Elizabeth Haydon - The Assassin King

“Are you all right, Owen?” Ashe called to the elderly chamberlain as they left the horses at the roadway and made their way through the grass at the glade’s edge. “Yes, m’lord,” Gerald Owen replied between grunts. “I— still say that the wench is—probably hiding out in the— garrison, servicing the—”

“Desist.” The Lord Cymrian stopped long enough to examine a beech tree that had sustained a snapped branch, the sap still running fresh from the break. “She did nothing, Owen, nothing save remind me of things beyond my grasp. It was wrong to send her away in such a state; there will be blood enough on my hands in due course. I don’t wish to inaugurate this war with that of an innocent servant,”

“Her blood’s—on Tristan Steward’s—hands,” replied Owen, struggling to keep up. “He should have taken her—back when we moved to—Highmeadow. She wasn’t—needed—”

“With any luck, her blood will remain in her veins, if we can find her soon enough,” Ashe said. “Hurry, Owen—I have to return forthwith.”

“I know, m’lord, I know.” Owen doubled his pace and kept sight of the Lord Cymrian as he traveled through the glen by the metallic gleam of his hair, silvery red in the light of the bloody moon.

Ashe stopped in his tracks, the dragon in his blood en-flamed. In the near distance they could hear the sounds of strife, a hissing whine that thudded and scratched against the ear-drums like nails. Each man put a hand to his temple as the pressure inside his head began to rise, throbbing in a sudden sharp headache. A vortex of power, ancient and deadly, was sucking all the energy, all the lore, from the air in the vicinity. The Lord Cymrian drew his sword, flooding the woods with pulsing blue light, and ran for the glen. Rath did not see the shadow that loomed behind him until it had already blotted out the light of the moon pooling in the glen at his feet. He was barely aware of the sound of the chanting now. From all corners of the Earth, the voices of the Gaol were whispering in primal melodies, the fricative buzz of the common mind, adding their power to the ancient ritual. The world stopped spinning for a moment, it seemed to him, as it always did when one of the denizens of the Vault was about to be extinguished, leaving behind nothing to taint the earth. The beast before him was in its death throes; he could see the devouring darkness of its spirit locked in the struggle to escape the woman’s body it had been inhabiting for years before that body died. Even as it grappled with its looming demise, its hatred was as caustic as acid, hissing and gurgling in fury as it writhed on the ground, blood pouring from eyes locked on him in malicious fury. Smoke, acrid and sulfurous as the stench of the Vault, began to issue forth from the demon’s chest. Her eyes bulged as the blood swelled in her brain, her back arched rigidly as the pathways to it burst. The air went suddenly dry on the verge of cracking, rent with the heat of evil being violently torn from its earthly connection. The smoke that had emerged from Portia’s sundered chest swirled angrily, then dissipated, as the beast was re- turned to its vulnerable noncorporeal form, choking and shuddering in the grip of the Dhracian’s net of wind.

The body fell to the ground, limp and without life.

Rath felt the woman fall, felt the strangling and twitching in his hand and heart as the invisible threads that bound its heart to his tugged, growing weaker with each breath, like a fish fighting on a line. The beast would continue to struggle for a few moments longer, he knew; being from the Older Pantheon, Hrarfa had a good deal more strength than the demons he had most recently destroyed.

Each twist, each attempt to sustain itself, caused Rath’s heart to cramp. The unbreakable bonds of wind that tied them together were threaded through his arteries; every tug was like a knife in the chest. But Rath had sustained worse, and oddly, the pain cheered him, did his heart good. Each contraction was weaker than the one before, a sure sign that the spirit would shortly follow the body in death and into oblivion.

And so he was far too submerged in the thrall of the moment, in the import of the event, in the revel of a thousand years of searching finally coming to fruition to be aware that the glen had been entered. Until the blow that caught him in the back with the force of a lance at full charge, snapping half of his ribs, flinging him across the glen and headfirst into a beech tree. The shock kept him conscious, at least at first.

Faron stood still for a moment, watching the man in the robe he had just slapped away crumple to the ground like a pile of cloth.

There was a smell in this place that had brought him to it, a dry burning of the air that reminded him on an innate level of the father he had lost in the sea. He had followed that odor to the glen and had come up on a sight he didn’t understand, except that whatever was being wrought was bringing back that loss in his mind. A loss he had not been able to fathom, let alone accept. The heft of the man was nothing; he had been flung with little more than a glancing blow. Faron looked around the glen, but saw nothing. Aid me! Please. The voice scratched against his ears; the stone titan slowly shook his head from side to side, recognizing the tenor of it. It was the same desperate wheedle that sometimes could be felt, if not heard, in the air around the Baron of Argaut, the man the world had once known as Michael, the Wind of Death.

Except that it was decidedly feminine.

Faron’s mind was too primitive, too malformed by birth, rebirth, and circumstance, to grasp what was happening. Something primal in him warned him to ran, some long-ago sense of self-preservation and horror bequeathed to him by his long-dead mother, yet at the same time there was also something familiar, something entrancing about the voice that also rang in the core of his being. Please—shelter me. I am dying.

Faron turned to leave the glen. Please. The voice was fading, though its tone was more desperate. We are kin, you and I—there is dark fire in you. You and I are kin. I will nurture you, teach you. Don’t let me die— please. Shelter me; take me on. Faron stopped. For all mat the words were frantic, there was a truth in them that could not be denied. The concept of kin was one he had long since abandoned, but now, the possibility of belonging, of being related, connected, of not being alone in the world, made him hesitate, like a child longing to touch the fire that he knew could bum him. Please. He had seen his father battle the demon that long ago he had taken on; that demon was as much his sire as his father had been, though one had created his body and the other his spirit. It was an ugly arrangement. And yet it had kept the man he loved, alone among all the people in the world, alive throughout time. And given him power beyond imagination. Together, we would be invincible, the voice whispered, light as air now in its last moments. I know so many corners of the world, so many secrets. Please, please—trust me. Shelter me. Had Faron been a man of flesh, and not of stone, he might have recognized the seduction in the voice. It was husky, even as the demon was slipping away into the ether, enticing in a way that spoke to the most primal urges in him, the longing for connection, for power. For identity beyond that of being Michael’s child and tool, and Talquist’s seer and toy. Slowly the titan nodded acceptance, answering the request with an inner surrender, knowing fully that the creature he was about to accept into the shell of his body would control him without a second thought.

Yes , he assented. Come unto me .

The glade suddenly became warmer, the air gaining heat and power at the same moment. For only the second time in known history, the act of voluntary surrender to one of the Unspoken was accomplished.