Lightfall, p.35
LightFall, page 35
“Demons don’t have auras,” Daoja objected. “That is why they want ours.”
The thread of hope I was trying to weave was knotting and unraveling even as I spun it. “But the horde does have auras. That’s what they take—and hold. Only shreds and tatters, yes, but that’s what the dragon steals back, ending them. And you both were told to chain her with auras of the Chosen.” Now I was just being stubborn, but I couldn’t stop now. “Maybe the dragon didn’t have an aura before, but if other demons can steal bits of knowledge and even speak with the voices of those they touch, then for three hundred years, the dragon has taken only purity and bravery and…” I realized that I was sounding a little too much like my lady, so noble and so naïve.
Daoja’s threadbare brows furrowed. “Maybe this luminarca could be fashioned of gold and jewels to hold pure auras like a body, but I don’t see how it would do anything besides tempt more demons, just like the bloodfire rune as you told me.” She shook her head. “It’s the dragon that destroys. This luminarca would only be a greater lure to more of the troubles that haunt us. More than even that monster might handle.”
“But I can handle a lot,” I muttered sullenly.
Though Daoja’s counsel had been about as enlightening as another dusty old scroll, we stayed into the late afternoon. Aric rearranged some heavy stones to shore up her rocky dwelling, and I helped, tearing up my fingers on the rock, until she called me within. After a questioning look for Aric and a wary nod in return, I followed her.
She handed me back the satchel with its empty containers. “Get him to bring me some more cakes next time,” she complained. “He never brings me enough cakes.”
“Cakes. More of.” I slung the satchel over my shoulder. “I’m glad you think there will be a next time, despite…” I waved one vague hand.
She shrugged philosophically. “World might crack tomorrow. If it doesn’t, I’ll have cake.”
Considering she was at least half mad, that made a shocking amount of sense to me. “Anything else?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “I can’t want too much,” she said, and her tone wavered. “I had too much of hungers…before.”
When she was the dragon’s, she meant.
I too hesitated. “Was there…anything that would’ve helped you…before?” I might not be able to give her anything, but maybe I could take some of her counsel, not to save all the Living Lands but just one man.
Her scarred eyes were sharp, like a white reflection of blackest obsidian. “You want him,” she murmured. “That’s a most dangerous desire, child.”
“Want to help,” I clarified. “If you can tell me how.”
She stared past me. Aric thought she didn’t remember—but I thought maybe she did. “The dragon gives him everything,” she said at last. “And if she doesn’t, she’ll take away whatever else he gets. As I said, better not to want.”
Was that why he’d rejected my touch, my kiss? I’d never quite understood the fear of losing because everything was lost eventually.
“There is one thing…” she said slowly.
I straightened. “Yes?”
She slanted a glance at me. “Cakes.” When I laughed, she smiled back crookedly. Then the humor faded. “He can’t risk indulging his desires. Not with the king and the haloria and the dragon ready to take everything.” She sighed. “But there is some solace, maybe even peace, in knowing that someone would miss you if you fell.” She looked away again. “Or maybe that’s just my wish, my own delusion to keep me from stepping off these mountains.”
The loneliness in her voice resonated with an echo in my bones. “I understand,” I told her. “No one would miss me either. But next time, I’ll bring more cakes so at least we won’t have to miss those.”
She nodded with great seriousness. “Maybe if not for the dragon…”
“If not for that, we never would’ve met,” I pointed out. “And it’s not like there’s any sense in fighting what’s been.”
She tilted her head. “Most people, that’s all they fight. But even a demon dragon can’t fly backward, and holding a sword in reverse only stabs yourself.”
Maybe she was mad old dragon-bait, left behind and forgotten, but she wasn’t wrong.
“More cakes,” I told her, tapping at my skull to show her the wish was there. That was a dream I could fulfill.
Or so I hoped.
“Hold him,” she whispered. “Hold him so the dragon can’t take him. He’s strong, stronger than I ever was, and if the monster claims him, he might take all the Living Lands with him when he falls.”
A chill swept through me, deeper than even the mountain wind could go. Hold him? How was I supposed to do that exactly when he was a prince? When he wouldn’t even take what I could give him in the shape of a touch or a kiss?
“There’s one more thing,” I said hesitantly. Perhaps there’d been a reason Aric hadn’t mentioned this, but Daoja seemed clearer than when we first arrived. “The last time we saw demons, not that far from here really, there was someone with them—a man, he called himself Claeve.” I studied her suddenly still face. “Do you know of such a one?”
“There were whispers…” She shook her head. “The wind always whispers. You need to go, now, before dark. The mountains will kill you anytime they want, but you don’t need to make it easier for them.”
Sensing more to her worry, I balked. “Do you know this Claeve?” I demanded. “If you’ve heard anything—”
“Aric.” Her cry held a strident edge. “Aric!”
He burst through the heavy flap of the doorway, his icy eyes wide with alarm. “What—?”
“You must take her,” Daoja said. “Take her away from here, now. I hear them coming.”
I stiffened. “Who’s coming? Demons?” I rolled my eyes in alarm to Aric.
But he was watching Daoja. “I’ll take her and go,” he said in a soothing tone. “It’s all right. We’ll be gone, and they won’t find you.”
“There’s nothing left to find,” she whispered. “Sometimes the snow falls quietly as if it will never end, but then the touch of the last crystal triggers the avalanche.”
I remembered what Aric had said to me: I’ll find you. “We will find you,” I repeated to her. “Gotta bring cakes.”
She strayed to the edge of her little niche to watch us go, and I waved back before we dropped out of sight.
“Will she be all right?” I asked Aric.
“Of the many things not within our power to say, that is one.” He didn’t look back, as he’d also told me. “But I’m grateful you came with me anyway. Sometimes she begs me to shred her aura, scatter it to the winds.” He shuddered, as if the shadows were suddenly too much. “I would never do that. I can’t do that, not without the dragon.”
We walked a little farther before I asked, “Did you really think she could help with the luminarca?”
His hesitation was an answer. “I had…hoped.”
Despite my disappointment, I grinned at him. “Was that hard to say?”
He didn’t exactly smile back, and maybe it was just the fading light, but his gaze seemed less icy. “Almost impossible.” He let out a breath. “And yet still easier than hearing that even Daoja, with her distant, distorted viewpoint, who came back from the dead no less, can’t see another path. She was with the dragon so much longer than I was, and listening to her stories since, I knew she’d been seeking through the library, same as the rest of you. I just…” He shook his head again. “Hoped.”
The bitter edge to his tone, turned like a knife against himself, made me reach out a hand. Hold him, Daoja had said.
Like grabbing the naked edge of a blade.
“No shame in hope,” I told him. “I suppose it’s partly what’s kept me going this long and brought me this far. Hope and these fine boots of mine.” I stuck out one foot by way of validation.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “And it’s gotten you where, exactly? Right here at my side?” But he took my hand to steady me past the rocky scree that guarded Daoja’s solitary sanctuary. “Another strike against hope, I’d say.” When I took a breath to chide him, he held up our joined hands. “But I agreed, no needling.”
“Not even against yourself,” I said.
And when his fingers clenched on mine, I thought maybe he was even hearing me a little.
As we continued down the mountain path, the peaks above us cut off the last of the light, leaving me stumbling. He kept my hand in his all the while, supporting me.
“You see in the dark, don’t you?” I asked him.
“At first I thought I was going blind because…” He gestured vaguely at his face. “But then I realized it was just changing. Some figures aren’t as bright, the details are hazy, but I see something else, like a glow that flows between everything I cannot see.”
I blinked at him. “You see auras?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe? Since I didn’t see it before, and not even the haloria talks about it without undue poetics, I’m not exactly sure. But I think I see some version of what the dragon sees.” His fingers on mine loosened then tightened again, as if he wasn’t sure if I’d keep holding on at this revelation. “I brought a lamp in case it got too dark for you.”
Even as he’d stalked around the palace searching for me, looking morose and angry, he’d already thought of my comfort with the cloak and the lamp he didn’t need. I shook my head. “I can see well enough if I hold onto you,” I told him. “I assume you won’t throw me over the cliff at this late date, and if you light the lamp, I’ll only be stumbling over shadows as well as stones.”
He made a soft noise in the dark, sort of a chuckle. “Then I’ll just hold on…” His grip tightened almost painfully, and I was about to joke that maybe he didn’t need to hold quite so hard. “Fei, do you see that?”
I peered in the direction he was facing, not quite sure where his focus was, and I gasped as tiny flames danced, seemingly suspended in the darkness. “What is that?”
“I’ve never seen this before either,” he said grimly. “But I think it’s the watchtower pyres on the bailey wall. It means demons have been sighted. The horde is attacking the High Keep.”
The fall of the shadow changes with every turn of the road—but still the shadow is yours.
~ A saying of the earthbone travelers
CHAPTER 26
“IS THIS WHAT Daoja heard?” My free hand clenched in a helpless fist. “Is this the cracking of the world?”
“So it seems.”
He tilted his face away from the horrendous view, letting go of me.
“What do we do?” I asked, trying to squelch the frantic note from my voice. “Call the dragon.”
He swiveled his face toward me, his hard expression reflecting that distant lick of flames like obsidian. “Call her? Like one of the fine ladies’ lap canids?”
I threw up my suddenly icy hands. “But this is what she wants—destroying things.”
He shook his head. “I’ve always had her leashed and lashed when we’ve gone after the horde,” he corrected. “I’ve no way to bring her to heel from this distance, even if she could hear me and would listen.”
I laced my fingers over my head, as if I could keep my terror from running away with me. “You say you are bonded. She gave you her sight as she takes your aura. Daoja swears she can hear the monster in her dreams. Certainly you can summon her over a few rocky peaks. If she truly hungers, she will hear you.”
“Even if we called her, what if I can’t hold her?” he whispered. “She would break me. Her brethren are right there at the High Keep, and she knows me, knows what I know…”
With an impatient oath, I twisted away from him and started to run.
And I wasn’t even running away from his hopelessness. He hadn’t spoken the cruelest truth: the dragon was unfettered because I’d broken the bone whistle. We were too far and couldn’t help and the High Keep would fall.
And it was all my fault.
Downhill wasn’t exactly easier than uphill, but at least it was faster. Stones tumbled around me, knocked loose by my own boots and by the prince’s behind me. Of course, the one time he wanted to be behind me.
The flicker of the watchtower pyres brightened as we descended. No, it wasn’t the signal fires alight, it was the wall of the High Keep itself. Oh no, no… As we got closer, I saw the marshal and his men directing one of the massive flamecasters at a rising wall of blackness. The device they’d used against the caravan attackers wasn’t the only such weapon. These were larger, obviously intended as defense for the whole lightkeep instead of an attacking weapon. The fire was so high, it burned everything in its path, flames splashing like waves.
The stench and the screams echoed back to us. And for a moment I wished the shadows would wash over me and take it all away.
“We have to get to the tower, rouse the dragon.” Aric cut to one side.
I hesitated, wanting to run after the marshal to ask after Lisel and the rest of my friends, but I turned and followed Aric. Bloody light seared my eyes, and my ears clogged with the nerve-rending shrieks from people and demons, so much alike as they fell together in death.
We raced through the outer ward toward the inner bailey gate, and it was here that I understood how terribly things had gone awry. The flamecasters had set the demons alight, and the vicious but clever monsters had thrown themselves in searing piles against the walls, using their own bodies as incendiaries, setting the mortar and stone of the walls ablaze until the sturdy ramparts of the High Keep had fractured, exposing the palace itself.
“They burned the very walls.” My voice cracked like our defenses. “How do you light stone and ice?”
“It wasn’t mere flame, but auric power,” Aric said grimly. “And the demons wouldn’t do this themselves. They don’t strategize and scheme. They are being orchestrated.”
Claeve, he meant. The demon master was here, somewhere.
The king’s soldiers and the haloric guard weren’t just for decoration. I didn’t know much about fighting, but they wielded their weapons ferociously and it seemed effective, judging by the mounds of demonic debris.
But there were just too many of the monsters. They set themselves on fire, flinging their already blackened bodies against their burning fellows and then charging at the guards. The screeching and the stink of charred flesh and stone made my stomach churn. Confused in the chaos, it was only because of a burnt-out hole in the inner bailey wall that we were able to gain the palace ward.
Within was eerily quiet. Was the horde concentrating on decimating the defenders in the outer ward? Or had the battle already swept the palace itself?
I shuddered. “I have to find my friends,” I fretted as we hastened up the wide sweep of the main steps.
Aric glanced back at me. “The dragon—” He cursed and lunged toward me, the short sword swinging in his hand.
I yelped and ducked—and the blade plunged into the demon sneaking up behind me. Since when did they sneak? That was my thing.
Its long claws scrabbled at the sword as Aric stepped past me, driving it backward down the steps. It didn’t resemble anything in Ormonde’s library, more like a yaxen had swallowed a catamount that had clawed its way half out. Though its slavering jaws hung wide open, exposing rows of jagged teeth, it didn’t make a sound, which was somehow worse than the shrieking.
In the same grim silence, Aric wrenched the sword free, only to wield it again and again, in terrible, sweeping arcs. The remorseless butchery left the demon in twitching chunks.
My nerves flinching along in time, I collapsed on the steps, still clutching my knife. Its demonic energy might not be subject to the rules of death, but dismemberment was a hindrance all the same.
Finally, Aric returned, sword smeared with demon gore. He paused several steps below me, his always forbidding gaze particularly bleak, and at first I wasn’t sure why since he had saved us—again.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice barely carrying over the distant sounds of battle. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He half-turned letting the blade drop out of sight.
Impulsively, I lurched to my feet and descended toward him to lay my hand on his shoulder. Under my fingertips, the muscles quivered, not with exertion—he’d ended the demon readily enough—but with…a fear of his own, maybe? “I’ve seen violence, Aric. I might scream every time, but I’m not sickened by what you just did.”
“Not just now,” he said. “So much violence. So many deaths.”
“Let’s just not add our own,” I urged him.
When he angled his head to rest his chin, just lightly, on my knuckles, some of the tightness eased from his face. But only for a moment, and then we ran onward.
The corridors of the palace were silent, more empty than the nights I’d crept around.
“Where is everyone?” I whispered.
“The guard and staff are well-trained,” Aric said. “They know what to do.”
That wasn’t an answer. I huffed. “From all the times the palace has been attacked by demons?”
“Everyone in the High Keep lives in the shadow of the obsidian spire,” he reminded me. “Maybe not everyone has faced a demon, but they’ve all seen the dragon’s wings above them.”
I swallowed hard. When we came to the corridor that connected the palace to the black tower, Aric grabbed my arm, dragging me to a halt. The short sword was still in his other hand.
I wished that sword was longer.
Glancing around, I put my hand over his, a silent question.
He just shook his head, scowling.
Something in the darkness…
He flashed his flattened palm at me in a stay gesture and stalked forward.
Not a chance. I leaned down to liberate my knife from my boot—not the animdao blade, but the one with the sharper edge. It was even shorter than Aric’s sword, but it was in my hand. Though I still wasn’t leaving the sphere of his protection even if his presence was its own danger.
Most of the corridor lamps were unlit, some just blown out, but some broken. Oil dripped down the walls in rivulets like dark tears, glinting erratically in the cast from the few remaining intact lights. Strangely, the reflecting shine spattered outward too, in violent arcs, as if the lamps had exploded.
