Surrender to the Will of the Night (74 page)

“Got you. Hanging around with them probably helped, too. So. Here we go. Off to the other one. Carry on, boys. You’re doing a wonderful job.”

Jarneyn’s son, called Copper, had picked up some middle-world Firaldian from Heris, Asgrimmur, and the Ninth Unknown. Copper was in charge of the second and even bigger Aelen Kofer machine. Heris demanded, “Why haven’t you shot the damned thing yet?”

“We were directed not to engage until you were here to see the effect of each shot.”

Heris muttered something about beginning to understand the frustrations her brother often felt. “All right. Talk to me. What are you going to do, Copper? And how did you come by that name?”

His companions snickered. Heris did not miss the fact that they understood her question fine. Then recalled that when they cared to the Aelen Kofer commanded the mythic power to understand all languages. When they failed to understand they did so deliberately.

Copper said, “It’s a bad joke. I did something stupid a few hundred years ago.”

“All right. When I need to know I’ll ask Iron Eyes. What are you doing?”

In part, that was obvious. The dwarves were cranking the ballista so tight it shrieked in protest.

Copper said, “Velocity will be critical, first shot. That will be a missile we cobbled together while we were waiting.” By gesture he invited her closer to the engine, a bow type with long arms crafted of laminated horn from a beast that did not exist in the middle world.

Done cranking, the dwarves moved to their ammunition, carefully arranged on the flattest ground available. Heris counted eight shafts, each fourteen feet long. They ranged from three to six inches in diameter. The one selected was six inches thick and appeared to be made of ice in imitation of a fluted marble column. The head flared out to a foot wide, beginning three feet from the end. That head was hollowed back in a cone shape a foot and a half deep inside.

“That looks like ice,” Heris said.

“It is ice. Carefully frozen, then bound with strings of the sort used on the rainbow bridge. If there wasn’t an overcast you’d see the light do marvelous things.”

“How can ice hurt the Windwalker? He’s a winter god.”

“It won’t stay ice. Impact will turn the ice to water. Hot water. As one shaft splits into twenty thinner ones. The Instrumentality will have twenty jets of water shooting through him. The pain should break his concentration.”

The shaft was in place. The Aelen Kofer moved to where they could begin cranking as soon as the ballista discharged.

Copper said, “This was your idea. All we did was tinker. Which is what Aelen Kofer do. Get up on the king seat and give the old toad a poke in the eye.”

Heris allowed herself to be guided to a seat atop the engine, above and to the left of the butt of the ice shaft. Copper said, “You see two oak levers by your right hand. The nearest one is the safety capture. Push forward on that one first. When you want to loose you do the same with the farther lever. Do them in that order, left lever, right lever, or you’ll find yourself in big trouble.”

“Got it. Forward on the nearest lever, then shoot with the other one.” She rested her hand on the safety release. That lever was as long as an ax handle. She focused on the Instrumentality, whose own focus was entirely on her.

The god knew what was coming. It was poised to do something about it. Kharoulke was one hundred percent connected to the moment. Was one hundred percent outside the Realm of Night. This was a fight for existence. No other instant in the entire history of the Nine Worlds or Night mattered. This was
the
moment. Perhaps for Heris and the Instrumentality, both. And she felt the full weight of what will the Instrumentality retained. She should not do this wicked thing. She was Chosen. …

Unexpected, sharp pain in her left buttock. She jumped, looked down. Copper winked. “You’re going to shoot, shoot, Son of Man. Left side, then right.”

Heris shoved levers. That hairy-ass runt would be sorry he had done that. She did not look at the Windwalker till the trigger lever slammed home.

The engine lurched violently as the tension in the great bow released. It slammed down again, jarring the air out of Heris’s lungs.

The god’s tongue leapt to meet the shaft of ice. For an instant psychic space filled with dark mockery. The god would brush the projectile aside. Then it would accumulate new Chosen.

The Aelen Kofer shaft had to conform to the physical laws of the middle world, in a part of that world where there was little magic left and the deity had squandered its share already.

The monster toad tongue did deflect the shaft. But that was moving too fast, carrying too much momentum, to be redirected much.

It hit just slightly off bull’s-eye. Otherwise, it performed as designed. It was, after all, an Aelen Kofer artifact.

Dwarves swarmed around the engine, getting it properly aimed again, spanned again, and loaded again. “This one is mostly salt,” Copper told her. “Khor-ben’s idea. I know not what muse moved him. Salt shouldn’t do much. On the other hand, there are iron knives inside the salt. They’ll start spinning when they release.”

Heris watched the shaft go into the tray.

Copper told her, “Left lever first, right lever second.”

“I remember.”

The engine did not buck as violently. The dwarves had seen no need for maximum velocity this time.

As the engine slammed back down Heris saw the other ballista ease into position. It got its first missile off an instant before she launched her third, a long wooden pole filled with thousands of little lead darts, each tipped with a barbed iron or silver head. The lead was expected to separate. The barbed heads were ever so slightly curved. They would not travel in a straight line as they kept creeping through divine flesh.

The wood peeled away while the shaft was in the air. The flechettes hit the Windwalker in a broad spray.

The shaft from the other engine was of the same type.

Thousands of boils and pustules appeared on the skin of the great toad. The god heaved violently, most of its mass clearing the stained and slimy shingle. A scream both physical and psychic froze the assailants. For a half minute Heris was capable of no rational thought at all.

Shaking, she pulled herself together. Downslope, the Windwalker desperately tried to do the same. Its violent heave had caused it to slide. Its leg and tail part were in the water. A sort of gray, foul mist puffed off the god where the darts had gone in.

The scream seemed to have no end.

Working like they were doing so in the face of a high wind and doubled gravity, the Aelen Kofer readied the engine again.

Heris shouted down, “One of you guys want to take a turn?”

Copper bellowed, “We can’t do that. We’re Aelen Kofer. We aren’t allowed. We only make things and explain their use.”

Heris thought that claim emanated from the stern quarters of a male bovine. Aelen Kofer could and did act when they thought they could get away with it. Whatever it might be.

Copper was hedging bets. Lawyering. Making sure he could disclaim responsibility somewhat. Despite having brought a full ration of Aelen Kofer ingenuity to the murder at hand.

Thenceforth the fight was an execution. The Windwalker was too weak. It could do nothing but take the punishment and hope to survive. And hope its enemies could not bring anything more to bear before winter came.

Winter would come. Winter would bring salvation. This coming winter would be the most ferocious in an epoch. This world would not emerge from its next winter.

“Let’s slow down,” Heris said. “Let’s let each shaft finish working before we launch another.”

The mist puffs coming off the Windwalker had become streamers. They built a cloud around the monster. Heris wanted that to clear.

She got down to stretch her legs. “Isn’t that something?” she asked the ascendant. She glanced at the sun. The day was getting on. The light might not last long enough to finish this.

“I don’t feel well,” Asgrimmur said.

“What?”

“I’m sick. I haven’t been sick like this since I suffered through that minor version of what the Windwalker is going through now.”

“But it isn’t happening to you.”

“No. In theory, it’s not. Except to those parts of me connected to the Night. The entire Night is feeling this. It’s confused, frightened, angry, and disoriented. And fully aware that something unprecedented is happening.”

“Your Old Ones, too?”

“Especially them.”

“The other Old Ones?”

“I don’t think so. They’re in a place outside the Nine Worlds and only the Nine Worlds are connected to the Night.”

“Your Old Ones. The rest of the Night. They can’t possibly feel sorry for this thing.”

“The Banished, not so much. The Walker … It isn’t sympathy. It’s fear and all the things the rest of the Night feels. And … No. That doesn’t make sense. Does it? A kind of guilt, despair, then another kind of guilt?”

“Who said the man is confused? That’s clear as a smack in the teeth. Time for me to take a couple more shots.” The steam had cleared off the Windwalker. The mottled, festering remnants of the toad did not retain a third of the mass that had been there before the attack began.

Her first shot set the surface of the Windwalker to bubbling like hot tar. Heris heard the bubbles bursting. Each vented a fat puff of steam. The toad soon disappeared inside another cloud.

Heris leaned back.

The ascendant climbed up and hung on to the side of her seat. “I’ve made sense of what the Walker is feeling. He sees all this as his fault. He now thinks you’ll actually kill the Windwalker. Being selfish, as gods are, he doesn’t care what that means for the Night. He does think that it means you won’t find it necessary to release the other Old Ones.”

“That wouldn’t hurt my feelings. Not having to try. Be pretty damned anticlimactic after all the work we’ve done to make it happen, though.”

“Yes. Just so.”

“What does that mean?”

“That the Walker is sure you won’t let the work go to waste. That, since you don’t need them now, you’ll bring them out to destroy them.”

Heris thought about that. And found it a not unappealing plan. But entirely unnecessary. The Old Ones could be kept forever harmless right where they were.

Asgrimmur said, “The Walker now believes the Old Ones made a huge miscalculation when they conscripted us Andorayans to use against a man who accidentally discovered a way to murder the Instrumentalities of the Night. But didn’t know that till the Night itself
made
him understand.”

“Yeah. That was a real screwup.”

“And now facts hitherto unnoticed have crept into the Walker’s awareness. It’s possible that the Godslayer himself was misidentified.”

“What?” Heris eased a hand toward one of her knives.

“You were a slave when the Esther’s Wood thing happened. In the Holy Lands. Less than twenty miles away. An imperceptible separation seen from the Great Sky Fortress, centuries earlier. The Walker thinks distance, time, and coincidence might have resulted in picking the wrong Godslayer.”

“Horse hockey.” And muttered something about keeping it in the family.

“You’re in the process of killing what, once upon a time, was the most terrible Instrumentality of all. A weakened Kharoulke but the real thing, not some ghost of a god raised up by a lunatic sorcerer with a lust for immortality. And you have it in your power to extinguish an entire pantheon and one of the Nine Worlds.”

“More horse puckey, Asgrimmur. Get down. Time for another shot.”

Shafts from both engines struck the Windwalker. God flesh surged violently but did not come down in the water this time.

The violence continued, as though the god’s back had been broken.

Asgrimmur swore. “Oh, shit! Get down from there, Heris.”

Copper snarled, “Down, woman! Down!” He and his people started crawling under the nearest chunks of basalt.

Heris felt the imminence. She dropped between skittering rocks, turned an ankle, made cover with an instant to spare.

A blinding flash. A roar that overshadowed all the firepowder roars Heris ever heard. The earth shook, rattled, and bucked. Scree slipped. Boulders went bounding or sliding downslope. Somebody shrieked as his hiding place fell in on him. For an instant the air was too hot to breathe. Then a ferocious wind came rushing downhill.

A massive fireball climbed toward and tore into the low overcast.

“Well,” Heris muttered. “This is what Piper saw when the god worm died. Damn! Good thing the old asshole was worn down to where he didn’t have anything left.”

She could not hear herself. Nor anything else. Just as well. Her companions did not need to follow her ramblings.

She did review what Piper had said about the incident with the god worm.

An egg. There should be some kind of egg. Piper had been collecting those since he started killing Instrumentalities. Better find out if there was one of those here.

Asgrimmur and Copper both yelled and waved as she headed downhill. She did not have to pretend she did not hear them.

The explosion had not consumed the Instrumentality completely. Slime and chunks of rotten “lard” were everywhere, including on the water of the Ormo Strait. The stench was brutal. But there was no more sense of a divine presence. The opposite was true. There was a vacuum, an impression that something important had gone missing. Heris felt an abiding sorrow that was not at all natural.

She spied the egg. It was bigger than any Piper had described. It shed a strong inner light and so much heat that she had to stop fifteen feet away. The light kept fading.

She began to feel other presences, unseen Night things in search of the truth. Not threatening things, just small things come to witness. She began to hear their whispers and rustles.

Copper joined her, as did Asgrimmur. The dwarf squatted. The ascendant stood with feet widespread, his hand behind him. Both stared at the egg. Heris said, “We can go as soon as that cools down.”

Asgrimmur asked, “What do you want with it?”

“Two souls. That’s the one the Windwalker brought to this world. I want it under control. I want it taken to where it can be destroyed.”