Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Days smeared together beneath the sunless sky.
After leaving Septimus, I freed my terrified horse from the inn’s stables, hacking at whatever soulless got in my way, and streaked from the city.
We left the burning slums behind us as we galloped through the plains, through forests and across rushing rivers, through abandoned villages and muddy swamps.
We ran until my horse’s every breath was gasping, until sweat foamed at her shoulders, until she tripped at every rock. When we reached a village bearing the sign of a working sorceress, I threw myself off her back just before she collapsed and kicked in the door with Zefiah raised.
There were children inside, perhaps the woman’s grandchildren; they cowered at me as I threatened her, demanded that she open a door to the aethergate nearest to Hegaella. I felt as if I were watching myself from the outside, a spectator of a terrible play, unable and unwilling to stop myself.
The woman’s hands trembled as she did what I asked. My poor, exhausted horse refused to go through the door, and with a savage string of curses I left her there and ran through by myself.
I staggered to the other side of the aethergate on gummy legs. Normally there would be a sorcerer here, minding the waystation, and a sizeable crowd of patrons.
But there was no one.
A wall of cold, moist air struck me. I nearly fell to my knees on the cobblestones, disoriented by aethergate travel.
The waystation let out just beyond the fortress.
The temple rose above me, perched upon a hill, great stone walls capped with iron spires.
They were covered with intricate mosaics depicting Shiket’s greatest victories in countless pieces of perfectly cut gold.
It was breathtaking. As grand as Mirie had described it to Valentina on so many dull travel days.
Grand, and now, destroyed.
Smoke plumed from the towers. The sky shimmered with silvery mist—the telltale gleam of magic, lots of it, left behind like a ghost. I could feel it on my skin. In my bones. Death.
And then, in the sky, enveloped in the metallic fog, I saw her. Just a glimpse. A woman with long hair flying out behind her, black as star-speckled night, and a body dripping with ethereal silver, and a bloody smile I could somehow see even from here.
I knew her. I had witnessed her once before, and she had followed me since in nightmares and unwanted memories.
I had seen her looking over her handiwork at another place so similar to this one—another citadel I had once been so certain would be safe, only for it, too, to fall to the vampires, abandoned by its protector.
Nyaxia. The goddess of vampires. Come to survey the bloody work of her followers, all of it done in her name and at her command.
Then she disappeared into the night, as if satisfied by what she’d seen.
Not again.
The words throbbed in my ears with my rushing heartbeat. I forced myself to move, to dash to the outer walls. The gate was open and the streets within empty. I slipped over cobblestones as I ran up the stairs and winding paths to the fortress.
Not again. Not again. Not again.
Grand marble steps led to the entrance. I dove up them, threw myself against the great double doors. They were bolted shut. I grabbed Zefiah from my back and started hacking, one two three four seven times—
Zefiah, impatient as I was, heated with a burst of godlight.
The door shattered.
And immediately, before I saw anything at all, the scent of blood struck me.
Humans don’t smell blood the way vampires do. But once you have experienced enough death, witnessed enough opened bodies, you recognize the essence of it. It coats your hair and skin and soul.
Bile rose in my throat.
Not again.
The doors opened into a grand chapel, stained-glass windows arcing above my head and stretching from floor to ceiling.
A visage of Shiket loomed over it, assembled in shards of gold.
Before the sun fell, it must have been breathtaking in the sunset, when westward beams would have lit up the glass like fire.
Now, only cool moonlight streamed through.
She stood there, a ghost in gold armor, nose and lips and chin exposed beneath the visor of her helmet, six swords spread behind her like wings of death—including Zefiah, the Blade of Retribution, on her top left side.
Her gauntleted hands were outstretched, perhaps once accepting offerings in her name.
Now, there was only death.
A sea of bodies and blood. Limbs and torsos and heads. Discarded weapons and scorched clothing. A small fire burned in the corner where a lantern had overturned, smoldering and smoking on a singed corpse.
{This is the work of fallen ones,} Zefiah said quietly. {It reeks of the magic of Nyaxia.}
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. The only words my mind offered me were: Not again. Not again. Not again.
Finally, I commanded to Zefiah, Find them. Mirie bore the gauntlet. A part of you. Find her. Find them.
A pause.
Then Zefiah said quietly, {There are some images, Kyrene, that cannot be easily cleansed from one’s mind.}
Didn’t she know I knew that? That I understood that better than a piece of fucking metal ever could?
“Find them!” I roared.
Find them, them, them . . .
The words echoed against the metal ceiling.
I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. My own voice was foreign to me.
I thrust Zefiah out before me, and she reluctantly obeyed.
Metal heated in my hand. Her godlight flickered to life, seeking her twin.
It led us across the blood-soaked floor, down the central hallway lined with statues of Sentinels, Shiket’s divine soldiers—figures in gold armor and white robes, now stained with splatters of red and black.
Everywhere, there were dead bodies. Soldiers and priests and sorcerers. Mothers and children. Elderly. People who had perhaps sought shelter here in the fortress, when the warning bells first sounded—people who had thought that there would be nowhere safer.
As I once had.
Not again.
We passed several soulless, feeding. Vampires did not feed on the dead, but soulless had no such standards. A pack of three sat atop a nest of corpses and cowered from Zefiah’s light, their bellies distended from their gluttony, cowardly in their contentment.
Distantly, what remained of my logical mind pieced together each horrifying clue. The scent, putrid. More than hours old. Perhaps days. The state of the soulless, who looked to have been feeding for nearly a week straight.
Not again. Not again.
We continued into the belly of the fortress, through hallways and armories, each spatter of blood or wet weapon or mutilated corpse acting out horrific scenes.
Two figures shielding each other in the corner; another pinned to the door in an ill-fated attempt to flee; a guard surrounded by the severed limbs of soulless, apparently having fought right to the end.
With each death, a million horrible possibilities bloomed in my mind.
Zefiah’s glow brightened. Soon, we reached a set of tall double doors, wide open, hinges creaking lazily in the breeze.
I stepped through and descended several stairs.
The floor was tiled, lined with gold, depicting a massive mosaic of Shiket’s sigil.
The ceiling was open, revealing the full, mournful moon.
A courtyard. Someone had worked very hard, leveraging the magic of Vitarus at great cost, to keep the garden alive out here.
There was more greenery than I’d seen in years—fluffy pine trees lining the outskirts of the court, ivy crawling over the tile pathways, little white flowers bursting up from between the mosaics, petals now spattered red.
Zefiah’s hilt seared hot in my hands. My mouth was dry. I stepped forward, even though a part of myself begged to stop.
There were bodies everywhere. Even those of the soulless, riddled with silver bolts or discarded swords.
They spilled from the double doors at the opposite side, too.
This was the center of the fortress—perhaps the people who had gathered here had thought it was the safest place they could go.
Instead, it had only offered them a perfect opportunity to be surrounded.
Zefiah pulled me to the center of the courtyard, at the apex of a grand mosaic of six crossed swords.
Don’t look, I begged myself.
My eyes, slowly, slowly, lowered anyway.
It took a minute to make sense of what I was looking at, in all the blood. But then I saw the golden light—the answering glow of the gauntlet, awakened by Zefiah’s call.
Mirie’s hand was no longer attached to her body. It was severed at the elbow, just beyond the end of the gauntlet, likely because whatever soulless got to her was so put off by the stench of divinity.
Numbly, I followed the trail of blood and gore.
And there she was.
Mirie’s entrails hung out of her body. Her sword was crossed over her chest in a pose that seemed oddly noble, even in death.
Her helmet was in pieces beside her, revealing her face.
One eye was a mess of gore, the other wide open and staring at the sunless sky.
Her armor had been destroyed. A soulless corpse lay beside her, claws still digging into her shoulder, as if the two had killed each other in their final moments.
I stared at her. This collection of bones and flesh that was, supposedly, Mirie, but looked nothing like her.
And then I raised my eyes, trailing to the path, where a large, dark-haired figure lay face down, hands clawing at the tile, legs severed at the knee. They’d been discarded down the path. Great claw marks raked down his broad back.
Marko.
I knew that body even without looking at his face. But I went to him anyway, gently nudging his massive form until I saw his profile. His eyes were rolled back. Or—
No.
He had been looking ahead when he died. Had been crawling toward something.
The dread throbbed in my ears. At the idea that Marko perhaps had listened to my threats—had done exactly what I’d told him to.
I followed his gaze.
And there she was.
The numbness shattered into a million razored shards, crashing through my veins like the river water through a broken dam.
Valentina, compared to the others, was mostly intact.
She was up against the wall, slumped over.
Her long brown hair was tangled over one shoulder.
She looked so whole, so much like herself, that for one agonizingly wonderful moment a part of me—the part that functioned on only emotion and blind hope—thought perhaps she was alive.
But then I noticed the wrongness of her body.
The way her legs were twisted, feet facing out, as if someone had tried to hobble her.
Several dead soulless lay not far from her body, gleaming bolts of silver jutting from them.
Curled up beside her, as if a sleeping lover, lay a dark-haired female figure.
I stepped closer to see that glint of copper just beyond her reach—a tube perhaps the length of my forearm, with a makeshift wooden handle and a trigger.
A stringless crossbow. Small enough to wear on one’s belt.
I choked a horrible, inhuman sound and dropped to my knees in front of her. I took her face in my hands—more physical tenderness than I’d ever shown to her in life.
Her eyes were half open, flooded red. Her throat was covered in blood and torn up by teeth marks.
As I knelt before her, the other body, precariously balanced, slumped back to the ground. A vampire. Her eyes were milky white. Crusted red smeared her mouth. And black blood covered her chest, where a bolt of silver jutted from it—a perfect hit.
And now I understood what had happened.
I let out another ragged sound as I stood, turned and surveyed my friends. And just like I had during the horrible funeral march to this point, I saw their deaths play out in the gruesome tableau of their bodies.
I saw them run into this courtyard with the other survivors, thinking they had a shot at outlasting the onslaught.
I saw the soulless and the vampires break through the doors and flood the courtyard.
Saw them take down Mirie as she fought, ever the virtuous warrior.
Saw them grab Marko’s legs, ripping them off as he tried to drag himself back to Valentina—trying to fulfill the promise I had forced him to make.
Saw the vampires go for Valentina—a machinist, too precious, too valuable, to feed to the soulless. They broke her legs to keep her from running.
But Valentina had done exactly what I told her to, right up to the end. Save yourself. She fought the soulless, one, two, three of them. But then there was the vampire, who had her right up against the wall, even as she fought and fought and fought.
And the vampire had decided, fuck it. Not worth the trouble. Had sunk her teeth into Valentina’s throat instead.
And Val—Val, who, for better or for worse, was becoming just like me—shot that fucker in the heart in her last breath.
Val had fought for survival with every ounce of her being, and when that had failed, she’d fought for spite.
The sound that bubbled up from me wasn’t words, or a laugh, or a sob, but a grotesque melding of the three.
My knees struck the ground. My stomach lurched, threatening to empty, but after days of nonstop travel eating only enough to stay conscious, there was nothing to expel.
Not again. Not again.
Not. Again.
Not a plea, anymore. Now it was a command.
Zefiah lay on the ground beside me. I didn’t remember dropping her.
{They fought well until the end,} she said softly. I could feel the genuine grief in her words. Zefiah was a part of me. She loved Valentina. Respected Mirie. Perhaps even cared for Marko, in a way.
Yes, Zefiah was a part of me. She felt what I felt. And that was why I hissed aloud, “Bullshit.”
One word to encapsulate so much. But she understood what I meant:
Bullshit. Don’t give me your mimicry of human platitudes. You are the Blade of Retribution.
Who fucking cared how they fought? I cared only that they needed to at all.
I had sent them away. I had given them the gauntlet that had led the vampires right to them. They had died thinking I had abandoned them. And hell, they had been right.
I felt myself teetering on a precipice, dangling over a pit that could swallow me forever—a pit brimming with the thick toxin of self-loathing. Their deaths would be heavy enough to drag me down and never let me go.
I stared into that pit and I saw my own reflection staring back—my reflection as I was now, and as I had been ten years ago, the last time I had been covered in blood in a fortress that was supposed to be safe.
No.
I forced myself to my feet. Seized Zefiah’s hilt.
And I ground out, “Call her.”
A beat of hesitation.
{Is that wise?}
I bellowed, “Call her!”
I thrust the blade to the sky, and Zefiah, at last, obeyed my command, shooting a streak of burning gold straight into the inky night.
Calling upon her original bearer.
The Lady of Justice.
Shiket.