The dead were waiting for them on the other side of the bridge.
They didn’t cross the line drawn by the skulls’ fire. Citadel Gheisteno’s defenders stayed in a mass outside the flames, which gave Ederras time to both recover from the gauntlet of bruising memories he’d walked through and to study the foes awaiting them.
Skeletons clad in rusting armor stood in the shadow of the citadel’s gates. They weren’t drawn up into ranks, just clumped together in a mob. Many were missing ribs, jaws, or entire limbs. Dented helmets, loose without skin or hair to pad them, hung lopsided on a few of their heads. Other skeletons showed the bare dirty bone of their skulls, sometimes intact, sometimes cracked open by a killing blow. A few, rising like islands from the sea of dead, sat astride lifeless horses.
Most of them were human, or close to it, and most were dressed in scraps of leather and rust-gnawed steel, all at least sixty years out of date. They wore leather, chainmail, or tattered, quilted padding with blind white worms peeping from the filth-filled pockets.
Not one of the skeletons wore Hellknight plate. These are the invaders, not the defenders.
But behind them, two hulking forms did.
They came out from the portcullis side by side, silent and enormous in black-enameled plate and charred, crumbling cloaks. One carried an immense greatsword, the other a wickedly spiked flail. Their skull-crowned helms towered over the skeletons around them, and the mass of walking bones parted where they passed.
Ederras drew his sword. White fire engulfed the blade as Iomedae’s blessing awoke in the steel. Beside him, Jheraal swung her shield in a slow arc to loosen her muscles. Velenne whispered her invocations behind him, brushing her fingers across the back of his cuirass. A moment after her nails clicked against the silvered steel, Ederras felt new power surge through his body. With her magic behind him, he was faster, stronger, deadlier.
He strode out to meet the dead.
They surged toward him, enveloping him in waves of mindless hunger. Finger bones scratched at Ederras’s breastplate and tugged at his elbows. The shards of broken swords stabbed at him, but their blows were so clumsy that the skeletons slapped him with the flats as often as they scraped the edges over his mail. Fleshless faces surrounded him, their dead jaws slack and clattering. In the chaos, he could barely keep track of Jheraal, although she loomed like an iron mountain at his side. He couldn’t see Vhaeros or Velenne at all.
Ederras didn’t even try to fight with finesse. The arts of feint and parry had no purpose in this horde. Instead he swept his sword through wide horizontal arcs, like a peasant cutting wheat, and bones tumbled around him in a grisly harvest.
Even so, there were too many. The skeletons grabbed at his shield, hurled themselves into his body, clawed at his armor with unthinking hands. The sheer weight of them forced him back, preventing him from carving his way into the center of the horde.
Jheraal was better able to withstand them. The Hellknight was stronger than he was, and more accustomed to using the bulk of her armor as its own weapon in battle. They weren’t pushing her back. She was pushing them.
“Cut a path for me!” Ederras called. “To the center! I need to get to the center!”
The Hellknight’s horned helm dipped in a nod. She bulled through the press of bones, slamming skeletons aside bodily with her shield and crushing any stragglers under her mace. A path opened, fleetingly, in her wake.
Ederras took it. He angled his stance to protect Jheraal from retaliatory attacks while the Hellknight continued her dogged march into the heart of the skeletons’ ranks. Beyond his sword’s reach, the horde closed in again, cutting off any chance of retreat to the bridge.
It didn’t matter. He had no intention of retreating.
A few steps more and they were in the swarm’s center, battered and assailed on all sides. The hulking Crux Hellknights waded through the press to reach them, smashing any of the lesser undead that got in the way.
Ederras waited until the enemy Hellknights were almost within reach, and then raised his sword to the heavens in prayer.
Iomedae’s glory filled him in a rush that ignited his soul. Golden light erupted around him, tearing through the massed skeletons in a coruscating nova. Bones exploded into dust as the divine fire seized them. Rotted leather and rusting mail, unable to protect their wearers from the Inheritor’s wrath, burst apart into flying scraps. The force of his prayer leveled the horde, devastating all but a few wobbling stragglers at its fringes.
In the suddenly empty space, the two Crux Hellknights stood alone. Dark smoke seeped from the joins in their plate. The stench of burning carrion filled the air.
A searing ribbon of fire struck the Hellknight on the left. Ederras raised his shield to block the wash of its heat from his face. At the same time he charged, rushing the temporarily stunned knight and calling upon Iomedae’s grace as he ran. The blessed fire wreathing his sword intensified until it was bright as the heart of the sun.
He plunged it into the weak point under the graveknight’s arm. Cold blood, wriggling with tiny pale vermin, spilled from the rent plate in black clots. The wound stank as if it had festered for weeks.
Gagging, Ederras drew back and slashed at the Crux knight again, this time aiming for the gap at the bottom of his gorget. His blessed blade overmatched the graveknight’s steel and sheared into his foe’s flesh with enough force to kill any living man.
And, it seemed, a dead one. The graveknight sank to his knees with tarry, verminous blood spreading sticky fingers across the side of his breastplate.
Ederras stepped away, turning to see how Jheraal fared. The hellspawn was hammering the other graveknight brutally. She’d caught his flail on her shield and driven it up, opening a space for her to slam her mace into the Crux knight’s side again and again. Her opponent, moving his shield as slowly as if it were made of lead, was far too ponderous to stop her. Jheraal smashed her weapon into the crushed plate one last time, and the second graveknight fell.
None of them had been scratched. Velenne and Vhaeros had barely stepped off the bridge. Ederras lowered his sword, letting the congealed black blood run off its blade. “I hadn’t expected that to be so easy.”
“It wasn’t.” Jheraal straightened from where she’d bent over the Hellknight she’d felled. She moved aside, letting the others see what she’d discovered when she’d lifted the downed knight’s visor. “They just wanted to fool you into wasting your spells.”
It wasn’t a graveknight. What had been inside that armor was a stinking, verminous corpse. Its face was a pulped mass of meat, so distended with crawling worms that Ederras could barely make out the contours of a skull. It didn’t look human, whatever it was. Maybe an unusually large orc, or some stripe of ogrekin.
Velenne’s face darkened when she saw the ruse. “Well. That was clever. Perhaps I’ll take more pleasure than I’d anticipated in destroying them.”
“Let’s go.” Jheraal stepped over the reeking body. “If we’re quick, we might be able to find those children and deal with the lictor before these enchantments expire. One of the two, at least.”
“The children first,” Ederras said.
Velenne nodded and waved two fingers at her dog. Vhaeros stretched, yawned pointedly at Ederras, and trotted past him to the castle’s open gates. Fearlessly the fiend loped under the portcullis’s iron teeth, vanishing into the shadows of the citadel.
Keeping his sword loose in his hand, Ederras followed.
Past the portcullis and its flanking gatehouses stood a barren inner courtyard. Once, the Crux’s horses might have been stabled there, and armigers and Hellknights might have tested their skills and discipline against summoned fiends. Nothing remained of the horses save a handful of pale equine skulls on the hard-beaten earth and a few flecks of colorless straw tumbling in the wind, and nothing remained of the armigers or their trainers at all.
Vhaeros put his nose to the earth, and then to the air. Hackles bristling, the gray dog made a low, huffing snarl and went to Velenne, his tail switching stiffly in agitation.
“What is it?” Ederras asked.
“The smells are wrong.” Velenne frowned, stroking her dog’s ears and looking around the courtyard as if she could see whatever he’d scented. “He’s found the children’s trail, but the shape of it … To Vhaeros’s nose, you must understand, scent is not a straight line. It pools. It shifts in the air. It moves along walls and ceilings. But here, even with the breezes in the courtyard, it is a straight line. It’s as if someone who had no idea how he perceives a scent trail had decided to invent one, and they’d drawn a single clear line hanging static in the air.”
“Could it be an illusion? Some kind of trick?” He didn’t want to think that the children had been sacrificed to the devilheart chain before they’d arrived, but they had no proof that the assassin had brought them to the fortress safely. She’d never bothered to bring any of the others back alive.
“No illusion. False scents obey the same patterns as real ones. Otherwise they wouldn’t be remotely convincing. It does, of course, suggest some other trick. Probably the obvious one: we’re being baited.” Velenne nodded to the dog, acknowledging unspoken words. Vhaeros trotted off, heading straight across the courtyard toward the inner keep. “He’s certain that the children are alive. Seven hellspawn, both boys and girls. Not poisoned, not sick. Very frightened. Some are injured. There’s a scent of fresh blood mixed in with them. But it’s not much. I assume you still want to follow them?”
“Yes.” Jheraal’s helm distorted her voice with the visor down, but it couldn’t conceal the Hellknight’s agitated intensity. “We have to find them.”
“Then Vhaeros will lead you.”
The wolflike dog paused at the entrance to the inner keep. The doors stood ajar, revealing nothing but a sliver of darkness. Ederras pushed them open with a creak, revealing the ruins of a cavernous great hall destroyed by fire.
Soot covered every surface. The windows were thick with it, casting the interior into smoky gloom. Benches and tables, charred into shapeless lumps, stood in tumbled heaps near the back of the hall, as if they’d been overturned to serve as barricades for the citadel’s last defenders.
The only thing that remained distinct in the burned-out hall was the array of blackened skulls embedded in the walls. They grinned down at irregular intervals, as blasted and damaged as the ones that had been sunk into the bridge. Ederras’s skin prickled when he saw them, even though these didn’t ignite with eldritch fire. What other snares do they hold?
Vhaeros started toward a gaping doorway on the right. Then the dog halted and backed up, his lip curled in a silent snarl.
From the hall beyond, the children came.
They were huddled in a tight cluster. Boys and girls, barefoot in rags, bound at the wrist by rope. Their eyes were big with fear. Thirty feet away, they stopped.
Behind them walked a woman in a hooded cloak that shifted through all the colors of twilight. Blue, violet, gray. Nothing of her face was visible under her cowl except for her eyes, but those eyes shimmered like poisoned stardust. It wasn’t a steady glow, like Jheraal’s, but a constellation of tiny sparks that spun endlessly.
Two Hellknights flanked her. These, Ederras knew instantly, were the true graveknights of Citadel Gheisteno. The aura of malevolence that surrounded them was unmistakable. Had he encountered them first, he would never have been fooled by the feeble imitations outside.
Yet even now, the lictor hadn’t come to them. He’d sent a host of lesser undead instead, with the two last members of the Crux at their head.
One was an impersonal, faceless figure in black plate mail and a skull-crowned helm. A flaming greatsword, its hilt shaped like a roaring dragon, crossed his back. Yellow eyes, fierce and terrible, burned in the darkness behind his visor. The Master of Blades. Behrion Khollarix.
The other was a woman, tall and severe. She carried a glassy-bladed scimitar strapped to her hip and wore a lighter version of the Crux’s platemail bound together with blue silk. Her helm had been cut back to a stylized crest that left her face bare. It drew a sharp steel point between her brows, then arched up on either side to frame the skull at its center in a double row of spikes. Snow-white hair flowed down to the small of her back.
Paravicar Corellia Leroung. His great-grandfather’s former squire had grown into a woman of rare beauty, but that beauty was colder than ice. Death, Ederras suspected, had not changed that in the slightest. It had only preserved what was already there.
Each of the undead knights stood a full head taller than the hooded woman between them, and the smaller figure had nothing like their malign auras. Yet it was she, not they, who spoke. “You came.”
“Surrender the children,” Ederras said.
The hooded woman—Sechel?—laughed. “Surrender? No, I won’t be surrendering them, or trading them, or anything else. I just wanted you to see them before you died.” She raised a gloved hand in mocking farewell and vanished from sight. On either side of the empty space, the graveknights drew their weapons. The horde of wights and skeletons came forward, their eyes glowing red or else blank and vacant in Citadel Gheisteno’s eternal gloom.
Ederras started toward the children, but Velenne held him back. She drew a black wand from its sheath at her hip. “It’s a bluff. They aren’t going to kill the hellspawn. They want the hearts. I’ll take the skeletons. You stop the graveknights.”
He nodded and changed his course, advancing on the Master of Blades. Before he was halfway there, Paravicar Leroung intercepted him.
Her lifeless lips were blue as death, and blue fire burned in her eyes. Its reflection shone in the scimitar’s crystal blade. “You look so much like Kelvax,” she said, and struck.
A hissing trail of ice crystals followed the arc of her blade. Ederras caught the scimitar on his shield. Frost crackled across its golden wings. “He killed you once. I’ll do it again.”
Her laughter was the sound of shattering ice. The paravicar twisted away, bringing her empty hand up behind the scimitar. Black magic blossomed in her palm, coalescing into a tight knot. “Did he? Kelvax rots in his grave, and I stand here.”
The energy leaped from her hand in a ray, striking Ederras in the chest. Weakness shuddered through him, sapping the vitality he’d gained from Velenne’s spell. Fatigue snared his feet and turned his sword arm to lead.
He swung at her anyway, calling upon Iomedae to grant him strength. The paravicar brought up her scimitar to parry. Unholy ice screamed against divine fire. Flakes of frost and golden sparks showered through the air, shining through the hazy mist between the two blades.
Ederras won through. His blessed sword smashed through Paravicar Leroung’s defenses and into her lightly armored side, crushing the steel plates into her ribcage. Bone and metal crunched inward, leaving a gap the size of two fists pressed together.
She hardly seemed to notice. Again she struck at him, and again he turned the blade aside on his shield, crystal shrilling against feathered gold. Around and around they spun in their dance of black and silvered steel, the paravicar’s slashes fast and frequent, Ederras’s slower but more telling. Black-tongued bursts of fire erupted at steady intervals behind and beside them, filling the hall with the acrid stench of burning bone as Velenne destroyed the wights and skeletons.
Crushing charred bones under her boots, Jheraal faced off against the Master of Blades. Blood spattered the floor around her, yet despite her wounds, the hellspawn seemed to be getting the better of their duel, in part because Vhaeros had put himself between Velenne and the graveknight and was harassing the undead knight mercilessly.
The Crux Hellknight’s platemail was gouged across the thighs and back, ripped by claws that carved steel as easily as melon rinds. Darkness flowed from the ruptured mail like cold smoke. Ederras had just enough time to wonder how Vhaeros had dealt those wounds—no dog has talons like that—before the paravicar’s scimitar came whirling at him again, and his focus spun back to her.
A cry jerked his attention to the right. Velenne was struggling badly against Sechel, who had blinked back into view. The diabolist had wrapped herself in evasive spells: illusory duplicates surrounded her, and a blurring mist veiled her form. None of those deceptions seemed to deter the assassin, though. Sechel’s twin black knives, each crackling with red-violet energy, struck unerringly and with deadly speed. An unseen enchantment turned her blades aside, but only imperfectly. Velenne’s chain-paneled dress was dark with blood, and her face was drawn in pain.
I have to go to her. Velenne wasn’t made for battle. She was a planner and a plotter, not a soldier. Ederras faltered, distracted.
The paravicar saw it. “You fear for her. Your paramour. Do you know what Lictor Shokneir intends for her?”
“Empty threats.” Struggling through the fog of his spell-driven fatigue, Ederras blocked another slash of the icy scimitar and retaliated with a high, sweeping cut of his own. His sword hacked into the plates that protected the graveknight’s shoulder, shearing through steel and frost-hard muscle. Iomedae’s fury exerted its full force on the paravicar’s flesh, charring it away in heatless flame.
Paravicar Leroung laughed in his face. The cold black blood of the dead bubbled at the back of her throat and spilled onto her tongue, limning her teeth between those corpse-blue lips. “He’ll kill her. Slowly. Badly. Not with his own hands. With your friend’s. He’ll use your friend to kill you, too, but I think the woman should go first. So you can watch. And then the lictor will use your deaths to set this empire of devils aflame.”
“Is your babbling meant to bore me to death?” Hindered by her spell, Ederras couldn’t catch the graveknight’s next strike. Her scimitar skittered across his rerebrace, then bit into his arm with icy teeth. A hot flash of pain shot through him, followed a split second later by a numbing blast of cold. His shield dipped, and he strained to bring it up before she could hit him again.
The paravicar’s perfect, pallid face twisted in hatred. “If your death hadn’t already been claimed … but no matter. Much can be done to the flesh short of that. As Ochtel will help you learn.”
Ederras’s answer was drowned out by a sudden, deafening roar. Even at a remove, the concussive force of the sound was staggering. Vhaeros? He looked wildly to where Jheraal and the dog were fighting the other Crux knight.
The Master of Blades was on his knees, brought low by the fiend’s unearthly roar. Jheraal clubbed his helm with her heavy mace, crushing its ornamental skull to shards. In an avalanche of sooty plates, the graveknight collapsed.
Somewhere in the heights of Citadel Gheisteno, a sepulchral bell tolled. Again and again it rang its mournful thunder, its echoes reverberating through the deep stones.
Ederras turned to the paravicar in triumph. “You see? You’re dead.”
Paravicar Leroung laughed again. “I am dead. I’ve been dead for sixty years. You’re a fool if you think that frightens me. And I’d be a fool if I didn’t know it frightened you.”
She pointed a finger at the huddled hellspawn children. “Your kind are easy to deal with. You and your forefather, stupid in all the same ways. Forever controlled by your concern for innocents. Even when those ‘innocents’ are the spawn of Hell.”
One of the children hiccupped a sob. The others were too frightened to hush him. Ederras lowered his sword, just a fraction. He saw Jheraal easing closer from the right. Vhaeros was crouched low, stalking toward the paravicar from behind. The fiend’s claws had sharpened and elongated. They looked more like a falcon’s talons than anything that should belong on a dog, and they left gouges half an inch deep in the stone.
He had to keep her distracted. “What do you want?”
Paravicar Leroung raised her empty hand, and mist gathered in her grasp. Ice spidered across the blackened steel and drew creaks from the ancient leather beneath. Its shimmering flakes spun faster as she drew upon her magic, intensifying the vortex into a polar freeze that frosted Ederras’s eyelashes and stung the breath in his lungs. “First and foremost? For you to watch them die.”
She thrust her hand outward, releasing the torrent of lethal cold at the children.
“No!”
Jheraal leaped into the blast’s path. She thrust her shield out, away from her body, to screen more of the children behind her. Raw elemental cold hammered into her, pounding her breastplate with fist-sized chunks of ice, and the Hellknight collapsed under the onslaught.
Behind her, the children screamed. Some sobbed. Ice shards skipped across the floor, spinning past their feet, trailing threads of bright red blood. But none of the children had been harmed.
“Save them,” Jheraal croaked at Ederras. One of the horns on her helm had cracked from the sheer force of the cold. Her shield, which had fallen an arm’s-reach away, was rimed to the floor with a rippled glaze of ice. The golden glow of her eyes was fading fast. “Save them.”
“Velenne,” Ederras called, keeping his gaze fixed on the paravicar as he stepped forward to renew their fight. He couldn’t do it. She could. “Please.”
“You’re asking me to get myself killed.” The diabolist’s voice was raw, breathless, full of angry fear. “For them. For children.”
“Help them. If you love me, help them.”
She made an inarticulate noise of terror and fury. He heard the metallic tink of the assassin’s knife striking Velenne’s protective spell, and the wetter sound of one sinking into flesh. But she cried: “Vhaeros! Take the children.”
With a snarl of protest, or perhaps frustration, the dog obeyed. Skirting around the renewed battle between Ederras and the paravicar, Vhaeros herded the terrified children toward the door. He wasn’t gentle about it. The ones who hesitated got a nip or a growl, or worse, to force them into compliance. But he gathered all of them, and he pushed them out toward the bridge.
As soon as the last of them crossed, a wall of crimson-streaked ice closed off the doorway behind them, preventing pursuit. Just as the wall crystallized into place, Ederras heard the hissing crackle of the assassin’s knives carving through the air, an anguished cry from Velenne, and then silence.
Paravicar Leroung smiled at Ederras through the clash of their blades. Black blood coated the insides of her lips as though she’d been supping on shadow. He could smell it on her, cold and dank as the breath of a rain-washed mausoleum. “I am impressed. You’re an even greater fool than Kelvax was.”
“You haven’t won yet,” Ederras replied grimly, hewing into the graveknight again. Her armor, battered and broken, was barely protecting her anymore, and she was weakening quickly. Another few blows would likely finish her. Then he could heal Velenne, and Jheraal, and—
Pain speared him from behind.
The assassin. Even as the thought occurred to him, the knives jerked out and came back in. Agony exploded in him, carrying oblivion on its back.
“Now I have,” Paravicar Leroung said, and then there was nothing more.