The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (134 page)

Chapter 36 – Severance

Lark didn't know how long she and Maevor walked, nor where they'd ended up.  The radiance of the Imperial City filled her view, a labyrinth of walls and spires and balconies nearly indistinguishable in the night.  The crowds had long vanished; she could still hear the priests' songs, but they were soft and sourceless, drifting like petals in the warm air.

Without warning, the light dimmed.

She stopped short in the middle of a set of alley stairs, alarmed.  It hadn't gone out fully; lines of radiance still ran through the ground and sketched the central mass of the buildings like skeletal trees.  As she watched, some of those retracted, withdrawing their power from the white walls to leave them dull and inert.

“Is this supposed to happen?” she said, looking to Maevor.

He raised his head, and in the muted ground-light she saw his eyes were wild, pupils blown wide.  His mouth moved, but no words emerged. 

Concerned, she moved closer, and grabbed his arm just as his legs unhinged.  His dead weight nearly pulled her down, but she managed to keep him from cracking his skull on the stairs.

A moment later, they softened under her feet.

“What in pike's name?” she said as she lowered him.  In the distance, the singing had stopped, the night now punctuated by shouts.  Concerned, she scanned the dim skyline until she spotted a brighter area—blocked from view by walls but painting the night with its glow.  A few glints of brightness rose from it like platinum needles.

“Palace is still lit up,” she told Maevor.  He didn't answer, but fumbled at her bracing arms with hands like moth-wings.

As the cries picked up in number and volume, her suspicion became a hope: Cob and the others had won!  But then the trees of brightness drained from the walls and the rooftops and bridges slumped, the windows gaping wider, and unease bloomed in her gut.

The remaining radiance pulled out from beneath her, and she felt Maevor spasm.  His hands locked around her wrists with desperate strength.

“It's all right,” she said, but she knew it was a lie.  If this man was like Dasira, then he was full of those wormy white strands—the same stuff that made up the city around them.  As it failed, apparently so did he.

Das...  Oh no.

She'll be all right
, Lark told herself. 
She's the toughest person I know.

Then the glow of the Palace disappeared.

Maevor gave a choking moan, spine arching against stairs so soft they indented beneath him.  Two faint filaments still gleamed in the distance, but as the moments passed she saw them gutter like candle-flames and finally go out.

Something stung into her hand.

She tried to recoil, but Maevor's grip was like a vise.  In the starlight, the white thread that stretched from his sleeve to her palm barely showed, only the darkness of her skin betraying it.

Wooziness invaded her, and she lurched upright in terror, thinking to stomp on him until he let go.  She knew perfectly well what this was.

“Please,” he rasped.

The softened steps sank underfoot, making her fight for balance.  Managing to plant a foot on his chest, she snapped, “Pike you.  I tried to help and this is what you do?”

“Anchor...”

“I'm not a fool.  I know how your stupid bracer works, and I won't let you take me.  If I'm right, then your god has just been locked out, and you'll probably...”

She trailed off, suddenly struck by pity.  He wasn't fighting her; his eyes had rolled up nearly all the way, chest heaving under her heel, and the few kicks and twitches he made were spasmodic, unintentional.  Though the dizziness still weighed on her, it hadn't worsened, and his bracer remained in place under his sleeve.

“Anchor?” she echoed belatedly.

The cords stood out in his neck as he tried to scream or speak but found no air.  In the distance, others screamed for him, or shouted in confusion or fear, and with a knot in her gut she dropped back to his side.  The stinger buried deeper into her palm, making her curse through gritted teeth.

It felt like an eternity before the seizures stopped and his grip loosened.  She extracted her un-spiked hand from his without struggle, and set the back of it to his cheek; he felt chilly, his breath coming harsh and shallow, eyes white-rimmed.  With a pang, she remembered rescuing Rian as a newt, and how he'd bitten her arms in panic as she freed him from the rubble.  Despite the difference, she felt a responsibility toward this man too.

“Is it over?” she said.

He blinked slowly, face slack with exhaustion and grief.  A movement nearby made her jerk around, only to see the building beside them peel apart, large hanks of its wall-stuff slithering off like shed skin.  In all directions, other structures were doing the same: bridges and balconies unraveling, spires collapsing inward, branched-out towers shearing off in soft silence.  There was such a delicacy to the fall that Lark would have thought herself dreaming if not for the pain in her hand.

She wanted to drag Maevor upright, to run, but the stairs were too squishy to climb now, and anyway there was nowhere to go.  So instead she huddled at his side as the walls curled away and the skyline melted, the city collapsing around them.

*****

A tremor passed through Captain Sarovy, through Messenger Cortine, through Colonel Wreth, as if they were connected.  It passed through the men behind them too—the abominations and specialists in all their vulnerable power.

“Captain?  Colonel?” said Houndmaster-Lieutenant Vrallek from his point in the tableau, sounding shaken.

Sarovy couldn't move.  The tremor had taken root in his flesh, and it was all he could do to keep his hand clenched on the broken blade.

“Messenger, what is this?” said the colonel.  Sarovy heard his horse snort, and the agitated clack of claws and horseshoes on paving stones—multiplied to dozens as the rest of the cavalry steeds caught wind of some danger.  A thumping began inside the stables: stalls being kicked open, then hooves on the main door.  Further away, the hounds bayed in panic.

Sarovy slanted his gaze toward his men.  The lieutenants had moved into his periphery: Vrallek, Korr and Herrick, with Rallant slightly separate as if standing guard over battered Linciard.  Every one of them was a mess—uniforms and ceremonial garb torn, faces bloodied, hair crisped or heavy with soot—and so were the rest of his company.  Crossbow bolts stuck like quills from several indifferent ruengriin.

Duty demanded he tell them to stand down and leave him to his justified demise.  But they weren't here for him; they were here for themselves, and he couldn't have been prouder.  If this was Blaze Company's last stand, then—

All at once, the world went white.

He tried to open his mouth but he no longer had one.  He hung pinioned in absolute brilliance, bodiless, bared to the core, and under the power of that glare he felt himself dissolving.

It didn't hurt.  Within the radiance, he saw the phantasmal glory that had led him here, the punishing clarity that had pierced him as he knelt at the foot of the Throne.  The presence and the force and the overwhelming will that had shaped him to this terrible purpose.  It called to him with rhapsodic fervor, and for a moment he could believe that it loved him—that it would save him.  That he would never be alone.

But the tether broke.  The Light flew away on burning wings, leaving only darkness—

A scream shocked him back to the physical realm.  His abhorrent body unhinged beneath him, joints forgetting what they were, limbs confused by their shape, and he grabbed at the nearest figure for support—Cortine—but Cortine was reeling back, clawing at his face.  His eyes.

Then the screams were everywhere, torn from the throats of men and women and horses, and movement convulsed through the mage-lit night: the Tasgard steeds bucking as one, froth flying from their muzzles as they snapped their monstrous riders from their backs.  Vrallek's agonized roar rose loudest, followed by Rallant's and Korr's almost musical keens and the voices of the three lagalaina—a dirge for the fleeing Light.

Sarovy collapsed, unable to control his flesh.  The pins-and-needles came back in enervating shocks, like dying nerves flaring their last.  In his head, a thousand voices babbled their terror, a thousand hands and faces struggling to emerge from the morass of himself—to be the mask worn at their final moment.

Within the maelstrom, a single point of stability tugged at him like an anchor.  He forced his recalcitrant substance around it and felt its outline: metal wings, shivering crystal.  Burning template.

With all his will, he forced himself into it.

His fingers delineated themselves, limned by the faint blue lines of the shaping magic.  His arms became his again; his throat hollowed, his face carving itself sharp from the misshapen lump it had become.  His skin rasped against the close cut of his uniform and the cinch of his belt.  His feet felt a weird constriction; in his collapse, he had slumped half-out of his boots and now they were twisted, crimping his regrowing toes.

Slowly, ponderously, he pushed himself up.  As his eyes regained focus, he saw a swath of downed figures in white armor, their horses dancing and jittering around them as if unsure where to step.  Other horses milled at the outskirts: Blaze Company's, free now that they'd broken down the stable doors.  The Tasgards had corralled the more skittish Ten-Skies as if aware they might flee.

Wreth lay only a few feet away, frothing and clutching his chest.  On the other side, Cortine still screamed, fingers knuckle-deep in the sockets of his unraveling eyes.  White shreds hung like cobwebs down his cheeks, and bloody streaks followed them as the priest clawed furiously at something buried in those hollows.

Had Sarovy a stomach, it might have revolted.  As it was, he could barely comprehend the scene.  Only when the mage-light overhead winked out did he realize that the whole street had gone dark, the colonel's mages thrown or fled.  Beyond the burning garrison's glow, the shadows opened cold mouths full of steely teeth.

Boots scuffed nearby.  He turned his head to see Linciard gaining his feet, Rallant now the one sprawled on the pavement.  All the other specialists were down, the human soldiers standing confused and terrified among the bodies, but while Linciard looked pale as a sheet, his expression was firm.  He met Sarovy's eyes, then jerked his chin toward Colonel Wreth.

Sarovy's hand tightened around the hilt of his heirloom sword, and he nodded.

As they moved on him, Wreth seemed to come back to consciousness, his limbs jerking and then pressing to the ground in the agitated need to rise.  The gold pendant at his throat no longer hid the chitinous pattern on his scalp or the razors of his ruengriin teeth, and as he staggered up, he snarled wide enough to show a second row behind the first.

Sarovy came in awkwardly, feet still crooked, and Wreth deflected his sword-strike with ease.  Fueled by purpose, Sarovy didn't let that stop him.  Wreth had made him murder one of his own men, but in the process had shown him exactly what he could do.  Ignoring the colonel's retaliatory punch, he stepped close enough to hook an arm around the bastard's neck.

Roaring, Wreth bashed him, clawed him, tore strips from the spine of his uniform, but that meant nothing to the adaptive clay of his flesh.  Even when teeth clamped hard on his forehead, it didn't matter; he had no skull for the ruengriin to crush.

That was the trick.  No matter what his template said, he was not a man.  He thought of himself as
Sarovy, Trivestean, former archer, mediocre lancer
—with all the strengths and weaknesses that entailed.  Good draw-strength, light feet, quick wits; delicate build, easily overpowered or fatigued.  He'd built himself around those limits, compensating carefully.

But the template only defined his body's shape.  It was his mind—his history, his expectations—that had enforced the rest.

So he focused, forgetting the limits of
Sarovy
in favor of being the
thing
.  And slowly, surely, he felt the bulkier colonel bend to the monstrous force of his grip.  A gauntleted fist hammered at his head without effect, the dents smoothing away in instants.

Over Wreth's shoulder, Sarovy saw Linciard raise the colonel's runed sword, then bring it across toward both their necks.

It bit in hard—steel cutting flesh and clay alike.  Sarovy's substance absorbed a gush of blood as Wreth convulsed, the star-shaped pupils in the bastard's eyes expanding for an instant then contracting hard as the second strike came in.  Chips of vertebrae stung Sarovy's neck, then the blade gashed his jawline.  As that wound sealed, Wreth's grip slackened.

Another blow, this time from the other side, shattered the colonel's spine in full.  With a gurgling sigh, Wreth folded downward, and Sarovy let him fall.

Linciard faced him across the body, eyes hard, blade still raised.  Sarovy lifted a hand to touch the fading lines that marked where the sword had cut into him, then inclined his head.

“Well done, lieutenant,” he said.