The Archon's Assassin (38 page)

Good intentions scattered like dust in the wind.

Shader took the bottle and read the label. “Is it any good?”

She slammed a corkscrew down on the table. “Why don’t we find out?”

He could feel her breath on his neck as he uncorked the wine. He poured a little into a glass and offered it to her to taste. She threw back her head and downed it in one.

Shader chuckled. “You remind me of someone else.” He should have winced at the memory of Rhiannon; of how close they’d come before her daughter had returned home. Her
daughter
.

She reversed a chair and slid onto it, glass tilted for a refill. “Do tell. I just love hearing the secrets of priests.”

Shadow frowned. Not because of what she wanted to know, but because she seemed to have forgotten about her husband and daughter, buried beneath the snow, nothing but blistered cavities where their eyes had been.

He filled her up and poured himself one. “Nothing to tell. Just an old friend.”

Her eyes widened, prompting him to say more.

“Really, it’s nothing. On another note,”—he swilled some wine around his mouth and made an appreciative grunt—“you haven’t told me your name.”

“Thecla.” She gave a bashful smile. “Thecla Cawdor.”

Her eyes glistened like precious stones, her lips a succulent gash around teeth that could have been carved from ivory.

Shader’s mouth hung open as he took in the full impact of her beauty. It was like she’d been hiding it before: the gentle slope of her shoulders; the creamy skin of her breasts plumped up enticingly above her unlaced shirt; the shimmering golden curls. Must have been the numbing effect of the cold, the shock of the way he’d found her.

“More wine, Pater? I said that right, didn’t I? That’s what you Nousians call your priests, isn’t it?”

Shader hadn’t realized his glass was empty.

Her eyes didn’t leave his as she poured, then she set the bottle down and licked the drips from her fingers. Her voice wafted over him like a summer breeze.

“Do you mind me calling you Pater? Or should I use something else?
Are
you a priest?” Her hand slipped into his lap. “Or a man?”

Wine splashed their clothes as Shader pulled her toward him. She sucked at his lips, and their tongues rolled about each other. She placed his hand on her breast, pushed it inside her shirt to cup soft flesh. She offered him her neck, gasping as he bit into it, clawing at his groin, shifting her hips to grant access to his probing fingers. They toppled to the tiles. Thecla rolled on top of him, tugging at his britches. Shader sighed with the anticipation, pulled her hips down—

Glass shattered. Shards rained over them, nicking, cutting.

A dark shape burst through the window.

Slavering jaws ripped into Thecla’s neck. Hot blood splashed Shader’s face. Like he’d been punched in the stomach, he couldn’t breathe; couldn’t move. All he could do was stare dumbly as the wolf-man tore out Thecla’s throat and left her head dangling by a sinewy strip.

“No!” Shader screamed, tugging up his britches and scrambling for his sword, then realizing he’d left it in the other room.

The wolf-man, Pete, roared and snapped at Thecla’s shoulder. Her arm swung down, chopping into his great head. Her other hand crunched into his jaw, smashing teeth.

Thecla lurched and then steadied herself, her head swinging over her breasts on a string of flesh. Her eyes burned red, and steam plumed from their sockets. Her lips curled back, cracked and blistered, and the skin of her face began to melt and slough away.

Pete backed up, snarling, but Thecla pounced, slamming him into the wall. The wolf-man whimpered and sagged to the floor.

Shader edged away around the table, transfixed as flames reduced Thecla’s head to ashes, which fell away to reveal a bleached skull with blazing rubies for eyes.

The body took a step toward Shader, arms extended like a blind person’s. The sliver of flesh that connected head and torso finally snapped, and the skull clattered to the tiles. The body shuddered and lurched. The knees buckled, and it pitched into the table. Blood pumped from the stump of its neck.

The skull scraped and grated on the tiles. It began to rock.

Thunder pounded in Shader’s ears as he backed round the table, edging his way toward the living room.

Pete was breathing in ragged pants, trying to lift his head and finding the effort too much.

One more step.

The skull hopped, cracking a tile as it came down hard. It rasped as it swiveled round to face Shader. Crimson fire blazed from its eyes as it began to rise, its demonic gaze locked to Shader’s.

He couldn’t look away, no matter how much he struggled. Nous, he couldn’t look away.

The skull drifted above the table toward him, eyes aswirl with carmine, hungering, hungering, hungering.

Shader felt the eyes tugging at him, sucking at the back of his mind. Faces accompanied every gasp of breath: Rhiannon, Jarl, Gaston. Vortices of red flame burgeoned from the eyes, latched onto his. Shader stared haplessly along their length toward a terminus of blackness. In his mind’s eye, he saw Heredwin shaking his head atop the beacon. Barek Thomas. Maldark. Poor lost Maldark.

The skull pressed close to his face, and the blackness grew till it became an all-encompassing maw, as full of the promise of oblivion as the Void. Shader felt a sickening jolt that ran all the way from his heart to his head; felt his spirit dredged to the surface, dragged relentlessly toward the dark.

Something golden flashed in the corner of his eye.

The skull’s jaws chattered in a frenzied death-rattle. Flames singed the flesh around Shader’s eyes.

He screamed.

Something pressed into his hand. His fingers curled around it, brought it between him and the skull.

Tremors down Shader’s arm: the stuttering puissance of ancient theurgy. Aureate brilliance flared—

—from the blade of the gladius.

Shader glared at the flaming rubies drinking his soul and shouted his defiance. Sizzling force blasted from the Archon’s sword and hurled the skull through the broken window.

Shader ran across the room to peer out.

The skull rolled about the ground, melting deep channels in the snow as it struggled to right itself. It pivoted to stare at him, eyes ablaze with all the ire of the Abyss, full of threat, full of promise.

And then it rose spinning into the air, trailing fire in its wake, and shot toward the distant castle like a comet.

“No!” Shader yelled after it.

Caledon, by the garden gate, whinnied as if he’d been called but was reluctant to come.

“No!’ Shader cried again. “You do not scare me. You hear? You do not scare me!”

He fell forward, put out one hand to steady himself on the window frame. He barely noticed the glass tearing into the flesh of his palm. Barely noticed the golden dweomer of the gladius suffusing his body, soothing, calming, healing.

He had lied, he knew it; but the alternative would have paralyzed him. He was frightened, true enough. More frightened than he knew it was possible to be. Ain, he’d come so close! So close to perishing under that ghastly stare.

—
b’ware the snares of beauty
.

Was that it? Thecla Cawdor: had she been the second of Heredwin’s prophecies to come true? But what of the piper? What of the running man? Were those horrors still ahead of him? Because that’s all he’d had so far: horror. What had he gotten himself into? What the hell had Aristodeus started this time?

He lifted his hand, slammed it into the wall beside the window; let out a torrent of curses that should have excoriated his Nousian soul. But they didn’t. They bolstered him; made it possible for him to remain standing. And he’d need more: more cursing, more anger, more sublimated terror. Because he knew what he’d just faced; knew how lucky he was to be alive. He knew the stories well enough: Otto Blightey, the Liche Lord of Verusia. A skull that borrowed bodies and drank souls. A skull that could not be destroyed.

But he was going to do it. If there was a way, Shader was going to find it. Evil like that… Even as he thought it, he felt as though maggots were writhing beneath his skin, burrowing into his brain. Ain, Blightey had been Thecla, or somehow assumed her flesh. And Shader had… he’d almost…

He doubled up and vomited. When he’d finished, when his guts were empty of the food that now seemed like ordure, he wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve and turned back to face the castle looming over the horizon.

He’d made a decision. A decision as uncompromising and as radical as his priesthood. Pointing the sword like a threat at the highest tower rising above the saw-toothed battlements, he made a promise; took a new and irrevocable oath. From now on, evil was his prey. His alone. Wherever it hid, he was going to find it, root it out, smite it. It didn’t matter how long it took, how far he had to travel, he was going to eradicate every Nous-damned iota of evil, right the way to the heart of the Abyss.

Behind him, he heard a rattling breath, a tormented wheeze.

Pete! He’d forgotten—

Shader half-lurched, half-ran to the wolf-man’s side, but before he got there, he already knew he was too late. Something like a sob threatened to shatter his newfound rage. But it was a protective rage. He couldn’t risk that. Couldn’t allow it, in case he lost his resolve and crumbled.

His Liber was already in hand, and he was automatically turning the pages for the Litany for the Dead, but he stopped himself, put it away.

That part of him, the part that mourned, the part that ministered, the part that felt each loss like an amputation was dead, buried beneath the horror of what he’d almost done; of what the Liche Lord had made him do.

He turned his back on Pete. “Let the dead bury their dead,” the Liber said. He’d never fully understood what that meant, until now. Because now he had a purpose honed keener than any blade. No more paradox, no more confusion. It was as if Nous himself had reached down and etched it into Shader’s soul with the tip of his ineffable finger; told him exactly what he needed to do.

And first up, he was going to start with Otto Blightey.

ONE AND THE SAME

The Perfect Peak, Aethir

R
hiannon lay back in the recliner as Aristodeus placed a cold metal cylinder over her eye. Light flashed, and he squinted through the other end.

“No sign of the turning,” he said.

“That’s a relief, then.” Whatever the shog he was talking about. She knew what he was up to: delay tactics, so he could work out how to keep her from seeing her daughter.

Aristodeus replaced the instrument in its case. He stood holding it for a moment, let his eyes roam around the octagonal room he’d taken for his study following the defeat of Sektis Gandaw. His gaze lingered on one of the three walls crammed floor to ceiling with books. He was in front of the shelves in two long strides. Setting the eye-instrument on a side table, he stooped to run a finger over the burgundy spines of half a dozen volumes that were grouped together. He half-slid one free, revealing a gray cloth and board cover, but then he checked himself and straightened up. With an almost palpable wrench, he turned his attention back to Rhiannon, as if he’d just remembered she was there.

“You’re lucky I found you,” he said. “If Bezaleel hadn’t cleaned and treated the wound… Lycanthropy is incurable, once it takes root.”

“Shog’s that?” Rhiannon rolled down her sleeve; scratched at the stitches through the fabric.

“Wolf-men from Qlippoth, that’s what. Beings that have no business crossing the Farfall Mountains, let alone turning up on Earth.”

“Perhaps you should have considered that before you sent them.”

Silence.

It lasted longer than was comfortable, but Rhiannon wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

Eventually, Aristodeus sighed and folded himself into a seat. He watched her for a moment, eyes cold and impassive. “Bezaleel talks too much.” He screwed his face up into something resembling a smile. “But it is of no matter. The important thing is that our mutual friend is back in the game.”

“Bully for you. That’s the kind of screwing with other people’s lives that made you the tosser you are today.”

The hint of a snarl curled Aristodeus’s top lip. “Difficult decisions have to be made. Deception is rife, and the odds are stacked against us. Every weapon we have must be thrown into the fray.”

“That include Saphra? Is that why you snatched her, so you can do to her what you did to Shader?” What he’d done to Rhiannon, too: all those months—or was it years?—of physical training in the timelessness of his ivory tower. Had he really hoped she could take down Gandaw after Shader had seemed so lost? Or was it just about getting her into shape to bear his child? Probably both, knowing the philosopher. It was seldom just one thing or the other.

Aristodeus closed his eyes, the picture of tranquility, like some sham holy man. “Sacrifices are necessary.”

She laughed out loud at that. “As long as it’s not you, eh?”

“I have already sacrificed enough,” he said. “Now it’s for others to step up and do their bit.”

“And you get to choose who, right? What’s that make you, Nous all-shogging mighty?” She winced internally at the slur on the holy name. It was an involuntary reaction left over from her lessons with Soror Agna, her time at the Templum of the Knot. She quashed it with a sneer and a quick glance at the black sword lying atop Aristodeus’s desk. Ancient history now. She was beyond that.

“Think what you like,” Aristodeus said. “Your part in all this is over. You have given me what I need. As far as I’m concerned, you can go back to drunkenly rutting with soldiers and vomiting in your beer glass. I’m sure your parents would be proud, were they still among us. Your brother Sammy, too.”

Rhiannon’s head started to pound, and a burning sensation crept over her scalp. She wanted to retort, wanted to strike back, but he’d touched a nerve; a nerve that paralyzed. With surgical precision, he’d cut to the heart of her shame, her losses, her emptiness.

“We both face the same foe, Rhiannon. We all do. Deception has been there from the beginning, prompting, pulling, promising. It does not belong to the natural order of the cosmos. It is… other. Alien, you might say. Even Gandaw knew that, in his own way, which is one of the reasons he tried to create all things anew. Makes you wonder, though, if he realized at the last, he was the most deceived all along.