The Gathering Storm (137 page)

Sanglant got to his feet. Zuangua had leaped to cover him and now danced back and forth as Henry struck blow after blow, attempting to get through him to Sanglant. The shadow prince was bleeding from face and leg and gut, and still he fought while his warriors pressed back the nobles.

Sanglant pulled his knife out of his boot and leaped in to grab Henry from behind. He kicked him hard at the back of one knee as he wrapped his arm around his father’s throat and pulled him backward. But the daimone caught the blade and
just the touch of that hand shattered the iron blade into shards that sprayed out, caught fire, and spattered against the ground in a hissing hail of sparks.

Henry reached back and wrenched Sanglant’s helmet right off his head. Before the prince could react, Henry twisted his fingers into Sanglant’s hair. Sanglant squeezed harder, trying to choke him, but those fingers ground into his flesh and twisted as though to yank his head right off his neck. What claws had cut open the aetherical substance of Zuangua’s shade had no purchase on mortal flesh, but the cutting edge of Henry’s iron gauntlets cut into Sanglant’s skin and seemed likely to sever tendons.

He struggled, but it was futile. Henry’s unnatural strength could not be bested, not even by him. The pain made spots flash and fade before Sanglant’s eyes. The world hazed as the daimone throttled him. His own grip slackened. He could not hold on.

Zuangua’s black-edged spear stabbed right through his father’s head. He felt the whisper of its passing as a hot tingle below his own chin.

Clutched so close, he actually felt the daimone die as the shadow blade pierced its soul and released it. That inhuman strength snapped and with an ungodly shriek it vanished into the aether, banished from Earth. He recoiled and collapsed onto his back with his father on top of him and his arm still wrapped around Henry’s throat.

His gaze was forced heavenward as he fought for breath. Through the boughs he saw stars swollen to twice their normal size. The Crown of Stars stood at zenith, so bright it hurt his eyes. The wheel of the stars throbbed and pulsed until that music reverberated through his head and sank into his very bones, making him weak, shaking the Earth itself with a roar filled with bangs and loud knocks and tremendous booms rolling on and on and on and on. Successive waves of a sickly, nacreous light washed across the sky.

“For Henry!” shouted Liutgard behind him.

“For Wendar!” cried Burchard. “And the empress!”

Then it hit.

A wind blasted out of the southeast. Trees snapped and splintered as they were scythed down. Men tumbled to the
ground. Horses screamed as the gale sent them flying. The gale scorched the air and turned the heavens white, and the leaves of a butcher’s-broom shriveled, curled, and disintegrated right before his eyes. His skin hurt.

He rolled to get his father’s body beneath him, to protect him from debris, and in that movement saw Zuangua and his companions staggering backward and their bodies shifting and changing as the wind howled over them, as if that wind were filling them with substance, with earth, with mortality. Liutgard had flung her spear before she was herself hurled to the ground; the weapon carried on the wind but held true, piercing Zuangua in the shoulder where he clung to a toppled tree trunk.

The Ashioi prince screamed, who had gone untold generations without any pain except that hoarded in his heart. Blood as red as a mortal man’s gushed from the wound.

The wind died abruptly, although Sanglant heard it tear away across the land, moving outward. He sat back on his heels.
We must take shelter
, Gyasi had said, and he knew it to be true: there was worse yet to come.

A horrible orange-red glare shot up into the heavens along the southeastern horizon. It looked as if the world had caught on fire. It reminded him of Liath, and a wave of sick dread coursed through him. Was she dead?

Henry groaned.

“Father!” He pulled off his father’s gauntlets and helm, chafing his hands, staring into his eyes, which looked like any man’s eyes in this strange half-light. “Ai, God! Father!”

Henry lifted an arm weakly. “Hush, son,” he said in a voice entirely like his own familiar beloved voice. His hand brushed Sanglant’s hair and stroked it softly. “Hush, child. Go back to sleep. You are Bloodheart’s prisoner no longer.”

Sanglant wept.

Around him, folk began to shake out of their stupor, those who had not been knocked unconscious by debris or falling trees. He heard a thrashing out in the forest as men and horses came to their senses, got up, then fled or shouted for help or moaned in pain, depending on their injuries. An unseen soldier yelled out an alarm, but it was too late. A dust-covered, blood-soaked nightmare of a man stumbled out of the trees,
laughing as coarsely as a madman. This creature steadied himself on the shaft of a banner pole from which hung a tattered banner so stained and ripped that it was almost impossible to mark what sigil had been embroidered thereon.

Almost, but not quite: it was a glittering crown of stars set on a sable field representing the night sky.

“Cousin! I have found you at last! God Above, you bastard, you abandoned me on the field! But this time I bested you. I won!”

Zuangua had roused; now he spoke a word. The hawk-masked woman leaped forward and, before Wichman realized what she meant to do, pulled the banner out of his hand. In an instant she stood back beside her captain, spear raised. Other Ashioi clattered in from the woods to form a grim wall made up of flesh and blood bodies and expressions filled with an ancient hatred.

The air was utterly still, the only sounds the cries of men and animals out among the trees, the snap of a weakened branch and the rustle and crash of its falling, and the steady filtering patter of falling ash.

“Let him go,” said Liutgard sternly. She had regained her feet although she had lost her horse. Burchard lay on the ground, not moving; Henry’s companions shook themselves off or writhed on the earth, and at least one had been crushed by a falling tree.

“Ah!” said Henry, blinking his eyes. “I’m dizzy. Sanglant, what has happened?”

The prince rose, but he knew already what faced him, standing as he did between the two sides and with what remained of his army, he prayed, safe within the fortress—but out of his reach. He was no different than his dragon tabard—one half smeared and grimy with earth and the other stained with blood. As inside, so outside.

“Now it is time to make peace,” he said.

Liutgard scoffed at him. “Traitor and murderer! How is it you can speak their language if you have not long conspired with them? This disaster is your doing, Sanglant! Let your father go.”

Zuangua laughed harshly, for it was obvious he could not understand one word Liutgard had said. “Peace? Nay, now it
is time to make war. Who do you choose, Cousin? Humankind, or us?”

“Neither,” said Sanglant furiously. “Both.”

“Stand back, Liutgard,” said Henry in a stronger voice. He attempted to rise but could not. Blood leaked from the wound in his head. He choked on blood, coughing and spitting, and raised an arm. “Sanglant! Help me. Help me sit up at least.”

“Ai, God.” Sanglant knelt beside him, still weeping. “Father, you must rest.”

“Nay, I have rested long enough. I have suffered….” He coughed again; with each pulse of blood he grew weaker. Burchard groaned, and a captain helped him rise. The nobles drew closer to attend the king. “I have suffered under a spell! I saw Villam killed by traitors. God! God! My own dear wife conspired against me.”

“Adelheid?” croaked Burchard as he knelt on the other side of the king. He had taken off his helm. “Not Adelheid!”

“What do you mean, Your Majesty?” Liutgard asked, coming up behind Burchard. She glared at the Ashioi, who held their position, as ready to strike as she was. “Yet it’s true you were shining in a most unnatural way, there on the path. Is it true, what Sanglant claims? Were you ensorcelled and chained by a daimone?”

“Presbyter Hugh and Adelheid between them … with the approval of the Holy Mother … Anne … to force their own schemes forward. They thrust a creature into me … into the heart of me….” He shuddered. Blood pumped from the wound. He sagged into Sanglant’s arms. “Hurry,” he whispered. “Hurry. Listen!”

They crowded forward. Behind, Zuangua snorted at this display, but he held his place and his peace for the moment.

“These are my wishes … my last wishes … my dispensation, as is my right as regnant. All my life I have wished … but custom went against it.” His head grew heavier against Sanglant’s arm, yet through sheer force of will he kept speaking although his face grew ghastly pale under the weird orange-red light as his life drained out of him through the hole made by Zuangua’s spear. The shush of falling ash was the only sound beyond his labored breathing and the footfalls
of men creeping closer to listen, to see, to seek comfort within the orbit of their dying king.

“What are you saying, Your Majesty?” asked Liutgard.

“My right… as king … to name my heir.”

“Princess Mathilda is your heir, Your Majesty,” said Burchard, troubled now, wiping ash from his face. “You named her yourself.”

“Under duress … even Sapientia not worthy. This one.” He reached across his chest, found Sanglant’s other arm, and clutched it tight. “This one. Swear to me. Give me your oath. You will follow Sanglant. He becomes regnant after me. Swear it!” He choked and convulsed, but he held on. “Swear it!”

They swore it, each one of them, because Henry was their king, the one they had followed all this way.

“Ah!” he said when last of all Burchard and Liutgard knelt and gave their oath. He looked up into Sanglant’s eyes. His own were free of any taint. “Ah! The pain is gone. My son. My beloved son.”

The light passed out of him. His soul was released, there one instant and in the next gone utterly.

Sanglant bowed his head, too stricken even to weep any longer. At first, the rustling seemed part of the strange night, more ash falling, perhaps, or leaves tickling down through dead and blasted branches. Then he looked up.

They had knelt, all of them; all but the Ashioi, who waited. Tears streaked Liutgard’s cheeks. Burchard sobbed silently, shoulders shaking. Beyond, as far back into the forest as Sanglant could see, captains and sergeants and men-at-arms knelt to honor their dead king.

Out of the gloom stumbled two recognizable figures—Lewenhardt and Hathui. The Eagle cried out and flung herself down beside Henry’s corpse.

“He died as himself,” said Sanglant as she wept, and she shook her head to show she’d understood because she could not speak through her grief. “He died as regnant.”

“Tell me, Cousin,” said Zuangua a little mockingly behind him. “What does this display of passion and weeping portend?”

Even Wichman had knelt, but he sprang up at the sound of
Zuangua’s voice and with a roar leaped forward and ripped the imperial banner out of the hawk-woman’s grip. He stuck it into the ground behind Sanglant, and he laughed.

“What is your command, Your Majesty?” he said, the words almost a taunt.

Sanglant laid his father’s body gently on the ground. He rose, shaking ash from his shoulders. Henry’s blood streaked his hands. His sword, shield, and lance were gone, but his father’s last gift to him had been the most powerful weapon of all.

“The storm is upon us,” he said, letting his voice carry. Ash and grief and exhaustion made him hoarse—but then, his voice always sounded like that. “I do not know what else we will have to endure to gain victory.”

What I will have to endure
, he thought,
if Liath and Blessing are dead.

“We have allies.” He looked at Zuangua, but the Ashioi prince only shrugged, unable to comprehend his words, holding himself aloof.
I hope we have allies.

“We have enemies. Some of them are those we trusted in the past.”

And some, like Adelheid and Hugh and Anne, don’t yet know what they have lost.

“Who follows me?”

“Your Majesty,” said Duchess Liutgard and Duke Burchard. Said the noble companions who remained. Said the captains still living. Said Lewenhardt, speaking for his own faithful soldiers.

Henry’s army echoed them, every one. They were his. He ruled them now.

ANNE ruled the heavens. Her net of magic spanned the Earth as the exiled land belonging to the Lost Ones shifted out of the aether in its attempt to return to its earthly roots. That net
quivered under so much weight, but it held. Even lacking three crowns it would hold, it would cast the Aoi land back into the aether, but beneath the weaving the first intimations of doom swept across the land as lightning torched the sky and earthquakes shuddered across the entire continent of Novaria. What the Seven Sleepers did not understand and refused to understand and cared nothing for was that by dooming the Lost Ones they were dooming Earth. They could not change their course now. They would not. They had won.

Anne’s triumph was as palpable as sand—and like sand, it could be washed away with one tidal surge.

Liath called fire from the deeps.

The eruption of molten rock exploded straight up through the heart of the stone circle that was itself the heart of the weaving. Liath felt Anne die. She felt Anne’s life ripped from her. The skopos hadn’t time even for a single startled exclamation. Between one breath and the next she was dead.

The souls of all of Anne’s retinue and Anne’s army were torn from their bodies as the power of the blast vaporized every living thing that stood or moved within a league of the crown. It stripped away the topsoil to expose the rock beneath. Ash and pulverized stone sprayed upward. The rock hammered to earth in a hail that struck up and down the coast and made the Middle Sea foam for leagues outward. The ash rose into the heavens as a churning plume that soon covered half the sky. Lava poured over what remained of the cliff face into the waters, where clouds of steam boiled upward to meld with ash and smoke.

Inside the shelter of her wings Liath witnessed all this and more, the massive destruction she and the WiseMothers had wrought in order to rip apart the spell. The stone crown was obliterated. Anne and her retinue were dead, utterly gone.