The Hammer and the Blade (36 page)

  He turned to look down on Rusilla. Tears leaked from the corners of her wide eyes. Her forefinger lifted, as if she were trying to point at him accusingly.

  He kneeled, took her hand in his. "I must. You'll forgive me in time."

  She replied with nothing but fear.

  "You tried to use those tomb robbers to help you. Did you think I didn't know? They're dead now, Rusilla, killed by the eater. No one can help you now."

  The tears flowed unchecked down his sister's face. Again the raised finger.

  He stood, his expression hard. "You lost this chess match, sister. And now you'll do what you were born to do. Both of you."

  He took the Horn of Alyyk in his hands and turned away from his sisters. The magic in the horn caused his hands to tingle. He walked toward the location on the glass where his spells had located the prison, his tread loud on the glass.

  The Vwynn fell silent. The winds died completely, even the sylph overwhelmed by the moment.

  As he walked, Rakon intoned a phrase of awakening in the Language of Creation. In answer, the horn vibrated in his hands.

  The Vwynn moaned.

  Rakon put the horn to his lips, aimed its bell at the glass surface before him, and blew. Shimmering air poured from the horn in a swirling column, the recoil pushing him back a step. The long, low note emitted into the charged air made his teeth ache. The vibratory energy struck the glass, cracked it, shattered it, and put a furrow in it deep enough for a burial. The impact threw millions of tiny glass shards into the air and they fell in a tinkling, musical rain. Scores fell on Rakon, cutting his hands, his face, his scalp. He cursed, shielded himself as best he could with his cloak.

  "Sylph!" Rakon called.

  "Yes, master," the sylph said, surmising his command.

  The wind swirled around Rakon, formed into dozens of vortices that collected the shards and expelled them away from Rakon.

  Rakon ignored the pain of his flesh wounds, ignored the warm blood dripping down his face, braced himself against the recoil, and blew another note. The magic of the horn deepened the gash in the glass. The air around him filled with more shards, filled with his sisters' fear, with the pensive terror and anger of the Vwynn. The sylph protected him from the rain of glass and he blew another note, another, digging deeper into the strata of the dead civilization, putting a deep scar on Ellerth's face. Another note, another shower of shards, and he saw what he sought, what his researches had told him he would find.

  A metal cylinder lay revealed at the bottom of the gash. Engraved glyphs covered it entirely, the straight lines of the characters a script Rakon did not recognize. Staring at the characters made his head ache.

  Movement in the hills around him, all around him: the Vwynn edging closer. He had to hurry.

  His sisters' terror grew incoherent, a cloud of fear polluting the air of the ruins.

  He stared at the cylinder, the contents within it the hope of his house. He put the horn to his lips and blew another blast. The energy slammed into the cylinder, sparking, sizzling, a shower of magical pyrotechnics that left Rakon blinking in its wake. When the note subsided and the sparks died, the prison remained sealed, but many of the glyphs were effaced. The horn was warm in his hands. He blew another note, effacing more of the glyphs in a storm of energy, another, and when the echoes of the final blast were nothing more than echoes, the cylinder lay blank.

  "Abrak-Thyss," Rakon shouted in Infernal, a dialect of the Language of Creation. "Come forth! Emerge and honor the ancient pact between your house and mine."

  The Vwynn watched in pensive silence.

  His sisters were reduced to animal terror.

  For a long moment nothing happened, but then two dots appeared on the smooth surface of the cylinder. The dots moved, leaving lines in their wake, seams, cracks in an egg that would soon birth a devil. Rakon watched it unfold with terrified fascination.

  A deep, bestial roar sounded from within the cylinder, the sound as pregnant with power as had been notes from the horn.

  The Vwynn moaned, snarled.

  Another growl from within the cylinder quieted them, awed them perhaps. A ferocious blow from within the cylinder buckled it outward. A roar, the pent-up rage of centuries, sounded from within.

  The Vwynn snarled, their terror turning to anger, their anger to action. Two or three took a reluctant step forward, breaking the border of the glass.

  Rakon's sisters' terror reached a climax, momentarily catching Rakon up in its flow, then diminished altogether. Perhaps they'd fainted.

  Another blow widened the cracks in the cylinder. The capsule rocked back and forth and frenetic snarls filled the air. The Vwynn echoed them.

  "Emerge, Abrak-Thyss!" Rakon said.

  A final, forceful blow exploded the cylinder outward. Dust and chunks of bent and broken metal flew into the air, crashed against the glass of the ground. A scaled, serpentine arm as thick as a man's leg emerged from the cylinder, gripped one of its edges. Instead of a hand, the arm ended in a fang-filled rictus. Two small black eyes above the mouth blinked in the light of the setting sun. A second hand joined it, a third, a fourth.

  The bulk of Abrak-Thyss shifted within the prison that had held him for millennia. He roared, the sound like an avalanche, and heaved his thick, scaled trunk out of the confines of the cylinder.

  Whatever spell or decadent beliefs had held the Vwynn at bay fell away the moment Abrak-Thyss emerged. A collective shriek, desperate and hate-filled, announced their advance. They poured wildly down from the ruins and onto the glass, coming from all sides, a savage horde of claws and teeth, loping wildly over the smooth surface, thousands strong. They tumbled and clambered over each other in their haste to reach the freed devil.

  Abrak-Thyss answered their howls with a roar of his own. The fanged, lamprey-like arms attached at the broad shoulders stretched and writhed. The devil stood half-again as tall as a man, his muscular, scaled form as broad at the chest as two barrels. Where a head and neck should have been, there was instead a mouth lined with glistening yellow fangs as long as knives. Two more arms, also serpentine and fanged but somewhat smaller than the other two, jutted from the devil's abdomen just below the mouth. They flexed and twisted in sickening jerks, as if already shoveling Vwynn into the fang-lined maw.

  "Sylph!" Rakon called.

  The devil crouched, his great muscles churning beneath the deep green scales, and leaped out of the furrow the horn had put in the glass. He landed near Rakon, the force of his impact veining the glass with tiny cracks. He roared again, his outer arms whipping around, regarding Rakon, the advancing horde of Vwynn. The gaze of one of the arms stopped when it fixed on the prone forms of his sisters.

  "Yes, Abrak-Thyss," Rakon said, sensing the devil's lust. "They are yours, offered in honor of the pact between House Thyss and House Norristru. Your blood requires you to honor that pact."

  The devil growled low in answer. Ichor dripped from the lamprey mouths at the end of his arms. One set of eyes darted around, following the movement of the Vwynn as they stormed across the glass. The other set stayed fixed on Rusilla and Merelda.

  "Sylph!" Rakon called again.

  The winds swirled around man and devil and sisters. The sylph's high-pitched voice rang out of the gusts.

  "Master?"

  "Remove us from here, and take us back to the manse."

  "Yes, master."

  The devil whirled on Rakon, the eyes of both arms glaring at him. When he spoke from his central mouth, his voice sounded like the coarse grinding of boulders.

  "No. Stay. Kill. Feed."

  Rakon held his ground in the shadow of the devil. "No, Abrak-Thyss. I freed you and you must honor the pact sworn by your house." He gestured at the setting sun. "And you must do it tonight, when Minnear is full in the vault. Feed as you will after honoring that obligation."

  The devil's arms squirmed in agitation, muscles and scales rippling. The beady eyes looked at the Vwynn, at Rakon's sisters, at Rakon.

  "Master?" prompted the sylph.

  The seething horde of Vwynn was closer, tumbling toward them, their claws slipping and scrabbling on the glass surface of the crater.

  "Those who rule your house will be as unhappy as I should the Pact fail, devil." The mouth in AbrakThyss's chest opened wide in a frustrated roar, but the huge shoulders slumped in surrender.

  "Do your duty tonight and help me repopulate my house. Then return to Hell, take a mate, and repopulate your own. The Pact will be honored for generations to come."

  Rakon took the devil's silence for agreement. "Now, sylph," he said.

  The winds picked up, spinning shards of glass, bits of metal from the capsule, and dust into the air. Rakon, the devil, and his sisters rose up, lifted by the invisible, gusting grip of the air spirit.

  As they rose, the Vwynn shrieked and howled in frustration. Abrak-Thyss answered with a frustrated roar of his own. The Vwynn kept coming, bounding over each other, slavering, all teeth and fangs. The sylph struggled to gain altitude, the weight of the devil perhaps challenging even the air spirit's abilities.

  "Higher, sylph!" Rakon shouted.

  The Vwynn massed below them, leaped up on their powerful legs, their claws slashing the air, teeth snapping in rage. Abrak-Thyss growled, lashed downward with one of his arms and plucked one of the leaping creatures from the air.

  The creature wailed, writhed in the devil's grasp, slashed in a maddened frenzy with its claws at the serpentine arm, all to no avail. The devil's arm constricted the creature, shattering bones, and transferred the stillliving Vwynn to his other set of arms, which shoveled the Vwynn toward the central mouth in his chest. A single bite cut the creature in half, spraying blood into the sylph's swirling winds. The devil dropped the gory lower half of the Vwynn back into the mass of the Vwynn shrieking below, his great body shaking with mirth while he devoured the upper half.

  They flew west, the immense, shifting but always winged form of the sylph outlined in crimson by the blood droplets of the Vwynn.

• • • •

Nix adjusted to the new form quickly. As a gull he flew with graceful, rapid beats of his wings. As a devil, he flew with long, ungainly strokes. He could scarcely see – the dying light of day pained his eyes and made him blink, and everything mostly an indistinct blur of red and orange and yellow – though his sense of smell was keen. The air above the Wastes, redolent with the scent of sulfur and ages long gone, acrid from alkalis, filled the slits of his nostrils. Ahead, he saw the ring of ruins. Vwynn thronged the glass sea, thousands of them, howling in maddened rage. A deep furrow gashed what had been the smooth surface and within it lay the metal fragments of some kind of lozengeshaped capsule. Empty now, it had blown open from the inside. They circled the area, looking for any sign of Rakon, the sylph, or what Nix assumed to be the freed devil, but saw nothing.

  He shrieked in rage.

  They were too late. Too godsdamned late.

  And he had no idea how much longer the transmutational magic would last.

  He plumbed the mnemonic fragments stuck in his mind by Rusilla, searching them for the location of the Norristru manse. It was the only place Rakon could go.

  He found it right away, both its location and appearance, half a league to the west of Dur Follin, a series of squat, interconnected towers perched like an unlanced boil on the edge of a steep escarpment called the Shelf.

  He shrieked at Egil, beat his wings, and arrowed west, as fast as their new forms allowed. Before long they could no longer outrun the sunset, and the day cast a final, coruscating blaze of red and orange across the sky before fading to night.

  At once Nix's vision improved. The landscape below him was blue and black, the occasional holes that led down to the Vwynn's particular Hell glowed orange. Otherwise the Wastes were little more than a void, a lesion on the face of Ellerth. They flew on, their small bodies exhausted.

  In time he tasted pepper and felt a familiar ache behind his eyes. It intensified as they flew, finally coalesced into haunting, terrified screams, a woman's screams. He heard them as though at a great distance, and at first he thought them the aftereffect of the storm of memories that had exploded out of the memory eater, but soon realized they weren't memories at all. They were too sharp, too acute, as jagged as the Wastes below. They were Rusilla's or Merelda's, invisible currents of terror that lodged in his mind and scarred his psyche, a trail of fear floating in her wake like psychic breadcrumbs.

  He glanced over at Egil, his friend's scaled form knifing through the air, the membranous wings billowing like sails with each beat. The priest's slit, reptilian eyes were somehow still Egil's, and somehow still communicated the priest's pain.

  Egil shrieked and Nix echoed it, their own cries sorry echoes of Rusilla and Merelda's. For the moment they could do nothing but endure, follow the fear, and use it to fire their need to catch Rakon and stop him. He pressed on.

  Minnear rose, crawling into the sky until the pockmarked disc of its full face dominated the sky near the horizon.

  The Thin Veil.

  They had little time, but they'd already almost cleared the Wastes.

  Ahead and to his left the blue-black of the jagged, broken Wastes gave way to a smooth sea of reds and oranges – the warm, stinking miasmic stretch of the Deadmire. They were close to Dur Follin. Soon he saw dots of red sprinkled on the horizon, the mage lights and watch fires of the city. He shrieked again and Egil answered in kind. To his right, the blue-black serpentine line of the Meander wound across the terrain, vanishing temporarily into the dark blot of the city, only to reappear on the other side to feed the Deadmire, its cool blue consumed by the steamy, organic heat of the swamp's red.