by Eric Asher
The Old Man, his forearms still writhing with the flesh of gravemakers, dragged Neil to the staircase and followed Calbach down at a hurried pace. Happy crunched the twitching face of Calbach’s adversary beneath his bulk before following the others down, the scream of the dying Fae filling the room.
“Impressive,” the Unseelie said. “Heather’s appraisal of your skills was understated. But even should you survive this, our commanders will now know.”
Had this been a test? Send in a few soldiers to poke the bear? It seemed like an unnecessary sacrifice at best, though Ward didn’t know the mind of the Unseelie.
The gauntlets along the Unseelie’s forearms glowed a deep blue. Ward dropped to his knees, kicking a small area rug to the side before planting both palms in the center of an impossible knot of runes.
No creature would have had time to react. One moment the room was like any other in any countless buildings in Gorias, and the next a violent webwork of electric blue arcs snapped and fizzled and burst from wall to wall until anyone looking upon it would have been blinded.
The shouts cut off in an instant. Ward waited for the screams of the dying Fae to begin before he opened his eyes again.
Ward stood, flexing his fingers to relieve the residual heat from the runes. No one was left alive in that room. No one but him. The charred ruin and melted slag of the Unseelie’s armor fizzled and sparked as the magic Heather had worked on them tried to knit itself back together, only to expire in darkness.
She’d know what he’d done. She’d know those runes of power had failed the Unseelie. He only hoped her masters wouldn’t know, because the Unseelie were unforgiving when it came to failure.
* * *
“It’s safe,” Ward called out when the dying screams of the fairies faded. He made his way over to the small gray box on the bookshelf. It didn’t look like much, and could easily be mistaken for the bookend it was being used as to someone who didn’t know.
Ward walked over to the table, taking a seat as the others rejoined him.
The Old Man looked around the room as the corrupted flesh of the gravemaker slid back into his scars, leaving jagged lines of blood behind. Neil flopped onto the table and went to work healing the worst of the cuts.
“You don’t have to do that,” Leviticus muttered. “They’ll heal up fast enough.”
“Do you really want some Unseelie beasty getting their hands on your blood?”
The Old Man blinked.
“I thought not. Socius Sanation.”
Leviticus winced, caught in the healing spell, and the surprise on his face was plain, as if he’d forgotten about the sword that had impaled his shoulder, or perhaps it had been deeper than he realized. Tendons and blood vessels knit themselves back together under Neil’s spell.
Calbach grunted as he slumped into his seat. “Times like this I wish Faerie had energy drinks.”
“You could always get some sugar,” Neil said.
“Not the same as that caffeine the commoners like. Now that’s a drug I can stand behind.”
Happy chuffed at Calbach. The iron-touched smiled at the panda and scratched his ears.
Ward fidgeted with the small gray cube until the lid twisted. Once it was aligned so, the corners formed an eight-pointed star, he placed his thumb over the top. Deep red lines etched their way across the dull metal surface and up Ward’s arm.
“The hell is that?” the Old Man asked.
“A safe of sorts,” Ward said. “Only, if the wrong person tries to open it, they die.”
“Die horribly,” Neil muttered.
“Indeed,” Ward said as the box clicked under his thumb and the red light receded. The top half of the safe lifted away, and Ward let it drop to the table with a hefty thud. It might not have looked like much more than a metal shoebox, but it was far denser stuff.
Ward pulled a worn leather pouch out and untied the drawstring. Whatever was inside clinked and rattled. He poured the contents onto the table and sifted through them, pushing etched discs and old coins around in search of one in particular.
“What are all of those?” Calbach asked, running fingers through his beard.
“Some were experiments,” Ward said. “Others are some of the most dangerous runes I’ve ever come across. I’d recommend against picking them up.”
Calbach’s hand froze a few inches from the nearest coin. It was a square thing, apparently die struck by the way the edges flared up. But in those rounded flares lived a tiny circle of runes.
Ward picked up a coin next to it and held up the golden coin to Happy, a flat oval thing with intricate lines cutting through it horizontally. It was stamped with a name, Happy’s true name. “You get this to Zola. This is the anchor. You save that girl. Save that vampire. We may have lost Damian, but we don’t have to lose them too. This paper has the entirety of the knot I think Zola will need. What she has now is incomplete.”
Happy sidled up to Ward and craned his neck. Ward opened the pouch on the panda’s collar and slid the paper and coin inside.
Calbach leaned forward. “Why does that coin have the name Shiawase on it?”
Ward smiled and patted Happy’s head. “It’s from a life he left behind a long time ago.”
“He was a mint master?” Calbach asked, eyeing the bear.
“I don’t believe so,” Ward said.
“Another time,” Happy’s voice boomed, carving the words into everyone’s ears and silencing the conversation. “Where will you go?”
Ward picked up a soft cloth that had tumbled out of the safe. “I have to get some sunglasses to the sun god.”
Neil pursed his lips. “What?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
They were almost to the front door when the Old Man froze.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, tilting his head.
A rumble sounded outside, as if Aeros himself was walking through the building. Only it was synchronized, regular, until at once it stopped.
“Shit,” the Old Man snapped. “Someone’s marching in formation.”
The voice boomed around them a moment later. “Surrender or die. The Lords of Murias may yet have use for you.”
Ward exchanged looks with the others around the table. “How many do you think that was?”
“If it was commoners, I’d say at least a company. A hundred spears.”
“We can’t beat a hundred Unseelie Fae if Heather warded them.”
Neil scoffed. “We couldn’t beat a hundred Unseelie Fae if they were naked and unarmed.”
Ward glanced back at the stairs, his eyes trailing up to where the ruins of the Fae had been left to gather dust. “She put a trap in there.”
“In where?” the Old Man asked.
“Buried in the wards. Triggered when they died. Like a signal flare that brought a hundred soldiers to our door.”
The air shook around them when Happy spoke, his mouth blurring as every syllable grew more violent. “I have not come here to fail Vicky. They will not keep me from her!”
Chatter rose outside the front door. Then they’d heard the bear too, but they had no idea, no clue, what was coming.
“Neil, tell me if the street is clear of innocents,” Ward whispered. “And how close the nearest unguarded portal into the Warded Ways is.”
The fairy nodded and snapped into his smaller form, sweeping up through the broken roof and vanishing from view.
Happy stalked toward the door.
“Not yet,” Ward hissed, taking the lone painting down from the wall. “We run. Our friends are depending on us.”
“Someone dies today,” Happy growled.
Behind the painting was a simple circle with jagged lines spearing the rune for destruction. Hagalaz, the crooked H, and the end of all men.
“Clear!” Neil shouted. “Two blocks northwest to the gateway.”
And before Ward could rethink his choice, he slammed the palm of his hand against the sigil. Fire tore through him, blue and molten and hot enough to riva
l a forge in the Burning Lands.
Faerie wood and stone could take more power than anything from the commoners’ world, but when the dam broke …
The wall before them vaporized, splinters of stone becoming bullets that cut through the air like death itself. Most crashed into the company of Unseelie Fae in the streets. A few pierced buildings and windows of the slums beyond, and Ward only hoped they were still vacant.
Unseelie Fae screamed as they fell to the stone street. The fact only two of them were being siphoned away into the ley lines spoke worlds of Heather’s skill. Bursts of red carved their way across armored Fae that should have been cut to pieces. Instead, they had a few splinters, and two casualties.
“Run!”
The wail of a child pierced the air as the group sprinted through the ruined wall. A small fairy, no larger than a toddler, sat with the edge of a blade to its throat.
Ward’s sprint slowed.
The same voice that had commanded them to surrender spoke again. “Oh, it gets better my dear, dear friends. The Fae holding that child is its father. Now then, cut off your daughter’s head.”
And before they could move, before they could register what was happening, metal met flesh, and the child’s head rolled free.
“If they’ll do that to their own child, imagine what they’d do to—”
The fairy had a split second to look surprised before a wall of darkness and blood shattered the warding on his armor, and Leviticus Aureus became fury incarnate. The cold cunning Ward had seen from the man vanished. He’d become something else as the flesh of a gravemaker closed over his eyes, and he roared like the fallen gods of old.
Ten, twenty, countless swords fell upon him, and as his flesh was carved away, more charred flesh rose between the cracks in the stone road to replace it, flickering into existence in bursts of electric red power.
“Fuck,” Neil said, spinning his sword in his hand. “What the fuck do we do?”
“He’s pulling gravemakers between worlds,” Ward said, the awe plain in his voice as the Old Man’s form grew.
There was no discerning who was screaming in that chaos. The line of Fae broke and scattered, only to be dragged back by tentacle-like whips of gravemaker flesh. They were being devoured without mercy, flayed without hesitation, and every ward that broke sent another signal hurtling through the ley lines.
“We have to go,” Ward said.
“We can’t leave him!” Calbach said, his knuckles white on his war hammer.
“Well, we sure as fuck can’t stop him!” Ward shouted.
Happy charged forward, racing down the gentle slope of the road until he plowed head-first into the nearest Fae, ripping them away from the Old Man until the bear could finally get in front of him.
“Stop!” Happy’s voice thundered, echoing all around as the Fae died screaming. “They are not all your enemies!”
Leviticus stepped toward Happy, and Ward feared the worst until the massive gravemaker paused. Several Fae didn’t miss their opportunity to escape, fleeing Leviticus’ sheer destructive power.
“The girl is gone,” Happy said, his form shifting until only the samurai stood before Leviticus, and his voice no longer shook the heavens. “She was not your daughter.”
Leviticus cried out as if he’d been stabbed once more, slowly falling to one knee, his head bowed as Shiawase laid a hand on the corrupted flesh of the gravemakers.
Ward watched the fairy who had slain the girl. He stood over her tiny empty armor, disbelief in his vacant face. He pulled off his breastplate, and his dagger found his heart a moment later.
Neil covered his mouth with his hand as the fairy disintegrated. “What the fuck just happened?”
“The ends justifying the means,” Ward said, and his gaze followed the retreating Unseelie. They hadn’t known about Leviticus. Hadn’t known what he was capable of. They could have unleashed an apocalypse on Gorias.
“I got him,” Calbach said, sliding under the Old Man’s arm. “Lean on me, Leviticus. We’ll get you out of here.”
Blood poured down the Old Man’s arms and face where the flesh of the gravemakers had retreated. Only two streaks, one on either cheek, were free of it, where the tears of a monster had washed them clean.
Shiawase’s hand settled on the hilt of the sword at his waist as he turned to what few Fae remained. “Leave. Or die.”
Whatever the Unseelie and their enthralled soldiers had been prepared for, that wasn’t it. They slid into the shadows or took to the sky as Calbach and Neil helped the Old Man down the street.
“They’ll be back.” the Old Man’s steps were slow and deliberate, an obvious pain to his movements. “There’s always another rat.”
* * *
“I’m surprised they didn’t stay to finish us,” the Old Man said.
Ward eyed him. “Truly? I was ready to run after what I saw. Imagine how they felt.”
The Old Man let a slow smile lift his beard. He dipped his hand into the fountain they stood beside and washed the rest of the blood away. It wouldn’t do anything for the tatters of clothes he was wearing, but that was remedied easily enough. The Iron Queen’s breastplate had survived, and that was a marvel in itself.
“Heather let them do that,” Neil said, turning to Ward. “She’s an enemy now. You know that, right?”
“The power she gave them led to the murder of that child,” Ward said, closing his eyes for a moment before meeting Neil’s gaze.
“You cannot know if she could have stopped that,” Shiawase said, placing a hand on Ward’s shoulder. “She cannot control what the Unseelie do with that power, can she? You cannot blame yourself for this.”
“Murias trash,” Calbach spat. “They never should have been allowed to stay in the hidden cities. Of all the people the Mad King murdered, why did he let that Unseelie scum survive?”
“Some part of him believed in the balance of the courts,” Neil said. “A part long lost to time now, I think, but it was there once.”
Ward looked away before turning his attention to Happy. “Tell Zola she needs to use the knot from the old mosaic. Match it to the paper I gave you. She’ll know what I mean.” Ward studied the Old Man for a time. “With all that power, I’m surprised you can’t throw down Nudd on your own.”
“The Lord of the Dead?” the Old Man said with a hollow laugh. “Damian was stronger than I’ve ever been, and look where it got him.”
It was a terrifying thought, to think there was a man with more power than Leviticus had just displayed. He’d taken a couple dozen sword strikes, been hit with some nasty incantations, and was still walking around.
“I’m staying here,” Calbach said, “while you go off to meet your Watcher. The city was already on the brink, and when word spreads about what happened here, the truth will be more and more twisted up in lies. I’ll do what I can about that. And I’ll send who I can to Morrigan.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Neil said.
Calbach nodded.
“I’ll return to Morrigan,” the Old Man said, looking at the entrance to the Warded Ways. “Perhaps I can do some good with the soldiers closer to the front.”
“Travel well,” Shiawase said as his form bent and twisted into the bear. He stepped through the portal and vanished on his way to Zola.
Ward exchanged a nod with the Old Man, and then stepped into the chaos of the Warded Ways.
CHAPTER NINE
Once the sickening spin and flashing red nightmare of the Ways receded, Ward found himself floating several feet above a swollen river. It took another second to process the fact he was falling into said river, and the string of expletives coming out of his mouth vanished in a wet, muddy embrace.
“Umm, hi?” a commanding voice said, the tone somewhat at odds with the casual words the woman spoke. “Do I need to shoot you?”
Ward stumbled as he stepped out of the river’s edge and wiped the water from his eyes. “Ah … no.” He studied her uniform briefly, from the urban
camouflage up to the pale hair tucked under a matching hat. But what worried him more was the gray blade sheathed at her waist, the rifle over her shoulder, and the pair of sidearms, one holstered on her thigh, the other near her ankle.
“And why are you here?”
Ward patted a pocket in his cloak, relieved to find the small wrapped bundle there.
He froze as a gun was locked onto him the instant he moved.
“Slowly. I took down Lewena with a more difficult shot.”
The pale skin, the pale hair, the light Irish accent. Ward knew who she was. He’d heard the stories. “Casper.”
“Aye, you know my name, which only means you know the name of who’s sending you bullets.”
Ward’s hands snapped up into the air. The runes and sigils etched into his body could stop a lot, but he wasn’t so sure about a bullet.
“Better. Now answer. What are you doing here?”
“I need to speak to Park or Edgar.”
“Why?”
“My apprentice was using her skills to magnify the control the Fae have over your people. It’s how Nudd’s spies infiltrated you. And if I’m right, I think you have more of them close to Park.”
Casper lowered her gun and raised her fist, calling off snipers Ward hadn’t noticed. “Considering how bungled up shit has been, I wouldn’t be surprised. Get out of the river.” She holstered the pistol and offered her hand, nearly dragging Ward out of the shallows.
“Thanks,” Ward said, almost yelping when his cloak flared, and he was suddenly dry again. He turned around in time to see a form vanish into the waters.
“Advantages of having the water witches here,” Casper said. “Now, come on. Let’s figure out if we’re going to show you to Park or just lock you up.”
“You can’t hold me,” Ward said.
“It’s a time of war,” Casper said. “We can do a lot of things.”
That wasn’t what Ward had meant, but he didn’t elaborate on the fact he could demolish most any prison wall. He wasn’t there to make a scene, and he’d heard good things about Park and his soldiers.
Casper led him to what amounted to a camouflaged golf cart. She started it with the press of a button, and they zipped out of the parking lot before bouncing onto a cobblestone street.
