“It’s already done,” Ilumat said. “No need to fret.”
“Lord Ilumat suggested sending a party of our best horsemarshals to the city to begin a preliminary search. A dozen just rode out. Perhaps you saw them.”
Draken’s jaw clenched. “I saw. What do they hope to achieve, exactly, my lord, with their swords and uniforms? Announce the search to her captors with banners and criers?”
“They will be subtle.”
Draken shook his head. “The enemy will be watching for threat. We walk a precipice with her future and you send strangers …”
Elena flinched. Draken steeled himself against mirroring it. He had been cruel to her before, to spur action. Truls moved closer to her. She reached up and rubbed her arm, maybe feeling his ethereal chill.
Draken followed the ghost-Mance’s progress rather than looking directly at Elena. “Prince Galbrait and I should go. He knows his people and their ways.”
“Your people, too,” Ilumat said.
Draken ignored that. “The Prince has led us here. Let him lead me the rest of the way to our daughter.”
“The Queen well knows your reliance on this foreign prince, which is why she is taking my advice on finding the child,” Ilumat said. “I am her Night Lord. Not you.”
you go go you must attend her … Truls seemed to flicker, edges fluttering. Maybe it was the damned lantern.
Draken tore his attention from the insistent ghost. “I am Sikyra’s father.”
“Blood only. You’ve no rights to her,” Elena said.
It was a moment before Draken could speak, before his voice sounded at all normal. “If they go into the city asking pointed questions the Moonlings will be alerted to our presence and intention.”
“They’ve only gone to see if the ice has thawed.”
Draken snorted. “A dozen horsemarshals riding into Algir on an errand better served by a lowrank servii will notify anyone paying attention—”
“The city is reportedly held by Monoea but they aren’t guarding the wall. They also will approach the baron to ascertain the truth of the situation, and to seek the Princess.” Elena delivered this with grudging confession.
“This is a mad plan. You should have let me go,” Draken said.
“We can do far more than you alone,” Ilumat said. His back was rigid, his hand solicitously resting on Elena’s lower back.
Anger surged. “I’m not known in Algir. I’ve no rank, no connection to the royal houses, as Queen Elena has made abundantly clear. I’m—”
“A vigilante,” Elena said. “You’re no better than the enemy. The last thing we need. You got us here. Now back off and let us do our work in finding my daughter.”
“I alone realize the true threat. You two are blind—deliberately, I assume—”
Elena’s voice shook with fury. “Leave us before I bind you in the center of camp for a whipping.”
“You’re only threatening me because you know I’m right.”
“Get out!”
Even Truls startled.
A steady hand on his back. Tyrolean.
Calming whispers in his mind. Bruche.
Draken complied without another word. He strode back for his tent. Tyrolean hurried along at his side. “What are we doing now?”
“I’m going to get my daughter.”
“Do you think the Queen will allow you to leave?”
“She can’t stop me and she knows it.” If she whipped him in the middle of camp, his healing would send the tents tumbling and startle their horses into fleeing.
“But how do you know?” Tyrolean ducked under the tent flap with him and took a knee under its low roof as Draken bent for the rest of his knives and a pack. The oiled canvas blocked enough daylight that Draken could pull down his mask.
“She would have arrested me if she means to stop me,” Draken said, grabbing up his last blade and strapping it on his wrist. He didn’t have time to work out why she was only threatening him, not stopping him. “Fetch Galbrait, will you?”
“And if his guards challenge me?”
“Pull rank. Kill them. I don’t care. We need him.”
Tyrolean held a moment, but, a muscle twitching in his cheek, he ducked out.
You take advantage of him, Bruche said.
He accepts the consequences of friendship with me.
And Galbrait?
He may know where the meeting is to take place, and when. I think he hasn’t been honest with me, not entirely.
What will you do with him at the end? When you find Sikyra.
Draken closed his eyes. Felt himself sway. I’ll keep my word to not kill him, and nothing more.
By extraordinarily good timing, a couple of outriders returned to report to the Queen and Ilumat. That would keep them occupied while he rode out. In short order, Tyrolean returned with Galbrait, who walked unbound. He must have been kept in his tent since they had arrived in the dark of night because he turned his head to stare at the leftover pieces of wall jutting up into the evening fog.
“Aye. That’s where we’re going.” Draken started walking for the horses. Tyrolean and Galbrait followed.
“You think they’re there already?”
“Sikyra and Setia, aye. The Ashen, I’ve no idea. But Ilumat has sent in troops. I don’t trust they’ll pave a safe path to my daughter.” He found Bumpus milling among the horses in a makeshift rope pen and slipped his bridle over his ears. The tora pony stretched his mouth wide in a grimace as the bit settled between his teeth, then tried to close them on Draken’s shoulder. Draken thumped his nose and led him to the others.
“You can ride him,” he said to Galbrait. “His saddle is just there. Mind his teeth.”
He’d be damned if he was riding a tora pony into Algir to fetch back his daughter. By the time the first moon paled the night horizon, they were half the distance to Algir and Draken had long since removed his mask. Truls flitted alongside the party until he balked and turned his blank, soulless face toward them. Draken’s blood lit with alarm.
The familiar reek of spilled blood and released bowels drifted on the air ahead. Crimson-stained green uniforms, horses tumbled, bodies sprawled. Over the massacre loomed a black shadow, stark against his darksight.
Bruche chilled, rising to the threat.
“What is it?” Galbrait, steady on the pony. He leaned forward to peer into the darkness but Draken got the idea he couldn’t see anything.
Draken swallowed, his chest hollow with fear. His horse snorted and stamped, tried to turn back, away, escape. The scent of blood spooked her, perhaps. He circled her and brought her back around to face the carnage, a mindless motion that served to calm them both. His hand was already on his sword hilt.
Truls had disappeared, which confirmed what the black shadow was. “Show yourself, Korde.”
“Here?” Galbrait drew up next to him. His hand moved to his side but they’d not given him a weapon. Not that ordinary weapons, maybe any weapon, could kill the god of the dead.
“Can’t you feel him?”
The Prince shook his head, even as the rest of the light seemed to fade from the world. Then a flash, which made Draken drop his chin. Galbrait gasped and Tyrolean uttered a rare curse.
Draken forced his burning eyes up, watched through streaming tears as a flicker of shadow against the dim night took on the shape of a looming figure topped with leering, gruesome, asymmetrical visage. The glow was the sickening green of mossy sludge. The edges were fluid, shifting quick as river rapids. More figures took shape within the glow. Dozens, shifting and jostling for position, looking as stormy as Osias’s angry eyes ever did. The glow raised up in the air at least the height of a half-dozen men.
Bumpus backed several steps, snorting and snuffling. Draken’s blood chilled. Galbrait slowed the pony, still looking all around for threat.
He can’t see Korde.
And Bruche only saw it through Draken. He grimaced and drew his sword. It gleamed like a soft-spoken threat.
Only Khellian rose enough to see his soldier fight below, and the Warrior’s Eye was a sliver.
“Tyrolean.”
“My lord?”
“Hold well back. If I fall, warn Elena.”
“You can’t be killed.”
Draken looked down at his hand where thin white scars crossed his palm. His own sword had made wounds that wouldn’t heal. One of his last secrets, one Korde undoubtedly knew. The glow off the blade stung his uncovered eyes. And while Seaborn had killed two gods and he had showed bravado in talking about facing down Korde, he walked into this now with nothing but weaknesses and uncertainty.
No words now, just a chill wind shifting grasses and bones, hissing like Frost through iced sails. It whipped his cloak and caught at the flat of his sword. He reached up and unclasped the cloak, let it fall on his horse’s rump. Then he slung a leg over and slid to the ground. His feet stung from the cold, his knee gave way, and he gasped, gripping his thigh in an effort to keep himself upright. The horse skittered away and Draken had to throw a foot back to not land on his arse. By the time he looked up for Korde, the greenish shadow was so near the stink of death sank into his bones and his blood froze in his veins. Bruche lifted Seaborn but it felt ineffectual and small. The fluctuating form of the god resonated through Draken’s darksight and made his stomach turn. With it came stinking winds. He retched, falling to his hands and knees in the dirt.
Of course the god of death would know how to turn magical gifts of life against him.
That wasn’t his only trick. Korde’s wind tugged at this clothes and swept around the scene of death. Bones trembled along the ground, scattering and reforming. Rising. Wrong shapes … but still they rose lopsided and clanking. Fingerbones gripped hilts of the weapons they’d wielded in life.
What binds them?
Necromancy. The bastard god has made a dead army.
A dead army, aye, but one he’d have to fight through. In perfect tandem he and Bruche lurched forward, thrusting with body and blade. The bones tore his skin and the fog of necromancy bruised Bruche, but slashes of Akhen Khel scattered them. Bruche’s control fluctuated. A thigh bone flew through Korde. The god stilled as if wounded. Draken was under no illusions what they’d do to himself. He already bled from a half dozen cuts; the ground already trembled with his healing. He feared the bones, should they make a mortal wound, could tear a hole in Bruche’s consciousness.
Agony stabbed through him at the thought. Full of battle-rage and terror, he hadn’t realized how badly the bones injured him. Percussions of healing exploded from him. He squinted in surprise as violent waves rippled through the bones and the very air. They shattered to bits, and the bits shattered to harmless dust, floating out in concentric waves.
There go your only weapons.
He drew his head up to glare at the god. He growled and rushed forward. Nothing held him now, no bones or grave dust or fear. He slashed at Korde, who didn’t seem to move, didn’t seem to notice Draken was suddenly in front of him until his sword sliced his leg in two.
Except it didn’t. It made Korde’s form waver slightly, as if the breeze had caught at his smoky form. Draken swung again and again. None of the extra figures, the spirits that made up the god, fell. They just kept shifting. Korde reached down with a great hand and pierced Draken. Squeezed. Pulled. He shuddered and gasped, trying to grab and cut at the god’s arm. His hand and sword went right through it.
His darksight squeezed like his heart, the world narrowing to a grey pinprick. He made noise—he must have, a guttural cry devoid of enough breath to make it carry far—
He could feel Bruche separating from inside his soul. Korde was tearing him away and Bruche could do nothing but scream. Someone shook the ground. Fresh agony pierced him. Gods, his body was trying to heal itself even as Korde ripped his heart from his chest—Bruche? Bruche!
The healing seemed to reject the god’s attack. The hand withdrew from his body. But an icy grip on the back of his neck, ethereal fingers winding round his throat. “No!” he husked out the word and lashed out, haphazard with his sword.
It slashed through trailing black edges like a broom sweeping through fine ash. The god barely moved, didn’t laugh or make a sound. Again Draken slashed. Instead of cutting the black mass apart, the god started to take shape, to bind himself together into something resembling a human, something familiar. Draken’s mind clawed for whatever Korde reminded him of. It seemed important. But the memory hid itself.
Korde’s other arm … it was in the right place if not quite the right shape … swung through him. It ran through Draken like an icy sluice of sea water, clogging lungs, stealing his air. He yawned for breath, throat desperate to swallow, lungs tight and empty. Nothing. Nothing.
Ethereal laughter ran through him like shards of metal, the glint of a thousand deaths amid his grasping for life. Despair filled him, but he cut through it like a drowning man splashing at roiling sea for a raft. He gasped for breath and none came.
A piercing scream reverberated through him, shaking the ground, the air, more than any of his healing had ever done. The pressure on his throat released but a great flash blinded Draken, twin daggers of pain from his eyes straight through his skull. He fell back, his sword clattering to his side, and the world closed in tight.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A rumbling shudder ran through him, dragging him back from darkness. And voices. Several frantic, one demanding. Bruche’s low, deep inside, weak. Gradually Draken’s hurts made themselves known as well as the spirithand’s. He drew a breath. Coughed and curled up on his side. He felt like his skin had been scraped off his bones, as if pokers filled his gut. Bruche; the recollection of death come upon him. Gods, no. They had flayed him alive with Seaborn, tortured him for his loyalty to Brîn. It had happened again just now, and even so, Bruche had refused to leave him.
Be easy. Rest. Draken soothing Bruche for once. Gradually he lay flat, letting his spine settle back into place. Beneath his back the ground thudded with what sounded like a thousand hooves and boots. Beyond, those voices, more insistent by the breath. He couldn’t be bothered to open his eyes. It all felt very distant, until a hand shook his chest, right over his heart.
“Drae? Draken. There you are!” The voice was soft, almost a whisper.
Draken flinched and pried open his eyes. “Aarin …” A wet gasp.
“Stay. Rest.” She crouched on her heels next to him, a fighting knife in one hand, her other still shaking him. The shaking ached all the way through him to his back. No. Not quite right. The hooves shuddering the ground, shadows against his darksight, and overhead, stinging Khellian rose to fully examine his failure. Korde he didn’t see, but he still smelled the rot and decay, still trembled from him near. The Eyes glowered down at him, storming the skies and drawing the wind.
A deep rumble joined the cacophony. A Voice. Words he didn’t know, some language he might have heard before but couldn’t fathom. Bruche shoved the name into his mind. “Osias.”
“Aye.” Aarinnaie turned her head. White fire seemed to glint deep in her dark blue eyes. She squinted and lifted her arm to her brow. “He was. I don’t know what he is now.”
Draken summoned his strength from some forgotten cavern of will and pushed to a sit. Something white and glowing stung his darksight. He ducked his chin and fumbled for his mask where it hung around his neck. And stared through the mesh, tears streaming at the sting.
Overhead the skies roiled with brilliant stinging colors, streaming and banking across the entire sky. Draken pointed but Aarinnaie didn’t see. She had her chin tucked to her chest, eyes closed.
Within the white flame he made out a slender figure, silvery white, robes and long hair wavering within the brightness. The sting in his eyes lessened as his mind started to catch up with what he saw, and he pulled the mask down. A thousand eyes took shape within the glow, drifting around the central figure like moths to a flame. Gradually Draken found he could let the glow fill his darksight. The worl
d took on edges, still cast in greys but sharper than before. Shadows materialized into shapes. Rows of soldiers … his soldiers … uniforms he recognized. Kheinian bows and swords, Brînians, even braided Gadye, all on their knees before the glowing figure. Hundreds strong. The Eyes and the new harsh light glittered off chains of rank and caste.
And then the memory, the familiarity struck Draken. Korde had made the Mance in his own image.
And Osias had remade himself into Korde.
Aarinnaie gasped. “Your eyes.”
“What of them?” His voice was hoarse.
“They’re silver … like a seashell.”
Tyrolean stared. “Iridescent.”
Osias. He swallowed hard and struggled to stand.
Aarinnaie took his arm and Tyrolean caught his other. Together they lifted Draken and helped him limp forward past the army of bowed heads and bodies. His body was stiff and battered, muscles moving like tough sinew under his skin. But he found the more he looked into the white fire that Osias had become, the easier he could bear it.
Bruche reached for the figure, pulling him along, drawn to Osias. Draken felt it, too; the dead god strengthening the dead. Truls drew near, glowing, too. Everyone living kept their heads ducked down, arms over their heads, eyes closed.
“You … how … ?” Draken stammered to a stop. His throat was very dry.
RITUAL, AS WITH BRUCHE. SIMPLE, REALLY.
Necromancy. Simple. Draken bowed his head, shook it. Osias sounded much the same … and not. “What now?”
FETCH YOUR DAUGHTER. The fiery form lifted his head toward the sky. AND I WILL FETCH MINE.
“Your daughter? Osias … Damn you. Talk sense.”
ELNA YET LEADS THE MOONLINGS ASTRAY.
Draken blinked. He had never paid attention to the gods’ family tree, never thought it mattered. Gradually his confusion cleared and the truth emerged. The last rebel god, working unknown to him. Draken felt very stupid, and very, very weary.
Truls disappeared into Osias’s light. The other dead Mance did as well. And banes … all drawn to him. Draken watched the blurs of raw power speed through the air toward their new god. Osias absorbed them and grew brighter.
Enemy Page 35
