Vi had fucked so many times, with so many men, in so many ways, she thought she knew pretty much everything about sex. But Kylar and Elene, in their mutual ignorance, were experiencing something she never had. Their lovemaking fit into a pattern bigger than itself. There was no awkwardness even in their fumbling, because there was no fear of judgment.
“Oh, fuck me, oh—” Vi’s voice squeaked and she lost the thought. Whatever Elene was doing, she was either naturally gifted or Kylar was extremely sensitive. Either way, the wave of pleasure through the bond was overwhelming. Vi’s cheeks felt like they were on fire.
Then Vi felt Kylar’s mischievous grin—dammit, it felt exactly the same way it looked—and his own pleasure faded into the pleasure of pleasuring.
“You bastard,” Vi said. “I hate you. I hate you I hate you I hate you.” When Vi fucked, she put on a persona like a mask, always. Kylar was making love as a whole man. Every aspect of himself was present—and Vi knew then that she loved him.
She’d been attracted to things about Kylar from the first time she saw that damned mischievous grin in Count Drake’s house. She’d admired how he tried to leave the way of shadows, how he treated Elene and Uly. She appreciated his excellence in fighting. She’d felt a twinge of infatuation long ago—but then, she’d once been infatuated with Jarl, who was homosexual. In the past month, she’d even come to accept that she desired Kylar. But all those things weren’t love. Perhaps she never would have known what love was if she hadn’t talked so much with Elene, and if she hadn’t felt it daily in Kylar’s feelings for Elene.
Something banged into the wall inches from Vi, and she gasped. Her eyes widened. The magic almost escaped her, and only her fear of what would happen if it did helped her regain control. She scrubbed the wool against her arm—fuck she hated wool! “Dead babies. Bearded women. Back hair so long you can braid it. Moon blood. The smell of the Warrens on a hot summer day. Unwashed whores. Vomit. Dead babies. Bearded women. Back hair so—oh shit!” Vi bit the wool and held onto the magic for dear life.
A few moments later, Vi could breathe again. She checked the magic as a deep sense of ease and restfulness and well-being and intimacy and peace with the entire world rolled over Kylar. The magic was still intact. Vi grabbed the pitcher of wine and drank from it directly. “It’s a good thing you’re a virgin, Kylar. Were a virgin. I don’t think I could’ve handled that for much—”
Vi realized something at apparently the same time Elene did: Kylar was still aroused. He asked a question, and Elene’s answer was unmistakably and passionately affirmative. Vi set the pitcher down with shaking hands. Pleasure arced through Kylar again.
Oh gods, it was going to be a long winter.
73
As winter slowly faded in Khaliras, Dorian arrayed his army on the plain north of the city to face the invaders from the Freeze. The ground was still covered in melting snow that their feet churned into freezing slush. Every breath steamed a protest against battle in such conditions.
The wild men who inhabited the Freeze always fought bravely, but their only tactic was to overwhelm a foe by throwing a larger army at it. Once engaged, they fought man to man, never as a unit. Since its founding, Khaliras had never been taken by the brutes, though a few times it had been a near thing. Garoth had always said that the wild men had proportionally more Talented men and women than any people in the world.
The armies faced each other as the sky turned from inky blue to ice blue with the rising sun. Godking Wanhope’s lines were only three deep, arrayed over as much of the plain as twenty thousand men would stretch. The wild men’s army dwarfed his, and stretched much further and more thickly. There was no way Wanhope could keep them from flanking his army. In the middle of the wild men’s line there was one huge block that the men shunned. If Dorian’s reports were correct, he faced twenty-eight thousand krul, and even more wild men.
Three-to-one odds. Dorian smiled, fearless. The current of prophecy was streaming past him, and he saw a thousand deaths. Ten thousand.
“Milord, are you feeling well?” Jenine asked. Dorian hadn’t wanted her to have to see this, but he’d been counting on Jenine more and more, not only for her advice, either.
He blinked and focused on her. Her futures were splitting off so sharply that he could barely see her as she was now, pretty, lips pale from the cold, bundled in furs. Flickering in front of her was a woman hugely pregnant with twins, and a woman with a crushed skull, features unrecognizable under the gore. “No, not well at all,” Dorian said. “But well enough that I won’t let my men die.”
From this distance, the grotesque features of the krul weren’t visible, though their plainly naked gray flesh was. That nakedness gave Dorian hope. The krul were created with magic, but they were creatures of flesh. The cold would cripple and kill them eventually. It wasn’t easy to force the krul to wear clothing, as it wasn’t easy to rein them in from slaughter, but each could be done. That the wild men’s shamans hadn’t meant their control was tenuous.
Dorian gave an order, and the slaves lowered his palanquin to the ground. Godking Wanhope stepped out and advanced onto the plain alone. Palming an obsidian knife, he shrugged off the priceless ermine cloak and let it fall to the mud. It was a gesture that would have infuriated him had he seen his father do it. Now, he understood. To protect what he loved, he had to keep control. To keep control, Wanhope had to be a god. A god was above ordinary concerns like ruining a cloak that cost more than fifty slaves.
The currents of prophecy were rising at the pressure of seventy thousand futures that Wanhope held in his hands. On his choices, tens of thousands would live and die. He looked at the army opposing him and saw ten thousand ravens swirling over them, waiting to feed. He blinked, and the ravens were gone, then blinked again, and they were back. But they weren’t ravens. Nor did they only swirl over the wild men.
Dorian turned, eyes wide. Wispy, dark figures swarmed over his entire army, clotted the air above his men, darting this way and that. Here six perched on a single man, their claws sunk deep into his flesh. There only a single dark figure spun around another warrior, stabbing in one place and then another, as if trying his defenses. But those were the exception. Almost every man in Dorian’s army had at least one figure clinging to him. And there were ranks among them; some were far more terrible. Dorian looked at General Naga nearby. A trio of the monsters clung to the man, two perched on his shoulders, one licking ephemeral blood from the general’s fingers.
This close, Dorian could see their features. One had a cancer that swelled one eye grotesquely. Open, suppurating ulcers dotted their golden-skinned faces, dribbling black blood onto robes so black with that blood that Dorian could barely tell that they had once been white. It was those shredded robes, dripping ephemeral blood that made them all look like ravens. The cancered one dipped his claws into General Naga’s skull and drew them out again and licked its claws greedily. But they weren’t claws, they were finger bones, denuded of their golden flesh. It turned its good eye to Dorian. “What is he looking at?” it asked.
The other cocked its head and it met Dorian’s gaze. “Us,” it hissed in wonder.
“Odniar, ruy’eo getnirfhign em. Dirlom?” Dorian heard the voice. It was Jenine, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Why couldn’t he understand her, but he could understand these things? What were they, anyway?
He looked back to the army across the plain. He saw the krul, but this time, he saw through their flesh. Each of them held one of these creatures. My God, these are the Strangers. Dorian saw them, and he understood. The Strangers carried hell with them wherever they went. They fed on human suffering not because it sustained them, but because it was a distraction from their own suffering; it was entertainment. Wearing flesh was no escape. Rather it was simply the best distraction of all, a chance to feel, if only for a time, to experience the pleasures of food and drink, if only in a muted way, and to kill. That was the pinnacle, to take away that which men had and wh
ich they had no more.
“Odniar!” the voice was in his ear. Dorian turned and for a moment, he could see with his natural vision once more. Every one of his men was staring at him, fearful. Then his vision bifurcated and he could see fear rise like a fragrance from his men—to the delight of the swirling Strangers. He felt the fingers on his shoulders, bony fingers, but before he could turn to face what he knew must cling even to him, he felt natural fingers grab his bicep and squeeze hard.
Jenine swam into his vision, which was natural once more, then it split. She was pregnant, right now, but not with twins. A Stranger spun in tight circles around her, but hadn’t yet found a place to rest. It wanted—by the God, it wanted their baby!
Dorian cried out and saw a fresh wave of fear rise from his men. A mob of the Strangers, now aware of his awareness of them, had congregated around him. They were walling him in.
“ODNIAR! Rodnia! Adimmt! Dornia. Dorian!” Jenine was whispering fiercely in his ear, her body pressed against him, turning him away from his men. He blinked, and saw only ground, and soldiers, and krul, and his wife. She’d called him back from madness, maybe using the thing which best anchored him to reality: his own name.
“I’m back,” he said. “I’m here. Thank you.” He shook himself, willed himself not to see beyond the veil again. He looked over his shoulder, nodded to General Naga to let the frightened man see that Dorian was well, and then strode forward.
Beneath the cloak, Dorian—Wanhope—had decided to go bare-chested. A god felt not the cold. He strode forward, decisive to cover for his earlier hesitation, great knots of vir rising in his skin. He gestured and a young man was brought forward. Dammit, Wanhope hadn’t wanted Jenine to see this. But it was too late, and there was no way she would go where she couldn’t see him after he’d almost doomed them all by standing around looking lost.
The young man’s name was Udrik Ursuul. All of the aethelings in Khaliras had been killed, but seventeen who’d already left for their Harrowings still lived. Udrik had impregnated the wrong Modaini oligarch’s daughter and had to flee, thus failing his uurdthan. He’d come home to beg mercy.
“Do you know, Udrik, if you raise thirteen legions of krul, you can command them yourself, but if you raise just one more, you have to master an arcanghul?”
“A what?” Udrik’s brows were still heavily kohled, menacing despite his fright.
“It’s a creature that these wild men didn’t dare try to master,” Wanhope said. “Tell me, brother, is it better for one man to die, or the whole people?”
Udrik’s eyes widened, and then widened again as Wanhope cut his throat with the obsidian knife. He dropped to his knees, throat spurting, then tumbled awkwardly on his back. Dorian felt—or imagined—the jubilation of a thousand Strangers. He blinked. Control, Dorian. Control it. He didn’t dare to watch what this next part looked like from that other reality.
Wanhope extended his arms and his wings toward the host before him. “Arcanghulus! Come! Be known to me!” The weaves spun out from him easily as if the vir itself was helping him, as if he’d done this a thousand times. Green lightning danced around him. A train of blue fire looped around him. Then the ground began to boil around Udrik’s corpse. Clumps of dirt burst and stuck to the body. Flares danced over Udrik and the corpse’s muscles tore, skin ripped.
The shamans saw their mistake. They hadn’t dared raise an arcanghulus, and Dorian had. An aurochs-horn bugle called the wild men to charge. But only half did.
A bolt of lightning cracked the earth before Wanhope, blinding him, and thunder ripped over him and over both armies, dropping men to the ground on both sides.
When Wanhope’s vision returned, the wild men’s charge had faltered and broken. There was a man standing where Udrik had been and every eye was on him. He was easily seven feet tall, with hair of molten gold falling to the nape of his neck. Though his skin was the color of polished silver, it wasn’t shiny or artificial. His eyes were an arresting emerald of a shade barely within human possibility. Perhaps one man in a million had such eyes. Perhaps mimicking Wanhope, he too was bare-chested, though his body was lean and angular. He was the most beautiful man Wanhope had ever seen.
The arcanghulus laughed, and even his laughter was beautiful. “We’re Strangers, Godking, not monsters.”
“What is your name?” Wanhope asked.
“I am Ba’elzebaen, the Lord of Serpents.”
“Awfully cold in the Freeze for a snake.”
“I’m not in the Freeze any more, am I?”
“I would have you serve me, Ba’elzebaen,” Wanhope said. He desperately wanted to look at Ba’elzebaen as he was, but he didn’t dare. If he lost himself to madness now, Ba’elzebaen might take Dorian’s body instead of Udrik’s.
The Stranger chuckled. “And I would have the sun and moon bow down to me.”
“But one of these things will happen.”
Ba’elzebaen laughed as if at a precocious child. “I am stronger than you.”
“It is only the will and the call that matters. I have called you, and my will is implacable.” The stunning green eyes locked onto his, and Dorian had only to think of how Jenine would be taken if he didn’t compel this snake. He felt the arcanghulus’s will rise against him, higher and higher. Ba’elzebaen was ever so much more than this body before Dorian. He was immortal, omnipotent, there was nothing Dorian could do to stop him. It was hopeless. He should bow and beg for mercy.
Dorian knew that this was the arcanghulus’s attack, and he held onto what he knew. The arcanghulus would obey, would bow, would serve. I am Godking. I am implacable. I will destroy those who challenge me. I will not serve. I am a god.
Ba’elzebaen relaxed and the attacks stopped. “Very well, Godking, I will serve you.”
“Where is my half-brother Moburu?”
“He attempted to take over the ten tribes. He failed. Only one tribe joined him, but he did take enough bones to raise a legion of krul. He’s heading for Black Barrow.” A legion was about two thousand krul. It wasn’t good, but it was far better than facing Moburu at the head of this army. “But it isn’t Moburu you have to worry about.”
“Neph,” Dorian said, his suspicions confirmed.
“Yes. Neph is the one who taught the wild men to raise krul. All this was nothing more than a diversion to keep any Ursuul away from Black Barrow.”
“What’s he trying?”
“To make himself Godking, whether by raising a Titan or by giving Khali flesh.”
Surely Neph Dada didn’t mean to raise Khali herself. It would be madness. If what Dorian had seen of the Strangers’ nature was true, giving their leader flesh would be inviting the devastation of all Midcyru. The good news was that no one since Roygaris Ursuul had been powerful enough to raise Khali. A Titan, on the other hand, was far more probable, and plenty frightening enough. Where in the Strangers’ hierarchy did a Titan fall? Two ranks above Ba’elzebaen? Three? By the God.
But all that was a conversation for another time. “To claim the wild men’s krul, we must strike down the shaman who controls them, correct?” Wanhope asked. “Who is it?”
Ba’elzebaen pointed to a wild man covered completely in woad tattoos. The man had dozens of shields surrounding him, both his own, and other magi’s, but as Ba’elzebaen gestured, the shields simply melted away. Wanhope threw a single green fiery missile at the man. The mage watched it contemptuously, secure in his shields—and it burned a hole in his chest. He died with a shocked look on his face.
Ba’elzebaen smiled and Dorian noticed something strange in how the skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes: the arcanghul’s skin was made of thousands of tiny scales. “Master,” Ba’elzebaen said, “what would you have the Fallen do?”
“Kill the wild men. No feeding until nightfall, and then load the bones onto the wagons. We may need them to make more krul at Black Barrow.”
“As you desire.” Ba’elzebaen bowed. By the time he straightened, panicked cries were already ris
ing from the wild men’s army as the krul in their own ranks turned on them.
74
Spring is upon us,” Elene said.
Vi joined her on the balcony, still sweating from her exertions with the hundreds of magae practicing in the yard below. Kylar was outside the city, training with his master again, and Elene had asked to meet. Vi tried to swallow away the lump in her throat as Elene turned and smiled at her.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” Elene said.
Vi wanted to say that she’d been busy. She had. The Chattel were gathering; women were joining Vi’s Shield Sisters every day; messages had to be passed secretly to the Speaker; and always tactics and magic had to be practiced. But all those weren’t why she hadn’t met with Elene. The past two months had seen them grow strangely closer, but the coming of spring was a naked sword.
“I need your advice, Vi. You know how Kylar’s gift works, and you also know how his mind works. I’m afraid he’ll try to do something stupid to save me, if . . .” She laid a hand on her stomach.
“If what?” Vi asked. Then it hit her. “Ah shit, you’re pregnant!”
Elene blushed, and said quietly. “A Healer confirmed it for me this morning. I’m one month along. Haven’t even had a touch of morning sickness. Lucky, I guess.”
Lucky. That was one way to put it. If Kylar found out. . . . Actually, Vi had no idea what he’d do, but stupid heroism was likely. Unfortunately, she had no idea how stupid heroism would show itself.
“It complicates things,” Elene said. Vi could see from her face that she didn’t mean only for Kylar.
“I can make you tansy tea,” Vi said.
Elene was incredulous. “If I wanted it to die, I’d wait a month! God, that’s the most stupidly callous thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Vi stood transfixed. I’m stupid and callous. This is why you never let anyone in. If you do, they shit all over you.