Read Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming) Online

Authors: John C. Wright

Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming) (21 page)

BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)
7.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
And Raven fell as well.
When his daughter fainted from the thunderclap, Pendrake managed to get an arm around her waist, and grab a passing roofbeam as he fell. There he dangled in air, half-fainting from his wounds, blinking at the bright sunlight that came unexpectedly from underfoot, until a pleasant warmth stole through his body and returned his strength.
He looked down. The head of the gigantic, supernatural being whose wings filled the hall from side to side, was slightly below the level of the balcony, so that the balcony was cast in deep shadow from the rays of brilliant light spreading from the archangel’s crown. There was some motion on the balcony; he dimly saw the skeletal Kelpie-steeds backing away, kicking at and pushing the chariot awkwardly behind them. He was not sure what the other black shape, crisscrossed by a pale framework, might be; this shape was hunched down on the balcony near the chariot.
Galen, standing near the foot of the great being, bent his bow and shot a shaft of sunlight into Raven’s fallen form. Raven said, “But Balphagor was …”
Galen smiled and nodded upward, saying, “Driven back to Acheron by Apollo. I finished Grandpa’s invocation!”
Pendrake’s command cut through their talk: “Gwendolyn next! We may have trouble up here!”
Galen turned and raised his bow.
In the sunlight shed from the burning shaft sinking into his daughter’s back, Pendrake could see the balcony. A thin, tall, humanoid shape, cloaked in billowing darkness and armored in knitted human bones, was bent over Azrael’s corpse. The torn ruination of Azrael’s bullet-ridden flesh had fallen open at the throat like a coat, and became no more than a torn white coat in fact. Beneath that coat was another body, whole and unhurt, which looked exactly like the first; and into this body the long razor fingernails of Koschei the Deathless were pushing a little ball of glowing light which flickered and shimmered like a burning butterfly.
The little light was sinking into the chest.
Pendrake said, “Wake up, Gwen! Daddy needs a free hand to shoot the bad guys! Wake up!”
Galen shouted, “Just drop her! I’ll heal her if she breaks her legs!”
Raven said, “Apollo! The god can reach her with his hand!” Pendrake let go of his daughter and reached under his cloak. Wendy, yawning and stretching, bobbed slowly through the air like a thistledown. Pendrake’s hand encountered three empty holsters, and his forth gun was holstered near the armpit of his free hand, so that when he drew the gun, it was awkwardly backward in his fingertips.
Koschei stood, drifted backward in a billowing flutter. Azrael de Gray regained his feet from a prone position when an invisible, silent thrust of pressure set him slowly upright, with neither his knees nor waist bending at all.
Pendrake flipped his wrist, caught the pistol grip, aimed, fired. No bullet touched Azrael.
Azrael looked at Apollo, and raised his hands, wrists crossed, ring fingers curled. Azrael’s robes began to billow and float around him, and the constellations came out from the fabric, burning with eerie starlight, and made a circle in the air around Azrael.
Galen shot a sunlit shaft into Lemuel, waking him. “Grandpa! Wake up! Big trouble!”
“Wake your father … .” said Lemuel, rising to his knees.
Peter had one arm around the neck of each goat-monster, who nuzzled him and drooled sparks, and, his legs dragging on the ground, they were stepping toward his wheelchair. “I’m awake!”
Azrael said to Apollo, “As Guardian of Everness, I revoke your permission to be upon these my lands. Go.”
Galen shouted up toward the balcony. “He’s not the Guardian! Grandpa is!”
Lemuel said softly, “Not I. When Mannannan cast me out of the window, fair or unfair, that ended my guardianship. Your father passed it to you. You are the true Guardian of Everness, Grandson.”
Galen drew a deep breath. He said, “Helion! Hyperion! I bid you to stay! I charge you and compel you in the name of the Unicorn, whose Key is in our keeping, and in the name of the head of dragons, from whom our charter comes!”
Raven reached over and threw the switch; but the lightbulbs had all shattered when the windows had, broken by the noise of the thunderclap.
Koschei’s icy, hideous voice floated from the balcony. “Great Lord Hyperion, seraph of the Third Circle of Heaven and universal chieftain of the armies of the daylight, have I your leave to address you?”
Azrael said sharply, “Apply to me for such permission! Speak!”
Koschei said nothing. Light danced along the walls when the titanic figure nodded his head crowned with glorious beams. Koschei spoke, “Great Lord Hyperion, Galen Amadeus Waylock, who is called by another name in higher realms, has perished. What you see before you is no more than a ghost. He cannot be the Guardian.”
Pendrake, still hanging from the ceiling, said, “Your honor, I object! The same thing could be said of Azrael, who was shot to death just now! You cannot call Galen’s claim void unless you also, by the same logic, call Azrael’s claim void. Galen’s claim would therefore pass to his nearest living heir, who is Peter Waylock!”
Pendrake kicked his legs and flung himself from one rafter to the next. Then he dropped down and landed lightly on the balcony on the far side of the bridge away from Azrael.
Peter spoke up, “Hey! If I’m the Guardian here, my orders are to arrest Azrael, neutralize his magic, and obey Galen. Am I in command? I’m ordering you to ignore Azrael’s orders, Mr. Sun-God. So don’t leave!”
Azrael stepped onto the back of the Kelpie-drawn chariot. He held up his left hand, first two fingers crossed. “I call upon the final rune to witness! Hyperion, Helion, Apollo, Uriel, I charge you to answer and to speak! Is not Galen Waylock truly past the day when the Book of Judgments records his death? Have I not the authority as Guardian of Everness to banish you?”
The voice of Hyperion filled all the hall, and his breath was like a warm summer wind when he spoke: “Galen is past the day and hour of his death; the Hours who serve me have decreed it …”
Azrael shouted, “When a god speaks your name, the ward is broken and permission is granted! Thanatos! Ares! Moira! Step forth! Into the daylit world you now may come!”
The tall doors to the central tower swung open. There, where three great archways opened beneath three great images of the waxing moon, the full moon, and the waning moon, the three outer gods hovered, and in some way that stung and confused the eye, they seemed farther away than the walls behind them, larger than the world they stood upon.
She in the middle was a tower of darkness, and a woman-featured mask of iron hung below her hood like a blood-red moon beneath a black cloud bank. In her hand was a flail of chains.
To her right hand was one who showed an ivory skull, now clearly seen, now fringed in the shadows of a hood, like a January moon seen full through weeping thunderheads. In one gauntlet hovered a reaping hook; in the other, a lantern imprisoning many little lights that fluttered like butterflies: the lights of many souls.
To her left, standing upright, was a figure drenched with blood and stinking of smoke. The face beneath the hood was that of a saber-toothed tiger, whose fangs gleamed like crescents. There were chains around the apelike shoulders and the bearlike waist, but the links were loose, with unshackled chain ends floating in the air in all directions. A vast claw held a terrible red sword.
Azrael said, “The pawns are swept away! Here is my knight, my tower, my queen! You have no defenses to oppose them! Pendrake! Order your daughter to yield the Key to me, or I unleash these things upon the world!”
Fate spoke: WE NEED NOT YOUR PERMISSION LONGER, SLAVE OF ACHERON. THE TIME COMES NIGH FOR DARKNESS TO COVER ALL.
Hyperion spoke. “Both claims are invalid, nor does Peter Waylock take. The guardianship reverts to the heir of the original grantor. I await for him to speak.”
Everyone looked back and forth dumbly. Lemuel opened his mouth, looked up at Pendrake, and blinked, as if he had come to a conclusion of which he was unsure.
Azrael said, “I call upon Chronos to sever the time of waiting! By the Final Sign I command a judgment!”
Hyperion’s glance flung Azrael reeling to his knees, and the ring of constellations around the warlock broke and faded. Hyperion’s words rolled like thunder. “You have no power here, for you have been arrested by an authority, which, in this land, is paramount. Your claim to the guardianship is exhausted. Your name is not your own. The Key is not yours.”
Hyperion pointed his finger at the unicorn horn where it had fallen from Azrael’s limp hand, and, turning, Hyperion raised a great shining hand toward Wendy. The unicorn horn slid through the air and hung before her.
Hyperion’s words rang and echoed in her ears: “Take and guard till the rightful owner shall declare himself.”
Lemuel shouted upward. “Anton Pendrake! It’s you! You are the one! Order the Sun-God to stop the three seraphim of darkness!”
Pendrake leaned from the balcony and pointed toward the central tower. “Apollo, I hereby deputize you! Arrest those creatures!”
The Sun-God stepped toward the great doors, and his wings fanned out from his golden shoulders to cover all the billowing darkness radiating from the three towering beings. Two themes of world-shaking music rang out, one made of notes of rising triumph, gladness, and majestic light; the other, a swelling pulse of dark drums and crashing horror.
The floor shook when the Sun-God stepped in to fill the door, and the light was blinding; his wings filled all the space of the huge doorway, so that only the tiniest crack of streaming darkness leaked through where his outer feathers failed to overlap.
“Checkmate, Azrael!” shouted Pendrake, pointing down the balcony. “Call off your attack and surrender, or my daughter will use her wand to turn you back into a bullet-ridden corpse!”
Azrael, on his knees in the car of the chariot, was clutching the railings of the car as if they were the bars of a cell. “No, oh no. It cannot be. The Pendragon is here. His name not hidden, I saw no hidden sign because it was open and clear! Hah! The mocking laughter of the goddess rises again in my ears! The King is come. The King is truly come again, and I have made him my enemy! Hah! The wide hat! The disguising cape! To think I did not recognize the garb of Odin! So she would dress him in mockery of older husbands than myself!”
Azrael climbed unsteadily to his feet, and turned his face down the length of the balcony. “Majesty, I sought only the establishment of the foundations of your throne! America would have been yours, and this nation’s might is more than great enough to conquer all the lands and peoples of this world, though why the rulers here have not done so long ago, I cannot guess.”
Pendrake was walking forward. The house shuddered again, and rays of darkness escaped the edges of Apollo’s wide-flung wings. The theme of darkness swelled; the music of daylight bent it into glad harmonies; and the rays of darkness narrowed and failed. But Apollo cried out in pain and the stitched scar on his back pulled open, and a little drop of glowing white blood began trailing down the length of his back.
Lemuel pointed and shouted, but his words were lost in a crashing crescendo of mingled music.
Pendrake, walking closer down the balcony, shouted to Azrael, “Call off your attack!”
Azrael said, “I have summoned what I cannot put down. My authority has been broken. But the Dark Gods can be driven back still, if you yield me the Silver Key! We have but moments!”
The voice of Death rang through the hall, making all hearing, only for a moment, numb: “Reagent of Light, you cannot keep Death from the Dead. However you protect the others, Galen Amadeus Waylock, the Parzifal of this time, must come with me now.”
The words of Hyperion healed the hearing of those within the ambit of his golden voice: “Till sunset I suspend your power, Lord of Silence.”
The shining one began to beat his mighty wings. A great wind, and gushes and streamers of light, began to emanate from him in all directions. Flashes of darkness pulsed from the door with each wing-beat, scarring the door frame and walls to either side with ice.
Peter put his palm up before his face, squinting. Galen, behind him, his hands on the wheelchair, was trying to shout something in his ear. Lemuel was backing away down the corridor, stepping over dead and sleeping bodies, a look, not of terror, but of exultation on his face.
Wendy floated down and hugged Raven. He put his arms around her. It was utterly calm where he was, and there was no wind.
She said, “Thank you for saving Galen.”
Raven patted her shoulder.
Wendy brushed a tear out of her eye. “I think I know how you get your true love back, but I’m afraid the story has a sad ending.”
“What? What are you saying?” A coldness and fear touched Raven; the winds began to tug at him.
“I’ve got to go. In Galen’s place. To give back the life you stole for me. It’s my time …”
She pulled out of his arms and began walking toward the great door. A look of grief so great that it was like terror now drove Raven’s calm expression away; and then winds, escaping his control, roared and flung him to the ground before he could put out a hand to stop her.
BOOK: Mists of Everness (The War of the Dreaming)
7.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Soft Target by Stephen Leather
Abducted Heart (Z-Series) by Drennen, Jerri
A Childs War by Richard Ballard
The Enchanted Quest by Frewin Jones
A Cup of Jo by Sandra Balzo
Thrown Down by Menon, David
Stagger Bay by Hansen, Pearce
Lord of the Mist by Ann Lawrence