He felt his strength returning. Blood flowed beneath his bandages, and his face felt like broken glass, but in spite of his pain he was revitalized.
With a last glance at Ijanna he carried on down the hill.
Twenty-Eight
Mother
, Kol thought.
Please. Help me.
Kol, leader of the band of Chul who until recently had resided in the city of Ebonmark, where they’d kept to the shadows and preyed on the weak while searching for the Dream Witch, stumbled up the hill in agony.
Pain rippled across his body. They’d never imagined the Dream Witch was so powerful. Echoes of hurt sliced through to his very soul. Each step was like walking on burning coals, even with the Skull of the Moon…
because
of the Skull of the Moon.
She somehow turned it against it – our own power, our own weapon.
Kol’s fleshless face stung like fire. Dirt and sand had pasted to the raw blood. He’d had no choice but to tear the skin away – he sensed the sharp energy tearing through his mind, felt the force hammering at the inside of his skull, and he had to remove the threat to his life before it was too late. He tasted his own blood, choked on pieces of his skin. Sticky flesh clung to the insides of his fingernails.
He delighted in pain, feasted on it, whether it was his own or that of another, but Kol had never felt torment such as this. Terrifying emotions he’d kept suppressed since his conversion to the Chul all came rushing back at him. He was weakened by waves of desolation and loss. Tears of blood streamed down his face, bitter to the taste and hot as acid on his mangled cheeks.
He advanced up the slope with his curved longsword in hand. The blade was serrated along its back edge, the hilt protected by a clawed guard. He’d killed dozens with that weapon, and before his time was done he’d kill again.
As terrible as the pain was, he wouldn’t let it overwhelm him.
I am Kol, leader of the Ebonmark pact, strongest of the Witch Mother’s Chul warriors. And no magic-yielding whore will best me.
Haunting images flashed through his mind, pain that wasn’t his, memories belonging to others. Kol was reliving the dying moments of all of the people he’d killed.
He saw his own face, the pale visage stained with scars and fetishes, teeth filed to points, dark hair pulled back with clasps of silvered bone. He saw blood run from his mouth as he snarled in fury, felt his own hands reach into his body and pull an unborn child from his torn womb. He saw himself gnaw on a foot as it dangled from tendrils of sinew and blood, ram his blade in and out of his stomach, stalk through the dark for a crying child he intended to torture and kill.
Kol felt other people’s fear and pain over and over again, saw himself through his victim’s eyes, felt his body torn, his entrails ripped free, the last breath of life squeezed from his mouth
No!
Pappa?
A voice froze him in place and echoed through his body like poison. At first he thought it was just another fragment from someone else’s dream, a vestige of one of his victim’s minds, but it only took him a moment to realize that wasn’t the case.
It can’t be her.
Kol’s blade sent up sparks as he ran it across the stones on the hill. He saw the big man up above, the soldier, who was hobbled and moved with an uncertain gait. At full strength Kol knew he could take him, but between the burns on his arms and chest and with so much blood lost he feared he might not be up to dealing with the brute.
Fear. There is no fear. You
know
no fear.
His feet stamped slow and heavy as he climbed. Everything shone green in the light of the moon. Kol pushed himself forward, poured every last bit of his strength into his single-minded resolve – he would take the Dream Witch, the source of his agony. He would send the bitch to meet her fate and make sure she suffered every step of the way
.
Pappa?
No.
It was no dream fragment, no shred of someone else’s mind. That voice was from his past, his weak past, the life he’d long since abandoned.
I’m no longer of that world. No longer human. That was another man, a weak man. Soft.
Kol’s mind blazed with madness. He howled up at the sick moon. Images of his daughter being tortured and sacrificed played out in his mind’s eye, the first offering he’d made to the Witch Mother in exchange for a new beginning, for the role of a hunter in the new order.
He felt something shift in his pack: a token he’d taken from Ebonmark. For some reason memory of his daughter
Not your daughter, His!
made him think of it, made him realize it would hold meaning to this man more than it would to the Dream Witch. He pulled it loose and held it high, then charged up the hill to meet his fate.
Twenty-Nine
Kath’s blood froze when the Chul came into the moonlight. The skin had been ripped from the man’s face, and his neck and arms were black and charred. His wild black hair swayed as he ran, a nightmare with fangs and a bloodied sword. His eyes were wild with rage and madness.
Kath steeled himself. He braced his weight on his good leg and stood against one of the waist-high stones. Hurt blazed down his shoulder, and his head swam.
As the Chul drew close something flashed in the moonlight. A head. It looked artificial, like the bust of some demented doll, half-rotted, its hair knotted and tangled. Petrified eyes stared out at nothing, and a dried-out tongue lolled from its dead mouth.
But as the cannibal drew close Kath saw that it was no doll. It was Julei.
His sister, his smart and sweet little sister, who was barely nine-years-old. The semblance was a mockery, an uncanny and grotesque toy.
It can’t be.
They’d ripped his baby sister’s head from her body and carried it across the wastelands like a trophy. He saw her on the stairs, looking at him and crying, heard her singing softly in her room, saw her sitting there on the bed with her many-named cat.
Kath screamed. His pain forgotten, he launched himself forward.
The Chul was fast and ducked beneath Kath’s swing and countered with his own strike, but Kath battered the weapon aside with a clang of steel on steel. He grabbed the blade of the cannibal warrior’s sword in his hand and pulled it away, ripping it from the other man’s grip. Blood squirted out through his ripped gauntlet, but Kath barely felt anything.
The Chul grappled him head on, pushing Kath against a stone and knocking the air from his lungs. They both struggled for the axe. Kath’s muscles strained with effort and sweat poured down his face. He was larger and stronger, but the Chul was more agile, and just as Kath thought he was getting the upper hand the cannibal reached down and dug his fingers into the wound in Kath’s leg, ripping the tender flesh and tearing at muscle and meat. Pain tore through his thigh.
Kath threw himself forward and brought his considerable weight down on top of the Chul. They fell onto the discarded sword and snapped it over a loose stone. Kath reached around, found the broken tip and rammed it into the cannibal’s stomach, once, twice, a third time, somehow imagining if he could only plunge it in deep enough that Julei would be okay, that it would all be some cruel trick, that killing this maniac would bring her back. Blood covered Kath’s arms. He tasted guts in his teeth.
The Chul tried to rise, but there was little left of his abdomen. Kath was on the verge of passing out but he stood up, lifted the axe, and brought the blade down on the Chul’s gruesome face. He left it there, and stumbled back.
His strength gone, Kath fell to his knees. He started to moan, which built to a hoarse cry. He couldn’t stop. He wanted to collapse in on himself. Tears poured from his face, and Kath clutched the ground, fingernails dug in the earth, clawing, searching, trying to dig his way to somewhere else, somewhere safe, somewhere he’d never met Ijanna, where none of this had ever happened. A place without pain.
He dug for a long time, and soon his bloodsoaked arms were covered with dust. After a while he passed out there on the ground, the severed head of his baby sister just out of reach.
Thirty
Ijanna woke a short time later. It didn’t take her long to realize what had happened.
I’m sorry, Kath. I’m so sorry.
There were no words to describe his pain. His physical wounds she could heal, and did. Veil energies poured from her hands and soaked through his skin like warming liquid, knitting his torn flesh, mending ripped muscles and replenishing the blood he’d lost.
But there was little she could do for the injuries sustained to his soul. Nothing and no one could fill the void left by the loss of a loved one.
I should know.
Thunder sounded in the distance. The red night felt suddenly claustrophobic, yet they were as far away from any other living beings as they could possibly imagine.
The air smelled of blood. Once Kath woke Ijanna gently led him onto the plains beyond the apex of the hill, where they made their way towards a rock formation at the edge of another stretch of twisted desert. Clouds massed up above, and the world seemed smeared in oil.
They rested near the rocks, at the mouth of a shallow cave. Kath silently stared into the wastes.
I’ve been the cause of so much pain.
She watched him, but held her tears in check. She hated herself at that moment. She told herself this could have been avoided if she’d done what the Allaji mystics had raised her to do, if she’d just accepted her fate. More than just her own life was at stake, and every moment she spent trying to avoid her destiny put somebody else in danger. How many had already died because of her, and how many more
would
die because she refused to do what needed to be done?
You selfish bitch
, she thought. You
did this. You killed his family, and many others.
She remembered her infant son, saw his dead eyes staring up at her. Every day she thought about him. Sometimes she still felt the weight of his corpse strapped across her back.
Ijanna watched for any signs of trouble. She looked at Kath and hoped he hated her, hoped her magic would allow him that. She didn’t want to lose his company, but she didn’t want there to be any illusions as to whose fault this was.
Neither of them said a word. His face was a mask.
Ijanna’s thoughts were so distant she almost didn’t recognize the voice in her head as belonging to someone else. It was just a whisper, a tickle at the edge of her thoughts. A sending.
North
, it said. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, young or old, for it was more wind than voice.
We’ll protect you.
From what?
she thought. The link between their minds was powerful, and though the sender shielded their identity she could tell they weren’t far away.
Jlantrians
, the voice said.
They’ve been watching you, but they can’t see you anymore. Something you did damaged the blades.
The blades?
She looked down at the
thar’koon. What about them? Who are you?
A friend,
the voice said.
Seek us to the north. We march towards a common goal.
And then the voice was gone.
Ijanna sat for a moment, her skin flushed with fear. The promise of protection felt far too obvious to be a trap. She looked down at the swords, and cursed to herself.
Of course they modified the weapons to track you,
she thought bitterly. When she’d tapped into the
thar’koon’s
power so she could destroy the Chul she must have somehow disrupted whatever it was the Jlantrians had done.
She readied herself to move and looked at Kath, who remained as still as a stone. She wondered if he’d come with her, or if he’d stay behind and die.
I’m sorry.
She reached out with her mind, tried to trace the Sending back to its origin. The voice from the other end wouldn’t be easy to find, but after a moment she noted traces, a masked and shadowy presence. She pressed at it with her thoughts, placed pressure on the connection.
Who are you?
she asked.
How did you know we were here?
Silence. Ijanna waited, watching the area. A cold sensation ran down her spine.
My name is Gilder,
the voice said, unmistakably male this time.
Our mutual friend asked me to watch out for you while I was here. He
’
s still grateful for what you did to help him in the camps.
Ijanna’s heart leapt into her throat. It couldn’t be.