DARKNESS AND DEATH; the cries of the dying a glimpse of what eternity in the Hells must be like. Every man, every woman, tensed as their feet crossed the threshold from light and silence into the footpaths of the undercity.
Beyond the cavern of the Sleepers, in a twisted, broken tunnel that might never have seen the day, the torches began to flicker: a change in air currents. The army shifted uneasily, but Evayne was unconcerned; she followed the winding tunnel until it once again reached a flat, worked place. The ruins of a hall, broken gargoyles, the bases of statues that had once lined the ways—these were blanketed in shadows that grew heavier and heavier with each step taken.
Those steps were silent, a gift of the mages who now walked slowly behind their compatriots and ahead of the main body of Priests. Anyone with the sight for it would see them coming; the lattice of magical light necessary to blanket such a large group had a distinct and unavoidable signature. Still, that signature was less obvious than the sound of a hundred—and more—booted, heavy pairs of feet. Any advantage, no matter how slender, would be used.
The Kings led again, but this time, the ranks of their Swords and Defenders were broken by the presence of war-mages. Mandaros’ Priests also walked in the forefront, judging the shadows, looking for any signs of life, natural or no.
They did not see as keenly as the woman who walked in midnight-blue robes; they did not have the hidden eye. But if she saw danger at the start of their descent, she did not speak its name: They journeyed into darkness to destroy a door through which a God was stepping. Danger enough.
• • •
The first creature to come out of the darkness swept in from the side, through a tunnel that was rough-hewn and recessed into the hall along which they had chosen to walk. It was not humanoid, and in the end, not sentient enough to realize that a small army was bearing down upon it.
It was fast enough, however, to claim first blood—first death—before its victory celebration was brought to a messy, and magical, end. For one brief second, the cries of its dying agony eclipsed the suffering of those below.
There was no body to study.
The mages fanned out into the side tunnel, but they found no other such creatures on the prowl. Fifteen minutes, perhaps less, and the army was once again on the move.
• • •
Another demon, hunting Gods only knew what, fell to the mages. A third.
The fourth came down from above, casting a dark and fiery web upon the unsuspecting Priests at the rear of the group. Although the war-mages joined the fray as quickly as they could, the maze and the updrafts in the large, abnormally shaped cavern were the territory and the strength of the beast. The fight was long and hard, and in the end, fully twenty men and women lay badly injured or dead.
But the seeress brought worse news than that.
The enemy would soon be warned of their presence. They would have time to prepare a defense.
• • •
Karathis-errakis erupted into the coliseum like the living flame that he was. He spun in air a moment before guttering; the ground approached his knees and the heels of his multiple hands as he rushed to abase himself against it.
“Lord.” His voice was muffled by dirt and the sound of the dying, but it was clear enough—barely—to be heard.
Karathis’ gaze, where it met the back of the prostrate creature, literally burned. But Karathis-errakis knew better than to scream or attempt to protect himself; to interrupt a lord while he presided over the damned was never a wise course. But to do nothing, this time, was even less wise. He waited, hoping to survive the wrath of a demon lord in the throes of the Conviction and the Contemplation.
It was not Lord Karathis’ even temper which saved errakis’ existence upon the mortal plane. “Enough, Karathis.” The fire burned less fiercely; the smoke of charring flesh gave way to the simple stench.
In the Hells, such interference would be an open declaration of war, and such wars, in a landscape where power and rulership meant everything, were common fare. But there had been no rulership challenges upon the mortal plane in millennia, perhaps because there was no easy dominion over the souls of those who had not yet chosen. Or perhaps it was merely because a demon lord rarely walked the plane; two were almost unheard of. Karathis turned his gaze upon Isladar, and Isladar raised an unfettered hand, one quite human in seeming.
Karathis did not know the limits of Isladar’s power, for he had never seen Isladar use it to its full extent. Isladar ruled no terrain in the demesnes, he forced no lesser creature to bear his name and do his bidding, he chose to absent himself from the ducal struggles, when the hierarchies of the Hells underwent their radical changes—and yet, absent, he incurred the wrath or enmity of no Duke.
It was almost as if he existed outside of the realm which had birthed him.
And in that realm, the unknown was the greatest danger of all. Karathis frowned openly as his surroundings lost the edge and the clarity that the Contemplation brought on.
“Speak,” he said.
Karathis-errakis did immediately as bid. “Strangers approach from the southeast.”
“What is this?”
The creature swallowed, and the last of its protective flame went out completely. “We think—we think at least one hundred, at most three. Humans.”
“Impossible,” Karathis said, folding his arms while his claws grew darker, longer, and harder.
“From the southeast?” Isladar asked.
The creature did not respond.
“Answer him.”
“Yes, Lord Isladar.”
“Interesting. Were they armed?”
“Yes. But—the armed men have not been fighting in the tunnels. They move with speed, and in complete silence.”
“How were they discovered?”
“Arradis-Shannen was destroyed in the seeker’s cavern. Before he died, he sent word.”
Arradis-Shannen served Sor na Shannen as lieutenant. He was not the most perceptive of creatures—but he was one of the more powerful; had his intellect ever matched his ambition, he would have been a threat.
“They have mages,” Karathis said coldly, no question in the question.
“Yes, Lord.”
Karathis seemed satisfied, but Isladar was not. “Karathis, do not be a fool. Arradis-Shannen was Kialli. If he were brought down in battle by mere human mages, we would have felt the ground breaking beneath our feet.” The demon lord turned to stare into the darkness at the mouth of the coliseum’s southern doors. “No, they have Summer magic,” he said softly. “They think to bring the light with them into the Winter’s haven.”
At this, Karathis smiled; his teeth gleamed a moment before his lips once again covered all but the longest of them. “Let them bring light,” he said softly. “We lost many to the cursed bardic voices—let them supply the final sacrifices that our Lord requires.”
“We cannot afford that,” was Isladar’s steely reply. “Think: the one who carries the Hunter’s Horn may lead the human pack.”
Silence.
And then the darkness began to fold and fray as Karathis raised his voice in a roar and a summons.
• • •
“This is not possible,” Sor na Shannen said, her voice a sensual growl—and a furious one. “Karathis—”
“I closed the tunnels personally. I saw each unmaking. Or do you challenge this?”
She said nothing; it was a small enough council that she did not dare to stand her ground. In a fight at this range, Karathis was assured a victory—with a lord of his stature, she could not even be certain it would be a costly one. “We cannot hold that tunnel,” she said at last.
“We have no choice.”
“Look at it. There are no crawlways above it, and none below; it is too low to properly shadow. If Isladar is correct, the strongest of our number will not be able to wield full power.”
It was Karathis’ turn to snarl. “You are not required to hold it indefinitely. A few weeks—”
“You will not have weeks,” Isladar said quietly.
Karathis turned a dark, dark ebony; his eyes burned orange, a glitter of sparks. Yet he did not argue with Isladar’s words. Instead, he spoke two of his own. “How long?”
“Hours, I think. And at that, few.”
The demon lord looked to the Gate that stood at the center of the coliseum, its iridescent keystone shining above a mass of roiling shadow. The altars were before it, and around them, piled like the refuse they had become, bodies. Not enough of them.
Karathis turned, wings unfurling from between the span of his shoulder blades. He gestured, and an ebony blade came to his hand, slick and wet from use.
“Isladar,” he said softly, the fine ridges of his wings flexing at each syllable, “you know what must be done. Do it. I will attend to the intruders.”
• • •
They felt the first tremors as the ground beneath their feet began to shake. Rubble from the walls came trickling down, as if the firmament had become, for a moment, a dangerous liquid.
The Lord of the Compact barked out orders before the rumbling stopped; the Kings pulled back, or rather, the Astari advanced, surrounding them in a slender protective shield. They held position as the ground trembled again.
“What is the cause of this?” the Lord of the Compact shouted.
“Some sort of magic,” Sigurne replied, her brow furrowed.
Were the Lord of the Compact a less literal man, his sarcasm might have reverberated in angry echoes down the length of the hall. Instead, he said through clenched teeth, “Can you counter it?”
“Not if we don’t know its type, no,” she replied, her tone ever more serene. There was reason that she often performed the function of liaison between the Crowns and the Order. “But if the Magi cannot discern it—” Her words were broken by the ominous shifting of rock; the ground shook and the ceiling creaked as if, having borne the weight of the earth for millennia, its strength was finally giving out.
• • •
Evayne, the crystal ball of the seer caught between two pale hands, looked into swirling mist, her pupils so large her eyes seemed blacker than the shadows.
“Evayne?”
She looked up at the sound of her name—a bad sign. When her sight was keen, and the vision clear, a storm raining down upon her exposed head could not distract her. Kallandras knew it for fact; he had seen it happen. Now was not that time; her eyes were already resuming their violet shade, and the ball was dimming—cooling, he thought—between her palms.
“I cannot say for certain,” she said at last. “I feared it might be the elemental magics—but it seems that they are too wild for our enemies.”
“They are not too wild,” Meralonne APhaniel said softly, “but they are not appropriate here. If what you have said is true—if what you have seen is true—we are on the road to the Cathedral that once stood at the heart of Vexusa. If you look at the ground here, and here,” he pointed very carefully, “I would say that we are almost upon it. Call the elemental earth magics, call the Old Earth, and it is quite likely that not only the tunnels, but also the Cathedral, would be destroyed.” His smile turned grim. “And the caster, for that matter, if old tales are true.
“Never bargain with the Old Earth when you have nothing of value to give it.” He paused a moment as the tremors stilled. “The demon-kin have nothing at all of interest to the earth.”
“Not to the earth, little brother,” a voice said in the darkness. “But come. Let there be fire.”
Orange light, white roiling heat. Framed by it, fanned by it, a creature half the height of the halls, with wings of dark flame, and a sword that shimmered as it cut the air. It stood, manlike but not in any way human, its eyes of fire, its tongue of flame.
“This is ill news,” the platinum-haired mage whispered softly. He gestured and the hall, yards away from where the creature stood, was suddenly illuminated by a shimmering opalescent wall.
“You know what it is?” Evayne’s voice, tighter, smaller somehow.
A lift of a brow answered her question; a glimmer of arrogance. “Oh, yes,” he said, master to student, as if for a moment that relationship had never been broken. “He is—or was—one of the Dukes of the Hells.” Meralonne lifted a hand, and to it came a blade that only Evayne and Gilliam of Elseth, of the assemblage gathered here, had seen him wield. It was blue ice to dark fire, thin and hard and uncompromising. “Tell me,” he said to Evayne, although his gaze did not leave their enemy. “You learned the Winter rites—did you ever learn the wild ones?”
“No mortal can contain the wild ways,” was her curt reply. “How can you test me at a time like this?”
“It was not a test,” was the equally curt answer. “It was a very, very strong hope. I do not know everything about you or your kin—and those mortals born of immortal blood, no matter how tainted, can sometimes bear the wild weight a moment or two.” He turned to look at the men and women at his back: the Kings, the Astari, the Defenders, the Exalted and the Priests, the mages. The dogs. “How important is this mission, Evayne? At what cost must we succeed?”
Fire casually began to bore a hole through the transparent wall that Meralonne’s magic sustained. He grunted. “Answer me; we do not have much time.”
Her violet eyes narrowed as she glanced at her back, seeing what he saw; then they widened as she understood what he asked her. “Not at that cost,” she said sharply.
“We will never reach the Cathedral if a price is not paid. Do you not understand what you have seen this day? This was Vexusa, yes, but before that it was something far worse, far darker; the Sleepers fell at the heart of a God’s dominion. There are places upon the world that still hold the ghosts of the things that have passed within them; there are places, dark and deep, that hold more. This is one.” Meralonne spoke from between clenched teeth; his knuckles, where they gripped the sword, were white. Fire had worn the shimmering wall to a clothlike thinness; before the wall snapped, the mage cried out sharply—a three-word command in a language that contained only magic. The wall shuddered, shrank, and flew to his outstretched hand, becoming a shield of the same substance as his sword.
The creature’s large eyes narrowed into edges. “Well met,” he said, almost pleased.
But there was no wildness to Meralonne, no exultation. He was pale—although he was always pale—and his eyes were the color of steel. “Evayne,” he said softly, “tell the mages to use spells of defense—and only those spells.”
“But—”
“Do it.” He stepped forward.
“You are already too late,” the creature said, stepping farther into the hall.
“If we were too late, we would face the God and not the lackey,” the mage replied.
The words cut the smile from the demon’s long mouth. “You will wish, before this is over, that you had.” His fire shot out like a whip, flaying the surface of rock and dirt. Where it struck, the rock grew red and white—above the heads of the army that waited at Meralonne’s back.
Meralonne’s magical shield-wall had given the war-mages the time they needed to react to the attack; molten rock dripped down in a glow of angry heat, and stopped in midair, congealing upon the invisible barrier hastily erected against it.
“You will wish it,” Meralonne replied through gritted teeth. “Your lord is not known to suffer failure gladly.”
“You are beginning to bore me.”
Fire.
• • •
Strike and counter, strike and parry, strike and miss. The demon’s sword cut a deep gouge in the face of the solid stone wall; the act did not slow his blade at all.
Perhaps the others did not note it; perhaps they did—but Kallandras was trained to observe in just such a manner. The demon’s height gave him the advantage, as did his weight; the size differential did not slow him. Curious that; he would have expected Meralonne to last scant seconds against such an opponent.
But the silver-haired, slender mage, with no obvious spell and no obvious defense, gave ground slowly and grudgingly. Ah. That was close. The ground thundered with the blow of the demon’s sword; shivered with the touch of his fire. Kallandras looked up at the crack that had appeared in the abutment. They could not stand here for much longer. The mages did not have the power to deny the demon’s attacks.
“Evayne,” he shouted; she turned, the edges of her cloak swirling wildly. She was the older Evayne; the woman of confidence and mystery. But he saw the fear in her eyes as they met his; the uncertainty shook him. Still, he lifted his hands to his mouth to mimic the call of the horn.
She knew which horn he referred to. “Not yet,” she said through clenched teeth. “Too early, and we have come this far for nothing.”
“We cannot—” He stopped at the sound of a terrible cracking, and swung round in time to see the shield of Meralonne APhaniel splintering into shards of cold light. The mage’s cry reverberated throughout the sudden silence in the hall.
The demon’s smile was a chill and terrible thing.
• • •
There were archers among the Kings’ Defenders; they were assembled in haste and brought forward along the tunnel’s width. But they were few, almost an afterthought to the battle plan, and not a conscious tactic. The light was poor in the tunnels, and the ceilings not always so high. But the demon was a target of such size that only one new to the art could miss—and there were no fledgling archers here.
Arrows, steel tips balanced by perfectly designed flights, were nocked and aimed. King Cormalyn, against the urgings of his brother, saw fit to test a single arrow’s flight before giving the order to let fly.
So it was that he lost a single archer, and not the group—for the arrow turned in flight to find its target at the center of the Defender’s eye. The archers were commanded to stand down in a silence heavy with uncertainty.
A Duke of the Hells gave them laughter in return for the offered death.
• • •
Fire ruffled the earth, transforming everything about it. Meralonne raised his blade against its onslaught, but without his shield it seemed clear that he had no defense. Clear, at least, to Kallandras.
He was no loremaster, to understand the niceties and subtleties of what he saw—but he was a bard, and the bardic colleges were built upon songs that were ancient before he first drew breath. The shield was riven, the fire stronger for it.
Can you wield the wild magics? Meralonne had asked.
But he had asked Evayne. Evayne’s answer was not Kallandras’.
We need you, he told himself, meaning his trapped brothers and he. In the darkness, he raised his arm and called. Searing in the shadows and the dim light, the answer came: the ring upon his left hand flashed, illuminating him. He spoke to air, and air answered, pulling at captive curls and tugging at the seams of his dark clothing—an invitation to play, or worse. Pointing, he spoke again. To fire went wind, and around it laid its binding.
Kallandras’ will was strong, but the demon lord was in his element. The fire banked but did not gutter.
• • •
Gilliam could see the fighting clearly because of the light the magical fire and ice shed in the hall itself. He could hear the grunts of the mages who kept the army protected, could hear the whispered, desperate prayers of the Priests, and the murmuring of the Exalted. That murmur was the only strong sound in the room, and it spread, growing louder and stronger in the saying.
The demon lord looked up as the darkness surrounding the army gave way to a golden light. His smile, if anything, grew broader. “Summer magic. How quaint. But you face no mere Winter.”
“No? We faced one of the Kialli, and he fell, taking only a handful with him.” Meralonne rose from his crouch; his shield arm dangled awkwardly at his side, but he did not favor it or attempt to protect it. The Summer magics seemed to strengthen him, if they did not weaken his foe.
“You did not face one of the Ducal Lords,” was the cold reply. “I do not know why you chose to interfere in this battle—but for you, it no longer matters.”
Meralonne opened his lips to shout a warning as the fires grew wild and uncontrolled. All that left him was a scream.
At his back, three of the Astari were ash in mere seconds, their armor and their swords a stream of smoking, white liquid.
Gilliam started forward, whether to aid or to flee even he was not certain. At his side, Ashfel growled; he brought a hand to the dog’s head and held it there a moment, steadying both himself and his pack leader. His pack. Fingers white where they gripped the Hunter’s Spear, he stared into the darkness, fumbling at his side. Evayne told him that he would know the right moment to make the call. He’d missed it; he must have, but he’d make up for it now. His hands found the small, smooth Hunter’s Horn.
Espere stopped him, her hand on his. Even here, it was hard to be touched by her.
Her eyes, he saw, were very golden and in the darkness almost luminescent. She opened her lips quietly; he thought she might whimper or growl. Instead, she spoke.
“Set me free.”
He stared at her as if the words were incomprehensible.
“Lord,” she said, tightening the grip she had kept on his hand. “Set me free.”
He could not speak. He felt her anxiety, saw his expression through her eyes; he knew that she was afraid of what she asked.
“I would stay with you,” she told him. “But if we are to fight, we must be equal—and we must be separate. Please.”
He didn’t even know how to do what she asked; the Hunter Lords built their invisible and necessary bonds, but only death broke them. And yet . . . her fear was not for him, and not for herself; it was an unnamed fear. Her fingers were curved and hard; he pulled his hand free of them and stepped back. Took a look at her, from the outside, as he would have to do with no Hunter’s bond to guide him.
He was lying to himself; he knew how to let her go. He could feel the stretch and stress of the bond between them, for it was thinner than that which bound Ashfel to him. And he had made it so, distancing himself from Espere, this strange, half-human creature, this daughter of Stephen’s killer, this—say it, Gil—the only woman for whom he had ever felt such a visceral desire.
Set me free.
He had distanced himself, but never completely.
The smell of charred flesh was carried down the tunnel by the howl of an unexpected wind; he froze in its chill and turned. She turned as well, and he saw the creature—the demon lord—through her eyes. But it was not as a human that she looked, not as a human that she saw.
Swallowing, closing his eyes a moment against her, and seeking instead the waist-high vantage of Ashfel, he cut her free, as cleanly and as quickly as possible.
It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he had once feared it might—but it left an emptiness. She filled it with surprise, with wonder, and with a little fear. Because, the moment she was lost to him, she found a different anchor.
Espere began to change.
• • •
Stephen had told him about the first change. But Stephen’s words were thin and weak compared to the reality of the child of the Hunter’s Death. Her arms sank to the shaking earth, and her knees; her head she bowed down to her chest as she began a guttural keening that grew lower and louder and lower still. What had once been skin became harder and took on a sheen of reflective gold. Scales, he thought. He stepped back, to make room for her.
“Don’t panic!” someone shouted. “She’s one of ours!” He did not know for certain, but he thought the voice Evayne’s.
Her face was the last to change, but if you looked upon her eyes, it was not so disturbing as all that. Yes, her jaws thinned and stretched, her teeth grew sharper and longer, her neck became almost the length of his arm from fingertip to shoulder joint—but her eyes were still Espere’s eyes. Only larger.
Was she taller than the demon? It was hard to tell. Was she longer? Her tail flicked up, tearing a chunk of the stone from the side of the wall.
She had no wings. There was no need for them. With a roar that shook the ceiling no less than the fires had done, she leaped.
• • •
From out of the darkness of the tunnels, gilded and shining with Summer heat, hope came. It howled in wordless rage, its teeth crashed shut on empty air, its tail struck ebony thigh. Where seconds before a demon the color of night’s despair fought a slender, injured mage, he now faced the Hunter’s scion: Bredan’s daughter.
Kallandras froze a moment in wonder—something his training should never have allowed—before he saw his opening. Without a word or a backward glance, he took the only chance he had to reach Meralonne APhaniel’s side. The mage was propped to near-standing in a crevice that his battle had made in the wall; he cradled his arm against his chest, although he did not drop or put up his sword.
“Meralonne,” the bard said softly.
The mage’s eyes were slow to focus, and when they did, his slender features twisted in a bitter disappointment—as if, for a moment, he had expected to see another face, a different compatriot.
Kallandras said nothing, but offered him instead the use of a strong arm, a strong back—and a silence in which to gather the pain and bury it deeply.
“What a pair we make, we two,” the mage said softly, his voice carrying over the thunder of a battle of giants.
“Yes,” Kallandras replied. But his attention was focused upon other things: fire, falling rocks, the movement of stone plates beneath his feet. The mage was not, after all, a light or scant burden—but he was not immobile either, and together they reached the line of the waiting army. The Astari opened the ranks to let them through as if even they knew there was no danger in it. The battle was between the demon lord and the beast.
“Will it be enough?” Kallandras heard himself asking.
Meralonne grimaced. “I am no seer,” he said, clenching his teeth. “But the Oathbinder is very near, and while he is here, his half-blood child is in her element. I would not choose this battle.”
“Kallandras.”
The bard turned to see Devon ATerafin’s pale face. “Take him to the healers.”
Wordlessly, Kallandras nodded; together they began to make their way down the eastern side of the hall.
• • •
But the bard stopped well short of the healers, seeking the shadows that fell between the radius of priestly lights.
Seeing this, understanding what it meant, Meralonne slumped against stone that was, for the moment, hard. “They cannot help me,” he said softly.
Kallandras nodded.
“The shield was riven.”
The bard again offered his silence. He had heard the cry that Meralonne gave as the shield splintered; had he not been watching, he might have mistaken it for a death cry. Might have. But he knew that Meralonne’s death, when and if it came, would occasion no mortal cry.
The vision of the Kovaschaii was still sharp. What had divided them, unspoken, bound them together now in the silence.
“Bind my arm, and return me to the front.”
“They will know that the healers have not tended you.”
Meralonne’s grimace was wry, and pained. “Yes, they’ll know. And I’ll give them the sharp edge of my tongue if they question me. Let the healer-born use their resources on the fallen they can help.” He fumbled in the darkness a moment, his smile growing less fragile as he saw the disapproval in Kallandras’ expression.
In the midst of a battle that would decide their fate, and the fate of Averalaan, Meralonne APhaniel lifted a long-stemmed shallow pipe to his lips with his whole hand. The aroma of burning tobacco made of the towering halls a familiar place.
• • •
He did not know what she was feeling, did not know what she was seeing, could not taste or smell or hear the sounds of battle as she did. As her tail cut a swath through fire and air, as the ground once again shuddered and heaved beneath the blow of demon blade, he made his way toward the front line where people stood at the ready as if they were uncomfortable just watching, but had no other choice.
Evayne caught his shoulder as he stepped past her, unseeing; he started and brought his spear around, but the space was too cramped to bring it to bear, which was just as well. He knew what she wanted to say before she spoke; her lips moved as the Hunter’s daughter roared in angry pain, drowning out sound and warning to underline her point.
This was not his battle.
There was no hunt here, no quarry that he, and his pack, could bring down. There was only ancient war. Stephen would have appreciated it. Or maybe not; maybe he would have been terrified because he understood all of its ramifications. Probably both.
He could bring himself to feel neither.
Either Espere would fail and he would perish here, in flame so hot and final that he probably wouldn’t have time to feel pain, or she would succeed, and he would be one step closer to the time when the Hunter could finally be summoned.
Unblinking, he watched as the demon and the beast circled each other. They were both, he realized, strangers to him. Neither spoke, although it wasn’t clear to Gilliam that the Hunter’s daughter could; such a serpentine head was not built for the nicety of speech.
He cringed when the demon’s sword struck home; she roared. A whip of flame caught her tail and held it a moment, but it did not burn or singe the flesh. Cascading sparks of pure green light fanned across her skin, and where it struck rock and stone it exploded; she was unfazed. At his side, Gilliam heard Evayne murmur, and although the words were indistinct, the surprise beneath them was not.
But the demon was also scraped by fang and claw, and forced back by the strike of tail, the ridge of skull that was almost hornlike. There was no easy victor here, no sure victim; where Meralonne had been overmatched, the beast fought upon an even field. It was not to the demon’s liking. Pressed, he called upon the shadow, and it came; he was close to the power of his Lord—closer than she to hers. His wings spread like the swan’s—deceptively lovely, ultimately deadly. Borne by the undercurrent of the Lord of the Hells’ power, he rose to take the advantage that height offered. The blade that fell against her upturned neck drew blood. Red blood.
But she was not alone.
The air grew cooler, and the shadows less; light, not sharp or harsh, but bright nonetheless, began to make headway in the long halls. Incense masked the stench of fiery death, and the strongest of the burning braziers filled the air with the scent of ash and a hint of cedar, the smell of fire in the hearth. Many were the months in Averalaan when that scent was foreign—but to Gilliam, Lord of the responsibility of Elseth, Hunter of the Breodanir, it was life; the winters were long.
I am Bredan’s follower, he thought, hating it less as he said it, over and over. She is Bredan’s daughter. We are the Breodani, we two.
He brought the spear up, shrugging Evayne’s hand from his shoulder. Then he stopped, thinking, I am a Hunter. The Hunters chose their quarry and they felled it with their pack—or they failed—alone.
But was she a Hunter? He hesitated; the moment seemed long. The demon’s blade fell again, finding its mark across her flank. Crimson followed in its wake.
“Lord Elseth,” Evayne said, her lips almost pressed to his ear, “this is not the Sacred Hunt.”
He lowered the spear.
And then, sudden and swift, he raised it with a guttural cry of anger and denial. The Sacred Hunt had already claimed its victim. He did not have to stand by; he would not stand by to watch and linger like a helpless child, afraid to raise hand or weapon.
He called the trance early, and it came to him with an ease that it never had. The light became bright and exact, the darkness hard and well-defined. Around him, like mist or fog, the floating whispers of the foreign Lords tweaked his ears. He saw Ashfel, proud and alert, saw through Salas’ eyes, caught more keenly the scent of the Mother’s hearth.
Grabbing his horn, he winded it, long and loud—but he called only the ground hunt, and not the great one.
The lowing of the horn reverberated throughout the hall, louder even than the sounds of combat. Before it died into stillness, the eyes of the demon lord sought the eyes of the Hunter Lord.
Recognition.
• • •
The nature of the battle changed in that moment. Unlooked for, unrecognizable until the instant the horn was winded, the miserable Hunter Lord had revealed himself—carrying, in his folly, the single item that was a threat to the Lord of the Hells.
Karathis had been in the Hells when the Horn was first taken, but he knew it on sight, and knew further that no simple spell, whether born of wild magics or darkness, could destroy it; the Horn’s destruction was not his intent. But the human bearer’s was.
Could he but retrieve the horn and retreat, the war was theirs to win at leisure. Gathering his power, he struck the ground with sword and flame-touched invocation. The rock shattered and melted beneath the human’s feet, fanning upward in a spray of heavy liquid.
But his target had already moved. Cursing, Karathis raised his blade as the beast roared and struck.
• • •
Gilliam pushed the trance to its limits, taking the speed and the strength that it had to offer and using them. The demon was faster than any quarry that he had ever hunted—and no quarry had proved so dangerous except the Hunter’s Death. The shaft of the spear felt too thin as he turned it in his hands, gripping it tightly.
The ground buckled beneath his boots; he felt it break as he rolled to the left, gaining his feet without a backward glance. This time, he did not stand for long; the spear became a vaulting pole as he thrust himself up from the rock a second—less—before it, too, splintered.
As he landed, he heard the demon snarl in pain, and his lips folded up in a vicious smile. Espere could strike where Gilliam could only flee; she could stand upon the demon’s summoned fire just as easily as the demon himself.
The smile dimmed quickly.
For as Gilliam looked hurriedly around, he realized what the demon’s intent was. The ground, inch by inch, was becoming a red and white patch of heated, melted rock—rock upon which Gilliam could not stand, let alone fight.
• • •
Sor na Shannen’s hands were slick with blood, and she stared down at the liquid with both distaste and fascination. Of the kin, she was a subtle creature, and her torments were not of the body, but of the mind and spirit. To kill in such a physical fashion, when her victim was helpless and waiting, was almost anathema to her. It did not show, however; the altars were blooded quickly and efficiently.
The Allasakari presided over some of the slaughter—a point of contention among the kin, but one that would be addressed later—and Isladar stood at the foot of the Gateway that had been so long in opening, kneeling so close to the tentacles that the God anchored himself to the world with that if he moved a hair’s breadth, he might be devoured. He did not move.
Above the arch that opened into the void and the darkness, the keystone glowed a pale green, pulsing like an irregular heartbeat. Not a living creature, save for the Allasakari, remained in the coliseum. Those who had been kept in the pens for the weeks to come were led out in herds, driven to the arms of the kin and the Allasakari, dedicated to the darkness, and destroyed by it.
But would they be enough?
“Lord,” Isladar said as the earth trembled beneath the coliseum, “all life and all light that can be found in your city has been offered to you. The Gate, we will hold while we can, but your ancient enemy stalks the streets of the city.”
The darkness turned in on itself in a twisting convulsion, and then it grew still for the first time in decades.
Be prepared, it said.
Isladar watched in utter stillness and silence, as the darkness began to coalesce. Above it, the keystone began to dim.
• • •
“What is that fool doing?”
Evayne, staring at the patchwork the demon lord made of the stone floor, made no response to Meralonne’s incredulity.
“The beast is weakened,” Kallandras said, in her stead. “Perhaps he thought to help.”
“Why thank you.” The mage’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “That much is obvious. I merely hoped that the mysterious Evayne could tell me—tell us—that the young man’s ability matches his intent.” He drew upon pipe smoke as if it were necessary breath, and then blew it out in a huff. Teeth clamped together, he handed the pipe to the bard. “Take care of her,” he told the younger man, as he gritted his teeth.
It was Evayne’s turn to stare. “What—what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? Your powers of observation have obviously dimmed over the decades.” Again, he grimaced; the expression of pain didn’t stop him from summoning his sword. It was slow to come, but when it did, it glittered in his hand like sharp, cold ice.
“Meralonne, this is not your fight.”
“No?” Of all things, he laughed. “Evayne, it is not for the student to choose the master’s battles.”
“I am not your student, nor have I been for—”
“Evayne.”
“What?” She did not turn to look at Kallandras, but she acknowledged his interruption.
“If Lord Elseth dies, who will wind the Horn? And if the Horn is not winded, who will face the God?”
For the first time, he saw the older Evayne angered as she turned to face him; her eyes flashed and hardened into something as cold as Meralonne’s sword. “I have lived my life in this cause,” she said though clenched teeth. “Do you think to remind me—”
The demon roared in agony.
As one, the three looked up to see Gilliam, Lord Elseth, dangling from the haft of a spear buried halfway into the demon’s back. Buffeted by the thrashing of powerful wings, he clung blindly. His struggling body cast a shadow above the fires that rippled and stretched as if to reach him; to fall was death.
“Meralonne,” Kallandras said urgently, surprising himself. “Can you save him?”
But Evayne said only, “What of the Spear and the Horn?”
The mage had no chance to answer, whether by word or deed, for as the demon struggled with the weight at his back, the beast struck, great jaws snapping so quickly they could be heard more easily than seen.
In a moment, the demon’s cries were cut off as the beast’s teeth worked their way into his throat.
“It seems,” the mage said softly, “that this discussion is at an end.”
• • •
It was too soon. Another two months would still be too early—but form would be easier for the Lord to assume, and the Gate easier to breach. Sor na Shannen felt the rumbling grow stronger beneath her feet. There was nothing she could do to stop it, and nothing she could do to bring her Lord closer to the plane; she looked inward instead.
Centuries ago, her name littered about for the idle and the foolish, she had been summoned to the plane by a young, long dead mageling. He was naive enough to believe the words of a demon, and talented enough to be able to teach her to manipulate the magic of the form; she had learned much from him before she had finally emptied the font of both his knowledge and his life.
It was Sor na Shannen who discovered Bredan’s presence. It was Sor na Shannen—succubus, not demon lord—who had made her way to the Allasakari, and thence, to the meager and ill-protected Priesthood of Bredan’s ignorant followers. It was Sor na Shannen who had in glory and power taken the Spear of the Hunter, and the Horn. Because it was Sor na Shannen who understood that if Bredan could somehow, in some way, walk the plane, so, too, could Allasakar.
If Allasakar began his ascent, Bredan would notice. If Bredan could notice, Bredan would interfere. Oh, it had taken years to understand most of the customs of the intricate and futile Hunt—and even now, she did not understand why Bredan chose not to feed upon the surrounding countryside to maintain his power and his sentience. But she knew that Allasakar would have no such difficulty.
It was a mark of genius, really, to destroy the priesthood. Ignorance descended upon the enemy’s followers in a generation or two. And Bredan? The God was barely intelligible. The kill that he took was enough to keep him from being claimed by the wildness, no more.
She had visited the forest. Sought the crippled God.
Her first mistake.
But her name had still lingered upon the mortal plane, and her plan, interrupted, still flourished. Licking her wounds, hiding in the Hells under the guise of mere succubus and not demon-mage, she had waited. And waited.
Davash AMarkham, member of the Order of Knowledge, finally dabbled in the dark arts, and on his twenty-eighth summoning, managed to reconstruct her name from forbidden scribblings and ancient texts. He was an older man, and quite a powerful one, but he mistook her, as so many did, for a mere succubus. Within six months, she had her freedom from all but the most tenuous of control. Two years later, having learned what he could teach, she summoned Karathis, offering Davash—and his master, Lord Cordufar—as fitting sacrifice.
Karathis had almost destroyed her then and there. But her Lord protected her, and in the end, a Duke of the Hells was forced into an alliance with—as he called her—one of the least of its demon lords.
For almost four decades she had labored upon this plane—labored as a servitor to the Lord of the Hells, and not as a free demon seeking the momentary pleasure of flesh and form, the idle torment of those who have not yet chosen.
She was the architect of Allasakar’s return.
Or she would be, once he crossed the threshold. And what might she ask for then? A return of the ancient, wild days, replete with shadow and suffering, with mystery and the magic of the unknown. Her lips were dry as she watched the arch in silence.
The keystone began to flicker.
When its light was dimmed completely, the door between the Hells and the world of the free would finally be pried open wide enough—and for long enough—that the Lord of the Hells could step across the threshold to claim the world as his dominion without the interference of the rest of his brethren.
• • •
“Master Gilliam,” a voice said softly.
Gilliam looked up into a shadowed light to see the familiar face of a healer. Recognizing him, he relaxed and turned away.
In his arms, Espere stirred. She lifted her head a moment, and strands of matted hair clung to his leathers, wet and sticky where blood had not quite dried. Tensing, he watched her eyelids; they flickered but did not open. He did not know what she felt, could barely guess; she was no longer his. Yet they were not free of each other. If she was not part of his pack, she was part of his responsibility, and he claimed her for Elseth with a sense of quiet, fierce pride.
“Master Gilliam.” The healer, Dantallon, spoke again, his tone strangely gentle. “The Kings are waiting.”
Let them wait, he thought, but to his surprise, he looked up.
Dantallon’s eyes were an unusual color. “Let me take her,” he said softly, gazing down at Espere. “If she’ll be safe anywhere—” He stopped, straightened his shoulders, and looked carefully at the man who sat upon the ground cradling an unconscious god-born girl. “I give you my word that I will watch over her.”
Gilliam’s arms tightened; he bowed his head a moment, resting dark hair against dark hair, filling his lungs with the scent of sweat and blood and ash. “You’ll take care of her?”
“While I have breath,” was the grave reply. Dantallon was not a large man, nor a particularly well-muscled one, but he was strong enough. To be a healer, to take the talent one was born to and temper it, to give everything that one was, and when that failed, still find something left to give—that took a strength that Stephen of Elseth had barely understood, and Gilliam of Elseth had not. Until now.
Quietly, Gilliam gained his feet, balancing Espere’s body against his chest and the crook of both arms. Dantallon’s sleeves were rolled up and buttoned to the edge of his plain shoulder seams, and his arms were stained with blood. Their hands met a moment as Espere passed from one to the other. Of the two, it was the healer’s that was the surer grip. He smiled, his brown eyes ringed with lack of sleep and hollowed with care.
Espere stiffened and raised her head; Gilliam tensed, prepared to take her back should she wake and call. But she did neither; instead, her expression relaxed into something that was almost a smile. Dantallon shifted automatically, juggling her weight so that her head rested beneath the point of his chin.
“We both have our battles to fight,” he told the Hunter Lord. “I envy you your prowess, Master Gilliam. It is upon your shoulders that the fate of the Empire rides. Do not envy me.”
Oh, the vision of the healer was sharp.
Gilliam stood, feeling a mixture of comfort and, yes, curse him, envy.
“The Kings,” the healer said, turning from him.
Lifting the Spear and girding himself once again with his sword, Gilliam of Elseth called his pack and strode toward the Kings of this foreign land. His leathers were singed, but miraculously whole, and the three burns across the length of his legs had been tended to by Dantallon himself. Gilliam would accept no other’s intrusion.
The Hunter Lord returned to the Hunt; it enfolded his vision once again, drew him into its purpose.
Espere would not Hunt further with him this day, and perhaps that was best; after all, what kind of a Lord would force his liege to kill her father?
• • •
The mages had cooled the rock, but the once fine floor now resembled a fallow field after first thaw. The army began to pick its way across the uneven ground, avoiding the wells of unnatural shadow that lingered where the demon had fallen. Of the demon itself, no other trace remained.
The order of march altered as the shadows grew stronger; the Exalted joined the Kings, followed by their priestly attendants. Their braziers now burned bright, and the chanting of the Priests, low and even, filled the halls. This was their battle hymn; there would be no other. The darkness was so pervasive it demanded silence from those that walked toward it.
The landscape changed abruptly; the halls ended, as they had once before. But this time, there was no turning back or turning aside. Earth hemmed them in, tight in places and loose in others; above them, wooden joists, great beams or rock wet with mildew and time.
No normal formations, these.
Meralonne, arm bound tight to his chest, walked the tunnels in quiet thought.
“Meralonne?” Sigurne’s voice, soothing in its ordinariness.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the earthen formation above their heads. “Roots. There.”
She nodded. “I noticed. But the tunnel walls, the roof, the ground—none of these have weathered time in any normal fashion. I fear the power that sank the city did not foresee such . . . resistance.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Her plain eyes were almost cutting as she cast a sidelong glance in his direction. “What power sank the city, and when?”
“It was never made clear,” he replied neutrally. “Do you feel it?”
“Yes.” It was as close as Sigurne would come to acknowledging the darkness. Her eyes sought the earthen roof once more, as she lifted a lamp aloft. “Are we walking on an upward slope?”
“A gradual one.”
They drew closer to air and sky, closer to Averalaan. The thought should have been comforting. “How long?”
“Sigurne, this may surprise you, but Vexusa was not my specialty of study.”
She smiled as smoke eddied up in a slow moving cloud. “Everything is your specialty of study, Meralonne. Give me an educated opinion.”
“Very well, but I won’t be found at fault if I prove incorrect.” He paused a moment, lighting dried leaves with a flicker of personal flame. “I would say that we are not fifteen minutes away from the main thoroughfare of the city.”
• • •
Like a falcon loosed to sky in search of earthbound quarry, Kallandras could suddenly see. Imposed upon the rocky twisted wall that was this tunnel’s surface, flickering as if it were the fire of a glass lamp in a gale, a vision of the dead came to him. His dead; the brothers that he had left.
“Kallandras?”
They lay stretched and broken in numbers too great to count, heaped like scraps of peel and core—the unwanted portion of a meal. Pressed thickly together by weight, he could discern among these corpses no face, no mark, no uniform.
“Kallandras?”
The vision altered as he searched; he could not hold it long.
• • •
The stretch of Kallandras’ mouth, the intensity of his gaze, the way his shoulders curled in told Evayne more than she wanted to know and less than she needed. “Kallandras,” she said for the third time.
“They’re in the coliseum.”
She didn’t ask who, and as someone—she thought perhaps the ATerafin—began to, she lifted a slender hand, demanding, by gesture, silence.
“We’re too late,” he continued, his voice a curious blend of flat monotone and earnest desire. “The prisoners are dead. They’ve slaughtered them all.”
Her hand rose again, and again questions gave way to silence, albeit annoyed.
“Something’s happening to the arch.”
Evayne turned absolutely white.
“The keystone is flickering.” He did not ask her if she remembered either keystone or arch; neither of them had forgotten, nor could. “I think it’s going out.” Blinking, Kallandras glanced over his shoulder, surrendering the finding vision to rock and shadow.
Evayne had already turned away. “Your Majesties,” she said, in a voice that carried weight because it also carried fear, “we are almost upon the Cathedral. Follow me now, and quickly.”
• • •
The tunnel twisted to the left in a sharp, awkward angle; Evayne did not even pause at the branch to see if the enemy was waiting for them. The time for caution had passed. She moved at great speed and with great silence, unarmed and unarmored as she was; they lost sight of her almost immediately as the darkness began to eat away at the lamps and the torches they held.
But they had enough light to see the walls fall away into blackness on either side; whether they knew it or not, they stepped across a threshold. Above, there was darkness, and at their feet, shadows; they knew that they were no longer in the tunnels because their voices carried higher and farther.
The Exalted paled and began their chant, but Evayne waved them to silence. Pulling her hood from her face, she turned to the Kings, back to the darkness, arms raised high as if in supplication. “So that you will see and remember,” she said, “Father!” Her cloak roiled at her feet as if her body itself were changing in shape as Espere’s had done. From out of the folds of a midnight-blue so dark it seemed black, the seer’s crystal rose.
Cascading down from the heights of a cavern that seemed—that was—too vast to be natural, came sparks of angry orange light. They traced a path in air, burning it into the vision not as a band of green afterlight, but rather as a swath of color. Like the brush of a crazed painter, these bands of light grew, ribbon by ribbon, until the whole of the cavern was revealed.
The dusty ruins of old stone buildings lined rubble-strewn streets. Brass railings and verandahs that looked down with suspicious ease on the grounds below were still intact. Doors, where doors might have once been, had long since rotted away; shutters were nowhere in evidence. But here and there, bottom-heavy glass work had not been shattered by the city’s descent.
And the city must have descended with speed and a terrible force. At the edges of the tunnels, halves of buildings stood, their rotted, snapped joists revealed as if a dull sword had cut from roof to basement in one stroke.
• • •
“My Lord, they are in the city.”
Sor na Shannen’s glassy eyes took in the keystone’s flickering light as if by doing so she could drain the last of it into her private darkness.
“Lord Isladar, should we—”
“No. Stand ready. He is almost nigh.”
• • •
“What brought this here?” King Cormalyn’s hushed voice.
Evayne pointed. At the center of the city, darkness lay like a formless cloud. But it rose almost to the cavern’s height, and it was wide and long.
The King nodded to the seeress; at his back, his men began to form up. Where light could not go, they would. The air was heavy with things unspoken.
“Now is the time,” she told them, seeing their apprehension and their determination. “Kings, Exalted, Sacred; Members of the Order of the profound; Astari, Defenders, and Priests—to the heart of a history that you could not have made, I have brought you.
“The darkness rises; beneath the shadows that light cannot pierce, the citadel is waking. Allasakar takes the last steps upon his path to this world. Let us meet him, as Moorelas met him; let us tender no less an answer.”
There was silence, and then from the men of the North—and there were few—the sound of sword against shield. Tentative at first, it grew louder and surer, and the cavern caught its tumult and echoed it. Then a single voice joined it, raised in a rough and uneven bass. King Reymalyn was singing “Morel’s Final Rider.”
As if his unaccompanied chorus was a command and an invitation, others began to join him, searching memory for the words that most had not sung since they were very young. The song that had eluded them in their march through the tunnels finally gave them strength now.
“Lord Elseth,” Evayne said, grave but loud, “the time has come. It is the first of Veral. The sun is breaking across the horizon in Breodanir.” She lifted her crystal high enough that he might see it; it looked for a moment as if the sun had been cupped in her hands. “Call the Hunt, Hunter Lord, and join it.”
Gilliam took the simple, unadorned Horn in his large hands and raised it, shaking, to his lips. He had come this far for only this reason: to Hunt the Hunter God, and have peace. But here, at the very threshold of an ancient, nigh forgotten city, his lungs faltered; he could not draw breath.
• • •
Isladar raised his head from the position of supplication to stare, not at the keystone, but at the darkness itself. To either side, the tentacles that had form and substance began to uproot themselves, taking great clods of dirt and flesh as they rose.
The shadows were omnipresent, but the darkness was not yet complete. With a mere gesture, Isladar doused the pathetic human lamps and plunged the coliseum into night. If the Allasakari objected, they did not give their anger voice—and in that, they were much like the kin in the face of their Lord.
The keystone was so pale it was almost simple stone. It flickered once, twice. Almost. Almost.
• • •
Was it fear?
Evayne watched his face as he pulled the Horn back to study it. “Lord Elseth?”
To his shame, his hands shook. Could it be that he was afraid to test his skill against the Lord of the Hunt—the very God who had given the trance, the bond and the hunting art to the Breodani? Angry, he gripped the shaft of the Spear and brought it down upon the ground in time to the beating of the shields.
Lifting the Hunter’s Horn, he drew breath as if it were blood. And half a continent away, at exactly that time, on exactly that signal, the King of the Breodani stood at the edge of the Sacred Forest, surrounded by the sound of the beating drums, the heightened awareness of breath and heartbeat filling his ears, the smell of his chosen quarry coming from eight different noses, the drive to be gone, be running, be hunting not quite driving away the sure and certain knowledge that by the end of this day one of his valued Hunters would lie dead at the hands of the Hunter.
The King of the Breodani lifted his intricate, ancient horn to lips as Lord Elseth—the lone Hunter Lord in the King’s lifetime to miss the call at the edge of the Sacred Forest—tipped smooth bone upward.
As one man, as one spirit, they called the Sacred Hunt, winding the Horn in its dance of three notes.
• • •
In the ancient city of Vexusa, in the heartland of his greatest enemy, the Hunter Lord answered.
And in the center of a Cathedral lost to shadow and magic, before the waiting eyes of demon-kin who stood at rigid, silent attention, the darkness finally became perfect.