The Heir of Night (18 page)

The herald looked from one face to the next, around their circle. “Can you see it?” she asked, very soft. “Can you feel the power?”

Eria drew in a shaky breath. “I feel it,” she said.

“I feel like a mote,” Tisanthe whispered, “a tiny spark in the middle of something vast.”

“It’s like floating in a river of light.” Var was exultant.

“It is all those things, and far more,” said Jehane Mor. “You must be part of it and it of you, but do not let it overpower you. You are neither the Eight’s servant nor its master, but rather the fish, swimming in an infinite stream. You may swim with the current or against it, so long as it is you who chooses that path.”

“If pressure is brought against you,” said Tarathan, “then
you must pour yourselves, mind and spirit, into the Eight. No matter what else happens you must remain as one within the flow, in order to maintain the shield. Never forget that it is working together that makes you strong. The moment you allow yourself to be pulled out of the flow, you will be alone again and vulnerable.”

“And those who remain,” concluded Jehane Mor, “will no longer be Eight. You can reform as Six or Four, but the greatest power lies in the seamless infinite; anything less than an Eight will always be considerably weaker.” She looked around at their serious faces and shining eyes. “Do you think you can do this, hold the shield?”

“We will try,” Eria said, her expression serious, but Torin tossed his head.

“Of course we can do it,” he said. “It doesn’t seem that difficult.”

“No-o-o,” agreed Terithis, more cautiously. “But how long must we hold it?”

“Until we return,” said Tarathan, with finality. “Time passes differently on the psychic plane and we don’t know how long we will be gone. It could be minutes here, but it could also be hours.”

“Not so easy after all,” said Var. Eria squared her shoulders.

“We will just have to do the best we can,” she said.

“No,” said Asantir from behind them. “You are Derai and will do whatever it takes. You will hold this shield for as long as the heralds need it.”

They all jumped, for none of them had heard her quiet approach. The keen eyes measured them and they flushed, shifting nervously. “Sister Korriya told me you are the best that the Temple has,” Asantir told them, “and she chose you to serve your Earl and your House. There is no doubt in my mind that you will fulfill her trust.”

No one spoke or even exchanged a glance but all the initiates drew themselves up a little straighter. Asantir, however, had already turned to the heralds. “We have this place
as defensible as it can be. Are you ready for your mindwalking?”

“We are,” the heralds said, speaking in their one, blended voice. They conferred briefly with the priests and then lay down, side by side, with Tarathan’s head pointing toward the main doors and Jehane Mor’s to the postern. Both heralds crossed their arms over their chests, but while Jehane Mor’s hands were empty, Tarathan held a naked, swallowtail blade in either hand. The swords gleamed in the soft glow of the cone lights as the priests formed a figure-of-eight around the heralds and the guards watched with a mixture of curiosity and distaste.

Eria, Tisanthe, Var, and Torin took the inner positions, close to the feet and heads of the heralds, while Terithis and Armar, Serin, and Ilor formed the outer curves of the Eight. All their faces were subdued as they sat cross-legged, facing away from the heralds, and the light from the cone lamps spilled around them in an incandescent figure-of-eight.

Tarathan looked up at Asantir. “Be vigilant,” he said, “for the enemy is very near.”

She nodded and then both heralds closed their eyes, still as carven stone at the heart of the silence that emanated from the Eight. The Honor Captain studied them for a long moment, then called four of the guards to her. “This is your watch,” she told them. “I do not want anyone to reach this Eight unless all four of you are dead.” Garan nodded, his dark, mobile face serious, while his companions, Mareth and Korin, murmured their acquiescence. Only Nerys remained silent as she took up a position between Terithis and the postern, her hand resting on her sword hilt.

Asantir nodded, satisfied, then crossed to the main door and stared into the shadowed hall. “Oh, yes,” she murmured, “they are close. It doesn’t need a seeker to know that.” She looked across the room to Sarus. “Keep a sharp eye out, old friend. It may be more than cold steel we have to deal with.”

The sergeant grunted, settling his shield more firmly
on his arm, and she smiled slightly, as if that were answer enough. The guard, Soril, who was from the keep garrison, looked from one to the other doubtfully. “Are you sure there’s something out there, Captain?”

“Ay,” said Asantir, “and they know we’re here as well. We are past seekers and shielding now, as far as that goes.”

“How do you know?” asked Ber, another guard from the keep garrison.

Sarus chuckled from the other side of the room. “How does the raven scent battle? It’s in the very air.”

Kyr, squatting on his heels at the sergeant’s side, had taken out a whetstone and was carefully honing his sword blade. “It’s a matter of time, that’s all,” he said, without looking up.

“And time,” murmured Asantir, with a quick glance back at the heralds, “is what we most need right now.”

They waited, while the long minutes crawled by and became an hour. Tension coiled in the air, like the feeling of a storm about to break. The cone lamps burned on, clear and steady, and the guards settled and resettled their weapons. And then the attack came, a swift rush out of the dark.

Asantir saw the light first, a pale witch-glow that came streaming down the corridor with shadows running behind it. “Here they come,” she said conversationally—and then the first wave was on them, a silent, snarling rush of warriors with the eldritch light spilling around them. Steel clashed on steel as Asantir shouted the battle cry of the House of Night and the guards to her left and right echoed it as they too leapt forward to engage the foe. For a moment, the witchlight wavered and drew back.

As swiftly as it had ebbed, however, it came flowing back and then the fight was on in earnest, a desperate reeling to and fro in the doorway with the attackers pressing fiercely forward and the defenders withstanding the assault. Shields pushed back against spearpoint and sword blade, the defenders’ swords cutting and slashing in bitter answer. The narrowness of the door meant that only a few attackers or
defenders could contest it at any one time, but there were always more attackers pressing forward over their fallen fellows and only a small number of defenders in reserve.

Nonetheless, the fight seemed very even, trampling back and forward across the threshold, which became slick and wet with blood. Asantir cut hard and fast with her sword, despite her wounded shoulder, and used her shield like a weapon, hammering it into her opponents’ faces. Ber and Soril pressed forward on either side, supporting her, and there was no more breath for war cries. The attackers, too, fought in silence, fierce and deadly in their antique armor, with the black visors down across their faces, each helmet wrought into an alien and terrifying shape. The eldritch light billowed and ebbed around them, seeming to follow the success or failure of their attacks.

Behind the melee, one of the priests gave a terrible scream and collapsed to the floor. The pale light surged forward, up and over Ber like a wave that breaks against a cliff. He screamed, too, and flung up his hands to claw at his face, dropping his sword and letting his shield fall. An attacker followed through with a spear thrust to Ber’s chest, then made to push on over the fallen body and into the room.

The guards behind pushed forward to close the gap—but the pale tide washed on over Mareth, who writhed and fell in his turn. His scream echoed that from another of the priests behind them, a woman’s wail of anguish. “Stand firm!” shouted Asantir, as she and Soril struggled to turn the flank of the attack. “Defend, House of Night!”

Another guard sprang to aid them and Eria and the remaining priests shouted, as if in answer to the captain’s call, a tremendous, unified cry that thundered in the chamber’s low roof. The lights in their hands flared into columns of incandescent white, transforming almost instantly to a blaze of molten gold that hurtled outward like spears, straight into the heart of the eldritch light. The two fires clashed and twisted upward in a conflagration that echoed the cut and thrust of the battle, but the golden flame blazed hotter,
towering to the roof. Gradually the pale light withered and shrank, dwindling until it was totally consumed.

The attackers broke and ran, leaving their dead behind them. The golden light flowed after them, crackling at their heels but neither consuming nor slaying as the witchlight had done.

“Hold!” commanded Asantir, for the second time that day. “Hold all positions! Our job is to defend this place, not pursue.” Astonishingly, even the golden light seemed to heed her command: It retreated as swiftly as it had raced out, splitting into six streams again as it reentered the chamber. The streams flowed back into the palm lamps, which continued to glitter, luminous and golden. A faint golden glow remained in the air, casting a sheen across the six remaining priests. Their faces were remote and calm, lost in their trance, but all six were drenched in sweat.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Sarus, but he sounded shaken.

Both Serin and Ilor were dead, their mouths stretched into a rictus, their beautiful, dark blue eyes holes that stared at nothing. They were both sprawled on their backs, Serin with his arms flung wide; blood had burst from their ears and nostrils, but was already starting to congeal. “Mind-burned,” said Garan, kneeling beside them. “There was nothing physical for us to fight—nothing we could do.”

“I know,” Asantir said heavily. She rested a gauntleted hand briefly on his shoulder.

“Was that the Golden Fire?” Lira, one of the honor guards standing with Sarus, was staring at the cone lamps. “Has it come back?” Her voice was full of hope.

“Perhaps,” said Asantir. “But it may simply have been some property of the lamps themselves. Do not hope too much, Lira. We need to be sure.”

She returned to the door where the living guards were sorting out the wounded from the dead. Ber and Mareth looked much like the dead priests, their seared eyes still staring at some horror only they could see. Two others lay
sprawled in death beside them, while Soril moaned on the ground, her intestines oozing from the terrible wound where a blow had cut clean through her mail shirt. Korin had removed her helmet, and Soril looked up at Asantir with pain-glazed eyes.

The guard’s lips moved as though she were trying to say something, but all that came out was another agonized moan and a trickle of blood. Asantir knelt at her side, bending close to hear the words she was trying so desperately to say.

“Mercy …” The whisper was wrenched out, followed by another bubbling moan.

Asantir held Soril’s eyes with her own, gripping the guard’s hand. With her other hand, the one that Soril could not see, she slid a fine, slender dagger from its sheath in her boot and bent close. “Go well,” she said and slid the dagger in under Soril’s ear, into her brain.

Asantir continued to kneel, her head bent over the dead guard as she murmured the invocation to Hurulth, Lord of Death, the Silent God—and then she stood up, her mouth set in a hard line. “Lay our dead to one side,” she said, “and cover them with their cloaks.” She swept a cursory glance over the bodies of the attackers that lay across the threshold. “As for the others, make certain they’re really dead before you get too close. Once you’re sure, drag them well clear of the door and leave them. But they are Darkswarm, so best put them where we can still see them.”

“Otherwise we wait and watch, is that it?” Sarus spoke from his post by the smaller door.

“As before,” Asantir agreed, “until our friends here get back from wherever it is they’ve gone.” She looked around at their reduced numbers, narrowing her eyes at the golden motes that still shimmered in the air. “Let’s hope they don’t take too long.”

11

M
alian was dreaming again, but this time her dream was not of darkness but of light. Light burned around her, as though she were standing in the heart of a fire, except that she felt no heat and the flames did not consume her. Voices murmured, but as with the hunters’ cries in the Old Keep, Malian could make no sense of them: They hovered just beyond the boundaries of understanding.

The flames spiraled up, whirling around her in a white-gold conflagration and then separating to leave a clear space in their center—a window that Malian could peer through, into the room on its far side. A rose motif was repeated in the wall hangings and other furnishings, and a deep winged armchair had been placed before the fire, which burned silently in a small grate. A man lounged in the armchair, his long legs stretched out toward the blaze. His clothes were as golden as his hair and he was reading a slender book with a tattered cover. “Haimyr,” said Malian, leaning forward, but a shadow moved in the corner of her eye and she drew back.