Chapter 48
Shattering
All growth requires pain. The good and new always requires the sacrifice of the old and broken, and every sacrifice requires suffering.
Odd the Bard, Odd’s Almanac of the World Beyond the Walls,
Torin caught a glimmer in the air from the corner of his eye. A blur of movement through the veil of glamour, then a curl of silver fire.
The sorceress Fola. Who else would have cast the spell to conceal the Count of Glascoed?
He spared not a thought for her presence here—only readied himself to take advantage of her interference.
In fact, he would have to thank her later, if the chance should present itself.
Perhaps, in a blessed future, while she waited for the attentions of his knife and pliers.
As the silver fire of the spell unfurled, Torin shouted to Anwe and threw himself to the ground, not knowing what to expect, bracing himself for anything.
There was a crack like stone breaking, then wind and a wall of sand whipped over Torin’s head.
It caught the druid standing guard over them and hurled him off his feet.
He landed with a crack, audible even over the sudden roar of the wind.
A blow that would daze him for a time, at the very least.
Torin snarled an invocation of perseverance, and another of honour for good measure, and pushed himself to his feet, pressing a muddy sleeve across his mouth and nose against the wind and grit.
Strengthened and made resilient by his virtues, he heaved into the gale, plunging towards where memory him told the tree-devil woman would be.
Assuming, of course, she had not been battered away, or broken herself free in the chaos of the sorceress’s storm.
‘Valt the bloody damned Incorruptible, Agion of fucking Honour!’ he heard Anwe roar behind him. She caught hold of his shoulder and leaned close. ‘Torin, we have to get out of here!’
He tried to shrug her off, but, both empowered by honour as they were, her natural strength made the difference, and her hand gripped like a vice.
‘Not without the tree-devil!’ Torin roared back. ‘Go if you want, but my task is to find the truth of this haunting, and it lies with her kind, I’m certain!’
‘Fuck the haunting!’ Anwe shook her head. ‘Fuck this place. It’s already killed Orn, and for what? Let things fall apart and a crusade sweep up the pieces. Not our bloody circus, Anakriarch. Not our bloody problem.’
But it was. Not in a practical sense, but a spiritual one. Anwe could not see this. She was a Knight of Action through and through. Industry, honour and courage—straightforward virtues, demanding little nuance of thought, only purpose. Until, it seemed, fear overwhelmed her courage, as it had here.
Orn might have grasped something of the horror in Torin’s heart, the doubt that had begun to claw at him when those black clouds refused to yield to sacred fire.
A challenge that demanded confrontation rather than flight.
But Orn was dead, and Torin was alone, and desperate not to lose the only thread he had that might lead to an answer, even if only a frayed and tattered one.
‘Unhand me,’ he said, turning and raising his palm. ‘By the purifying flame of Raj, Agion of Justice.’
Spellwrought flame pulsed from him, seized Anwe’s middle, and hurled her away.
She was strong, and empowered by her own blazing crown of virtue, but it was enough to stagger her back and break her grip.
He whirled and plunged into the storm, cursing Anwe for breaking his focus on the place where the tree-devil had been.
A silhouette appeared through the haze of whirling sand.
He pushed towards it, snarling through a flash of pain as the wind buffeted his wounded arm.
The silhouette stood tall—not the tree-devil, then, but the only point of reference Torin had.
It seemed to notice him, and as he drew nearer he saw a staff raised high.
Leaves unfurled from the crown of the staff, glowed with brilliant light for a heartbeat, and unfurled into golden daffodils.
A ball of lightning exploded to life and lanced through the storm, trailing a roll of thunder.
Torin squinted at the sudden burst of light, but in its glow he glimpsed more figures.
The lightning darted past a hulking, four-armed man wielding an enormous bow—the sorceress’s body guard—who did not have time even to flinch.
Only the blinding effect of the sandstorm saved him as the lightning speared past and buried itself in the ground.
A second figure knelt beside him, its silhouette made lumpen and awkward by draping chains. Torin altered course.
He would have the tree-devil, and the answers she promised, whatever the danger. The weave of his faith had shaken loose, the warp unravelling from the weft. Until it was made whole and strong again, nothing else mattered.
The druidess whipped her attention towards him, alerted by the light of his corona, or some preternatural sense granted by the empowerment of the ritual.
She swept her flowering staff. Lightning burned from its tip and lashed out, carving the air.
He ducked, hurled justice outwards to meet her blow, grunted as the weight of the clash ripped through his body.
It would come to a duel, then. The virtue of the Mortal Church against these heathen magics, borrowed from the First Folk, strengthened by depravity.
‘You see, Anakriarch?’ Medrith cried, her voice carrying on the conjured winds.
‘We had no need of you. Parwys is a kingdom unto itself, carved out in ancient days, its powers as deep as the roots of its forests and mountains! As vast as its seas, as swift as its rivers! They were sleeping for want of a king. Now they wake. Soon, I will pour them through this fae monster. The ghosts will lose their anchor, and fade, and there will be peace again! And then we will sweep aside your crusade, crush your puppets in Afondir and Alberon!’
Her laughter pealed like thunder. A bowshot sounded, and her voice turned to a snarl.
No lightning, this time, but a bullet of her own wind tore from her outstretched hand and through the storm.
Torin glimpsed the hulking mercenary and saw a spurt of blood wet the whirling sand. Here was his chance.
Justice was his. All he did, he did in its name.
All the pain he inflicted, all the lives he had claimed.
Even the confusion that tormented him he carried for the sake of justice, his mind always open to the slim possibility that he might be wrong, to evidence that might turn his knife at the last, fatal moment.
Always tempered by compassion for the suffering of his victims. It made him effective, cognisant of precisely how much pain to inflict to extract what was necessary, and no more.
It had made him vulnerable, too. Doubt had crept in, and now threatened to drown his faith, and leave him a shell of himself. Lacking purpose. All his virtues turned to vicious flaws.
Unless he could seize that tree-devil and pry from her an answer to buttress his collapsing certainty and purpose.
His hands became claws of fire, unimpeded by the haze, unhindered by the wind, reaching for Medrith’s throat.
He would have had her, the virtues of the Mortal Church cleaving through the thin defences of heathen magic.
A scream unfurled from the altar. Force rolled behind it, striking Torin like a cudgel and knocking him to the ground.
He managed to lift his head in time to see Prince Owyn ready a second blow.
An aurora of sunlight and fire burned from the head of the hammer as it fell.
The altar, already cracked, now shattered.
The power the First Folk had woven to create this tower, the space within it and the weapon in the prince’s hand snapped, like the mast line of a sailing ship held taut and suddenly freed.
‘Everyone get out!’ a voice cried—the sorceress Fola, standing by the shattered altar, visible now that her conjured storm had died in the wake of the power the prince had unleashed.
Taking her own advice, she seized the prince and Ifan—freed and on his feet at her side—and bolted towards the tunnel that burrowed through the eerily distant walls.
Walls that now bowed inwards, as though they bore more weight than they could carry.
Cracks the brilliant white of a forge’s heart appeared in the walls, but cast no light.
The musty, earthen smell that permeated the place became choked with rot.
A darkness like the space between the stars settled around Torin.
The curving runes in the faces of the Old Stones, which had glowed with the magic of Medrith’s ritual, faded away.
The furious brilliance that had poured from the leaves of the queen’s staff, too, went out like a snuffed candle.
By the last of their glow he saw the druidess’s eyes go wide with terror, and the tree-devil woman behind her, wrapped in chains.
The air became thick with sudden pressure, as though great, invisible hands had seized them all and begun to squeeze.
Rolls like thunder heralded something huge and vast that fell from high overhead, collided with and shattered one of the Old Stones.
Then another, landing closer, shook the ground and sent Torin to his knees.
A fragment of it struck Medrith. She made no sound but the splintering of her bones.
No time to seize the tree-devil and spring for the exit. Torin called out for Anwe, but she did not call back. Crushed, perhaps, by the collapsing tower.