Chapter IX. A Saint Godless
IX
A SAINT GODLESS
“SNOW CHURNING, WIND biting, hearts pounding, we rode. Aaron on Eclipse, me on Argent, thundering dauntless beneath me. Dawn’s feeble light was bleeding across eastern skies, but no warmth followed in its wake.
If anything, as our troops marched over the bridge toward the city of San Maximille, the chill only seemed to deepen. ”
The Last Silversaint breathed deep, stroking the stubble on his chin.
“I didn’t see the battle in the city streets.
I know only what I was told afterward. The city around the chateau was designed to be easily defensible, but it seemed abandoned at first. No troops manned the outer walls, and the gates were soon split apart by Lachie’s and Tolman’s blows.
The streets beyond were a tangle, sloping and twisting seemingly at random; all the better to foil bow and wheellock fire.
There was no straight path up to the chateau walls, just a maze of crooked doglegs and wending stairs.
And into that warren the army of León marched, infantry afront, archers arear, silversaints among their number.
“The ambush was a clever one, but not quite clever enough. Voss waited until our troops were enmeshed in the streets before striking. Wretched lay in wait; hundreds hidden in basements and attics, under floorboards and in gutters, held breathless and still by Ironheart will. But it’s hard for the Dead to surprise a man whose very skin glows in their presence, and those ’saints had been fighting the Dead all their lives.
“The battle was nothing close to brief, and no few of those brave men I’d joked with the night before breathed their last beneath that iron sky.
But the ’saints strode among them, each worth hundreds of ordinary men.
And at the end of the carnage, the Dead had paid a far steeper toll than we, grey snows drenched with gore and ashes.
The battle for the chateau would be far bloodier, but Voss conceding the city so cheaply had the commanders optimistic; perhaps he was weak after his failure at Augustin.
And cleaning the blood off her sword, Charlotte ordered her troops up the hill.
“But as I say, we saw none of it. Aaron and I instead rode west, into the cover of a deadwood and thundering downriver.
We crossed the frozen Ranger, swung back along the northern banks, and there we found a spray of ice spilling from a rugged cavemouth—the outflow of that tributary beneath the roots of San Maximille, now frozen solid.
“The cave was sealed—a heavy iron grate drilled into the rock. Binding up our horses, Aaron and I locked hands around the rusting bars. Fledglings of Blood Dyvok are stronger than all but the eldest of the other lines, and the Moonsthrone’s strength burned in me still.
We growled together, lips peeling back from Aaron’s fangs, my knuckles gone white.
And with the scream of tortured metal, we wrenched the bars apart.
“Side by side, we plunged into the gloom. The cave was six feet in the round, but the frozen outflow filled fully half of it, and we were forced to stoop, scuttling into the slopway like crabs. Aaron was a vampire and I paleblooded, but the dark was complete, and I lit a hunter’s lantern at my belt to light our way.
Its glow glittered on the twisted, icy path ahead, the crack of wheellocks and shuffshuffshuff!
of mechwork crossbows rising faint over echoes of our crunching boots, my rasping breath.
“‘I pray Lachlan and the others are aright,’ Aaron whispered.
“I smirked over my shoulder. ‘Didn’t think you cared, brother.’
“‘He’s an oafish little cuss, your squire. And if you breathe a word to him, I’ll never speak to you again.’ Aaron shook his head. ‘But the romantic in me can’t help but be a little struck watching him and Charlotte. Did you see the way they looked at each other?’
“‘The same way you look at your Baptiste.’
“‘Do you think they…’
“‘I think that’s a riddle best left unanswered. But if you must pray for anyone, brother, pray for us. Heaven knows we’re going to need it.’
“We plunged on, over the frozen flow, the space growing so narrow we were forced to crawl. The air was breathtakingly cold, my teeth chattering and bollocks crawling up my throat. But even in that freezing hole, there was yet one thing to be grateful for.”
The silversaint paused, drinking from his goblet. His grey eyes seemed ablur with memory, fixed on that pale moth fluttering upon the chymical globe.
“And that was?” the historian finally asked.
Gabriel blinked, shrugging as he met the vampire’s eyes.
“No shit.”
Jean-Francois arched one brow in question.
“It was about the cleanest slopway I’ve ever visited.
” Gabriel chuckled. “And in my time, I’ve visited a few.
Once, that ice we crawled along would have been mostly frozen nightsoil and piss, and the way ahead would have been blocked by a buildup of raw sewage, the four and four thousand men in the keep above filling it to brimming.
But they were all dead now, of course. Had been for months.
And though I’m not such a bastard as to be grateful for the murder of so many, every cloud is lined with silver.
“The reek was still evil, my eyes soon watering. The way grew narrower, ice pressing in about us, and we were forced to slide on our bellies. We came across another portcullis, but the bars were soon wrenched far enough apart for us to slip through. We found another deeper in, dispatched after much swearing and toil. It’d have taken a team of blastmen and engineers hours, maybe days to deal with each, and the defenders would’ve heard the ruckus.
Sometimes, even I was forced to thank my father for the curse of what I was.
“And so, after perhaps an hour, we saw dim light spilling from a puncture in the stone overhead.
Another grate was riveted across it, crusted with frozen filth, and choked with cold corpses.
But past those bars waited a stone channel—a nightsoil well—leading up to the chateau courtyard.
We could hear the full-throated roar of war overhead now; cracking wheellocks and singing blades, shattering bone and screaming men.
Snatches of testament quotes hung in the blood-thick air with the stink of black ignis and the reek of sundered bowel.
And above, I heard the music of silver horns.
“‘For San Michon! ’
“‘That’s Valentino. He made it through the sally port.’
“‘Let’s be swift,’ Aaron growled.
“Sliding onto our backs, we wrapped fists about the bars, wrenching them apart. I pulled myself up, cursing as I snaked through the corpses piled atop the grate—men and women and children too, fresh murdered by the monsters above. Crawling upward through that tangle of frozen meat, grim and silent, I marveled again at the brutality of these things we fought. Cresting the bodies, I clawed my way up walls slick with frost and slime, Aaron close behind. One last portcullis barred the way, the metal so cold it burned my hands. But a few bars of iron were all that stood between me and the Forever King’s throat now, and with the song of splintering stone, I tore it free.
“Chaos awaited. Bitterbleak chill and black smoke and a courtyard flooded with the Dead. They took a moment to notice us, bodies toppling in pieces as I sprang from the well, cleaving flesh and splitting bone. But then they were on us, clawing, scrambling, Aaron rising behind me. And just as we’d done at the Twins, we two faced down an army.
“‘No fear,’ I hissed.
“‘Only fury,’ Aaron replied.
“The courtyard was vast, slick with frost, snows already drenched red. The chateau rose at our backs; a black fist rimed with ice, ringed by broad battlements and a deep highwalk, thronged with Voss thralls and foulbloods.
“The well we’d burst from stood on the bailey’s east side, but the fighting was even thicker on the south.
The battlements were a thresher, soldiers in León colors clashing with highbloods and wretched and thralls in Voss livery.
Burning foulbloods fell from on high, set ablaze by mechwork bows; an awful, burning rainshower bursting into ash on the frozen cobbles.
And in the courtyard beneath, amid the glow of silver ink scribed by my bride’s own hands, the brothers Beaufort fought side by side.
“Sweet Mothermaid, the twins were brilliant. They were silverclad; Valentino’s shirtless chest spattered red, Carlos flinging silverbombs into the crush, the brothers carving their way toward the gatehouse.
Those gates were splintering, ice-clad crossbeams cracking as Lachie and Tolman hammered upon their other side, but a wall of wretched were pressing against the timbers now, the sheer weight of numbers holding them closed.
“‘Gabriel!’ Carlos roared. ‘To the gates!’
“Aaron and I began carving our way across the courtyard, Epitaph booming as it cut great swathes through the Dead. My brother fought as a son of Dyvok that day, dancing the Anyja—the Tempest—his weapon’s weight dragging him about as he swung it, spinning, pivoting with the momentum, anything in his path split to pieces.
I battled in his wake, skulls crushed and limbs severed, iron on my tongue.
The blade I wielded felt so strange—for years I’d fought only with Ashdrinker, and finely wrought as Valor was, it could only be a poor second to enchanted starsteel.
But the blood of the Moonsthrone burned in my veins, and there’s truth to the notion that the blade matters not so much as the hand wielding it.
“Valor would be enough.
“The walls were a slaughterhouse, de León soldiers dying by the hundreds, holy sisters weeping as they raised burning silver wheels and prayed for God’s aid.
But we were only a hundred yards from the gates now, and if we could break through, split the fight across three fronts, we could win this day.
“And then the Princes entered the fray.