Promise of Wrath (The Hellequin Chronicles Book 6) (8 page)

I kicked another vampire off the battlements, and cut the head off a second as he dropped beside me. A third screamed in rage as he launched himself at me from several feet away, but a whip of fire from my hand sliced him in two, both halves turning to dust as they fell into the city.

Somewhere in the darkness a horn sounded and the earth began to rumble. I looked over the city walls and reapplied my night vision. Asag was running full-pelt toward the city gates close to us. Next to him were a dozen smaller creatures.

“We have a big problem,” I said to Irkalla, who was busy killing more vampires.

“Asag?” she asked.

“And his friends.”

“Gilgamesh, we’ve got ekimmu on the way!” she shouted to the large man, who was currently flinging vampires off the battlements with ease, his huge maul knocking them aside, destroying bone and organ alike.

“We need to protect the gates!” Nanshe shouted up from below. “If they make it through, a lot more people will die.”

“I will take the Teutonic Knights to one of the other gates,” Nabu said from beside her. “Nanshe, take the Templars to the third gate. Hold it for as long as you can. There are others of our group already there—they will aid you.”

Nanshe nodded and ran off into the city.

“Hellequin, can you, Gilgamesh, and Irkalla hold here?”

I looked over the wall again, and found that only Asag remained; the remainder of the attacking force had run to different parts of the city walls. “I really hope so!” I shouted back.

Any archers still capable of firing rained down death on Asag and his creatures, but most of the arrows bounced off his body. For the most part Asag ignored them, and even ignored the badly wounded but still-alive vampires, who were tossed over the side onto him. He swatted them away with barely a loss in stride before he reared back and struck the gates.

The entire wall shook with the force of the blow.

“Anyone ever fought this thing before?” I asked.

“I will stop him,” Gilgamesh said, launching himself over the battlements, down onto Asag.

“Idiot,” Irkalla snapped, just as a dozen small rock monsters clambered over the walls and began pulling men to their death over the battlements, or cutting them open with their sharp claws.

Using my wind magic to knock them back seemed to do the trick, and my whips of fire were able to cut through one monster. The others decided that avoiding me to take on easier prey was a better use of their time.

“They’re an extension of Asag’s power,” Irkalla told me. “I’d advise you to destroy as many of them as possible.”

The blows against the city gate had ceased while the sounds of battle between Asag and Gilgamesh rang out below.

“What if enough people attacked Asag?” I asked. “Would he be forced to take these little things away?”

“I have no idea. Only one way to find out: I assume you mean you.”

“You’re more capable at dispatching the vampires quicker, and the little rock bastards seem to ignore anyone with actual power. They’re only here for the humans. We can use that to keep them occupied.”

“Go. I’ll make sure these little things don’t cause too much trouble. Maybe some hammers would help even the odds; I doubt they like them. How will you get out of the city without the gate being open?”

I climbed up onto the edge of the battlements in response. “Best of luck.”

Irkalla nodded slightly at me before rushing toward the fighting as it spilled off the battlements and down onto the area just in front of the city gates.

My air magic slowed me down enough that I hit the ground outside of the city with an impressive noise and a lot of dust, but no actual injuries. Starting a fight with a broken leg is hardly the best idea.

Gilgamesh was on his knees in front of Asag, who had one massive fist wrapped around his opponent’s maul and was trying to wrench it free of his grasp. Gilgamesh was bleeding from a dozen cuts to his face and body, and Asag’s face appeared to be chipped and dented. War had been waged between the two.

Asag saw me, released his grasp on Gilgamesh’s maul, and kicked the still-kneeling man in the chest, sending him tumbling down the steep bank behind him. It wasn’t a long way down, nor overly deep at the bottom, but even so, I couldn’t count on Gilgamesh’s help for the next few minutes.

At almost seven feet tall and wider than two men, Asag was still every bit as imposing as when I’d fought him before I’d arrived at the city. Rock jutted out of every part of his body, forming plates that overlapped one another, leaving only the inside of his mouth and eyes free from it. His hands more closely resembled claws. He had the appearance of a smaller, but no less deadly, mountain.

“I tracked you for days,” Asag said. “Your pathetic coward of a guide wouldn’t let you face me.”

“He told me you’d kill me.”

“I will.”

“Come on, then. We don’t have all night.”

Asag charged toward me, bringing his considerable rocky bulk to attack. I moved aside of his blow and raked my sword along his ribs to test the strength of his rock skin.

I put enough distance between us and sheathed my sword: it was all but useless. I remembered Asag’s scream of pain when I’d used my fire magic the last time we’d met, and an instant later, a whip of fire ignited from one of my hands. I flicked it toward Asag, who moved back slightly, but not quickly enough to tell me he was concerned about it.

I walked steadily toward him, the whip trailing along the ground, scorching the earth, until I was close enough, then I flicked it up toward him once again. He stepped back, and at the last second, I removed the whip and threw a ball of flame at him. Asag raised his hand to shield his face from harm, and I darted forward, changing the whip of flame for a blade, which I brought down on his arm.

I hadn’t really known what effect it was going to have; I was just trying anything to see what could make it through Asag’s tough skin, so I wasn’t expecting the monster to scream in pain and anger. His eyes locked with mine as the blade of flame cut through the rock and bit into whatever was beneath, and I knew he knew that I’d confirmed his weakness: magical fire. Asag swung with his good arm, but I removed the blade, darted aside, reignited it, and plunged it into his side. Asag cried out once more as several of the small monsters he controlled jumped from the battlements above me, landing with a crash.

I twisted the blade and pushed it in further, but my attention wasn’t wholly on Asag, so I didn’t see him swipe back at me with his enormous arm. He caught me in the chest, throwing me aside as if I were nothing. The breath left my body in one go as several of my ribs broke, and my magical night vision flickered on and off for a few seconds. When my sight was steady, I used the wooden bridge beside me to get back to my feet as Asag barreled into me, driving me over the bridge and down the bank where Gilgamesh had fallen. Water and grime filled my nose, eyes, and mouth, and I rolled onto my side, blindly trying to use the reeds and plants that littered the banks to pull myself out. I was trying to get the muck out of my eyes when I was lifted from my feet and thrown aside, colliding with the side of the bank, but thankfully not rolling back into the muck at the bottom.

My chest was on fire, and I was pretty certain I’d done more than just break a few ribs. I needed time to heal. I crawled toward the nearest tree, hoping to use it to get me back to my feet.

“I’m going to crush you, Merlin’s little man,” Asag said, his face close to mine, his hot breath making me feel sick.

I didn’t even see the blow to my stomach, but I doubled up and vomited onto the ground all the same. I couldn’t remember the last time something had hit me that hard. Asag picked me up, his claws raking over the flesh on my shoulder, and once more I found myself sailing through the air. I landed roughly, feeling my wrist snap, but used air magic to get the muck off my face. Unfortunately, that just let me watch as Asag walked up the bank toward me.

I scrambled to my feet and looked around. I was outside the main gate once more, but I was not going to go down without a fight. I limped to the other end of the bridge and watched for Asag to climb the bank. His little monsters had vanished, and as he walked into view, I saw the last of them merge with him, healing him.

“Neat trick,” I said through clenched teeth.

“My next one is ripping your head off.”

I placed my broken hand against my chest and felt the blood there. Power flowed through me as my blood magic ignited. Asag paused; he’d probably seen Mordred use blood magic, but while I was nowhere near as powerful as he was with it, I was no slouch.

I flexed my fingers and my blood magic began to block out the pain of my broken ribs and other injuries. Using blood magic in such a way that you ignore your own limitations and injuries was incredibly dangerous, but so was being dead. If I didn’t do something, the latter was much more likely to happen.

Asag, now seemingly fully healed, walked methodically toward me. “There’s nothing you can do to hurt me, little man.”

I breathed in, ignoring the pain in my ribs, and held my breath as Asag walked closer and closer, each step reverberating over the wooden bridge. I held my place, blocking out the noise of soldiers yelling at me to run, to move aside.

Asag stopped only a few paces away from me. “You going to use that flame blade on me again, boy?”

I ignored him and used as much blood magic as possible to mix with my fire magic, giving me the power I needed. And I breathed out.

The flame that left my mouth was almost white hot. I was glad I’d used my air magic to coat my throat, lungs, and mouth before trying this trick. The flame hit Asag’s face before he even had time to register it. Just as he was about to speak, he screamed in pain as the flame torched the inside of his mouth, along with his eyes, blinding him instantly. It was then that I saw that the rock plates didn’t quite overlap by his neck, leaving the skin beneath exposed.

I reignited the flame blade and drove it up into a gap between the rocky plates of Asag’s neck before removing it, stepping around to his exposed flank, and driving it back into where his liver would be, cutting through the plates as if they weren’t there.

Asag dropped to his knees as a silver tar-like substance flowed out of his wounds. He swiped at me once again, but I’d already removed the blade and stepped around him to his back, where I drove the blade into his spine.

Asag fell to the ground as the gate to the city slowly opened. Irkalla ran out, followed by Nabu, who steadied me as my blood magic shut off and my body roared in pain. He helped lower me to the ground and placed me up against a tree.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

Irkalla shrugged. “I have no idea. He’s not trying to kill us, so quite possibly, yes.”

“Gilgamesh fell down there.” I pointed to where I’d seen him fall and Irkalla ordered the soldiers to go and check.

“The other gates held,” Nabu told me, his voice completely neutral, giving nothing away.

“What aren’t you telling me? Did Mordred escape?”

“No, Mordred is fine: he’s unconscious, but alive. Isabel was taken. Three human guards were killed in the fight.”

“Do you know by whom?” I asked, trying to get back to my feet, but Nabu held me in place until I gave up on the idea.

“Siris.” Nanshe’s tone betrayed the hurt that her expression didn’t give away. “We were betrayed by one of our own.”

CHAPTER
8

Now. London, England.

I
do hope you’re comfortable,” Mordred said as he sat on the chair beside me.

The half-dozen golems that had stopped me from being crushed by the collapsing building stood there, stoic and emotionless, as if holding up several tons of rubble was nothing to them. Which it probably was, considering they were a magical construct.

The tranquilizer was beginning to wear off, and once it did, I’d be able to free myself and stop Mordred before he did anything to hurt someone.

Mordred reached out and, before I could move, slipped a sorcerer’s band onto my wrist. I tried to push him away, but was too weak, and the second the clasp shut I felt my magic vanish from my body.

“Now don’t try to take that off; you know what happens. I don’t want you being silly.”

If I tried to remove the band, the runes inscribed on the metal touching my skin would instantly ignite, setting off the equivalent of a magical napalm bomb. It would be too quick for me to set up any kind of defense, and all I’d be able to do would be to die quickly and painfully. If it were possible, I hated Mordred even more for making me wear one, for removing my magic from me, but I pushed the anger down. I was in no position to make demands. Instead, I stayed still and stared at the man I had once called a friend.

“Why are you here?”

“To talk to you. I brought someone with me.” He pointed over to his right.

I turned and saw a woman. Her hair had been cut short since I’d last seen her over a thousand years ago, and was dyed bright green, but I couldn’t mistake the woman I’d once loved. The woman who’d betrayed Arthur, betrayed Avalon—betrayed me. Morgan.

“I wouldn’t distract her if I was you,” Mordred told me. “She’s all that’s keeping those golems from letting that roof fall onto you. So here’s how it’s going to go: you’re going to stay exceptionally still and answer my questions. I may even answer a few of yours. Because I’m feeling so generous, I’ll let you go first. Just to prove it, I’m not going to trick you.”

I continued staring past Mordred at Morgan. I always thought I’d feel something when I saw her again, something bigger than myself, something I couldn’t contain and would have to scream and rage at her. Ask her why. Ask her how she could betray me. But when it came down to it, I didn’t feel anything for her: no anger, no hate; I just pitied her. I pitied her for the fact that she’d aligned herself with such a psychopath as Mordred. A thousand years of distance between people was apparently a good way to deal with something.

“What’s the point? You’ll only lie.”

Mordred raised his hand, palm out, toward me. “You know what this is, don’t you?”

I recognized the small mark still drying on his palm. A blood-magic curse, one that forces the wearer to tell the truth. Like all blood-magic curses, this one had a catch, and in this mark’s case, one that made it rarely used. The mark could only be activated on someone who’d drawn it on themselves with their own blood, and done so freely. It meant that Mordred could avoid my questions, he could change the subject, but if he lied, he would feel intense pain.

“You’re wondering why I would go to such lengths to talk to you,” Mordred said, as if reading my thoughts. “I thought it better that we meet face-to-face, and when I watched you fight Kay, I was going to intervene, but I needed to be sure you had no fight left in you.”

We maintained eye contact for several seconds before he sighed. He held out his hand again, showing me the mark. “This mark was drawn here by a wandering giraffe.” The screams that left Mordred’s throat were immediate, and he threw himself from the chair, using his non-marked hand to hold the other against him, like someone would do if they’d broken a limb.

“No,” he said and raised his hand toward Morgan, who had taken a step toward her comrade.

“Do you believe now?” Mordred asked, showing me the mark once more, which had turned bright orange.

“Yes,” I promised him. There was no way to fake what he’d done. Which left the question: why had Mordred wanted to talk to me?

“Right,” Mordred said, smoothing back his hair and reapplying his ponytail before returning to his chair. “Damn it, I’ve got mud on my trousers. Do you see this?”

I looked at the specks of mud that had stained the black trousers of the expensive suit he was wearing. “I knew I should have just worn a T-shirt and jeans. These will need to be dry-cleaned. All it needs now is to piss it down with rain and my day will be complete.”

“Did you really come here to talk about clothing?” I asked, feeling confused about the sudden conversation change.

“Oh, yes, sorry. Where was I?” He looked around, as if trying to figure out where he was. “Right, why I’m here. And I assume you want to know how I’m still alive.”

“The question did come up,” I admitted. “I killed you.”

“Yes, you did,” Mordred said, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Bloody good job you did, too. Sniper round through the eye. Unbelievably painful. And you took my hand.” He raised both hands. “But just like dying, losing a hand didn’t take, either.”

“How are you alive?”

“Lots of reasons, really. I’m not here to get into all of them; they can wait for another time. Essentially, magic, luck, more magic, some more magic, and a fucking shitload of power. I’m not immortal, if that’s what you’re thinking, and I’m pretty certain if you tried that trick again, I’d be dead for real this time. I sort of thought of it at the time like an extra mushroom.”

“A what?”

“A mushroom. You know, a
mush . . . room
.” He repeated the word slowly the second time, as if talking to someone who doesn’t quite understand the language.

“I know what a mushroom is. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“
Super Mario
,” Mordred said. “Mushrooms make him bigger. There are other things that give him the ability to fly, or shoot fireballs, but they’re not mushrooms, although I guess they’d still work in this analogy. But I went with mushroom, so here we are.”

He paused for a second. “Anyway, if Mario gets hit he doesn’t die; he just shrinks to a smaller Mario. Then if he gets hit again, he dies. That’s me. Although in my case, I’ve gotten a lot more powerful since you killed me. I guess I should thank you for that.”

“You play
Super Mario
?”

“I had a lot of free time on my hands while my body and mind repaired itself. I played a lot of
Mario
, and
Final Fantasy
, and something called
Fallout
. That was fun. Oh, and
Lego
. I love
Lego
.”

I was beginning to feel like I’d been knocked out and was having some sort of weird hallucination. “Have you lost your mind? Genuinely curious.”

“Yes. I got shot in my brain.” Mordred’s words were said with a mocking tone, as if trying to get me to bite, to argue with him. He paused again. “It makes me go off on a tangent a lot. So I’ll be talking about something and then all of a sudden I’ll think of something else and off I go. It gets frustrating for those talking to me. I imagine you’re pretty annoyed right now.”

I sighed. This was turning into an exhausting conversation. “This is the strangest day I’ve had in a considerably long time. Any chance you could just get on with killing me? This whole thing is beginning to give me a headache.”

Mordred smiled and clapped his hands together. “Oh, it’s going to get stranger. You see, I’m not here to kill you. Not today, anyway.”

“You’re not?” My disbelief was easy to hear.

“Nope. We’re going to talk, and I’m going to leave.”

Despite every part of me knowing that Mordred was an insane murderer, he sounded sincere.

“Have you got
Mario
on pause or something?” I didn’t mean to mock him. I just couldn’t help it.

“Don’t be facetious. I’m being serious. I don’t want you dead today. If I did, I wouldn’t have had Morgan save you, I wouldn’t have checked the rest of the garden for any more surprises. That annex over there is empty, in case you were wondering. I already searched it. Also, Asag, Kay, and Jerry are long gone. You’re safe—for now.”

“Today?”

“Oh, I am going to kill you. I have to; it’s sort of where my destiny lies. In fact, it’s more where your destiny lies. But you’re not ready; you’re certainly not powerful enough. I need you at your peak before you can die. Or at least a lot more ready than you are now. Killing you now would achieve nothing. It would only make things more complicated in the long term, and I don’t really want that.”

“Do you plan on telling me
when
you’re going to kill me?”

Mordred tilted his head slightly and rolled his eyes. “I might be crazy, but I’m not an idiot. No, I’m not going to tell you. But you will die, and by my hands, too.”

“So why
are
you here?”

“To talk to you. To let you know I’m back. Oh, and to see how things are going with you. How many of your blood-curse marks are gone now? Be honest.”

For as long as I could remember—right the way back to waking up age eight on a field outside of Camelot—I had six blood-curse marks on my torso. For the longest time I had no idea what they did, but then, due to Mordred trying to kill me a few years earlier, they’d started vanishing. Two had gone so far, giving me an increase in power and my necromancy. Four remained. I had no idea what they would do, and frankly I was a little nervous about finding out.

I wondered if Mordred wanted to know so he could figure out any more of my weaknesses, but there was little point in lying. “Two.”

“I heard about the necromancy; that’s nice. So, that leaves four to go, yes?”

I nodded.

“They’re taking their sweet time, aren’t they? I mean, I expected another one, maybe two more, to have gone by now. It must be quite frustrating for you.”

“Why do you care?”

“Why? Because when you die, you need to be my equal. I want to kill the best of you there is, not someone who has most of their power locked up. I need as many of those marks gone as possible. Also, I’m really curious about what they do. Aren’t you?”

“What did yours do?”

Mordred looked shocked for a second before he smiled. “Figured that out, did you?”

“You’ve always been able to see my marks before. That means you had some yourself, but you can’t see them now, which means you no longer have any. So, what did yours do? And where were they? I never saw them.”

“Tops of my thighs,” he said. “I don’t believe we were ever
that
close. And they did vanish, yes. They’ve given me some interesting talents; a few other things, too. I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out who put them there and why.”

“Can I assume you didn’t discover who put them there?”

Mordred shook his head. “I wish I had. If I knew, maybe I could kill you now. Maybe I could get all of this over with.”

“So you came here to say hi and leave. Okay, you can go now, I guess.”

Mordred laughed. “Actually, I thought we could talk for a while longer. I certainly don’t want you to think I don’t care.”

“I won’t hold it against you.”

Mordred got up and sat on the ground next to me. He leaned up against the remains of the wall and sighed. “Can I tell you a secret?”

This whole thing was beginning to make me incredibly confused. The only times Mordred hadn’t tried to kill me were when it benefited him somehow. I stared at the man I’d considered my enemy, a man I’d hated for over a thousand years, and thought something was off with him. There was something different. Maybe the shooting had damaged his brain, but it felt like more than that.

“Sure. Why not?” I said eventually.

“I’ve had a few truths shown to me since my murder. I’ve undergone a transformation of sorts. Things have changed—I’ve changed.”

“Yet you’re still going to kill me.”

“Some things will never change. The rain will always be wet, dogs will always be man’s best friend, and Mexican food will always be the greatest food on earth.” He looked down at me. “Sorry, went off on a tangent again. Anyway, my secret.” He leaned close to me until his mouth was almost touching my ear, then whispered, “Your mother was a Valkyrie. Her name was Brynhildr.”

I wanted to say something clever to let him know that I wasn’t about to be played, but as I opened my mouth, nothing came out. My brain suddenly felt as if it were on fire, and I began shaking, unable to talk, unable to move. While Mordred’s words unlocked flashes of memories, I lay there and stared at the darkness and stars above me.