Ally: A Dark Fantasy Novel (On the Bones of Gods Book 3)

by K. Eason

  And he must not think of that. He focused instead on here and now. On the bleached silver sky. On the ink-and-blood clouds. There were two wurms now, to his noidghe’s sight. One was flesh and bone and mortal, Sian the avatar. The second, in the ghost roads, was the greater blackness of Tal’Shik herself, hung behind her dragon-avatar by skeins of lightning and violet fire.

  Those connective filaments were stretching. Growing fine and fragile as cobwebs, as the adepts worked their conjuring. One strand snapped as he watched, and the wurm wobbled midflight.

  “It is time. Now.”

  Dekklis spun and shouted orders. “Scouts! Down!”

  Illhari discipline meant they all dropped, so that none except Veiko was still standing when conjured blue-white lightning arced up from the knot of adepts on the river and struck the wurm. The shock rippled through air and earth, shaking trees and heaving the very ground up underfoot. A hundred-hundred spirits screaming protest, dying to fuel that strike, but the bolt tore Tal’Shik free of the avatar’s body.

  The wurm pinwheeled, trailing smoke, churning with charred wings for a grip on the storm. That was her magic, that storm, a wurm’s natural witchery, independent of Tal’Shik. The gusts would carry her away from the field, to some high safety where she could heal. Lightning zagged out of the clouds, striking at the ground forces, random flailing as the avatar marshalled her storm.

  Then Veiko felt the adepts strike a second time, a conjuring that stopped the storm, sudden hollow stillness rolling out from the river, killing the wind, leaving straight rain and heavy, still air. The wurm thrashed her ruined wings, clawing at the nothing. Then she fell, smashing into the heaving mess of battle halfway up the slope, exactly where Belaery had said she would fall. A sheet of fire rippled away from that impact, flash and scorch before the rain beat it out.

  A noidghe did not fear the shards of shattered trees, or the very earth’s rebellion. A noidghe could ignore the blood running down his leg, too. He sang himself past that pain, anchored himself in sky and earth. His feet became mountains. His arms, the whole arc of sky. The arrow on his bow was nature’s own inevitability: the wheel of seasons, the rise and fall of the sun behind the horizon.

  Veiko loosed that arrow down the slope as the wurm churned and clawed herself upright. Sang her name as a summons so that she turned toward him, ember eyes wide as cauldrons. She was all shadow, all chaos, meant to unbind sky from earth, wind from water, and unravel all the world. His arrow became lightning, became a star burning across a night sky. Beyond a man’s control, or a noidghe’s, but he could guide it. Steer it. Put it squarely into her right eye.

  Then it was only an arrow again, mere wood and feather fletching. Then the avatar was just a woman-turned-wurm, thrashing mad and half-blind amid broken trees and broken bodies and a guttering fire. Then the sky turned grey and the worlds snapped apart and now, only now, did his knee buckle. Veiko left skin on the rocks, palm and elbow. Dropped the bow. The clatter was lost in Dekklis’s shout—

  “Archers! Ready! Fire!”

  —and the hiss of bowstrings. There was a new rain falling now, fletched in Illhari red and black, tipped with black Illhari steel.

  Veiko dragged his knees under him. Laced his fingers across the wound in his thigh. The bleeding had stopped. Only ghost aches now, an old scar’s protest at the exertion. He had promised to kill a wurm for his partner, and arrows would not find her vitals. Sharp metal into soft flesh. That simple.

  He settled the axe in his hand and went down the hill to keep his promise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Snow landed badly, hands and knees, on the blasted bank of the black river. Ghost roads–Illharek loomed behind her, shadow and dust and rock. The sky sagged under its own weight, storm and lightning dipping down until it looked close enough to touch. Everything in the ghost roads wore a violet cast, a dimness. Probably something to do with the bruise-and-blood sky and the dragon cutting across it, spewing violet lightning and thrashing its wings. She got up slowly. Fuck and damn, her leg hurt. The poison crawled under her skin, slow spreading burn from the wounding point.

  Lightning flashed overhead: blue and white, adept-lightning. The dragon howled, and the ground shook a little. Snow thought she could see two dragons now, one smaller and sleeker and real, which just meant flesh. On this side, in the ghost roads, the dragon

  Tal’Shik

  was bigger, blacker, blurred on the edges, bound to the flesh-dragon with godmagic filaments, violet and black and glowing. The adepts threw another bolt of lightning, and one of those filaments snapped.

  All right. Bel’s ritual was working. Time for her part of it.

  Snow heaved herself to her feet. Now she had to finish the sacrifice that Ehkla had started. Cut the glyphs into the air, not her flesh. Veiko had done this once. Cut the marks in the air as if it were flesh, because that’s what Snow’d told him to do.

  The magic’s in making the mark, not the mark itself.

  Which was true: Tal’Shik had come for him.

  Well, now Tal’Shik was right there, no great distance to travel. But she was also busy. Distracted. Wearing an avatar’s skin.

  Snow touched the wound on her leg. Slick and wet and yeah, that was blood. Dangerous, in the ghost roads, to use blood as ink. Blood was a noidghe currency; but it was also a godmagic currency. Blood sacrifice, to gain a god’s favor. Or to make an avatar.

  Or get a god to leave an avatar.

  Snow hadn’t told Veiko about this part. Belaery knew. But Bel wouldn’t, hadn’t, told anyone: had agreed it was dangerous, likely stupid, certain to succeed. Or as certain as anything was when you mixed in godmagic.

  Snow drew a breath, held it. Dipped her finger again in the blood and cut the summoning sigils briskly, neatly in the air. One stroke, two, three: the sigils remained, hanging. Veiko had said his looked like fire. Hers looked—well. Like blood. Dripping like the air itself was wounded. Each stroke hurt, like a knife in her flesh. Please

  who? The God can’t hear

  Veiko didn’t feel it. Didn’t know what she was doing. He needed all his wits. She just needed to finish this—

  And there. She let her hand drop, just as another adept-bolt jagged skyward. She heard the pop and sizzle as it struck, overlapped by the avatar’s shriek, and looked up just as the two dragons split. It was like watching a shadow tear itself loose from its body. Black ink and violet smoke drawing to the edges of the avatar, and then out.

  Now there was one dragon in the ghost roads. Just Tal’Shik, falling out of the sky to crash into the riverbank, into, because the ground cratered around her. Then the world got suddenly, violently quiet, all the sound sucked away. Tal’Shik’s dragon-shape bled and shrank and curdled in on itself. Just the woman now, at least mostly, climbing to her feet. Her edges slipped and blurred as she stood up. There was beauty in that body, but the face—fuck and damn. Marred and marked on one side, the features run together like wax. Veiko’s scar, a noidghe’s wounding.

  Veiko hadn’t been much of a noidghe when he’d done that. Remember that.

  Tal’Shik turned her head and looked. Her single eye, blood-vivid, snagged on Snow’s face.

  And then, clear and sharp as broken glass: “Snowdenaelikk!” like a greeting.

  Or a summons.

  Snow’s heart climbed into the back of her throat. That couldn’t be good.

  Everyone in Illharek belongs to her, Snow. She is Illharek.

  All right, so Bel might’ve been right about that. Tell her when she got back, Bel could be smug, time to go—

  Except, when Snow spun on her good leg and kicked off the bad one, there was no rift waiting for her. No raft. No adepts. Just a twisting ribbon dangling over the black river.

  So much for Belaery’s theory. So much for I know what I’m doing and Trust me, Snow.

  Snow spun back toward Tal’Shik and ripped her seax out of its sheath. Set her back to ghost-Illharek and the river. Rather run, Laughing God, she’d rather. It�
�s just there was nowhere to go, with the rift closed. And her leg wouldn’t let her. And Tal’Shik was here, coming, so close Snow smelled the rot, smelled the—fuck and damn, the nothing of her, the emptiness, plucking and dragging and trying to fill itself.

  But oh fuck and damn, look at that: there was blood pooling around Tal’Shik’s feet like shadows, running in rivulets toward the black river, and from there—probably, hopefully—to the raft, to Belaery, to the conjurors. The ritual was working. And Tal’Shik seemed unaware of it: all her attention focused on Snow.

  So keep that attention, yeah, and wait, and hope Bel could reopen the rift. Or that the ritual sucked Tal’Shik dry. Or that Snow was a better noidghe than either she or Veiko thought.

  Snow swung the tip of the seax up and set the metal between herself and Tal’Shik. Sad little barrier, yeah, but better than nothing.

  “You stop there. Tal’Shik,” with all the force of a

  but you’re not really a

  noidghe’s naming.

  Tal’Shik stopped beside the bleeding glyphs. Glanced at them. “I smell Veiko on you. Is this his idea? Is he here? Snowdenaelikk.”

  Snow felt the syllables plucking at her. Felt the power in the naming, like hooks just under her skin. But only just. She bared her teeth and stayed quiet, for once, because Tal’Shik wanted otherwise.

  And ask why that was, why Tal’Shik was bothering with a conversation, why she hadn’t killed her yet. And guess: Belaery’s spell, and the shadow-river bleeding out of Tal’Shik, which Tal’Shik was acting like she didn’t see, didn’t notice. And maybe she didn’t. But it was making her weaker.

  “And I smell the Laughing God. Are you a gift? An apology? Snowdenaelikk,” a third time, and this time it hurt.

  “No,” Snow said, because she had to say something. “To both those things.”

  “Then why are you here?” Tal’Shik composed a smile that was beautiful for the heartbeat her face stayed whole. Then it became a mockery of itself, one lovely thing amid the wreckage.

  Snow dragged air into her lungs. Pushed it out again. “Because you’ve still got one eye.”

  She jabbed at Tal’Shik. Not much of a strike, more of a feint. But enough that Tal’Shik started a little and slid back into her own features. A splash of disbelief, and then rage, like a flood spilling over.

  Tal’Shik was Illharek, yeah, and Illharek’s best and worst trait was pride.

  Closely followed by temper.

  Snow angled to present the narrowest possible target. It was no worse than fighting in the Suburban alleys. Same tight quarters. Same nowhere to run. Not so bad—

  tell yourself that

  —and then Tal’Shik’s arm snapped straight and kept snapping. Bonecrack and then it was stretching, elastic muscle and skin pulled translucent. There were swinging talons where fingers had been, coming head-height, face-height. Coming for her eyes, both of them.

  Snow tried to give ground, felt her leg buckle. Closed her eyes, turned her head—

  Please, Laughing God, I mean it, I need you

  —and raised a parry, swatting blind.

  The seax bit into something. Not bone. Not meat. But something enough like both that the blade bucked in her hand. Snow muscled it steady, terror-fed strength that strained all the bone and sinew in her wrist. Then the metal tore through. Half of Tal’Shik’s hand fell onto the rocks and sand between them.

  Crashing silence, for a half-dozen heartbeats, while Snow and Tal’Shik both gaped at the half-severed hand. While the godblood on Snow’s blade turned white, then grey. The black steel smoked into dust, leaving three fingerlengths of jagged metal on the hilt.

  Then Tal’Shik shrieked, and the sky ripped and bled. Tal’Shik bled too: a geyser of red, too much for the wound, that hit the ground and ran for the river, joining the shadows of Bel’s conjuring. Drawing off more of her strength.

  Tal’Shik staggered. Dimmed and stumbled. Scooped up the severed half of her hand and cradled like a child. “You are a noidghe?”

  Snow grinned over the ruin of her seax. “Yeah. And first blood goes to me.”

  * * *

  All the songs and ballads said that dragons spat fire. Belaery had called it all toadshit, but Belaery had a habit of basing her authority on what some several-hundred-years-dead scholar had written.

  The bestiary hadn’t said what dragons did spit, which was something thicker, like phlegm. Something that raised blisters on skin and smoked where it touched leather or metal and made Dek’s eyes water. She was glad for the rain washing the foulness off as fast as it landed, even if the storm meant the archers couldn’t see to shoot at any useful range. She was happy to wade in and risk tail-spikes and teeth if it meant the motherless avatar died in the mud.

  Dekklis swung a cut at the dragon’s flank. Halfway to the hilt into the area between hip and haunches, where there should have been something vital and fragile underneath. She held on to the blade as the dragon jerked forward. Braced both feet in the mud and pulled hard against suction, damn near lost her grip when the dragon whipped that long head around, open-mouthed, and spat definitely-not-fire in Dek’s general direction.

  Add that to Belaery’s motherless bestiary: whatever burned in dragon-spit didn’t burn actual dragonhide.

  The dragon was big, not in bulk but in reach. Long neck. Longer tail. And even if the bones stabbed up white out of one ruined wing, well, that wing and its partner were still weapons in themselves, and the dragon knew how to use them. Belaery had guessed there might not be much woman left in that spear-shaped skull, that wearing the dragon’s skin might have stripped wit and reason away. Bel had meant that as comfort and consolation: that Dekklis would face an animal, not a person.

  A wounded, frightened, angry animal. No comfort at all.

  But it was Veiko who had offered the most useful bit of advice: wherever that head went, the tail followed. Dekklis was already moving. Ripped her blade loose, backstepped and angled the sword up to deflect a whip made of muscle with a barb on the end easily the length of her forearm. She had lost four scouts to the tail-sweep already. Two outright impaled, another laid open, another smashed by the strike. Hell if she’d be the fifth.

  The dragon snapped and thrashed, unable to see Dekklis tucked in on her blind side. The tail-spike carved the rain aside and jabbed where the dragon thought Dekklis must be. The tip, dark with Illhari blood, ripped past her, fast and close enough she felt the wind of it.

  Then Veiko came at the dragon from her sighted side, and she went right for him. Spat venom, lunged and snapped. He twisted away from her teeth. Her spit spattered across his chest and shoulder and arm. Dekklis heard the sizzle as it chewed into the leather breastplate before the rain sluiced it away. Must’ve hit him, too, some exposed skin, but he wasn’t yelling about it. He sidestepped the thrusting head. Raised his axe to intercept the tail.

  Dekklis dipped her head and got ready to charge back in, to strike from her blind side, end this—

  Then Istel was beside her, just like old times. Except this Istel was pulling her away from this battle, dragging her down the slope toward to the river with more strength than Istel should own. “Problem, Dek. Come on.”

  “The hell! Veiko needs me.”

  Furious barking from upslope. A svartjagr’s keening. And a song, somehow, a melody she couldn’t hear chasing under her skin. It was armor. Shield. Heresy and skraeling witchery and:

  “Veiko can handle the toadfucking dragon. Veiko has to.” Fires in Istel’s eye sockets, licking up and heedless of rain. “Snowdenaelikk needs you now, Szanys Dekklis. Illharek needs you.”

  Illharek had the legion and the Senate. But Dekklis didn’t have so many friends that she could lose any more.

  “Fine,” she said, and ran with the Laughing God down the slope toward the river.

  * * *

  Veiko caught the wurm’s tail on the edge of his axe, high on a coil. The blade bit deeply anyway, but there was too much muscled length between his axe an
d the deadly spike. He had time to twist aside as the spike came around, scything through the rain and stabbing empty air.

  Pity he could not get the axe around in time to hack it off. That would even the fight. The scouts were trying, ancestors knew; they had traded up from arrows to swords and javelins for close range. But they could do little damage. Wurms were creatures of stone and shadow, like the Dvergiri. Made of the same stuff as Illhari black steel.

  He might have told them that. Would have, but Snow counseled otherwise. If they think they can’t help, they won’t. And hell if you fight that thing alone. You want her dead, you need the distraction they can give you.

  There was wisdom in that advice, if not honor; a warrior might care for the latter, but a noidghe did not. He had bargained for the knowledge to kill a wurm, and he had to stay alive to use it.

  So he fought, silent and savage, braids lashing like a dozen tails. Leaped to the dragon’s shoulder, kicked off again, struck down. Missed the soft canyon behind her jaw, caught the bone ridge instead, threw himself into the mud and rolled as she spat where he’d been.

  It would take a heartbeat to find his footing again, a dangerous, vulnerable heartbeat. Briel bought it for him. Arrowed out of the sky and lashed her own tail-spike across the wurm’s nose. It might do no damage, but it hurt. The wurm reared up and howled and snapped at Briel’s retreating insolence.

  Baring her chest. Baring her belly. The scales were no softer there, but there were deep grooves between them, perfect for the wedge-blade of an axe. Veiko surged to his feet. He swung, and struck one of those grooves. Felt the axe bite and stick. He wrenched it loose again as the wurm forgot her rage at Briel. She rolled her head, trying to see with her one good eye the source of her pain.

  One of the legion scouts ran past, the hard-eyed woman, Salis. She had her javelin clenched in one hand. Stopped and slid a little in the mud. Then cocked her arm and threw, straight and powerful. Veiko had expected a throw aimed at chest and belly, the obvious targets, but Salis’s javelin caught the dragon in the left leg, from the soft inside. Pierced the skin between bone and tendon and drove deep into the hillside behind.