Chapter 22 #2
Something hit him hard, his body going limp as a spinning vortex of fangs and scales tore his head free from his neck.
Na? rolled with the body, her white scales stained black with his blood.
She seemed to be grinning. I pushed up to my feet, grabbing a sword that had been abandoned on the ground, the intricate carving along the blade marking it as Imperial instead of Krustavian.
The fact that I could lift it at all told me it had once belonged to one of Maki’s own soldiers.
I readied the blade, the grip awkward compared to my grasp of the wolf’s claw, but I was ready, or at least as ready as I’d ever be facing down a room of seven dead men and an animalia wearing the face of an imperial general.
Three men rushed toward me, and I shifted my grip to something more defensive, ready for anything.
Lightning flashed over my shoulder, and I should have expected that, but somehow, it was still shocking, watching Tallu’s power arc from man to man, the very mechanism Maki had used to control their bodies now used to destroy them.
Only, it didn’t destroy them. Their bodies arched, spines cracking, and then their mouths opened so it looked like they were wearing grotesque smiles.
The electricity had only made them faster as they rushed me.
Tallu must not have realized, for he let loose another bolt; it pushed one corpse back without making the dead man fall.
Decapitation killed them. My attacks and Na?’s bloody entrance to the battle proved that.
But just stabbing or wielding electricity did nothing to damage them.
I swung the blade but missed the nearest attacker’s throat, catching on his shoulder instead and glancing off what was left of his armor.
Footsteps rushed up behind me. I stepped back, expecting Irad?o with her own wolf’s claw.
Instead, Tallu swept into place next to me, his cloak flowing around him like the incoming tide, inevitable and powerful.
“Electricity doesn’t work,” I panted. My muscles strained as I swung my blade up to block a sword blow. Its shoulder wound didn’t seem to bother the corpse at all.
“I saw,” Tallu said, catching a punch in his hand and pulling it to the side in a motion that was as smooth as glass.
He slammed the heel of his palm into his opponent’s face, and I focused on the man attacking me, unable to look away as he redoubled, swinging his sword brutally, without any care for how exposed he left himself.
I could hear the scream of Tallu’s electricity, the angry shout of it in my ear: You will not touch him. It reminded me of what I was doing.
“Tallu,” I said. “I need electricity.”
A wolf’s claw was designed to protect the wielder from an electro mage’s dangerous attacks.
But the blade I was wielding—that of an imperial soldier—was designed to focus and steer an attack.
Tallu didn’t even hesitate, throwing a bolt of lightning at the blade, and I heard his intention in it as though Tallu had crooned it in my ear: Protect him.
In one motion, I sent it streaming at my attacker, his Krustavian blade swinging wide again. The electricity made him arch as it repowered him, and that was what I needed. I stabbed my blade through his exposed throat.
Another came up behind my attacker, and I yelled for Tallu. He sent a bolt at me, its casual strength a command. Protect him.
The electricity moved across my blade, flowing through the man I had impaled and hitting the one approaching.
He spasmed, and the man I had stabbed suddenly froze, body going lax in true death as the electricity keeping him alive left his body.
He dropped too fast for me to correct, taking my blade with him and almost breaking my wrists.
I didn’t have time to make sense of it because the one who’d been hit by the bolt—a Krustavian warrior—lunged forward, grabbing at me. My blade was on the ground with my last opponent, so I backed up just enough, and he stumbled, hitting the body, but righted himself, grabbing my wrist.
With a sharp grin, I let him have it, his hand closing around me, and then I used it to pull him forward, tripping him over the splayed corpse, twisting my wrist loose as he fell. He wouldn’t stay down long, but I knew how to kill him now.
I smashed down, my knee landing hard on the back of his neck, but even with a broken spine, he struggled and thrashed. He didn’t scream but bucked instead, trying to unseat me.
“Tallu, can you drain the electricity out of them?” I tried pulling my blade loose from the corpse, but I didn’t have the strength. Tallu immediately understood.
When he’d sent me a bolt of electricity through the other man’s body, it had taken all the electro magic contained in his corpse and sent it into the next body. Then he’d dropped, as dead as he should be, just as when Tallu had pulled all the electricity from the men in Maki’s experiments.
Tallu grabbed hold of his opponent and reached for the one I had pinned on the ground.
I looked away as brilliant white lightning flashed, and Tallu grunted.
He spit blood onto the ground, but the man underneath me was still, and the one Tallu had been fighting swayed, then fell to his knees, the impact making the whole room vibrate.
Irad?o had dispatched her own attacker, Na? circling and snapping the head clean off another.
On the throne, Maki smiled and smiled and smiled, so delighted that the grin stretched past what a human face should be able to accomplish. I could see his back teeth, his gums bright red from blood.
“I told him,” Maki said, his voice sibilant and crackling. “I told him, and still he doubted. That is the folly of man.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked Centipede.
“He thought his technique of bringing men back gave him power equal to mine. He thought—” Maki paused to chortle, the sound turning into a clicking, clattering sound like a thousand small pieces of stone striking each other.
The lights in the room brightened, and the room seemed to heat with it, the brilliant white turning lava-orange, as though the black stone was about to turn back into the volcanic rock it had come from.
“You killed scores of imperial soldiers the last time they came,” Tallu said, stepping forward, Maki’s attention fixating on him as soon as he opened his mouth. I let myself fade back, my feet moving silently.
I couldn’t escape into the shadows, but Tallu was doing exactly what I needed, what we’d planned for Eona? to do. No one could look away from him. He controlled the room around him. Maki practically salivated as he looked at him, unable to focus on anything except Tallu’s powerful voice.
“I what?” Centipede asked. His voice shifted, dropping into Maki’s human tones. “No, the soldiers were killed by—what was it—monsters in the dark—but not—”
Maki’s whole body shook, spine cracking and jaw working open and shut, his voice turning into a scream that vibrated the black stones.
I didn’t wait, sprinting toward him, grabbing two swords off the ground where they’d fallen.
I had already decapitated a man on the throne today, and Inor had Krustavian bones as heavy as the stones that they worked with.
In comparison, Maki would be easy.
He started to turn toward me, but Tallu said, “Are you saying that there is something in these mines more frightening than you?”
The words were mocking, a soft whisper of amusement in them. Centipede snapped Maki’s head back toward Tallu.
“I am animalia. I am what they fear in the dark. I can take over their minds as they live, and now that I have Maki’s ways, I can control them even in death.
There is no one more powerful than me.” When he opened his mouth, grotesque, distended mandibles extended from behind his teeth, framing his open lips.
“You couldn’t even keep hold of my brother. You are no more powerful than any other insect,” Tallu said, stepping forward, his ragged and torn cloak giving the effect of wings. “And I will crush you just as easily.”
He raised his hand as though to release lightning, and Maki leaned forward, grinning. But I was there, drawing my blade across his neck. It pierced all the way through, the skin parting under the blade.
Maki spun, turning so fast that I could hear the snap in his neck. Where my blade had parted the skin, a thick carapace wrapped around his neck. He grinned, the mandibles curving upward.
“You think a blade can stop me? I am animalia. The One Dragon dropped a mountain on me, trapped me with a fire dragon, and still I live.” He laughed, then reached out and caught hold of my arm.
I slammed my other blade into his temple, but he just kept grinning, his eyes fixed on me. In my head, I heard laughter, the promise of torture and death. I could feel it under my skin, feel it in my bones.
The whispers in my skin shivered up my spine and then a ball of white fury hit him hard. Na? grabbed hold of his arm where he had me, and her teeth tore at his elbow until he was forced to drop me, his other hand trying to pry her off him even as she ripped his arm from his body.
“Together,” I said and didn’t wait to see if she understood.
I called out to the ice magic, shaping my desire clearly. Hold him.
I kept up the chant, the words in every beat of my heart. Hold him. Hold him.
Ice spread like water across the dais, surrounding Maki, rising up from the ground, catching first his ankles, then his calves and knees, and he struggled, but I wanted it so badly that my heart pounded with it, my vision going spotty with the need.
I would hold him, even though that wasn’t what I had been taught.
I would hold him, because I was an assassin, but Na? was a killer. Predatory and fierce, she clawed over his face, breathing ice straight down his throat, her head practically inside his mouth as she poured magic into him.
Maki might know how to control electricity, and Centipede knew how to control men, but neither of them was prepared for the raw fury in Na?’s magic. It slammed into them, distilled from generations of dragons’ rage, all the way from the One Dragon whom Centipede had wronged.
Maki froze, ice crystals sprouting from his eyes, his extremities going black from frostbite. He still struggled, and I could feel his desperation. He didn’t know that he was already dead.
Inside Maki’s throat, Centipede flexed and moved, his head breaking free from the open wound I’d carved, his mandibles clicking together as he reached for me.
The bite he had given me earlier throbbed, pulsing with my own heartbeat, the skin so hot I was sure it was going to burst open.
I can promise you Tallu’s life. I was the only one of the animalia to escape Spider’s clutches.
I was the only one who was able to walk along her webs and not get caught.
I can save him. Centipede turned his head, his black eyes staring directly at me; it was a promise he couldn’t make, and yet it fell so freely into my head.
I can promise you happiness. That is what you want, isn’t it?
I can promise you happiness and a life free of the responsibility you think you need to bear.
Then he wasn’t just speaking into my head. He turned Maki’s face toward Tallu, Maki’s black lips moving as he spoke with a ghost of a voice, his vocal cords frozen by Na?’s magic.
“Let me free, and I will fight this war for you. The Imperium will not survive my wrath. The Imperium will not survive my soldiers. I will turn the empire on itself, turn the generals on each other.” Centipede’s words were a promise. One made by an ancient animalia. He could do it, too.
Na? dropped to his neck, tearing it out with her teeth, shards of frozen skin dropping on the floor with the tinkle of gemstones. I could barely see, my vision black-spotted and hazy.
But I could feel Na?’s weakness, her bites slowing, her claws unable to dig as deeply. Impossibly, Centipede raised Maki’s hand, grabbing hold of Na?. She tried to turn, but the effort was too much.
I didn’t wait to see what he would do to her.
Kill him. I pushed my desire into the ice, imagining a column of it thick enough to hold him, thick enough to destroy him once and for all.
A whirlwind spun around us, circling tighter and tighter until it surrounded Maki alone. His hand fell free, dropping Na? to the ground. She stayed unmoving, and I pushed harder, the cyclone that trapped him beginning to tear him apart.
Maki’s body came loose, falling away and revealing Centipede. The creature was half frozen, lying limply on the ground, and I had to release my hold on the magic.
The screaming winds were suddenly silent, and all I heard was my own heavy panting and the drip of something behind me. I didn’t need to turn to know what it was: Tallu was bleeding.
I can save him still, Centipede promised. Let me have him, and I will save him.
Taking two staggering steps, I smashed my foot down on the back of his neck, bending to pick up King Inor’s abandoned sword. I raised it over my head, the blade trembling, the tip swaying like a pendulum.
I brought it down, the sword cracking through Centipede’s thick carapace. Black oozed from the wound, Centipede’s head knocked aside by the force of the blow. It chuckled.
Do you think that is the way to kill me? I’m already inside you. Your desire let me in, it whispered, and this time I could feel it shivering up my spine, the animalia already inside me. The animalia had moved from Maki to me in the moments before its death. My hesitation had cost me my life.
I staggered back, stumbling down the stairs, and Tallu caught me, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
We collapsed down onto the ground together as Irad?o approached the dead animalia, bending to pick up Na?.
The dragon whimpered. The blood monks circled one of the dead bodies, whispering among each other about the magic.
Then, the floor behind the throne exploded into lava.