Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

I will have you, lady, she thought excitedly. In your very husband’s body, I will have you. I will feed off your passion, your surrender. And when you are open to him, vulnerable in the throes of sickening love, I will take your soul and have your body for my own as well. And right before I do, I will tell you, in his voice, what is happening, so I can pleasure myself with your horror—at least for a moment.

And as I eat your soul, I will take your fire. But first, I will take your husband. Her excitement was reaching a fever pitch. She could leave her next conquest waiting no longer. The woman in the dark glen turned slowly around, her eyes glittering in the moonlight.

“I knew you would come after me,” she said softly. “I knew you could not let me go.” The breeze picked up around her, caressing her hair. At first there was silence in the glade. Then a voice spoke, not the warm baritone she had come to recognize, but a fiat, toneless one that vibrated against her eardrums, inaudible to the wind. All of your kind should know the same, Hrarfa. So it has been since the beginning of history, and so it shall remain until each of you is extinguished and buried in ash, like candle-flame. Deep within her, Portia felt the words echo.

Terror, old and consuming, rose up inside her and spread through her like fire on pine. She turned to ran, or tried to, but ahead of her, almost as close as her own shadow, the darkness of the glade moved. A figure in shadow held up his hand, palm forward. Zhvet, it said. Halt. All around Portia the wind died suddenly. All sound, all air, seemed to vanish from the glen, leaving her breathless and gasping. Panic swelled and overran her defenses; each of her kind knew this moment, feared it almost from the beginning of Time. She, like many of the escapees of the Vault, had come to disbelieve the possibility of it, especially after the racial pogroms and campaigns against the Dhracians that all but extinguished the hunters from the face of the Earth.

Yet the time had come, and she was trapped by one that had her name. Rath inhaled again, allowing his skin-web to relax, and gave a tug on the first net of wind he had woven from the invisible silk of his kirai. The demon’s body flinched, then shuddered to a frozen stance, he noted with satisfaction.

Slowly he spread his fingers and began to chant.

Bien, he canted in the inaudible buzzing voice of his first throat. It was the name of the north wind, the strongest of the four and the most easily found. The wind responded immediately, as it always did for him, wrapping itself snugly around his index finger, anchored in the first chamber of his heart.

“No,” the woman whispered, rigid in place. Rath could see her eyes darting wildly even from where he stood. “No.”

He hadn’t expected a F’dor of the Older Pantheon to beg. In his experience, the older, more powerful demons were stoic, furious, but generally silent or threatening rather than supplicant when facing destruction. He remembered her penchant for deception and cleared his mind, returning to his state of inner calm.

Jahne, he whispered over the aperture of his second throat. This was a call to the south wind, the most constant and enduring of the winds. Rath felt the answer in both his finger and his chest, where the wind had knotted in the second chamber of his heart. The woman screamed, not the harsh, atonal scratching of an angry F’dor, but a heartrending wail of human despair that had no impact on Rath whatsoever.

“Please,” she begged, her eyes growing wide from fear and the pressure that was building up in her skull. “Have—have mercy. I know much that would be—valuable—” Rath did not even hear her words. His focus was his entire existence now, and all sound, all fury, faded into the shadowy twilight at the edge of his consciousness, leaving nothing but the pure, ringing tones of the winds responding to his call. Satisfied with the clarity of the first two, he summoned the third wind, the wind of justice, that blew from the west. Leuk. “I—I know where—others are,” the woman whispered now, the effort of forming words causing the veins in her neck to distend grotesquely. “I—will—tell—you—”

In the darkness of his ritual, Rath called for the last, the east wind, and waited patiently for the tentative breeze to appear in the glen, hesitantly wrapping itself around his fourth finger, entwining itself in the last chamber of his heart that was now beating erratically with the changeable breezes. Thas. The wind of morning, the wind of death. Like strands of spider-silk, the currents of air hung on his fingertips, waiting, tethered through the valves of his heart. Once he cast the second net and began the ending of the Ritual, he would be vulnerable; he could not stop until the body of the host and spirit of the F’dor were dead, even if he desired to, lest his own heart be sundered in his chest. Rath opened his eyes and met the terrified gaze of the beast. The woman who had been Hrarfa’s last host had been beautiful in life, with large, dark eyes that gleamed in reflected light. Those eyes brimmed with tears that he almost could believe were tied to actual emotion. Almost. Rath closed his hand into a fist. The woman twitched again, still frozen in place. With a fluid motion, he cast the net of tangled winds around the demon, anchored in his palm, cemented in his heart, and pulled with all his might.

The demon screamed again, this time in a primal voice that scratched Rath’s inner ears like nails on flesh. The lovely face began to contort into something dark and hideous, with black eyes flashing hatred that was palpable. Smoke rose around her as the winds encircled her in an unbreakable cage and began to close in, pressing against her with the force of a cyclone. Rath inhaled deeply. The Thrall ritual had reached its climax. It was time to cut the net. He opened his mouth slightly wider, inhaling the air over all four of his throat openings, each holding a single, unwavering note. With a skill born of uncounted hunts, Rath clicked the glottis in the back of his throat.

A harsh fifth note sliced through the monotone of the other four. The winds screamed discordantly with the beast, tearing through the glade and causing the trees to shiver violently. Rath felt the threads of wind attached to his fingers go slack. Quickly he clicked his tongue, tying off the ends of the wind-cage and allowing his first net to dissipate. Then he clenched his thumb to snap the wind-thread taut against the flailing spirit. His heart thudded against his chest. Now that the beast was stationary, unable to escape, he began the final chant, the note that would build to a crescendo of such intense sound, aligned with the vibrations of their interlocked heartbeats, that die host body’s blood would reverse in its path and flood the brain until it exploded. All the air in the glen was sucked into the vortex of knotted wind swirling around the ancient monster. The rictus of fury twisted the woman’s face into a mask of even more hate. She grimaced in agony and tried to scream curses back, but her pupils were beginning to expand almost to the size of her irises, her forehead scored in deep furrows of pain.

Rath matched the intensity of her gaze. He could hear in the rising sound of imminent death the age-old calls of his Brethren, living and dead, joining him, unlimited by time and space, adding their voices to the chant. For all that the climax of the Thrall ritual left the hunter vulnerable, his heart in syn-chronicity with the essence of pure evil, there was a comfort in the solidarity of the cause that his race had sworn fealty to thousands of years ago. He was too in thrall himself to hear the cracking of the branches under the feet of someone entering the glade.

The moon gleamed silver on the open fields, lighting a path.