The shock of impact rode up my arms, and I nearly lost hold of the hilt. Blood sprayed up, hot rivulets of it splashing my face and torso, but I’d done it.
“Again, Amra!” Holgren’s voice was strident. I looked more closely at the cut I’d made. I’d failed to cut all the way through. Tha-Agoth’s head was still connected to his body by a thin strip of flesh at the back of his neck. His body spasmed. His torso tried to curl into a backbreaking arch, but it was held in place by the rod. His head was already reattaching itself to his body.
“Cut again, Amra! Quickly!” Holgren’s voice was rough with strain. I cursed, dropped the sword, and severed the remaining scrap of flesh with my knife. Then, I pulled Tha-Agoth’s head a little away from the rest of him and scrambled for the dropped sword. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Tha-Agoth’s eyes tracking my every move. I know he blinked.
A greenish, pulsing glow began to suffuse the room, emanating from the point where Holgren clutched the rod. It lit his face, gave him a diabolic look. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his forearms trembled with the effort of his magics. A low groan began to force past his teeth, growing slowly louder.
“Holgren?”
The green glow suddenly turned to a burst of brilliant red, and Holgren flew back from the rod as if he’d been hurled away from it by an invisible giant. He slammed into the far wall and slid down to the floor. Then the unnatural light died and was replaced by the weak winter light from far above.
I dropped the sword and ran over to Holgren. He was already climbing to his feet. The palms of his hands were burned.
“What happened?”
He let me help him to his feet. “I failed,” he said, voice tight. “I don’t have the power to destroy the rod. It’s been feeding off him for an age. Its reserves are vast.”
“So we can’t break the rod. We’ll just have to try something else.”
“What else is there?”
I looked back at the rod, the altar, the beheaded god. Good question. What else was there to try? The rod was indestructible. We could try to break the altar using the pick, but that would take weeks at best. I watched Tha-Agoth’s head slowly reattach itself to his body, and an idea came to me.
“So the rod won’t break. We don’t need it to.”
“What have you thought of?”
“We need to get him free of the rod, not the other way around.”
Holgren looked at me, and I saw understanding spark in his eyes. “Why didn’t I think of that? Brilliant!”
“I know. Come on, let’s do it before he has a chance to object.”
Object to what?
Too late. “We’re going to free you,” I said. “It’s going to be painful.”
You will not sever my head from my body again. His voice was full of pain and a little fear.
“You’re absolutely right.” I walked back over to him and picked up the bloody sword.
Tell me what you intend to do.
“We can’t break the rod, so were going to cut you free.”
I have been struggling against it for centuries with no effect.
“You’re also weak as a kitten. You don’t have the physical ability to pull yourself free of the rod. If you did, you’d have escaped long ago. Now, do you want to be free or not?”
Yes, he hissed.
“Then prepare yourself. As I said, this is going to hurt. A lot.”
The rod was about two inches in diameter and had speared him roughly through the heart or near enough. I would have to cut more than a hand span’s worth of flesh and bone from the rod to his side. And I’d probably have to do it more than once considering the rate at which he healed.
“Holgren.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to stay on the other side. Start pulling once I get enough of his chest cut away to free him. I don’t want to have to keep hacking at him. Pull him by his right arm.”
“All right.”
It was easier to think of him as a pig or a cow about to be butchered. I wasn't sure I could go through with it otherwise, immortal or no. I wasn’t particularly squeamish, but this was going to be gruesome. Not that beheading him hadn’t been, but…
“Put your left arm above your head and stretch out your right for Holgren to pull on.” I didn’t want to hack his arm by accident. He did as I asked, and then there was nothing left to do but start cutting.
The main difference between beheading someone and butchering them is the screaming. It’s hard to scream when your vocal cords have been severed along with the rest of your neck. When chunks are being taken out of your chest, you can scream just fine though the blood from your punctured lung works its way into your throat and mouth and gives the screaming a wet, bubbling quality. And when you’re a god, you can stream right into someone’s mind so they get the full effect.
I couldn’t very well tell him to be quiet. I gritted my teeth and hacked through flesh and ribs, clearing a bloody path for Holgren to pull him free of the rod. I kept hoping he would pass out. He didn’t. Tha-Agoth healed with amazing rapidity.
We resorted to a constant tugging on Holgren’s part and methodical hacking on mine. It might have gone a little more smoothly if I’d thought to cut out a wedge-shaped portion out of the god’s flesh, but I didn’t until later. So I had to sever reconnecting flesh continually.
At last, Holgren gave a yank. Tha-Agoth fell to the blood-washed floor of his temple in a limp, shrieking heap. I let the gore-drenched sword slip from my fingers. It fell to the stone floor with a metallic ring. I was exhausted. I felt as if I’d been hauling nets all day, something I had never been fond of as a child. I was drenched in blood. On the positive side, none of it was mine.
Tha-Agoth’s shrieks began to subside. I looked over at Holgren, and he looked back at me, smiling. “You did it,” he said.
Free. Tha-Agoth rose from the floor, one hand on the altar for support. A golden glow began to gather around him. I could see the wound I’d caused healing over completely.
Free, he said again, and the golden aura grew in intensity. He stretched out his arms, threw his head back, and howled. It made the very stones tremble. There was an undeniable—glory, I suppose—about him. I knew I was in the presence of a power, something greater than me. Greater than I ever would be. I shrugged the feeling off as much as I could. I began to have second thoughts about what we’d just done.
Tha-Agoth beat furiously on the rod that had pinned him for so many years with both fists. At first, nothing happened. Then, the rod started to bend under the assault. Tha-Agoth unleashed a flurry of blows, hands bloody. Finally, the rod snapped about two feet above the altar. Tha-Agoth wrenched the short length of rod from the stone that supported it and hurled it away toward the stairs.
So much for your indestructible object, mage.
Holgren took a step back from him a bit too late. I’d have backed off when fists started flying.
Tha-Agoth grabbed him by his shirtfront and lifted him off his feet. Holgren made no move, but I felt magic gathering around him. It wouldn’t be enough, whatever he was preparing.
“Think very carefully about what you do next, Tha-Agoth," I said.
You sent my sister to my enemy. For that, I should kill you. But you freed me from an age of torment. What should I do with you two?
“Why don’t we just call it even and start fresh? We aren’t your main concern, Tha-Agoth. We want the Shadow King destroyed as much as you do if not more. We’re your allies.”
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
“We share a common goal, damn it. What happens after the Shadow King is destroyed doesn’t really concern us right now. We’ve got to get to Athagos before she gets to him. Frankly, we don't have time for this.”
Tha-Agoth dropped Holgren, who stumbled but did not fall, still holding on to energies he’d summoned.
I know truth when I hear it.
“Good. What do you suggest we do next?”
Now, I go and look at the whole of the sky for the first time in a thousand years instead of mere slivers of it. With that, he walked across the chamber, through the doors, and up the stairs.
I looked at Holgren. He shrugged. We followed Tha-Agoth up into the wreckage of his city, Holgren ahead of me. I stopped and surreptitiously picked up the short piece of rod that Tha-Agoth had flung toward the stairs, securing it under my ragged shirt in my belt. It was mostly instinct that made me do it. I had a vague, itchy feeling that it might come in handy at some point.
#
How much has time undone, Tha-Agoth said upon entering the Tabernacle grounds. The gardens have run riot. Something close to shock suffused his features. What did he expect after a thousand years?
“I’m afraid you haven’t seen the half of it yet,” I told him. “Wait until you get out into the city. Though a lot of the destruction is covered by the snow.”
Yes. The weather is inclement. He glanced up at the sky. The wind suddenly died, and the snow stopped falling. Just like that. Then, the cloud cover began to thin away. The sun broke through. I could feel the temperature begin to climb.
I began to understand just how powerful he actually was. A hope for surviving the Shadow King began to grow within me, tempered by a certain feeling of dread for what might happen after. We had unleashed a power on the world that would probably, for good or ill, change it forever.
Tha-Agoth started off toward the gates. We followed him through the melting snow. When he saw what had happened to his city, I thought he was going to cry.
He turned in slow circles, taking in the destruction. The feeling of loss and sorrow rolled off him in waves.
How fate must hate me to allow this to happen.
“I don’t know anything about fate. I do know a little about time. Nothing lasts forever.”
He stared at me, a grim expression on his bronze face.
Not so, Amra. I will show you otherwise. He set off to the north. Holgren and I followed. What else could we do?
Tha-Agoth climbed the tower I’d gone to the day before—was it only a day? We followed. “What are you planning?” I asked him as we went up the cracked stairs.
You shall see.
“If it doesn’t have something to do with catching up to your sister, we’re wasting time.”
There is time enough for this.
“I guess I’ll just have to take your word on it since I have no idea what you’re going to do.”
He didn’t respond but just kept climbing the steps. When we reached the top floor, he went from one window to the next, looking out at the corpse of Thagoth.
It was now completely free of the last remnants of snow, dreary desolation ringed on all sides by the death lands. Then, impatient with his limited ability to see, I suppose, he gestured with one hand, and the roofless walls of the tower fell away, leaving an unobstructed view on all sides. The stones didn’t fall really; they just disappeared.
Now, you will see. What has been done can be undone. What time has destroyed, I can mend here in this place. First, I will cure the disease that eats away at the edges of my domain.
A wind started up, blowing outward in all directions from Tha-Agoth. That golden glow suffused him again, only this time, it was swept up by the wind and formed a pulsing, shimmering whirlwind with him at the base. Powerful gusts battered us. I fell to my knees and held onto the edge of the tower’s precipice. Holgren followed my lead.
The storm grew to an intensity that threatened to pluck us from the tower top. Tha-Agoth gestured, throwing his arms wide. The whirlwind of light surged outward in all directions. It hit the death lands with a mighty rumble.
The scale of the change was massive and instantaneous. Demented vegetation turned to ash, swept away by that light-suffused, cleansing wind. Horribly mutated predators were caught in it, died, and decomposed in the blink of an eye.
It was finished in the space of a dozen slow breaths. The wind just ceased to be, and the golden light winked out. Tha-Agoth had swept the remnants of the Sorcerer King’s death magic away from the limits of the valley, scoured the earth around the city clean of any taint of it. I looked out on that newly discovered terrain and saw tumbled stones and bare, red earth. Dreary as it was, it was a beautiful thing to behold.
I am far from finished. Observe.
I looked up into his starlight eyes then back out on the red, stony wasteland that had been covered by the death lands. First, I saw nothing. Then, I glimpsed movement out of the corner of my eye and felt the first tremors. The ground was spewing up stones.
What the Sorcerer King’s magic tore down, what time’s patient fingers pried apart, I will rebuild.
Hewn stones flew through the air in a complicated dance, re-knitting buildings, streets, fountains, garden walls, statues. The very dust of crumbled stones was drawn together like iron filings to a lodestone, obscuring much of the magic playing out before us in a howling, rust-colored storm.
When the storm was done, we saw Thagoth standing in its true splendor for the first time in over a thousand years. It was breathtaking. The shattered ruins I’d wandered through for six months hadn’t given me a true sense of the beauty of the city.
It put Lucernis or any of the great cities of the Dragonsea to shame. Where most of them had grown up in haphazard fashion over the course of centuries, the city that now lay before me was planned with care and thought given to the placement of streets and fountains and garden spaces. Perhaps one of the great builders or architects could have appreciated and understood it more, a Lohen or a Kanikesh, but I understood well enough that Thagoth was of a piece. The last detail had been planned before the first stone was ever laid. It saddened me that it was, despite its resurrection, still a dead city.
Patience, Amra. Patience and faith. My work is not yet complete. You see only bones.
Fountains sputtered to life first as their workings knitted back together below ground. Water splashed on stone and caught the light. Then green things began to reappear across the city—trees shot up, vines climbed walls and sprouted flowers, hedges burst forth in spots that had lacked something I couldn’t name before, and lush grass rushed across bare expanses of earth like a frantic, green tide, changing the primary color of the city from rust red to emerald green.
“How can you do this? I know you’re powerful, but—”
This is my city. The earth and the stones of the earth here take their color from the blood I shed to create it and to keep it safe. It is mine. Time itself cannot destroy it if I will otherwise.
“But it’s still lifeless. Cities are meant to be inhabited. Your people are long since dust.”
He smiled. The ones that fled the cataclysm, I can do nothing for. Those whose lives Athagos took I can do nothing for. All others I cradle in my palm. My blood is life eternal. What the earth has taken to its bosom, I can call back into the light. Your knife, please.
I handed it over to him, and he plunged it into his palm unflinchingly. Then, he flung the resulting blood droplets out and away from the tower.
Awake, you sleepers, he muttered as he walked around the tower top, slinging blood in every direction. Death is only a dream.
And they came. A vast humming filled the air, and thousand-year-old corpses reassembled themselves out of the tiniest bits of matter, suddenly appearing one after the other on lawns, in streets, in doorways. They stood and stretched for all the world like sleepers awakening from a thousand-year nap. It was powerful magic.
They had lost their lives here. Even after an age, some infinitesimal portion of their physical selves still remained in this place. It seemed to be enough for Tha-Agoth to work with.
“Nothing is ever truly destroyed, I suppose,” said Holgren.
Come, awake. I call to you, my people, my children. Time is no bar, and matter no barrier. Come. One by one they woke from death, hundreds of me
n, women, children—an entire bronze-skinned race that had not walked the world in a thousand years. Straight-limbed and handsome, each and every one, they looked up at their emperor and god with an expression of wonder and rapture. They uttered no sound. And Tha-Agoth looked down on them with what I can only call a look of paternal affection.
My children, he said. My people. I am eternal, they are eternal, denizens of this eternal city.
That was all great and wonderful but had little to do with the doom pressing down on the rest of the world. I had had enough of wonders. I wanted to foil the Shadow King, save Holgren from a fate worse than death, and go home.
“Can I have my knife back now?” I asked.
#
He decided to start out as the setting sun touched the rim of the valley. Tha-Agoth had called up the warriors of his people to accompany us, and the rest went back to their daily lives as if nothing had happened. That in itself was bizarre, but the truly unnerving thing about the Thagothians was that none of them spoke. Not a word, not a sigh or a chuckle or a hum. Not even the children. They walked around their resurrected city with content smiles plastered on their faces, like half-wits, or sleepwalkers.
Thagoth was not a city I wanted to spend any more time in, whether the death lands were gone or not.
What Holgren thought of the situation, he kept to himself. He was hardly more talkative than the Thagothians. When I asked him what the matter was, he shrugged and squeezed my hand lightly with his own burned one. We were sitting out of the way of things, against the outer wall of the Tabernacle.
“Everything depends on what happens now,” he said. “I’m nervous is all.”
“Don’t be. We’ve made it through everything else. We’ll make it through this as well.”
He smiled and nodded then pointed out to the square where warriors were assembling around Tha-Agoth. They wore ancient bronze breastplates and helms and nothing by way of armor below their waists except for pale, linen breechcloths and sandals. They carried huge, bronze shields and long, bronze-tipped spears. They looked like something out of legend. I had no idea what good they could possibly do in the coming struggle, but they’d look good doing it.
Thief Who Spat in Luck's Good Eye Page 18
