The White Towers (43 page)

“I do the honey-leaf because when my mind is flying, I fuck like an experienced whore.”

“I watched my own wife murdered by brigands,” said Professor Kaivertes, eyes shining. “They stabbed her in the throat, and attempted to rape her whilst her blood leaked out onto the forest lane.”

Kiki sat, stunned for a moment.

“It takes more than a common, foul mouth to shock me.”

“You stopped them?” she blurted out, almost forgetting where she was.

Kaivertes smiled kindly. “There were four of them. I executed them where they knelt, their hands up before them pleading, their eyes full of tears and fear. I chopped down, cutting off their fingers and hands. Then I left them howling in the mud whilst I tended to my dying wife. When she had finally passed beyond the Infinite, and we had exchanged our vows of love, I returned to my work with much vigour, I can assure you. It took those gutter motherfuckers two days to die. But then, that hardly matters, because it didn’t bring back sweet Arolia, and I did not feel any sense of gratitude at having committed the deed. Everybody lost. Such it is with events and bad choices, sometimes. Such it is with the honey-leaf.”

“Neat.”

“So, will you talk to me?”

“I will try.”

“Explain.”

“I do the honey-leaf because I cannot stop.”

“Why not?”

Kiki considered this. Then she closed her eyes, and she spoke slowly. “I have tried to stop. Many, many times, by Grak’s Balls! I tried cutting it off. I tried other substances. I tried alcohol. I tried hard friends and locked rooms. But I think there is something wrong in my mind; something is badly wired. It does not work right. It does not connect. It does not respond. It does not listen.”

“What started you using it?”

“The…
mana
. The
Shamathe
.”

“It goes back that far?”

Kiki’s eyes flickered open. “Did General Dalgoran tell you he took me in as a child?”

“No. I did not realise your relationship went back that far.”

“It does. I was…
different.
But the power of the Equiem flowed strong in my veins.”

“How different?”

“I could show you, but you’d vomit your lunch on the floor between those neatly polished brown shoes of yours.”

“Try me. I had the stomach to feed my wife’s murderers their own pulsing, excised kidneys.”

Kiki gave a narrow smile. “As you wish,” she said.

 

All those images flickered through her mind in a heartbeat and she remembered the Summoning and remembered the Rage and remembered the Heart and remembered the Earth and, finally, sought out the energy of the Equiem.

“You have been in my dreams,” whispered Kiki.

“I know.”

Aeoxir attacked, his sword a blistering trail of shining silver light.

Kiki parried, both swords clanging from Aeoxir’s blades as she back-pedalled, boots skidding through dead pine needles on the forest road, and their swords exchanged blows in a dazzling array of double thrusts and blocks. Dek strained forward, like a dog on a leash, but Zastarte slapped him in the chest, shaking his head.

“No, she’ll not thank you!”

“She’ll not thank me if she ends up dead!”

“Er.” Zastarte looked over Dek’s shoulder. “I think we have other problems.”

Kiki and Aeoxir fought backwards and forwards on the woodland road, a dazzling display of awesome skill, and with Kiki’s confidence growing. Then she felt, more than saw, Dek and Zastarte step out behind her, with their backs to her, weapons drawn. She launched a dazzling attack which saw Aeoxir forced back, defending frantically with both blades, and she thought to herself: fucking chew on this you elf rat motherfucker, fucking Tree Stalkers is it, I’ll give you a piece of Iron Wolf steel through your fucking heart – but managed a quick glance and her heart went cold.

On the road behind them, stood the other four Tree Stalkers. They were all tall, narrow of hip, broad of shoulder. They had black glass eyes and white needle teeth. Wreaths of smoke curled about their boots, and they carried swords and bows. They stood in a line, unmoving.

Kiki and Aeoxir circled one another warily, swords reaching out, touching occasionally with tiny
clings
of metal on metal. Their eyes were fixed, mouths grim lines, both having found somebody of fearsome match.

“You are faster than I imagined,” said Aeoxir, voice a purr of falling pine needles.

“And you’re a damn sight uglier in the flesh than in my fucking nightmares.”

A smile. “You will all be ugly, Kiki, when the elf rat armies swarm across your lands and take what’s rightfully ours.”

“Show me.”

Again, she launched, and their swords rang across the opening. She blanked out the idea that the other Tree Stalkers were waiting for her; that was a problem for another age, another lifetime; and maybe Dek and Zastarte would sort out that particular problem. Or maybe not.

Steel clashed, the four swords of the two combatants a shimmering blur as they moved backwards and forwards across the dead pine needles. Suddenly, Aeoxir launched at her, recklessly, and used both blades to slam Kiki’s blades aside, and he front-kicked her in the chest making her stagger back; then he leapt in, one sword taking both her blades to the side in a circular sweep, whilst the other hacked for her neck…

Kiki spun low, dropping suddenly, her legs sweeping Aeoxir’s from under him. Her right-hand blade hacked overhead, thudding into the ground where his head had been an instant earlier. He rolled smoothly to his feet, but Kiki launched another blistering attack, forcing him back. A thrust cut a long line across his cheek, and a low blow hacked a chunk from his knee a split-second later. Aeoxir, growling, suddenly drew back his arm and threw his sword like a spear. Kiki flexed left, and the blade whistled past her ear and clattered off between the boles of winter trees, lost in the darkness of the winter forest.

Kiki turned her head back, and stared at Aeoxir, and smiled.

He grabbed his remaining blade two-handed. “Come on bitch, come and die.”

Without a word Kiki leapt forward, both blades shimmering in arcs of silver steel with blistering speed, displaying incredible agility and accuracy as the steel clashed and danced and sang a song of death across the forest road. Kiki drove Aeoxir back, and she felt triumph in her heart and quashed it savagely, for the fight was only done when the fight was done, and the killing only finished when the cunt was dead and headless on the road, corpse spewing a bloody fountain. She sensed panic in Aeoxir, felt him making tiny mistakes, slowing just a little as the worm drove deep into the flesh ripe apple of his confidence; and this pushed her on harder, her blades blurring as she threw every single ounce of skill and technique and experience into the battle that was, she realised, one of the hardest fights of her life. Suddenly, a savage horizontal cut took Aeoxir’s blade from his hands and it skittered silently across the pine needles of the road. Kiki risked a glance at the other Tree Stalkers, thinking this was their moment to charge; but they stood motionless, like ghosts in the gloom and swirling mist. Immobile. A distant threat.

Is that what it’s like with these Tree Stalkers? she wondered idly in the splinter of a second. They stand by and let their comrades die? Punishment for failure? A lack of team-work, a lack of camaraderie?

Suza sidled into her mind at this moment, with Aeoxir disabled, hands before him, face suddenly ashen, dark glass eyes gleaming with understanding as he backed away a millimetre at a time, and she gave a snort of derision.

You think you’re special, bitch? You think the elf rats are somehow lower on the fucking nobility scale? What a load of horse shit. You Iron Wolves are a bunch of fucking scum lowlifes, you think you have honour because you cut up a few mud-orcs and put a spear through a sorcerer’s eyeball? Well it soon changed, didn’t it bitch? You all turned on one another. You couldn’t wait to fill your hearts with hate. Look at Dek and Narnok. All that business with Dek shagging his wife and betraying his best fucking friend, betraying you, his lover and wife to be; and even you, bitch, cunt, you fucking turned on Dalgoran, the man who took you in as a deformed
Shamathe
child, who brought you up, who taught you the secrets of Equiem magick and how to channel it and how to ease away your pain, milk away your suffering, how to change your fucking shell into something that wouldn’t get you burned at the stake as a witch or demon or devil. Because that’s what you are, Kiki, a fucking devil.

Kiki leapt forward, and her blade pressed against Aeoxir’s throat, cold iron jerking up to lift his head so his eyes met hers.

“I thought your friends would help,” she snarled, Suza’s poison still ripe in her mind, her brain fluttering as she wondered what the fuck she should do. It wasn’t their aim to destroy the bastard elf rats; the idea was to make them pure again. To
save
them in some twisted logic that harked back ten thousand years to the time when their decadent ancestors had persecuted a noble race. This fight, here and now… well, it wasn’t
right.

“We fight alone,” said Aeoxir, smoothly, eyes fixed on hers.

“And you die alone?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“We work together. As a team. As a unit. The Iron Wolves.”

“Interesting.”

Aeoxir’s back was against a tree – and he simply
melted
into it. Kiki blinked, and in reflex stabbed forward her sword, the point of which embedded in solid wood. She whirled, fast, and saw the other Tree Stalkers still standing – immobile. Watching. Like sentinels. Dek cast a glance back at her, his own black sword out, his face grim as the Reaper.

Before Kiki could even react to Aeoxir’s disappearance, a savage wind howled down the forest road, kicking up leaves and branches and pine needles. It screamed, and roared: a primeval thing, a raw elemental, like a wall of sheer force that slammed down, nearly bowling Dek and Zastarte over, and sending Kiki skidding across the ground still upright, her hair whipping around her head, her face filled with pain.

The wind dropped as suddenly as it came.

Kiki threw a glance to Dek, who shrugged.

Then it roared again, a solid wall of force that cannoned down the forest road, stirring up great piles of debris into a howling, spitting tunnel of branches, leaves and pine needles. Kiki started moving up the road with great, exaggerated steps, towards Dek and Zastarte who were watching the other four Tree Stalkers with suspicion and the threat of violence. Kiki found herself in the middle of the road, buffeted, her shouted words whipped away in an instant. She started to slide again, for the force was incredible, and Dek turned as if to move towards her, to offer help…

Overhead, two great oaks suddenly seemed to flex, leaning over the road towards Kiki who blinked, mouth dry, fear slamming into her mind as her hands raised above her to protect herself, and the great oaks loomed, branches stretching towards her with massive cracks and creaks and snaps. Thin roots slithered across the floor – pale white, anaemic, glistening with oil and sap – and began wrapping around her boots. She screamed, but the panicked noise was snapped away by the howling wind. Dek tried to run to her, but another tree bent, then slapped sideways, smacking into him, sending him flying into the darkness of the wintry undergrowth. All was chaos, all was bedlam, all was anarchy. Darkness fell like velvet dropped over the sun and moon and stars. Kiki found she could not move, through fear, because of the storm that screamed against her, and then roots whipped around her feet, and came snapping from the storm to fasten around her arms and body and throat. The ancient oaks flexed, and she was lifted screaming into the air, held apart like some religious icon, some virgin to be sacrificed, and panic slammed into her and down her and through her and she was completely at the mercy of the forest, of the trees, and of the creature that controlled them – Aeoxir, the elf rat, the High Lord of the Heartwood. Kiki felt herself stretched wide, and she knew with utmost certainty that this ancient woodland could wrench her apart in an instant and the irony ripped through her worse than any instant honey-leaf high; she’d thought she could beat the Tree Stalkers with good hard iron. How wrong she had been. How wrong.

 

Look inside yourself. We are joined. We have always been joined by that same blood mother bitch who carried us; only I was a deformed fucking nightmare, and you were the pretty little blonde bitch. Mummy’s little girl who got everything she ever wanted, and wanted for nothing, and I was jealous, and I despised you, I admit, but then we always get what we deserve, don’t you think? And you got dead. The problem here, bitch, is that when I die – and you probably think I deserve that – then
you
die with me. You’re a malingering spirit because you’re hooked on to me;
in
to me. But trust me when I say I’m going to Hell and beyond. I’m going to the Furnace. And you’re coming with me.