Faith Hunter - Host

I swallowed the acid down, a convulsive spasm. “Fancy that,” I said, bravado the only weapon I had left. Weakness leached into my bones from the night air, freezing. The Dragon was close enough to draw on our energies. Death was coming to the town and I didn’t know how to stop it. I clamped my arms tight to my sides, my useless blades crossed at my waist.

The thing in the air chuckled, the sound of a lover, amused. “Come. I desire you.”

Muscles weak, I slid to my knees, straddling Rupert. His body was warm beneath me, my shins and knees cold on the ice. Up and down the street the elders who had prayed, shouting scripture in spiritual warfare, lay silent and still. I missed the continuous sound of their litany, a background to the warfare of steel and explosives.

“You will be mine. You carry my talisman,” it said, its voice a sibilant hiss.

Blue light blazed like a torch in the darkness, trilling a piercing cry. I saw my hand setting the tanto on the street. I placed the longsword beside it. My hand went into a pocket.

“What the flying f—heck is she doing?” Eli said, barely avoiding swearing in the presence of the Dark. I wanted to laugh. As if the cloud surrounding us needed any help at all. “What’s she holding?” he asked no one in particular.

It was a six-inch-long claw from the underside of a dragonet leg. A spur. A thorn. I stroked the talisman, feeling the power thrum within it. I had carried it with me, in the pocket of my cloak, since it pierced my side. “Forcas used it to try to claim me,” I said.

“Forcas was my errand boy,” the Darkness breathed, “delivering the thorn of binding.” The spur hummed in my hand. Not the empty vessel I had thought, the spur had been waiting for this moment, this Darkness. In mage-sight, it glowed like a black opal with fire at its heart.

In some small, rational part of my brain, I knew I had been stupid to keep it, a keepsake of victory disguising a defeat postponed. Stupid, stupid, stupid, my mental voice condemned. I watched as my hand lifted, arm straight, pointing the barbed, razor-sharp spur at my left side. My scars blazed with a strange smoky light. The unhealed psychic wound on my side knotted tightly, the sensation more pleasure than pain. Something long and sinuous twisted through me.

“Come. You are mine.”

I belong to someone? A gentle joy welled up in me, surging with the beat of my heart. I was no longer alone. I was so tired of being alone. So tired of fighting.

“Thorn?”

“Stop her!”

A hand grabbed my arm, ripped the spur from me, and threw it to the street. Another raised a battle-ax above the amulet. The steel blade smashed down, breaking the talisman, disrupting the conjure. A shaft of dark lightning shot into the sky. Audric fell away from the broken barb, grunting. Thunder echoed down the street. Pain wrenched through my scars and a single pulse of white light lit them, a terrible schema of old wounds and ancient pain. For an instant, my amulets shone bright as a Flame. In the retinal afterburn, the world was a negative reality, black snow and white sky.

“What was that thing?” Eli shouted through the muffling of the gas mask. Audric, lying on the snow, shook with a single epilepticlike tremor in the aftermath of the explosion.

I snatched up my blades and stood. The whir of wings sounded and I tried to dance over Rupert’s body, but stumbled, falling to the side. A blow sent me sprawling. A stinger whipped by my ear. A second dragonet hovered over Rupert, barbed legs to either side, long snarled fur dragging the street. The flying beast slashed a long gash down my friend’s back.

I leaped at the beast’s head, changing my grip on the tanto, bringing the weapon forward along the plane of my body. I drew on the prime amulet in the hilt of the longsword, pulled on the prime ring and visa, drawing all the power at my disposal into me. Strength poured in.

Midstrike, the visa suggested a verse from Job and I shouted, my voice swelling through the tourmaline into a mighty roar as I cut. “His hand hath pierced the swift serpent!” In a death strike, I thrust up under its jaw with the last word, snapping its mouth shut, driving the blade up through the roof of its mouth. The final thud against the top of its skull was a satisfying finish, forcing back its head, but again the tanto missed its tiny brain.

In a ferocious flex of muscle, it rose into the air over me, wrenching my left arm up as I gripped the tanto hilt. It carried my body high and again I shouted the scripture. Below me, a second dragonet darted in. I caught a glimpse of gray metal, a shaped ring, demon-iron forged over human steel. The claw holding it slid the steel along my body, into the bite wound on my calf. I screamed as the frozen metal seared down to the bone.

With a supple twist, the beast then dipped the iron against Rupert’s body, following the length of the bloody wound in his back. When it came away, Rupert’s blood splattered over my shins, hot and human, mixed with mage-blood. Comprehension blossomed, wordless.

The dragonet I had pinned thrashed in a vicious whip. The tanto blade slipped free of it. I hung suspended a moment, the blade plasma-bright. And then I fell to the ice. I gasped as air slammed out of my body. Breathless, lungs empty, I lay on the street, arms outspread, watching the night sky reappear overhead as the cloud of blackness coalesced into a spiral, forming a black tornado of might over the town. A true Darkness, the visa proposed. Leviathan.

Fear tightened my body and set off sparks in my vision. I understood why it had suggested Job in warfare. This was the vision of true Darkness Job had seen and prophesied. “Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it…. Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.”

Leviathan.

This was the opponent we faced, an evil who had played two roles in the rebellion against the High Host: as one who joined the Watchers, became their leader, and taught humans the arts of war before language had been recorded, and also as the left hand of Lucifer, taking part in that one’s rebellion against heaven. Since the time of the Last War, Leviathan had been coupled with the name Azazel. Azazel was the left hand of Satan.

This Dragon had been bound three times, twice in prehistory, and once by Mole Man’s sacrifice. The Dragon of Darkness was greater than we had guessed. I wondered if Mole Man had known the beast’s name.

The coil of air tightened, growing darker, shot through with motes of emptiness like holes in the universe, a Darkness so intense it trailed afterimages of lightless tails. The spiral of power centered on the demon-iron in the claw of the small dragonet. A link three inches across, smeared in Rupert’s blood. In my blood. “Oh, merciful seraphs,” I breathed. The Dragon, partially unbound from Mole Man’s chain, was manifesting.

The tornado of power slipped through the link like a finger gliding through a ring and carried it into the night air, swirling through it in a twisting, undulating snake of black cloud. Dragonets flew beside it, trumpeting in victory. The ground trembled as the earthquake shuddered through the ancient hills.

Audric and Eli were right. It was indeed much more than a two-fer. Layered intentions, incantations, and conjures, purposes that covered every possible contingency. The Dragon was using the death of the townsfolk, the mixed blood, its minions, and the link to break fully free. The Dark Wind whipped overhead, the spirit form of the Dragon.

Close by, the WT7 boomed. A dragonet split in two, spraying me with gore, its head tumbling into the night. The two-foot section between was vaporized. The big gun boomed again. Flames darted across my line of sight, zapping the dragonets. Where had they been, the Flames and the big weapon? Fighting what? I remembered to breathe, my ribs creaking with the motion. The cloud of Darkness hurt to inhale, bitter with the taste of failure.