Chapter 73 The Red Veil
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The Red Veil
A red veil had descended behind Levan’s eyes.
Gone was the young boy who just wanted to heal.
He thought only of blood.
Alucia’s savage smile in the moments before she slayed him was imprinted on the back of his eyelids, stamped onto his psyche, branded over his heart.
His mind went blank, his body took over, and Whitewings fell.
He spun in the air, bringing the dagger down on the papery skin of a throat.
He twisted at the waist, slicing through a femoral artery.
He ducked to the floor, cutting at heels and hamstrings, through wand-holding wrists and into gut-spilling bellies.
Killing curses forked toward him, but the highly trained animal of his body dodged with such perfect precision that they found different marks.
Whitewings killed Whitewings, screaming in pain and confusion, bellowing at one another to stop using ammorten, but what else could they do?
They were fighting a monster, and on their faces Levan saw the same reaction he’d had to the Sordai.
The sense that all was lost, that they had made an immense mistake in coming here, that they’d pay for it with their lives.
But then—
—another color.
Silvercloaks spilled into the station, barking orders and spells, and whites began turning to stone. Terrified faces, wounded mages, transmuted to gurning statues.
Jolting from his violent reverie, Levan ducked behind a stone figure, heart thumping like a Bokolani battle drum, some of the crimson fog in his mind clearing.
He surveyed the carnage, noting with vague horror that he’d killed more whites than he could count on his hands.
Dark blood—blacker than it was red—soaked the flagstones, pooled at the feet of statues, trickled beneath the axelmare arches of the portari gates.
This had been so different from the killing of the wardholders in Flarence. That had hurt him, badly, but this had not. It had been mindless, furious, righteous. He hadn’t seen his foes as fellow human beings, only as enemies. As other.
It had not been in his mother’s name, nor at his father’s command.
This was all him.
Miret was wrong. He was a monster, after all.
There was no redemption. The prospect had always been a fallacy.
And judging by the hordes of Silvercloaks, he was about to be arrested for all he had done—unless he could get to the portari gate.
He was loath to leave Saffron after she’d saved his life, but he could get a message to her once he reached safety.
He’d go down to Aredan, over Assassin’s Bay to Mersina, catch his breath on the isle of mercenaries and mendicants.
She’d flee this skirmish without too much trouble—she was atop an axelmare and immune to magic, after all—providing she didn’t come back for him.
Shouts and footsteps thudded and blurred around him, echoing in the rafters. A Silvercloak tore toward him—Tenébo Jebat, the Sinyi mage he’d compelled in the Havenwood—and Levan knew he had to move.
The portari gate was twenty yards away, but statue curses flew with reckless abandon. Sweat poured from his temples, pooled in the small of his back, as he picked up a heavy Whitewing statue as a shield and broke into a grunting run.
Fifteen yards.
Ten.
The statue slipped from his slick grip and fell to the floor, the stone-hewn mage snapping at the waist.
Out of the corner of his eye, Levan spotted the fork of a death curse just in time. He ducked out of the firing line and kept running, pulse roaring in his ears.
Five yards from the gate, his boots slipped and skidded in a bloody puddle. He fell forward onto the ground, knees and palms bearing the brunt of the impact. He dropped his wand but snatched it back quickly, almost blind with adrenaline.
He was close enough to the gate to drag himself there on his screaming knees.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Planting his wand-bearing golden palm on the floor of the gate, he thought, for a luminous moment, that he was going to make it.
A hand closed around his ankle, hauled him back. A glance over his shoulder showed a snarling Whitewing face, standing with her wand pointed down at Levan’s face. Levan compelled her to let go, and she let go. He compelled her not to kill him, but the curse had already left her mouth.
Then—a Silvercloak ran at the Whitewing.
Then—a soft thud as a new mage arrived beneath the portari arches. The sole of a richly polished boot slammed down on the back of Levan’s golden hand.
Levan looked up, and the whole world ceased to turn.
His brother.
Emotion crashed down onto Levan like a crumbling temple.
Laris was alive, Sebran was alive, he was alive.
Shortly followed by the fear.
He was alive, but he was here, in the violent chaos.
Everybody except Sebran Aduran—stop. Stay back.
The dozens of silver- and white-cloaked bodies in the room froze at once. All the sound died with a strange echoing taper.
“Brother,” Levan breathed.
Every broad peak and shallow valley of Sebran’s face was hard with hatred.
“No. Look at all you have wrought.” Sebran swept a horrified hand around the slaughterhouse of a station, the mutilated bodies, countless stab wounds.
Levan was the only mage carrying a dagger.
Blood still dripped from its tip to the tiles, and his clothes were drenched crimson-black.
“I take back what I said. You are fundamentally broken, Levan. And there is no redemption, whether you want it or not.”
Sebran raised his wand, silver cloak shifting on his thinner frame, all the brawn he’d painstakingly built atrophied during his time in cell six. Levan could take him down physically, if he wanted to.
But he no longer wanted to. The fight was leaving him, the red-eyed animal who slew all these mages now mortally wounded, cowering in the undergrowth and waiting to die.
Casting a gaze once more around the carnage he’d created, at the gleaming cloaks of silver and white soaked in patches of ruinous blood, Levan knew at once that—
No. Not all silver and white.
A pale blue scholar’s cloak had appeared in the doorway atop a skeletal black axelmare. The rider was mild-faced, almost disinterested, and missing a chunk of flesh from his torso, but still searching the room for something. Someone.
Miret too was frozen in place by the compelled command to stop, but he could still see, hear, understand what was happening. Levan did not want that, did not want him to have to watch his surrogate grandson perish.
Levan looked desperately back to Sebran. “Are you going to kill me?”
“You do not deserve such a mercy,” Sebran spat, a vein bulging in his forehead. “Throw me your wand.”
If Levan thought his own compelling was powerful, it was naught by comparison with Sebran’s.
The command was hard, absolute, unflinching, both surgically precise and as strong as a hurricane, and as Levan tossed his wand at his brother’s feet, he could not help but marvel at how the boy from the woods had grown into his ability.
He could command the world entire, if he so wanted.
How easily Levan might have been overpowered in the watchtower, had his own power not surged and broken first.
With a frighteningly steady hand, Sebran unlooped a set of deminite manacles from his belt and threw them at Levan’s feet. “Clasp these around your ankles.”
A perfect mirror of what had been done to Sebran on the night of Lorissa’s death.
Levan’s own hands shaking, reality dawning, the sudden and terrible knowledge that he was caught at last, the kingpin crouched to one knee and restrained himself.
As the cold deminite met his skin, the compelled command holding the room hostage fell, and the station descended once more into chaos. Shuffles and yells and incantations, a blur of color and sound.
Fear pulsing through him white and cold, Levan did not look up at his brother, but rather across at Miret, his anchor, his safe haven, the port in the great storm of his life. Surely the old mage could do something. Fix this, without necessarily hurting Sebran.
Miret’s warm eyes met Levan’s cold blue ones.
“Mil,” he murmured, my child, and something soared in Levan then, because the word was imbued with emotion, and surely someone truly soul-dead could not feign such depth of feeling, but then—
—a spell leapt from a Whitewing wand toward a Silvercloak.
The Silvercloak ducked, and the scholar did not.
Miret Tomazin, the mentor, the surrogate grandfather, one of so few people who had ever seen the good in Levan, fell lifelessly from the axelmare’s saddle to the blood-soaked ground.
The roar Levan let out was louder than thunder, than an earthquake, than a dragon’s furious scream. A scream from the very cellar of his soul.
Twice the pain of his mother’s death, his father’s, the suddenness lending an unreality to it, and yet Levan’s body knew, his heart and his throat and the mind beneath his mind knew…
that this one was permanent. Miret had wanted this, had asked for as much.
To take him to the crypt and beg Halant to bring him back would be a disservice.
Miret was gone.
“No,” he moaned, though he wasn’t sure any sound left his mouth. He was a little boy again, the killing machine of the previous minute vanished somewhere deep inside. “I can’t keep losing everyone. I can’t, I can’t…”
As Levan continued to howl his despair, Sebran knelt and took into custody the last Rezaran wand—and with it the possibility of all the lives his brother might have chosen instead of this.