Chapter 41
Virtue in War
The Virtue of Courage demands this—that we stand ever ready to shed blood in defence of mortalkind and the bright future we would build.
‘Llewyn!’ the fae girl screamed from the battlement, her voice thunderous, echoing, pealing with a grief that would become unimaginable horror.
History is fickle. Both the truth of it, and its telling.
The fog between the present and the past, between memory and the story we tell ourselves, makes difficult an accurate accounting of our choices—to say nothing of an honest one.
Time occludes the chain of causality from one moment to the next.
It falls to us to explain our world, and ourselves as part of that world, to ourselves.
Something that can only be done at the end of the chain.
Or in a moment, partway through, of reflection.
Torin would face such a moment as what transpired in Parwys took a sudden, terrible turn. One he ought to have foreseen, perhaps. Poor assumptions, even those made in good faith, can twist our understanding awry.
He would reflect on these things, later, as he fled back to Castle Parwys.
Anwe muttered a curse, glared at Orn—she had been enjoying the duel, but in Torin’s opinion Orn had saved her from an excess of courage—and drove her blade through the thrall’s chest, cutting the last, fraying thread of his life.
Beyond the shattered window, the fae girl collapsed to her knees.
Her voice split, became as two voices screaming at once.
One the girl’s, full of pain. The second deeper, bestial, rasping, like the cry of a raven.
That scream became a wind that roared out from her, tearing tiles from the rooftop.
Above her the clouds turned black, as though dipped in ink, and a great eye, as yellow as the harvest moon, opened.
Animal terror scoured away any satisfaction Torin might have felt in victory. Anwe’s grin nearly split her face.
‘Here we are, at last,’ she snarled, tearing her sword from the dead thrall. ‘Let’s get this done and leave this backward bloody place behind.’
The girl staggered to her feet as Anwe ducked through the ruined window. Her eyes burned like pale stars, feverish and jaundiced. Their pupils, as black as night, fixed on Anwe.
YOU.
The voice issued from the air, from the wind itself.
YOU HAVE TAKEN EVERYTHING.
The girl stepped forward and stretched out a thin, pale arm. A boy with goat’s horns appeared on the battlement behind her, a gleaming sword in his hand. He shouted something incomprehensible, drowned as it was by the howl of the wind.
Anwe took another stride, raising her sword. The wind pushed against her. Her tabard whipped about her frame. The cloth gathered and scrunched, as though seized by an invisible hand.
A hand that became visible, coalescing from the air, formed of bones black as deepest shadow.
‘Anwe, run!’ Orn screamed, and dashed forward, his sword held ready.
Another hand appeared, caught the young Knight of Stillness by the throat, and twisted.
Armour of raw iron should have protected him. The invocation of the Agion should have been his shield. It had been, before, when last he had confronted these fae devils—or so Torin had believed. Or perhaps that had been a mercy. One no longer extended.
Orn’s legs gave out and he fell. All his budding virtue, all his strength of character, amounted to nothing. His spine unfurled, stretching to the fullness of its length. He lay there, a serpentine mockery of the young man he had been, neck bruised, eyes bulging.
Anwe froze on the rooftop, her sword poised and dripping viscous blood.
The hands pulled at her, seeking purchase to make of her what they had of Orn.
Her eyes rolled, trying to follow the movements of the wraiths.
She roared and lashed out wildly as terror overwhelmed her—her bravado breaking against horror.
Torin stepped through the window, keeping wide of her flailing blade, and stretched out his own hand. He screamed the Invocation of Raj. Justice burned at his fingertips and reached for the fae girl.
Something struck between his wrist and elbow.
The force of it numbed the arm, the shoulder, half his torso, and shattered his concentration.
There was no pain, at first. Only surprise.
Until he looked at the wound and saw the shaft of an arrow as thick as two fingers, its head nearly as wide as his hand.
One of the bones of his arm had been shattered.
Splinters of it lay in the pooling blood at his feet.
The arm itself dangled, half-severed, useless.
And then the pain flowed in.
* * *
Torin did not remember passing out. Only the agony—which woke him as he was jostled. It was duller, now. His virtue of perseverance must have slowed the bleeding and begun to ease the pain, unconscious though he was. He blinked, looked up, and saw the black, churning clouds.
Anwe grunted, her only recognition that he had woken. He lay cradled in her arms while she ran. There were deep bruises on her forearm and her cheek. Handprints. The wraiths had left their mark, but had not killed her. Nor had they killed him.
A thought bubbled up. A mistake.
Why had he reached for justice when the cleansing ritual stood ready? He felt its thrum, even then. The pulse of virtue encircled the kingdom. Ready to burn out the rot that had emerged that day—as it had at the festival ground—and taken Orn.
He laughed, miserably. Anwe’s face twitched.
‘Put me down,’ he rasped.
‘We need to get away from there,’ Anwe said. He felt her shudder. ‘It’s madness. There’s shadows moving between the trees, Torin. Reaching for me. Like they reached for Orn.’
‘You answer to me, Knight of Action, even injured. Even mad.’
She slowed her stride. Took deep breaths, mastering her own fear and rage, then set him down to lean against a fallen log.
He chanced one look at his arm. She had paused, at some point, to tie a tourniquet above his elbow.
Else, he’d have bled out from that ruin of mangled flesh, no matter his virtues.
The arrowhead was still there, though Anwe had broken the shaft.
Blood seeped around it—slowed, but still flowing.
He could only trust that perseverance would clot it and chase away infection.
Even then, the limb would be forever mangled. Useless.
‘What are we doing, Torin,’ Anwe snapped. ‘Orn is dead. The haunting’s back in full force. We should keep on to Ispont and Templar Unwith.’
Torin ignored her. He shut his eyes—against the pain, against the terrible sky—and reached out to the thrum of the ritual. Nine medallions, channels for the raw power of the Agion. His to summon and turn loose upon this wretched, vile kingdom.
Whatever hesitations he might have felt were gone.
Compassion had always been his weakness.
Parwys, to his mind, had earned whatever violence and chaos would descend when the ritual was done and all the powers that shored up the kingdom’s foundations cracked and crumbled.
If only he had found such conviction sooner, Orn would still be alive.
The life of one virtuous knight—however disgusting his morphology—was worth a thousand of these heathen fools.
‘By the Agion,’ he said. The words fell from him by rote.
He had no strength to muster power in his voice—could only trust that the words, and the intent, would be enough.
And indeed, the thrum of the ritual’s readiness became a thundering, potent hammer.
‘The Exemplary Nine, whose light of virtue is our guide-star through the dark fog of this corrupted world, I assert the primacy of Truth, of Mortality, of the Mundane against the contorted wickedness of Glamour, of Undeath, of Magic.’
He envisioned a map of the kingdom, and the circle of nine points where he and Unwith had sent their agents bearing the medallions.
There would be dregs of dark power around the edges.
In Cilbran not all the rumoured Rimewolves would be caught, he was sure, and scattered artifacts of the First Folk in that county, as well as the furthest north of the Greenwood, might survive.
And the hateful power within the green tower of Bryngodre would endure in its little half-world.
But it would be enough. An end to the haunting.
And a mighty blow against the druids, to the backward-looking beliefs that had made this place a horror.
‘Let what the Agion surround be sundered. Let enchantment burn away. Let the world be as it truly is, and not as our viciousness would wish it.’
Power surged through him as the ritual began. He sighed, relaxed against the tree, and opened his eyes. Soon, those ink-black clouds would turn grey again, and the work of rebuilding Parwys would begin.
The steady thunder through him quickened. Tension seized his joints, filling his spine with an ache. He tried to scream, but his jaw held shut. His eyes bulged. He looked to Anwe, who stared down at him in bafflement, then terror.
Silver lights flared in the sky against the black of the clouds, and Torin’s agony deepened. Each pulse of the ritual was a heartbeat pumping liquid fire. The lights—the sacred flames of virtue—clawed at the haunting, tore at it, burned out its power.
For a moment. Until a scream that rent the sky and seized Torin with a pain like he had never known. The darkness above him roiled like breaking waves and swallowed the flames of his ritual.
The pain was gone, and with it, Torin’s certainty.
The mind must simplify the world to understand it, using stories—of history, and of the deeper forces that have shaped the world.
Simplification allows us to anticipate. To put our faith in cause and effect, in the predictability of the world.
A rock is lifted from the ground, is dropped, and falls.
Virtue wins out, in the end, against wickedness.
Torin lay against the fallen log, his mind shattered as his arm was shattered—as the ritual had been shattered.
A new terror, as deep and dark as the all-swallowing sea, filled him. Here was fae magic of a sort he had never before encountered—had never heard rumour of. Power able to resist the cleansing fire of the Agion, that defied the order of the world as he understood it.
Power he needed, desperately, to understand, to restore the foundation of everything he knew.
A selfish thought, he realised. But more than that …
If the cleansing ritual was powerless against these Parwysh fae, what was to stop them from sallying forth to Tarebach?
What was to stop this haunting from consuming the world?
‘Take me to Parwys,’ Torin said, a calm in his voice despite the riot within him. ‘To the tree-devil woman.’
He would pry knowledge of this fae power from her. Turn all his arts of pain and questioning to the intractable dam of her mind until it cracked, and crumbled, and her secrets poured forth. Nothing else mattered, now.
‘Bleed that,’ Anwe snarled, and gathered him back up. ‘We go to Ispont.’
‘No!’ Torin screamed, and seized her with his good arm, speaking with all the authority he could muster—authority with what ground, now?
‘The ritual failed, Anwe. Do you understand what that means? It has never happened before. We must understand this. The Church must understand this. To Parwys, and the tree-devil woman. We will take her with us, back to Unwith, and thence to the Iron Citadel. This is beyond me, Anwe. It is beyond any one of us.’
Despite the density of her mind, Anwe seemed shaken by his desperation and his fear.
She nodded, slowly, and set off to the west. While she carried him, Torin gazed upwards at the swirling, infinite depths of the evil that had broken him.
His faith had been shaken to the point of collapse. His mind reeled.
What virtue, he wondered, could survive the death of certainty?