COBALT 7.9: THE SAVIOUR
“You are trapped in this instant and you do not know why. You know only that you must escape. And that knowledge is all that traps you. Do not listen to the voices; it matters not what they say. All of them will lead you only downwards. No. It is the silence you need to heed. I hereby leave the next page blank for you to fill with your thoughts. Do not be too quick to turn it!”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 12:18-26
“Kill them, and Cullimo dies.”
The words were incongruously harsh, given the delicacy of his voice. He must’ve been a crawling thing on the floor or ceiling; whatever his shape, I hadn’t noticed his entrance in the darkness. The druid took his human form right behind me, on the edge of my circle. He was backing me up, facing down his fellow heretic without the slightest tremor in his voice.
“Nighteye,” I choked. The word alone was a prayer of heartfelt gratitude.
But what was this he was saying?
“Cull…” It was the sorcerer’s turn to shudder, and his focus on his shields wavered momentarily, causing his force-blades to wobble chaotically. He still had his claw raised. “You wouldn’t do it. Y-you –“
“I did it like she told me to,” the druid replied smoothly. “You were right, about paying the price alone. I introduced a poison into his bloodstream through his food this afternoon. Ithilya’s diviners couldn’t see it, her druids couldn’t sense it. It’s already over. Unless…” Nighteye reached into his bedraggled robe, retrieving a small glass tube, a gelatinous fluid like glittering honey contained within. “Unless you give him this specific elixir. You wouldn’t have long, either.”
“He killed Fintwyna!”
Despite his vehement response, the sorcerer lowered his claw, bit by bit.
“No, he didn’t,” Nighteye said in a chiding tone. “Vardae explained everything. She won’t let you get to Uwaine, and I won’t let you get to Kas either. Deal with it.”
Uwaine? I thought. Could that be Winterprince’s name?
I had to admit to myself, though – I liked this new, assertive Nighteye.
“You’re… bluffing.” My enemy’s voice was strangled now.
The druid pulled back his hood, making his sad, sincere expression visible to both of us. “I wish I were, Aramas. I… I’m sorry. She, hm… she said this was how I – how I would…”
“It’s okay, Theor,” I murmured.
“Shut up!” the heretic shrieked. “How, then? What d’ you want?”
“Relinquish your shields over Kas’s family. Stand aside. I’ll let you take the elixir to him.”
“Swear by Vaahn!”
“I swear,” the druid whispered.
“No – no, say his name!” the sorcerer roared.
“I swear…” Nighteye licked his lips, “by Grandfather Vaahn.”
I ground my teeth, hearing the vile sound uttered by the champion.
The heretic – Aramas – slowly reduced his shields, one by one, until the blades surmounted his personal circle. He banished his quintet of wights and stepped away from my loved ones.
I circled around the room, moving at a snail’s pace to mirror him, stepping over one of the cast-aside benches to ensure our force-lines didn’t come close to contact.
The moment my shields were over the stacked-up pile of sleeping people, I shrugged out Avaelar. I pressed a healing potion into the sylph’s hands and had him check Xastur over for anything I couldn’t perceive, while keeping my eyes on the others: Aramas was reaching out for the contents of Nighteye’s hand.
There were more things I could do, now – many more. I could summon a thousand things to hold him tight while I flayed him… wrap him in my new octopus… Or I could rip and tear at him with my black talons… test Gilaela’s eolastyr-derived augmentations on his flesh… Perhaps he had a regenerative quality that would permit him to endure a whole sequence of deaths… I could kill him a dozen ways, if I was lucky…
“And we’re supposed to just let him go?” I growled as he took the phial from Nighteye. “Let him try again, another time and place? He needs to die!”
“He won’t try,” Nighteye said plainly. “He can’t. And I’d like to speak to my friend, to Kas, not this vampire, thank you.”
The sad, almost elvish eyes were turned towards me in the gloom.
Gong! Gong! Gong!
Of course – he’s right. My knees started to knock suddenly.
Nighteye looked back at Aramas and nodded, stepping away from him towards me, while I just floundered in shock.
The arch-sorcerer wasn’t looking back at Nighteye – his face was centred on me still, the baleful glare burning into me, my vampiric senses going berserk.
Then, still staring daggers at me, he utilised a power I’d never seen before. It was somewhat similar to a mizelikon: waves of shadow were rippling over him from his head to his toes, giving his body the quality of smoke. As though he were enwraithed, he turned aside and disappeared through the wall, leaving an after-image that hung there briefly in the air before it dissipated.
I flung the vampire out of me, then sent it back to the shadowland in a burst of amethyst mist. Freed of its influence, I almost sobbed, looking down in the darkness at my loved ones, piled as sacrifices…
I could tell from Avaelar’s demeanour that they were all going to be okay.
I couldn’t help myself – my body took over and it threw itself at Nighteye, as he’d thrown himself at me several hours ago. I held onto him, and I wept.
So close… they were so close…
“You,” I gasped, “you –“
I couldn’t even muster the wherewithal to thank him properly, but he seemed to understand. With what must’ve been excruciating gentleness, given his strength, he patted me on the back.
Then after a few moments the embarrassment came over me and I released him, looking aside, scowling in self-directed scorn.
“W-what was I thinking?” I moaned, pulling off my mask and pawing at my face with the heel of my hand. “Stupid stupid stupid!”
“Vardae’s got our back,” he replied. The new confidence was there in his voice again.
I shook my head. “There’ll be more. He won’t be the last, and she won’t stop them all. I just – I didn’t realise –“
The champions whose identities are public… they don’t have people like this. Sure, threatening to kill any innocent is going to bring any champion to their knees. But threatening to kill their loved ones, it’s going to break a champion in two.
Break me in two…
We are all broken, came my own voice from months back, winging its way down the corridors of my memory, causing me to shudder again.
“Is it our fate?” I asked bitterly. “It’s a curse, power. I – I thought it was a blessing in disguise, but it’s not. It’s really a curse, isn’t it? All the way through…”
I remembered my life before all this. How selfish was I? To drag them into this? All of them, victims not of heretics, not of criminals – victims of me… Sure, I saved a bunch of lives – but why did I get to choose those innocents over these? Xantaire never volunteered her son’s life for his place as collateral in my arrogant games. And at its core, wasn’t it just that I wanted this? – the excitement? I wanted to be standing here, making life-or-death decisions, dancing on the razor’s edge that threatened in every moment to topple me into darkness.
I’d read too many books, envied too many false heroes, and emulated the legends as they were passed down by word of mouth. I had acted throughout as though, because I was invincible, nothing could ever touch me. The truth was the exact opposite.
A curse.
Nighteye was nodding, his expression still sorrowful as he sighed in resignation and pulled up his hood, hiding his face once more.
“She made you kill a horse, and, now, you kill a human for her –“
“No, Kas,” he said, turning away towards the apartment door. “I was bluffing.”
He moved towards the exit, putting out his hand to grip the edge of the slightly-ajar door.
“Then, Vardae might kill you for that,” I warned him.
“She’s not evil, Kas. She told me I could bluff, if I wanted.”
She did, did she?
He was still heading outside, swinging the door open.
This is the time to save him.
“You’ve always known best, Nighteye. Always. But you must know she’s indulging you, just to bring you deeper into her trust. You can stop now. Before you do it for real. One day you’ll look back at tonight and you won’t even be able to remember why you didn’t. Then you’ll be lost forever.“
He froze right on the threshold, silhouetted against the dreary light of Mud Lane. His head was bowed, and voice was low when he replied, not turning.
“I always wanted to kill them, Kas. My father, my brothers… And I could do it. It would be so easy. I’ve seen it, a thousand ways, a million times… Vardae even sh-showed them to me. But I – I think I’m not going to. I think I’m… g-going to go.”
“Go?”
“Away. From Mund. From everything. I can –“
A hollow boom far above Mud Lane fills me with sudden, unspeakable horror.
Another voice, a single word, comes down as if from a goddess beyond the skies, louder than thunder, flooding the lane with light:
“No!”
I don’t even see the stroke of her lightning-blade – only the shining line of radiance that is burned into my vision after it passes through his spine at the base of the skull, biting clean through the walls on either side of him too.
There is no fountain of blood, no spray – the wound is perfectly cauterised, the action perfectly irreversible.
Nighteye’s head doesn’t roll, but lands with a dull smack then sits there, at rest inside the smouldering hood.
His body, still standing, begins to tremble.
I stare, shivering, and I watch his ghost, twisting in the nethernal wind.
The body collapses – the ghost becomes transparent inside a tornado, a vortex of inevitability –
I watch him go, go for good, and feel the change as his flesh cries out to me, cries out for the sick half-life I can restore to it – a headless zombie –
“No!” I cry back at her out there, lunging forwards, far too late to do anything except catch the corpse before it suffers the same ignominy as his head.
I lower him to the floor with all the respect such a mutilated corpse deserves, and when I look back up she is there, right there, floating just off the balcony.
I see the anger in her eyes and I mirror it by instinct.
“What are you doing?” I shriek.
“Me? What? Kas!” She doesn’t understand, but she’s still angry – more angry – offended at my words. “We fought the demons – while – what, Kas? I thought you were saving them? What is zis? Look at you! Get avay from it!”
“It’s Nighteye!” I said, starting to get myself under control. “Nighteye! You killed Nighteye, Em! He’s dead.”
“What?” she muttered. “What? No, no, zat can’t be right, zere is no –“
I unleashed gremlin-light from my hand, illuminating the room, the corpse –
The shadowed face wasn’t quite free of the hood, but she could see the hair. It was enough to shut her up.
“You killed him, and he just saved them. He was going to leave Mund, he wasn’t –“
“He voz a heretic!” she screamed at me. “Vot – what are you? Kas!”
The desperation in her voice sliced my soul.
“Ze book…” The words were wrung from her; she spoke breathily, as though her insides were contorting in panic. “He told me – zis morning – he should’ve never have let you have ze book…”
I saw the tears coursing down her cheeks, streaming behind the phoenix-mask.
“Em –”
A flash of colour and a gust of super-charged air announced Tanra’s arrival. The seeress was crouching beside Theor’s body, looking down on him.
I could hear Killstop’s whimpering through the frowning mask.
“Oh – oh no,” she moaned. “Why? How did this happen, Kas? Why didn’t I see it?”
“Everseer sent him,” I said, “to save them. Save me from it.” I grated out the remainder: “Don’t you see. It’s all over now.”
“She saw it, then,” Tanra mumbled. “She could’ve come herself. She gave him a death-sentence.” She turned, the frown coming to centre on me – her eyes were shining through the slits. “She did this to us.”
“I understand now,” Em intoned.
That quiet, untrembling voice was dreadful to my ears.
I looked back up at her, and she was drawing away from the balcony, surrounding herself in a nimbus of light.
“Both of you, is it? How voz it I could have been so blind? You vere vith her, veren’t you? Last night.”
I couldn’t hold myself to the lie. I lowered my head in defeat.
Killstop blurred to her feet, daggers appearing in her hands, then froze –
“No,” Em said, moving farther away again. “You should know zat I have removed your flight-spells. You cannot stop me from leaving.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Killstop growled.
“Tanra, no!” I snapped, putting out my arm as if to restrain her.
Like I could restrain her.
“There’s a way to stop you without killing you; you know I would never do that, Storm!” the seeress continued in a more-measured tone. “You don’t need to tell them about this. You don’t need any of this. There are ways I can help you…”
The wizard floated there, incandescent, below the spans and walkways of Mud Lane. People were coming out of their doors and opening their windows to watch, even though the Mourning Bells were still ringing.
I didn’t like it, this sudden pause, and I didn’t trust Tanra not to attack Em. Even if Stormsword were trying to make it difficult for her, an arch-diviner of Killstop’s calibre could at least throw a knife, do her some harm…
Surreptitiously, I spread my shields across the space, so as to encompass both of them. Any violent will would hurl her out of its area, while keeping Em protected –
When my outer shield repelled Em, I instantly realised my mistake.
“Wait!” I cried, throwing out my hands in what I intended as a gesture of peace – how was I to know she was already harbouring ill-will?
It must’ve looked to her like I was trying to attack her with force-blades, because she drew away a few feet from my barrier, doubled her fists, and levelled her arms straight at me.
The white fire she sent tearing through my defences was as strong as I’d ever encountered. If she’d hit Winterprince with this, he’d have been steam on the wind.
Each barrier fell, taking longer and longer to buckle as she penetrated deeper into my shapes – until at last only the circle, triangle and square remained to cover me and Killstop standing beside me.
The white light was a furious column of pure heat, and, in combination with the pressure of maintaining the shield, sweat sprung out on my brow almost instantly.
“Do you want me to fight her?” Killstop asked in a low voice, hard to hear under the billowing of the wizardry.
“What?” I asked her, panicked. “No! She –“
“I won’t kill her. I promise. She will be healed afterwards. We can bind her. Talk to her.”
“I…”
Em supports the Magisterium. She makes excuses for those who fed her and clothed her and gave her a purpose.
Those who sprinkle the seed of men in the mud and let the woebegotten fester there, misshapen and ignored. Those whose boot is upon every throat, of every creed and race and kind, save for their own.
She believes in death. She will never stop killing.
She killed Nighteye.
And at some point, at her side, I’ll do it too. I’ll kill. Then one day, I’ll even wear the smile while I do it, like a badge of honour.
I’ll be lost, like I warned, warned Nighteye, warned Theor before, before she –
“Too late,” Tanra murmured – and at the very next instant, Em gave up her attack, frustrated by the time it was taking to chew through my shield; she whipped about and soared away like a bolt of her lightning, climbing into the sky, heading north-east.
Towards Hightown.
“Where’s she going?” I panted.
“Gah!” Tanra blurted, whirling and stomping back into my apartment. “I can’t see – Zakimel, obviously, but who else? Where? What gets said? Oh… Bor…”
I followed her into the main room, staring at her nonplussed, but as soon as I came to a stop she just walked around me, heading straight back to the door once more.
“I have to move Mum,” she muttered, looking at the floor. “Kas… I’ll always be your friend, Kas. Please trust me. I’ll keep everyone safe.”
“Tanra – what – what is this…?”
I reached out, grabbed her hand; she looked me in the eyes, and shook her head softly.
“Goodbye, Kas – goodbye!”
She vanished, leaving me empty-handed in a room of stacked-up sacrifices, a sylph, and a heretic’s decapitated corpse.
I stood in the dark, my back against the damaged door, and tried to focus on my breathing. Tapping my wraith-essence helped. Avaelar was talking, but I was only half-listening… quarter-listening. My mind could only do so many things at once, and the sudden headache that started filling my skull with rocks wasn’t helping.
Everything had fallen apart, in a matter of seconds, and I couldn’t understand.
I was standing over Nighteye’s headless corpse, and the temptation to simply bring him back was surprising in its strength. The sorcerer’s mind I’d inherited along with my abilities was already going over the options with regard to the severed head. It could be an advantage to certain undead, the way I understood it…
Overriding those base sensations, though, was a sea of fire in my thoughts: the recognition, however unbearable, that my life now hung in the balance.
Thanks to Irimar’s games, Em had been put into the perfect position to turn on me. After our meeting with Nighteye last night, Timesnatcher had made plain to her the real nature of my betrayal, yet she’d said nothing all day. She knew it had nothing to do with romance. Instead, she’d had all day to mull over the notion I might commit Heresy.
Did Timesnatcher see this? Or a part of it? Did he know this was coming?
I wouldn’t have put it past him, even given Vardae’s potency.
“Can you wake them?” I asked Avaelar quietly, letting some radiance out of my hand to illuminate the room. My sylph just nodded, looking almost as disturbed as I must’ve been, then turned to his task.
I sent some gungrelafor with the pieces of Nighteye’s body to the shrine of Yune. The way I figured it, I could send a message to Fang now – the truth about Theor’s new identity was out of the bag. At least I could give the poor girl some closure. I doubted anyone else would care, at least outwardly – heretics being what they were, it’d be frowned-upon to grieve over the death of one, wouldn’t it? And Everseer had sent him to his death, as Tanra said… It wasn’t like she really cared about him…
I put the benches back in place and stretched out Orstrum’s mattress; one by one we laid out my sleeping family members in more comfortable positions, before Avaelar went to each of them in turn, blowing gently in their ears.
I had Xan awakened first.
She was on her side on one of the benches, opposite her son, and the moment she opened her eyes she rolled off the bench in a panic, literally climbing the table with her elbows and knees, such was her urgency, her desperation to get to Xastur’s side.
“Th-the scar might not… not fu-fully heal, but I’ll g-get an arch-druid to look –”
“No you won’t,” she said fervently, gathering her still-sleeping son into her arms and closing her eyes. “Oh no, no you won’t, Kastyr. This is it. I’m not even sorry. We can’t even be around you anymore.”
Orstrum was shaking his head groggily, looking about in a daze. He slowly rolled onto his side to face us as my sylph moved on to the twins.
“Xantaire –” he croaked.
“No, old man!” she burst out, opening her eyes and glaring across at him. “You listen to me now. You think you got Morsus killed? Well what about Xastur? What about my son!”
She welled up with tears, and clung again to Xastur.
“This is it,” she went on. “It’s too much. You’ve got to go.”
I shook my head. The tears were rolling down my face now.
“What?” Jaroan cried, furious even as he opened his eyes. “No! This is our house! You go!”
I ignored him for the moment. “Xan – Xan, it’s not enough. Y-you’re in danger, wherever I go, if they know you were…” I let my voice drop away, remembering Tanra’s last words to me:
“I’ll keep everyone safe.”
The moment Jaid was up she ran across to me, flung herself into my arms.
“Kas – I knew you’d save us,” she murmured. “I knew it. I prayed to – to Yune, and she answered…”
I shook my head again, holding her tight. “I didn’t. I didn’t, okay! It was all some stupid diviner’s game and, and if they’d decided differently you’d all be dead, and Nighteye, maybe he wouldn’t but –”
“Kas, Kas slow down,” Xan said, suddenly looking, if such a thing were possible, even more ill. “What’s this about Nighteye?”
As Avaelar crouched beside Xastur, still cradled in his mother’s arms, I explained. I censored the worst of it, but I explained. I didn’t mention that it was Em who’d done it.
When I was done, I caught Xan staring in mingled horror and awe at the thin slice a champion had taken out of the apartment, a blackened groove now cutting through the walls on either side of the door-frame and through the hinge-side of the door itself.
“So what… what does this mean?” she asked. “Are they going to come for you too?”
As if in answer, between one peal and the next, the Mourning Bells suddenly dropped away.
We sat there in silence, and I felt as though I were on the block, waiting for the headsman’s axe to bite into my spine, do to me what had been done to Theor… poor Theor…
I rose to my feet, slowly detaching myself from my sister. “I have to go – to the graveyard. His – he’s there. Nighteye. I have to look after him.”
“We’ll come with you,” Jaroan said defiantly.
“No you will not,” I said, letting my wraith-form take over my flesh and beckoning to Avaelar. “I’ll be gone before you could get there, so don’t try, okay? I’ll – I’ll be back. I won’t let them take me in, don’t worry.”
“You’ll fight?” my brother asked, eyes flashing.
“It won’t come to that,” I replied, spreading my wings. “I’ll run.”
“Can – can you leave Princess?” Jaid asked in a trembling little voice. Her bottom lip was going.
“I… Princess went for a paint-job… I’ll show her to you again really soon, okay? I promise. Hey, that’s not a bad idea, really…”
I bequeathed them a host of huge golden squirrels, under firm instructions to defend them against attack but not to strike the first blow. I set a series of shields over the apartment, and barely reinforced the outermost one, putting almost double the effectiveness into the next one. This way I ought to receive a better warning if someone started dismantling them.
“I don’t think I want to stay here,” Xan said, trying to stop Xastur from mounting the nearest fey squirrel. At first when he’d awoken he’d seemed sullen, but it hadn’t taken him long to cheer up.
“Trust the boy, Xantaire,” Orstrum murmured, sounding scared too – then his eyes met mine. “Trust the man.”
I nodded to him in gratitude as I let myself slip out of physical reality, into the shapes and shadows of the wraith’s motion. A beat of softly-glowing blue wings, and I was gone.
* * *
I fished out the half-drunk wine bottle from my satchel and finished it, then crushed it to shards in my hands. The splinters of glass weren’t sturdy enough to pierce my toughened skin, and as I rubbed my palms together they turned to dust.
No point throwing the bottle, or letting it fall. That could kill someone.
I flew high above the city, and it was as though I were doing it for the first time. Not that I felt giddy, beyond the alcohol’s effects, or that I forgot how to fly – but, looking down, I had that sensation I’d felt the night Dustbringer came for me. The exhilaration, like this was new to me. Gazing down on street after street of tiny little people, going about their Yearsend business, and in certain spots helping to clear the post-Incursion rubble. I didn’t descend to help – I just observed. After hiding Theor’s body and haltingly glyphing a message to Sol, I remembered to contact Zakimel about Ilitar and the others Aramas had taken for his slaves… Thankfully he didn’t answer either, and I spoke into the telepathic space, wondering whether he’d even listen to it, now he was under the impression my words might contain Heresy…
Afterwards I’d joined with the vampire, utilising his essence to peer through the darkness; coursing the clouds, I could pick out every detail, every facet of the scenes below me. Utilising his coldness, to separate myself.
Ordinarily it would be a shame that this eldritch stole away so much of my empathy. It would’ve been the perfect tool for a champion, if it allowed them to actually do their job. I could see now why apparently none of my peers had elected to join with a vampire. Still, for what I wanted tonight, he was useful. Most all I needed to hide. Up here, the wraith turned up to full, I was practically non-existent.
I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly, but in the moment it felt as though, if I could just not exist, everyone would be better off for it. If ‘Fintwyna’ had killed me in Firenight Square… none of this would’ve happened. Wyre would’ve never kidnapped the twins. Aramas would’ve never come after my family.
And Em might’ve died, in the Incursion, without the potion I made her take…
Thinking of Em was difficult.
“Hey!” I cry indignantly. “I’m the good guy here.”
“I vos called to fight a demon-summoner,” comes the foreign-accented voice of a girl or young woman from above me. “And look vhat I have found.”
There was so much – so much had happened in the past few months…
“I vill be happy to meet with you at noon tomorrow at ze bank in Blackbranch Square… And yes, you may call me Em.” This last she says quietly, looking down and not meeting my eyes. Her smile is fragile, shy.
We’d both changed, for better and for worse in different ways. I remembered how she’d defended me. How quickly we’d become besotted with one another.
Em glances at me again as I struggle.
She looks back at our opponents, and flexes her fingers.
The frostbolt and fireball swell once more, resuming their former diameter and brightness.
“I shall take him to Henthae myself,” she says. “Release him now, Dustbringer, or you vill face me in combat, and I shall not hold back.”
That night, with Dustbringer’s spectres… Would it be like that, if they came for me? Would they send a champion? Would I have to fight Netherhame? Would they send Em?
I almost wished they would. I could imagine it – not fighting her, but confronting her. The bitter accusations and retorts flashed through my head, tangled like the intestines of some submerged creature, only half making sense at best: in my mind I always won, capable of effortlessly changing the context of the argument as soon as I needed to.
“You killed Nighteye!”
“I’m your girlfriend! You’ve known me longer! I should be more important!”
“It’s not a contest! You know you can never come first for me, Em.”
“Your brother and sister! You aren’t zeir dad you know, Kas. You have to live your own life.”
“How dare you! Nighteye knew it. I’m all they’ve got! ‘Live my life’! Till someone like you comes and kills me… You killed him, and he wasn’t trying to kill you!”
“He would’ve killed ozzers.”
“No he wouldn’t! But we didn’t even give him a chance! You! You didn’t give him a chance!”
“He voz a heretic! Zat’s how zis works!”
“No, that’s how you work. How didn’t I see you for what you are till now? Except that’s the worst thing: I did, and I didn’t even care… how sick is that of me…”
We could get through this, couldn’t we? Go back to normal, pretend nothing had happened?
No. If there was a way out, it was through. We had to face this misunderstanding head-on. I had to hear her explanation. We had to finally have the discussion I’d been putting off since forever.
It had to have been a few hours since the Bells stopped ringing by now. Long enough for her to have made her report. Long enough for her to have gone home.
I wheeled about, heading towards Rivertown. Oldtown’s ancient cobbles disappeared behind me, rolling up above me as I sank, descending into the lower districts. Within minutes I was crossing over the Greyspan; reconstruction crews were already there, and the magisters were allowing a limited flow of civilians to make their way over the river.
When I reached Em’s, I came to hover in the street in front of her window.
“Emrelet!” I shouted.
Nothing.
“Emrelet!”
I used an illusory sound-effect, bringing my voice through the glass and letting it emanate within her bedroom.
Vampiric senses informed me that someone was opening the front door, so I backed away and sank down some more so that I had just a few feet of empty air below me.
The door swung open and Linn stood there, Atar framed in candlelight just behind him, both of them in their bedclothes.
“Mr. and Mrs. Reyd, I’m so sorry to disturb you at this hour…” I supposed it had to be around midnight now. “It’s just, we had this argu-“
“Feychilde.” Linn’s voice was cold. “You shouldn’t be here. Not now. Not ever. Zis conversation is over.”
“Linnard,” I swallowed, “I don’t know what she’s told you but it isn’t true – or not quite, anyway – not that she’s lying to you, but she doesn’t understand the truth and if I could just speak to her…”
“She doesn’t want to see you, Kas,” Atar said in a softer voice designed to carry only to my ears, rather than those of the neighbours I could sense watching, listening in. “She says zat you changed.”
What does she mean, I changed? We both changed!
How dared she try to control the truth like that? Did they know what she’d done?
“Over,” Linn repeated with finality, and, nudging his wife back, he went to slam the door.
I rushed down and forwards and then I was there, wraith turned low, satyr-strength and fey-flight easily keeping him from closing the door, even though he had his feet on the ground.
I saw him straining against my immovable pressure, saw the fear on Atar’s face, and I felt sorry for them.
I could hear Em’s sobbing, uncontrollable, echoing down the stairs – and I did not feel sorry.
“I’ve changed?” I hissed. “It’s your daughter who changed. You know she’s a killer, don’t you?”
“Whose fault is zat?” Linn gasped, still struggling to shift my weight. “You made her zis – zis champion!”
“It was before that!” I spat. “Maybe if she let me tell you when she died –”
“Vot?” Atar breathed, falling back against the hall wall in shock.
“You let her die?” Linn whispered, suddenly stepping away from the door, his hand sliding limply down its surface. Then his face hardened. “You – let – her – die!”
He struck me, and I wasn’t using my wraith or my shield. His fist connected with my chin. The skin on his knuckles opened, he hit me that hard, and I did feel a trace of pain.
I let it happen. It would’ve been a simple thing to slip aside, but I forced myself to take it. I could hardly return the favour if he didn’t land the blow, could I? And I found I really, really wanted to hit someone right now.
I struck him back, and he had a bit less choice about the matter. My fist connected with his chin, and his skin opened again –
Blood, delicious-smelling blood, splashed out to cover the door.
Atar screamed.
“It’s okay,” I murmured, reaching for my demiskin to find a healing potion –
Satyr-reflexes alone let me evade the lightning that came in two directions – one finger of electricity came streaking at me from Em halfway up the stairs, but there was another beam, bigger, perhaps lethal, shooting down at me from the sky outside.
It wasn’t too difficult to ascend slightly and slip back out the doorway before I was fried. The two lightning-bolts met just below me, then together they flowed back into the house, up the stairs to infuse Em with their energies.
I started working on shields as she gave chase, tearing out the doorway, wreathed in her tempest. Within two or three seconds we were far above the powerless ones below.
This is it, I thought, grinning, as she struck my defences with an initial set of lightning-bolts, testing them. This is what I’ve been waiting for.
She killed Nighteye. She defended the Magisterium over Zadhal. She never trusted me, not really. She took Timesnatcher’s side over mine.
“You, Feychilde, leave me vith no choice!”
Her voice was that of the arch-magister, the same as it had been that night when we first met. But this time, there was no excuse.
This time, I was the darkmage.
“Come on, tell me you’re not enjoying this,” I yelled back, still grinning, rebuilding shields at the same rate as she destroyed them. “We’ve always been waiting for this, you and I!”
“I don’t even know you, sorcerer! And you do not know me!” Her eyes shone white, the radiance only disappearing as she blinked, twinkling like twin stars out there in the night. “Henthae explained everything! Ze lie, it is over!”
My grin slipped somewhat. “Say again?”
I slowed, and watched as she screeched to a halt a hundred yards from me. She was a nimbus of pure white in the blackness. The wind didn’t buffet her like it did me – it radiated out from her, platinum hair dancing in the tornado.
“It voz Lovebright! It voz always her! She had plans for you, plans zat never saw ze light of day… I voz to be instrumental in vot you became… and so I have been, to my regret.”
She unleashed a sheet of lightning that tore through five shields at the same time, the rolling waves of power crackling as they spread through my blue lines.
She’d been holding back.
I furiously fought to remake the defences, frowning. “What was Lovebright?” I forced myself to laugh. “You’re not making any sense now!”
“Lovebright, who made me love you! She – she made Henthae do it to me… Eizzer vay, I do not love you, Kastyr Mortenn. It is undone, now. I do not, and I never did!”
There was no word in the languages of the Mundic Realm – no word even in Zadhalite – for the kind of cold that entered my gut. It was a blade. It was designed to kill.
‘I remembered how she’d defended me. How quickly we’d become besotted with one another.’
All a lie?
All of it? Everything she’d felt? Everything I’d felt from her?
The knife of ice that entered my stomach and slashed around in there – it found my ego, found it and punctured it, jabbing the serrated blade in deep and sawing back and forth, releasing every scrap of identity I’d built up for myself since kicking a gravestone three months ago.
“You’re serious,” I said, having to hear myself say it aloud for it to begin to sink in.
“I am serious,” she replied, voice shaking. “You… you need to understand, before zis happens. Thinking of you – it is repulsive to me now. I voz never… never vith you to begin viz…”
I could tell she was barely dealing with it either. It must’ve been far, far worse for her.
Our relationship had only been going on a couple of months – better expressed in weeks, really. I supposed I hadn’t even known her a hundred days.
But squashed into those days were thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of minutes. Existence hadn’t been a slow, laborious thing since becoming a champion – I’d lived those minutes, those seconds, down to the very last.
I loved her, damn it. And despite everything we’d been through together – everything we’d shared – this was it.
I accepted it, not with anger, but with submission.
I should’ve known… should’ve known it was too good to be true…
“Em, you must be –“
“You cannot call me zat.”
“No, listen, Em – Emrelet, I don’t –“
“Do not speak to me!” she screamed suddenly, screwing her eyes shut, and thunder drowned out my words, even when I tried to augment them.
There was something about having my power of speech robbed from me, something that ignited a spark within my breast, a fire that despite its briefness came to touch the tinder of my slowly-churning frustrations.
Touch them and set them ablaze.
“Fine,” I said to myself, and started moving towards her. I would batter her with my shields –
When I’d covered half the distance, travelling close to top speed, she opened her eyes again.
Silence – complete, utterly bewildering – suddenly descended. The air itself expired.
“And now you are mine, heretic,” she snarled quietly.
I feared her.
I feared her.
It was only in the light of this revelation that the reality of my situation really struck me.
Why did I join with the vampire again?
I’d struck her dad. I didn’t even know how injured he was, and I’d barely even made an effort at healing him afterwards –
I faltered, almost careening off to the right –
This, this darkness, it was an addiction, and as I realised my error, my foolishness – that was when she unleashed her true power.
Nothing had been done to my mind by the vampire, nothing that equalled the transformation in hers since Henthae showed her the truth.
She didn’t open up with flame, with ice or wind or any of the other tricks at her disposal. I was a darkmage, ostensibly trying to hurt her – one with the power to do so, maybe.
She had to respond as she did. I left her no choice.
My sentence, to be carried out immediately, was death. The punishment for Heresy, death.
I slowed to a crawl but not by will, losing leverage in the air – I only realised what she was doing when I found that I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t maintain my altitude. My wraith only slowed the process – even that power required some kind of substance to move through, it seemed.
She’d stolen the air within my shields – it was ingenious, I had to admit, evading the ill-will clause by tweaking the pressure of the air just beyond the shield’s edges… and without the air my wings, my lungs, didn’t work.
“For vot it’s vorth,” she murmured as I stopped moving forwards and felt my stomach lurch in descent, “I am sorry it has to be zis vay.”
She knew what she was doing to me. She knew what this meant to me, and she did it anyway. Satyr-durability wasn’t even going to have a shot at getting me through this. I built up speed, and I knew what the impact would be.
I plummeted. I fell.
As I had the last time Em, the Em I knew and loved, had died.
Only this time the way she died destroyed not her body but her soul, the death-blow dealt not by demons but by a respected elder, by Mistress Keliko Henthae –
Only this time, no one could catch me.
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