TWENTY THREE
The McAllister army made for a magnificent sight. Kelan and a dozen more up front on horseback. The rest marching four-deep to a pounding rhythm, tall, straight, rifles strung over their broad shoulders. Neco and Ana bought up the rear with the two horse-pulled wagons loaded with spare weapons and ammunition.
Lily had never understood the fever of war, the heroics of men charging to their death, but now she felt it in the air, in her soul. Not one of these men marched for themselves. They marched for the man beside them, they marched for their families, they marched for their country. They marched with heads held high, victory grasped to their chests no matter the outcome. Battles lost, lives spent, that was not defeat, not so long as their country stood and the home fires burned.
The tail end of the army, the wagons, rounded a bend in the densely wooded trail and disappeared. Her heart fisted. The next time she saw Kelan would be through the demon glass. She wasn’t going with them. Not on the ground, anyway.
“You’re the only person who can do this,” Kelan had insisted when she’d rebelled rather fiercely. “You’re the only one who can have eyes on the ground while remaining hidden in the air.”
So here she was, sailing the Aether in the opposite direction so that they could circle wide, out of sight, so that Agares wouldn’t see them coming. They needed to be upwind, and a strong South-Westerly was blowing in from the coast, chasing Agares’ back.
Devon was with her, his expertise required with the meteorology equipment that would tune their exact position and altitude for optimal precision. The exact timing was Lily’s responsibility.
The Customs Dirigible chugged—a ship like this would never swoop—deep over the ocean and then made an awkward turn to bring them back around. The door between the Pilot Cabin and the cargo area stood wide open, allowing Devon to shout directions depending on the readouts from the brass machinery.
“Perfect,” he finally yelled to be heard above the roar. “Hold this position.”
The Captain, a McAllister who’d transplanted the original customs officer, called back, “We have steam power to hover for an hour, no more. Should I set down?”
Devon looked to Lily.
How on earth should I know?
“Yes,” she said, making the call with her gut. “Let’s set down for now.”
One side of the ship’s cargo area had been completely removed, replaced with a canvas that could be easily stripped away. Once they’d settled on the ground, Lily stepped over the rows and rows of fastidiously lined up automaton birds to peep out through the canvas flap.
A gentle hill rose up to their right. Agares had stayed on course, keeping south of the series of hillocks instead of winding through the valley and onto the plain. Lily couldn’t see through the left wall of the dirigible, but she knew thick, woody shrubs and winter-dried long grass mostly covered the fields until they dropped off the edges of rocky cliffs.
She searched the demon glass every few minutes, her nerves chaffing from the wait. There was nothing they could do. She wouldn’t even know where Kelan was until the two armies clashed forces.
A half hour passed.
The Captain poked his head through the open doorway for the hundredth time.
“Nothing yet,” Lily told him. “Perhaps we should fly further inland. The closer we are to the enemy’s back, the more accurate the birds will be.”
“Lord Perth was adamant,” he said with a shake of his head. “He doesna want us ta risk exposing ourselves.”
“Armand said these birds will fly until their power cell is drained,” Devon said. “We just need to set them off on the right course, taking into account the wind speed and direction that might offset the trajectory.”
Another half hour, and then the next time Lily checked the demon glass, she came out tense, her stomach cramped with excited fear. “They’re approaching the last hill. Beyond that, this path merges with the plain.”
Kelan had prepared for flexibility. The hills would provide more protection, but he’d hedge Agares in on the wide open plain if need be. He had, however, been positive that he’d reach the hills before Agares.
“It’s time,” the Captain said grimly, turning on his heel to take the helm.
Devon hunched over the complicated set of dials. “We may need slight adjustments,” he called out.
Lily scooped the orange-beaked eagle from the corner and clutched it carefully. One mistake and all would be ruined.
She changed her mind, handing the eagle to Devon. “I need to go in, stay in as long as I possibly can and I’m not sure…” She rubbed her brow, then pointed at the bird. “Do you know what to do?”
“Yes, but you need to give the command.” His pale blue eyes darkened with his frown, worried or suspicious.
Probably both. Devon didn’t know much about what her demon glass actually was or how it worked, and he trusted it even less.
“I’ll give the command,” she assured him as she closed her eyes and reached inside herself. She just wasn’t sure she’d have enough wits left to find the button beneath the wing and press.
Lily surged as high as she could, as far back as could. She didn’t think Agares could scent her when she attached to another demon, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Up ahead, already halfway past the last hill, there was a slight break between Agares and the pack, an extra length in her stride, her dress and hair a shade more vibrant, the chill she exuded in a completely different class. Even her blurred edges were sharper than the smudged outlines of the pack.
A sour warning lined Lily’s stomach, tepid and stale, and she couldn’t see Kelan or any of his men. If they were here, they’d be crawling low, blending into the hills. If they weren’t here… Her nerves recoiled and stuttered at the sudden crack, crack, crack, rapid blasts fired from both sides. The mass of bodies below puckered and puttered like marionettes jerked on a string. Screams, curses, howling groans, the air filled with the torturous sound of demon bodies being peppered with Cairngorm bullets. Some bent double, some rippled backward, some went down, but they wouldn’t stay down and the crippling pain would fade too soon.
Lily caught the briefest glimpse of Kelan at the far end of the battlefield, light-footed and fluid, graceful and swift, and she wanted to stay one more moment, one last look, but she was already pulling out, screaming, “Now! Now!”
Her frantic gaze opened on Devon fiddling with the feathery eagle. She pressed a fist to her mouth to quell another rising scream. Her heart shook, trembled against her ribcage. Kelan was fighting Agares right now. He had to. We take out the head of the snake first, or at least keep it busy, otherwise the battle will be over before it’s started. But how? How does one take out a Queen demon like Agares?
A hand grabbed her arm. Devon. Spinning her back with him against the far wall, out of the way. The temporary canvas flap had been stripped aside, leaving the full broadside of the dirigible wide open.
The row of automaton birds closest to the opening came alive. Brightly coloured parrots, black eagles, mottled brown hawks. They cocked their heads up proudly, a small vulcanised rubber balloon filled with sea water hanging by the string hooked through their beaks.
Miles and miles away, Cragloden’s Aether Signaller had received the frequency transmission that Devon had triggered with the eagle. The signal for Armand to start the wave of flights. Each row of modified birds would be activated on a different frequency, allowing him to implement a three second delay to space the birds out.
With a flutter of flapping feathers, the first row took flight.
Lily held her breath. Armand had tested the weight of the balloons, adjusted the amount of water each type of bird could carry, but she didn’t breathe again until the birds held their course in a direct line for the battle field without plunging to the ground. The next wave took flight, then the next, until one hundred and fifty automaton birds of every colour, shape and texture were flocking to the rescue with their loaded beaks.
&
nbsp; “How long?” she asked Devon.
“At least three minutes.”
She waited two before diving inside the demon glass.
A steady stream of bullets still fired from both sides, racking into the central mass of the pack. On both ends, the twenty or so McAllister guardians, recognisable by their blue and gold capes and glinting Cairngorm steel, kept out of the fray of bullets and duelled the stragglers. They fought in pairs, one eye on the demons and the other on their partner’s back. Already a few demons had been contained, trapped in runes to bind and keep until they could be dealt with.
At the head of the battle, Kelan fought alone. He dipped and swerved in a series of short charges and narrow retreats, his blade slicing through the continuous assault of icicle tentacles that whipped at him from all sides.
He fought the Queen, the most lethal demon, and no one had his back.
He’d insisted.
His guardians had trained in the art of demon warfare since childhood, but they lacked the proper experience.
“The distraction will kill me before Agares does,” he’d stated bluntly, and Armand had agreed. Lily hadn’t, but her voice had gone unheeded.
She wasn’t close enough to see how he fared. He was still standing, still fighting, and he hadn’t given Agares any quarter to unleash her frozen fury in any other direction, but he hadn’t gained ground either and how long could he last?
A bolt of fire snagged her eye and her head spun that way. It had come from the pack. A demon who’d avoided one too many rounds of rifle fire and recovered. The bolt had snagged a guardian’s eye as well. The man swirled and lunged. His blade cut through the fire and both halves of the ray fizzled into a shower of sparks. But he’d left himself exposed to the demon he’d been duelling. The tar-black bolt snapped low across his hips. His entire body arched backward, then collapsed into a smoking, broken heap.
Lily dry-heaved, her scream choking inside her lungs.
She clamped her lips and balled her hands into tight fists. The scream was for the fallen guardian. The dry heave was from the demon poison. Pull yourself together. She spun away from the fighting and looked to the sky, and nearly slumped into her own heap with relief when she found her prayer answered.
The first wave of birds was upon them, flying true and low, so low above the battle. She looked down again. Once the demons noticed the threat from above, their fire bolts would fry the birds and vaporise the water into harmless steam that would never fall. This was why they’d had to wait, ensure the demons’ attention was thoroughly engaged in the heat of battle before the sky attack was launched.
Lily waited another heartbeat. And another. The front line of birds swooped over her head and then she ripped herself out of the scene.
“Now!” she panted and Devon sent the second signal to Armand.
He tossed the eagle into the corner and shoved a tense hand through his hair as his eyes came to her. “It’s done.”
Lily plunged straight back in.
The leading birds were seconds from passing over the front of the battle. The last wave that brought up the rear was too far back, they’d misjudged the spaced delay.
Her pulse hammering, her breath literally imploding, she waited and watched, her gaze glued to the flocks of low-flying birds. The rapid crackle of rifle fire and noise from the fighting masked the flapping. Not a single demon looked up. Not a single demon noticed what flew a couple of feet above their heads. Kelan’s men were expecting the attack, but they were too well-trained to break orders and cast anticipating looks upward.
Back at Cragloden, Armand rapidly transmitted the command on each of the frequencies and one by one, the waves of birds opened their beaks. The strings slipped from the beaks and the loose ties unravelled from the necks of the balloons as they dropped and Lily never saw them hit. The ground was instantly awash with thick, sulphuric swirls of silver smoke as the sea water either spilled and rained down or exploded upon impact.
Heat coiled in her stomach, churning hot and rancid. All her short trips were adding up and she could feel it, in her blood, in her shaky bones, she didn’t have long. She jumped out…
She didn’t surface. The grainy canvas of her demon glass no longer pulsed with layer upon layer of whirlwinds, but there were still too many. At least two dozen. She focussed on the dominant tunnel that swirled strongly in the centre and plunged straight in again, sweeping through the passage to Agares.
The sulphuric smoke had dissipated into silvery wisps and a few resistant pockets.
“Hold fire!”
“Hold fire!”
The guardians called as they spread out to engage the remaining demons scattered across the field.
Agares’ face contorted in rage, crystal bolts flying from her flexing fingers. “You will die for this.”
“Oh...” The strain narrowed Kelan’s eyes to slits as he wielded his sword, slicing through the ice she spat at him. “So you weren’t trying to kill me up till now.”
The words were cavalier, but crunched through a clenched jaw. He was tiring. He was in pain. His coat was slashed in too many places for him not to be. A bloodied gash cut his cheek open from the corner of his right eye to an inch above his mouth.
Agares threw her arms out and up, unleashing a shower of ice shards that rained down over his head. Kelan gripped his sword with both hands and spun his body in a tight circle as the shards united in the air and dropped over him as a solid ice cage. His blade cut through the cage and the ice shattered.
But it cost them.
Agares used that spin to blast a bolt of ice past him. The bolt hit the ground and slithered toward the foot of the hill, then the head divided into a thousand veins of liquid ice and spread up the slope, turning grass, shrubs, trees, and the men taking cover there, into a frozen spectacle. Screams. Human screams that cut off into deadly silence.
Kelan whipped about and dragged the tip of his sword across the main artery to his left. The live ends of the veins shrivelled and the spread stopped. With a roar, Kelan circled around, his sword slashing through yet another bolt and then he rocked on the balls of his feet, adjusting the angle of his blade, watching for the bolt that he could perhaps catch and reflect straight back at Agares to stun.
Swallowing down a mouthful of bile, Lily surged forward to swoop around Agares and come up close. Kelan did not have to do this alone. She had his back.
“Agares!” she screamed in the demon’s ear.
Agares’ head jerked her way, then snapped instantly back to Kelan as he gained some ground. “I thought I scented something foul,” she snarled.
“Lily,” Kelan breathed out heavily.
“Agares!” Lily screamed again, this time in the other ear. Her throat burned from the bile and rot shooting up from her stomach but she needed to be loud, she needed to scream through the burn. “You wanted to know why!” The other ear. “Why!”
Agares didn’t make the mistake of taking her eyes off Kelan again, but the next bolt unleashed was slightly off. Kelan swerved around it easily and didn’t slash, keeping his sword steady instead.
“I was always going to betray you,” Lily shouted, switching from one ear to the other with each phrase to disorientate Agares as much as possible. “From the start. You were nothing to me. Agares!” She plucked the assumptions from everything she remembered about Agares’ bitter ranting, and she didn’t care how right or wrong they were. She only had to hit one or two raw nerves. “You were always just the step I trod down on as I climbed to power.”
“You were nothing to me, Agares.” She was hissing now, her throat scraped raw. Her skin felt clammy, her blood boiling, her body rattling with tremors. “You are nothing. My enemy was worth ten of you.”
A guttural noise tore from Agares’ throat. She cast one arm at Lily, the other at Kelan, and white fire shot from her fingertips.
Lily jerked back, a gut reaction. The fire couldn’t touch her in this form, but it might as well have. The poison choked her veins
, her lungs, it convulsed her stomach, determined to eject her from the demon glass and she was fading.
She held on, a few more seconds, to see the white fire glance off Kelan’s blade at a forty-five degree angle to strike below Agares’ waist in flaming brilliance. Kelan didn’t hesitate. He charged in as the demon teetered, momentarily stunned by her own power. The tip of his blade carved the ground so quickly, his hand and sword were a blur, and then he was kicking Agares inside the rune to bind and keep, slicing his palm open to activate the rune with drops of his blood, and Lily smiled as she lost her hold on consciousness…
TWENTY FOUR
The infernal hacking was the worst. Greyston rolled up onto an elbow, the wet cough rattling around his chest.
The quack had diagnosed a lung infection, had even tried to assert his authority and have Greyston removed to the hospital in Edinburgh.
Never again. No hospitals. No clinics. The world could rot in hell first, and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
The war was over, fought and won.
Agares was gone.
There were still a handful of runners left, demons who’d slipped away either before or during the battle, but they were shadowy dilutions compared to their Queen. With Lily’s help, Kelan and his men were hunting them down. They’d been at it for a week now and were almost done. Only two left, Lily had declared when she’d visited him last night.
Greyston fell onto his back again as he heard the door click open. His gaze bore into Georgina as she stepped inside, bearing a breakfast tray. “You’re still here.”
“Still here,” she said brightly, setting the tray down on the bedside table. “How many times did that cough wake you up last night?”
It was their usual greeting, but for some reason, today it irritated him and he didn’t keep his usual silence. “I didn’t realise I was supposed to be keeping count.”
“A definite improvement,” she declared, shooting him a warm smile as she rounded the foot of the bed to fling the drapes wide open.
The Dark Matters Quartet Page 88
