Arc 8: Chapter 43: Kiss of Death |
Rysanthe limped over to me as her magic faded, leaving the throne room lit only by somber moonlight once more. I showed her Ildeban’s silently snarling head.
“What now?” I asked her.
In answer, my fellow Doombearer glanced up. I followed her gaze and cursed. Evangeline was gone. She must have fled when I’d charged Ildeban, during that moment when all eyes were directed away from her. I moved to give chase even as I realized.
Rysanthe grabbed my arm with skeletal fingers, stopping me. She was mostly skeleton then, only a faint impression of elfin features hovering about her silver bones, but her grip had strength in it.
“What?” I asked impatiently. “We can’t let her get away.”
Rysanthe tried to speak, but even as she started to form the words her lips melted back to reveal a tongueless mouth. Tzanith, who’d approached us by then, translated for the other elf.
“The true threat is ended,” the pixie told me. “And you are injured.”
Rysanthe just nodded.
They were right. I felt my injuries, though at a remove, partly from lingering battle fever and in part due to the cold necromantic power flowing through my limbs. I felt cold, sharp. Ready to end this.
Neither of them argued, though I sensed their reluctance to let me go. I looked to where Penric knelt with Lisette and Olliard. Lisette was conscious, a good sign, and gave me a nod.
I handed Ildeban’s head to Tzanith. “This goes to the Briar.” I glanced to Rysanthe. “Nowhere else.”
I could not read that death’s mask as it regarded me. Rysanthe had been given her own mission, one that did not fully align with mine. She’d given me the opportunity to subdue Ildeban without destroying him, however, so I felt she would cooperate. Tzanith was stronger even than her just then, and loyal to Maerlys over the Choir, so it seemed the safest choice.
I would defy Umareon after all. The Briar would remain intact, its guardian given over to his gaolers for punishment. Maintaining the status quo, even if it sat uneasy with me.
Tzanith took the severed head without complaint. The glare Ildeban passed over all of us might have been immolating, if he were Zosite, but fortunately for us he was only a step removed from mortal. I caught the pixie’s worried look and tried for a smile, though I imagine it looked more grim than reassuring.
“It’s alright,” I told her. “I’ll find her and put an end to this, one way or another. Can you gather my lance, make sure they’re seen to?”
Tzanith’s own smile had a weary edge. “You are a demanding man, Alken Hewer. I am not at my best either.”
My gaze fixed on her injured right eye, the one that’d shone such a tantalizing shade of gold when we’d first met at her father’s hall. Raania’s stone knife had dimmed it forever.
“I know,” I said. “This is almost over.”
I tore through the castle as fast as my legs would carry me, burning aura to chase away the pain of my wounds and grant me greater speed, more stamina. It was dangerous to work both my body and spirit this hard, but every second wasted gave Evangeline time to get away.
Later, I would learn more about what transpired outside the throne room that night. I would learn how Rysanthe had woken just as Emma and Hendry were trying to escape over the moat, how they’d been attacked by Ildeban’s squires as the irkish marauders burst forth from the Wend, rising from the lake itself like foul mermen. They would tell me how the reaper insisted on going back, leading them in a furious hall-to-hall battle against vampires and bloodthirsty changelings until they encountered Tzanith, even then engaged in a vicious duel with Raania.
Together, they’d chased the dhampir off. Then, with Emma and Hendry dealing with the Briar King’s reinforcements to buy us time and protect the palace’s embattled staff, Tzanith had flown Rysanthe into the throne room through the shattered roof, setting up the encounter I’d participated in.
I would learn how Alfonse Lorn, Lord of the Gilded Acres and cousin to the Crimsonbrand Knight, who I’d fought at the tournament in Garihelm, had actually been an ally to Amelia Hare. He bided his time and led many of the nobles against the monsters in the castle, bringing in reinforcements placed in the city over recent weeks. The Bannerfolk had not forgiven the horrors of the Pale Lady’s Winter, as that first bloody season of Evangeline’s rule was later called, and they’d never intended to follow her into heresy and damnation.
I did not then know that there would come a time when I would think them all fools for that choice, and believe that perhaps there is room in the world for virtuous devils. Evangeline was a true knight, one who loved her country, and though she could be cruel and had done evil, there were worse evils in the world, and I could not fight them all alone.
I took Vicar with me from the throne room, and had the pelt draped over my left shoulder as I approached the gates and the palace bailey where our carriage and chimera had been left even before the grand ball began.
“Can you track them?” I asked the devil.
“I have her scent,” Vicar confirmed. “She is fleeing west.”
West. She was fleeing to the Dawntowers, to the fortress of House Ark where it guarded over the Fences. If she reached that redoubt, then she would be untouchable to anything short of an army.
I took Morgause and tore through the city, which had transformed starkly since the fighting began. There were soldiers in the street, knights and levies loyal to Houses Brightling, Hare, Lorn, and many other Bannerland clans. They’d taken over the garrisons and the gates, a coup against the usurper many months in planning.
Evangeline and Ildeban could have destroyed all of them in a night. Would she have joined herself to the Briar King had me and Tzanith not been there to reveal his true scheme? Would she have seen through it on her own?
I couldn’t say.
The Bannerfolk allowed me to pass, perhaps thanks to some warning from Lady Amelia. There were exclamations of shock and awe as my scadumare flew through the night, my name whispered on the wind. There would be many tales about what happened in Tall Carreweir that night, about how Death had come for the usurper and her dark allies, how the Emperor had sent his devil and the Underworld its own scythebearer.
The truth of things, as always, remained in the memory of only a few.
“What do you intend?” Vicar asked me as Morgause brought us into the rolling plains beyond the city, skirting eastward along the main road. Perhaps he saw a shadow of my thoughts on my face, or simply knew me well.
I had Morgause sprinting fast enough that I couldn’t talk without the risk of biting my tongue off, so I said nothing. My sword was in my hand, a sliver of black ice beneath the moonlight, my armor clattering in rhythm with the chimera’s stride. My cloak remained with Rysanthe, for the sake of her modesty.
What did I intend? Evangeline deserved to die. So long as she lived, there remained the threat that she would simply build a new army of the undead, remain a thorn in the Accord’s side for years or even generations to come.
Yet, she’d rejected Ildeban’s offer. She was no ally to the Gorelion or to Reynard. She was evil, a Thing of Darkness, and yet…
She is not beyond redemption, Finn Nu had told me. And by God, there were greater monsters threatening us than Evangeline Ark.
Perhaps it was vanity. Perhaps I wanted to believe that her sins could be turned to good, so that I could believe it of myself. I’d been granted Tuvon’s power and authority during my ritual before Baille Os, and that had come with unexpected side effects. His shadow in my mind was one, my influence over ghosts and faeries, my own resolve to use the power rather than avoid it.
You gave Calerus a chance. He did as much evil along with his sister, and yet you let him be King of Talsyn. You would have let his sister go too, had she survived.
I would dwell on those thoughts often, later. All that mattered then was catching up to her.
That turned out to be easier than I expected. We did not have to go terribly far, perhaps a handful of miles from the city’s northern gate. Evangeline waited for me atop a hill, which wasn’t large but formed a dramatic break in the wide western plains of the Banner. An old burial mound, risen in the tradition of the west for the burial of both knights and the mounts who’d born them into battle. Cairns of river stone were placed about the hill’s face, grave markers as surely as any headstone or auremark.
The Queen of the Bannerlands stood atop that hill. Her checkered cape rustled about her in the night wind, and the Corpse Moon shone down to tint her pale hair to silver, her skin to marble. She seemed more an elf than a dead thing then, almost glowing, a valkyrie come to collect the souls of dead warriors.
She must have flown to get so far so quickly, I thought. I could imagine her fleeing the throne room in that fiendish form, taking to the skies over Tall Carreweir even as Amelia Hare sprung her coup.
Neither was she alone. Raania stood halfway up the hill, still dressed in red and holding her ancient blade. The dhampir had several fresh wounds, including an ugly burn mark at her right shoulder as though she’d been stuck through by a hot brand. I could imagine one of Tzanith’s auratic arrows piercing her there. There were several other vampires as well, including two Ark knights in pale steel and white capes, and the banshee-thing Tzanith had rebuked back in the ballroom.
I stopped Morgause some distance from the base of the hill. Evangeline’s guards tensed, brandishing their weapons, while Raania stepped forward with a furious snarl.
“Fly, my queen!” The dhampir cried out. “We will delay him!”
I had my own sword out, but made no move just yet. Evangeline had remained still during my approach, and even then watched me with a strange calm.
“No need, Raania.” Evangeline had been facing the moon, so she only showed me her side profile, but turned fully to me as she spoke.
Raania grimaced. “But—”
“He would slay each of you and hunt me all the way to the mountains,” Evangeline said in a firmer voice, sounding more like her usual imperious self. “Is that not right, Hewer?”
I shrugged. “This has to end, one way or another. You saw the city?”
In answer, Evangeline turned her attention east. I didn’t need to follow that look to know what she saw. Even from here, there were signal fires burning along Tall Carreweir’s walls, and the banners of many different clans flapping beneath the moon, where just hours earlier there had been the black ships of House Ark.
“I took a kingdom in a year,” Evangeline said in a musing tone. “And lost it in a night.”
I didn’t need to state the obvious. Even if she made new vampires and continued to lash out at the Houses of the Bannerlands, she would never subdue them again. They would be ready for her, and they would fight. The Accord would send reinforcements sooner or later, and there would be other Olliards. Perhaps even Inquisition, and Knights Penitent.
Instead, I asked a question. “Why did you refuse him? Ildeban. If you had taken his hand, back in the keep, then you would have won. You would have had an army that could cow anything the Accord might send at you.”
“And I would have been Queen of Darkness!” Evangeline threw her head back and let out a high, piercing laugh. It was an unrestrained sound, almost a shriek. “Yes, perhaps I should have! But I am as I am. I would not submit to my brother’s rule, nor would I bond myself to the Brightlings, even when it might have given me the throne I sought.”
She held her hands out in something like a shrug, almost as though feeling at fresh rain despite the clear skies.
Raania threw a worried glance back at her chosen queen. Strange, I thought, that the dhampir hadn’t abandoned the beaten lady. The other one, the hovering creature with the unhinged jaw and empty eyes just stared at me with a blank hunger, kept back either by some wariness or its mistress’s will.
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I shook my head. “I do not understand you. I thought I did, but…”
Evangeline’s smirk was cold and devoid of humor. “I thought you might. You, who has for so many years fought our enemies despite being reviled and feared.”
Our enemies. Unconsciously, I let the tip of my sword lower.
“The Banner will not be ruled by you,” I said. “But you can still serve it. Still fight for it.”
Evangeline snorted. “Is this where you offer me mercy, like you did to Calerus? If I recall, he got to keep his throne, even if just as a figurehead. It seems a raw deal to me.”
Was it Finn Nu whispering to me, or the other orphaned souls I shepherded through all these battles? Or some other instinct or fel whim. Whatever it was, it drove me to say my next words.
“The Alder Table is gone, dead to betrayal. I am the last.”
Evangeline’s eyes widened. “You mean… It’s true? What they say happened in Elfhome?”
It was only dark rumor that the Alder Knights had turned apostate and betrayed the Archon, slew him even as the Recusants began to set fire to the Golden Country. Very few had managed to escape that initial wave of destruction, and only a handful had witnessed the deed itself.
I nodded. “I saw it. I was there.”
Evangeline blinked, her only response to the confirmation of dark rumors and legend. I might have only been a shadow of myth, but it must have been hard to deny, given what she’d seen herself. Perhaps her demon whispered to her then, confirmed it for her. I knew it watched me through its host, felt its presence by the burn in my scars.
I dismounted, placing a hand to the side of Morgause’s neck to signal her to wait as I walked forward. Raania and the other vampires tensed, bared their fangs and showed their weapons, but I kept my attention on their mistress. When I’d come within ten paces of the base of the burial mound, I placed the flat tip of my executioner’s blade on the ground, resting a hand on its pommel.
Had Urawn Aarlu predicted something like this, or was it simply a strange whim, his choice of words? He had tasked me to bring my doom to the ones responsible for Rysanthe’s capture and torment. Not the Choir’s, or the Headsman’s, or even the Underworld’s. He’d said your doom.
“You are sure about this?” Vicar asked me.
I did not answer him as I stood there, the undead watching me. Instead I lowered my chin while holding Evangeline’s gaze. “There’s a war beginning. No, that’s not right… It’s already started. The Fall didn’t end with the formation of the Accord. It’s still happening, has been happening all these years. There are demons and fallen angels running rampant, the Choir is desperate and trying to buck restrictions placed on them a millennia ago, and monsters are attacking our cities. I’ve been fighting this war for over ten years now, much of it alone…”
It almost staggered me then, thinking back on the endless, vile battles I’d fought against madmen and monsters. The years of war before Markham’s illusion of peace, my endless string of tasks after accepting the Choir’s penance, my skirmishes and duels against the Zosite, the Abgrüdai, the Vykes and all their plots.
Every dark secret I’d been let in on, every uncomfortable truth about the world, the slow revelation that the angels who watched over us were little different from the demons who fed upon us, save only that a now departed god had put collars on them.
An endless nightmare. I’d made my lance on the Emperor’s insistence, but it wasn’t enough. Something larger needed to be made. I’d started it with Calerus, and committed to it when I’d stripped Vicar’s hide from his iron bones. That I could not fight alone, and that devils were sometimes more reliable, and more motivated, than angels.
“The Table is gone,” I said. “But its enemies aren’t. Its purpose needs to be filled. You and I are both devils, Evangeline, but we can be humanity’s devils. Abandon your ambition. Swear to my cause.”
Evangeline’s eyes were intense as a hawk’s. “Become an Alder Knight?”
“There are none anymore,” I rejoined. “We’ll have to make something else.”
“A new Table,” Evangeline mused. “One filled by the likes of you and me?”
I nodded. It was close enough to what I imagined. “The alternative is death. I can’t just let you go. I was given a penance for my own failures by the Choir, so I will give you one now. This is the doom I would give to you, Evangeline Ark — fight against this darkness, the same one that’s taken root in both of us. Give up all of your ambition to rule, your armies and your schemes. Serve, rather than dominate. Be a knight again.”
For a long while, for what felt like many minutes but couldn’t have been more than one or two, she didn’t say anything. The night breeze stirred her cloak, the other vampires watched me with restrained bloodlust, and the dead moon slowly crawled over the black sky. Fires burned along the walls of the city, much as they’d lit above it earlier that night, in celebration for a reign already ended.
“And if I refuse?” Evangeline asked. “You will kill me?”
I gave a shallow nod in answer. “I would rather not. It would be a waste of your skill, and your willpower.”
I’d never even heard of someone not only resisting demonic possession, but bending the demon to their will. Evangeline wasn’t only a keen blade, but uniquely resistant to the Adversary. More so than me, and that had value.
“Do not listen to this fool!” Raania spat. “We can still win! A score of us could cow every castle in the Banner in a season, and you still have the drow’s strength in you!”
“He is wounded,” the banshee-thing hissed in a voice like broken glass. “I smell his blood and his pain. Let us feast on him and grow stronger.”
“No.”
Both vampires flinched at that word, spoken with such utter resolve. Even the two Ark knights, gone to undeath out of loyalty to their lady, glanced at Evangeline with surprise. The knight only drew in a sharp breath, closed her eyes and threw her head back, then let that breath out. Much of that marble feel of her went out with it, and she looked almost human again.
“No,” Evangeline repeated. “The Banner will not accept what they have once rejected. I know, because I am a daughter of the Banner. They have made their choice, my countrymen, and I have been proven a fool. Randal had the last laugh after all, the brat.”
“You are queen of wolves!” Raania snarled, growing angrier now. “Where was that resolve I saw before, that strength?! I did not agree to bind myself to this.”
She’d advanced up the hill as she raved, her one hand clutching her stone dagger tight. Even injured by faerie fire and hounded from the position of strength that’d seemed so certain earlier that same night, her rage was impressive.
The dhampir bared her fangs and spat at Evangeline’s feet. “Disappointing. You would let the resolve of cattle bow you? You are no wolf at all, just a fangless dog, one who cringes from harsh words with its tail tucked between its—”
The torslowan never finished that sentence. Calmly, almost as though she were batting a fly away, Evangeline’s sword flashed. The strike was so fast that even I, a swordsman all my life, missed the motion that initiated it. One moment she stood there, calm as the dhampir advanced on her, and then her blade gleamed in the moonlight.
Raania fell in two separate pieces, beheaded just as I’d beheaded Ildeban. And like Ildeban, she was not wholly mortal. Her decapitated corpse thrashed on the ground, blindly flailing, desperate as an injured cockroach.
“You may have her,” Evangeline said in a bored, tired voice. The two knights both lunged for the dhampir without hesitation. I had to turn my eyes away.
She looked to the other vampire on the hill then, the ragged thing with long gray hair and tattered gown, its skull face locked in a perpetual scream. The creature turned, and just as it had when Tzanith burned it, flew into the night with an angry, or perhaps terrified, howl.
With a sigh, the deposed queen sheathed her sword and threw a thoughtful look to me where I stood at the base of the cairn hill, disturbed by what I’d just seen. “So, how does this work? Do I kneel? Take some kind of oath?”
With Vicar, he had coached me on Orkaelin runes to carve into the underside of his hide, to properly bind him and create a link by which we could almost trust one another. That would probably not work on Evangeline, and I knew no techniques to assure a vampire’s loyalty.
An oath was good. I believed that Evangeline Ark might abide by an oath. So I nodded, and while ignoring the two creatures feasting on the still animate remains of Raania of Torslowe, began to ascend the hill to complete this impromptu ceremony.
Only to freeze as a flash of searing pain shot through the scars on my left cheek. I reached up to feel at them, and my fingers came away bloody.
It was only a moment that my eyes were torn from the top of the hill, a brief glance down at the blood on my fingers as I blinked against the pain in the old wounds. It felt like they’d just been slashed fresh, like those hellish nails were digging into my skin all over again.
I looked up to see Evangeline watching me with a small frown, confused at my pause. It must have seemed to her like I stumbled. She saw the blood on my face, or smelled it, and that look of confusion shifted to surprise.
But my gaze went past Evangeline, to the figure behind her.
What happened next must have taken very little time at all to play out, yet to me it felt like hours, like ages. I stood there frozen, dumb, watching it all play out in the same way I might stand frozen in a dream. That’s what it felt like. A dream. It had that same quality of surreal slowness, of inevitability.
The newcomer was wrapped in black robes and a traveler’s cloak, all loose, as though too large for the figure concealed within. The cloth moved with an oddly liquid quality, as though they were underwater. They descended down in the moonlight with arms outstretched, like an image of motherly death inviting a drowning man into an embrace, floating in defiance of gravity. There was something familiar about those garments.
Evangeline turned to follow my gaze even as pale hands slipped from the depths of the shrouded figure’s sleeves. Feminine hands, tipped in sharp nails the color of bloodstained bone. The moonlight caught a portion of the face beneath the hood, revealing full lips, pale skin. She looked like a living portrait of a saint, like the very holy pilgrim the God-Queen was said to have taken the guise of when She first appeared before the skeptical lords of Edaea.
Exactly like that. That was where I recognized those clothes. They were nun clothes, the same kind Delphine had worn that day we’d parted ways, when she’d—
It all happened quickly, but my shock and the way the world seemed to blur around the edges of my vision, focusing on the top of the hill and the one who alighted down upon Evangeline, made it all seem a tableau, a painting. Evangeline’s eyes went wide with shock, and I knew the world must have slowed for her as well, that this wasn’t a natural stasis.
The four scars on my face boiled with pain, bled red tears down the length of my jaw, but all I could think was why? Why now? Why here?
But I knew. She’d been here all along, waiting for her moment. I’d felt her calling me the entire night, but dismissed it, believed that familiar itch the product of being surrounded by so much evil, of the thing lurking within Evangeline
Her presence had alerted me while I’d been lost inside Finn Nu, the reason I’d broken free of him at the ball.
The vampire began to lift her sword, but she seemed to move like she were underwater, too slow, lethargic, as the hooded one took her face in their hands. With decisive motions, like a confident lover, the saintly form leaned forward and pressed her lips to Evangeline’s.
The vampire’s eyes went wide. She lifted a hand, perhaps to shove her captor away or grasp her throat, but the limb went limp. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she began to shake as though from a seizure. The kiss was almost chaste, barely lasting more than a handful of seconds before they parted. Evangeline slumped to the ground, her skin taking on a hue like ash, sinking in against the bone so she became gaunt, aging thirty years in a moment. Her eyes melted in their sockets, forming bloody tears down her hollow cheeks. Her withered hand flexed weakly, and a faint vapor escaped her parted lips, like her innards were burning away and turning to smoke. The nun almost rode her to the ground, keeping her face in her hands and letting her fall gently.
Evangeline Ark, Queen of the Bannerlands and Knight of the Accorded Realms, did not die a warrior’s death. By the time the nun stood, she was little more than a skeleton in queenly regalia, still with a mane of fine blond hair spilling around her remains.
Her killer straightened from their crouch, and she held an arm up. Her pale, clawed digits grasped the throat of something else, something she’d pulled from the vampire. It was an emaciated thing, female and naked, with stony gray flesh and limbs that seemed made of sinew and cord. It was hairless, with a face that looked like it’d been eaten by a worm, little more than a twisted spiral of flesh sinking into a black pit. That same worm pit yawned at the center of a sagging belly.
“Alken!” Vicar’s voice snapped me from my daze. He’d been saying my name since the figure had appeared, but I’d barely heard it save as a muted itch in my ear. I did not respond to him, only had attention for what stood at the top of the hill.
The scrawny, manikin-like thing in the nun’s hand writhed in a futile effort to escape. It was the demon, I realized, the one that’d been hiding inside Evangeline all this time.
“You!” It hissed.“The wizard discarded you!”
“You know he only discards useless tools,” the other demon said. “You were clever to hide inside this warrior, Liieshi, but you had to know we would find you.”
Then, the hooded figure opened her lips and seemed to let out a long breath, like one does when blowing the head off a dandelion. The demon in her grip immolated, bursting into toxic looking flames. It screamed as it burned, and in a moment became nothing.
Evangeline’s guards, drunk from their feasting, let out piteous howls of rage and grief as they saw what remained of their lady. They flashed into motion, ignoring their swords and attacking with claws and fangs.
I took a single step forward at the same time, an unbidden word escaping my lips. “Dei—”
With a flutter of cloth and air, two mighty wings spread out from the demon’s robes. They were far prouder than Evangeline’s batlike membranes, these more like the fell appendages of a dragon, with hooked claws and crimson skin stretched between finger-like ribs. They lifted her high, half a hundred feet in a moment, well out of the reach of those two freshly orphaned monsters.
Out of my reach.
“Wait!”
I lurched forward, but a sudden gust of wind caught at my hair, strong enough nearly to bowl me over and down the face of the hill. The demon hung far above, hovering like an angel backlit by the full moon. Her robes and cloak flapped in the wind, making her seem like a shadowy stain against the sky. I could just barely make out the glint of a pale gray eye watching me from within the hood.
“Wait,” I said again in little more than a whisper. I’d been waiting for this moment for endless weeks — no, for a decade and more — and just like beneath that cathedral, she went out of my reach.
The moon seemed to swallow that dark, winged form, and she was gone. Again.
“Are you free of it?” Vicar demanded even as I stood there, staring up at the empty sky like an idiot. The two vampires were kneeling by the carcass of their mistress, weeping like children.
“What?” I asked.
“Of the demon’s will!” The devil snapped impatiently. “It struck all of us with lethargy. A common tactic for that one’s type. I broke free of it first, but you did not seem to hear me.”
I hadn’t felt anything like that. The pain in my scars was already fading, though blood ran down my neck. My gaze went to Evangeline. “What did she do to her?”
“The kiss of the succubus is deadly,” Vicar said in a dark voice. “Pernicious Shyora has taken an ally from you, and delivered punishment to her errant sibling. That was Liieshi the Empty, another succubus and one of Reynard’s minions. This all but confirms his involvement.”
Liieshi. I recognized the name as one of the eight demons that Reynard had bound to help him start his war and destroy the Archon. With Yith, Raath, and Skreel, that was four of the Fall’s harbingers accounted for.
And I could not bring myself to care, either about that or the confirmation of Reynard’s survival. I hadn’t even lifted my sword when she’d appeared. She hadn’t given me the chance to say anything, even after all these weeks of preparing myself.
“We need to get back to the others,” I said, turning to my chimera and the distant fires of Tall Carreweir.
“You are not going to take care of them?” Vicar asked.
I glanced at the two vampires still bawling over the dead Ark. It would be smart to kill them. Tie up a loose end.
“No,” I said. “Let them grieve.”
I’d had my fill of death that night.
