Royce stood there for a moment, only able to stare at the man who had killed his adopted parents. It was impossible to think that the man was here, now, after all the other things that had happened on this island. He could feel the disappointment of failing to find his father here, the fear of what might be happening as the volcano rumbled and sections started to fall inward, the exhaustion of his fight with Barihash, and his headlong flight from the grotto.
Ember circled, and Royce sent his thoughts up to her, hoping Lori would hear.
You sent me here to find my father.
There was a pause before the answer came back.
You said that your father was searching for the mirror, Royce. I merely told you where it was. And you have defeated a great evil here. Now… now you need to run. You cannot defeat the man who stands in front of you.
Royce ignored that. He couldn’t run, not now, not like this. Carefully, Royce set down the mirror he held, still covered in its bag.
Then fury rose in Royce, and he flung himself at the gray-skinned man.
“You murdered my parents!”
Dust spun away from him, dodging the first sweep of Royce’s obsidian sword. He struck back with one foot, and Royce barely twisted away in time to keep the impact from shattering his knee. Instead, it struck the thigh above, the force of it bruising.
“That was in the days when I obeyed all signs,” Dust said. “In the days when I was the tool of evil men. I am sorry.”
“And that’s supposed to make it better?” Royce demanded. He cut at Dust again, but the other man swayed aside from the blow. Royce struck twice more. Dust dodged both.
“No,” Dust said. “But it means that your death will not be without purpose. It is necessary, to save those who will follow.”
Dust struck back, blades in his hands now, and it was all Royce could do to deflect them. As fast and as strong as Royce was, the other man was every bit as dangerous. Royce parried a blow from a short blade, and Dust’s elbow slammed into him, striking him next to the collarbone, sending him spinning.
“What about my friends?” Royce demanded, his thoughts on Mark and the others, hidden away in their cave. If Dust had followed him here, it was too much to ask that he hadn’t found them too. “What have you done to them?”
“I told you,” Dust said. “I choose now, and I did not choose them. They are safe.”
Relief flooded through Royce, and in that moment of relaxation, Dust attacked. He flung what seemed like a whole cloud of darts, and Royce had to fling himself flat to avoid them. Royce rolled, managing to avoid a stomp from the other man’s foot, then threw himself at Dust in a blind tackle that aimed to bring him down. Dust went with the movement, dropping back and planting a foot in Royce’s abdomen, throwing him away from the gray-skinned man so that Royce had to tumble to come back to his feet.
“Why are you even doing this?” Royce demanded. “Why come after me like this? Why hunt me?”
Dust stepped back, short blades held casually. “It is necessary for the future.”
“What do you mean by that?” Royce demanded. “Do you think I’m going to be some kind of monstrous tyrant? That if I find my father, he’ll destroy the kingdom?”
“Neither of you,” Dust said. “King Philip was a fair man, and a powerful one, who tried to contain his nobles and failed. You would be a good king, maybe even a great one.”
“And you want to stop that?” Royce demanded. Mostly, he’d started talking in an effort to catch his breath. Now, though, he wanted to make some kind of sense of this. This man had done so much… Royce felt as though he needed to find some kind of sense in it all.
“I want to stop what will come after,” Dust said. “You remember my attempt to destroy you in the battle against Altfor and his uncle?”
How could Royce forget? The powder that Dust had thrown into the air had caused chaos. Indirectly, it had helped to change the course of the battle.
“I remember it,” Royce said. His hand tightened on the grip of the obsidian sword. “I remember how many people died that day. Do you?”
“I remember every death,” Dust said. “And I know every death to come. The powder let me see it, laid out like a map. I saw your victory, and I saw your reign. Then I saw what would follow.”
“You’re trying to murder me because of something that might happen in the future?” Royce said.
“Not ‘might’!” Dust shot back. “I’ve seen it! There is a child who follows, and that reign is darker than any light you can bring to the world! You have to die. This has to be stopped.”
“No matter how many people die along the way?” Royce demanded. He could feel his strength seeping back into him now, building up again after the fight with Barihash, and now with Dust.
“It just needs to be you, Royce,” Dust said. “We can end this here. Just throw down your sword, and I will make it painless. The priests trained me in a thousand methods of death, and some of them are barely felt until they are done.”
“You want me to just stand here and die?” Royce demanded, his anger building up in him. “You want me to be one more death on your tally? You’re going to have to fight for it!”
Above Royce, the volcano rumbled, the ground shaking under his feet. It started to collapse in on itself, rocks falling, forming a tomb for the monster within. More tumbled out, a landslide starting and boulders flashing past. For an instant, just an instant, Dust looked away.
Royce leapt at him, lunging forward with the obsidian blade in a furious attack that had everything he had in it. He struck and struck again, forcing Dust to give ground even while boulders tumbled around them, making their footing uneven and threatening to crush them if they stepped in the wrong place. One slammed into the ground just where Royce had been standing before, huge enough that it could have rendered both him and Dust no more than bloody pulp.
Royce kept cutting at Dust from every angle he could think of, and now one of the attacks got through, then another. Royce nicked Dust’s arm with his blade, then managed to barely pierce his thigh. Dust struck back, and Royce felt the pain of a dagger stroke along his ribs, another slicing into his upper arm.
“I can see the patterns in your swordsmanship,” Dust said. “You cannot win this.”
Royce dodged out of the way of another attack, then had to dive to the side as a rock fell almost where he was standing. Dust struck again, and once more, Royce found himself having to dodge the falling rocks. Could the gray man see the patterns in those falls as well?
All of which begged one horrible question: what if he really could see horrors to come in the wake of Royce’s victory? What if all of this really would lead to horrors beyond any of those that Altfor and his family could inflict?
Royce shook his head, even as he parried another attack from Dust. No, he couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t live his life trying to deal with things that might happen far in the future. Altfor, and those like him, were causing misery and death now. He had to fight against it. If the future held other threats, then he would fight against those too.
“If the future holds darkness, then we fight against that darkness,” Royce said, even as he struck back with a sweeping cut.
Dust managed to duck under it. “No,” he said. “Every action has effects. Consequence after consequence, stretching out into the future. Your witch understands that.”
He pointed up to where Ember was circling, and Royce realized then that he wasn’t alone in this fight. He reached up for Ember, sending the hawk into a dive aimed at Dust’s face. Dust didn’t flinch, but instead threw out a kind of dark powder. In the face of it, Ember pulled up sharply, and when Royce reached out for her thoughts, he heard Lori’s shriek of pain through the hawk.
He cried out in his own pain as Dust struck at him with a long, slender blade, feeling it enter just above his hip. He pushed Dust back, but the killer kicked Royce hard, sending him stumbling. Royce picked up a handful of rocks, throwing them toward Dust’s face, but the gray man saw the move coming and wheeled away from it.
Dust moved in then, striking high and low, forcing Royce to defend desperately. Royce parried and tried to counter cut, but the other man was ahead of him, stopping every blow now, defending every attack. Worse, Royce could feel the little energy that he’d managed to recover ebbing out of him again, his movements slowing while Dust’s seemed to be just as strong. The assassin hadn’t had a fight against a creature like Barihash to sap his strength.
“I have provided your friends with a route off the island,” Dust said calmly, even as he parried another of Royce’s attacks. “They will be able to go away from this place safely. Whatever you did inside the mountain, it seems to be destroying everything.”
That was true. Now, it was more than falling rocks. Now, whole sections of basalt around the edge of the island seemed to be falling into the sea. It was an uncomfortable reminder that in one sense Dust was right: the things Royce did had their consequences. He’d defeated an evil creature here, and now, it seemed as though the whole island was starting to slip into the sea as a result.
To Royce, that just meant that he needed to defeat Dust quickly. He was feeling tired now, but he made it look worse than it was, exaggerating it so it looked as though he could barely lift his sword arm. Sure enough, Dust seemed to take that as a sign to rush in for the kill, moving forward quickly toward Royce with his weapons raised.
Royce thrust for him with everything he had, the obsidian blade singing out toward the other man’s throat, every scrap of strength he had thrown into that one blow, so that the moment seemed to stretch out, the sword moving toward Dust almost slowly.
Then Royce saw the look of amusement in Dust’s eyes as the assassin turned, sliding away from the blow, his knives catching on either side of the obsidian sword to wrench it from Royce’s grasp. He kicked Royce then, sending him down into the dirt, small rocks bruising him as they skittered past. Royce fell hard, almost crushing the mirror in its cloth bag, so that he had to turn awkwardly to keep from breaking it. That left Royce lying there, staring up at the gray man as he advanced, ready for the kill.
“You can’t trick me, Royce,” Dust said. “I can see every move that you can make.”
He advanced to stand over Royce, knives raised for the kill.
“I am sorry,” Dust said, “but some evils must be stopped, no matter the cost.”
“You want to see things?” Royce said. “See this!”
He wrenched the cloth clear from the mirror, grabbing either side of the frame and lifting it like a shield with the mirrored surface toward Dust. The killer stood there for a moment, then stared, eyes wide, mouth slack with apparent horror.
“No,” he said, almost in a whisper.
He stood there almost as if he had no strength to move, and Royce could see the horror only increasing on his face.
He stared at Royce while Royce regained his footing, still holding out the mirror like a shield. Whatever Dust was staring at in it, the sight of it was enough to transfix him, the killer standing there perfectly still, until finally he fell to his knees.
“Please,” he begged Royce. “Please just kill me.”
Royce didn’t know what to say, what to do. This had to be some kind of trick, some ploy to get him to move closer. He didn’t believe for one moment that a man like Dust actually wanted to die after what he’d seen.
Of course, trick or not, the fact remained that Dust was the one responsible for his adopted parents’ deaths, and for many more besides. Royce couldn’t forgive that. Putting away the mirror in its cloth bag, he looked around for the obsidian sword, finding it just a little way away. While he lifted it, he saw Dust weeping, tears falling onto the volcanic soil beneath him.
Royce started back toward the other man, but a rumble came and more rocks started to fall. Royce stepped out of the way, slipped as the rock gave way beneath him, and found himself sliding down the side of the mountain, fighting to get any kind of handhold. By the time he brought himself to a stop, he’d slid at least a hundred yards, and rocks were still falling.
A part of Royce wanted to fight his way back up through it all to avenge his parents, but he didn’t trust that Dust would still be there if he went back. Maybe all of this was some grand trick to get him to stay there, while the island collapsed around him. Maybe this was how Dust planned to kill him.
Whatever the truth of it, the fact was that the island was collapsing around him. Royce could go back to kill Dust, but it would probably cost him his life, or he could go get his friends, and together they could try to find a way off of here before they all died.
Making his decision, Royce ran back in the direction of the cave.