As Iron Falls (The Wings of War Book 4)

by Bryce O'Connor

  Raz himself drew next blood, snagging the hilt of one Southerner’s sword in the crook of the sagaris and dragging it past him, driving the blade into the belly of another assassin on his other side even as the gladius whipped crosswise, cleaving the owner’s head from his shoulders.

  All at once, the ten had become seven.

  If he expected Koro or the others to balk as their comrades fell, though, Raz was sorely disappointed. The Percian maintained his assault in a steady stream of blows, stepping away only when the others were in a position to engage, never giving Raz a moment of respite. Though the dark forms flickering in the firelight numbered less now, Raz knew he would tire eventually. It drove him to fight with a savagery that would have made most men pale and run, his sword and axe a violent stream of silvery steel moving about his body. The sagaris caught one assassin’s sword at its base, shattering the thinner metal with a screech of breaking. He deflected a downward blow from Koro with a looping parry, transitioning the momentum in a crushing kick that caught the man in the chest, sending him flying four feet into the air and ten back. Two of the Southerners descended on Raz at once following this, refusing to grant him even a moment to breathe. His weapons screamed as they worked independently of each other, engaging a figure each, his tail snaking out in an attempt to sweep their legs out from under them. One leapt over the appendage, jumping back so that Raz couldn’t take advantage of the forced movement. The other, though, was slower, his grey eyes too concentrated on managing the battering blows of the gladius. The tail caught him about the ankles, knocking him to the floor with a surprised “Oomph!”

  Raz had just raised a foot, was just about to stomp down on the man’s neck, when Syrah screamed.

  Feeling her slide away from him, Raz whirled around, uncaring that he left his own back exposed to Koro and the others. The Priestess had fallen to her knees, clutching at her leg. A third unconscious form now lay next to her, hand outstretched and clutched around a reddened knife, and with a thrill of fear Raz saw the blood spilling from the long gash across Syrah’s thigh, darkening her clothes and splattering the charred remnants of the carpet beneath her feet.

  For a blink, the world stopped. Not even the flames around him seemed to move as the cold thundered upward, starting at his feet and rising like boiling water turned to ice. All around Raz, men stood frozen, some in mid-leap as they pounced, others crouched with blades held ready at their sides. He could smell the blood, smell the smoke as cloth and clothing burned, smell the odd lingering scent of vinegar mixed with the sweat and perfume that still clung to the air. All he saw, though, was the split flesh beneath Syrah’s free hand, the meat of her leg showing through the fabric of her robes, reddening the white cotton and spilling through her pale fingers.

  Then the abyss ripped open, Raz fell, and all was blackness and death as the animal took over with a screaming, chilling roar of rage.

  “By the Twins,” Naizer said, standing beside Ekene, eyes fixed in horrified fascination on the battle below as Raz i’Syul Arro’s hair-raising bellow echoed even over the crackling of the fire. “What a terror!”

  In reply, the Tash said nothing. He, too, had seen the change descend over the atherian as his woman fell, a sudden horrible stillness grabbing hold of him for the briefest instant.

  Then the Monster was moving again, and this time when he killed it was with a feral savagery beyond anything Ekene had ever seen even in the wilds of the savannah.

  In less than ten seconds, of the five assassins who’d still been left standing, three remained. Arro cut into them like a butcher carving through meat, utterly uncaring of the wounds he took in the process. Koro had regained his feet and was dancing around the creature once more, an impressive sight on his own, snaking between the Southerners in a clear attempt to get to the Priestess, still kneeling with one hand pressed to her mangled leg. Arro, though, was having none of it, and more than once the Third only barely managed to retreat with his life, often a little bloodier than he’d been before the attempt.

  Still… Ekene thought to himself, watching the Dragon’s axe cave in yet another man’s skull, splattering blood and bone and brain matter across the pillars along the left side of the hall. We expected this.

  “Be ready,” he told his Hands. “It will be soon.”

  At his word, Yseri pushed himself up from his throne on the Tash’s other side. Together, the two men hurried over to the great clay pots waiting atop the steps.

  They didn’t have to wait long. As Koro managed to strike a blow, slashing Arro across the arm, they watched him retreat several steps, allowing the last pair of the Mahsadën’s blades—Na’zeem and one of his lieutenants—to engage the Monster. As he did, Koro raised his curved blade straight into the air, the red stain of blood dancing in the firelight as it trickled down the steel.

  “NOW!” Ekene shouted.

  At once, Yseri and Naizer put a foot each against the body of their pots, shoving them with every ounce of force they could muster. With a grinding screech against the marble of the dais, the great clay things tilted and toppled over, each bouncing once, then twice, then smashing into a dozen pieces to spill their vile contents out over the clean white of the steps.

  CRASH!

  The mirrored sounds of shattering clay didn’t register with Raz for several seconds as he fought, his gladius and sagaris winding a lightning-like pattern about his body as he circled Syrah protectively. Through the fog of battle, he noted the Priestess’s head jerk up in alarm at the noise, tears of pain and anger streaking down her left cheek. Raz never saw the stillness that overcame her, then, the horrified twist of her face, but he did hear her choking, wrenching gasp. Alone, even that wasn’t enough to pull his attention away from the fight at hand, his mind consumed by black need to kill the three men still ringing them.

  Then, though, the overpowering stench of vinegar and flesh crashed over him, pungent even through the flames, peeling away just enough at the animal’s control to drag his attention toward the dais.

  What he saw there, sprawled across the ivory marble of the tapering stairs, dragged him out of the bloody world so viciously it very nearly cost him his life.

  The two bodies were bloated and warped, their skin pallid, like drowned corpses. One was a man’s, large and balding, the other was a woman’s, dreaded hair tangled and lank, one side of her head shaved. They were both naked, their arms and legs and torsos covered in horrid bruises, like they’d been beaten within an inch of their lives before death. The woman had it far worse, though, and Raz felt his own heart constrict as he took in an all-too familiar pattern of marks around her wrists and legs, the pointed discolorations of rough hands about her breasts and neck.

  He knew all too well what such bruises meant.

  Despite this, though, it wasn’t the injuries that brought Raz to his knees. It wasn’t the vulnerability of their nakedness or the swollen condition of the corpses that ripped him from the fight, causing him to lose all sight of the blades lancing for him even as his own weapons faltered.

  Rather, it was their faces that ceded Raz’s life to the steel of Koro and the assassins. It was the twisted condition of their features, the violent panic frozen eternally there. The man’s wide eyes were milky in death, set against the faintest trace of the war paint that had streaked across his brow and mouth. The woman’s teeth were bared, lips pulled back in a grimace of horror that combined with her scarred nose to give her face a cadaverous, skull-like impression.

  Raz knew what the eternal fear of their features meant. He knew the man and woman had been beaten and tortured to the edge of death, knew the latter had been subjected to other horrors at the hands of her male captors. He knew that then, as their bodies were on the brink of being unable to suffer any more, they had been hauled from whatever squalor they’d been imprisoned in, dragged to the two pots Raz realized suddenly he’d seen before.

  They’d kept him and Syrah company, waiting for the pirates to find them, hidden away in the smuggling
hatch of the Sylgid.

  As Koro shouted in victory, seizing on the distraction to leap up and bring his blade arcing around for a final blow, Raz knew that Garht Argoan and Lysa had been drowned in the putrid vinegar of their own trafficked goods.

  That was when he heard Syrah gasp in wretched despair, and the magic came alive around him.

  CHAPTER 55

  Raz’s ears popped as the pressure in the room suddenly dropped. There was a deep whooshing, like air being funneled through a tunnel, then utter, abrupt quiet that drowned out all sound.

  Then, just as his stunned mind understood that Azzeki Koro’s blade was inches from taking him between the eyes, a concussive blast shook the very foundations of the room.

  BOOM!

  The discharge tore over him, hurtling Raz, Koro, and the two remaining assassins head over heels as effortlessly as dead leaves blown about in a fall storm. In the confused tumble and heavy landing some dozen feet away, Raz didn’t have a prayer of holding onto his weapons, hearing the sword and axe clatter away across the marble floor behind him. Off to the side, he heard the thuds of two bodies landing nearby, as well as a sickening crunch of someone striking one of the columns and sliding heavily to the ground. He barely registered any of this, though, and was just clambering to get up when an intense shock of heat crashed over him, tingling across his skin in a solid wave, like the Sun had fallen to earth at their very feet.

  Finally managing to stand, Raz stared—along with every other person in the room—at the base of the steps.

  Syrah had pulled herself up, leaning on her staff as she limped her way slowly, silently toward the dais, ignoring the blood that seeped like a sash down her right leg. It was from her that the power was rippling forth, a palpable, undulating aura that was hard to look at despite not producing any actual light. The air shimmered about her form, the magic closest to her scorched and churning. About her feet, the carpet burst into white flames with every step she took, approaching the column of soldiers with such utter disinterest she might not have even known they were there.

  Which is possible, Raz thought in a panic when he saw that her gaze, cold and still and dead, was fixed on the body of Lysa, sprawled and naked across the right side of the steps.

  “Syrah!” Raz roared, started to rush forward only to be rebuffed by the searing heat as she neared the bristling wall of shields and blades. “Syrah! Wait!”

  But it was no good. Raz couldn’t get within five feet of her before the magic was too much for even his hide to bear, and his voice was muffled and dull, like the air around her had thickened and congealed. He could only watch with dread as Syrah took the last few steps toward the soldiers, who were yelling, warning her not to approach any further, their threats shrill with fear.

  When their leathers and the wood of their shields started to blister and smoke, though, the center of the group began hollering in pain and alarm as they fell into disarray, splitting to let the Priestess through.

  “NO!” the Tash howled from the top of the dais, shrinking back into his throne while his Hands did the same on either side of him. “NO! STOP HER! STOP HER!”

  Syrah, though, took about as much notice of the old man as she had the soldiers. She ascended the steps slowly, one after the other, never looking away from the first mate’s corpse, like nothing else in the world mattered in that moment. When she reached it, she slipped to her knees, as though unable to keep bearing some great weight that pulled her down, laying her staff gently across the stairs beside her.

  Then, with such tender, gentle care it made Raz’s heart break to watch, she gathered Lysa’s beaten form into her arms, head bowed over the woman’s bare bruised chest, white hair spilling over her bloated skin. The Priestess shook with unsuppressed grief, and through the continued screaming of the Tash and the shout of the rallying soldiers, Raz thought he could hear broken, gasping sobs. He watched, frozen and unable to move, as Syrah’s pale fingers reached out to trace the black and blue marks where fingers had dug into the first mate’s flesh as she’d been held down against her will. Raz could see Syrah reading the patterns like the lines on a page, recreating the story of the horrors in her mind.

  It was as he realized this, as he watched Syrah’s hand shake and shiver over Lysa's corpse, that all the warmth in the room suddenly vanished.

  For one horrifying instant, Raz thought the truth the Priestess saw painted across her friend’s bruised body had broken her, had dragged her mind away to a place even the magics couldn’t follow. He’d almost started moving, almost started making a mad dash for the woman even as the rest of the room realized the spellwork appeared to have faded, when it came to Raz that the temperature still seemed to be dropping. Indeed, his rush faltered when he started to see his own breath in the air before him, the humidity frosting like the courtroom had suddenly been plunged into the depth of a Northern freeze.

  With a thrill of terror, he realized that Syrah seemed to be gathering the heat of the early summer morning, her shivering form drawing the energy from the space around her so voraciously, even the Sunlight appeared to warp and bend in her direction.

  “SYRAH!” he roared even as his talons carved divots into the marble beneath his feet, screeching him to a halt. “SYRAH! NO! WAIT! YOU CAN’T—!”

  His words, though, were drowned by an even more urgent voice.

  “THE SPELL FAILS!” the Tash howled from where he had pressed himself as far back in his throne as possible. “NOW, FOOLS! KILL HER NOW!”

  The soldiers responded to their master’s call without a moment’s hesitation. The threat of the heat apparently gone, the men cared little for the growing cold as they roared in unison and charged Syrah, still kneeling with Lysa in her lap, collapsing on her from either side of the stairs. Raz caught a glimpse of triumph gleaming in the eyes of the Tash and his Hands, and he wanted to curse them, to scream at them for their rashness. He wanted to shout to Syrah again, wanted to howl for her, to bring her back from the dark place her mind had receded to. He understood, though, that the Priestess was too far gone to be reached with mere words.

  He understood it just as surely as he understood the single, screaming urge every fiber of his being was telling his body to follow as the air began to crackle ominously around the kneeling woman.

  RUN.

  Raz whirled away from the scene just as the soldiers closed the last dozen feet between them and Syrah, his powerful legs hurtling him away with desperation and madness as he felt the air shimmer around him again. He’d just reached the closest pillar when all the noise vanished from the room once more, like a spell had been cast to swallow all sound for the briefest of moments as calamity gathered itself. He bolted between the two Southern assassins, still struggling to get to their feet, when the pressure in the chamber bottomed out again.

  Raz just made it behind the column, just plastered himself against the rounded stone, when he heard Syrah scream, a single shrill note of keen, grief-stricken anguish.

  And then the world was fire.

  CHAPTER 56

  BOOOOM!

  The deafening sound of the eruption struck Raz like a hammer in the back of the head, setting his ears to ringing as the force of it swept over him even through the marble colonnade. It staggered him, blasting him with such an impact that he nearly stumbled out from his place of shelter. In the next moment, the air itself blistered and rippled, seething and warping before his very eyes, and with an earth-shaking crash the ivory fire reached him. It billowed around the edges of his pillar, churning like a tornado of flame, washing over the ground around his feet and the ceiling above to engulf the wall he was facing in a lake of flickering white tongues. Raz roared in fear and pain, sliding down the stone to ball himself up, throwing his arms protectively over his head and tucking his wings so tight to his back they hurt. His armor was superheating, searing his scaled skin. The atmosphere was boiling, making it impossible to breathe. He couldn’t see, his entire world consisting of nothing but fire and heat and a r
aging, fathomless power at its center, feeding it all. Nearby, the only thing to penetrate the cacophony of the inferno were the agonized screams of the assassins, who’d been standing in the open not ten feet away when the magics broke free.

  Then, just as Raz began to pray to the Moon that he would be allowed to see all those he had loved and lost when She came to claim him too, the fires were ripped away again.

  As swiftly as they’d come, the flames receded with a whoosh like a tide being dragged violently back to its source. Through the ringing in his head, Raz heard silence take hold of the room once more, but it was a different sort of quiet than the magically-induced one which had preceded the spell-wrought explosions. This time, the stillness was true, as though everything that mattered in the world had been dragged to a halt, everything that stirred ended and silenced.

  Raz heaved in a shuddering gasp, hacking and coughing and twisting to fall onto all fours as he inhaled breath after breath of cool air. It tasted like soot and smoke and iron. Eventually, through the thrum of the stillness, the ringing began to fade until Raz’s ears had adjusted enough to hear the shuddering thuds of what sounded like a battering ram against the outside of the courtroom doors. Next came Akelo and the others shouting to one another, calling back and forth from the other side of the room. “What in the Sun’s name was that?” one voice demanded, though more were yelling “They’re getting through! Hold them! Hold them!”