Viktor halted before the bridge, eyes on the Grelyt’s rushing waters and claymore against his uninjured shoulder. The other shoulder screamed beneath the shadow’s embrace, a fit match for the aftermath of Anastacia’s light still seething in his charred hands. Try though he might, he could manage no hatred for Josiri, not for betrayal in the city, nor ambush hidden beneath promise of parley. His heart held only weariness, and a sense of inevitability birthed by cosmic humours.
Of course it had to end there, on that bridge. On the spot where Katya Trelan had once given herself to the Raven for want of the courage to live, her son now did the same.
Such a waste.
Viktor reached out through his shadow, and recanted as his wounds screamed for attention. Even an hour before, he could have ended Josiri’s threat with barely a thought. Now, to assail him with shadow carried too great a risk. His whole being felt diffuse, as much a part of the Dark as the Dark was of him.
He needed no shadow to beat Josiri. He’d laid low emperors in his time, and fought an Empress to a standstill. All through steel and discipline, and the will to triumph. He was a hero, a champion. Josiri was only a man. An ordinary man. Viktor had killed more ordinary men than he could readily count.
But Sidara’s disquiet was a growing blight in his thoughts, and he feared delay as greatly as defeat. He risked a little shadow, reaching out to the umbral presence of Ocranza in nearby streets. To Drazina further east, their minds awash with thoughts of survival as they fought a running battle with Phoenixes. A caress of shadow – a nudge – and it was done, and Viktor free to grant Josiri the Raven’s mercy.
“Are we really to do this, brother?” he asked.
Josiri hesitated before replying, his aspect no less weary than Viktor’s own. “What choice have you left me?”
Viktor snorted. How small he seemed. Not just in stature, but in vision. He cursed himself for not seeing it before.
“I thought it was I who blamed my failings on others.”
Josiri’s only reply was to sweep his sword to the formal salute. For all the steel in his voice, his limbs shook. Impossible not to admire the man for marching knowingly into death. Viktor resolved that the Republic’s histories would hold no record of this moment. Let future generations believe Josiri loyal to the last. He could do that much for the man who’d been his closest friend.
He returned the salute and strode onto the bridge.
Viktor raised his sword to a two-handed high guard, letting his left arm bear the burden of the injured right. At once, Josiri shrank back, slipping into a defensive stance, shield to the fore. His limbs no longer shook, and the point of his longsword held steady.
The claymore looped about, the blade rising to threaten Josiri’s left side. Steel chimed, the longsword’s parry as textbook as the stance. Slower than it should have been, but Viktor allowed that neither of them were at their best in that hour.
With a cry borne of the day’s frustrations, Viktor launched a flurry of short, efficient strikes at Josiri’s head. A dull scrape sounded as the shield cheated the first. Others found empty air as Josiri retreated. Viktor thrust before the other regathered himself. Josiri’s cloak tore beneath steel.
Pressing his advantage, Viktor cleared the bridge’s crest, a roll of the wrists making feint of a downward arc in favour of a vicious slash at Josiri’s left. Taken off guard by the superior reach granted by Viktor’s height and the claymore’s length, Josiri again let his shield weather the blow. It bucked, the rim clattering against armour.
Again Viktor pressed in. Steel flashed between them as Josiri went on the offensive for the first time. Viktor’s hurried parry struck the slash away, but there was another, another, another, each attack flowing seamlessly into the next. A practised, blurring rhythm that sent Viktor scrambling back across the bridge’s crest.
Harrowed eyes tight, Josiri advanced, ash billowing about his feet.
A thrust cheated a slow parry as they recrossed the bridge’s crest. Steel shrieked as Viktor’s breastplate turned the blow his sword could not. Unbidden, regret arose that they’d never duelled in comradeship, not even between the red pennants on Stonecrest’s lawn. Unthinkable that after everything Josiri might prove the better swordsman.
Frustration gorged on pride and flared to fury. Roaring, Viktor swung a downward two-handed haymaker, fit to cleave a man in two. Josiri stepped aside. Too late, Viktor realised he’d meant to tempt such recklessness.
Even as the claymore sparked against cobbles, the longsword blurred silver beneath moonlight.
Viktor hurled himself away. The rising lunge meant to take his throat instead scored his left cheek. Warmth sheeted Viktor’s face and neck, the tang of blood sharp above the bitter, ashen air.
Snarling, he let loose a portion of his shadow. Let resurgent pain lend much-needed purpose. One sweep of the claymore battered Josiri’s shield wide. Another sliced deep into Josiri’s exposed forearm, severing the shield’s straps and drowning the vambrace in blood.
As Josiri cried out, Viktor gathered him up in shadow and hurled him against the bridge’s northern wall. A sweep of the claymore ripped the longsword from Josiri’s hand and sent it skittering down the bridge’s western slope.
“Why did you make me do this?” Viktor bellowed, loss and fury a poisonous mix in his ravaged heart. “We were brothers!”
Trapped in the shadow’s embrace, Josiri offered no reply.
Even in that moment, a piece of him yearned to stay his hand. To show mercy. But only a piece. In a single, smooth moment he raised the claymore and hacked down.
“No!”
The cry and the blur of movement came as one.
Flesh parted beneath the claymore’s blade. Collarbone and ribs snapped, the sensations travelling up Viktor’s arm to awaken shuddering empathies. And yet, there was no blood. The blow sent to bestow mercy Josiri no longer deserved fell not upon him, but a pale woman in shadowthorn robes, her grey eyes cold and unflinching.
Apara Rann cried out as Viktor ripped the claymore free. Again, as he seized her by the throat. Whirling, he slammed her against the bridge’s wall, scattering loose stone from the parapet and into the rushing Grelyt below.
Another loose end. Another act of mercy gone awry. How long would he suffer the mistakes of his past?
“Have you not learned your place, thief?” he demanded.
Her right hand clawed at his. Her left hung limp at her side. “Right now?” she hissed. “It’s between you and Josiri.”
“Foolish to be so, without even a sword.”
Somehow, she smiled. “Oh, I had one. I gave it away.”
Red rage crowding his vision, Viktor sent what he could afford of his shadow flowing into her, seeking to break her anew. But the riven, pathetic woman of Tarvallion’s cells was a stranger to them both. He weaker, and she stronger in ways that defied ready words. His shadow, already stretched to breaking point, recoiled.
Apara’s smile turned vicious. “I’m not your slave any more.”
With a roar, Viktor hurled her across the parapet. A splash of white in the darkness, and she was lost to the rushing waters. Chest heaving with exertion and anger, Viktor straightened.
As he did so, the night paled.
Josiri staggered into sight, bloody, tattered and weary beyond words, the sword in his hand blazing with alabaster flame.
“We’re not done, Viktor.”
Tzila spun on her heel, right-hand sabre slashing at Kurkas’ head, the left at his midriff. He ducked the former, flung a hurried block at the latter, and stumbled away. Lungs labouring fit to burst and his heartbeat a stampede, he propped a shoulder against a statue. The empty-eyed serathi stared back.
He hoped the others were doing better than he was.
“For the Phoenix, Halvor,” he gasped. “Don’t you remember? Sunshine, shadowthorns… all that good stuff?”
Words that had twice frozen Tzila barely gave her pause. A sabre arced down. Kurkas flung himself aside. Steel chimed off stone. He staggered about, eyes scrying the black sallet helm for crumb of comfort. Some sign his words were getting through. Lumestra knew his sword wasn’t.
[[That’s not my name.]]
“But it is!” he said. “It is! Droshna’s just made you forget, that’s all. Come on, Halvor! You really gonna bend a knee to a northwealder and not even question?”
He hobbled into a colonnade of tombs. Last resting place of Eskavord’s wealthy before rebellion and war had scattered its families. High-roofed sepulchres, guarded by dead yews and yet more graven serathi, their features thick with dust and ash.
A moment. Just needed a moment to get his breath back.
Who was he kidding? He’d not been Halvor’s match in life, with all his parts and pieces, let alone now, with his leg throbbing and his life bleeding away into his shirt. Main thing was to keep her away from Altiris. Give the lad time to talk sense into Sidara.
He glanced back through the mist. No sign of Tzila on the path between the tombs.
“Come on, Halvor. Snap out of it!”
Still no sign. Had she wandered off? Was she even now sticking a blade in Altiris’ back? Getting stabbed in the back wasn’t an experience Kurkas could recommend.
He edged back the way he’d come. At last, Tzila stepped into sight, sabres again at her sides, the points inches from the desiccated vines and yew roots choking the path.
But there was movement behind as well, betrayed by the scrape of stone upon stone and the crackle of long-dead fibres.
Risking a glance, Kurkas saw Ocranza moving amid the tombs, cutting off his retreat.
He sighed, and shook his head. Like that, was it? Fair enough. Couldn’t say he’d not had a good run. Better to go out on a high.
Putting the last of his strength behind his sword, he threw himself at Tzila.
For the first time, she retreated, sabres flashing to a parry. Kurkas’ thrust became a feint, became a neck-high slash, the moves flowing from aching shoulder to creaking wrist. No thought now to the deeds. No worries of Altiris, or Lord Trelan, or other comrades lost to the mists. Only survival instincts earned in Dregmeet’s cruel streets, honed in the army and practised to perfection on the battlefield. The sick fury at how Lord Droshna had contorted so fine a woman into an obedient puppet.
Tzila twisted from a lunge. Silk torn from her cloak fluttered atop a tomb. [[You can’t win. Too old and tired.]]
“You think I don’t know that?” Kurkas replied, breath hot in his throat. The realisation she no longer bothered even to parry hurt more than his throbbing back.
[[Then why fight?]]
He slashed again, the sword heavier in his hand than ever. “If you were really her, you’d know.”
Another lunge went wide, cheated by a slow pirouette. A sabre’s guard crashed into his cheek, rattling teeth and running the world red. Lungs heaving, Kurkas fell to one knee and spat blood into the ash.
From the moment Viktor’s claymore first met the Goddess’ sword, Josiri knew he couldn’t win. For all that the flame kept Viktor’s shadow at bay, it couldn’t do the same for his steel. Only strength might do that, and Josiri’s rapidly faded, seeping from the gash in his left arm. He clung two-handed to the grips as a drowning man to driftwood, the moonlight flame his only warmth in a world growing steadily colder.
Again and again, Viktor hammered at him. No longer recognisable as himself. Barely recognisable as a man. A grim apparition, cloaked in shadow. A hole in the world.
Somehow Josiri met Viktor’s steel with his own, old lessons roused in desperation for a fight far beyond him. But for every blow countered, another cheated the flame. Armour blunted some. Too many slipped through, slicking steel and rushing garments red.
The world beyond the alabaster flame grew dreary and fuzzed, but within the flame Josiri found purpose. The will to carry on, even when every inch of him screamed, or else had fallen silent.
The claymore arced down. Josiri sent the white flame to meet it, the blow driving him to one knee. Fire raced along the locked swords, Viktor darker than ever behind it.
“The dutiful son!” bellowed Viktor. “Determined to repeat his mother’s mistakes!”
The blades slipped with a banshee screech. Hilts met.
“This isn’t about my mother,” gasped Josiri. “This is about my promise to you.”
Muscles screaming, he heaved the swords aside. Old stone crumbled beneath the claymore’s strike, more of the bridge’s abused northern wall plunging into the seething Grelyt.
As Viktor stumbled away, Josiri rose on rubbery legs.
“You won’t win!” snarled Viktor.
“I will,” gasped Josiri. The sword dipped to the road, too heavy for what little of him remained. “And if I don’t, another will. It’s the rule of the Southshires, Viktor. Don’t you see that? A Phoenix will come. The chains will be broken. The darkness never lasts!”
With a roar that owed more to madness than to man, Viktor barrelled forward, claymore hacking down. Somehow, Josiri brought the Goddess’ sword up to meet it.
Fire faded with a dull crack. Ashana’s sword, her last gift – the last hope, offered by an enemy who had become the finest friend – split asunder, the upper part pinwheeling away.
The blow’s force sent Josiri sprawling to the roadway, jagged hilt in hand, numbed limbs cold as the fire’s warmth departed, leaving him with the dying embers of a life pushed beyond its limit.
Viktor loomed above, eclipsing even the moon.
The night grew darker. Josiri heard the mists calling, their song sweet and solemn, their welcome soothing to bones aching for rest. And there in the darkness, he glimpsed a familiar, impossible sight. A pale, vaporous figure moving purposefully through the mists, arms crossed and hands clasped to her chest.
“Calenne?” he breathed.
After so long trapped within the mists or in a body of clay, Calenne’s senses rebelled at the ephemeral world’s glory. Even beneath moonlight, the colours were brighter, the sounds crisper. And the smells… The foulness of sweat. The coppery miasma of Josiri’s blood. Sickness crowded her thoughts. She forced it back. Nausea was of the body, and she nothing but spirit. A cyraeth set loose from Otherworld at the Raven’s hand to settle old business.
“Leave my brother be, Viktor,” she said. “You know he’s right.”
Viktor turned, the shadow swirling about him. “Calenne?” The claymore fell as bruised and bloodied features cracked to disbelieving joy. “What is this? How…?”
So dreadful he looked, no longer even the Black Knight of her unquiet dreams but a suffocating, malevolent spirit become mockery of a man… And yet, she felt the allure. The piece of her that had been Calenne Akadra belonged to him, was part of him. It yearned for unity, and its yearning became hers also.
Calenne tamped it down, held tight to the squirming bundle wrapped in her arms. The Raven’s collateral. A bargain to deliver a god’s vengeance, and perhaps a measure of peace to those touched by Viktor’s madness.
“You’re lost, Viktor. Can’t you see that? You’re everything you swore never to be.”
His expression darkened with hurt. “So you turn on me as well?”
“On what you’ve become.” Drawing level with Josiri’s body, she sought traces of life and found almost nothing. She choked back the memory of tears, and cursed herself for arriving too late. “Not what you were.”
She spread her hands and a pale, ghostly raven took wing. It spiralled through mists, climbing ever higher, and flew away east.
The light shifted as Ocranza closed in behind. Tzila stepped closer. Slow. Deliberate. Kurkas flinched as the sabre’s icy point slipped under his chin.
He met the sallet helm’s empty gaze one last time. “One last bastion? D’you remember? You and me against the world. Whatever happened to that?”
Kurkas started as a spectral raven came screeching out of the western mists, ghostly feathers streaming behind. It shot past his shoulder and, without slowing, dived straight at Tzila, passing through breastplate and tabard with a ripple of green-white light. Sabres slipping from her hands, she doubled over, clutching at a tomb for support.
Bemused, but never one to let opportunity pass him by, Kurkas stumbled to his feet. An Ocranza’s shield-barge threw him to the ground, vision swimming as his head hit stone.
Expressionless shadow-set faces blotted out the moon.
The war hammer smote Sevaka’s shield and set her staggering. The Ocranza trudged on, its backswing hurling aside a knight and forcing the gap wider. Others barrelled in its wake, and were met in turn by a rush of green from Sevaka’s right, Rosa at its head.
“Essamere!”
The hammer-wielder toppled back, its arm shattered by the strike of Rosa’s sword. Sevaka rammed her own notched blade forward and cast another back into the mists.
But through the rush of battle, one clarion rang true: the Ocranza were too many, and Essamere too few.
Helping a bruised knight to her feet, Sevaka stared toward Eskavord. At the foes yet between them and the gate. Ocranza. Stray survivors of the 14th in King’s Blue. Drazina in midnight black. Perhaps a hundred. Perhaps more. And her strength was spent. Essamere was spent. Too many dead, and of those who remained, few could hold both sword and shield.
But still they came, gathering one last time to the hawk and the sword.
“It’s death to go down there,” said Rosa.
“I’ve been dead before.” Sevaka forced a smile. “And you’re going, aren’t you?”
“Only because you’ll be there.”
A hundred thoughts vied for expression as their eyes met. A thousand words to go for ever unsaid because, in the end, their life together had been too brief. But there were worse ways to meet an end, and no better company in which to do so.
“Until Death, Lady Orova.”
Rosa nodded, lips tight and eyes shining. “Until Death, Lady Orova.”
Sevaka lifted her sword anew, no longer her heaviest burden. With Essamere at her back and her love beside her, she went smiling to her doom.
Steel flashed over Kurkas’ head, the crunch of clay close behind. An Ocranza staggered back, shadow oozing from a broken skull and into the night. Another collapsed, a sabre buried to the hilt in its chest. A third managed two parries before its shadow bled free.
Tzila reached down, hand spread.
[[One last bastion, Vladama?]] Though she looked the same in aspect and posture, the voice was different. Still hollow, but rounded, softer… though with bite behind. A woman ill-accustomed to suffering fools gladly, even when they were friends.
Elation surging through the pain, Kurkas took Tzila’s – Revekah’s – hand. “Being awfully familiar, ain’t you, Halvor?”
[[Shut up.]]
Bones creaking and an idiot grin on his face, Kurkas reached his feet.
“Knew you’d come back to me,” he lied.
[[I don’t remember any of it,]] she replied softly. [[Not in detail. Just glimpses through the Dark. And rage… So much rage, and none of it mine.]]
“Then you don’t remember me handing your arse to you in that duel?”
She tilted her head. [[No you didn’t.]]
Impossibly, he felt his grin broaden. “No I didn’t. Glad to have you back, you old baggage.”
Revekah flinched and shrank back. [[Anastacia… What have I done?]]
Swaying with exhaustion, Kurkas grabbed her shoulder. “Wasn’t you.” The words seemed worthless, pitiful. Never much one for finer feelings, he’d no idea how to ease a pain he knew he’d never fully understand. “She knew that. Bloody knew everything, did the plant pot.”
Breath crackling and popping in his chest, Kurkas peered at the Ocranza drawing nearer through the mists. Eschewing his sword, he reclaimed a mace from amid broken clay and set his back to Revekah’s. Too many to beat, but not too many to fight… not with a friend at his side.
One last bastion indeed.
As to last words? Well, what else could they be?
“For the Phoenix, Captain Halvor?”
The sabres came up. [[For the Phoenix.]]
Sidara shrieked and doubled over, golden light again flaring beneath shadow. Trembling, uncertain – the sword in his hand feeling more useless than ever – Altiris edged closer.
“I know you’re still in there, Sidara. I can see you fighting what he’s done to you.”
She straightened, dark eyes murderous. The light died, smothered by ascendant shadow. Frost crackled along Altiris’ sword and stung his cheeks. “The Republic needs Viktor, and he needs me. I won’t fail him!”
Gone were the accusations of apparitionhood, Altiris realised. Did Sidara see him for who he was? Or did she simply no longer care? How much did Droshna’s shadow influence her sight? Influence her? Or was he grasping at straws, desperate for anything offering hope that the Sidara he loved still existed?
Gritting his teeth against the cold, Altiris pressed on. “The Republic needs many things, but Droshna isn’t one of them. He lost his fight against the Dark long ago. He’ll drag us all down with him before he’s done!”
“Maybe he should!” Sidara’s eyes blazed gold, shadow rimming them as smoke rings flame. “Maybe that’s what the Republic deserves.”
“How can you say that?”
“They killed Ana! Viktor told me.”
The words made sense of so much. “Sidara… Viktor murdered Ana.”
Shadow rushed back, drowning gold in darkness. It swirled about them both, concealing all else from sight, whipping ash and mist to a storm. The cold dug deeper.
“You’re lying!” shouted Sidara.
“I’ve never been able to lie to you, even when I’ve wanted to! Ana… She tried to stop all this, and Viktor killed her for it. I held her as she died. I watched the wind blow her soul out to sea. But she never stopped fighting him. Nor will I, even if it kills me too.”
Altiris cast aside his useless sword. A sword he knew he’d never be able to use. It vanished into spiralling shadow, lost to sight.
“But I won’t fight you. I can’t. If that’s weakness, I don’t care.” Willing shaking limbs to motion, he closed the last distance and took her hands. Warmth and chill rippled across chafed, frostbitten skin as Light and Dark fought for mastery of her soul. “As long as I’ve known you, you’ve wanted to help folk. To protect them from things they can’t fight. Well, they need you now! I need you!”
Golden light crackled through the shadow-storm. Fitful. Sputtering. Sidara doubled over, shadow burning across shuddering shoulders.
“Help me!” she screamed.
Altiris clung tight. “However I can. With whatever I have to give. I will always catch you. But you don’t need my help. You’ve never needed it. You’re Sidara Reveque. The Lady of Light. And if history and scripture agree on anything, it’s that light burns away shadow.”
Sidara’s eyes tightened as she pulled away. The tremor subsided from her shoulders. Fists clenched and tears running down her face, she screamed – no longer in loss or confusion, but in wrath fit to set the world ablaze.
Light overtook the lychfield and the ruined church, the night suddenly bright as day.