Chapter 31 #2
“Then enjoy this truth,” Sir Coriand says. “Up there in that harness is your friend Adalbrand, who spared your life from false accusation only yesterday. And he works studiously to craft a demon. Are you and yours really so different from us? You will do what you must to survive, too.”
“Too?” she grits out before leaping so high that she kicks up, pivots on Suture’s chest, and spins over Owalan’s blade to land at his back.
He barely makes the turn in time to deflect her sliding blow, and the awkward defense makes him stumble at the same time that her dog plows into him and bowls him over.
“Too,” Coriand barks. “Do you think you can put this back now? The ability to craft demons to order is out in the world, child of foolishness. You cannot re-cork the bottle. You cannot un-drink the wine. It will be used now by us or our enemies. Better it be us. Better we find ways to use it. To survive. Because someone will.”
“No one has to,” the Vagabond says.
She’s dancing to the side, fighting both golems as Sir Coriand tries desperately to keep her dog from his throat. Its savage growling reminds me it’s more than just a dog.
I want to help her, but the High Saint’s demon is ready for action now, and it leaps at mine, rending and tearing and spinning like a corkscrew made of smoke, and I must write and write as I battle foes on two sides.
Mayhap if I change the geometry of the thing, I could use a double fulcrum to apply force a little more precisely.
I sketch a plan out with quick strokes. I feel the sweat forming on my brow and the dull ache in my forehead.
My mind is exhausted with how hard I’ve forced it to think, to draw up knowledge of everything from ancient wisdom to modern engineering, but I must succeed. I must.
The Vagabond is speaking. “We could seal this place up. We could burn it to cinders. No one ever has to use it again.”
“Burn it?” Owalan sounds aghast, even though his cry bites off his words as Brindle leaps at him. He bashes the massive dog with his gauntlet. Brindle rolls to the side, only to leap to his feet and launch again in a blur of fur and fury.
“You can’t. Be. Earnest,” Owalan says, punctuating his words with strikes. He must use his off-hand. The dog is too far under his reach for him to use his sword. “There would be no. More Saints. No more. Cup. And haven’t you seen this place? The. Art. Alone. Must. Be. Preserved.”
I can hear the strain in the Vagabond’s voice, but I can’t look at her as she speaks next. My demon is all that’s holding back the other two from ripping her and Brindle apart, and I can’t write fast enough. I can’t.
If I bend the natural order just here and insist that a flux in gravity could pull this way and a spectral power drawn in through a wind draft just here, I could possibly lengthen the reach … my thoughts tangle and jumble as I try to design the corporeal form of the demon.
I’m losing ground. I know why. I’ve shaped and pulled and formed this shadow to fight, but I’ve fed it nothing. And unless I’m willing to channel both power and wickedness into it, then it can’t stand up to real denizens of hell.
My demon is too insubstantial. It remains shadow and aping mockery while the others have crafted true horrors.
I do not know what the High Saint has fed his, but it glows with a bloody fanaticism that must look like his soul in the mirror.
The Engineer’s demon is as hard and set as his stone golem.
There is a ripple of something at the edge of my vision that tells me its foundation is heartlessness.
It will eat the unborn if it must, to fuel itself.
My stomach twists. Will I shape such a thing to save the woman below? Will I shape it to destroy the rest? I stare bleakly at it. Honor shakes its head and balks like a war stallion refusing a gate.
Beneath me, the conversation drifts up in snatches as I fight my own battle. A battle of heart and mind.
“You couldn’t have murdered them all. You must have had help. You weren’t down here when the Seer died.”
That’s my blazing Beggar. She refuses to give up, tearing every shred of flesh from this bone. Just like her half-demon dog.
“Who do you think has the power to twist a head from a body and a hand from an arm, child? Not any man I’ve ever known,” Sir Coriand says.
“It was someone here. It was no demon,” she insists.
Sir Coriand’s laughter is thready. I risk a quick glance. He’s standing on the shoulders of his golem as it shambles one-handed toward the Beggar, its one good arm scything out as if it will reap her like ripe grain.
“No, it was someone with greater power than any man.”
“A golem,” she says with certainty. “They could have snuck in later. And they wouldn’t even have to confess a sin. Like my dog, they wouldn’t be considered contestants in this terrible game.”
“Indeed.” Sir Coriand sounds pleased that she’s drawn the right conclusion.
“But why kill her?”
“She was trying to destroy the key. But she — of all people — should have known. You can’t stop fate. What will be, must be. World without end.”
I know I must make a choice very soon, or fail in this task. The other two demons have battered mine to nothing but a gasp of shadow. It’s faint and weak, a tattered curtain before an armed assault. There’s only a breath of it left.
“And Sir Kodelai? An accident? Or planned by you, also?”
“You know, I was hoping someone would ask that.” Sir Coriand sounds smug.
“It bothers me that the God would let him be wrong,” the Vagabond admits through heavy breaths.
She is tiring. They’ve beat her backward steadily.
She’s nearly to the wall. Her dog has given up on a limping Sir Owalan and he has backed up with her.
“Bothers me enormously. Isn’t his same power given to each of us?
And yet to me, it flows with goodness, to you, it flows with evil, and to the Hand, it flowed in a way that twisted in his grasp and slaughtered him. ”
Sir Coriand laughs. And I do not like how his laugh makes my throat tight and my heart race.
“It’s always the most noble, the most holier-than-thou who are easiest to twist right out of the God’s own hand, my girl. The High Saint doubted you. Didn’t you, Saint?”
If the High Saint finds his words beguiling, it does not slow his attack. He seizes one seam of my fractured shadow demon and pulls.
“And he whispered in the ear of Sir Kodelai and prepared him as a good wife feeds the yeast in her bowl. And that night, when all of you slept, I came to the High Saint and I confessed all the doubts I had about you, Beggar. Confessed in a heartfelt, wretched manner, and told him too, how you inspired sin within my heart. Not the truth — but he didn’t ask me directly if it were true, so I broke my oath and lied.
And it was that lie he brought to Sir Kodelai that morning, feeling duty bound to do so.
It was that lie that turned Sir Kodelai’s eye away from the golems he was considering as perpetrators, and toward the ragged, dirty, mud-streaked girl with her filthy mockery of our aspects.
That’s the power of words, girl. Pick the right one and you can use it like a long lever to twist the heart of man into a knot unrecognizable.
I did. And I did it well. Men are just machines, after all.
No different than a golem made of rag and bone. ”
“That’s not true.” Her voice is small, her doubt creeping back.
“The God cares no more for you than poor Suture here. But one of you will soon be dead and the other has never lived at all.”
And with those words, he presses his attack. His golem grabs Brindle and throws him so that he smacks a stone Saint statue hard and falls to the earth, limp. His other golem leans in, arms reaching with intent, and in that moment I make my choice.
Better to die in the name of the God than to live as creatures turned and twisted. I’ve always known it, but it is real to me right now.
And for the first time since we’ve reached this place, I really pray.
I pray from deep in my bowels, from the very visceral blood and tissue of my body, from the place at the base of my spine where my soul is knit, from where my heart reaches up like a flowing spring and my brain branches forth like an oak.
From that place I reach with all I am to the God and I beg him.
“Deliver me from evil.”
Perhaps I have also said it out loud. Perhaps I have shouted it. I do not know. But I feel the response.
Light and heat crash over me as if someone has flung a bucket of fire over my head.
It is not pleasant, shining glory. It is nothing I might revel in or preen under.
It is like being dredged under by the grip of illness.
It is like the fever dreams that wrack you to the bone when they twist and rend and seek to separate a man from his very sinews.
It wrenches and wrings me so furiously that I retch down onto the sand.
I lose all sense of time and space and the knowledge of my own form, until at last my eyes shoot open and I watch as a great shadow is vomited from my mouth and falls hot and heavy to the ground.
I feel as if a burning coal has been touched to my mouth.
My limbs are suddenly free. The book I had written in is aflame, burning with a fire so white I can hardly look.
I grab the ash and flame in my bare hands and rip the book apart, flinging it to the sand.
I do not even feel the flames. I am already burning.
I stand with superhuman agility in the crisscross of the leather straps, and I leap.
No man should leap so far and live. I have no explanation for why I do not break both tibias and shatter my legs as I hit the ground.
I have heard of the great acts the God allows in times of desperation.
My only explanation is that here and now I have been gifted a reprieve from the laws that govern the earth, and that for that space of a heartbeat, my body and bones belong only to the God and not to any of the rules he buckled round the earth when he wove her form.
I land with my feet on the shoulders of Suture and my belly pressing down on Sir Coriand’s back.
I feel the bone golem buckle under the sudden force, driven to his bone knees on the marble of the floor.
There’s a splintering sound and then Sir Coriand tumbles out from under me, somersaulting.
He rolls upward, dagger flicking from its sheath like the tongue of a lizard as he seeks to come up under the Vagabond’s guard.
I’m distracted as I find my feet.
A faint bark arrests me and I spin in time to turn Owalan’s strike.
Another head strike? Is the man doubly a fool? He certainly seems to revel in such nonsense.
I press my own attack, drive him back, and then backhand him hard across the cheek.
My strength must be greater than I remember, because he rolls through the air like a barrel down the hill over and around and over again until he smacks the floor hard, his hands unable to get up and protect his face from the blow.
I fear his neck may be broken but I have not the time to check.
Already, I am spinning again. I am leaping just in time to use the weight of my own body to turn aside the stone punch of Cleft as he reaches for the Vagabond.
She’s locked into a dagger fight with Sir Coriand, the dagger gripped in her off-hand. She refuses to drop her sword but its bulk is too great for this knife battle and the old paladin is inside her reach.
My breath wooshes out of me and my breastplate crumples painfully into my flesh as I take Cleft’s blow, but some of whatever blessing the God has gifted me clings to my body and I drop my sword, grab his stone fist in both hands, and shove with all my strength. He stumbles backward and then freezes.
His sudden motionlessness leaves me off-balance, and I complete my spin unhindered and crash into him, my backplate into his stone chest. He falls backward, balance lost, stone crashing into stone with a horrendous smashing sound.
I stumble, find my bearings, and look up just in time to see Sir Coriand drop his dagger, an angelic expression on his elderly cherub face as the Vagabond’s sword slashes a perfect arc through the heavenly light and cleaves his head from his body.
It follows the arc of her blade like a perfectly thrown ragball, spinning ribbons of red out from it in arcs like a maypole at festival time.
I don’t have time to react. It comes right for me, smacks my ruined breastplate, and lands at my feet, so that all I have to do is bend forward to look straight into the face of evil.
The face of evil looks back at me, blinks once, and then freezes in a smiling rictus.