Master of Crows (33 page)

“Damn, damn, damn!”  Martise staggered to her feet, sore from the fall and the long ride.  She spat blood and dusted her skirts.  The wind howled its rage, and she wanted to howl with it.  So close.  The tor was within sight—mere minutes on horseback, a good half hour on foot.  The fear of dying was a moot point now.  If she managed to survive the ritual with Silhara, Cumbria would kill her for losing his horse.

She struck out for the tor, buffeted by the magic storm blasting off its peak.  The wind tore at her clothes, dried her eyes.  At the base, she discovered the retainers and their horses huddled together within the protective bounds of a warding circle.  None looked her way, their terrified gazes locked on the spinning column of jet light erupting from the tor’s crown.

She circled away from the servants, careful not to draw attention to herself while she trekked up the hill.

The climb was steeper than it appeared and far more treacherous.  The magic streaming from the top froze the surrounding turf, turning the face of the tor into a slippery pitch of ice and mud.  Martise shrieked curses as she lost her footing twice and slid down the incline.  Wiping mud from her cheeks, she clawed her way up on numb hands and wet knees.

Breathless and shuddering with cold, she reached the top and collapsed against a standing stone.  The tableau before her sent her scrambling behind the stone.

The stones, ancient sentinels raised by the not quite human hands of a vanished race, encircled the tor’s peak in a granite coronet.  Within their ring, a dozen Conclave priests confronted the black tornado at its center.  Reduced to pale, hollow-eyed wraiths, they swayed in the howling maelstrom, spears of crimson light shooting from their raised palms to tether them to Corruption’s earthly manifestation.  Cumbria stood among them, eyes wide and glazed white from the ritual’s magic.

Martise covered her mouth and moaned.  Thirteen mages battled Corruption on this high and ancient place, twelve within the circle, one within the storm itself.  Silhara stood inside the whirlwind’s center.  She saw only flashes of his harsh face, cloaked by the spin of clouds, gaunt and stripped of its humanity by the god’s full possession.  He seemed taller than before, equaling Gurn’s height, and his eyes were the same reptilian-black they’d been when he’d attacked her at Neith.  The wind didn’t touch him, and he watched the priests’ efforts with an icy half smile of triumph.  The Master of Crows had wholly become Corruption’s vessel.

Despair and anger mingled with fear, lessened it so that she abandoned the safety of the stone and stepped inside the perimeter of the ritual gathering.  Her Gift surged inside her, hostile, desperate to engage the malevolent force filling the space inside the ring of stones.

Martise slowly approached one of the priests, a woman she recognized from her years at Conclave.  The bishop didn’t even twitch when she touched her arm.  Lightning bolts of magery shot through Martise’s fingers, hot and sharp.  Her Gift roiled in response, beating against her will.  She held on, running her hand over the woman’s forearm until she reached the cascade of scarlet light spilling from her palm.

The light binding the priests to the god was the path to Silhara.  Martise took a shuddering breath, glanced at her lover trapped in the whirlwind, and touched the crimson stream.

Her Gift punched through the barrier of her control, buried ethereal claws in the mage-bind and wrenched her soul along as it raced toward a pilaster of shimmering obsidian.

Colors—emerald and nacreous yellow, silver and rust—collapsed in on themselves in a mad kaleidoscope.  Martise gasped at the rush of wind, the agonized jolt of her spirit splitting from her body as her Gift struck the black spire and shattered the wall of the world.

She hit something soft with a muffled thud.  No pain juddered up her arm or down her back.  She rolled and leapt to her feet.  The cold mud smeared on her face and clothes was gone.  She stood on a beach, but a beach unlike any existing in the living world.  Gray sand drifted over her feet, light as ash and smelling of funeral pyres.  Behind her, cliffs hewn of tortured rock reached toward an endless night brightened only by twelve red stars.  An ocean stretched before her, black waves tumbling toward the silent shore.

This was a dead place, a prison of vanished memories and unlife, of eternity that passed without the measure of days.  A soulless quiet that devoured itself as a serpent swallowing its tail.  She was in the belly of the god, and somewhere in this wretched prison Silhara waited.

Above her, the twelve points of light brightened in the moonless sky.  The flat sea rolling in from a vanishing horizon suddenly split into churning waves.  Martise caught a glimpse of an arching shape and a massive dorsal fin taller than a temple spire before it sank into the depths.  Something swam in the dead waters, something titanic that thrashed with fury.  Waves heaved, higher than castle walls.  The chant of ancient spells filled the heavy air and was answered by shrieking laughter.

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed an outcropping of rock rising from the water, not far from the shore.  A figure, silhouetted in red starlight, sat on the rock and watched the waves lap at his feet.

“Silhara!”  Martise bellowed his name and jumped as the ghostly echo of her voice bounced off the jet cliffs behind her.  She caught her breath when the water suddenly churned, leaving a wake of white peaks as the thing in the water sped for the outcropping.

She raced along the shore’s edge, following the leviathan’s waterborn path until she faced Silhara’s rocky perch from the shore’s sanctuary.  He didn’t look at her, but instead stared at the far horizon.

“Silhara!” she shouted once more, and he turned long enough to give her a bored glance.  Martise motioned frantically.  “Swim to shore, Master!”

This Silhara was the soul of the man yet unclaimed by the god.  He watched her with human eyes, eyes filled with a hard resolve and an acceptance of his own death.  The bitter smile he bestowed on her was poignantly familiar.

“Was it not enough that you burned my grove to the ground, Corruption?  You would torture me with this illusion?”  Like Martise’s, his voice echoed in the vault of the god’s prison.  He turned away from her.

Martise closed her eyes for a moment, a sympathetic ache lodged in her chest.  Willing possession wasn’t enough.  The god had punished him by destroying the thing that meant the most to Silhara—his trees.  Such petty cruelty spoke of lesser beings unworthy of a prayer, much less worship.  Hatred for Corruption rocked her.

Terrified to her bones by what her immediate future held, she was still glad to be here with the man who’d chosen her life above his own.  She loved him.  He was worth dying for.

“Master,” she called.  “I’m no illusion.”

Silhara ignored her.  Martise clenched her hands into fists and growled her frustration.  Damn the stubborn bastard, he’d make her swim to him.

She kicked off her shoes and tucked the hem of her cyrtel into her belt.  The water lapped at her feet, neither cold nor warm.  She had only a sense of oily wetness, as if the tide lapped blood instead of water on the shore.  This sea didn’t smell of sun or salt or fish, had likely never tossed a ship on its waters or had anything other than the leviathan swim in the depths.  Taking a breath, Martise waded in, certain she walked into a liquid sarcophagus.

Black waves struck her face as she swam for the rock.  She kept her mouth tightly shut against the water, fearful of somehow swallowing the god’s essence and tainting her soul forever.

Something vast moved below her, stirring the underwater current.  Martise sensed its presence, a colossal entity that watched her from the black deep.  She swam harder.  In this unnatural world, she didn’t tire from the exertion and soon reached the outcropping on which Silhara sat, arms braced casually over his knees.

“Silhara, help me up.”  She stretched out a hand.  He glanced at her, annoyed.

“What do you want of me, Corruption?”

Martise slapped her hand against the slippery rock.  “Stop being so thick-headed!  I’m not the god or an illusion.”  She scrabbled harder to find a solid grip, sure the monster with its towering fin was even now rushing up from the depths, its great mouth, razored with rows of sharp teeth, opened wide to swallow her.  “Damn it, Silhara.  I’m Zafira.”

The sucking grasp of the water pulled at her legs as Silhara yanked her out of the lifeless sea.  He glared at her, the first vibrant emotion she’d seen in his face since she’d fallen into this alternate place.

He dropped her hand as if scorched by her touch.  “I’ve poor luck.  You discovered the symbol’s meaning too soon.”

Heedless of her drenched state and his sharp reception, Martise threw her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.  Like the waters and shore, he smelled of a funeral pyre.  She could see her hands through his back and shuddered.  In this world, his soul had taken physical form like hers, but it was fading.  Like the priests, he was becoming a wraith, drained by the god and holding onto life with an ever-weakening grasp.

Still, Martise felt the weight of his arms as he embraced her, the ferocity of his kiss.  He didn’t taste of oranges or tea, but of a terrible despair.  Her Gift, quieted once it slung her through the barrier of realities, awakened.  Martise held it down, hoarded its strength.  She captured Silhara’s mouth in a kiss of her own, savoring the feel of him in her arms.

“Foolish woman,” he whispered against her lips.  “You have made this meaningless.”

The apprentice returns.
  Corruption’s voice, mocking and filled with malice, thundered over the waves.

“Not meaningless,” she said.  “Survivable.”  She meant to say more, but Silhara suddenly seized in her embrace, convulsing as a spear of red light from the distant stars struck him.  His eyes rolled back in his head, mouth opening on a silent scream.  Martise cried out with him, scrambling to hold him upright when his knees buckled.  The shadowy creature surfing beneath the waves slapped an enormous fin against the rock, and Corruption’s enraged howl deafened her.

Martise lowered Silhara to the wet ground, holding him like a child.  Bursin!  The strength of the priests and their spells.  They’d attacked as one, throwing all their force against Corruption and the mage who held him in a body growing fragile with the strain.

Had this world and time allowed it, she would have cried when Silhara opened his eyes.  All the stars missing from the false night glittered in his black gaze.

“I cursed the day you came to Neith.”  He turned his face into her hand, kissing her palm.  “And cursed the day you left.”

“Let me help you.”  She stroked a lock of hair from his cheek, loving him with her eyes, her touch.  “I don’t want your nobility, Silhara.  It doesn’t suit you.”

He stared at her for a long moment.  “You may well die here with me.  Neither Berdikhan nor Zafira survived.”

She shrugged, doing her best to conceal her terror, knowing he saw it in her eyes.  “There are worse deaths.”

Silhara pulled her down and kissed her again.  This time Martise tasted the bitter essence of battle magic.  The priests would continue to decimate him.  As long as he trapped the god and was trapped by him, Conclave would attack until Corruption fell and his avatar fell with him.

“I didn’t give you up to death at Iwehvenn,” she said.  “I won’t do so now.”

His sensual mouth, thinned with pain, curved into a shallow smile.  “What happened to that sad mouse of a woman who first came to Neith and leapt at her own shadow?”

“I didn’t love you then.”  Martise stroked his cheek.  “And I still leap at my own shadow.”

Crimson light rained down on the sea.  The outcropping shuddered beneath Martise and Silhara as the water beast slammed against the rock in agitation.  Silhara struggled in her arms.  Martise helped him stand, shouldering his weight as he staggered.

“I’m dying,” he rasped.

Martise wrapped her arms around his waist and stared into his drawn features.  His dark eyes, alight with stars moments earlier, were dull.

“Then make it stop,” she beseeched him.  “Use me.  Use my Gift.  I didn’t make your sacrifice futile.  Don’t make mine wasteful.”  She curved her palm against his cheek.  “Let me love you for this moment.  It will be enough.”

Silhara laughed, a deep, hollow sound.  “No, Martise of Asher.”  A nimbus of bloody light bathed him in macabre radiance.  His hands on her shoulders tightened.  “I am a greedy man.  We could live a thousand years more than this twisted god, and still it will not be enough.”

He bent to her, teased her lips with his.  “Open for me,
bide jiana
.  Let me in.”

Martise shook with fright and laughed with joy.  Her Gift, smashing against the gates of her will, broke free, rushed toward the man in her arms in a surge of living amber light.  She fell into darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She would die in his arms, and by his hand.  Silhara gathered Martise close and claimed her willing soul, hoarded it within his own fragile spirit and raged against the god for his actions.  This wasn’t a mating, but a possession, vile and parasitic.  The god’s control over him was limited, and the most powerful part of his being remained untouched.  Silhara not only possessed Martise, he consumed her.  He almost dropped her, recoiling at the thought of what he was doing to the woman who had saved him, not once but twice.

This plain, unassuming girl held a Gift more powerful than a hundred suns, a Gift rushing through him like a vast, undammed river.  He’d taken what she offered because she’d offered something no other person had ever given him—hope.  His Gift rallied beneath the buoyed strength of hers, filling his soul so that he no longer saw sea and rock through his own hands.  No longer suffered the bludgeoning force of the god’s possession or the single-minded hatred of the priests.

The waters raged around them as the creature in the depths flailed the rock, sending broken stones tumbling into the waves.  The stars above, manifestations of the priests, brightened, converging their magic in preparation for attacking the god once more.

Silhara stared at Martise’s peaceful face, her closed eyes.  In this foul place, she burned softly, haloed in amber light.  He loved her to the point of madness, to obsession and even sacrifice.  He wasn’t Berdikhan, and he wouldn’t make her Zafira.  He’d rob her of her Gift, but she’d live.  If he had to destroy Corruption, Conclave and himself, she’d live.

He drew on her Gift as a starved man at a feast.  The sudden agony ripping up his spine made him cry out.  The priests hurled their combined might against him, and through him, to the god.  Despite the agony, Silhara grasped their power, channeled it, fortified it and honed it until the magic pulsed in his hand, a blazing javelin.  He flung the spear into the waves, harpooning the black shadow undulating just below the surface.  Corruption’s shock, its sudden terror, lashed him as hard as the priests’ attack.  A spray of glutinous water shot skyward as the creature launched out of the waves in a convulsive arc—a great eel-like thing with dark, slick scales, its eyeless head towered over them.  The gaping mouth, pierced by the mage-spear Silhara crafted, was wide enough to swallow the moon.

Corruption twisted in the air as it hurtled back toward Silhara.  The mage invoked a shield spell, using the residual strength of Conclave’s magic and the ceaseless flow of Martise’s Gift.  The eel slammed against the mage ward before falling into the water, sending a tidal wave high as a tor toward the lifeless shore.

The god shrieked its anger. 
I am betrayed!

Conclave’s priests flooded the ocean in crimson light.  Silhara, triumphant and riddled with pain, laughed.  “You are disbelieved,” he shouted.

The leviathan churned the waters in rising panic. 
You are my avatar!

Silhara smiled a grim smile.  “I am your ruin and your executioner.”

A sudden silence fell around them, and the sea flattened to a glassy stillness.  Corruption’s voice whispered comprehension and malice. 
The apprentice.

Silhara hugged Martise’s limp body, shuddering at her lightness, the translucence of her skin as her life force faded with the diminishing of her Gift.  He could no longer wait.  The god now knew the source of his greatest strength.  “My woman,” he whispered.  “My weapon.”

More of the priestly light shone down, and Silhara seized it, weaving an unbreakable web as he not only drained Martise but the priests as well.  A nebulous darkness billowed out from the vanished horizon and surged over the ocean’s surface toward him.  Silhara braced himself, knowing the god had turned all its will and power on him.  To destroy Martise, destroy him and free itself from the prison of its own possession.

Silhara clenched his teeth when the blackness smashed into him.  Invisible claws raked his skin.  He could see nothing, only hear the cacophony of shrieks and demon howls as Corruption strove to obliterate him.  Silhara fought back, bound the god in ethereal chains and bled the darkness dry.  A last beseeching screech blasted his ears before the black cloud fractured like glass and exploded in a shower of obsidian splinters.  The Master of Crows collapsed.

He awakened flat on his back with a close-up view of Gurn’s blunt face and tear-filled eyes staring at him.  A wet coldness seeped into his back and legs.  The broken moans of suffering and distress serenaded him into full consciousness.  He tried to speak but only managed to cough up a mouthful of blood.  Gurn rolled him gently to his side so he could spit.

“Martise.” He struggled to breathe.  “Gurn, find Martise.”

The giant stroked the damp hair away from Silhara’s temple and signed before he left.  Silhara remained on his side.  The uncomfortable damp was the grass beneath him, muddied and brittle with melting frost.  From where he huddled, he saw battered white shapes sprawled on the ground.  The priests lay around him, their once pristine robes stained with dirt and blood.  Some twitched and moaned.  Others were ominously still.

His vision blurred, and he squinted, desperate to see another shape—small and dressed in brown wool—among the gathering.  “Please,” he prayed sincerely for the first time in his life.  “Let her be alive.”

His prayer was answered when a pair of mud-encrusted shoes and a dirty hem filled his vision.  Martise fell to her knees beside him.  As filthy and bloodied as he, she stared at him as Gurn had, eyes wide and full of tears, but exultant.

“You did it,” she said.  Her hand drifted over his face in a feather-light caress.  “You defeated a god, Silhara.”

He pulled her down and rolled so that she rested on top of him.  Every muscle and bone in his body screamed in protest, but he ignored the pain.  She was freezing, muddy and blessedly alive.  He cupped her face in his palms and kissed her deeply, uncaring that he tasted of blood.  So did she, and she returned his kiss with a desperate fervor, sweeping her tongue into his mouth and sucking on his lower lip.

Tears painted silver tracks on her dirty cheeks when they finally separated.  “I will give tribute to the gods every day at temple.  You’re a hero, not a martyr.”

He snorted his disdain.  “I’m neither, and want to stay that way.  Take your credit.  Without you, I would not have lived to sing of Corruption’s defeat.”

Martise wiped a trickle of blood from beneath her nose.  “I’m just glad it’s over.”

Silhara couldn’t agree more.  “Can you summon your Gift?”

She frowned, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them.  Her wry smile told its tale.  “No.  It’s gone.”

They both knew such would be the outcome, and in the case of her unique magic, that outcome was a blessing.  Still, he remembered the excitement in her eyes when her Gift first manifested and sorrowed for its loss.  He stroked her back.  “Would you believe me if I said I’m sorry?”

Martise ran her finger over his lip before kissing the spot she’d caressed.  No condemnation clouded her gaze.  “Yes.  But why be sorry?  My sacrifice is no greater than yours.  I’m free of another yoke, and I’ve lived my life until now without such power.  I’ll do so again.  And you’re here.  Whole and unconquered.  I’m happy with that.”  She kissed him again, her gaze holding a grief like his.  “I heard you on the beach.  I’m sorry about your grove.  Corruption exacted a terrible punishment.”

Anguish rose within him, despite his present fortuitous circumstances.  His grove.  The heart of Neith, once the heart of him.  Until Martise.  The thought eased his sorrow.  He rubbed the tip of her braid between thumb and forefinger.  “He didn’t take what means most to me.”

Her eyes glittered, almost as dark as his in the shadows of true night.  “I love you,” she whispered.

He embraced her, kissed her and inhaled her scent, almost hidden beneath the pungent odors of wet wool and blood.  Corruption hadn’t taken her from him, but Cumbria would.  Not for long.  Not if he had a say in it.

Gurn loomed over them, conspicuously occupying himself with stargazing.  He looked down when Silhara raised a hand.  The servant helped them stand.  His eyes were glassy with tears, but he bestowed a beatific smile on Silhara and signed.

The world tilted on its axis as Silhara tottered.  His stomach roiled; he wanted to retch, and his clothes were sodden and cold.  All those things paled before Gurn’s obvious happiness.   He slapped the giant on the arm and gave him a mock scowl.  “Piss-poor, disobedient servant as always.  I thought I laid a geas against you.”

More signing, and Martise blinked innocently when Gurn pointed to her.  “Your geas prevented him from returning to Neith, not the tor.”

This time Silhara’s scowl was genuine.  “I’m not usually so careless.”

Servant and apprentice both shrugged.  “You were distracted,” she said.

More groans from the surviving priests, along with the whinny of horses and the rattle of carts as Conclave retainers began their climb up the tor to help their masters.

  He was out of time.  Even with her Gift now extinct, Conclave could never know Martise was here.  No lie, no matter how skillfully told, would convince the priests she’d come as a spectator if they saw her standing with him.  They’d sensed the change in his strength, the signature feel of a powerful magic not his own.  He despised the clerics, but he never underestimated them.

He ached with the need to keep Martise close, to steal her away.  Back to Neith where he ruled unchallenged and could defend his right to keep her.  But even he couldn’t break the chain that bound her to Cumbria.  She had to return.

“Get out of here, Martise,” he said in a harsh voice.

Bewildered by his sudden turn in mood, she gaped at him.

“They can’t find you here.  None can know you participated in the ritual.  The priests sensed the strengthening of my magic, but they don’t know why.  If you stay, they will."

She shook her head, backing away as if to prevent him from physically forcing her down the hillside.  “I can’t leave you here.  What if the priests…”

“I have Gurn for protection, and they’re no stronger than I am at the moment.  I can defend myself if I must.  Thanks to you.”  He turned to his servant avoiding his sympathetic gaze.  “Get her down there and don’t let the servants see her either.  If you have to kill one of them to steal a horse, do it.”  Gurn nodded and touched a dagger in the sheath at his belt.

Martise stood before him, hands buried in her skirts, her mouth trembling.  “Please,” she mouthed.

He didn’t dare comfort her, didn’t dare get too close. If he did, he wouldn’t let her go.  His next words cut him like knives, and he bled inside.  “You aren’t mine,” he said in a soft voice.  “Go home, Martise…of Asher.”