Chapter 34 #2
Durlain’s lips moved, almost imperceptibly, and the blaze parted around him, then dissipated like mist into the vibrating air.
Taking control, yet again. Tearing the fire from the other mage’s grip like a sword wrenched from a clenched fist – I’d seen it before, in fireborn duels about to end, and Belloc’s quickening retreat suggested he knew it too.
He was going to die.
He was going to die, and Durlain wouldn’t even know—
I tried to call for him again, choked on ash and heat and acrid fumes.
Durlain was barely ten yards away from me now, and on either side of him, the lava was rushing forward – closing in on Belloc from two sides, then cutting off the way behind him too, locking him in on a fast-shrinking island of solid stone.
A last fireball was gathering in the bastard’s palms. Durlain gave it no more than a single swift glance, with a disinterest bordering on mockery.
The white-hot flame sizzled out before Belloc could throw it.
I heard his curse even over the rumbling of the earth.
‘Life is hard,’ Durlain agreed, lips twisting with all the warmth of an open grave. ‘Short as well, under certain circumstances.’
Belloc gulped for air. ‘You can’t—’
‘Kindly don’t attempt to educate me on what I can and cannot do, Estien.
’ His voice was soft as silk, yet sharp as a whetted dagger, carrying effortlessly over the roar of the lava.
‘You’ve already given me plenty of reasons to make this deeply unpleasant for you.
It’s not in your best interests to annoy me any further. ’
There was no reply this time.
But Belloc’s hands slowly lowered to his sides. The fire on his fingertips flickered, then died away. I saw the slow bob of his throat and knew that he knew what I knew – that it was a matter of minutes now. Seconds, perhaps.
‘Dur!’ I croaked out, not knowing where to start but knowing I had to say something before the fires swallowed my captor whole. He killed your mother. He told me everything. I thought you’d never come back. ‘Wait— He’s— You—’
Grammar, Thraga.
He glanced at me, a flicker of something raw in his eye before he turned back to Belloc and – with a swift, surgical lash of fire – burned out the man’s knees from beneath him.
Aranc’s brother went down screaming, then screamed harder as he landed on the unyielding obsidian, one forearm disappearing to the elbow into the flow of lava. Durlain knelt beside him, still eerily unhurried, and raised a hand to his contorted face.
A flick of his fingers, and fire poured down Belloc’s throat, stifling his cries in a last agonised gurgle.
‘There,’ Durlain said mildly, almost amiably, if there could be such a thing as amiable doom.
On the rocky ground beneath him, Belloc thrashed and writhed, one arm still caught in hardening stone, tears running down his smoke-stained face.
‘Now, I won’t bore either of us by enumerating the long list of mistakes that led you to the present moment – but the one thing I would like for you to understand before I relieve the world of you … ’
He paused, meeting Belloc’s bulging eyes with a dark, contemplative gaze. Just a moment. Just long enough for the fire to quieten around them, for the shaking earth to settle a fraction.
Belloc was making keening, inhuman sounds.
‘The cardinal mistake you made,’ Durlain continued in the sudden silence, his voice almost intimately soft, his face a study in ragged edges, ‘was laying even a single finger on a woman whose boots you aren’t worthy of crawling beneath.
And you’re fortunate that I have better things to do than reinforcing that lesson for a few more hours, or that only a blind man would volunteer to look at your face a moment longer than strictly necessary – but give the matter a think on your way down, will you? ’
Belloc gave a last, strangled moan.
Durlain raised his hand again.
Light flared, blinding white – and then there was no more thrashing.
Just the dull thud of a corpse collapsing against the earth, the last shudders of a volcano sinking back to sleep, and then nothing but silence – utter, profound silence, stretching like a blanket of snow across the ravaged plain and the uncaring sea below.
Five yards away, Durlain pulled his hands off Belloc’s body. Wiped them on the dead man’s coat, calmly and methodically. Rose to his feet. Met my gaze.
And said, in a sudden, stumbling rush of words, ‘Sweet fucking hell, Thraga.’
That broke the paralysis.
I was saying things, probably. Was trying to move, maybe.
He reached me in five hurried steps, lava parting obligingly around his boots, and fell to his knees without any of his usual grace; his hands made for my shoulders, faltered at the sight of my burned left arm, then clutched my face instead.
‘What did you think you were doing, you reckless, foolhardy—’
‘I thought you’d run!’ My voice cracked into shards – the urge to kick him as overwhelming as the urge to fall into his arms and burst out crying. ‘You were an arse! They said your horse was gone! And it’s been a day and a half and—’
‘You spent that day and a half sitting at the foot of a volcano he controlled, you madwoman,’ Durlain snapped.
His eye was too wide. His fingers shook on my jaw.
‘All you had to do was leave, and instead you— Do you even realise— If he hadn’t been so distracted by your duel, if I hadn’t been able to sever his control at the last moment … ’
He didn’t finish that sentence, sucking in a shuddering breath instead. His hands didn’t let go, squeezing tight enough to leave bruises on my face – as if I might slither from his grip and dissolve into fire and ash after all.
Scared.
He’d been scared.
‘Had to,’ I said numbly. ‘Couldn’t let him get away with—’
‘You hadn’t eaten for a day!’
‘No, but— Dur, fucking listen.’ My tongue felt like dead meat. I clawed at his forearm with my unhurt hand, and the throbbing pain in my shoulder intensified to searing agony – but I had to tell him, and I had to tell him now. ‘You don’t understand. He killed the queen. He killed your mother.’
It echoed, that last word.
It echoed because all of a sudden, there was no other sound in the world.
His face had gone utterly blank between one eyeblink and the next – pale skin, slack jaw, eye empty and unseeing. Not the killer’s mask I’d seen from him before. Not the impenetrable facade of a born courtier either, honed and polished and devoid of all true character.
This was an expression like a graveyard – a deep, dark hole where feelings went to die.
‘What?’ he said, and his voice didn’t sound like his voice at all.
‘Your mother. Queen Izenore.’ My voice would only leave my lips in a whisper.
‘He was at Mount Averre when she died, wasn’t he?
Not a member of the court. And your father never ordered him to do it – but it advanced the Estien interests, causing a rift between Garnot and Averre, and your father needed a way to get rid of his wayward wife, and—’
Durlain jerked away from me as if I’d slapped him in the face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I breathed. ‘I’m so very—’
He was already standing.
White mist leaked from his scars, flimsy, gauzy shreds trailing after him as he strode across the hardening lava.
A thin blade lay in his hands all of a sudden.
He bent over Belloc’s corpse without pausing, slashed down the knife, and came back up with a single dead finger in his grip – not meeting my eyes as the mists thickened around him, gaseous death and hoarfrost, blindingly white in the darkness.
A gate loomed from the churning veil.
Every fibre in me recoiled from its yawning void … but Durlain turned towards it without flinching, and stepped through.
Just like that, he was gone.
A surreal silence settled over the plane in his wake, nothing left but Belloc’s unmoving corpse, the pulsing and crackling flows of lava, and the gate to Niflheim itself, hovering corpse-white and ghastly over the marred obsidian.
Jay and Rook were nowhere to be seen, I realised.
Two of the horses were gone. I could only hope that meant they had done the sensible thing and gotten the hell out – could only hope it meant they wouldn’t spread the word of Durlain’s return to the world of the living.
And as if he’d heard that thought—
Two moving figures burst from the swirling, shimmering gate.
One of them was screaming. The other was Durlain, whose eye was so purple it almost glowed, his hair similarly aflame with violet light, mist rippling off his hands – hands that were dragging a thrashing, flailing Belloc Estien over the threshold of life by his hair and arm.
The resurrected man shrieked like a pig at the butcher’s as Durlain shoved him roughly onto jagged stone.
Behind them, the deathmade gate billowed, then dissolved like smoke on a breeze – as if it had never been there at all, except that there were now two Bellocs on the plain, and only one of them was alive.
Aranc’s heir caught sight of his own corpse, five feet away, and abruptly went quiet.
‘Unpleasant sight, isn’t it?’ Durlain enquired, his voice much more unpleasant than the look of anything around us. Belloc began to crawl away from him, his bulky form shaking all over, and Durlain calmly and precisely brought his boot down on the man’s wrist.
There was a faint sound of snapping bone, and Belloc howled again.
‘Spare me your melodrama.’ Purple flashed in that one furious eye, a thread of poison and frost in every icily punctuated word.
‘Let me clarify how this is going to happen. We’re about to have a conversation.
You’ll talk. Then you’ll die again. If you cooperate, I might hurt you slightly less. Do we have an understanding?’
Belloc gasped, fright in his face that I hadn’t seen before. ‘No! No, please, don’t—’
His second death.
A final death.
So he had been counting on his brother bringing him back the first time around.
Durlain watched him writhe, features hollow like a mask carved from old bone. ‘Did my mother plead?’
‘No!’ Belloc howled. ‘No, I made it quick! I—’
Durlain’s boot ground down. ‘Liar.’
‘Your father.’ It was almost a sob. ‘Your father wanted it to hurt – would ask me with the oathstone what I’d done – had no choice but—’
‘And a coward.’ Durlain’s face was pale as the gate to hell had been. ‘I can see why the two of you got along. Who else knew?’
‘Aranc,’ Belloc gasped. ‘Just Aranc. I— No, no please—’
‘Did you know he intended to wed Cimmura?’ Durlain continued, talking over the howls of pain without raising his voice.
Belloc choked on a scream. ‘What?’
‘Your brother. Who named you his heir, for lack of any offspring. Who arranged to marry my sister, presumably with the intention to make good use of her.’ Every word was a shard of glass. ‘Did he tell you?’
The silence was all-revealing.
‘As I thought,’ Durlain said, quiet and cutting.
‘Always just a pawn in the game, weren’t you?
Trying to be a player. What a tragedy.’ His boot twisted, and Belloc’s scream echoed across the plain.
‘Remember that, Estien – that you killed a queen in your pathetic quest for power, and it didn’t win you anything.
Do you recall? She told you it was all for nothing even while you were killing her. ’
Belloc went rigid on the ground.
His face had been pale. Now it was utterly bloodless.
While you were killing her – I stared at Durlain, numb and unseeing, and felt those words trickle into my mind like burning poison. Told you. While you were killing her. Which he couldn’t know – he couldn’t know – unless—
‘You were there?’ Belloc breathed.
‘Hiding in the closet she’d shoved us into while you were butchering her guards.
’ Durlain’s voice was eerily flat – fury curled into something far, far more terrible.
‘Holding a toddler in my arms, trying to keep her from making a sound while you were taking your sweet time. I was there, yes. I heard every word she spoke to you.’
I wasn’t breathing.
Neither was Belloc, it seemed.
Durlain knelt, still but for his fingers, which trembled so violently that the mist spilling from his scars shivered like a living thing.
He drew a slow line down the man’s chest, never quite touching.
Then another, left to right shoulder, leaving glittering traces of frost behind on Belloc’s charred and bloodstained clothes.
‘Tell me,’ he said, softly. ‘The last words she spoke.’
Belloc swallowed, face ashen.
‘I do recommend you cooperate,’ Durlain added in that same deceptively quiet tone, fingers still making small, methodical movements over that broad chest. ‘I could make your second death significantly more unpleasant than hers.’
‘She … she said …’ The Estien heir sucked in a jagged breath. ‘He’ll be king one day. And you’ll regret this.’
Durlain lifted his hand. Mist flared at that gesture, spreading like small flames across the lines he’d drawn on Belloc’s heaving chest.
‘Time to prove her right,’ he murmured and flicked his fingers.
And with a terrible, bloodcurdling scream, Belloc Estien died for the second time.