The Assassin King (48 page)

The world stopped spinning for a moment, it seemed to him, as it always did when one of the denizens of the Vault was about to be extinguished, leaving behind nothing to taint the earth.

The beast before him was in its death throes; he could see the devouring darkness of its spirit locked in the struggle to escape the woman's body it had been inhabiting for years before that body died. Even as it grappled with its looming demise, its hatred was as caustic as acid, hissing and gurgling in fury as it writhed on the ground, blood pouring from eyes locked on him in malicious fury. Smoke, acrid and sulfurous as the stench of the Vault, began to issue forth from the demon's chest. Her eyes bulged as the blood swelled in her brain, her back arched rigidly as the pathways to it burst. The air went suddenly dry on the verge of cracking, rent with the heat of evil being violently torn from its earthly connection. The smoke that had emerged from Portia's sundered chest swirled angrily, then dissipated, as the beast was re-

turned to its vulnerable noncorporeal form, choking and shuddering in the grip of the Dhracian's net of wind.

The body fell to the ground, limp and without life.

Rath felt the woman fall, felt the strangling and twitching in his hand and heart as the invisible threads that bound its heart to his tugged, growing weaker with each breath, like a fish fighting on a line. The beast would continue to struggle for a few moments longer, he knew; being from the Older Pantheon, Hrarfa had a good deal more strength than the demons he had most recently destroyed.

Each twist, each attempt to sustain itself, caused Rath's heart to cramp. The unbreakable bonds of wind that tied them together were threaded through his arteries; every tug was like a knife in the chest. But Rath had sustained worse, and oddly, the pain cheered him, did his heart good. Each contraction was weaker than the one before, a sure sign that the spirit would shortly follow the body in death and into oblivion.

And so he was far too submerged in the thrall of the moment, in the import of the event, in the revel of a thousand years of searching finally coming to fruition to be aware that the glen had been entered. Until the blow that caught him in the back with the force of a lance at full charge, snapping half of his ribs, flinging him across the glen and headfirst into a beech tree.

The shock kept him conscious, at least at first.

Faron stood still for a moment, watching the man in the robe he had just slapped away crumple to the ground like a pile of cloth.

There was a smell in this place that had brought him to it, a dry burning of the air that reminded him on an innate level of the father he had lost in the sea. He had followed that odor to the glen and had come up on a sight he didn't understand, except that whatever was being wrought was bringing back that loss in his mind. A loss he had not been able to fathom, let alone accept. The heft of the man was nothing; he had been flung with little more than a glancing blow. Faron looked around the glen, but saw nothing. Aid me! Please. The voice scratched against his ears; the stone titan slowly shook his head from side to side, recognizing the tenor of it. It was the same desperate wheedle that sometimes could be felt, if not heard, in the air around the Baron of Argaut, the man the world had once known as Michael, the Wind of Death.

Except that it was decidedly feminine.

Faron's mind was too primitive, too malformed by birth, rebirth, and circumstance, to grasp what was happening. Something primal in him warned him to ran, some long-ago sense of self-preservation and horror bequeathed to him by his long-dead mother, yet at the same time there was also something familiar, something entrancing about the voice that also rang in the core of his being. Please—shelter me. I am dying.

Faron turned to leave the glen. Please. The voice was fading, though its tone was more desperate. We are kin, you and I—there is dark fire in you. You and I are kin. I will nurture you, teach you. Don't let me die— please. Shelter me; take me on.

Faron stopped. For all mat the words were frantic, there was a truth in them that could not be denied. The concept of kin was one he had long since abandoned, but now, the possibility of belonging, of being related, connected, of not being alone in the world, made him hesitate, like a child longing to touch the fire that he knew could bum him.

Please. He had seen his father battle the demon that long ago he had taken on; that demon was as much his sire as his father had been, though one had created his body and the other his spirit. It was an ugly arrangement. And yet it had kept the man he loved, alone among all the people in the world, alive throughout time. And given him power beyond imagination.

Together, we would be invincible, the voice whispered, light as air now in its last moments. I know so many corners of the world, so many secrets. Please, please—trust me. Shelter me.

Had Faron been a man of flesh, and not of stone, he might have recognized the seduction in the voice. It was husky, even as the demon was slipping away into the ether, enticing in a way that spoke to the most primal urges in him, the longing for connection, for power.

For identity beyond that of being Michael's child and tool, and Talquist's seer and toy.

Slowly the titan nodded acceptance, answering the request with an inner surrender, knowing fully that the creature he was about to accept into the shell of his body would control him without a second thought.

Yes, he assented. Come unto me.

The glade suddenly became warmer, the air gaining heat and power at the same moment.

For only the second time in known history, the act of voluntary surrender to one of the Unspoken was accomplished.

The air in the glade sharpened to cracking as the lore of primordial earth blended with the demon's dark fire and the ether that was extant in the blood of Faron's Seren mother, all now fused within the statue of Living Stone.

The demon shrieked joyfully within Faron's ears as it recognized its own, the seed of tainted fire that had been bequeathed from his father. With your lore and mine together, we are truly godlike, it whispereq, reveling in the solidity of stone flesh and the spark of ethereal magic.

We alone have the power to find and take the Sleeping Child—and then the Vault will be opened. The voice dropped to an almost maternal croon. And all the world will burn beneath your feet—my child. The demon's mutability, its innate power to change form and aspect, coursed through the titanic body, refining its features. The milky eyes that had at one time been out of place in the rough-hewn stone sharpened, became more lifelike and clear, growing lids that allowed him to blink and close them against the grit of dust. The hands stretched and extended, the rough edges resolving, the place in the palm from which the stone sword had been torn smoothed into the image of calloused skin. Each finger appeared to grow knuckles, each knuckle defined by a series of tiny grooves in the smooth earthen skin. The swirls of clay that had at one time suggested hair lengthened and became heavier, with each individual strand visible. The muscles of the shoulders, torso, genitals, and legs lengthened and striated until they appeared as human tissue, pulsing as if they were alive.

Faron raised his head to the moon, basking in the light, reveling in the sensation of wind passing over the tiny earthen hairs in the smooth skin of his stone arms.

A rasping gasp on the other side of the glen caught his attention. The titan turned to where the man he had struck had been flung. He was lying on his side, clutching his chest, his sinewy hand held shakily aloft in the breeze that rustled the newborn leaves on the trees and scrub bushes all around him. Behind him he could hear someone approaching. Someone comes, the demon's voice cautioned. Kill the Dhracian, and let us be gone from here. Faron lunged across the glen. Rath lay still, struggling to breathe, feeling the hiss of air in the back of his throat from his punctured lung. He willed himself to keep from losing consciousness, softly canting into the wind a report to the Gaol of what he was witnessing, knowing that no more dire news had been sent in all the time of their upworld history.

A favorable breeze caught the words and carried them aloft, into the sky, where they would circle the wide world, bearing their dread tidings to those who could hear them.

The titan's volcanic blue eyes came to rest on him. A light of malice entered them, causing them to gleam in the reflected light of the moon, the edges tinged with the red rim of blood that occasionally betrayed demonic possession.

And then it was coming for him. Rath reached up with a shaking hand.

For all that the currents of air had been confounding him since his arrival in the Wyrmlands, a beneficent wind was blowing through the glade, a strong, warm updraft with a heavier gust behind it. Thank you, he thought as the titan bore down upon him.

Just as it arrived, Rath disappeared into the wind.

The sound of cracking branches and pulsing waves of blue Sight flooded the small glen in the woods beneath the moon. Ashe froze. The dryness of the air was unmistakable, the thin charge that hung, like static energy, from every current of air. Great power had been expended here, power that was primordial, elemental. The wyrm within his blood could feel it, and shrank away at the intensity of it. And yet there was nothing to be seen, no scorched ground or trees, no violent upheaval or signs of destruction. The breeze blew gently through the

glade, rustling the infant leaves that had just grown large enough to flutter on their stems in these early days of spring.

Ashe slowed his steps. It seemed to him that this innocent setting had a taint to it, an odor of malice, of deadly intent, but then the whole world was beginning to taste that way to him.

A prickling ran down his neck and over his skin; his dragon sense urged him forward, warning him of what he would find.

Deeper in the glade the womarrXbody was lying, curled as

if she were sleeping.

The Lord Cymrian exhaled dismally, then came to her side.

“Portia,” he said brokenly. He crouched down and put his hand against her neck, but it was merely an attempt to deny what he already knew. There was no breath, no warmth, no heartbeat, no sign of life—in fact, all sense that life had ever resided within her was missing.

Her skin was as cold as marble, her body frozen in the rictus of death.

On her cheek a bloody tear had frozen.

“M'lord—”

“Stop, Owen. Spare me your consolation; I don't deserve it. My family's bane has always been its temper, its lack of control, and I am just the most recent one to stain our collective soul with the destruction of innocent life.” Ashe took off his cloak and gently laid it over her as if it were a blanket. “My father would find this ironic, I have no doubt. All the years I walked the world unseen, hidden from the eyes of men, with no power or authority of my own, I condemned him for the decisions he made, for the suffering he willingly visited upon others in the accomplishment of his goals, all of which were intended to serve the greater good. And now that I am the one who holds the responsibility for the Alliance in my hands, I have inaugurated the prosecution of what will no doubt be a grim and devastating war with the blood of an innocent peasant.”

“Innocent peasants die in war all the time, m'lord,” said Gerald Owen flatly. “If you'll forgive my impertinence, you've been in enough conflicts to know this, have fought in enough battles to be inured to it. You were the one who told us that what is to come will change us all. Did you think that you were above it happening to you?”

Ashe just continued to watch the dead woman's face as clouds passed before the moon, sending shadows across it.

Gerald Owen bent to the ground. “Come, we must return to Highmeadow. I'll carry the girl.”

“No,” said Ashe. “I'll do it.” He gathered the body in his arms and carried it back to the horses, keeping it before him in the saddle as they made their way home.

Deep in his mind, mixed with the grief and guilt that was threatening to consume him, was the unmistakable and undeniable sensation of relief.

Palace of Jierna Tal

The wild ringing of bells from the distant garrison, caught and picked up by the carillon towers of Jierna Tal, dragged Talquist from his repose.

The bells of the garrisons along the border had been ringing regularly day and night each changing of duty shift since the invasion, or to signal comings and goings of troops and divisions. Until now he had barely noticed them. But this pealing was different; there was an urgency, an insistency that rang with portent and caused dread in the Emperor Presumptive's heart.

Talquist rose from his thickly besilked bed and robed himself. Then he went to the balcony and looked out over the dark streets of Jiema'sid glowing in the lanternlight and the radiance of a hundred duty fires burning at the patrol centers. The smoke of the foundries belched into the night sky, on the other side of the city, hovering in the air like a thousand ghosts before the wind carried it into the desert. “Why are the bells ringing?” he demanded of one of the guards stationed there. “Go and discover this.” The soldier bowed and hurried away down the inner steps.

He was back several agonizing minutes later.

“The titan returns, m'lord,” he said. The emperor's brows arched, then knit in consternation.

He looked down over the balcony railing to the main street far below, where noise was beginning to issue forth the way it had not long ago, when Faron had first returned to the site of his animation, his birth upon the great weighing, plate of the Scales. Then, it had been the noise of panic and terror, as the titanic statue had lumbered down the street, smashing oxcarts and destroying anything in its way, most especially any troops that tried to interdict it before it reached Jierna Tal.

This time, however, the sounds were muted, confused, but orderly.

The commanders had apparently ordered more light, for the signal fire braziers atop each street post roared suddenly aflame at the far end of the street, casting illuminated pools on the cobblestones below. The titan was, indeed, approaching, casting an enormous shadow that twisted against the buildings in the dark as it neared. The gait was somehow different. Unlike the lumbering statue that had violently lurched down the street, this time Faron's stride was measured, even; he walked slowly, standing erect, with a control that Talquist had not seen before. Walking down the center of the thoroughfare, ignoring troops and carts, he approached Jierna Tal with a manner that in a being with less innate power and musculature would not even be seen as threatening.