Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  Eliana

  “Sometimes it’s strange to think of them together and in love, even after all the stories I’ve read—the Lightbringer and the Blood Queen. One kind, one cruel. One good, one evil. I wonder what their daughter would have been like, if she’d ever been born. I wonder which parent she’d take after.”

  —Journal of Remy Ferracora, dated May 24, Year 1014 of the Third Age

  The nightmares were shapeless and vast, but Eliana let them sweep her along on their savage current. She held herself carefully within a fraying net. If she fought too hard against her bindings, if she tried to turn against the nightmares and swim through them to shore, the net would break, and she would fall.

  Eliana.

  She turned away from the voice. It was him again. He had returned to bash her head in, and this time she would let him.

  Eliana, please, wake up!

  The voice calling her name was not Corien’s. It was familiar, soft, urgent. Beyond it soared music carried high on strings, punctuated by the brassy blasts of horns.

  Slowly, Eliana opened her eyes—and saw, crouching behind her chair in Corien’s private theater box, a lanky boy with dark, mussed hair, his face shining with sweat.

  Remy.

  She stared at him, breathed in and out slowly. It was an illusion. It was a lie. She held herself still, waiting to awaken.

  But the orchestra played on, and Remy was beckoning to her, and her mind was clear. Corien had said nothing—no taunts, no cruel laughter. Eliana stared at Remy, her blood roaring. She recalled the voice that had called her name only moments ago and recognized it.

  It had been the Prophet, urging her awake.

  Only her long weeks working with the Prophet could have prepared Eliana for such a moment. Though her mind was battered, her every muscle pulsing with pain, she reached for calm and found it. She thought of her cool little river and stepped quietly inside it.

  Then she held Remy’s eyes for a moment, telling him not to move, telling him to hold every part of himself still, and turned carefully in her seat to look at Corien. She remained slumped, her eyes half-lidded. Her vision tilted even at that slight movement. Pain stabbed her temples.

  There he was, standing near the polished railing with his drink in hand. The music on stage was deafening, and still he yelled for more.

  “I can’t hear you!” Corien cried, then gulped down the rest of his drink and flung his empty glass at the stage.

  In the rows of seats below, the citizens of Elysium echoed his disdain, throwing jeers at the musicians sweating on the stage, tossing shoes and half-eaten food, whatever they could find.

  But the musicians did not dare stop, the conductor’s arms were tireless, and the sweetness of the music continued—triumphant and joyful, perversely incongruous with its audience.

  Eliana watched Corien lean against the railing, his shoulders hunched, his hands white-knuckled. He shook his head in fury; he looked ready to burst. Any moment now, he would reach for another glass to throw.

  He would reach for her.

  Eliana could not move, frozen with indecision. What should she do? Feign sleep? Offer herself to Corien once more so Remy could run?

  Then the choir in the grand curving loft above the stage stood as one. Four soloists dressed in long glittering coats began to sing in an angelic tongue they had no doubt learned at swordpoint.

  To Eliana’s left, beyond where Corien stood, two adatrox dragged up the stairs a man Eliana did not recognize. His head lolled; his black-eyed expression was listless and fuzzy. An angel, but who?

  Corien threw up his hands, overjoyed. “Ravikant! What a delight that you could join us this evening. And just in time for the finale too. What luck!”

  Ravikant. Eliana looked hard at the admiral. She had not seen him since he lived in Ioseph Ferracora’s body. He had found a new body, it seemed—a short, skinny man with smooth brown skin and a shaved head. The adatrox released Ravikant, and he fell to his knees. He had dressed for the occasion in an immaculate suit of soft cream.

  Corien knelt beside him, placed his hand on Ravikant’s sweating cheek. The admiral began to sob.

  The orchestra quieted. The music became a playful march, chirpy and sly, accompanied by tiny rhythmic chimes.

  “Did you think you would get away with it?” Corien asked softly, cocking his head. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out that you meant to ruin me? And here I was, thinking we were friends.”

  Ravikant gasped, twitching on the floor, and Eliana’s body jolted with remembered pain. She breathed in and out through her nose and kept her hands relaxed on the arms of her chair.

  Only then did she notice the floor of their lavishly appointed box.

  It was strewn with corpses.

  Corien stood, and Ravikant’s body grew still. Instead, another body nearer to the door began to convulse. A young, pale girl in a silken gown, perhaps selected from the audience below.

  Eliana watched her body shudder as Ravikant’s screams, his pleas in Lissar, tore free of her throat.

  “So easily I can toss you from body to body,” Corien mused, standing over the girl. “Could you do this? I don’t think you could. I think all of you are rats next to me. I think you ought to feel ashamed of your own stupidity.”

  “The city…my lord…” Ravikant tried next in the common tongue. “It is overrun…”

  Corien snarled with fury. The girl’s body stilled, and that of a white-haired, dark-skinned man sitting propped up in a chair began to twist in agony. His voice was deep; his words were Ravikant’s. The orchestra below played on, frenetic strings pushing a melody higher and higher.

  Eliana tensed in her chair, fighting for calm. Corien was not watching her. He was distracted, drunk on wine and violence. She could run. Remy still waited behind her; she could feel his tension, how he ached to reach for her. If he had somehow gotten inside, there was a way to escape. If he was real, that is—if she could believe anything she saw.

  Corien’s back was to her, but not entirely. His mind might have another focus, but his stolen eyes would see if she moved.

  The orchestra grew quiet once more—only hesitant pulses from the horns, cautious echoes from the reedy winds.

  Eliana held her breath.

  Then the full orchestra returned, and the full chorus, in a triumphant, pounding passage that shook the theater from floor to ceiling.

  Run, Eliana. The Prophet, faint as a distant dream.

  Corien leaned closer to Ravikant, tilting his head so his ear was near the angel’s sobbing mouth—and putting his face completely out of view. He was howling as Ravikant did, mocking him. His voice split with laughter.

  Eliana did not waste a moment. She slipped free of her chair and followed Remy into the box’s shadows. The music pounded in her chest; Corien’s furious invectives, hurled at the admiral in tongues Eliana did not know, rang in her ears.

  Remy grabbed her hand, helped her down a small flight of stairs in the darkness and out through a door left unlocked. Once outside, they ran. The narrow corridor circling the theater was eerily empty. Unease coiled tight in Eliana’s chest. Whatever Remy was doing, he was not doing it alone.

  “How did you get inside the theater?” she asked quietly as they hurried through the shadows. “He locked every door.”

  Remy cut her a quick glance. “Not all of them. One was left unlocked.”

  A chill nipped her neck. “And you trusted that?”

  “I didn’t have time to think about it. I only knew you were inside.”

  His voice was so strange—it was his, and yet not. There was a new steel to it. His face betrayed nothing. Her brother, and a stranger too. Eliana wished there were time to hold him still by the shoulders and make him look at her dead-on until she knew him again.

  They raced down a flight of stairs. At the bottom, hidden agai
nst the far wall, waited Jessamyn. Her leg was bandaged and her color wan, but her blood-spattered face was hard and eager for a fight. Three dead adatrox lay at her feet.

  “That took far too long,” she hissed, then gave Eliana one assessing look. If she felt shame at having been a witness in that white room of pain, she showed none of it. “No one saw you leave?”

  “If they had, we wouldn’t still be standing here,” Remy said darkly, moving to the nearest window to peer outside.

  Eliana glanced from Jessamyn to Remy. Remy’s trimmed hair, his tunic and trousers that were certainly not prison wear. “You know each other?”

  “I’m her virashta,” Remy said, as if that explained everything.

  Beyond the glass, Ostia’s crimson light flooded the world, but it was Remy Eliana couldn’t tear her eyes from. How comfortable he looked with a dagger in his hand. The grim set of his face, the scars rimming his knuckles.

  “Can you close that thing in the sky?” Jessamyn asked, gesturing at the window.

  “Yes,” Eliana said, not saying the rest—that she would do no such thing until she had won and Corien lay in ruins.

  “Somehow we’ve got to get you to it safely,” Jessamyn muttered, glancing out the window. “And the whole city’s gone mad.”

  Remy shot Eliana a glance. She could see on his face that he knew what she had not said, and his mouth twitched with a small smile.

  I will guide you to me. The Prophet’s voice came quietly. Tell them you know where to go. They will follow you.

  “I know how to get there,” Eliana said firmly. “I know the safest path.”

  Jessamyn’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

  Eliana forced a wry grin. “I’m the Sun Queen. I know everything.”

  He is distracted, but he won’t be for long, the Prophet warned. Exit the palace on the southern side. You will encounter several adatrox on the way out. Prisoners too. The beasts are swarming toward the palace. Some already cling to it, trying to bash their way inside. Go to the plaza where Corien brought you before he opened Vaera Bashta.

  Eliana drew a deep breath, shifted her hands to feel the slide of her castings’ chains. Can I use my power?

  Try not to. He will only remain ignorant of your escape for so long. The farther you get from him, the more easily I will be able to hide you.

  Eliana swallowed against a cold knot of fear. She felt the Prophet’s presence, a supple layer of water coating her mind, but it was too thin for comfort.

  “I need a knife,” she said, and Jessamyn pulled a long dagger from her boot. Eliana recognized it as a standard adatrox weapon. She tested its weight, her grip. She nodded once at Jessamyn in thanks.

  “Follow me,” she said, and ran, Remy and Jessamyn close behind.

  The palace was a cavernous tomb, its stone walls muffling the chaos beyond. The low boom of vaecordia cannon fire, the shriek of swarming cruciata. Eliana raced down a broad hallway lined with windows, the shadows sliced open by streams of red light. Adatrox clustered at the far end like animals huddling together against the cold. Abandoned by their angelic masters, their minds left in ruins, they turned at the sound of Eliana’s approach, bellowing wordlessly. Eliana rushed at them, gutted one, and by the time she whirled around to find the others, they were already dead. Jessamyn wiped her dagger on her sleeve. Remy wrenched his own knife from the belly of his kill.

  Eliana turned away from him, guilt sitting hard in her throat. There was only ever supposed to be one Dread of Orline, and now the city of Elysium had given birth to another.

  They raced down two flights of stairs, out into a great hall in the palace’s southern wing. Dark shapes slammed against the windows, then skittered up them, climbing the walls.

  Adatrox rushed across the hall, straight for them. Eliana flung her knife into one’s throat. Jessamyn held another while Remy drove his dagger into its chest. Another stumbled out of the shadows. Jessamyn hissed something at Remy, and Remy ripped his knife from the first adatrox, spun around, and slashed it across the newest one’s neck.

  They felled another five on their way out of the palace, then six more as they raced through the ring of courtyards surrounding it. A prisoner in rags leapt for Eliana, his eyes gone mad with fear, and with a fierce cry, Jessamyn threw herself in his path and slashed open his stomach. Another prisoner burst through the hedges and swung a huge club at her, metal spikes protruding from the wood. Remy leapt onto his back and slashed open his throat. The courtyards crawled with prisoners shrieking for blood, adatrox stumbling and flailing their swords.

  Eliana let Jessamyn and Remy fight for her, but her head spun, and the world was a choppy haze of red and gold. Her power was desperate, chomping for release. Instead, she used her knife and picked up others from the soldiers she slew. She still wore her filthy jeweled gown and wished bitterly for a belt, hidden pockets, holsters, anything useful.

  At the border of the city proper, they hid against the courtyards’ outermost wall to catch their breath. Jessamyn, her skin soaked with sweat, clutched her right leg. In Eliana’s tight fists, her castings buzzed with need. The sky was dark with raptors, the streets teeming. Nearby, two vipers tore at a knot of bodies between them.

  Eliana looked back through one of the courtyard gates and saw a sea of cruciata rushing through the maze of hedges toward the palace. Streams of darkness rose swiftly up its walls and towers, slipped inside windows and bashed in doors. Above the palace, fogged in red clouds, shone a smiling crescent moon.

  “That ought to hold him for a while,” Remy said grimly. “If he touches any cruciata blood—”

  “He won’t,” Eliana said at once. “He’s too clever to get beaten that easily.”

  But a palace crawling with monsters would at least distract him for a few more minutes. She hoped.

  Hurry, Eliana, came the Prophet’s voice. Stronger now, but tense with effort.

  Overhead, at the courtyard’s edge, a brass funnel standing tall on a pole wrapped with wires blared a crescendo of brassy horns. Eliana blew out a sharp breath, then launched herself into a relentless sprint. She heard Jessamyn’s measured breaths behind her, ragged but constant, and Remy’s quick footfalls. Bodies and feasting cruciata clogged the city’s larger roads. The stink was hot and rotten, the bite of blood sour on Eliana’s tongue.

  She turned into an alleyway. People huddled in the shadows, covering their ears, keening over the dead. They cried out as she passed, every head soaked with blood. The alleyway narrowed at the end, and Eliana had to turn sideways to escape it. Emerging from it, she looked down a slope washed red with Ostia’s angry light. Low walls and a network of squat white steps separated manicured gardens and wading pools capped with fountains. She raced toward them, jumped over a wall to the path below, landed hard, pushed herself up, ran on. Remy and Jessamyn dropped behind her a few seconds later.

  Overhead, a fluttering ribbon of dark color. Eliana looked up. A scarlet-winged raptor had found them, swooping down from the sky with its black beak open wide.

  Eliana stared it down, her castings sparking in her fists, her power roaring for release—and at last she let it rise. She reached for the empirium, seized the beast with fingers of gold, and slammed it furiously to the ground. More raptors dove, and she knocked each one out of the sky, her fists flying. Soon, the sky was empty, and Eliana stood panting in a heap of their steaming, ruined bodies.

  “Shit,” Jessamyn muttered quietly just behind her.

  The plaza, now, and hurry, said the Prophet, tense with desperation. They’re coming for you. You just showed them the way.

  She looked around wildly. Who’s coming?

  Angels.

  But not him?

  He is rather occupied at the moment. The cruciata have flooded the palace, and he cannot control them. Their minds are too strange, too strong. But his soldiers here in the city are eager to impress.
/>   “This way,” Eliana said over her shoulder, then raced down the road with Jessamyn and Remy close on her heels. She descended a flight of stairs, then sped across a stone bridge arching over a road that buzzed with cruciata. The creatures burst through doors and windows, flung people screaming into the streets.

  Eliana glanced ahead and saw the five angelic statues surrounding their destination. She remembered the pentagonal plaza and the arcades of white pillars that bordered it. The twin black doors, and what had burst out of them at Corien’s command.

  Jessamyn’s blade whizzed past her ear. A skinny raptor with slick black wings dropped from the sky. Eliana dodged it, then raced down a spiraling staircase of white stone and tumbled out into the plaza. She stopped, gulping down air. Remy crashed to a halt beside her, Jessamyn right after him.

  “This is madness,” Jessamyn hissed. She found an abandoned sword wedged beneath a body shredded beyond recognition, tugged it free. She jerked her head up at the red sky. “Are you going to close the damn thing, or aren’t you?”

  Eliana looked around the plaza but could see no sign of the Prophet, no escape route, no reinforcements. Instead, she saw angels—ten of them, twenty, fifty—streaming down from the upper roads and racing toward the plaza, resplendent in stained golden armor. Cruciata followed, snapping at their heels. One of the angels threw a spear. It spun silver through the air, then pierced a raptor’s scaled chest and sent blue blood spraying. The nearest angel fell, then another. It was not enough; soon, they would reach the plaza.

  But Eliana didn’t dare use her power again with those eyes so near. Corien would feel it, slip into one of their minds, and seize her.

  I’m here, she thought, wiping sweat from her eyes. Now what?

  Something stirred in her mind. A familiar presence that left her cold as ice.

  Pain exploded in her skull, searing and brilliant. The world went white, and she crumpled to her knees. The dim cries of battle spun around her, but she saw only this—an armored angel towering over her, his hand outstretched, slowly turning as if working the handle of a door.

  It was not an angel she knew, but through the slit of his helmet, in the depths of his black eyes, Eliana saw Corien’s smile.