Souldancer (Soul Cycle Book 2) (14 page)

Astlin’s eyes flashed with sudden intensity. For a second she seemed confused, as though she’d woken from sleepwalking. “Xander,” she said softly. “I’m seventeen, and I visited Ostrith as a child.”

“It was living?” Xander swept his arms around. “Like this?”

Astlin nodded slowly. “The way I remember.”

Xander rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I do not understand.”

Astlin took his hand again. “It’s okay. Gate travel can disorient people. Let’s go home and figure this out.”

“Home?”

“I live two blocks from here.”

“But your father is gone. I can’t be alone with you until I meet him.”

“You Mithgarders sure are formal,” Astlin said, a touch exasperated. “You’re alone. I’m alone. So we might as well be alone together.”

Astlin started walking again. A moment later she looked back. “It’s your choice, but I wouldn’t be out in this neighborhood after dark.”

Xander cast wary glances up and down the street. A slim, sandy-haired boy leaning in a doorway stared back with watchful brown eyes. Their hardness implied long intimacy with violence, though he must have been younger than Astlin.

Xander suppressed his inhibitions and followed her.

Nahel wouldn’t normally have considered an open plaza hostile terrain. Yet the lack of much to look at and the profound feeling of isolation invited the wrong kinds of thoughts.

Worse, the emptiness played havoc with his sense of perspective. At first he thought the wall was an optical illusion, but its reality dawned as he drew closer. The square’s west quarter reared upward in a sheer bluff fronted by a wide trench.

Nahel turned to Damus. “What do you think did
that
?”

“Tectonic upheaval from the Cataclysm. They must have built the square on a fault line.”

“The scent leads straight to it,” said Nahel, “but I don’t see a way across. We’ll have to follow the rise; hope there’s an opening…”

Feral howls drowned out his words.

“What in the Void is that?” Damus asked.

Nahel’s nose wrinkled at the sour stench of madness. “
Isnashi
.” He glanced to his left and saw six dark shapes galloping across the paved wastes toward them.

“How did they find us?”

“They’re not after us,” said Nahel. “It’d already be too late if they were.” He raised his bow, nocked an arrow, and fired. One of the grey shadows stumbled. The rest sped forward undeterred.

Damus drew his sword. “We can’t outrun them.”

With a frustrated grunt, Nahel loosed another arrow. The missile flew past its target and vanished in the distance. “We can’t fight them, either.”

“I won’t judge you for brainstorming,” said Damus. By then the
Isnashi
were close enough to make out the three raw slashes across their right eyes.

Nahel drew his own blades. They gleamed despite the overcast day. “Head north along the fault. Either it’ll run out, or the square will. Losing the wolves will be easier in town.”

“Right,” said Damus. “Come on.” He turned to run but stopped short when Nahel didn’t follow. “This is no time to dawdle.”

Nahel kept his face to the
Isnashi
. They were close enough to throw rocks at. “Like you said,
we
can’t outrun them. So I’ll cover you.”

“You mean
waste your life like a damned fool
!”

“I’m here so you don’t have to,” said Nahel. “It’s my mission from the queen. Xander’s part of yours. If you don’t find him—if you don’t warn people about the Night Gen—
that’s
a waste.”

Damus’ voice was dire. “I won’t leave you to die.”

Nahel turned and winked at his friend. “Relax. I’ll buy you a head start and slip out.”

The struggle between shame and enlightened self-interest was plain on Damus’ face. A victor soon emerged, and he ran.

Nahel faced the onrushing wolves, keeping the fault line hard on his right. Damus’ rapid footfalls receded behind him.

The wolves were within spitting distance. Their barking turned to feral growls. Nahel readied his swords to receive them. Two of the skin changers charged straight at him. He saw their dripping jaws, smelled blood on their breath, and knew a moment of fear.

One wolf snapped at Nahel’s leg. His right blade sang and came away streaked with black blood as the beast hobbled away on three legs. The second
Isnashi
reared up to lunge at Nahel’s face. He stepped in to meet it and leaned right, letting his foe drive itself onto his left blade. Black sludge oozed from its punctured chest, along with a noxious stench. The dying beast sank its fangs into Nahel’s shoulder. Its bite stabbed his flesh like electric ice.

Nahel struggled to free himself from the wolf’s weight. Two more
Isnashi
circled behind him and dove for his legs. In desperation he released the sword buried in the wolf’s heart and pivoted, sweeping his remaining blade behind him.

Both wolves retreated, but Nahel saw that another—the pack’s fifth member—had slipped past him as he’d fought the other four. Icy dread gripped the malakh’s heart. His diversion hadn’t bought Damus half the distance he’d hoped.

He heard the wolf a second before it struck. Nahel reflexively turned at the waist to meet the leaping foe whose missing forepaw named it his first attacker. It was all Nahel could do to block. Another wolf reared up on two legs and bore down against the blessed steel, its maw snapping. Nahel’s shoulder burned.

Nahel grabbed the wolf’s sinewy throat. Its talons rent his arms as he jabbed his blade deep into its side. The
Isnashi’s
corpse began to shrivel and contort as Nahel threw it down beside its already reverted pack mate.

“A lord of heaven treads the base soil,” a guttural voice said in a harsh Gen dialect.

The chorus of hunger and violence ceased, leaving only the wind sighing across the square. Nahel saw his last foe—the one that had stayed aloof from the fight—pacing toward him on two legs.

The
Isnashi’s
face had lost none of its savagery in the change from wolf to Gen. “Faerda does not receive him,” he continued, his harsh syllables taking the cadence of a litany. “Her house lies desolate.”

Nahel growled. “Shut up and fight!”

The Gen drew closer. Metal shards adorned his dark braids and bulged under his ashen skin. He held his arms at a shallow angle, his hands pointing at the ground with their palms turned outward. “I bind you, trespasser, with the old names: Aurokthon, Elathan, Aesham-Daeva…”

Nahel chuckled. “They can’t hear you, pal.”

An irresistible force pulled at the malakh from somewhere deep below Steersmen’s Square—below the world itself—as if he’d angered gravity.

“Thera,” the
Isnashi
said, and for a moment the weird chthonic force ebbed. Confusion shadowed the speaker’s face, only to be replaced with anger. He raised his voice. “And with the new Name—
Shaiel
.”

A burst of sickly gold light accompanied the final invocation. The subterranean pull trebled, fixing Nahel where he stood like a moth on a pin.

The Gen’s metal-studded lips parted in a lupine smile. “Feed.”

Nahel watched the two
Isnashi
still in wolf form circle him. He winced—but couldn’t scream—when one of them tore a bloody gash in his right leg. He fell to his knees, and the other wolf ripped open his belly.

Amid Nahel’s agony, a long neglected aspect of his nature reasserted itself.
If you’re really there,
he prayed to the only name that hadn’t answered his foe,
help Damus find Xander. Help him find
you
!

The triumphant barks and yips echoing from the bluffs were the last sounds he heard before the pack leader—still in Gen form—tore Nahel’s throat out with dull, straight teeth.

The savage music of combat drove Damus’ flight across the square. He kept the grunts and howls to his back and fixed his eyes on the deep chasm at his left. Far ahead, burned towers loomed like fingers clawing their way from titans’ graves.

Too far,
Damus thought. Behind him, the battle’s intensity rose to a crescendo even as increasing distance lowered its volume—except for the sound of heavy breathing through snaggled teeth, which was growing louder.

One of them is chasing me.

Looking back would be pointless, as would running, any moment now. Damus frantically scanned the fault for any means of escape—a rock bridge; even a narrowing of the trench. The bluff’s blank face returned his gaze without pity.

Damus heard the sharp tattoo of claws striking pavement. He thought he could smell his pursuer’s rank breath. Still, he kept his eyes on the bluff. His persistence paid off when he spotted an anomaly.

Low on the cliff’s sheer face, a recess delved into the stone. The feature couldn’t be natural. A perfectly square opening framed three regular walls, a floor, and a ceiling—all clad in metal. Damus considered whether the alcove, which stood slightly above the chasm, was within range of a running leap. It could be. Or desperation could be playing tricks on him.

Fangs like rail spikes caught the heel of Damus’ boot. In his panic he tore free, and somehow kept from stumbling. The choice between the wolf and the abyss resolved itself. He surged to the lip of the precipice and leapt.

For what seemed an eternity, the only sound Damus heard was the rushing of his blood. He hung in midair like a dandelion seed on a still day; then the cliff face rushed toward him. The alcove’s lower edge seemed much higher than he’d estimated.

I’m going to miss!

In a last gesture of defiance, Damus stretched his free arm upward till he thought it would rip out of the socket. The shock of his fingers touching the ledge almost made him forget to grab hold. The metal floor had been sheared away from the missing fourth wall, and its sharp edge sliced his hand. Damus nearly slipped to his death on his own blood before he anchored his sword in a seam between rocks.

Damus hauled himself into the alcove. He sat on his haunches, panting and wiping sweat from his eyes with a bloody hand. His questing mind couldn’t help noting that he was inside a metal box (the ceiling was too low for him to stand). The box would have originally lain far below Steersmen’s Square, embedded in solid rock. It must have been a vault of some kind—a vault that the Cataclysm had torn open.

What treasures did you hold?
Or what horrors?
Damus inched farther inside. Dents that might’ve been impressions of small fists scored the thick steel. Every metal surface bore a rainbow sheen, as if it had suffered repeated exposure to incredible heat. But under the burned metal smell there lingered the scent of roses.

The screech of talons on steel riveted Damus’ attention to the alcove’s opening. A hideous bastardization of wolf and Gen clawed its way onto the ledge, bearing the stench of sickness. It glared at its prey and growled.

Damus felt as if the metal floor had turned to mud. He stared transfixed at the beast’s wound-marked eye as it climbed into the vault. The Gen-wolf lowered itself onto all fours, giving Damus a view of the square below; of three
Isnashi
fighting over a corpse with blood-matted russet fur.

The beast on the ledge lashed out with a clawed hand. Damus ran his rapier through its palm. Mithgar’s terrors had exhausted the last of his fear. Only red anger remained. Wounding his foe brought grim satisfaction, but its tainted flesh quickly closed around the blade.

Nahel’s swords didn’t hurt them,
Damus thought.
Only the blessing on their blades did.
Dismay threatened to quench his wrath when he considered that his rapier wasn’t blessed. Though well made, it wasn’t even Worked.

The
Isnashi
roared. It gripped the rapier’s hand guard in its free claw, pressing the elegant metal cage into Damus’ knuckles.

Damus’ rage flared. His left hand joined his foe’s grip on the sword, and he threw all his weight into a lunge. The blade passed fully through the beast’s hand to embed itself in the back of its wolfish maw.

Gurgling howls poured from the
Isnashi’s
throat as it struggled to free itself. Damus endured its thrashing. He held tight to his sword and pushed forward with all his might. The sudden lack of resistance caught him off guard when the
Isnashi
went over the edge. The beast’s weight pulled him after it, and Damus fell prone with an impact that drove the air from his lungs. He slid across the cold steel floor to the chasm’s edge, where he lay looking down at his entangled foe.

The
Isnashi’s
grip tightened, fracturing the rapier’s wirework. Metal splinters pierced Damus’ right hand. He felt similar pain in his chest, and cold sticky liquid pooling under him as he slid further over the brink.

The wolf’s eyes held no fear of death. Its skewered maw seemed to grin.

Damus’ left hand released his sword and plunged under his shirt. Broken glass pricked his fingers. He withdrew the shattered vial of Xander’s blood and plunged its shards into the Gen-wolf’s hand. He kept stabbing until, with an agonized shriek, the
Isnashi
lost its hold. Its twisted form slid off Damus’ blade and into the abyss.

“Give Shaiel my regards,” Damus said when the depths swallowed his foe’s cries.