Chapter 26 Choosers of the Fallen #4
She was backed against the stone wall. She looked, desperately, for a chink in his armour where she might press her tācn, but there was none, only plate after overlapping plate of black metal, stained with Warden blood.
Her only hope would be if he raised his tācn to her—if she could press her palm to his, and she was quicker with her seith, then maybe—
No. He was going for his scythe.
For a moment Aurienne saw double; something blacker than the Dreor moved behind him. Then it was gone.
Aurienne scrambled sideways. The Dreor’s scythe swiped where her head had been. She tripped over the remains of a wightling.
“Haelan Fairhrim,” came Verity’s panicked cry. She whipped a ward towards the Dreor, but it was too late, the Dreor loomed—
Then it exploded.
A figure stepped out from within the remains of the Dreor. A figure cloaked in black, his silver hair soaked in black-red blood.
A wet gloved hand pulled Aurienne to her feet.
It was Mordaunt.
His hands clutched her arms, her shoulders. “You’re all right?”
“Mordaunt,” gasped Aurienne.
“You promised to leave.”
“I couldn’t—I can’t leave my Order behind—why are you here?”
“You weren’t in London. So I knew you were here. You promised to leave.”
Mordaunt, hard-eyed, turned away. Aurienne watched, speechless, as he stepped from Dreor to Dreor, eviscerating them from the inside out.
The Wardens watched, too. Haven pushed her visor up in disbelief. “Is that a Fyren?”
Mordaunt had learned his lesson from the asylum. He didn’t attempt to stab any of the wightlings or Dreor; he merely walked through them.
“Traitor,” hissed a Dreor. “You walk the Dusken Path.”
“You’re the traitors,” said Mordaunt. “Orders mustn’t attack one another. And really—the Haelan? Not very sporting of you.”
A death’s head tācn was held his way. He shadow-walked into the offending Dreor.
Mordaunt’s moves from Dreor to Dreor weren’t without sacrifice. They learned his pattern and anticipated his next jump. He was grabbed by a black tācn; his right arm withered before he could shadow-walk away.
He had once told Aurienne that walking through unconnected shadows was a heavy drain on seith. This wasn’t sustainable.
He took down at least ten Dreor before his Cost was triggered; one eye went blind, the other filmed over.
The Wardens took advantage of the chaos he caused.
All who were still standing regrouped across the courtyard, defending the door that led into the fortress and from thence to the sick children.
Aurienne, Corinne, and Nym tripped between them, transferring stuttering, final bursts of seith.
Still more Dreor came. There was a finite number of them. There had to be. How was the breach blackened again with them?
Mordaunt became the focus of the enraged Dreor.
He was pulled in towards a black tācn. Ataraxia whipped a ward towards the Dreor responsible and tore off the Dreor’s arm.
On his other side came a scythe. He shadow-walked away.
Because of his Cost, he could no longer see well.
He walked into a Dreor, left her half-disembowelled, and was hooked through the chest by a scythe.
Verity dragged him to safety behind the line.
Aurienne ran to him and pressed her hands, so damaged by her Cost they were beyond feeling, to his chest. “Why did you come?”
“I have nothing to lose.”
“But I have you to lose—”
The wound at his chest gaped and gushed blood.
“Osric,” cried Aurienne.
He was dying.
The grief was pain; it bent her in half.
Her palm split across her tācn and still she pressed it to Mordaunt’s chest, pouring healing into him. Her vision blackened at the edges. There was bone visible at her knuckles.
Someone pulled her hands away from him. “Aurienne—you’re out of seith—stop—”
Aurienne yanked them back. “I will heal him until my hands are gone.”
“Let me help, you idiot—”
It was Cath. She had so overused her seith that her Cost was in absolute overdrive, her scalp was peeling back and her lash line was bloody welts.
Aurienne didn’t know what horror to attend to—Mordaunt bleeding out, or Cath, so maimed, or her own hands, more bone than flesh, or Hraith and Beorgan, who had just fallen near them, grey-faced, dead-eyed, or the Haelan collapsing all around them.
“Your eyes,” sobbed Aurienne, reaching out to Cath’s dear face.
“Your hands,” said Cath, a mix of tears and blood streaming down her cheeks. Her tācn was on Osric’s chest, drawing out the last of her seith as she tried to stop his bleeding. “Aurienne, I think we’re all going to die.”
Cath’s voice grew fainter and fainter. Aurienne, seith drained to the bitterest end, was on the verge of passing out.
In the periphery of her vision came the massive form of a Dreor.
He had one of Felicette’s projectiles protruding from his eye, but he didn’t need seith to swing his scythe towards Osric.
Aurienne threw herself on top of Osric—was it still Osric, or was it Osric’s body? She expected the point of the scythe between her shoulder blades. Instead came the clang of metal on metal.
Her fading vision filled with shadow.
The shadow took the form of a shapely calf in a long black boot.
Aurienne looked up.
It was Tristane.