'Come on then!' he bellowed over them, stilling a hundred voices at a stroke. 'You want the Ascendants? Come and get them. All I promise you is that the first of you up here feels my hammer through their chest.'
Kashilli held the hammer by the end of its shaft and held it outstretched, letting it track across the crowd. His arm was ramrod straight, solid as a mast and the muscles bulged.
'So,' growled Kashilli as the noise fell away. 'Which one of you bastards wants to go first?'
Iliev licked his lips and scanned the crowd. No takers. No surprise. He moved towards the fountain and no one stood in his way. The guards let him through and he joined Kashilli on the fountain lip. Below him, the face of a frightened girl looked up at him and Kashilli, admiration in her wide eyes.
'What's your name, young lady?' asked Iliev.
'Yola, my Lord.'
Kashilli smiled down at her too. 'Do what you have to do, little Yola. No one will hurt you now.'
From the gates, panicked citizens bunched and spilled inside. The gates, which had been closing slowly, slapped open once more, timbers rattling against the marble of the arch. People poured into the courtyard. Iliev bit his lip. Whatever these Ascendants were going to do, they needed to do it quickly.
Chapter Sixty-Six
859th cycle of God, 12th day of
Genasfall
A line of dead appeared from under the outer boughs of the glade. Not many. Ten in plain view, spreading in a thin line and walking a couple of paces into the mire. Above, the sun shone down on the tiny oasis of life, the place for which the living and the dead were all groping.
Behind the crippled Ascendant group, the dead had closed in on all sides. Arducius was barely able to move. His shattered leg was black and blue with bleeding under the skin. He said he was still able to work but Jhered wasn't so sure. Ossacer had said the same thing, after all, and Ossacer was only vaguely conscious right now.
The three of them staggered the last hundred yards to the glade. There was no escape behind. The game would finish here. Either Gorian would die or they would all join the ranks of the dead. Jhered looked at the few dead ahead of them, a sense of foreboding upon him. Only their faces remained hidden in shadow. They stood absolutely still and silent, waiting with gladius or knife. They were in various states of decay. From the freshly harvested to the forty-day rotten. Clothes clean but for smears of blood, or grey, torn and mouldering from within.
The line of dead moved out a pace and Jhered's heart broke. 'Oh, Gorian, you bastard,' he whispered.
He stopped. With the army behind him less than fifty yards from their backs and the dead in front only ten paces away, he couldn't find the will to take another step.
'Jhered,' said the ten dead. 'Jhered.'
His name shivered through him, a knife in his gut.
'Turn away,' he said to them, voice clogging. 'Please.'
Mirron was at his side.
'We have to destroy them to move on. Quickly,' she said.
'I can't. I know them. My friends are standing there. The King of Tsard's son is standing there.'
Jhered shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Opening them, the scene was the same. No dream. Dina Kell. Pavel Nunan. Dahnishev. Dahnishev who Roberto thought had escaped was there, lifeless but upright. He had a long scalpel in his hands. Jhered choked back a sob. Such a waste. Such a crime.
'I cannot strike them down,' he said.
'No, but I can,' said Mirron. 'Turn away if you must.'
'Use my energy,' said Arducius, wheezing a breath into his tortured lungs. 'And be quick. Trouble behind.'
The rumble of the approaching army of dead refugees and soldiers obscured the breeze rustling the trees. Mirron nodded. Jhered wanted to look away but found he could not. It would be a dishonour.
'I am sorry,' he said, 'that your ends should be thus. Your memories will never be allowed to die.'
Heat blossomed to Jhered's right. He took Ossacer a pace left. Fire washed out in a sheet, drenching the dead, the loved dead, standing there. Jhered forced himself to look on while they burned. Thrashing and screaming where they stood as if alive and knowing their fate. The keening wail that spoke of the comprehension of eternal destruction. An end to cycles under God. The denial of His embrace.
The fire raged out from Mirron's body, consuming them, the heat like a furnace setting light to trees, scotching bark and leaf black. Tears were on Jhered's cheeks. The bodies dropped to the ground, ash and dust in the embers. He looked past them and into the glade. A shout of fury echoed through the branches.
'You're next, Westfallen.'
Jhered marched into the glade, Ossacer tight to his chest. Mirron and Arducius, smoking and smouldering still, came after him. Clothes and hair were burned away. Their faces bore a terrible weight. Not the guilt at what they had done, but the understanding of what lay directly ahead. They could feel it through the earth and the air the moment they set foot on unspoiled ground. Jhered could see it draining them with every passing heartbeat.
The glade was silent now but for the rustling of leaves and the whisper of the breeze over lush grass. All that was needed to make this the perfect genastro stroll were the songs of birds. And Gorian's dead body at Jhered's feet. Mirron and Arducius were struggling with the effects of whatever they were sampling. Ossacer was moving too, coming out of his deep exhaustion, dragged back to consciousness by the simmering evil in front of him. Mirron gasped in a breath. 'Kessian.'
She began to hurry, Arducius crying out in pain as he was dragged too fast over the ground. She paid him no heed, moving quickly t
o
wards a circle of light in the centre of the glade.
'Mirron!' said Jhered and picked up his pace too though his body was screaming at him to stop.
'He's here. He's here. He's—'
Jhered ran. Shouldering under the low branches, protecting Ossacer's face from stray twigs. He burst into the circle of light. It was a small clearing in which a wagon stood. Two bodies lay in it. Karku. Impossible to tell if they were alive or not. And next to it, something
...
'Hello, Mirron, my darling,' it said. 'You have come back to me.' Mirron dropped Arducius to the ground, put her hands to her face and began to scream.
It was a sea and it would engulf them and drown them, but not before they had rescued as many of the dead as possible for a return to God's embrace. Davarov stood at the head of the stairs leading back down to the causeway. His long sword felt sublime in his hands. Like in the old days before the Conquord came and taught them a new way to fight. Sharp and heavy, bludgeoning power with an edge to carve the stone from a mountain side.
He crashed it through the shoulder of a dead, carving through mouldy leather armour, through rotting flesh and brittle bones. Davarov roared into the face of the Tsardon corpse. His blade sheared all the way through, exiting at the dead's hip and continuing down to take the leg from another. The body collapsed, spilling stinking entrails back down the stairs.
Davarov kicked the legs after it. The other dead had fallen sideways, partially blocking the way. Davarov backed up a pace, watching the dead slither and fall on the slick ground. Like a dozen times before, he could draw breath until they smeared the blood and guts dry. Then they would come again.
'Duck!'
Davarov ducked. Roberto threw another flask over his head and onto the stairs, about halfway down. The explosive smacked onto a helmet. The detonation ripped through bodies in all directions. Gore peppered Davarov's face. Ten and more dead had been ripped to pieces by the blast, leaving a hole painted in blood and blackened flesh. There was a crack in the stairs. The concrete, weakened by the earth wave, was failing and the powder was widening the fracture. Dead moved to fill the space.
'How many more, Roberto?'
Davarov looked back over his shoulder. Roberto was standing in front of the crate of flasks. Behind him, the thinning line of Conquord legionaries and engineers fought for their lives, driven on by the fear of becoming the walking dead. Like Davarov, they faced Tsardon warriors covered head to toe in slime, killed by the passage of the wave and the touch of the killing ground. Disease had taken their bodies and Gorian had made them walk again. They were strong, these dead. Fresh. The word was bitter in Davarov's mind.
The dead tried to scale everywhere they could. Their ladders had been reduced to rotten waste by the wave but they climbed fallen stone and grasped with their fingers on the shattered roof to try and get at the living they were so desperate to convert. Impelled by pure evil.
And for the hundreds who lost hands and fingers to the blades of the Conquord, others came. And they had started to pile stone on stone, creating slopes of broken rock up which they came. Closer and closer, until at last they could wield blades. Davarov thought they could keep those back until fatigue took them. It was at the stairs where their greatest risk lay. He and the remarkable Harban-Qvist, along with twenty others, worked in relays with long swords or axes to keep the way blocked. But it could not go on forever.
'Roberto?'
'Four,' he said. 'Not many.'
'But maybe enough. Target the same place you dropped the last one. The stair is weakening.'
Dead had trampled their fallen aside and scraped the gore from their path by the attrition of boot falls alone. They came on again. Harban stepped in front of them, axe in hand. His strong legs and short body allowed him to crouch and swing through on a horizontal at waist height. He used the blade flat as often as he did its edge.
Davarov watched him swipe a dead clean off the stairs and back into the teeming mass. On the return, the blade bit deep into the hip of another, crippling him. He fell forwards. Harban stepped back a half pace and crushed his skull. He lifted the axe from the still moving body, stepped in again, butted the boss into the face of a third and brought the blade back down again on his victim's lower back, smashing his spine.
It was so quiet. It gave the battle an unearthly feeling. Ten thousand dead and more all intent on a single purpose and not one making a sound. Only when the pitch fire hit them did they scream and it was a sound that would live with Davarov to his grave. Only on the roof of the broken fort did the living still hold sway and their voices and the thud of their weapons were unnaturally loud in the blasted land.
Harban ducked a swinging sword, came up and kicked straight out. The dead, off-balance, tumbled down the stairs, taking four others with him. A moment's pause.
'Roberto!'
Roberto stepped to the side, took aim and threw his flask. The explosion ripped into stone, armour and bone. The fort shuddered briefly. The gap had widened. A foot now, right across the stairs about halfway to the causeway. Dead were flung from the centre of the detonation, tumbling bodies, torn in half or shredded. Blood misted in the air. The long snakes of entrails whipped and splattered.
'Good shot,' said Davarov. 'Let's go again. Harban, my turn.'
'As you wish, General,' said the Karku.
'Oh, I wish. I certainly wish.' Davarov walked to the head of the stairs and hefted his blade. 'Come on, Tsardon bastards. The only way is up. And the Exchequer is another pace closer to his quarry.'
Davarov heard Roberto's muttered words.
'He'd better be.'
Jhered had laid Ossacer down. Mirron was still inconsolable, though the Exchequer was trying his best. Arducius propped himself up on his good arm and looked but barely believed. It
was
Gorian and it was Kessian too. Mirron had seen that it was and her outstretched hands, where she sat in a heap almost within touching distance, were heart-rending to witness.
Gorian was behind Kessian and they were both standing. Arducius could just about see their faces, their eyes particularly. But that was almost all. From their bodies, covering them almost completely, sprouted roots. Narrow twists and thick, healthy, woody stems. From their temples, their cheeks, and into the tops of their heads a living net of vegetation came and went. It speared into the ground around them, surely pierced every part of them and formed a thick cloak about them. Leaves sprouted even as Arducius watched, and small flowers budded and bloomed.
The earth had grown into and through them. Arducius tried hard to pierce the life map that Gorian had created but it was impenetrable, barring a slow, green and brown pulsing energy. The earth energy but twisted somehow. Arducius couldn't even tell whether in the course of creating the wave, Gorian had meant this to happen or whether it was pure consequence. All he thought he could tell was that Gorian and Kessian were completely interlinked to the earth and the life it spawned.
'Gorian,' said Mirron, speaking through her heaving, desperate breaths. 'Please, let him go. Let my son go.'