The Archon's Assassin (22 page)

He lowered his sword, found himself watching the sway of the long grass. “But you warned me.”

Heredwin gave the wolf-man a final pat before placing both hands around the snaith of his scythe.

“Be still,” he said in a voice like rushing water, and the beast settled on its haunches. “I told you they was coming, Pater, but I wished they wasn’t. Two of ’em gone back to the loam, and this one all alone.”

Shader tensed, felt the blood pounding in his ears. “And what about the man they killed? What about this man?” He used the sword to indicate Pete. He couldn’t bring himself to mention Rhiannon and Saphra. That would be an admission they were lost. That he’d let them down.

Heredwin stooped over the scythe. “Ain’t no blame here, least of all with the wolves. They don’t choose what they are. They don’t choose to play these games.”

The wolf-man whimpered and rubbed its snout in the dirt.

“Did you not see the sky, Pater Deacon? Did you not see it change?”

Shader nodded. “I saw Aethir.”

“You’re a man of the worlds, Pater. You’ve seen some measure of their secrets. Snares upon snares. Tricks and traps and deceptions. But you don’t have to go blundering into ’em. Least, not if you want to be your own man.”

Shader was growing sick of the riddles. Sandau was dead—Rhiannon, Saphra—and someone was going to pay.

“What the Abyss is going on here?”

“You already know, Pater,” Heredwin said. “He wants you back on Aethir. He’s at war with the Deceiver. Your victory over Sektis Gandaw was a pyrrhic one. Picked off a scab, but there’s a deeper wound beneath.”

Shader felt his chest constricting. A vein in his temple throbbed. “Aristodeus.”

Heredwin looked into the sunrise, as if he were entirely innocent.

“Maybe I’ll do what he wants.” Shader ran a finger along the chipped and bloodstained blade of Sandau’s sword. “Maybe it’s time I paid him a visit.”

He was startled by a yelp of laughter from Heredwin, who doubled up over the scythe as if he were dying of mirth. “Now that I’d like ta see. But how’ll you get there?”

Shader’s mind grabbed at the image of the cave in the phony Araboth; relived the bloated spider-thing sucking the life from Jarmin the Anchorite’s corpse; saw again the swirling of the air, and Sammy reaching out to him from a portal.

“Ah, Huntsman’s apprentice.” Heredwin nodded, apparently aware of what Shader was thinking. “P’raps the boy could help you, if you could get to Sahul.”

Shader frowned. That was a journey of many weeks, even if he could evade the Imperial ships scouring the oceans. Still, Aristodeus was bound to come to him again, and when he did…

“Leave all the choices to him, would you? Seems ta me he’s running you ragged.”

“Then what?”

Heredwin drifted toward him, as if walking on the mist. “Your woman ain’t dead, is she boy? Only one killed was the big fellow.”

“Sandau. Sandau was his name. So, Rhiannon, Saphra—”

“He took ’em,” Heredwin said. “Reckons they belong ta him, I guess. Maybe they’re the bait that hooks the
fish
.” He emphasized the last word.

Shader’s hand went to the pendant the dying man had given him in New Jerusalem. He rubbed the contours of the woman’s image, and the words of the inscription—
Causa Salutis
—ran round his mind like a silent petition. “Then you must help me.”

Heredwin twisted his head like he was dangling from a hangman’s noose, took in the view of Caburn across the valley. “Me, or her?” he said whimsically. Before Shader could muster a reply, Heredwin continued. “Might need some help of my own first.” He swept his hand out over the long grass. “It’s a big job at my age.”

The wolf-man crawled a little way down the slope, nostrils flaring, eyes bright. It rolled its head to look at Heredwin, growled, and padded past Shader toward Pete.

Shader had all but forgotten the injured man, and reacted with a start.

“Don’t you be worrying about that’n,” Heredwin said. “He’s fer the turning. We’ll see him through it, then he’ll go where he’s most drawn, like they all do. The Weald’ll nurse him, for the sake of Old Nous.”

There was a taunt in those words, Shader felt certain. If not a taunt, then an invitation to probe deeper.
Old Nous
. What did that even mean?

Nous is not Nous
, Dave the Slave once said. Whatever he’d meant by that, one thing was clear: Dave was certainly no Nousian, at least, not in any sense Shader would recognize. The hunchback had shown his true colors when he’d passed through the archway leading into Arx Gravis. Had the hunchback meant that, whatever Shader took for Nous wasn’t the real Nous? Aristodeus had told him as a child that Nous was real, but other than he seemed. Did that mean he wasn’t all good? That he wasn’t the son of Ain?

The inclination of Heredwin’s head implied he’d been following Shader’s internal monologue.

“Old Nous—true Nous—is a thing created.” He looked out across the Weald. “Consciousness. Intellect. The All-Mind. What you call Nous once went by another name.
He
is of a different order altogether.” He thumped the butt of his scythe into the ground twice in quick succession.

“He?” Shader asked. “What name?”

Heredwin wagged a finger. “Not my place. Knowledge men mislay is for them to rediscover.”

Pete moaned as the wolf-man lifted him from the grass. His face was pale and glistening with sweat. The beast nuzzled him, and then loped to the top of the beacon, cradling him in its arms.

Shader scratched at his scalp and frowned. Stiffness crept along his spine, knotted around his shoulder-blades. One hand slid into the pocket of his coat, fingers tracing the ridges of his Liber like a blind man identifying a corpse.

“Here,” Heredwin said, planting the scythe in front of him and guiding Shader’s hands to the snaith. “You’ll get what you need, soon as yer done.” He nodded in the direction of the rising sun over Caburn. “Dawn’s the best time fer mowing, especially following rain. Now, upend it. Put the blade to the grass. Careful, mind. That’s a preened edge, honed thin as paper.”

Shader gingerly took hold of a handle at the base of the shaft with his left hand, and the central handle with his right.

“Keep the edge toward you, arms out straight.” Heredwin adopted the stance and twisted his body to the right, gesturing for Shader to do the same.

Shader felt awkward, not quite sure where to put his feet; afraid he might slice them off.

“Not too low now,” Heredwin said. “Don’t want you soiling the blade. That’ll blunt it sure as anything. That’s right, just skim above the ground. Easy does it. Nice steady rhythm, sweeping your swaths and keeping them narrow.”

Shader forced the blade through its path, hacking a wide strip of grass and gouging up soil.

“Too close to the ground. Keep it nice an’ even now.”

He swung again, skimming and shaving the top of the grass to deposit it in a small pile at the end of the arc.

“That’s better.” Heredwin clapped him on the shoulder. “From here to the top, before the sun’s fully golden. Then I’ll give you what I can in the way of help.”

Heredwin tramped away toward the summit, leaving Shader frowning at the magnitude of his task. Shrugging, he stripped off his coat and rolled up his sleeves.

“You’ll be needing this.” A long whetstone thudded into the grass at his feet. “Use it regular now,” Heredwin shot over his shoulder as he disappeared from sight.

Shader paused to run his forearm over his brow, then picked up the whetstone. Standing the scythe upright, he took some grass to rub the blade dry. It’s what they used to do in the Seventh Horse whenever there was a shortage of rags. Next, he started to rub the stone along the edge toward the point in quick, hard strokes. With a curse, he snatched his hand away and sucked at a nick in his finger. It was more a scratch than a cut, but it served as a warning.

This time, he built up his rhythm slowly, until the stone was clanging and grinding against the iron, softening, blending, making it ring with a single musical note.

He resumed mowing, and after half a dozen mishaps, finally had the motion. His cuts grew smoother, more certain. He began to move around the hilltop steadily, each swish of the scythe barely missing the ground; every blade of grass falling to collect in neat piles at his side. His hands were raw with blisters, his back an agony of needle-stabs, knees fiery and swollen. He labored up onto the summit without one wasted movement, scything like a man skimming milk.

The blade struck metal, and he stopped, lowering the snaith and crouching down in the tall grass. Something glinted in the soil. He pulled aside the grass and scratched in the earth. It quickly grew visible: the hilt of a sword, followed by the scabbard. A short sword, just like—

Was it? Could it be…

He pulled free a gladius, keen-edged and shining, as if newly forged. He stood, went through the forms, thrusting and slashing, twirling the blade. It looked the same; felt the same. The balance was perfect, the weight featherlight. He peered closer at the weapon, noted the knobbed hilt with ridges for the fingers; the central channel. Then he remembered the inscription, lifted the blade to his eyes. There it was, punched into the steel:

VADE IN PACEM. Go in peace.

It had always summed up the paradox of the Elect for him: dispatching the enemy with a blessing.

A tremor ran through his every muscle. The cold clutch of the ineffable tightened around his chest. He could only describe it as dread; but dread of the unknown, the unseen, not of anything tangible.

Is this why Heredwin had enticed him here? Had he known two days ago? And did he know this was exactly what Aristodeus wanted: for Shader to find the Sword of the Archon and re-enter the fray?

“The ground is in a giving mood,” Heredwin said, snatching up the scythe. “A job well done deserves a reward.”

A reward? Is that what it was? And then Shader’s mind was tearing off at another tangent. The Archon’s sword. Was Heredwin… No. The Archon had shown himself to Shader before, that time in the Abyss. There’d been no need for disguise then, so why would there be now?

Shader stared at the gladius, shaking his head. “But it was lost. Taken from the worlds.” It had buried itself in the flesh of the great serpent, Eingana, and the two had vanished.

Heredwin touched the blade with a lover’s delicacy. “It was crafted as a safeguard, a receptacle for the Archon’s own power. A mirror of his essence.”

“But this is what Aristodeus wants,” Shader said. “For me to possess the sword.”

Heredwin withdrew his hand and leaned on the scythe. “The forgings of the Supernal Realm aren’t objects to be possessed. The Archon made it, but not as a slave. With the sword’s work done, it’s free to do as it pleases; like the wolf-men, to go wherever it’s drawn.”

But did it still have the same power? The power to heal, to fly as if held in an invisible hand? And what of the way it had protected Shader from the might of Eingana directed against him by Sektis Gandaw?

Heredwin scoffed, still reading Shader’s thoughts. “You miss that power?”

Shader didn’t know how to answer that. Part of him did, he was sure. But was that the part nurtured by Aristodeus? Honed to do his bidding?

“What do you see in your mind’s eye,” Heredwin said, “when you think of all you could have achieved with the sword? All you could still achieve?”

Shader shut his eyes and focused. He was immediately someplace else: an enormous cavern formed from coal. “A man—I think—a gigantic man, encased in ice.”

“Look closer. Describe him to me.”

Tingles of wrongness crawled beneath Shader’s skin. There was a tug on his umbilicus, a steady pressure dragging him toward the figure in ice. Quickly, he called out what he saw: “A shadow. A chiseled shadow. The features are obscured by the ice, but…”

“Yes?” Heredwin prompted.

Shader began to shudder. “The eyes. The eyes are violet.”

Heredwin let out a sharp hiss. “And what do you feel?”

“Numbness. Boredom.” And then he realized: “His boredom, but bubbling up from it, his bile, his rage.”

“And what do you hear?” Heredwin asked. “Soft words and caressing whispers? Promises in the dark, leading you home?”

Shader was about to say no, but then he became aware of it: an almost inaudible susurrus: invitations, enticements, reassurances.

He opened his eyes and sucked in air. How long had he forgotten to breathe?

Heredwin put a hand on his arm. The touch was soft and loamy, and the aroma of freshly-tilled earth filled Shader’s nostrils. When Heredwin laughed, it was like the chatter of a sparkling brook.

“Your ambivalence deafens you to the Demiurgos’s promptings,” Heredwin said. “You neither seek power nor shun it.”

Shader’s grip on the gladius slackened. “Why is the Sword of the Archon here?”

“Knows what it wants, I suppose. Reckon it sees right through you.”

“What—”

Heredwin cut him off. “It is here because it wants to be. P’raps even because it needs to be.”

“And you,” Shader wanted to ask. “What about you?”

Again, Heredwin betrayed the impression he was reading Shader’s thoughts. “I am the Weald’s as she is mine,” he said. “But in this cosmic drama you’ve been pitched into, know that I’ve chosen sides.”

“The Archon’s?” Shader said.

“Eingana’s. When she seeded the Earth after her rape, we was all affected. All changed. Just as this sword was changed when it lodged within her flesh.”

Heredwin stared off into the clouds for a long moment. When he next spoke, there was a hint of amusement in his voice. “And what of you, Pater? Which side will you take?”

Shader returned the gladius to its scabbard. “Rhiannon’s. Saphra’s. If they’re alive, I’ll bring them back. And if they’re dead, I’ll avenge them.”

“So, you will do the philosopher’s bidding, after all? You will travel to Aethir?”

Shader could do nothing about that. “Can you get me there?”

Heredwin shook his head, the white patches of his mask dazzling in the sun, the black lost in shadow.

“I have eyes and ears on Aethir but cannot pass there.”