Covenant's End (10 page)

A heavy bladed dagger, clutched in Lisette's fist, sank into the hardwood where Shins's back had just been, scarring the wood and utterly blunting the tip.

“Do you have any idea,” she shrieked, hurling the ruined weapon aside, “how much this desk is
worth
?!”

“How did you do that?” Shins demanded, shocked to her core and starting—far, far too late—to feel the first genuine stirrings of fear.

Lisette's answer was almost a purr. “There are powers in this world, you damn fool. Powers greater than you can imagine, and powers more than capable of concealing themselves.

“From you
or your wretched, insignificant pet of a god!
”

The words were weapons, rocking Widdershins, stunning her—and Olgun, too—far more than any physical blow. Her mouth opened, but she couldn't force whole concepts to pass through it.

“What…? How…?”

But Lisette was already moving. This time it was she who landed atop the hardwood, and though Shins was far too taken aback to be certain, it looked less like she had jumped and more as though she had simply lifted both legs, at once, high enough to reach the desktop. She wielded a rapier in one hand, a new dagger in the other, and Shins hadn't even seen her draw. Lisette froze for an endless instant, crouched atop the desk, and then her legs straightened in a tremendous leap.

Passing within a rat's knuckle of the ceiling, she soared over Widdershins's head in an arc so impossible it almost hurt to see it. By any natural law, she should have struck hard against the stone ceiling, or else covered perhaps half the room, at most, in her flight. Instead she landed at the far door, having already twisted to wind up facing her opponent.

“Are you beginning to understand,” Lisette hissed, exhaling pure malevolence, “how badly you fucked up in coming here?”

“I think so,” Widdershins said through a wan, sickly smile. “So, time to call it lesson learned and go our separate ways, yes?”

“Ah, yes, I well recall the famous Widdershins's wit. But no, my mocking gutter bitch, we're not done. I have so much yet to teach you!” Rapier and dagger swirling around past one another, Lisette advanced.

“Olgun…?”

Another surge of divine power, and the older woman's foot caught on an up-curled edge of rug. It should have sent her tumbling into the waiting chairs, granting Widdershins a second or two of opportunity to try to get past her, make for the door…

It didn't happen. Even as the toe of Lisette's boot made contact with the heavy weaving, the rug twitched, yanking that awkward fold from her path before it could begin to trip her up.

Olgun gibbered, and Shins felt a very great deal like joining him. Palms sweating, heart pounding, she retreated toward the desk.

“Such childish little tricks you two rely on,” Lisette taunted. “Not much more than divine sleight of hand. Would you care to see something…rather more interesting?”

“If it's all the same—” Shins's reply began with words; it concluded in a terrified cry, hers and Olgun's both.

Still spinning, Lisette's weapons advanced, suddenly seeming to attack Shins from all sides.
Yet Lisette herself hadn't taken another step.
It was impossible to see for sure—the whirling steel, and her efforts to either dodge or parry it, occupied the entirety of the young thief's attentions—but she swore her enemy's arms had simply reached across the intervening space, lengthening to compensate. Every time she allowed herself a fraction of a blink to look past the weapons, though, to actually try to
study
those arms, she couldn't quite focus on them. As though she tried to examine them through tears and a thick heat haze.

The superhuman speed with which Olgun infused her limbs, the extra warning he gave, the manipulations of chance that ensured her rapier was so often in place to catch an incoming attack—only these had kept Shins alive thus far. Her entire body was drenched in sweat, now, her arms stung from half a dozen tiny cuts where she hadn't
quite
moved fast enough. She couldn't recall ever growing so tired, so swiftly, or feeling Olgun falter so soon in his own exhaustion.

What
was
she? What had Lisette become?!

The incoming blades froze, and then Lisette was standing
directly before her
, as though her arms had resumed their natural length and pulled her forward to match, rather than recoiling.

Or at least that's what Shins assumed later, when she had a moment to gather her thoughts. Now, all she saw was a sudden blur, the vicious leer, and then searing pain as Lisette slammed her forehead into Shins's face.

She'd tried to turn aside, to avoid the blow she'd somehow known was coming. All she'd accomplished was that her nose
might
be broken, rather
than assuredly was; it was something, but between the throbbing agony and the horrid sound of
something
going crunch, it didn't mean much.

Olgun guiding her arm more than she herself was, Shins twisted her wrist inward and stabbed awkwardly, struggling to thrust with a rapier at a range where a far shorter blade would have proven far more effective.

Still, clumsy a strike as it was, it should have connected. Before the tip could cover those mere inches of distance, however, Lisette simultaneously dropped the rapier from her right hand and tossed the dagger from her left. Neither hand
remained
empty, however, as she caught the dagger in her right,
and grabbed the blade of Shins's rapier
in her left.

The sword just stopped; she might as well have stabbed an oak tree. That the grip was impossible, that no human hand was strong enough to arrest a thrust like that—let alone do so without slicing open her palm and fingers—wasn't remotely surprising, not anymore. In fact, Widdershins had just enough time to think a bitter
Of course
before Lisette plunged the dagger into her body.

Olgun did for her everything he could. Had the blade struck precisely as Lisette intended, punching into Widdershins's liver, the young thief would have died in agony, excruciatingly slowly, but not slowly enough for the tiny god to make any real attempt at healing the damage. At saving her.

Instead, with the last of the power he could muster, he deflected the steel, just the slightest angle. The result, instead, was a gut wound.

Meaning that Widdershins would still probably die in agony, excruciatingly slowly, but it
might
buy Olgun enough time to patch up the worst of it before that could happen.

Might.
If
he was even given the opportunity. If the red-haired monster didn't just finish her—finish
them
—outright.

Because whatever else, Olgun knew damn well that his powers were drained, that he could do only so much without Widdershins's will to channel his own. That he couldn't protect her any further.

In the deepest confines of the young woman's mind, the frightened, grieving god wept.

A piercing scream, a sob, a plea, all that and more. Shins fell back against the desk, felt the steel slithering from her flesh, then crumpled into a tiny ball on the floor, arms clutched tight to her stomach. Her sleeves were already soaked in thick, warm blood, but she didn't notice. Didn't notice she had fallen, didn't notice she still screamed and cried.

She had been stabbed before, in her life of conflict. Had strips of skin torn from her by the clinging fingers of the creature Iruoch. Had even been struck in the gut before, with a hammer wielded by a man large enough to make the Taskmaster, Remy, look like Robin.

She had never felt
anything
to match this.

Her world was fire, agony and nausea and terror. In that moment she would have done anything, given Lisette anything she could possibly have asked for, begged Olgun to kill her,
anything
to make it stop. Would have, had she possessed the presence of mind to try, but even that was denied her.

Around the edges of her awareness, she almost thought she felt the faintest tingling, a sense that Olgun was doing what he could for her injury, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough. Her body spasmed, wrenching muscles, as though sharply tugged inward by the wound itself.

“Please…” She'd no idea what she begged for, exactly, nor to whom. Possibly to Lisette herself, and Shins couldn't even find it within her to be ashamed at the thought. “Please…”

And all the gods be praised, the pain
did
begin to fade! She believed, at first, it was her imagination, or perhaps her mind shutting down. A chill spread through her body, from the wound outward, and where it passed the torment eased—sort of. It didn't go away, not exactly. Rather, it felt like the seeping cold formed a wall, a barrier of ice and numbness, between the agony and Shins herself. It was still present, still raging, but somehow the worst of it failed to reach her.

Widdershins vomited a gout of bile-tinted blood and then stared up at Lisette in utter bewilderment.

The older woman was cloaked in ribbons of nothingness, maddened worms of shadow that slithered and humped about her.

One of those lengths of shade had snaked its way between them, caressing the edges of Widdershins's wound, doubtless the source of that frigid relief.

“We can't have you overcome yet, little scab,” Lisette taunted her. “Not until the others have had the chance to meet you.”

“O-others?”

“Oh, yes. They've been almost as eager for this as I have.”

Those writhing shadows erupted to either side of Lisette, somewhere between a billowing cloak and widespread wings. The lanterns flickered and dulled, the light itself seeming to recoil, and the air was abruptly redolent with cinnamon and vanilla and other sweets.

From within those shadows, an array of figures formed.

The first was a silhouette only vaguely human, a lithely muscled man with skin the mottled colors of a stagnant marsh and the legs of a giant frog. His head was bald, and the corners of his lips reached all the way to his ears. Even in her state, Shins shuddered at the thought of that mouth opening wide, and of what might lie within.

He—it?—was followed by a young woman, pirouetting on long, slender legs. She was clad in a dress of leaves, and her hair was red—not the simple ginger of Lisette's own, but as deep and rich as rose petals. Her eyes, when she paused in her twirling to glare at Shins,
were tree bark, and the fingers of both hands were long rosebush stems with vicious thorns.

And finally, the last, though this one was accompanied by his own entourage. Lanky of form and greasy of hair, he looked no older than Shins herself, yet there was something of the ancient about him. His left hand boasted long, slender switches where its fingers should have been, and his eyes were mirrors in which Shins saw her own reflection, but not Lisette's.

Crawling at his heels, moaning with every breath, were half a dozen children—or child-shaped creatures. Their flesh was maggot-pale, their eyes no more than gaping hollows into a seemingly endless darkness, their jaws distended around long and jagged teeth. They wore only old and tattered rags, all save one: from her neck alone dangled a silver pendant, badly tarnished, in the shape of an elegant swan.

Through it all, Olgun shrieked his fear and his warnings, to which Shins could offer no response at all.

“My dear friends, this is Widdershins,” Lisette announced grandly, “to whom we owe thanks for bringing us together. Widdershins, these are my new friends. Do you understand why they're here?”

It wasn't, even in her current condition, hard to puzzle out. “Iruoch…” she whispered, blood dribbling from one side of her lips.

As if in response, somewhere off in the distance, in a direction that had nothing to do with any compass, an entire chorus of children babbled.

“Very good,” the older woman congratulated with joviality so false it should have qualified as counterfeiting. “They're not
really
here, of course. Iruoch was invited, however accidentally. My friends were not, and the Church presence is still a bother to them. We're taking care of that, though, aren't we, my dears?”