11. INCARNATE
INCARNATE
YSIRA
Cold steel against Ysira’s throat jolted her back to lucidity. The silver halo of the eclipse flashed against the surface of the blade.
“Stand up,” said Casandra Semira.
Damir strolled up beside his sister. Their two kirikil, burdened with gear and provisions, followed. The twins looked a bit worse for the wear, with cuts and bruises and an ugly gash across Damir’s forehead, but they were alive. And angry.
Ysira had hoped they would go running back to Zivora. She had not anticipated that they would be smart enough to retreat and wait on the off-chance Neri succeeded. She rose slowly, calculating her options.
“All the way,” said Casandra. “Hand over your weapons.”
As the kirikil approached, water sloshed in one of the packs, torturously tantalizing. Ysira’s knees went weak.
“He actually did it.” There was awe on Damir’s face, tinged with fear as he stared at his brother. “He has the demon.”
Neri had not yet regained consciousness. He shivered as though wracked with fever, skin glistening, hair matted with sweat.
Casandra’s voice trembled as she told Ysira, “Get away from him.” “I’m trying to protect him,” Ysira bit out. “This might kill him. Do you understand that?”
Of course they did. They simply didn’t care.
“We’re taking Lurchy,” said Damir. “Step aside or die.”
Rage built in the back of Ysira’s mind like an itch, harder and harder to ignore, compounded by thirst and exhaustion. She wrestled it back, leashed it where it couldn’t interfere. For what she’d done in the canyon, the twins would kill her. Their father wouldn’t have suffered an insult like this.
This could only end one way.
Damir had to go first. He had a long reach, probably forty pounds of muscle on Ysira . . . every advantage. He was ready, too—eyes glinting with bloodthirsty glee for what they both knew was coming.
It remained a sad fact of life that brute strength would win most fights; the one thing that could reliably beat it was the element of surprise. Ysira had long come out on top by being less scrupulous and more decisive than everyone around her, and today would be no different.
She went still. The moment crystallized.
Ysira jerked sideways, out of Casandra’s reach, as she whipped out her glaive. Damir’s gaze dropped to Ysira’s hands. She toed a burst of sand up at his face. He blinked and coughed, off guard for a fraction of a second. She leveled her glaive and buried its blade in his heart.
Surprise registered in his expression. Wait, start over, not fair—she’d seen it dozens of times on scores of faces. Blood dribbled out of his mouth. Pain came next, then mortal terror.
Casandra stood in shock long enough for Ysira to wrench out the blade and thrust it at her. With an anguished cry, Casandra parried. She pivoted and swung at Ysira’s neck.
They clashed back and forth, dangerously close to the canyon’s edge.
Casandra rained blow after blow on Ysira’s head with a savagery born of rage and grief.
Ysira adjusted her strategy. Gave ground quick enough that Casandra overshot and stumbled.
Ysira swept her feet out from under her with the blunt end of her glaive.
She flipped it around in her grip and drove the blade down, toward Casandra’s chest—or would have, had the girl not lashed out with a foot and knocked her to the ground.
Ysira landed on her back. Breath slammed out of her lungs.
She lost her grip on her glaive. Her head hit nothing but air, hanging over the edge of the cliff.
Her stomach lurched. She rolled out of the way just in time to avoid Casandra’s plunging sword—and see her glaive go spinning into the depths.
Casandra’s blade stuck in the earth. It bought Ysira an instant. She tackled Casandra by the waist. Threw all her weight behind it. Both of them now weaponless, Ysira managed to pin Casandra in a tight hold.
The girl shrieked in helpless rage. She tried to bite, but Ysira snaked an arm around her neck, pinning her tighter, locking her jaw.
“I’ll kill you if I have to,” Ysira panted against her ear. “You won’t win this. Your brother gave me no choice, but you don’t have to be that stupid.” Despite herself, her voice wavered. “Please.”
Casandra wrenched free with a yell. She scrambled away, boots slipping in the sand. She faced Ysira in a crouch and ripped a dagger from her belt.
“Walk away,” Ysira said. “Go home. Leave Neri with me.” Casandra stared at her, distraught. “Who are you?” “Please” was all Ysira said, again.
Casandra’s sword arm shook. She looked sideways at her twin’s body and sagged to her knees. “I don’t know what to do,” she babbled. “I can’t— Oh, gods.” The reality of her circumstances seemed to settle in.
Perhaps, next, she would have dropped her sword. Perhaps she would have surrendered. Ysira never found out.
Her passenger spasmed violently. A rustle in the desert brush made both her and Casandra turn, to see a man in a hooded black robe. Where he’d come from, or how long he’d been there, Ysira could not say. And . . . no.
This was not a man. Not exactly.
Even in the twilight, he appeared out of place, as if he belonged somewhere that hadn’t seen sunlight in a thousand years.
There was no flush of red blood beneath his larva-pale skin and greyish lips.
He was tall and narrow, utterly hairless, with disproportionately long, four-fingered hands and pointed ears. Bony ridges lined his jaw and forehead.
From certain angles, he might pass for human.
Then he moved, and Ysira glimpsed something .
. . else. Something slithered beneath that papery-white skin, older than the stars and not entirely at home in this universe.
He blinked at her. A second set of eyelids moved sideways, meeting in the middle with a click over luminous golden irises and ink-black sclerae.
The god appeared unsurprised to see them, as though someone had warned him they were coming. As though he had been waiting. He fixated on Neri.
Ysira put herself in front of her son. She hated the pitiful timbre of her voice as she rasped, “Stay away from him.”
Casandra was still on her knees, breathing ragged as she whimpered, again, “Oh, gods.”
“Give me the boy.” The god’s manner of speaking was cold and clipped but more human than expected. “I will not ask twice.”
Ysira didn’t move. “What do you want with him?”
“I am Nabatar, Lord of Sickness,” he said. “And I will not explain to an insect.”
Ysira reached for a knife. The god lifted a strange metal device. A sharp black blur shot forward. First came a thud of cold pressure. Next, blinding pain.
A gigantic black thorn impaled her through the torso, pinning her to the rock formation.
Had probably ripped through her spine and every organ in her abdominal cavity.
Her heart seized in her chest, hammering uselessly.
The thorn disintegrated into black mist. She dropped to the ground. Her vision went dark.
Somewhere to her left, Casandra was screaming.
Consciousness flickered—and came surging back. Ysira gasped for air, ineffectually, mouth open wide. She lay paralyzed, helpless as her passenger worked. The Lord of Sickness did not spare her a second glance. He had eyes only for Neri, whose face lay a few feet from Ysira’s own.
Nabatar knelt beside the boy. He did something with his expression that might have been a frown. He reached out—hesitant, as though afraid Neri’s flesh might burn him.
Afraid. The god was afraid.
Ysira twitched the fingers of her right hand, then the whole arm. Agonizingly slow, she managed to move it enough to palm a knife. Pain surged through her body. She struggled not to cry out. But if she hadn’t died yet . . . this would not kill her. This was not the end.
In her peripheral vision, Casandra still screamed, crumpled on the ground and clutching the obliterated stump of her left leg. Nabatar paid her no more mind than he did Ysira. He put a hand to Neri’s thin brown arm and seemed to realize it was safe. Her window was closing.
Ysira levered herself to her knees and hurled her weapon. She did not miss. Nabatar turned, impossibly fast. He caught it by the hilt an inch from his face. But as she leapt to her feet and readied her best steel knife, he stared at her. Stunned speechless.
It lasted long enough for her to lunge. She’d have stabbed him in the heart, but he snatched the blade with his bare hand. Four digits curled around the metal. He seized Ysira by the wrist with that same awful strength, baring his teeth at her. “What’s this?”
Ysira howled in agony as he ground her wrist bones to gravel beneath his fingertips and loosened his grip just enough to feel them reconstitute. He leaned in close and sniffed, inhaling her scent.
“Valak,” he hissed. “Every time I think we’ve killed the last of you . . .” Ysira’s heart pounded in her ears, her thoughts a tangle of incoherent terror. Something itched at the apex of her spine, like the spindly legs of a spider probing for purchase—for a way inside her head.
And then—
Light. A boy’s scream, and a brilliant, blinding red that forced Ysira to shut her eyes. The god released her. Light rippled out from Neri in waves, bringing with it a heat so intense, it made the desert air feel chilled.
Transfixed, Ysira watched her raised fingers redden, bubble, and blister, then heal, then burn again, caught between equal and opposite forces.
She barely registered the pain. The energy around Neri surged, red appendages pulsating as though waking from centuries of slumber, atrophied muscles recalling whispers of their old strength.
“Stop,” came the faintest of cries. Neri was on his knees, hugging himself as if trying to pull the energy inward.
The world seemed to tilt. The air shimmered and warped.
Dust skittered toward the light—and a devouring void at its core.
One tendril flashed out, brighter than the sun. Ysira buried her face in her elbow.