The Trials of Empire, page 43
“No,” I breathed. It was no use Aegraxes telling me to flee. I had no idea how to. The wall was solid behind me, the floor unyielding beneath my buttocks.
I reached out and snatched up the sword from where Aegraxes had dropped it. It felt hot and heavy in my hands, the iridescent golden light of the blade like liquid sun.
I stood.
The Decapitator came at me.
I tried to think of my swordplay tutelage, but there was simply no time. I brought the sun blade down in a great stroke from high to low, but the Decapitator danced backwards. The blade seemed to cut the aether itself, leaving an incision in the fabric of the air. Beyond, deep into the reality-wound, I caught the briefest hint of a city, a place of white marble and gold beneath a turbulent grey sky. For a moment I thought it was Sova, but it was not – it was so much more than that.
And it was at war.
The incision knitted itself closed.
The Decapitator was there.
I shouted as it smacked the flat of the sun blade with its hand. I held on to it, but the force of the blow knocked me off my feet and wrenched my arm badly. The demon staggered backwards, clutching its wounded hand. A great pall of smoke was rising off it, bleeding into the air. The sun blade, whatever its substance, was anathema to it.
I scrabbled to my feet, swinging the sword back and forth, shouting as I did so. I had no idea what my endgame was; even if I managed to defeat this despicable creature, I was trapped here. Aegraxes was motionless and still on the floor.
The Decapitator came at me again, arms whipping out. It moved with jarring speed, not like a person, but as though reality itself were skipping forward fractions of a second. I couldn’t predict its movements. I swung once, twice, wildly, my panic rising—
And then again it was on me.
I screamed and squirmed as it pinned me down, its enormous stomach-mouth directly above my own midriff. A great stink came off it that caused me to gag and retch. Insane with rage, its enormous jaws clamped down over my hand which held the sun blade.
And it tore it clean off.
I gaped at my missing right hand. It was a ruin of flesh and bone. Blood jetted from the stump. Worse: a horrible darkness was spreading from it, an iridescent purple-black bruise of malign energies snaking up my forearm like oil on water.
It was agony. It was like my arm was on fire. It was like someone had peeled off my skin and was bathing my nerves in vinegar.
The Decapitator was not faring much better. In biting my sword hand off, it had idiotically sliced its mouth open. Stinking black ectoplasm gushed from where it had cut its cheeks into four flaps. It bit at the air stupidly, mad with pain. Its six hands flailed about the chamber, crashing off the doppelgänger walls. The sun blade smoked and hissed on the floor next to Aegraxes.
And then, finally, they arrived.
I knew not what had summoned them; certainly I had not done anything deliberate. Perhaps cutting open the fabric of reality, breaching the wall of aether between this place and the realm of Nema, had alerted them. Perhaps it had been the death of Aegraxes. Perhaps this monstrous calamity simply made so much fucking noise that intervention was inevitable.
Whatever the reason, the Shrine Guardians arrived. Or at least, one did. Perhaps it was all they could spare.
The Decapitator shrieked dementedly in the corner, clutching the golden thread attached to Resi and winding it desperately around one of its arms. The Shrine Guardian, impassive behind its faceplate of beautiful ivory, strode the length of the room. It drew its sword. In its wake, footsteps of flickering white flame, like chainfire, coruscated in and out of existence. The air in the chamber suddenly felt cleaner, fresher, more vital and fragrant.
Sensing its doom, the Decapitator screeched and lurched forwards, trying to bite at this celestial interloper – but it was thrown backwards with an incredible, bone-crunching punch. It landed awkwardly on the floor, sprawling, insensible. A moment later, the Guardian stomped its sabaton on the demon’s neck and cut off its hand – the one holding the golden thread anchored to Resi.
And then, it decapitated the Decapitator.
I watched this execution unfold with a sort of baffled, horrified fascination, until I was jolted by a noise to my right. My heart lurched. I scrabbled for a weapon, fearing the very worst, but I quickly discovered it was Aegraxes. He was stirring. I had thought him to be dead – and felt perfectly justified in so thinking – but he was not. Nor would he die. I wasn’t even sure if he could die, at least in a way that meant anything to me.
His neck stump appeared to have sealed itself off, and he slowly pressed himself up into a sitting position.
“I told you,” his surviving snake head croaked. “Judicious intervention.”
The Shrine Guardian took up the golden thread and manipulated it in some way. It seemed to disappear, or fold back into Resi’s body.
A rook appeared in the chamber, perched on the windowsill. It cawed at the Guardian; the Guardian stroked the bird’s cheek.
And then the Shrine Guardian was gone.
The rook flew over to me and landed on my ruined arm.
And then I was gone, too.
XXXI
Blades of the Sun
“Only a death witnessed may be glorious.”
LEGIONARY APHORISM
I was standing next to August in a place of chaos.
But it was not the chaotic maelstrom of dark energies which swirled around the Halls of Hell. This felt like a much more mortal chaos – a mortal chaos perpetrated by immortals.
Here was the Palace of Blood. It sat at the nadir of an immense slope, though the slope was no natural formation. Instead, it was a vast plane of marble which cut a shallow angle towards the Palace, like an enormous drain.
In fact it quite literally was.
Arrayed in perfect ranks were thousands of marble slabs. Tens of thousands. Perhaps millions. They stretched up into the crimson sky, which presided over this nightmare in a perpetual sunset. On top of each slab was a person, or what had once been a person. Each was headless, inverted, and being slowly drained. At the base of these long ranks of slabs were channels which siphoned the blood down into the Palace. The quantity of it was beyond comprehension.
The Palace itself looked to have been constructed entirely from bone. Its outermost curtain wall had set upon it two huge faces, and from their closed eyes fountained thousands of gallons of blood in a great sanguinary lament. It pooled on to the plane beyond, and it was on that plane which August and I now crouched, an infinite, ankle-deep lake of blood like a never-ending plate of red glass.
In front of the walls, sloshing across this revolting moat, were two armies.
“Thank you, Helena,” August said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “That took no small store of courage.”
I could only concentrate on the stump of my right hand, where the black corruption of the Decapitator spread. It was up to my elbow now. My wrist stank, and pustulent yellow fluid and black ectoplasm drooled from it. I was dissolving. I could think on little else except the pain.
August eyed it warily. “Come. We must be quick.”
I gripped the stump and followed her, whilst the forces of Oleni stormed the palace and the Legions of Sardach, Ramayah’s personal demonic armies, met them on the plane. Oleni’s soldiers reminded me of the Shrine Guardians. They were a mirror-image of the Sovan legions, clad in armour of gold and flowing cream-coloured cloaks. Amongst them were standards and pennants bearing the white deer of Nema, not flapping in the windless air, but swirling as though underwater. They wielded weapons forged from light, and directed crackling corposant blue energy at their enemies.
The Legions of Sardach were the black to Oleni’s white. Like the demons I had summoned in Keraq, their skin was leathery and black. Each was headless, though that seemed to be no impediment. They moved more like enormous spiders than people.
These armies met in a great melee, the sun blades of Oleni’s warriors carving through the demons as though they were little more than clouds of smoke. I was not sure if either the angelic host or the Legions of Sardach bled in the traditional sense, but there was so much blood being kicked up in great sprays that it was impossible to tell.
“Come on. This is not our concern.”
We had been crouched behind an outcrop of obsidian; now we moved towards the great sloped field of death, sloshing through the blood plain like children playing in a stream. Away to our right was a wretched and gloomy metropolis of dull brown stone which put me in mind of the City of Sleep. In the centre of it was a hill, and crowning that was a structure which looked like a Savaran monastery.
“You were caught,” I said, clutching at my forearm. “Something had you.”
“Ghessis found me,” August said. It was clear that the experience had rattled her.
“That was not Ghessis in the hospice.”
August looked at me sharply. “Please: I do not want to know. Don’t tell me about that.”
I could not fault that kind of thinking.
“Is he still after you?” I asked.
“Always,” was all August said. “Hurry. We must be quick.”
We moved closer to the gloomy city. There was little sign of habitation. It was as still and silent as the grave. Perhaps it was the settlement in which the soldiers of the Legions of Sardach lived – which would account for its being empty. It seemed bizarre to imagine the creatures just… existing. Eating, drinking, arguing, carousing. Perhaps they didn’t; perhaps they simply sat in silence forever, waiting until they were needed. That was a bleak thought, too.
We achieved the settlement, cutting figures of midnight thieves. Our footsteps seemed unforgivably loud on the cobbles.
“They are watching us,” I murmured. Now I did see flickers of movement in the upstairs windows of each dismal lodging: dark presences, the flash of eyes, an imagined hand pointing. I heard whispers, too.
“They do not like us being here,” August said. “Nor should they.”
She pulled me into an alleyway and unbuckled the weapon from about her hips. It was a blade forged from golden light, nested in an ornate scabbard. It was the same sort of sword that the Shrine Guardians used. She helped me to strap it on whilst I held my wounded arm out of the way. “Ramayah’s connexion to Claver has its nexus in that building,” she said, nodding to the monastery.
“You mean to sever it?” I asked. I gestured to the sword she had given me with my remaining hand. “This is the spirit knife?”
“No; this is the spirit knife.” She pulled back her cloak to reveal what looked more like a spearhead than a blade, wrought from gold and still attached to a short length of broken haft. Its sides were so razor-sharp they looked as though they could cut the air itself. I could feel powerful energies radiating from it.
“The blade that cut out the heart of Vangrid,” I breathed.
August nodded. “Only an attenuation artefact such as this has the necessary power to sever the connexion between Ramayah and Claver.”
“Why can Ramayah not simply use this to cut his way into the mortal plane?” I asked. “I have incised the fabric of the aether with something much less potent.”
“For one, its holy energies would be agony. It is said that he was so affected by the weight of his heresy in murdering Vangrid that he cannot bear to look at it, much less hold it. Secondly, he cannot exist on the mortal plane without a human host; he will simply discorporate. And thirdly…”
“Yes?”
“Thirdly,” August repeated, as she finished buckling the scabbard about my hips, “he does not have it.”
I eyed the monastery warily. “How do you sever the link?”
“It is a simple case of cutting a—”
She stopped, cocked her head.
“I hear it too,” I said.
“Run.”
We ran.
Ghessis smashed his way into the street. I looked back only once, to see the – dismally familiar – sight of that alabaster-skinned colossus, an enormous man naked except for his grotesque iron mask. His feet and shins were scratched and bloodied from where they smashed through the brick and bone of the structures lining the streets. He pulled entire handfuls of tiles and roof beams free in his haste to clamber after us. A bone-shaking roar of animalistic rage filled the air.
If he caught me, that would be it. No more dipping in and out of the afterlife like an indecisive bather. No more returning to the mortal plane, frightened and shaking, but ultimately safe. No. If he caught me, it would be oblivion. My body would be rendered nothing more than an empty vessel like August’s. Who knew what excruciation awaited my soul?
I tore recklessly across the cobbles, driven to fresh urgency. The only good thing about being chased by Ghessis was that it made all of our other problems disappear. The creatures of this wretched city were as frightened of him as we were. Where once they might have tried to stop us attempting the monastery, now they cowered in their houses.
“Come on!” August shouted at me breathlessly. We cut right, then left up a wide boulevard. The monastery sat atop a hill of black rock, and seemed to exist in its own in time and space. The air was curiously quiet and muted here; the sounds of the battle outside the Palace of Blood died away – itself an enormous feint, I now realised, for this much more important task. Still, could not even a small detachment of them be spared?
“Can they not help us?” I shouted at August’s back as we barged our way through a large pair of iron gates at the bottom of the path leading up to the monastery’s entrance. Behind us, Ghessis roared again, smashing over a house and crushing its occupants. They disappeared in explosions of black smoke.
“Not them,” August said. She was looking frantically up at the sky. I noticed she had something in her hand, a small charm or amulet. She kept whispering into it, talking to it, pleading with it. She rubbed it with her thumbs as she ran.
Ghessis roared again.
“Who then?!” I asked.
The answer came a half-second later. There was a shift in the air behind me. I whirled around. The aether had split, cut open like a sword cutting skin. Three Shrine Guardians stood there, shields and spears in hand, forming a protective rearguard.
The last thing I saw was Ghessis ripping one of them in two in a great welter of glowing white ectoplasm and golden light.
“No!” I shrieked, and then the monastery doors boomed closed, and we were alone in that hellish place.
Inside it was quiet and gloomy.
August led me at a run across the floor – formed, I observed, of a mosaic of bone chips. The walls were draped in tapestries of tanned skin, and the pillars which held the roof aloft were great accretions of human spines strapped with iron. I saw that what I had first taken to be wood grain in the panelling on the walls were in fact faces, groaning quietly, shifting in slow agony. Just another horror in a realm of horrors, no more or less remarkable than a thousand other things I had seen.
We moved at speed through the silent, dark corridors. It seemed unlikely that the Shrine Guardians would be able to hold Ghessis for long. The place was set out much like a Neman kloster, and August was leading me to what I would have recognised as the chapterhouse. As we approached, I felt a horrible pull of energies, like underwater currents swirling around my feet and ankles.
Inside was Claver.
I came up short, but August was untroubled. She shouldered straight into the chapterhouse, and I realised that this was another artefact of Claver’s soul, a spectral doppelgänger, the same as what we had seen on the ash wastes of Hell.
He was in agony.
He was strapped – no, nailed – to a large X-shaped cross of wood. He was naked and covered in bloody rents, as though a large clawed beast had raked him up and down. The floor of the chapterhouse was awash with blood. From Claver’s chest sprouted a thin column of what I can only describe as black light. Much like the golden tether which the Decapitator had tried to unpick from August’s body, this thread rose up through the roof of the chapterhouse and into the sky.
“Quick,” August said to herself, pulling out the spirit knife. She moved forward, ready to cut the tether—
—when the wall of the chapterhouse beyond dissolved in a great welter of cracked bone. A Shrine Guardian, thrown as though from a catapult, smashed through the wall and into the wooden cross, knocking Claver’s bound spirit face down. The tether jerked away, and August’s knife missed it by an inch.
The Shrine Guardian righted itself and recovered its spear and shield. August lurched once more for the tether, but she was batted away with a sideswipe from Ghessis’ hand and sent sprawling.
“Resi!” I shouted, making to dash over to her; but then Ghessis reached in to the chapterhouse, grabbing at us madly, fingers grasping, clutching at rubble.
“Do something!” I yelled at the Shrine Guardian, but it was already up and moving. It stabbed Ghessis in the hand, cutting a deep gash into his index finger. It was another wound to add to the tally, for I saw now that Ghessis had several more; a great rent where the skin of his chest was laid open, and a deep stab in his side, judging by the way he held it and hunched slightly. With a clearer view, I saw also that Ghessis’ movements were sluggish. The Shrine Guardian’s, to the contrary, were nimble, and for several short moments I actually thought the latter might have the better of the former.
And then there was a foetid stink in the air, and the buzzing sound of a million flies. An enormous entity thumped into the roof of the monastery, cracking the beams and dislodging a thousand millennia of dust in a great grey waterfall. As the Shrine Guardian leapt forward to plunge his spear into the eyehole of Ghessis’ mask, both of them were crushed under the hook-clawed feet of an enormous black demon.
“Blessed Nema,” August said, her voice cracking with the most profound fear. She lurched once more to try and slice through the tether, but Ramayah smashed the entire roof off the chapterhouse and yanked the tether away, grasping it as though that unending coil of black aether were simply a rope.
