Authors: Tim Akers
Even her lone companion had abandoned her. The shaman lay in a pool of his own fury, confused by the profane dimensions of their captivity. She tried to approach him, but the fool only lashed out. Finally, he gathered himself and melted into the rock, taking his anger with him.
Alone, she witnessed the first leaf fall, somehow visible despite the blackness. It appeared in the blood that streaked the ceiling, emerging damp and gory from between the stones, like a jester’s sleight of hand. It plopped to the floor. Another leaf followed, and another, each less bloody, more whole, until a cascade of autumn leaves tumbled from the ceiling. Something stirred in Maeve’s memory. Hope.
The floor opened, and a season breached the world. It grew in a furious tornado of autumn color, leaves and dripping sunlight, warm and amber. An entire column of leaves snaked through the shrine and up the stairs, twisting and wailing as it fled the profanity of its sacred heart. The sound was overwhelming.
When it was past, two figures huddled in the black. A man and a woman, shadow and flame, winter and sun. They exchanged frightened words as they hurried up the stairs, following the last vestige of light that had preceded them. The woman nearly had to carry the man. They both looked on the verge of death.
Maeve settled and waited. They would be back. Death would always bring them back.
* * *
The god that hung over the Fen Gate was unlike anything Ian had ever seen. It transformed the world in its wake. The forest stirred with gheist-ridden life, the trees groaning from their roots, their limbs uplifted in supplication, their leaves flying like flocks of golden birds.
In his limited time with the pagans, Ian had learned to sense the hidden spirits of the world, had grown accustomed to the subtle touch of their force. Now his skin was alive with burning swirls of energy.
From his position on the parapet he watched in awe as the god gathered into a storm above the castle. It loomed over the ruined village, bent, ran a hand the size of a horse over the wreckage of one building, then another. It seemed to be feeling its way forward, and as the god bent to the earth, Ian saw that there was a seed at its core, a human figure wrapped in light and curled into a fetus. It looked to be a woman, fists over her face, hair floating around her.
The god stood and roared, a sound that echoed through Ian’s bones and blistered his blood. The wreckage at its feet shuffled away like a pile of leaves scattered by a child, flakes of stone and timber drifting up into the air, and then disappearing completely. Wherever it moved, clouds of leaves spun in rings in the sky like multi-colored mist, pinwheeling around their host.
The wind tasted of dust and autumn.
“What in the sweet hells…” Sir Brennan muttered. He was standing near Ian, helping organize the defense. All around, men stopped whatever they were doing and stared, slack-jawed, at the gargantuan sight.
“Get everyone inside,” Ian barked. “Tenerran, Suhdrin, everyone.”
“But, the walls…”
“Forget the walls. Forget everything.” Ian grabbed the knight by the shoulders and pushed him toward the great hall. “Get as many people as you can into the crypts. Perhaps the stone will provide some protection.”
A tendril of swirling leaves spilled from the sky like a tornado, falling into a courtyard. Everyone it struck was ground into bones and rags of flesh. The courtyard filled with screams as all who survived—knight and priest and page and lord—ran for cover. Barrels of pitch overturned, wagons shuddered, and in places the walkways along the walls buckled at the violence of their retreat.
Ian waited until the worst of the surge had passed, then he turned to the walls and started to climb to the god above. Wind battered his face, and heavy, wet globs of sunlight spattered against him as he made his way up. Pausing at a landing, he looked down. The fields beyond the walls were in chaos. The autumn god was scattering the Suhdrin forces like leaves in the wind.
The war was over.
It was destroying Tenerran lives, too. The castle was coming apart in bits and flecks, jagged stones that joined the wind to cut flesh. Ian’s armor was tattered by the time he reached the highest tower in the Fen Gate. Shielding his face from the worst of the assault, Ian peered up at the looming form of the Fen god. It was massive, a pillar of divine light cloaked in bands of autumn leaves, its eyes as bright and amber as the setting sun. There were other figures, warped and strange, gheists moving within the body of their god, and…
His eyes went wide with surprise and recognition. From this vantage, he could see who hung at the center—who was at the heart of the monster.
“Gwen!” Ian bellowed, but his words were lost in the maelstrom. Clinging to the wall, he thought back to the way he had felt when the hound had passed him, trying to emulate the pagan unfolding of heart and mind that had led him to this point. He tasted the storm, and knew its fury. “Gwen!” he shouted again. “Stop! You’re destroying everything—your home, your family, those you love… you have to stop!”
Suddenly he went rigid, unable to move or speak.
Despite the roar of the storm, the Fen god had noticed him. It turned and bent toward him, and reached out with a huge, amorphous hand.
Then there was silence.
H
IS EYES OPENED
to a world of honey-smooth light. He was floating. Layers of amber clouds hovered in a sky flecked with brighter gold, and the endless sparks of butterfly-like life that fluttered through the yellowing air.
Gwen hung close by, still in the fetal position. Her hair had grown into a ragged bush twined with leaves and pebbles and scraps of leather. Her skin was the color of beaten copper. Her fists were clenched and angry. Ian wasn’t sure she could hear him, wasn’t sure she was really here, really herself.
“Gwendolyn?” he said tentatively. “Gwen?”
“That name is dead,” the sky answered in a voice that was near and far, that echoed and came from inside his head. “The guardian house has fallen.”
Ian tried to understand, and suddenly he knew. Somehow Colm Adair was dead, and with him his wife and child. Yet…
Sacombre.
“Gwendolyn still lives,” Ian said. “The iron is still in her blood.”
“Iron is the earth’s harvest. Iron and stone.” Gwen shifted in her glowing nest of hair. “Iron does not bend to the barking of dogs.” At that Ian found himself floating away from the huntress. He bent his will and moved closer.
“What are you doing, Gwen? What do you hope to accomplish in destroying your home? Your people?”
Only silence. In the quiet, Ian could make out a distant, grinding roar, and realized that at the limits of his vision he could see the storm wall and its stone teeth, tearing through the castle. He tried to focus on slowing the destruction, and for a second he could
feel
the edge of the storm, but then lost it. He was reaching to try again when Gwen spoke.
“Do not,” she said, and she looked up. Her eyes were twin sparks of golden light, burning in her face. “You are here as a guest. Do not interfere.” Her mouth didn’t move, yet he heard her.
“There are people dying out there.”
“Are you one of them?” she asked, and the sky echoed her words.
“It’s your family that’s dying,” Ian said. “The people of Fenton, of the Gate. Your father’s loyal men. The people who left their hearths and homes to defend your name.” He paused, clenching his fists against the weight of wind that pushed him away. “The people your family betrayed, Gwen. We thought you faithful!”
The air tensed around him, and a wrinkle formed on Gwen’s brow. She turned to face him, and a storm arose at his feet.
“We are the only faithful,” the sky answered. “The last faithful. You are the betrayer, Ian of dogs. These deaths are on you! Your father! Your blood!”
The storm that lashed his skin was bitter and cold. Leaves as sharp as steel cut his face and hands. He bore down, dragging himself closer to Gwen and her nest of living hair.
“That’s no excuse!” he yelled. “We have died to protect you! My father has waged a war to honor your name. Too many of the faithful…”
“Do not speak of faith,” the sky replied, and there was a hint of thunder in its voice. “The tribe of hounds was the first to bow to the new gods. Your hallow is empty, and your gods are absent.”
“No, that’s not true,” Ian insisted. “I have seen the hound. It led me here. The hound brought me to you.”
“To stop me?” Gwen asked. “To rob me of my vengeance? Do you mean to stand with Sacombre, Ian of hounds?”
“Sacombre will pay for what he’s done, but not if you destroy everything around him. Not if you kill the very people who looked to your father for protection!”
“I have no trust in the justice of your ashen god,” she snarled. “I will count the cost and exact the payment myself. You won’t stop me. No one will stop me.”
She curled away from him again. The storm redoubled. Ian found himself pinwheeling through the air. Behind him, the churning wall of destruction crept closer. If he was thrown out of the towering god now, he would be torn to shreds.
“I can’t… let you… do that!” he gasped. He bent his will against the sky, and found his heart lacking. He was floating at the whim of the storm, spinning madly through the air. Ian became just another piece of flotsam in Gwen’s destructive maelstrom, and flew over the castle like a discarded puppet.
He looked down at what remained of the Fen Gate. The stone walls were falling apart, shuffling into the air like cards of stone, the roofs of the outbuildings torn away. Far below, the bodies of the dead and dying tumbled close to the ground, smashing against the buildings that still stood, breaking into horrible rags of flesh and bone. The god was burrowing into the doma, cracking the shuttered dome like a shell and scattering the holy instruments of the Celestial faith into the wind. Ian shivered to see such destruction. This was not what he had expected of war.
This was not what he expected of his gods.
Movement near the central tower of the castle, miraculously intact, caught his eye. A familiar scrap of robe flashed past a window. Ian recognized his father, and a half-dozen others, moving carefully through the upper chambers.
They were hunting.
Ian twisted in the storm. He whistled past the window where he had seen his father, scraping along the stone wall to bump unceremoniously against the windows of a farther chamber. As he struggled to right himself, he peered inside.
Sacombre stood over the body of Colm Adair, his hands spread in benediction, the heart blood of the dying baron smeared on his face.
“Gwen!” Ian yelled, though the storm tore his words away. “I’ve found your justice! There is your priest!”
The storm guttered like a torch, then Ian was snatched up into the sky once again. He felt for a moment the wiry grasp of fur between his fingers and the stone-hard knobby spine of the hound against his chest, but the image passed.
The wind died down, and he was standing beside Gwendolyn Adair. She seemed more herself, though there was still a feral madness to her hair, her eyes, the bright glitter of her skin.
“The high inquisitor…” she snarled.
“My father hunts him. You can end this, Gwen. There is no need to destroy the castle if you can strike Sacombre down.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes…” A crown of lightning and wicker graced her head, bright light dancing along the whip-thin branches of the mask, and she was arcing down toward the castle.
The god of storms followed in her wake.
S
PLINTERED SHARDS OF
stained glass littered the interior of the doma, the icons of faith scattered around the stations of sun and moon. The chimes used to denote the hours of Cinder’s ascension were dashed against the wall by a howling wind. The bodies of the choir eternal lay scattered among the pews.
Malcolm hurried through, scanning for any sign of life. He thought the high inquisitor might be here, preparing the sanctum’s defense against the pagan god, but there was no sign of Tomas Sacombre or his attendants. He took the priest’s door at the back of the doma, traveling through Frair Humble’s meager lodgings, then entered the labyrinth of back corridors and servant halls that formed the guts of the castle.
Just as he exited the doma, he heard a tremendous crash behind him. The sanctuary collapsed, the wreckage lifted into the air by the storm outside. Malcolm found himself on the ground, his ears ringing.
“Gods bless,” he muttered to himself, then crawled forward and into the deeper chambers of the castle.
More bodies, more silence, the only sound the distant hammer of god against the walls. He continued on to the family’s corridors.
The great hall was choked with the dead and dying. They were lined up in tidy rows along the walls, attended by the remnants of the doma’s clergy and guarded by knights of Adair and Blakley. Sir Brennan paced quietly near the door to the courtyard, sword in hand.
“My lord,” the knight said. “Have you seen your son?”
“What is happening?” Malcolm said, ignoring the question. “Where is Lord Adair?”
“The baron is missing. I have sent messengers to his rooms, but none have returned. I was about to organize a search party.”
“I will lead that,” Malcolm said. “Do you know anything about this storm?”
“No, my lord. It seemed to rise from the stones themselves.”
“Something is buried in this place,” Malcolm grumbled. “Something best forgotten, I suspect. What force do you still command?”
“A dozen knights of the banner, mostly of Adair, a few of Blakley. Jaerdin and Roard have reinforced the gatehouse. Hopefully Halverdt’s men will be less likely to attack their own blood. The rest are spread throughout the castle, trying to hunt down whatever is killing our servants.”
“What other danger is there?” Malcolm asked.
“There remain blades in the shadows. Whether they are spies sent by Halverdt, or some darker emissary, we do not know. The corridors are far from safe.” Brennan motioned to an icon of Strife that hung about his neck, hastily formed from the wreckage of the doma and a length of rough cord. “The men have taken to wearing charms, my lord.”