Finally he spotted the north-gate fortress, and checked his friends' readiness. Arik was on Fiora's other side, hood up and jaw clenched, with the silver sword strapped across his back. Fiora carried her own in the same way, and looked resolute.
“If we get separated, we meet on the White Road,” he said. “Move clear of the mob and wait somewhere visible. All right?”
“Do you think we need anything? Supplies?” said Fiora. “If there are no wagons going north, there might not be waystations.”
Cob frowned and squinted at the crowd. “Yendrah and the old folks brought no baggage, and I don't see much out there. We're suspicious enough wi' the swords; no need t' add to it. If there's no waystations, I can always forage in the swamp.”
Fiora grimaced. “I suppose. I'd still like to have something for emergencies.”
“Me too, but...”
“Yeah. Suspicious. All right, lead on!”
As they plunged into the crowd, Cob felt the urge to hold his breath. It was like being swept along through rapids: bodies jostling, voices chanting and cursing, and an insistent push that occasionally gave way to eddies and side-streets and alcoves from which merchants screeched. He was not the tallest here, not by far. Men and women with ogrish heritage forded the crowd, trailed by opportunists, while rugged shaggy folk with dun-brown skin drifted like buoys in the current as if too shy to use force.
“Darronwayn,” Fiora told him when he leaned down to ask her, and he finally knew how he could be mistaken for one.
And there were hands everywhere. He spent half his time steadying people he had jostled, or being grabbed by others, or pushed, or pulled—as if the great fingers of the crowd were trying to separate him from his friends. Fiora finally hooked an arm around his waist and clutched his belt, and he put an arm around her shoulders, while on her other side Arik looked white around the eyes. Cob sensed his anxiety, but couldn't do much beyond steer them into an alcove when he saw fur start to sprout from the skinchanger's jaw.
“You can't snap,” he told Arik in a low voice, blocking the crowd with his body. “It's not that far, and then we'll be on the road and can spread out.”
“Maybe we should put him in the middle,” said Fiora.
He opened his mouth to object, but Fiora had that look in her eye again, and Arik was breathing through his teeth, hands trembling and shoulders flexing weirdly beneath the white robe. His hair had already greyed back to its normal tone.
“Pike it,” Cob muttered, and nodded. He hated the idea of Fiora being on the outside edge, but it seemed like do that or have Arik shift in the middle of the street.
They formed up quickly and stepped out again, hands linked behind Arik's back and his arms across both their shoulders. It was hard to make progress with the three of them so closely abreast, but finally they rounded a corner to see the gate in the distance.
Then Cob's arm began to itch.
*****
Dasira, dressed like a pilgrim, paused at the mouth of an alley to sniff the air. She had caught Cob's scent from her spot on a rooftop by the eastern gate, where she'd lurked since arriving in Keceirnden last night, but hadn't been able to spot him. By the time she'd reached street-level, the scent had faded to a wisp and a memory.
It was frustrating, but also heartening. She'd been right to come here, right to wait, and their reunion was just a matter of time. Even if she couldn't locate him in this press, she knew where he was going. The long road would give her plenty of opportunity to catch up.
Still, she could have throttled him for not sensing her.
The scenting organs in the roof of her mouth pointed her toward the north gate. That was expected, and as she slid back into the crowd, she let her gaze prowl the sidelines. Priests and templars were out in force, preaching from balconies or policing the plazas, and though she'd yet to hear any uproar, she didn't think Cob could stay undetected forever. She almost wished he'd circumvented the city and gone straight into the swamp, even though that would have lost her.
She was just turning onto the wide northward boulevard when the blade at her hip gave a twitch. Her hand fell to it, but she dared not draw; Serindas' light would pick her out plainly among the crowd.
You'd better not be hungry again, she thought at it.
But the sensation beneath her palm was not the usual demanding throb. It was sharper, tenser: an alert.
A ripple in the crowd ahead made her look up to see a patrol emerging from a side-street. A mix of White Flames and mages, they were edged by glimmering wards that kept the civilians back—but what riveted her was the figure in the lead. It was armored like the rest but held a sword, black-on-black, like a handler might hold a hound on a leash.
Erevard.
He didn't pause, didn't even scan the crowd. Fronted by the dividing wards, he stalked straight down the street, the same way that Dasira had caught Cob's scent.
Her stomach sank. She'd known this would happen. As confusion swirled through the stalled crowd, she slipped between the pilgrims like an eel, hand hooked on Serindas' hilt as she angled after the patrol.
They might start the fight, but she would finish it.
*****
Catching a shift in the mood of the crowd, Cob tried to glance back, but it was like standing against an avalanche. The press of pilgrims pushed him onward, the sea of whiteness too muddled to make much out.
“Keep moving,” said Fiora, her fingers vise-tight on his. Between them, Arik staggered drunkenly, lips pulled back from wolfish teeth.
He could feel the skinchanger's phobia like a tick, swelling alongside the ambient unease. There was a sort of communal spirit in the crowd, individuality squelched by close proximity and common destination, and any shift in emotion propagated swiftly through the mass. Right now, it felt like a low-grade panic, but he couldn't tell why—
The itch in his arm flared again, and he remembered what it meant.
“He's here. We have t'go,” he muttered, but when he looked forward, there were no openings. Several streets converged before the fortress, packing the pilgrims shoulder-to-shoulder as they awaited their turn at the gate. Gold Army uniforms stood out from the white mass, several handfuls of them spanning the bottleneck to check papers, while more lurked in the shadows of the through-tunnel beyond. On the parapet above stood dozens of archers in Sapphire uniforms, watching the crowd with keen eyes.
Forcing a path through would defeat the purpose of their disguises. But as the sting in his arm grew, Cob knew he was about to be unmasked anyway.
“You two go on ahead,” he hissed, pulling his hand free of Fiora's.
She made a sound somewhere between alarm and anger and tried to grab after him, but he slipped Arik's arm and left the skinchanger's whole weight on her shoulders. With their eyes boring into his back, he used the tectonic lever as a staff to divide the pilgrims behind him, who glared or cursed but gave way to his bullying.
Soon he reached the edge, where the buildings formed high banks above this human river, their ground-floor windows and doors shuttered tight and business relegated to the balconies above. There were no recesses big enough to provide him shelter, so he pressed his spine to the bricks and tried to read the crowd. The line on his arm hurt worse with each moment.
There—people swaying aside from a cross-current, stumbling, their fear radiating out through those they bumped. White armor, white helms turned directly toward him, and at the lead like a ship's prow, a dead-black sword...
He was all but pinned to the bricks. There had to be an alley nearby but he couldn't see it, and as the crowd surged sideways toward him to escape that sword, he felt himself squeezed by its fear. Pain lanced through his arm, making his fingers spasm, but worse were the memories. In Riftward, Morshoc had panicked a crowd less than a tenth this size and sown terrible destruction.
He opened his mouth to call for a halt—a different venue—perhaps even to surrender. They couldn't do this here. But the crowd peeled back from Erevard's path, and he
was charging.
Cob readied the lever and bared his teeth.
*****
The stag's-bellow of the Guardian's rage rang out over the crowd-noise like a trumpet. Fiora winced, knowing they'd lost their chance to go unnoticed.
At her side, Arik straightened, his hair puffing up under his hood. His nails, clutching her shoulder, became claws at the instant the Guardian's shade-like aura hit them.
“Don't,” she hissed. They still had more than a block to go before the gate.
The skinchanger's jaw clenched. She sympathized; it was equally difficult not to draw her sword and wade into battle. But the press of people toward the gate had intensified, and it was only Arik's sheltering bulk that kept her from being swept away or squashed.
They had to do as Cob said, and trust that he could—
A tangle of desert brush burst diagonally out through the crowd at the center of the Guardian aura, thorny branches expanding in instants far past their natural reach. Just as swiftly, they fell away in blackening swaths. Fiora glimpsed antlers and the lash of a black blade, and her heart lurched into her throat.
That blade cut right into him at Akarridi. The Guardian can't stop it.
I have to do something. Brigydde, if I'm yours now—
No.
I'm not done with my sword.
“Brea Eranine, hear me,” she rasped.
And felt an answer.
*****
Erevard's first slash nearly took Cob in the neck, but the bellow set him back on his heels and the thorns battered him away. It was just a moment's reprieve, but it gave Cob a chance to toe his clogs off.
The street felt wrong under his feet, but he had no time to contemplate it. The black sword's rot consumed the thorns faster than they could grow, and he had little enough to work with—just the material he'd used to disguise the lever. He forced out another bank of brush but a single slash was all it took for the rot to grip them, and then Erevard was at him again.
He bellowed once more, feeling the Guardian's mantle settle solidly on his shoulders. Never before had he accessed the full weight of it; he'd seen what it did to Darilan and thus avoided using it around Dasira. But under that faceless white armor, Erevard was an abomination too—and by the way he staggered, he felt it.
Cob thrust the chisel-end of the lever into his opponent's side with all his strength.
White lightning flared beneath the center of the blow, scattering away through the armor like a pulse through veins. Erevard took another step back, but just to steady himself—nothing commensurate to the force Cob had just exerted—then sliced in again with the black sword, driving Cob into retreat.
What in pike's name is that stuff? Cob thought. Can't sense it, or sense through it. Can't affect it. And it changes...
He saw the bright cocoon wrapping around Enkhaelen, the white tendrils extending down toward him from the sky of his flying dream, the unraveling of the Palace floor.
Shit.
And there were others pushing through the crowd beyond him, in the same white armor and in white robes and Gold and Sapphire gear...
As Erevard took another step forward, Cob slammed the chisel-end of the staff into the pavings. They split like chalk, giving him contact with the packed earth beneath.
A twist, and the slates beneath Erevard collapsed like a sinkhole, but he was already leaping, white boots leaving no sense of impact on the closer stones. Cob skittered sideways and popped the next paving stone up between them fast enough to catch the advancing man in the shins, and as Erevard rocked forward, flailing for balance, he jabbed again—this time at the blank faceplate.
The chisel-end dug a bright furrow across it that closed like water. At the same moment, the black sword came up and gouged a chunk from the lever.
Cob felt the rot take hold, and gritted his teeth. Given a free moment, he knew he could shake the damaged part off, but he didn't have a moment; Erevard advanced as inexorably as ever, forcing him to circle away from the brick wall lest he be trapped in a corner, the rest of the Imperial soldiers positioning themselves around him.
And now, suddenly, he became aware of the pilgrims. The stampede he'd feared had not manifested; while many had withdrawn, some were now moving in concert with the Imperials, their voices raised in shouts of monster and Dark thing and evil spirit. A rock bounced off his shoulder—and then suddenly there were many rocks, and half-bricks, cups, pieces of food.
It wasn't the first time a crowd had turned on him, pelted him, but when he looked around, he could barely see faces. All was white. A voice began a killing chant that suddenly every mouth echoed, and a scent swelled in the air: poisoned honey, like Lady Annia's control.
The crowd had a spirit, yes, but that spirit was the Light. And it had found him.
He lashed out at them all, dragging the lever along a wall to pull bricks free of it and spray them at everyone close. Several pattered against Erevard without impact, the man approaching as fast as Cob retreated, and there were more White Flames at Cob's back now, which he thrust away momentarily with uprucked paving stones. For all their hostility, none seemed too keen on getting close.
As glimmering webs spun out from the mages' hands, he realized why. They were still trying to capture him.
Mostly. Another slice from Erevard nearly took off his nose; he dared not think what would happen if the black blade cut him deep. There was a stiff conservation to the man's movements that declared his struggle: vengeance versus obedience, with the chance for an 'accidental' touch.
The bellow rose to his lips again, but he bit it back because something else was trying to bubble up with it. The black water. It made the back of his throat briny and the corners of his eyes wet, and the voices—
—they deserve it—
—your enemies, traitors—
—all the Light-loving fools—
—down with us—
—going to their deaths anyway—
—bring them, bring them—
—shouldn't matter to you now, you're not one—
—down with us...
He couldn't shake them. The ground felt wrong because it was water, the paving stones and wagons and buildings and people and beasts and enemies all floating on them like little boats, blissfully unaware, and all he had to do was stir up another wave—another dredging wall of darkness to clear out all this white...
Lassos of energy hooked him, only to snap and scatter off his armor. The sparks fell sizzling into the black, and he was—
no, no
—raising the lever, commanding the tide to rise—
stop it, not again
—and there was—
Fiora, suddenly blurring into visibility behind the white shape of Erevard, her Trifold sword chopping straight into his neck only to rebound in a flare of white light. He glimpsed her startled face, saw Erevard sway then start to turn. The black blade swept across, and he couldn't move fast enough, couldn't escape the drag of the dark water—
Another robed lunatic crashed into Erevard, sending him sideways into the ground with a full-body tackle. A wolf's maw protruded from the hood to clamp on his neck and force him face-down, huge paws raking at his sides. He still held the black sword somehow, but the angle had buried it in the street, and he struggled with it as the paving stones disintegrated under him.
Cob saw Fiora straighten, eyes round, face blanched under her hood. Her sword had been cut in half. The crowd noticed her; someone shoved her forward and she nearly fell into the growing pit—and then there were lines of light reaching for both of them, and the black sword sheared up through a skinchanger limb to the accompaniment of Arik's howled agony.
The dark water tried to take him again, but he gritted his teeth against it and stabbed the lever into a paving stone. It stuck, and as Arik tumbled off of Erevard, Cob raised it and slammed it full-force into the abomination's rising helm. Light flickered through the armor so he did it again, and again, and again while energy-ropes sheeted off
of him like rain and spears nipped at his back. Still Erevard tried to get up, so finally Cob slammed the paving down across the black sword itself, hammering it flat to the street.
Swords cracked against his stony shell. Electricity drilled, thin needles of it penetrating where damage had been done. From the corner of his eye he saw other White Flames stepping in, strands of weblike substance rising from their armor to reach for him, and he knew what would happen if they grabbed him. He hadn't been able to feel them in the desert, couldn't fight them, couldn't run.
I didn't even reach the White Road.
Road...
Cursing himself for not thinking of this, but also for what it would do, he turned the lever point-down and slammed it into the pavings. Beneath the packed earth and stone, the pipes, the foundations, the ponderous weight of the fortress, he felt a network of weird thready absences and grimaced, unsurprised.
He closed his eyes, extended his reach in a narrow careful band, then heaved.
The street shuddered before him, then liquefied. This close to the swamp, the ground was already well-saturated, and the absence-threads had cracked the bedrock below; it was easy to shake and shear its fragile structure apart.
Difficult to stop.
There would be black water at the bottom, if he let it come. But he made himself resist, and struggled against the desire to topple buildings and crush his foes, to bring down the entire gate and its fortress. Screams rose in cacophony as the pavings subsided, and he felt it like a pull on his shoulders: the compounding stress of controlling the damage. Keeping it just enough to suck down the soldiers, not enough to kill, to ruin.
Other weights still hung on him, insensate yet intrusive. The white-armors. A section of his back went numb, and then his upper left arm. His armor couldn't react to what it couldn't feel, and as the numbness spread, he felt it echoed in the ground below his feet—the absences tunneling toward him, ready to bind.
He could only deal with so much at once. Will clenched around the shaking street, he opened his eyes to check his options—
The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) Page 78
