saved your life,” he said, examining a deep gash on his wrist.

  “Sure, yes, thank you, now move. Please, Ciaran! Brand’s under attack!”

  The dust-choked hallway led to a service area, and from there to a huge storage space as long as the entire wing. The room reeked of dust and disuse, and was crowded with tall objects under canvas tarps.

  I came to a stop in the middle of the room and stared at a wall. There were no windows or doors in eyesight—just this wall. “He’s there,” I said. My voice shook in anger. “He’s on the other side!” With a wordless cry of frustration, I shot off a firebolt, powdering a marble frieze and setting cobwebs aflame.

  “Doors and corridors and corners,” Ciaran said in disgust. “Rats. They have us as rats in a maze. Enough.”

  He touched a link on his bone necklace. Magic snapped free and surrounded us like a freeway rumble. He lifted a hand toward the wall, and a length of it shuddered and buckled, grinding against itself. When the thunderous shaking stopped, the wall was still there, but it looked different. Less substantial.

  “Take a swing,” Ciaran said. I lifted my sabre to fire at it, and Ciaran grabbed my wrist—which turned the cuff of my godsdamn leather jacket into corduroy. He repeated, “A swing.”

  I shook him loose, strode the three steps, and snapped a side kick at the wall. It cracked through. The stone had thinned to shale.

  A spindly table was overturned on top of a nearby shroud. I yanked it down and used it to batter the wall. After my third swing, the storage room opened into shouting, into a drizzle of rain.

  Through the ragged hole I spotted Brand. He and five household servants had formed a loose circle in the middle of a rainswept patio. Recarnates in muddy urban camo were coming at them from every side. At least two layers of corpses surrounded Brand. Blood had turned one of his sleeves red.

  As I watched, one of the servants was run through by a recarnate’s blade.

  I shouted, “DOWN!”

  Most of the men followed Brand’s immediate lead as he dropped. He yanked the rest off their feet. Not wasting time climbing through the wall, I brought my shooting hand up and sprayed the area with a chest-high barrage of firebolts. Brand didn’t wait for an all-clear. He spun his leg out and broke the ankles of a recarnate who tried to dodge between the blasts. When it staggered, Brand hooked his hand in its waistband while stabbing the back of its neck.

  I turned my strafe into precision shots, going for recarnates on the other side of the defensive huddle.

 
Revitalized by my appearance, and following Brand’s tactic, the rest of the servants began stabbing at legs and ankles with their blades, pulling the recarnates into killing range. It was over in seconds.

  Ciaran said, “Budge up,” and shoved at the small of my back. I grabbed the edge of the fragile hole and pulled myself onto the orange-colored terra-cotta. The rain made the stone slick, so I watched my footing as I ran to Brand.

  “There’ll be more,” he said, and glared when I tried to pull up his sleeve. He gave a pointed look toward the household worker who’d been stabbed, as if I was supposed to worry about anyone else first.

  “Why are you out here?” I asked.

  “Shortcut.”

  “Through an exposed outdoor patio in a lightning storm. You should make maps.”

  “The storm’s ending,” he said through his teeth.

  I looked up while ripping his sleeve to the elbow. The sky still churned with layers of gray and black. “No, it’s not. That’s just the eye.”

  Brand had a six-inch cut on the outside of his forearm. It was bleeding freely and would need to be sealed, but he’d had worse. He kept super-glue in one of his belt pouches, which would hold it for now.

  “How is he?” I asked Ciaran, who was crouched over the servant who took a sword in the gut.

  Without lifting his head, Ciaran shook a no.

  “Let’s get everyone back to the barricade. And reload those.” I pointed to the two crossbows the servants had dropped.

  Across the patio, a French door opened so hard that it cracked. Addam and Geoff spilled into view. Addam had drawn his sword, and Geoffrey, the little fuck, had wasted another sigil spell. An icy nimbus of light surrounded his outstretched hand.

  A window on the other side of the patio shattered. A hat rack stabbed back and forth through the opening and cleared away the glass. Max’s blond head poked out.

  “I have the healing kit,” he called. “I heard you were attacked. I want to help.”

  “Then kick yourself in the ass really fucking hard,” Brand said. “I told you to stay put.”

  As he stomped to the window to drag Max out, Addam crossed the patio toward us. He stared at his fallen man, and went down on one knee before the body.

  I would have joined him, but Ciaran hissed in a breath. The principality lifted a hand into the air, fingers splayed, questing upward toward the roof, and then down toward the storage room we’d broken through. He said, “More coming.”

  “Recarnates?” I said. “Brand, form up!”

  Ciaran shook his head slowly and said, “And draug.” He repeated the word with a drawn-out Z. “Draugs.”

  “Get those crossbows loaded!” Brand shouted. “Geoffrey, use that damn spell before it runs out—Addam, anyone injured goes inside a circle!” He pushed Max in the circle too.

  That was as much time as we had for strategy. A mass of bodies reached the hole I’d made in the wall of the storage room. Three recarnates jumped through. Behind them I could see pale faces and oilskins.

  “I’ve got this,” Geoff said. As crossbows twanged and took down the recarnates on the patio, Geoffrey flung a squirming ball of Frost against the building. A wall of wavering mist stretched across the hole.

  A recarnate, trapped behind the barrier, charged. Its face blackened and split. It fell out of sight in heavy, frozen pieces.

  Geoffrey poured his willpower into the subzero defense. But it was a futile effort. Ciaran’s spell had weakened much of the wall. More and more stone began to chip away under the pressure, forcing Geoff to expand the surface area of the barrier and weaken its efficacy. Worse, the draugs grabbed the recarnates in their midst and tossed them into the spell.

  The barrier overloaded and vanished with a whumph. The draug swarmed. Four of them—five—more than half a dozen. Too many. No matter what tricks we had up our sleeve, there were too many.

  The two last crossbow bolts twanged, tearing into the draug with enough punch to stagger them. Behind me, I sensed Ciaran and Addam unloading sigil spells. Addam’s sword flared with a rim of Bless-fire, while Ciaran created a shuddering maelstrom of force around his entire body. He took three steps away from us and held out his arms. Patio furniture and walls buckled as he pulled loose the bolts and nails and pointed a hand at a draug. The nails snapped forward. Impaled through neck and chest, the draug dropped.

  I saw Brand’s eyes jerk upward a half a second before the next prong of the attack hit us.

  Five recarnates vaulted from the roof. I hadn’t expected them, and I should have, because recarnates wouldn’t care about broken legs or sprained muscles, and because Ciaran had already indicated danger might come from above as well.

  The dead men hit the ground, stood on splintered bones, and ran at us.

  Brand took the first. He slashed it across the eyes with a knife, pivoted, and punched the point into the recarnate’s neck. The recarnate hadn’t even hit the ground before Brand spun to stab at another. I lifted my sabre and shot three firebolts at the circling draug, the greatest threat, hoping to keep them at bay. I took one in the eye at the same moment five carpenter nails stabbed through its jaw.

  We lost a man, taking a dagger in the cheek from a recarnate. I glimpsed teeth through a gaping tear as he went down. Addam positioned himself in front of the servants and engaged with his sword. One of his swings cut off half of a recarnate’s face. Black blood splattered me, cold to the touch.

  I shot at the draug. Another recarnate dropped when Max leapt forward and stabbed it in the neck. I ran, grabbed the back of his shirt, and hauled him into the center of the circle. I shot firebolts into the wounded recarnate’s head until it stopped moving.

  Another recarnate took advantage of Addam’s defense parry to slip by and charge us, claws extended. Geoffrey ducked behind the household staff, leaving an open path to me. My sabre shot went wide and scorched the second story. I sent willpower into my sabre, transmuting it into a punch-blade. Before I could use it, Brand spun past and took the creature down with a cut.

  “Sigils!” he barked at me.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Draug!” Ciaran shouted as the first real wave of draug attacks began. I dove forward and met the first riptide vampire. The rotting oils on its bloated cheeks gleamed with reflected light. I ducked one blow, and a riposte, and then a fake lunge put me in front of its twist. I stabbed it in the chest. My punch-blade hooked inside the creature’s brittle ribcage. Rather than pull it out, I dissolved it into flaming sparks. The thing died in a screaming fit.

  One of the draug had pulled a servant from our midst and was feeding on it. Another was locked in battle with Brand. As fast as Brand was, he was already bleeding from cuts on his face.

  “Reload the crossbows!” I shouted while jumping at the draug. Max tried to follow, so I spared a second to whirl back and shove him into the relative safety of the huddle. Geoffrey grabbed him and held him for me, which was nice, except for the fact that Geoffrey was a bloody coward probably just using Max as a shield. I moved in front of them.

  Addam passed me with his Bless-fire burning sword and killed the draug that had cornered Brand. The last of the recarnates were dead behind him.

  Still too many.

  I touched my thigh and sent willpower into the sigil there. The released Shield shimmered across my body. Before it sank into my skin, I pulled it into a wedge-shape. I lashed out with it, sending two draug flying to the edge of the patio. One of them lost precious seconds in a scramble back toward us. The second hit my defense barrier and began to smoke and burn.

  “Force them to the edge!” Brand yelled as our eyes met. He disengaged from the draug he was fighting, ducked, spun, caught the draug in the center of its gravity with a round kick. Brand kept at it, trying to force it into the defense perimeter.

  A draug leapt over our heads and landed in the center of our circle. Another raced up to Brand to outnumber him. A third jumped over Addam and flanked him.

  Too many.

>   Max had moved in front of the remaining servants—in front of Geoffrey—and was fighting the draug with a kitchen cleaver. Before I could race toward him, Ciaran caught the draug on the side of its head with a table leg, and the draug collapsed.

  Brand was down on one knee, blood all over his leg. I started running toward him. Then a draug came out of nowhere and nearly raked claws across my face. I lost balance on the slick tiles and stumbled. Ahead of me, Brand twisted out of the way of one attack, but took a horrible swipe against his neck. I reached for my mass sigil. The draug grabbed my collar and yanked me off-balance. My mass sigil scattered to the tiles, out of reach.

  “You waste our time,” the creature hissed through swollen, drowned lips. It had breath like seaweed. “You don’t have the sense to lie down and bleed.”

  I shouted in its face and smacked it with my palm. I called on my Aspect, but I’d drained too much of my willpower reserves. The creature opened its jagged, broken teeth in a soundless smile and tried to bite me. I punched it. Its head snapped back. It lifted a hand to swipe me with razor-sharp nails.

  Max ran up from behind and tried to block the creature’s swipe with his cleaver. The draug’s thrust skated up Max’s arm. All five nails went into Max’s neck.

  A pressurized burst of blood jetted out of the teenager. I stared numbly as Max’s body started to slide downward. I yelled and moved, and then the draug was flying off me, as Ciaran threw it toward the defense barrier.

  I stood there looking at Max’s unmoving body—looking at one of the last servants, dying on the ground—looking at Addam, throwing himself between Brand and a sword thrust—looking at Brand, unable to put weight on his damaged leg—looking at four more draug, fresh to the fight, scrambling onto the patio.

  There were no words that could describe what I felt. There are no words to describe the feeling when the battle tide has turned against you, and you are drowning in your own loss.

  From that space in my heart where desperation lived, my Aspect finally answered my need.