46. Bane
Chapter 46
Bane
T ension trembled in every limb. Thirst scorched my throat, a burning ember of need in my belly. Rage coursed through me, from being held back from what I wanted most.
The day was sinking towards night, and the golems still hadn’t moved.
The legions had caught up. Wyn had visibly aged another twenty years. Voryan had found a dead rabbit and was carefully separating flesh from bone and tendon, laying out veins plucked free with surgical precision. Just like the old days.
Exactly like the old days, like the past had been preserved in amber out here on the plains, a sliver of time where nothing had changed and we played out the same actions we had before: a bloody night, followed by a bloody morning, and too much gods-damned waiting in between, all of our hopes hinging on a single miracle.
But the miracles weren’t awakening this time.
Voryan’s third eye rolled wildly, while the other two focused on removing the rabbit’s spinal column. He was simply biding his time, waiting to wash the world in blood. Andrus was in quiet contemplation, making his peace with his gods before battle, as he had always done before. Wroth paced back and forth, not worried about tactics or strategy—as soon as the order was given, he would hunt, then leap into the fray, blazing with unleashed joy at the chaos of battle.
And once upon a time, I would have been relaxed and ready, arrogant in the belief that I would wade through a river of blood and come out triumphant on the other side.
Those days were long over.
Now I crouched at the golems’ heads, every muscle taut and trembling with the strain of waiting, my tongue flicking out uncontrollably to taste the air: the charred cabin was all I scented, but I kept hoping beyond hope for the taste of roses, for soft skin, for her sweet blood.
Anything at all to tell me she was still alive and close enough to find.
“Why do we wait?” Voryan breathed in that nightmare voice, the sound of dying wolves and screaming humans. “Let us hunt now. We’ll find her eventually.”
“We wait.” The words hurt to speak; I wanted to rush into the vast darkness, to use the blood coursing through my veins, pounding at my temples. My back ached, the final stage of my transformation preparing to break free. “Until the golems wake. She could be anywhere in Foria; Hakkon could’ve moved her.”
Andrus sighed, touching a silver pendant hanging around his neck; it had burned into his chest, leaving a smoky afterimage of itself embossed in his flesh. “Always so bloodthirsty. May the gods have mercy on all our souls. If we die in battle, we die in Her sight.”
“Still on the religious nonsense, are you?” Wroth’s eyes, now a deep crimson, flashed over Andrus and his charm with amusement. “What does Mother Blood care for us? If you’re correct, then was she not the one who opened a door to this hell and locked us inside?”
Andrus had always been a master of his emotions; not even his level gaze gave away a hint of annoyance. “Is it hell, or do you simply fail to see the forest for the trees?”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“Our lives are a test,” Andrus said. “A trial of patience to atone for our choices.”
Wroth snorted, his tail lashing, but we could all see that it was a facade; compared to the Wroth of Bloodrain, he was positively cheerful. “What the hell kind of a trial would that be?”
I exhaled silently; this, too, was from the past, the same circular, pointless conversations and friendly—sometimes not so friendly—arguments; the ways we clawed through our days, second by second, waiting only for the next round of war to sweep all else aside.
“The kind where, perhaps…” Andrus dropped the pendant; it hit his bare chest with a sizzle of freshly-scorched flesh. He held up his blackened fingertips, claws curling over them and adding to the uncomfortable appearance of too many joints. “We are rewarded with new lives. A new beginning.”
We all fell silent; of all of us, Andrus alone had not chosen to be reborn as a vampire. He had been forced into it, leaving behind a human family.
Later, when the woman and children he could never have again were dust in their graves, he had joined us, eventually choosing to become something worse than a vampire—he had already lost everything he had to lose.
What was becoming a monster, when you had nothing to live for at all?
But he alone hoped that there was a way to return to what he was. In his wildest fancies, I believed he thought Mother Blood would turn back time for him, dispel him from her red embrace, return him to everything he’d lost.
We never had the heart to disagree. Not even Voryan, who ate pain and drank despair.
“This too will be marked in Her ledger.” Andrus gazed at the golems, solemn and certain. “We are not here for blood, but to save the innocent.”
Voryan let out a laugh like a dead man’s choking wheeze. “No, Andrus, I am most certainly here for blood.” His actual eyes glanced sidelong at me, the third still rolling. “Mostly to save your woman, but blood, too.”
“Would you save yours?” The question came from Wroth, who looked startled that he’d spoken it aloud. He growled to himself, ears twitching to lay flat.
Voryan tipped his head back and forth. “From something in the Moor? Yes. Would I go to Foria for her? Doubtful. All she does is eat, sleep, and cry. She’d probably do the same here.”
“But she is innocent,” Andrus said softly. “She did not ask for this.”
“Innocent?” Voryan reared up. “She ran from me.”
“Because you’re a fiend, and a notorious murderer beyond that, perhaps?” Andrus suggested coolly. “Perhaps you are her trial.”
Voryan looked nettled at the idea, but shook his sharp-snouted head. “No,” he said. “I was kind to her. I’ve never liked the idea of killing women much, nor do I want to hurt them. But she screamed and cried from the moment she saw me. Why should I give her a chance, if she gave me none?”
As much as I appreciated my brothers, with our bonds forged in war, I thought that love was beyond Voryan. For him, the world was divided into two categories: Voryan, and everything he could kill.
The fingers on Thorn’s left hand twitched; I leaned forward to watch, ears swiveling to catch the slightest sound of movement. “If I thought that way, I would never have found meaning in my life,” I murmured.
The fingers came to a rest. The disappointment weighed on my shoulders, heavier than any mountain. The relentless crush of it stole the breath from my lungs.
“And there you have it,” Andrus said to Voryan. “You have covered your eyes and ears. Your trial will pass you by, and you will be none the wiser—you have learned nothing.”
Voryan’s sharp snout wrinkled, giving him a rabid mien. “Don’t you keep your woman in a poppy sleep?”
Andrus was quiet for a long moment. “Only by her request. I would have given her freedom instead, if I could.”
“And what if the Mother thinks, ‘oh, I did it because it was written on this piece of paper’ isn’t a good enough excuse?”
The Heartpiercer lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “Then I will have failed, as I have failed at so much else.”
“By the ancestors, shut up.” Wroth rubbed his temple. “For fuck’s sake. I shouldn’t have asked.”
The argument devolved into silence, but it was a comfortable, familiar one.
“Just like old times,” Voryan said in his dead man’s voice, arranging the rabbit’s severed paws in the anatomically correct places. “I miss those days. Things were so simple.”
Wroth shrugged, nodded, and Andrus tipped his horned head. “I miss these times, speaking to my brothers. Amari… doesn’t speak. Only sleeps.”
“You mean you miss proselytizing to a captive audience,” Wroth growled, and despite himself, Andrus’s long face twisted into something that could’ve been a smile.
“That, too,” he said.
I tore my eyes from the motionless golems and looked up at them. “Those were good days at times, weren’t they?”
I had missed them, more than I could say. There was something to be said for brotherhood, for the simple days where we fought, argued, jabbed and poked, but at the end of the day, I knew every one of them had my back, and I had theirs.
To be on the throne was lonelier than I’d ever imagined, and only Cirri was my light; I wished that they could have the same, a person who made them feel that life was not a trial or a test, nor a burden to be endured, but a true joy to experience.
I turned to look at them once, remembering what they used to be: Wroth and his wild mane of pale braids, shining with bones, wearing the furs of a northern savage; Andrus, a tall, pale priest who delivered salvation only with death; Voryan, dark-haired and scarred, those coal black eyes that only lit when he was up to his elbows in gore.
And now I looked at them and saw men who had all gotten what they deserved, myself included.
Now our skins reflected the interiors.
Monsters, one and all. Brothers wrought by war and pain.
But it had been worth it, because it took a monster to destroy a monster. That was the only way she was coming home.
“Better than these days.” Wroth shook his head, tail flicking.
Andrus took a breath to speak, and fell silent.
The golems shivered, their bodies convulsing in the grass, and went still again. But it wasn’t the stillness of death; there was something aware, watchful, about their limp limbs. Like they were waking up.
Then, with eerie silence, they rose to their feet, statues that shouldn’t exist rising from Foria’s dry grass.
They were still diminished, still bruised and damaged, but they stood upright without swaying. Wyn rushed to them, limping slightly on older limbs, her pure white hair a wild corona around her head.
“They seem… as they were, physically,” she said, with only the slightest hesitance in her voice. “But they weren’t designed for outright warfare, Bane. The damage the wargs caused was too great, and their bodies will fail sooner rather than later. The odds of them living another week are minuscule, but they should last long enough to find her, I would hope.”
The golems tipped their heads as she spoke, then ‘looked’ at each other; there was something disquieting in their silent communication and assessment, though they signed nothing of their thoughts.
I wondered what minds existed in those skulls of thorns and roses, if they were disturbed at the thought that their artificial lifespans had dropped to something near zero.
There was no telling, and the golems weren’t speaking of it. Moving as one again, they turned to the northeast, adjusting and searching until they faced true north.
Gods. If I had left on my own… I would have been wrong.
My vampire advisors mounted up, and Visca wheeled her horse around, well away from the three of us fiends.
My brothers shifted, eyes on the golems.
“Lead on, Bane. We’re with you.” Andrus tossed his horned head; even as he burned his fingers on the silver pendant, he too craved bloodshed. It was the lot of a fiend to always want more.
The golems trembled, eager to run.
“What are we waiting for?” Wroth growled. “Let’s not let the lady down.”
“Find her,” I ordered Thorn, and they both burst into a quick stride, rounding the burned-out cabin in a split and meeting again on the opposite side.
The three of us followed at their heels, following the path. Below our feet were tunnels, warrens of the Below, but the golems, following Cirri’s blood-call, didn’t need to maneuver in such things to follow her. If they halted at nothing, that would mean she was beneath us, and I would find a way under when that time came.
I thought of the rumors that Hakkon had tunneled deep beneath Foria, excavating Fae ruins; if we were to fight in that territory, we would require Voryan and the legions.
I hoped he was above ground, not only because the terrain would make our lives much easier, but because the thought of Cirri being trapped Below in the endless dark was a terrible one.
But the golems kept running north. North into the cold, into the empty expanse. Rose pulled ahead, her form lighter and more lithe than Thorn’s, until she was so far ahead she was nothing but a bright point on the plains. Even with her dark, bruised petals, she stood out brilliantly against the dreary backdrop of the ruined plains.
The rest of us followed, numb to all thought but the hunt, tasting the air and finding nothing, and despite myself, despite my brothers’ presence, my hope began to dwindle.
If the golems would die, sooner rather than later… what if they died before they found her? Wyn had never made them before; she had no idea if they would survive the coming night. There was every chance they would fall apart into their base components, and leave me with nothing but a direction—a direction that might be very wrong, if Hakkon were to move Cirri again.
Don’t think of it. Think of nothing but the hunt, nothing but finding her scent.
I ran mindlessly, driven only by desperation, the night crawling minute by minute as my four limbs ate the miles.
But Rose came back. Now a shadow against the night as she came to a halt in front of me, unwinded from the run but petals trembling, hands moving frantically.
Hope leaped in my heart as I read her words, the fire in my soul returning—not only because she was there, she was in sight, only a breath away, but because… it seemed there was a chance my Cirri had not been imprisoned in darkness.
I found her , the golem said. In the sky . A princess in the tower. I found her.
The tower itself loomed on the horizon, a lonely behemoth on these vast plains. It was slumped and ancient, a colossus left to rot and ruin, forgotten from a time when humankind, newly freed of the Fae, began their expansion into the wilds.
There was nothing left of the keep that had once been around it, but for the odd stone crushed into the muddy fields; it stood alone, wargs camping at its base, their pungent carrion reek carried on the wind.
And she was in there. Rose and Thorn stood before us, straining against their order to halt so intensely I could see them shivering. Their eyeless faces were fixed on the tower, heedless of whatever traps Hakkon would have ready.
And oh, there would be traps aplenty. Even now, I saw only six wargs in human skins, crouched around a fire; no scouts had come our way, no watchers’ spyglasses flashed from the tower window.
Which meant we were expected, and the empty expanse of ground between us and them had an unpleasant surprise waiting. Wargs, no doubt; the only uncertainty was how many and where, two minute details that could bring down the most vicious of armies. If he had six waiting, I had to assume a hundred more lay out of sight.
It was only the golems’ insistence that she was there in the tower that kept me sane and wary, more concerned for Cirri’s safety than my need to leap in and kill anything that moved.
When I’d first tasted the air and received nothing but blood and rot, I’d asked them, again and again, where she was. And every time, they insistently pointed to the top of the tower, that crumbling ruin.
So I had to believe she was there. My compasses were not sentient, thinking beings, with their own agendas and motivations; they lived to find Cirri, so she was there.
The legions were behind us, driving their horses as fast as they could gallop. Wyn and Visca were only a few miles away.
There were four of us. Four fiends.
We could hold the line until the legions arrived.
“They’re hiding from us,” Voryan whispered gleefully, his third eye so bloodshot it looked like it would leak scarlet tears. “Oh, I love games.”
I opened my mouth to growl the order to charge, and as soon as I did a taste hit my tongue, fresh and terrible.
The scent didn’t just caress my nose, but plowed into me, lighting my sinuses on fire, sending a gush of saliva over my tongue.
Cirri’s blood, sweet and strong. A taste—a scent—I could never forget, engraved on my mind like one of my own limbs.
It was carried on the wind, no longer sweet, but acrid with the juices of pain and terror.
There was a sound around us like thunder, roaring over the plains. Something in me burst loose, heat pouring over me, the sky as red as blood.
In a dim part of my mind, I realized we weren’t under attack, nothing had changed except for that dire scent, and that the noise was coming from me. My wings had ripped free, shredding skin and muscle, slick with blood as they spread wide behind me.
Andrus touched his silver pendant, burning his fingertips down to the bone. “May She smile on us, and bless the blood spilled this day, in service to the innocent.” And his face peeled open, four fleshy sepals lined with ivory needles, revealing the blood-slick bone beneath, the grinding maw of fangs.
Voryan sucked in a shuddering, delightful breath, his mouth splitting wider and wider until his jaw unhinged, third eye darkening with blood as it sighted an enemy; his many fingers flexed and cracked in anticipation.
“Fuck Her blessing, just let me feel alive once more,” Wroth whispered. His eyes were flames, flickering deep in empty sockets; if he resembled any lion, it was one born in the abyss and spit out by hell itself.
Blood rushed into my mouth, fangs bursting through the roof of my mouth, my crown heavy with horns. My wings spread wide, aching, dripping, and every inch of me screamed at the agony of it.
We followed the blood.
The terrible, godawful stench of pain and fear, the reek of failure.
I had failed her.
And the door of the tower opened, and there he was, clutching something close; Hakkon, his teeth bursting from his mouth to scatter at his feet like pearls, replaced with a fang-lined gullet; his body wracked with spasms, limbs lengthening, fingers snapping and extending.
Before he lost control, he held it up, showing it to me, the blunt head gleaming red: a hammer. The wind carried its scent to me, the despair of my lover, splitting me apart inside.
“Come, all of you!” He threw the hammer aside, shrieking as his spine crackled and expanded, a barrel-chested, thin-limbed nightmare. He breathed fast and heavy, eyes wide with exhilaration, his words distorted as his mouth shifted and changed. “I’ve killed your redling, Bane. Avenge her!”
He had killed her.
That hammer, bright with blood, with a snarl of crimson hair caught in its claw; he’d killed her with that thing.
There were no words in me. Nothing but a mindless roar, a scream of hopelessness, as I launched into the air, angling for him.
My brothers plunged in and the earth boiled around them.
The wargs came, all the wargs Hakkon had created and hidden beneath the earth.
A hundred… no, a thousand … a sea of teeth and hunger, writhing up from the depths of the earth, surrounding the tower.
My brothers disappeared into the roiling mass, and I plunged into Hakkon’s waiting arms, scything my claws through his flesh and gripping him close.
There was a distant horn call as the knights of the legions followed, the joyous thunder of my brothers’ screams as they fought their way through the ocean of bodies, the rasp of Hakkon’s snarls in my ear. The golems plunged in, Rose torn apart instantly, her petals showering the killing field like drops of blood.
Hakkon tore at me, angling teeth for my throat, eyes burning white with madness.
I let him have at me; there was nothing to lose anymore, but to drag him into hell with me.
Claws, slipping against bones, teeth shattering on my flesh; I reached for his heart, feeling the clamp of his body around my arm, the wetness of blood and organs, as close as a lover. The wargs crawled over me, their teeth ripping into my wings, slicing away flesh.
They could consume me, but I would be the last thing he ever felt.