undying legion 01 - unbound man (62 page)

Eilwen pointed at the speck. “There I am.”

“Yes,” Havilah said.

The speck was a ship, no longer distant but close enough to hear the terrified shrieks of those on board. The sea bucked and heaved beneath it, tossing it in the air then slamming up to meet it on its way down. Eilwen saw men and women thrown from its sides into the churning sea. A horrible crack tore the air, the sound of something immense splitting apart.

“It won’t last long,” Havilah said conversationally, his chin propped on his hands.

Lightning stabbed from the boiling sky, transfixing the floundering vessel. With a great, tearing screech, the ship broke in two, folding as though hinged in the middle and sinking beneath the heaving waves. In the space of a dozen heartbeats it was gone, pulled into the murky depths. Nothing remained above the surface but wild, foaming water.

Havilah folded his arms and looked out over the restless, featureless sea. “Where are you now?”

She opened her mouth to respond, and heard a low, wordless growl. Fear pierced her belly like a spear. Hands trembling, she felt for her mouth. Her fingers closed over a snout, furry and bestial, lips curled in a snarl. Fangs jutted from her lower jaw, curving over her cheeks. Panic rose in her breast and she reeled backward, clutching her face and screaming at the sky.

Eilwen jolted awake to find herself lying sideways on the hard cell floor. Heart pounding, she reached for her face, and sighed in relief as her hands touched smooth, familiar skin.
Thank the gods.
She struggled upright, cursing as her elbow struck a glancing blow on the wall behind her, and hugged her legs to her chest.

The dream’s meaning was plain enough.
I am becoming the beast.
It had survived all her efforts to put it down, and in the end she’d come crawling back, surrendering herself willingly to its embrace.
I pushed it away, and it pushed back even harder.
She’d given herself over to it, and it had led her out of Anstice, given her a kill in the forest above, and finally brought her here.

And where am I? Locked in a cell by my enemies, barely able to stand even before they snapped the chains shut.

Defying the beast hadn’t worked. In the end, it had just made it stronger. But giving it its head hadn’t worked either.

What else is there? What can I do, other than resist or yield?

The surge and ebb of the beast’s hunger was like a river: sometimes rushing, sometimes crawling, but always there; sometimes calm for a while but never truly exhausted. No dam she could imagine would be enough to contain it forever. She frowned.
I need something else. A weir, maybe. Some way to control the flow, let a small amount out sometimes, but keep it from becoming a flood.

Perhaps she had already begun without realising it.

I am a soldier. A soldier fights, but does not kill indiscriminately. She has a mission, a purpose that eclipses her own desires. A soldier is not her own master.
She shifted position, causing her chains to clink against the rough stone floor, and loosed a bitter chuckle.
Not her own master. No sooner thought than accomplished. See what progress I make.

The cell’s darkness was complete. After a while, Eilwen fell into a fitful doze, neither fully awake nor truly asleep. When her bladder grew too full to ignore, she relieved herself as far away from her place by the wall as her chains would allow. It had been evening when they captured her, but whether it was now midnight or midday or evening once more, she could not say. Her knee pounded, her back ached, and she longed for a cup of water.

When at last the corridor outside the cell began to lighten, shifting almost imperceptibly from black to the darkest of greys, she thought it a trick of the eyes, a conjuration of a mind starved of light. Then she felt the egg throbbing against her side and heard the soft scrape of approaching footsteps. She sat up, blinking sleep-encrusted eyes at the lightening wall, and ran a hand through her tangled mass of hair.

A man appeared in the doorway. He was older than the one who’d left her here: mid-forties, perhaps, with dark, shoulder-length hair and slender fingers. Setting his lamp on the ground, he leaned against the open doorway, considering her with narrowed eyes and a faintly distracted air.

“Please,” Eilwen said, her voice little more than a croak. “Could I have some water?”

The man folded his arms. “What’s your name?” His words carried the expectant tone of one accustomed to authority.

“Eilwen. Eilwen Nasareen.” She coughed. “Some water, please.”

“Eilwen,” the man repeated. “Tell me, Eilwen. Did you kill my man?”

She hesitated. The man was an Oculus, and not just a token-bearer. But he’d asked the question as though he already knew.

“Yes,” she said.

The man’s expression didn’t change. “Why?”

Something gave way within her. “
Because you’re Oculus,
” she snarled, and he blinked in surprise. “You drowned my ship and made me watch. You betrayed everything I cared about. If I could, I’d drive a knife through your heart right now.”

A hint of a smile played about the man’s lips. “You’re not in much position to be making threats.”

“Fuck you!” She surged from the wall, reaching for his smirking face with clawed hands. The chains at her ankles snapped tight and she pitched forward, her arms hitting the ground still a hand’s breadth from his foot. Something dropped from her shirt, cracking against the stone floor and rolling to a halt just beside her hand.

The man dropped to a crouch, his eyes fixed on the black amber egg. “What’s this?”

She snatched the egg away, wrapping her fist around it and holding it against her belly. “That’s mine,” she said, and glared up at him, daring him to take it from her.

“You didn’t get that from Yuri, did you?”

Eilwen shook her head, confused. “Who?”

“No matter.” He straightened. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said, and she could almost see him shunting her aside to a holding area in his mind, the one marked
not important.
He picked up the lamp, turned, and left.

“What?” Eilwen blinked at the empty doorway. “Wait. Wait! What’s wrong? Too busy invading cities to stop and chat? Hey, come back!”

The footsteps halted. The man returned, stopping in the doorway and staring at her. “What did you say?”

“I said, are you too busy —”

A presence roared into the room, something huge and ancient, an indescribable mass of rage and vast, insatiable hunger. Eilwen reeled back, the egg in her hand vibrating as though fit to burst apart. The man staggered before her, dropping the lamp with a clang and bracing himself against the doorway, shoulders bent beneath a sudden, invisible weight. Eilwen whimpered, huddling against the wall as it pressed against her, raising her arm in a futile effort to ward it away.

It hung in the air, invisible and ravenous; then it settled about the man in front of her, coiling around and through him as though making itself comfortable in a favourite chair. The pressure eased.

The man straightened slowly, staring at her with an expression of astonishment. She stared back, unable to do anything more than gasp for breath. He put a finger to his lips, indicating silence, and she nodded fractionally. His eyes flicked to the lamp, then back at her, and she nodded again in understanding.
You leave the lamp to show you’ll be back.

He gave her a final stunned look, then turned and walked out of the cell. Eilwen listened to the soft, scraping steps as they receded down the corridor, taking the unspeakable presence with them.

•

The woman could sense Azador.

Clade paced the length of the chamber, shoulders bowed beneath the god’s weight, his mind whirling. The notion was crazy. Impossible. The woman had clearly never been bound to the Oculus. She didn’t even seem to be a sorcerer. Yet her reaction to the god had been unmistakable.
She felt it as strongly as I did. Maybe more.

He turned, taking a deep, calming breath, slowing his pace as he retraced his steps. The golem stood motionless in its place by the wall, its wrists and ankles now bound with the shackles that hung beside it. It had made no move to resist when Clade snapped them shut, nor shown any awareness that it was being restrained. A pair of Quill lamps retrieved by Meline burned in opposite corners of the chamber, filling it with a soft, yellow light.

How had she done it? He frowned, going over the sequence of events in his mind. Azador had come, pressing down on him like a great stone, and she… Clade paused, remembering the woman’s expression.
She was surprised. No, more than that. Shocked.
She’d reacted as if she’d never felt the god’s presence before. She certainly hadn’t anticipated its arrival. Perhaps she didn’t even know what Azador was.

All the same, she was sensitive to its presence. Add to that her apparent knowledge of their plans to invade Neysa, and what seemed an obsessive grudge against the Oculus, and the woman was… what?

Dangerous, certainly. Volatile, too. She’d wished him dead without knowing a thing about him. Which meant it wasn’t him she hated, just what he represented.

Or what she thought he represented.

An idea began to form. Perhaps he could give her hatred a real target.
And maybe, just maybe, she can help me solve some of my other problems.

Picking up a lamp, Clade left the chamber and headed across the vast passageway, taking the first set of stairs down. The lower level was built around a twisting corridor, with stairs to the cavern at either end. Sub-corridors branched off the main trunk, though none seemed to lead very far. Cells sprouted about the branches like leaves, some with chains and shackles sunk into walls and floors, some without. The Quill prisoners had been confined in one such branch; the woman, Eilwen, was chained in another.

He found Sinon sitting on the bottom stair, a lamp midway between his feet and the mouth of the side passage leading to the Quill. The large man grunted as Clade passed.

Clade gestured at the cells. “Any change?”

“Two of them have been out since morning,” Sinon said, his tone one of profound indifference. “Haven’t touched their water. Either they’re really sound sleepers, or…”

Clade nodded his understanding.
Live or die, there’s nothing I can do about it now.
“Fetch me some of the water you left them,” he said. “Then take a break. Go and have a look at the golems.”

“About time,” Sinon said, pushing himself to his feet with an enthusiasm that belied his gruff response.

The sorcerer ducked into the passage, returning a moment later with a cup of water. Then he disappeared up the stairs, Azador going with him. Clade took a long breath, straightening as the pressure of the god eased.
It’s getting worse.
When Azador had come upon him in the cell, it had felt like a yoke of iron dropping into place around his neck. And before, in the gorge, he would have fallen but for Kalie. It wasn’t just the arrivals, either: the god’s ongoing presence was becoming increasingly oppressive, requiring ever more effort to ignore.
The longer we stay, the harder it gets.

And he still had a spell to build.

Clade rubbed his chin, grimacing as the thought played out to its conclusion.
I can’t wait for Arandras. I need to rid myself of the god while I still can.
He set his teeth, resisting the urge to slam his palm against the stone wall.
Damn it, Eilwen, you’d better be what I need, or this whole thing is going to come crashing down like a house of twigs.

Eilwen sat just as she had on his first visit, back to the wall, her legs stretched out before her. Her eyes flicked up at his approach, then widened at the sight of the cup in his hand. Clade crouched in the doorway, placing the cup on the ground close enough for her to reach. “Water,” he said. “As requested.”

She scrambled forward, snatching the cup and putting it greedily to her lips; then, with a visible effort of will, she paused, taking only a small sip from the cup. A few heartbeats later, she took another.

“I’d like to start again,” Clade said, still crouching. “My name is Clade. I’m sorry for chaining you up, but you did kill my man.”

She blinked at him over the top of the cup, waiting.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Yes,” she said. “More water, and then some food. But that can wait.” She lowered the cup. “What in the Gatherer’s cesspit was that thing?”

Clade seated himself on the rough stone floor with a grunt. “You say you hate the Oculus?” he said. “Then that thing is what you hate most of all.”

“Really.” Eilwen gave him an appraising look. “What is it?”

“It’s a god,” Clade said, and the woman raised her eyebrows. “Of a sort, at least. It calls itself Azador. Each member of the Oculus is bound to it.”

Eilwen’s slow nod suggested that the revelation was not entirely unexpected. “And when you say bound, that’s not just a metaphor, is it? There’s some sort of, I don’t know, sorcerous link between you and it. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Clade said, struggling to keep the surprise off his face and out of his heart. “How did you know —”

“Answer me this first.” She fixed him with a hard stare. “This god. This Azador. Do you worship it?”

He hesitated. The question seemed to carry a layer of meaning beyond that of the words themselves. “No,” he said at last. “Azador is my foe. It believes I am here in obedience to its will, but in fact my purpose is entirely my own.” He met her eyes. “I’m here to break its hold over me.”

She studied him for a long moment; then, slowly, she nodded. “And if you succeed, what will you do then?”

Clade shook his head. “Your turn. Tell me how you knew about the binding.”

The woman shrugged. “Maybe I’m a sorcerer too.”

“I don’t think so. How?”

Eilwen tilted her head in mock-acquiescence. “With this,” she said, reaching into her shirt and drawing out the locus she had dropped earlier. “It tells me who’s Oculus and who’s not.”

He raised a brow. “I’ve got dozens of those back home. They don’t do anything of the sort.”