Lightfall, p.45
Lightfall, page 45
“Did you hold him?”
Salvotor’s question drew her focus back to him. “What?”
“Thorne.” Salvotor spat his name like a filthy word. “Did you reach him before the end? Cradle him while he died? Did you know the knife was given to me by a friend of Tatiana’s? She’s been sniffing at the heels of all this for too long…that tinker’s daughter always had a knack for interfering, ever since she was a girl. I hope she knows her ignorance delivered the weapon straight into my hand.”
Rage reddened Cistine’s sight. “You won’t taunt me into a fight, bandayo.”
He flushed at that word—then attacked without warning, augmented wind curling around his fists. But Cistine had anticipated him, the corners of that whip of air crawling toward her while he postured. So when he struck, she was already moving, banking off the base of the steps in a spinning dodge and launching herself at him. She formed a fist, thumb outside her fingers, knuckles driving in; and Salvotor, wicked, pain-pleasured fool that he was, didn’t retreat. He braced and smirked, welcoming her to break her hand on his cheek like she did the very first time they met.
But not again.
At the last instant, she flicked her wrist; the mechanisms in Aden’s gift made no sound at all, launching the thin, sleek Svarkyst knife from the gauntlet’s hidden seams. And she would never forget the sound or the feeling as it jammed to the full length straight through the flesh of Salvotor’s cheek, so flush that his weeks of stubble scraped her palm.
Howling profanely, he smashed her away with a kick to the stomach, knocking the air from her lungs; but when she went, the blade went with her, ripping clean down his teeth and out the side of his mouth, shrieking over his molars hard enough to spit sparks. Cistine cracked against the stone, her head snapping along the steps, and black splotches bloomed across her vision. While she struggled to cling to consciousness, Salvotor slammed his foot on her gauntleted wrist; bone snapped audibly, and if not for her training, she would’ve vomited. White fire screamed through her arm up into her head, and then she was screaming in agony until Salvotor struck her across the face, splitting her lip and knocking her head to the side so she spat blood on the steps.
“Enough,” the other man spoke suddenly, his tone harsher than before. “Do not waste one drop of that sacred blood.”
Salvotor ripped his foot from her arm, and light flooded back into the world too fast. Gasping, fighting not to retch, she watched through pain-slitted eyes as Salvotor jerked a healing augment from his cloak. He shattered it against the unhurt half of his face with a wobbling hand, and those warm white threads spread across his body—but it didn’t heal properly. Too much of the man was replaced with the machinations meant to protect him from attack. The healing augment bucked across his skin, stitching and unbinding, knitting the edges askew so that what emerged was not pinked flesh but a jarring mound of scarred tissue and still-weeping gaps along one half of his ravaged face, teeth peeping through.
Salvotor glared down at her. “Nevermind that, she’s going to bleed anyway. Let’s get her to the Door, shall we? Then you take your augments and your companions and go. Once the disloyal are routed, I’ll reshape the remnants of this city into something fit for a king.”
“We will not leave the city.” His voice full of an ancient hunger and hate, the man still didn’t turn from the statue.
“But that was the arrangement.” Salvotor’s tone darkened. “You would tell me the secret to opening one of the Doors. In exchange, you could take your fill of augments before we parted ways.”
“That agreement was the only way to solicit your aid in taking this city. We have no interest in braggart Chancellors who think themselves kings, and we will not share our rule.”
“Rule? Since when do you care for rulership?”
“Since he who rules the city rules the well. And he who rules the well rules the world.”
Cistine pried herself up on the steps and slowly dragged herself backward, clutching her broken wrist to her body, scooting on her heels and feeling along her thigh with her other hand.
“I grow tired of this.” Every imitation of amicability vanished from Salvotor’s tone. “We struck a bargain. My valenar brought you the plans you needed. These siege towers and the people who helped build them are ours.”
“I think you will find what we offered them was enough to sway their loyalty from your banal dreams to our broader vision.” The man flicked a long-boned hand, casting off Salvotor’s mustering shout of protest. “This city is ours. The prisoners that your woman and your spy freed are ours. And the augments will be ours, too. You and your spies and messengers served your purpose of distraction. If you humble yourselves before us now, we might have more use for you.”
Silence again as Salvotor’s schemes crumbled before him.
“Kneel,” the man purred. “And I will spare you.”
Salvotor’s lip curled. “I kneel before no man.”
“I am not a man. I am your new god.”
Thunder boomed as Salvotor unleashed a lightning augment, spanned it across his palms, and stepped forward to battle the ally who’d betrayed him. At that torrent of power set free, the man finally pivoted to face them, a slow, lazy swivel on heel revealing his long antelope-skull mask, sharp teeth forcing the mouth into an unnatural grin. Empty eyeholes dripping with shadows, he snapped both hands, shattering a flagon in each: wind and blood. Stirring together, they shot across the atrium and slammed into Salvotor’s chest.
He froze, trembling, then jerked to one side—head aslant, limbs contorting, his entire frame tangling into an unnatural rictus. His reinforced skin rippled, violent heaves traveling up his arms, across his scale-plated cheekbones. The stench of unbearable heat corroded the air, and Salvotor cast his head back and bellowed in agony with a voice so like his son’s.
Then he evaporated.
There was no other word for it. Cistine’s tormentor, Thorne’s abuser—the cabal’s greatest nightmare and seemingly-unkillable foe—turned to vapor. Bone, muscle, sinew, marrow, and flesh all became a fine red mist hanging suspended on that augmented wind.
Then it all dribbled onto the marble.
Mouth filling with vomit, Cistine stumbled to her feet as the creature turned to face her. “I know what you are. You’re not a god, you’re a criminal who kidnaps children.” She swallowed the surge of panic in her throat. “You’re a Bloodwight.”
“I am called the Aeoprast.” He turned back toward the white statue. “This was my first house of schooling. Before we fled to Azkai, I came here every day for a month, a fresh and pious acolyte. I prayed at this statue so fervently my body ran wet with sweat. I prayed for some answer…some sign of my place in this world. Swore I would atone for every theft, every murder, every defilement if only I was given purpose. I received silence in reply.”
He circled to the statue’s front, and Cistine fingered the augment pouch on her thigh, mapping the course from the steps to the door. With all her might, she avoided glancing at the stain of Salvotor spread on the floor.
“We are not bidden to render their faces, you know.” The Aeoprast looked up at what must’ve been the statue’s blank countenance. “Yet still we’re expected pay tribute to them with the labor of our hands and the lay of our minds. A faceless honor for a faceless God.”
Clamminess spattered Cistine’s palms. The sick feeling in her stomach steepened and bile rose up her throat.
“The silence was the reply, I realized. I have no need to atone. The True God will atone to me. I will march to his realm and lay claim to what is his. And you,” his head snapped toward Cistine, augments rising around him in a torrent. “Your blood will pave my path to the stars.”
Cistine shattered her own flagon, and fire burned up the wind he sent toward her. She lunged back from the steps, sending one blast of flame toward him and sheathing her arm with the other, tight tendrils to stabilize her broken wrist. The blinding pain dimmed so she could think while he moved, a vicious shadow melting through the wall of fire and gliding toward her like a nightmare given flesh.
Cords of flame sailed from his cloak; Cistine’s fire broke them. He feinted from the right, and she pivoted on heel, dispatching another gout. This one he caught backhanded, bringing it up along his cloak, and for a moment as his shadows and her flame braided together, she was back in a cold sewer tunnel, facing Reema, not him. Cold wind sailed over her, then heat, moving in tandem like two heads of the same beast.
Two augments as one.
Her focus scattered and reformed as his shadows did the same, anchoring her boots to the marble so she couldn’t retreat when he leaped toward her, hands grasping for what wasn’t his to take.
He didn’t expect her to brace for their meeting; nor had he seen the earth augment gripped in her weak hand, hidden up the fiery sleeve wrapped around her wrist; so he didn’t expect the power that rallied and boomed out from her; perhaps he didn’t even sense that it was not just fire, but earth as well, that scythed out from her body.
And when they did, the acolyte temple exploded around them.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
THE SCREAMING DRAGGED Cistine back from oblivion, many voices raised like figures gathered around her crib, like warm, white light and a hand on her brow.
There was light, not white but red, bathing her face from above, interrupted by flirts of shadow and so much screaming—
Cistine, Cistine, look at us. Look at me, Princess! Say my name!
“Ashe,” she choked.
Her Warden swore in relief. “I’ve got her, she’s here! Over here, Thorne!”
Another curse. Then Thorne plunged down next to her on his knees, his hands curling around something, and he moved it with a grind of rock and rock and a burst of strength beyond reason. The heaviness lifted; air rushed back into Cistine’s lungs, and hands looped under her arms and slid her backward on mud and marble, propping her up. No questions came before the healing light stole over her body, mending hurts just as she became aware of them: in her hips and legs, in her stomach and chest, and at last in her broken wrist. The last of the terrible pressure released from her lungs, and she croaked Thorne’s name.
He knelt over her sprawled legs, yanking his armored jacket off and hurling it around her ripped dress. Then his bloodied hands felt along her shoulders, her arms, and her sides, seeking any injury the augment didn’t heal. “Are you all right? Cistine!”
“We have to go,” she wheezed, and the arms around her tightened. At that, she knew them, and gripped the elbow locked across her body. “Ariadne, please…”
“She’s right. Now, Thorne,” Ariadne hissed.
And then above the wreckage Cistine had created with her power, Maleck screamed like a man being burned alive. Ashe shouted, Aden roared, and deep in the belly of the decimated structure, stone groaned and shifted.
The Aeoprast was moving.
Cistine yanked forward in Ariadne’s grip, seizing Thorne by the shoulder to brace herself when her head tipped and spun. “Help me. I have to get away from here!”
He reacted to her desperation without further pause, the thunder echoing her lightning. He swooped her up in his arms and was out of the hole in three precise jumps, broken rock to broken rock and then out. He staggered when they landed and settled her on her own feet, Ariadne lunging out behind them.
Breathless at the carnage she wrought, walls folded and floor caved in, Cistine saw at last how her augments sundered the acolyte training grounds to their barest foundations and leveled half the plaza—and in that ruin the cabal had fallen together. Ashe grabbed Maleck’s cheeks as his unfocused eyes darted, seeing and sensing what Cistine had trapped under this ruin.
But it wouldn’t be held there forever.
Something snapped under their feet. Thorne wrapped both arms around Cistine’s waist and slung her toward the alleyway, and Aden and Ashe pulled Maleck up and shoved him after her. He buckled with every step, grabbing his head, and when Ashe tugged him upright again he cried out at being touched, pulling away.
They hurtled into the city, crashing past broken Vassoran bodies, more stone and ruined buildings, clots of ice and unnatural fires licking up the city’s edges, and too many dead to number. Elites rushed by with weapons, ready to fight for the first time in twenty years. Ashe yanked up the necklace she wore and screamed for Bresnyar, and Cistine’s ears rang with all the yelling, the gasping, the weeping in the streets around them. Thorne hauled her with his hand locked around hers, her feet dragging at the stone road like a drunkard, the call almost loud enough to consume everything else. Understanding slammed again and again into her head, making sense at last of all she had felt, pursued, and endured from the moment she stepped onto that Door beneath Stornhaz when she set all of this in motion.
Nazvaldolya. A name for what she’d been running toward all this time.
“Bresnyar!” Ashe’s voice cracked from shouting. “Wherever you are, please—”
She broke down without warning, slamming her hand into the nearest building and rocking back and forward like a sailor reeling on her sealegs. Maleck dug his heels into the road and twisted, reaching for her; Cistine screamed, “Ashe, what’s wrong?”
“I just saw…” She dug the heel of her hand into her brow, then snapped her head up. “Bresnyar.”
Gold flashed and flickered across the fire-soaked sky. With a bellow to rend the world, the dragon plunged from the smoke and crashed into the nearest siege-tower, ripping into it with his mighty talons and gutting it with his hind feet. Inside, men screamed, and outside mirrors cracked with concussive bursts.
Ashe yelled again, this time in warning.
Lightning shot out from the siege-tower slats, bursting across Bresnyar’s scales. He roared, released, and plunged backward; Ashe sobbed his name and staggered into a run toward the wall, though she could never scale it—nor was there any need. The dragon vaulted back into view seconds later, faltering and angling, forgoing the tower for the city streets this time. Homes and shops fractured under the drag of his tail, the slam of his feet, but no one cared—if they were even left alive to see.
The cabal skidded up to Bresnyar’s side, and his pain-dimmed eyes raked over them. “All of you, climb on.”
“Wait,” Quill panted, stepping back. “Tatiana.”
“I know where she is, I can scent her. Now climb up, will you?”
Cursing, Quill gripped the dragon’s hinge joint and swung onto his back. Ashe flagged the others up, streaked her runemarked hand over Bresnyar’s side, and leaped on last. Spinning in place, he bashed more buildings to rubble, clearing a way for himself; then he lunged and clawed up the wall to the walkway and streaked down it at a dead run, teeth and tail sweeping enemies to their deaths on both sides.
Lightning arced from the towers, rippling whips of pink, white, and lavender. Cistine cringed against Thorne’s chest as a tine shot out past Bresnyar’s nose, far too close. Then Quill coiled up at the front, straining forward on Bresnyar’s back. “I see her!”
Tatiana was fighting for her life at the top of the Channel gate, battling six men at once, a wild fury in her movements Cistine had never witnessed before. Every blow precise, no strength spared, she was a death-god in a cobalt dress. Fury raged in her face, embers flocking the tips of her hair as she hurled men down with honed blows and snapped their necks left and right, clearing a path; then she slammed her boot into the hauling winch that ran up the gate.
“What is she doing?” Cistine screamed. “She’ll let them all inside!”
“She’s letting our people out!” Aden’s voice was nearly lost to the wind.
He was right; the Channel had clogged with fleeing Valgardans clustered on docks and barges. But the Vassora who manned the winch and chains were splattered on the stone far below; there was no one to free the city except Tatiana, running to the second chain and activating the winch with flying fingers. She whooped in relief as the gate groaned and started to rise, then whipped down the wall to face another pack of enemies dismounting from the nearest siege-tower, moving straight toward her.
Quill’s shout of her name cracked with anguish. Tatiana swiveled half-toward them, eyes glinting, then looked back at the men. Quill yelled for her again, warning and a plea woven in his tone.
Bresnyar tore down the wall, picking up speed as he went, and Tatiana drew the knives from her thigh sheaths and hurled them with all her might, picking off the two men at the lead. Then she turned and hurtled toward the golden dragon running to meet her.
As they neared the gate, power built on the air again, turning static as lightning gathered at their backs.
“Bresnyar!” Ashe cried out.
Roaring, the dragon lunged sideways from the wall toward free skies. Tatiana changed course and hurtled after him, flinging herself to the mercy of the empty air. Quill jerked his feet under him and leaped with all his might, gripping Bresnyar’s wing joint in one hand, the other reaching out wildly for his valenar. His fingers caught hers at the very tips, and he swung her toward the dragon’s back and Ariadne’s waiting arms. Aden steadied Quill’s graceful, brutal arc, landing again on Bresnyar’s spine where he clung on for dear life, panting and shaking. Then Bresnyar gathered what remained of his strength and shot into the darkness—away from the Bloodwight siege.
When Stornhaz was little more than a speck on the horizon, burning across Eben’s plains, the dragon finally slowed, descended in tight spirals, and struck down on a small hilltop. Cistine tumbled from his back and whirled toward the others. “Is everyone all right?”
Quill shook his head.
“Pippet?” Tatiana croaked.
“Gone.” The word ripped from Aden like a knife, agony shining in his sweat-damp face. “Faer couldn’t keep her trail.”
A tear slid from the corner of Tatiana’s eye. Quill stared at her, jaw feathering with tension. “Where were you?”
