Covenant's End (26 page)

The corridors of the Guild were strangely, even disturbingly quiet.

No surprise, there, not with so many dead or incarcerated. Still, as Igraine knelt in the darkened chapel, before the hood-blinded idol of the Shrouded God, it nagged at her. A sense of wrongness, nibbling at the edges of her focus as she prayed for guidance.

The place wasn't
entirely
silent, of course. Not every Finder had been present for the raid, and the Guard was too busy dealing with the masses of criminals they
had
arrested, as well as the tension on the streets, to pay much attention to the headquarters of what they knew to be a broken Guild. Slowly, then, in dribs and drabs, a tiny population of remaining thieves had returned to their halls.

Some were Finders who fled when they learned of Lisette's takeover, either loyal to the Shrouded Lord and the priests or simply unwilling to follow a woman they clearly remembered as unstable. Others were members of the Guild who'd simply happened to be out that night, and who, though they'd been willing to follow Lisette while she was here, were wise enough keep their heads down and ride out this new change in regime as they had the last. A few had even been present during the raid but managed to remain hidden from even the most meticulous searches.

So, disturbingly quiet, yes, but it meant that when the nearest hall went
completely
silent, when sound ceased trickling around the partly open door to the chapel, Igraine noticed swiftly enough.

I suppose I should have expected this.

The priestess concluded her prayer, then stood from vaguely aching knees and turned, facing the door and placing her back to the effigy of the Shrouded God. Idly wishing that she had a pistol or a larger blade on her person, she slid a thick-bladed dagger from its sheath.

“I know you're here!” she called.

It obliged her by appearing in the doorway, and for all her bravado, Igraine couldn't repress a shudder as she pressed herself tight against the cold stone of her god. It was gaunt, painfully so, and taller even than the idol, which was itself slightly larger than a big man. Shadow clung to it in rags, ignoring the efforts of the chapel's lanterns. She could make out little, save that its limbs were gangly, diaphanous wings buzzed at its back, and its facial features consisted solely of a pair of glinting, faceted eyes.

And given that shudder, she could never be certain, but she'd have sworn the statue at her back also quivered a bit at the thing's approach.

Not one of the creatures that made its presence known at Widdershins's capture, according to the story as she'd told it, but “Gloaming Court” wasn't precisely a difficult conclusion to reach.

Clicking and chittering, it advanced on her, though she noted on two separate occasions that it hesitated in mid-step. Only for a fraction of a second, almost unobservable, but definite.

“You don't like being in here with the idol, do you?” she asked, just a hint of taunting peppering her words. It buzzed something in reply and came on once more. Only a few steps away, now.

“I
live
by my faith,” she continued, struggling to meet its terrible, cracked gaze. “I have faith, for instance, that he will guide me, prevent me from looking where I must not.”

A narrow, serrated limb stretched toward her. Still she hadn't so much as raised her dagger in defense.

“And that his curse, though meant for mortals, isn't something you can just ignore. Shall we see?”

Inches from the fae creature's grasp, Igraine reached up and yanked the hood from the idol of the Shrouded Lord.

Evrard d'Arras fell backward, tumbling awkwardly over the carpet. The ragged gashes in his cheek and his shoulder left a smeared trail of blood across the weave. It looked like a child's art project, compared to the delicate footprints, also a wet crimson, that had stained that carpet moments before.

He coughed, wincing as a ripping pain ran across his face. One hand on the wall, the other using a rapier as a cane, he forced himself to his feet. Not good for the blade, that, but given how horribly marred and scratched up it had become over the past few minutes, it hardly mattered.

Heralded by a gust of floral-scented air, she emerged from the hallway. Lithe, graceful, with hair of autumn, wardrobe of leaves, eyes of bark, and fingers of thorns. She laughed, and it was the airy rustling of wind through the branches.

Through the windows, thunder roared its deep counterpoint.

“At least tell me,” Evrard gasped, “that I get the most beautiful of you because I'm particularly worth it.”

Those rose-stem digits struck, wrapped around the sword he'd barely raised in time to parry, digging more creases into the steel. Skilled duelist as he was, he didn't even try to riposte; he knew from personal and painful experience that a normal blade would barely even inconvenience the creature.

Time for other options.

When those tendrils withdrew again, preparing for a new attack, he hurled the rapier along with them. By no means harmful, of course,
but it startled her into retreating half a step. That extra instant was enough time for Evrard to reach the rack of swords he'd been steering them toward with every fall, every backstep.

The weapon he drew from it was too thick to qualify as a rapier; perhaps a particularly long and slender arming sword.

Even stranger, however, was the dull hue of the blade—very much
not
the glint of steel.

“Had this custom forged,” he told her, pausing to wipe blood from his lips, “after our little spat with Iruoch last year.”

The creature's hiss at the mention of that name was a cracking branch, slowed to a drawn-out breath.

“So yes, that
is
holy scripture etched down the blood groove. And yes, it's iron. Pure.”

He swung through a few muscle-loosening arcs, then dropped into an expert defensive stance. “Now…shall we try this again?”

The soaking rain transformed cinder and charred wood into thick paste, clinging to shoes or mixing with the mud in a distasteful slurry. Choked with soot, the rivulets running over the wooden skeleton—the portions of it still standing—came over black in the light of the overcast moon and streetlamps.

So thickly had they permeated the property over the years, the aromas of roasting meats and pungent alcohols remained detectable even over the much stronger, crisper stench of the more recent fire.

“We'll rebuild?” Robin asked for the hundredth time, forcing the words out between sniffles and slow, erratic steps.

Faustine, her arm already around her lover's waist, supporting her as she limped through the ruin of the Flippant Witch, squeezed Robin more closely to her. “Of course. You heard what Shins said. It'll be better than it was!”

“But it won't be the
same
!”

“No.” Faustine turned Robin so she could hug her with both arms, now. They gazed at one another, bedraggled, shivering, drenched to the bone and hair plastered flat by the rain, until they pulled themselves tightly together. “No, love, it won't. But nothing ever really is.”

Robin sniffled again in response but nodded against the other woman's shoulder.

At the far edge of the seared property, Shins waited, arms wrapped around herself, staring intently at nothing. It seemed awfully considerate of her, giving the young couple a few moments of privacy, but the truth was she'd almost forgotten they were there, forgotten where she herself was.

As much of her heart as the Witch occupied, she was currently deep in discussion about something far more important. Unlike her two friends nearby, when she shivered, it had nothing to do with the temperature.

“…course I don't want to!” It shouldn't have been possible for her to shout under her breath, but she'd been talking that way long enough to learn the tricks. “Gods, Olgun, you're a
part
of me! It's like asking me to give up my sense of humor, or my lungs, or…I don't know, any knowledge or memory of anything that starts with a vowel.

“But you…” She welcomed the rain, not so that it would hide any tears from Robin, or even Olgun, but because it provided an excuse for her to deny them herself. “We've been lucky these last few years, and we both know it. If something happens to me…. Oh, stop that! It's
absolutely
possible! Just last week, if Renard and Igraine hadn't shown up…” She squeezed herself tighter, until her ribs creaked.

“I don't want anything to happen to
you
. I'm
supposed
to die eventually. I mean, not for a while or anything, yes? Eventually, though.
But you? You're supposed to go on. You're supposed to have forever. I don't…you can't lose that. I can't…” So much for pretending she retained any composure whatsoever; her sobs nearly doubled her over. “I can't be the reason you lose that.

“We've been talking about this since it all started. We knew it had to happen.” Each syllable was an effort, one she could barely stand. Her throat was so tight she'd almost have wondered if Olgun were doing something to her, trying to keep her from speaking, if she didn't know him so much better than that. “I need to do this. For you! I need to go to Sicard and—”

It all replayed before her, as clear and clean as when it happened. In a span of seconds, she relived every good moment of her life with Olgun. Every triumph, every joy. Every comfort.

All followed by an aching loneliness such as she'd never known, vaster than the gulfs between the stars of the night sky.

He was willing to risk death itself—an immortal willing to relinquish at least one hand from his grip on eternity—to stay with her.

It was too much, too overwhelming. Something inside her melted. “Of course you'd feel that way now,” she sobbed, “but in ten years? A hundred? A thousand?”

If anything, his grip grew tighter. She felt him entwined with her memories and dreams, wrapped around her soul. And despite her tears and her certainty, she couldn't help but shake her head and smile.

“All right, all right! No decisions for now. We'll take our time. I won't break up the team just yet.”

Her grin widened at the surge of joy that bubbled up inside her. “Or maybe I should say I won't kick you out of the nest yet. Big baby.” She laughed aloud—something she had wondered, mere moments ago, if she would ever do again—at the expression she felt him make.

Behind her, two feminine voices cleared their throats in unison, barely audible over the rain.

“How long have you two been there?” she demanded, blushing faintly.

Robin stepped forward and offered her friend a short hug from behind. “Long enough to know you're upset. What's wrong?”

“Nothing.” Widdershins turned, making this a proper embrace—and then, after only a moment's hesitation, held out one hand for Faustine to join them. “Nothing's wrong.” They stood, the three of them, by the grave of the old Flippant Witch and, they swore, the cradle of the new, each drawing support from the other.

“Okay, enough of that!” Shins finally declared, stepping back from the others with an obviously false scowl. “We don't need to spend all night here. I'm pretty sure if I get any wetter I'm going to sprout gills. Tomorrow, or whenever the rain stops, we'll come back and start trying to figure out—”

On a rooftop across the street, obscured by curtains of night and storm, something howled in a voice just barely human.

The second cry was heard by Widdershins alone, as Olgun screamed in terror at what he felt was coming.

“It means so very much to see all of you here tonight.”

No empty words, those; he absolutely meant it. His head pounded, his stomach still rose and fell in burning waves, but Bishop Sicard would have chosen to be nowhere else than standing at the pulpit of the basilica's main sanctuary. Every lamp, chandelier, and candelabra glowed warm and bright, glinting in deep colors off the stained glass and a clear, almost blinding white everywhere else.

It wasn't the light, however, lifting Sicard's spirit after what had, thus far, been a difficult and terrifying night.

Word had spread quickly, faster even than rumor's normally swift wings, of the unnatural entity that had invaded the church, and the assembly of clergy who stood against it. By the time Sicard and the House priests had emerged from seclusion, their combined faith having finally banished their fae attacker back to the shadows whence it came, the Basilica of the Sacred Choir was already packed with enough people to raise a deafening cheer.

The crowd grew further still when the other priests sent word back to the noble Houses of what had just occurred. When midnight mass rolled around, the normally sparsely attended service was packed, so much so that the temperature in the great chapel had grown uncomfortably warm, and the sound of prayer and paean utterly dwarfed the thunder shaking the building from outside. Despite the deathly late hour and the pounding storm, the people had come to hear the word of, and lend support to, the voice of the Hallowed Pact in Davillon.

Had Sicard not been so drained, so exhausted, he might have realized—either through the faint intuitions that often came from the 147
gods to their most devout clergy, or simply via educated guesswork and deduction—that other such attacks must have occurred throughout the city. He might have attempted to do something; even though there seemed precious little he
could
have done, he would have wanted to try.

But exhausted he was, and what energy he could muster was devoted to delivering service and sermon at an hour to which he was unaccustomed even on normal days.

So, with the equally exhausted, aching, and worn House priests fanned out on the dais behind him, Sicard launched into the tale of what had occurred—and, to an extent, had been occurring recently throughout Davillon—assuring his flock that the situation was gradually coming under control, that the Church was with them, that there would soon be no more reason to fear…

She was afraid, terribly afraid, before she even knew why.

Although she could certainly guess.

For Olgun to panic that completely, that loudly, whatever was coming had to be something
bad
. Really bad, demon-bad, Iruoch-bad.

Lisette-bad.

So when she felt her god's power pulling her vision through the darkness, winding around the raindrops to the distant rooftop, she wasn't remotely surprised to spot the thick red hair or the bestial snarl on the otherwise shadow-veiled figure.

The world narrowed, so there was nothing but the rain, the cobblestones, the buildings before her and the burnt-out ruin behind. And Widdershins—brash, confident, defiant to a fault; thief and duelist and, no matter how she tried to avoid it, how she never would have accepted it, hero—had, for one instant, a single despairing thought. Foreign, even alien, and cold as the oldest glacier, but as absolutely certain as if it were written on the bedrock of creation.

I'm going to die tonight.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. After everything she'd been through, everything she'd done, she deserved better than this. She wanted to shriek at the injustice of it, kick the mud and spit in the rain, curse the world and the fates and the gods who would do this to her.

She did nothing of the sort, of course. She kept herself, on the surface, calm. Collected. She knew what Lisette could do, knew that no help of any significance would arrive, could
possibly
arrive, in time to do any good. She couldn't win. She couldn't escape. Not even Olgun could save her. Simple fact.

Even as her gut twisted like a dying snake, though, and her heart began to pound faster than the falling rain, Widdershins realized that
that
wasn't what scared her.

I'm going to die tonight.

But I'll be baked and breaded if anyone
else
is!

She continued to scan the street, as though still searching for the source of that horrid cry, as were Robin and Faustine—hand clasped in hand, until the skin went white as bone and not a trickle of the rain could squeeze between. In the process, Shins took a step back, nearly bumping into her confused and frightened friends.

“You need to run!” she hissed between her teeth.

“What? We're not leaving you alone!” Shins could hear the steel coalescing in Robin's voice, the stubbornness that she absolutely, positively couldn't afford to indulge right now. “There's no way we—!”

“Robin! There's no time for this. I need you to go. I
need
you to go!” The idea of lying to her best friend almost made her throw up in mid-sentence, but she managed to force it out anyway. “If you stay, if I have to worry about you, you're going to get me killed.”

A second howl shook the night, closer. Even knowing it was Lisette, now, Shins could barely hear her voice in the horrid sound, a roar of murderous fury soaked through with a burgeoning pain.

“Faustine, get her out of here!”

Robin still protested, growing ever more frantic, but Faustine clearly heard the urgency in Widdershins's tone. She nodded once, began gathering the younger woman to her, leading her away, when Shins called after her.

“Faustine! As soon as Robin's safe, I need you to get to the bishop as fast as you can. Tell him I said yes, but it has to be
now
or it'll be too late! He'll understand.”

Olgun was screaming again, this time at
her
. It buffeted her, harsher than the storm. Had the earth vanished beneath her feet or she found herself slammed into one of the nearby walls, it wouldn't have come as the faintest surprise.

She ignored it. It wrenched at her, like dismissing the pleas of a drowning loved one, but she remained steadfast, refusing to take back her demand.

Maybe she had been willing to
risk
Olgun's life along with her own, but she wouldn't throw it hopelessly away.

Widdershins held herself rigid, a statue in the rain, unwilling to take the chance that Olgun might yet manage, mystically or emotionally, to influence her actions or her words. Only when her friends were off—Faustine helping Robin to shuffle along as fast as her bad leg would permit, Robin staring back with wide eyes glinting in the glow of the streetlamps—did Shins force her shoulders to relax. She stepped into the road, drawing the rapier she'd thus far “neglected” to return to Paschal.

“Stop yelling at me!” she snapped as she reached the center of the road. Then, as she looked up at the roofs, blinking against the rain that seemed like it would never stop, “So much was awful, but I wouldn't have missed it. I love you, Olgun.”

She actually smiled, then, trying to remember the last time she'd felt him so utterly stunned. Lips tight to filter out the water, she took a single deep breath.

Her shout, when unleashed, seemed to stomp along the street, knocking on doors and windows as it passed. “You just going to stand
around all night screeching, Lisette? And what's with that, anyway? Got to be murder on your throat, and even you can't have a singing voice
that
bad. Is it a mating call? Is this deranged homicidal lunatic season already?”

A vaguely human-like blot, dark even against the gloom, shot from the roof down the street. It sailed in a sharp arc, an impossible leap, landing atop the building directly in front of Shins. A juddering
thump
announced her landing, but for the moment she remained too far from the edge for Shins to see.

“You'll have to excuse the screaming.” It sounded more like Lisette's voice, now, calling over the rain, though there remained something raspy, bestial within. “I'm still getting accustomed to controlling foreign emotions. And they are so
very
angry with you, little scab! Not as much as I am, but close!”

Foreign emotions?
Shins could come up with three or four ways to interpret that, and not a one of them were pleasant.

“It's almost funny, in a way,” the madwoman continued from above, her tone suggesting absolutely nothing at all in the way of amusement. “Such an intricate, interlocking plan, and all you had to do to bring it down was
open your fucking mouth!
”

“Well, it wasn't
that
easy. They took some convincing.”

“The godsdamned Houses haven't worked smoothly together in
decades
! It should never have happened. But that's what Widdershins does, isn't it? Find new and unexpected ways to bugger everything up! I should have killed you years ago, when I had the chance!”

“Uh, you never actually had—”

Something moved at the roof's edge. Shins tensed, waiting for whatever came next.

“Those friends you just oh so gallantly sent away?” Lisette purred from above. “I'm not chasing them down because you might use the opportunity to hide for a few more days, and I really want you to die tonight. But I want you to know that, once you're dead, I'm going to hunt them down. We're
going to make them suffer, body and soul, until they beg with their last sane thoughts for me to kill them, and then they're going to suffer more.

“And only because you care about them!”

Shins's breath came quick, now. Her clenched fingers left divots in the wet wrapping of the rapier's hilt. She felt it roaring up inside her, not merely her own anger but Olgun's, too.

“Then I guess,” she spat, “I'll just have to not die tonight!”

Lisette jumped, laughing, from the roof.

She landed hard in a crouch on the building's stoop, the impact spraying puddles in every direction. Although the nearest streetlight shone clear upon the doorway, she remained partially obscured. Shadows rolled and dripped from her arms, her legs, her shoulders, as though she were ridden by a variety of dark and fidgeting serpents.

Still, they were not so thick, those shadows, as to obscure her from Widdershins's sight, not with divine power augmenting the young thief's vision.

“Gods! You look terrible!”

A statement that was rather akin to telling a vampire he appeared “a tad pale.”

That crimson hair seemed straw-like, brittle, noticeable even matted and wet as it was. Her lips were cracked and broken, her gums—as Shins saw when she snarled—shrunken and retreating from her teeth. But worse, far worse, were her eyes.

Or what had been her eyes.

Sunken sockets held pools of a lumpy, viscous black, like ink mixed with the congealed fats scraped from atop an old stew. It sluiced down her face, leaving tarry streaks on her skin that the rain seemed powerless to touch. Water dribbled away from it, polluted and dark, but failing to dilute the stuff even slightly.

“You should see it from my side,” Lisette sneered. “I'm going to need months to recover. Maybe I never will.

“Oh, but it's worth it! They're here with me, you see—
and
they're
painting the walls with my other enemies, at the same time!” Her face twisted into an almost conspiratorial smirk. “That's people you care about, dying horribly as we speak, in case you weren't sure. If a part of me is the price they need to manifest like that, I'm
thrilled
to pay!”

Oh, gods! No, no, no, who else has she—

A steadying hand and whispered emotions stopped her before her thoughts drove her to hysterics.
Don't think about that. Can't be distracted; that's what she wants. Focus on her, worry about the rest later…

As if there would
be
a later.

Instead, hoping the sounds of the storm would hide any of the tremor she couldn't quite banish from her voice, Widdershins said, “You may feel different when you're too shriveled up and pathetic to use a chamber pot without a pulley, three assistants, and a mule.”