The Night Parade (38 page)

Thought and action merged as she pulled back the folds of her cape, lifted the twin loaded crossbows that had been tied to her waist sash, and fired both weapons. The first shaft plunged into the cluster of eyes in Lord Sixx’s chest; the second struck the apparatus, knocking it from his hands. The smaller blue-white construct hit the marble at their feet. Its counterpart wavered slightly, the palace of lightning shuddering, then regaining its form and brilliance.

For a moment, Lord Sixx teetered in shock, his words of evocation halted in midsentence. Myrmeen heard a slight whistle of air and prayed that the shaft Reisz had fired from his perch would strike true. She felt a sudden rush of wind at her side and saw a blur of motion as Lord Sixx was thrust out of the way of the shaft and Dymas suddenly appeared with a grunt of agony and surprise, Reisz’s arrow buried in his skull. The flayed man went down, his lifeless body falling upon his master’s wounded form.

“This one dies for your crime,” said the acolyte.

Myrmeen turned to see the old woman to whom she had handed the infant. The woman’s charred black nails suddenly extended into claws that were positioned to descend and tear the infant into bloody ribbons. Before Myrmeen could act, a sword arced through the air and severed the head of the old woman. Myrmeen rushed forward and snatched the baby as the headless body fell.

Krystin stood before her, chest heaving, the sword she had used to kill the acolyte scraping the docks’ wooden surface. She was trembling, covered in blood. Although they knew they were dead, that no one would rescue them from the angry mob of creatures that was just now assimilating the shocking events of the last few moments, Myrmeen and Krystin smiled. A strange, insane look passed between them.

“You really should have been my daughter,” Myrmeen said with a laugh as barren as the giggle of a man being led to the executioner’s blade. “You’re as arrogant and stupid as I ever was.”

“I love you, too, Mom,” Krystin whispered.

Before them, Lord Sixx was being helped to his knees by the remaining acolytes. The woman with the splash of red upon her black cloak had retrieved the apparatus. Another acolyte was dragging away Magistrate Dymas’s body. Myrmeen had no time to react as Lord Sixx produced the edged weapon he had displayed in Pieraccinni’s lair, the one Alden had described to her. He pressed the center gem of three rubies on the jagged blade’s hilt, and the two knives that had been squeezed together sprang apart, revealing a strand of razor-sharp wire that stretched between them.

Myrmeen knew she could not leap out of the way with the baby in her hands. The fighter clutched the child and turned her back on Lord Sixx as he threw the knife. Krystin screamed her mother’s name.

Pain suddenly exploded in Myrmeen’s shoulder. Her left arm went limp, forcing her to hold the baby with one arm. She fell to her knees as she pressed the child to her breasts, determined to shield it with her own body. A single thought raced through her:

Reisz, shoot them! Damn you, Reisz, where are you?

Lightning struck, and from the sudden illumination she saw that the rooftop where he had been perched was empty. From his vantage it must have appeared that Sixx had been struck, and Reisz was scrambling down to help her, not realizing that he had left her to die.

Her entire back was soaked with blood and she quickly became light-headed and dizzy. A moment later it occurred to her that she had not been engulfed by the creatures gathered on the dock. She looked up to see that the monsters had come as close as they could with any degree of safety.

The magic of the apparatus is fatal to them upon contact, Myrmeen thought. Only Sixx and the old woman were safe because they had recited spells of protection against the energies. Dymas had gone to Sixx’s side even when he knew it would mean his death; Reisz’s arrow had been unnecessary.

“Take her,” Myrmeen said, assuming that Krystin was close. The girl appeared before the fighter and took the child from her arms. Myrmeen dragged herself to her feet and turned to confront Lord Sixx.

Behind them, the structures formed by the apparatus suddenly revealed an open center. In that void, a large, rolling cloud of nebulous energy appeared. At the center of the sphere that was forming Myrmeen could see a second round patch of darkness and understood that she was not merely looking at the absence of light, but at entropy, the unraveling of all physical principles known to humanity. The black dot at the ball’s core grew until it resembled a pupil.

An eye, Myrmeen thought in shock. She realized that she was staring at the detached eye of something large enough to dwarf the docks, a creature that looked out with eyes of darkness and absorbed reality in its wake, changing the laws of reason to suit its own desires.

“Lord Sixx, it is time!” the first acolyte screamed.

“No,” he hissed. “This one dies first.”

Myrmeen drew her stolen sword, which she had taken from the shop they had looted, and advanced on the man, her legs nearly giving out with the exertion.

“Not that way,” Lord Sixx said as he yanked her crossbow shaft from the cluster of eyes in his exposed chest. The Eyes of Domination flared. “Watch closely.”

The five remaining eyes on his chest suddenly locked their gazes with Myrmeen’s and changed color. All five suddenly took on the cast of her own eyes—deep blue with golden slivers—and suddenly she was no longer on the docks. The rain had stopped, and her wound had vanished. Darkness surrounded her.

She wondered briefly if she were dead. She knew that it could happen very quickly: an explosion so instant and devastating that she would have no time to become aware of her moment of death. In her mind she ran through a catalogue of other ways in which she could have been dispatched that would explain her presence in this noiseless, formless void.

“What’s happening?” she cried. “Where am I?”

She recalled the eyes of Lord Sixx, the eyes she had seen in a nightmare. Suddenly she understood. He had used those eyes to transport her to another place, a land of the mind. None of this was real.

But how could that be? she wondered. It felt real. It tasted real. The sounds were very real. Music slowly drifted in her direction. Bellophat? No, that was impossible. He had been destroyed, his music stopped forever. She recognized the lullaby, played on a lute, one of her father’s compositions.

“Help me,” a distraught voice called from behind her. She turned, fairly certain that what she would see would be a horror that would inflame her nightmares for years, should she survive this encounter and escape this place.

Her father was there. His body had been pulled apart, stretched to impossible elasticity as it had been in her dream. But this time his face and chest were still intact, while the rest of his body had been ripped to steaming bands of muscle, bone, and bleeding tissue.

“I went there because you were hungry,” he sobbed. “I didn’t want to die. I wouldn’t have if not for you.”

She was not moving. Her legs were not in motion, but she was getting closer to the web. In a sudden, instinctive burst of understanding, she knew that this gibbering creature before her was not her father. It was nothing more than a nightmare Sixx had dredged up from her past. This isn’t real, she thought. Sixx is trying to get at me though my weaknesses, my fears. But I’m tired of being afraid. I’m sick of feeling guilty.

Sixx could shape this place to suit his needs. She understood that if he broke her will here, he would control her forever. And if he murdered her in this place, she would die in the real world. A smile came to her face, because she knew that it also worked both ways.

“I’ve had enough,” she said, pressing her hands together as if she were clutching a sword. Suddenly a long, burning silver shaft sliced itself from the darkness and she felt the weight of her phoenix armor.

want to make the monsters go away, a voice from her locked up memories called. Myrmeen identified the voice and realized that what she had told Krystin was wrong; her father had not spoken those words, even though he had loved her very much and would have echoed the sentiment, given the chance. It had been her second husband, the man she had loved until the day he died, though she had not realized that until this very moment. He had been the one to forge this armor. He had given her the strength to wall herself up emotionally until she was ready to deal with the horrors of her past, ready to face her private pain.p>

Staring at the bastardized image of her father, she knew she had faced it already. She had dredged up all the terrors she had been hiding from, confronted them, and survived. What was before her now was nothing but a lie, an illusion of the mind and the heart.

She had been a victim. All of her life she had blamed herself for tragedies that were beyond her ability to control. She had not sent her father off to be murdered. She had not asked to have her daughter stolen from her.

Myrmeen raised her sword and cleared her mind. She no longer heard either her father’s music or his pitiful wails. The man he had been would never have cried in this way. He would have met his end with dignity. Staring into his eyes, she planted her legs firmly, held the sword parallel to the unseen floor beneath her, and held out her left hand, assuming the first position of defense that the man who had given her the name Lhal had taught her.

The screaming monstrosity racing toward her no longer resembled her father. It had dark hair, a widow’s peak, and eyes covering its entire body. The creature was not a mere construct that Sixx had created to fool her, it was Sixx himself in disguise, terror painted upon his face. He had exerted too much power and could not arrest his flight as he raced toward Myrmeen. As Sixx thundered close, Myrmeen shifted her weight and thrust the sword forward, impaling the screaming figure.

An explosion of blood engulfed her senses, and she suddenly found herself back on the docks, moving in midstride, Lord Sixx’s scream echoing in her ears. The dark man was before her, his many eyes glazing over in shock. Myrmeen stood as if she still held the sword, and Sixx’s chest had been mangled, blood streaming from a terrible wound that had been opened on the psychic landscape. She had no idea if such an injury would have harmed him in this reality—he might have laughed at being impaled—but this wound was different. This one he had suffered within his mind, and even he could not argue with its results. Each of the man’s eyes turned blank as he fell and struck the ground.

Lord Sixx was dead.

“You’re too late!” the first acolyte howled as she held up the apparatus. “You’re—”

She stopped, a stream of blood spewing from her mouth as a sword sliced her heart in two from behind. A gloved hand reached forward and snatched the apparatus from the woman as she sank to her knees, the remaining acolytes mimicking her motions. Myrmeen stumbled forward another step as she saw the laughing, burned face of Reisz Roudabush, his blood-drenched sword in one hand, the apparatus in the other.

A sigh that reminded Myrmeen of the gentle call of a hawk came from the acolytes as each of the children was gently laid on the marble slab. The acolytes then folded themselves into black shapes that shrank to the size of a fist and winked out of existence.

“I took a gamble,” Reisz explained. “These forces didn’t hurt us when we touched Shandower’s gauntlet, so I thought they might be harmless to us now.”

From the charred flesh, the burned clothing that hung on him, and the halting manner in which he moved, Myrmeen knew that the energies gathering behind them were far from harmless to any human. Myrmeen’s attention suddenly was drawn to the sphere gathering in power and intensity behind them, a rolling fireball of arcane energies. The smaller, equally volatile ball of magic that lay within the cage of the apparatus was growing larger in Reisz’s hand.

The old woman had said they were too late. The sacred words had already been spoken. The energies would be released, but without the steady stream of spells the old woman and Lord Sixx were supplying, they would have no focus. Their purpose would be only to consume, or so Myrmeen was willing to wager.

“It never occurred to me that some of these damned things could fly. One of them swooped in and knocked me off the roof after I fired my first arrow,” Reisz said nervously, cutting glances at the shimmering object he held. Desperation tinged his next words. “I never would have abandoned you, Myrmeen.”

“I know that,” she said, certain that the energies from the apparatus in this undistilled form would prove to be poisonous even to humans. Reisz was dead. The last of the Harpers was about to fall.

Suddenly a battle cry came from the crowd of monstrosities that had been forced to wait before the palace of lightning. They were being engaged by human guardsmen. A handsome, dark-haired man appeared before Myrmeen, and she recognized him instantly: Vizier Punjor Djenispool.

She gathered that he had slipped his bonds and run to get help. Hundreds of humans had responded to his plea. His small army fought the creatures of darkness, keeping them well away from the infants near the apparatus.

“We have to take this thing out to sea,” Reisz said. “It’s going to explode—I can feel it—and when it does—”

He decided not to finish. Reisz had no idea what actually would happen if the fireball escaped its cage and sent its energies throughout Calimport. Perhaps a purge would commence, the energies destroying all the creatures of the Night Parade that infested the city. There was an equally reasonable chance that all the humans caught in its wake would perish or be transformed. If the latter occurred, two million new members of the Night Parade would look out to the coming dawn, after the storm had passed.

“It’s not going to be far enough,” Krystin said, holding the voiceless child to her breast. “There isn’t time, can’t you sense it?”

Vibrations rose from the dock. Unchecked, the dark magic of the apparatus was reaching a critical stage. The energies were boiling over, burning away the rain engulfing the city, charging everything within their reach with heat.

Myrmeen glanced at the crying children lying in a circle and felt the greatest sadness for them. Her life had been full, if tortuous at times, and she had made peace with her past. The children would not be given that luxury. A single gallows laugh escaped Myrmeen.