“Donal says for you to come,” Rye said.
They followed him toward the light, which turned out to be a lantern sitting on a rock, its flame weak in the heaviness of the dark. Bodies of half a dozen Second Empire soldiers lay about on the ground.
“We’ve a mystery,” Donal said.
Zachary saw what he meant soon enough. The bodies lay unmarked by any violence, not a drop of blood on them, but their faces were contorted in some agony.
“There is more,” Donal said. He took the lantern and passed it over a hole in the ground. “It’s a Second Empire trap.”
The lantern light gleamed off the eyes and fangs of groundmites crumpled at the bottom of the hole, a deep pit. There was no evidence of obvious violence upon them, either, other than the fact that they had fallen into the pit. It was not deep enough to have killed them, just to contain them. In the tangle of limbs was one who looked more prominent than the others with finer furs and necklaces of teeth. On the whole, these ’mites looked better fed than one would expect after so long and hard a winter.
“A mystery, truly,” Zachary said, wondering if these were the same ones that had brought him to Grandmother, “but one we cannot solve right now, for we must go on.”
They left the lantern to mark the pit so others would not fall in it, and before they left, he noticed that much of the vegetation surrounding the bodies and pit appeared to be dead—no needles on the evergreens, the underbrush dry and brittle.
• • •
They caught up with the fighting and found, with dismay, the River Unit was being pushed back. Two soldiers rushed toward them with a wounded man between them. Zachary realized with a start that it was Treman, blood staining the front of his tunic.
“Stop, stop,” the captain told his soldiers. “Put me down.”
“Captain,” Zachary said, striding up to him as he was lowered to the ground.
“Sire . . . Met a stronger defense than expected. Our front rank . . . falling apart. Rennard, you must . . .” His head lolled to the side. Either he’d fallen unconscious, or was dead. Rennard blanched.
Zachary wasted no time. He grabbed Rennard’s shoulder. “Come, we must reverse the situation.”
Donal tried to convince him to stay back, but he did not listen. Rennard looked shaken, and he practically dragged the young man with him. Donal and Rye helped form a wedge, with Fiori falling in behind, to force their way through melees in an attempt to reach the front. Even with his eyes well-adjusted to the night, it was not easy to distinguish between friend and foe.
Metal rang against metal, there was the splash of blood, the cries of the wounded and dying, but as Zachary surged forward, he became singularly focused on reaching the front. His sword took on a life of its own, a scythe to reap a bloody harvest. The killing joy came upon him. There were no politics to restrain him, no betrayals to feed doubt. He harnessed all the unexpressed rage that had built up over the years, at the helplessness he’d felt during his captivity, and used it against the enemy.
Second Empire had little in the way of armor, and he threw himself against its warriors. They were too easy to kill, like bugs to be squashed. A thrust to the gut here, the razor’s edge hewing off a head there. He gloried in the spray of their life’s blood upon him.
His Weapons fought to keep up with him. He’d lost track of Rennard and Fiori, somewhere behind him, but felt the troops rallying around him, following his example, pressing back the enemy.
A spiked cudgel descended toward him and he sheared off the arm of the warrior who wielded it. He did not pause to provide the killing blow, but moved on to the next, and the next, stepping on and over bodies to reach the enemy. No longer a man governed by reason or empathy, he was a force of skill, strength, and bloodlust. If any steel touched him, he did not feel it. If anyone stepped in his path, he cut them down.
He soon broke into a clearing, his nostrils flared, and he searched vainly for another enemy to slay. The soldiers of the River Unit flooded in around him, and he raised his sword high above his head.
“Forward! Forward till the enemy falls!”
His words were greeted with a great shout from his soldiers, and they surged after him.
He paused when he felt a cold pinprick upon the heat of his cheek. And then another. He blinked and turned his face up toward the sky as snowflakes sifted between the limbs of trees, drifting this way and that as air currents carried them on their wayward course. For a brief moment, Zachary Hillander came back to himself, remembering how, as a small boy, he took joy at first snowfalls, at the games he would play, his cheeks ruddy and mittens soaked through from building armies of snow soldiers. It was a brief moment only, before he once more scented death on the air and the fury took him again.
BREAKING THE IIRE
The slaves were in place, about fifty of them chained together in the chamber they had worked so hard to dig out. It would most likely become their tomb. Leg irons were bolted to the floor so they could not escape. They were dirty, hunched and beaten. One or two coughed, someone sobbed, most looked resigned, and there was the one who looked fierce. Beneath the dirt caked on her face and the tangle of hair that hung over it, Grandmother recognized her, the agitator, the one who would have no kings. No emperors, either. Lorilie Dorran.
“Are you going to slaughter us now that you’re done with us?” Lorilie demanded.
“Not precisely, dear,” Grandmother replied, “though you may wish it before long. In fact, you may survive, but it depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much one of your gods is interested in the welfare of you and your people.”
The chamber felt very full with all the slaves in there at once, almost suffocating with its low ceiling. Cole and his second hung back by the entry to the passage. The silver sphere still floated by Terrik’s corpse and drifted a bit toward the slaves. It wanted more blood, but there were other entities that needed to be sated.
Scrape, scrape. Scratch. Scrape, scrape.
She could feel them massed beneath the seal. When she glanced at Lorilie, she saw that the woman had blanched beneath the dirt of her face. She must sense the dark denizens of the underworld, as well. How could she not? Dread permeated the chamber. Perhaps Grandmother had more faith in Westrion than Lorilie, whose god he was.
“Your empire will never rise,” Lorilie said.
Grandmother was impressed by her conviction. “Oh, it will rise. Sacoridia is dead.” She chuckled at her own joke, but it was a weary sound. It was too much for a woman her age to contend with, and soon she must step back for the younger generation to take over. She just had to see her people through the fall of Sacoridia, and then she could live out the rest of her days resting and teaching the art to any with the talent who would learn it.
But now, the time had come to lure the avatar. She stepped over Terrik’s body and scooped up the sphere into her sore hands. It pulsated more wildly, and she felt it sucking on her blisters, trying to reach the blood beneath.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she told it in a mild tone. “You’ve another purpose.”
She gazed down at the seal, at the sluggish symbols. She stooped and lowered the sphere and felt the attraction between it and the seal like a magnetic force. The scratching beneath the seal grew furious. She gently placed the sphere over the dying symbols. It clicked when it touched the steel of the iire, and she stepped away.
“Come,” she told her guards. “We do not want to be here when the spell erupts.”
“Grandmother, I don’t think you should be here at all,” Cole said as they hastened out of the chamber and up the steep rise in the torchlit passage. She heard crying from the slaves behind them. Some were pleading with her to release them.
“If I am not here,” she replied, “then I cannot finish what I’ve worked so long and hard to achieve.”
She did not speak agai
n until they stepped into the open air. She shivered and was astonished to see snow cascading down. A layer of powder already covered the ground.
“It appears winter has come for another visit.”
In the distance came the sounds of battle, the shouts, the clash of blades. Somewhere through the wall of falling snow was the keep, empty of civilians, but guarded. The assault by the king’s forces was not unexpected, and though Immerez had requested reinforcements from Birch, none had come. Had Birch refused, or had their messenger been slain enroute to his encampment? She would find out in time, and if the former, she would express her displeasure with Birch in no uncertain terms.
“Go now,” Grandmother told her guards. “Go to Captain Immerez to help in our defense.”
“But—” Cole began.
“You will not wish to be nearby when the spell begins.”
“What about—”
“Go.”
Her tone brooked no argument, and they left her alone in the snow. She stood there in silence for a moment, then removed a length of yarn from her coat pocket. It was crusty with Terrik’s dry blood. It was time.
She tied the knot, a complicated chain, more by feel than sight in the dark. The lantern Cole left at the mouth of the passage offered scant light. She felt the power pulling at her as she worked, connecting her to the sphere, felt its pulsations through the yarn. When she tied off the last knot, she unsheathed her knife and cut the length of yarn in half. She checked the wards she had put in place behind a large rock near the entrance to the passage, and hid. Now she would see what came of her great working.
Lorilie Dorran had never liked the feeling of the passage as she and the other slaves cleared it out. The closer they had gotten to the chamber she and the others now stood in, the darker and more oppressive it felt. When Grandmother had placed the sphere on the round metal object she called a seal, the sensation grew even worse.
“I just wanna die, I just wanna die,” Binning said.
Others prayed.
Pitkin said, “The king will come for us. He was with us here. He wouldn’t just abandon us.”
Lorilie was less certain. Royals were more likely to preserve their own hides than risk themselves for someone else, but King Zachary, who they’d known as Dav, had surprised her. He’d helped his fellow slaves if one weakened or needed assistance. It was not for nothing that she and the others had shielded him that day when Second Empire started stoning him. They were not absolutely sure what had become of him after Nyssa’s workshop burned down. They were told he’d burned within, but most believed he had been rescued, and it was because of this rescue that Terrik lay dead at their feet. He’d allowed the king to go free. There was also something else happening—the civilians of Second Empire had left the encampment, along with their belongings and livestock, and the guards had been particularly alert of late. It meant, she believed, that Grandmother was anticipating an attack. Was the king coming back for them as Pitkin suggested?
“Let me out! I can’t stand it. Let me out!”
Lorilie couldn’t turn all the way around to see who was shouting, but she thought it sounded like Em. “Let us be calm, my friends,” she said in an effort to prevent full-blown panic.
It was not easy to convince them, chained together as they were, and anchored in this malignant chamber waiting for who-knew-what to happen.
“We have already endured so much,” Lorilie said. “We can endure anything Grandmother puts before us.”
Binning kept muttering to himself. There were sniffles and more sobbing, but no more panicked outbursts. A hiss drew her attention back to the seal in time to witness Grandmother’s sphere dissolving upon it. Some of the odd symbols moved more frantically, racing across the metal surface. A black viscous fluid began to ooze from the remains of the sphere and across the shining steel, swallowing the symbols. She could hear howls emanating from beneath the seal that turned her cold. Inhuman, they were. The panic started to build again, the weight of the earthen chamber closing in around her. Her own breath grew ragged.
The fluid now engulfed the top surface of the seal. It seeped over its edges, translucent with the hue of dried blood. A twisting, tortured groan arose from the metal, and the sound of hammer blows came from beneath it. A crack formed across the blackened seal and widened. It was as though all the world had gone still, silent, waiting. Lorilie heard not a breath, not the faintest flick of an eyelash.
She was not sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but dark mist appeared to rise through the crack. Her fellow captives shifted, cried. Binning struggled, yanking on the chains that bound them.
“Be brave, friends,” Lorilie wanted to shout, but it came only as a whisper, for at that moment, a clawed, scaled hand reached up through the seal’s crack, and a wave of despair crashed so violently into her she thought she would drown.
Zachary’s forces had broken through the ranks of Second Empire to face those who guarded the keep. They were sorely outnumbered, but he led the charge into the clearing. Gore clung to his sword as he raised it above his head for his soldiers to rally around and follow, and follow him they did, roaring all the way.
Arrows descended in the dark from guards on the curtain wall loosing at will, and blindly through the snow and dark. Zachary’s soldiers fell around him. He rushed heedlessly toward the wall and the enemy that loomed in the squall.
Donal and Rye tried to race before him, but they labored to keep up. Zachary caught the smashing blow of an enemy sword on his buckler, and deftly maneuvered his sword beneath the man’s guard and disemboweled him.
He did not pause, but moved on to the next defender, who was armed with only a cudgel. Down he went. The joy still burned in Zachary, and he laughed as his sword swept across the neck of another. There was only the snow and the killing, until he heard a familiar voice, a distinctive gravelly voice, shouting orders from near the wall. He angled his attack in that direction, thrusting his sword into a soldier engaged with Rye and then stepping over the body. He went on to the next, and the next after that. He had turned feral, as untamed as the wind that rushed around him.
He glimpsed the shape of Immerez urging his soldiers on, but there were so many swords cutting through the falling snow between them. Instead of being deterred, the fire in his blood rekindled, and with a savage cry, he charged sword first, slashing and knocking soldiers out of his way with his buckler.
And then, he halted. Everything, everyone, heaved to a stop, fell silent. Even the snow slowed as though each snowflake was suspended in motion. A darkening dread spread through the air. His steamy breaths blew flurries swirling away.
The pressure of the air split, and shapes darker than night blackened the veil of snow. Their screams pierced beyond the range of hearing. The sky was full of flapping, drifting terror that changed the pattern of the snowfall. The spaces around the combatants filled with a darkling mist, and creatures—entities of some kind—scuttled by, perceived if not seen. Soldiers cried out in terror on both sides.
What the hells? Zachary wondered.
Rye turned to him. “Sire, I think we should—” Some clawed thing ripped off the young man’s face, exposing jawbone and eye socket, before he could finish his sentence. He fell to the ground, and dark entities converged on him, jerking and tugging at his body. They slurped and gnawed in a frenzy of gluttonous feeding.
Zachary stabbed at the shadows, hit something that resisted the point of his sword, but he threw his weight into it and plunged the blade until it touched ground. The thing gurgled. He loosed his sword and plunged again and again until it stopped moving. He did so to the others that had clustered around Rye’s body.
When he finished, he saw Donal’s back to him, defending him from demons of the air. Yes, demons they had to be. Grandmother must have succeeded in opening the Aeon Iire, for what else could explain this?
The combatants no longer f
ought one another, but the dark beings that clawed and bit and feasted. A man dropped dead beside Zachary after he’d walked into a black mist. Zachary tried cutting at it, but it just continued drifting along and leaving corpses in its wake. How could they overcome mist?
He slashed through something skeletal, scattering bones, and fouled his blade in a winged creature that dove at him. A claw raked his shoulder, and only his breastplate saved him from worse. Fire lanced through the wound. Donal pivoted and killed the entity that scored him.
“I must get you away,” Donal said.
“How do you get away from this?” Zachary demanded. “They are everywhere.”
Shadows slithered by his feet. Others moved quickly among them, growling and snarling. They were horned and tailed and scaled, and stank of decay when stabbed. They flapped just above the heads of the soldiers, and some made chuckling, chittering noises before sinking serrated teeth into an unprotected arm or leg.
The Aeon Iire was broken, and now their only hope was that the avatar of Westrion truly existed and would come to their aid.
AUREAS SLEE
Slee continued to drift in its insubstantial form. Its time in the arctic had helped heal it some, and during its drifting time, it had plotted and planned, and found it had not the patience to wait until winter to take its revenge. So, it hunted, and brought with it snow.
It searched for the one who had hurt it most, the Zachary, and then it would hunt the others who had injured it, and take the Beautiful One with her offspring to its new domain, an ice cave in the far, far north. There they would live together. The Beautiful One would grow to love Slee. It would make her.
Slee had caught the tang of the Zachary upon the wind. He was still in the north region. It then whiffed the scent of the other that was dear to the Zachary, the Karigan. She was not far off.
Slee moved against the air currents to investigate. It roiled across tundra, over treetops and boglands. More woods and a stretch of rocky terrain. The air was milder here, but Slee persisted and found the Zachary below, in the wood. He smelled of metal and intent, as did the many other humans who moved with him.