The Trials of Empire, page 44
“Too long have I tolerated these absurdities,” Ramayah said in a voice that hurt my ears. He knocked Ghessis roughly to the ground and stamped four, five, six times on his neck until it snapped; then he picked up the shattered body of the Shrine Guardian and pulled off its head and sucked out its glowing white innards. Once this appalling display was complete, he reached down and plucked up Claver’s groaning spirit, still nailed to the wooden cross.
Ramayah looked at me – except he had no eyes. None that I could see. His face, an enormous black oval, was simply… mouth. Three mouths – three sets of grinning jaws, stacked one on top of the other. His skin was the texture of coal-black tree bark, or melted fire-mountain rock, or hewn obsidian. Two horns, like great antlers, sprouted from his head. He wore a crown of pink light, a jagged, spiked, unholy thing.
This was the Progenitor. The Prince of Blood. Chieftain of Kasivar himself and the foremost lieutenant of Hell.
Eyeless, he regarded me with penetrating intensity. His attention was a physical force, burning me, stripping away my skin and flesh. What could I do against such a being? What could any of us do? To even be here felt like the most absurd hubris. We were like mice trying to take down a tyger.
Ramayah pointed an enormous finger at me. I wilted and wept.
“I know you, girl.”
He threw away the body of the Shrine Guardian, tossed it over to where the forces of Oleni and the Legions of Sardach still battled in the shadow of the palace. That fight was about to become a very one-sided affair.
“I have tasted you.” His mouths didn’t synchronise with the words he spoke. Sometimes they gnashed; other times they remained still, and his voice simply issued from the air about my ears. “Such sweetness.” The middle mouth licked its lips. The upper whispered; the lower burped blood.
I stood, frozen in place, mute with fear.
“The temporal path flows in a strange way, does it not? Fate, making us all dance to her tune.” He snorted, a ghastly sound. “You all think it is that rancid wench Oleni who is your saviour, but we all answer to Fate in the end. Even I.” He pointed at me, at the sword I held in my remaining, trembling hand. “That blade. You are unworthy to hold it, girl. You sully it with your mortal touch.”
“I-I…” I stammered.
“DROP IT.”
I screamed and fell over backwards, landing heavily on my buttocks. I was so terrified I couldn’t breathe. For a moment I said nothing at all; and then, with all of my sense and pride leaking out of me, I began to jabber and plead for my life.
“Courage, Helena,” August said quietly from next to me. She gripped me under the armpits and hauled me to my feet. Then she moved so that she was standing next to me, shoulder to shoulder. I felt her press something cold and hard into my one remaining hand. It was the Vangrid blade.
“Ah, Ghessis’ plaything,” Ramayah mocked. “What an interesting creature you are. Tell me your name, woman, and I shall make your cadaver sing sweet music.”
“I shall tell you nothing,” August said, her terror wearing a mask of ferocity.
“Whore of Nema!” Ramayah exploded. “What exotic patrons you rally to your banner!” He gestured to the broken form of the Shrine Guardian. “Where is your soul’s anchor secreted, eh? In the Golden City? Tell me your secrets and I shall permit you life.”
“When I say, you must cut the tether,” August whispered to me.
“How?” I asked desperately.
“In a moment. You will know.”
Ramayah’s mouths suddenly roared in unison: “I will not permit a half-corpse to ignore me! Disgusting bitch of soil and bone! Your spirit is mould! I should have let Ghessis take you. When I sack the Realm of Oleni it will be your soul I put to the longest excruciation! Tell me of Her plans or I shall unstring them out of you like veins—”
It all happened very quickly.
August vanished. For a moment of dizzying, profound resentment I thought she had abandoned me entirely; but then a huge rook flapped away from the place she had just been standing. The bird, almost the same size as me, tore towards Ramayah’s face as surely and swiftly as a javelin, plunged into his middle throat, and tore out his uvula.
Ramayah roared and lurched backwards, flapping his wings, gnashing his jaws, achieving nothing except a mouthful of feathers. He swung wildly with his hands to try and grab August out of the sky – and in so doing, released Claver’s soul tether.
“Now!” August shouted. At the same time I became aware of hundreds – no, thousands – of creatures converging on the monastery. Drawn to their master’s agony, alerted to what was unfolding here in the chapterhouse, the Legions of Sardach were abandoning the palace and swarming towards us.
I brought to bear every last ounce of courage I had and ran over to where Claver’s spirit artefact lay, the Spear of Vangrid gripped in my hand.
I froze. A cry of rage filled the air. I looked up to see Ramayah grab August’s avian form.
“No!” I shouted.
“Do it!” August cried.
I slashed the blade through the tether. August cried out the words of the Nyrsanar Nexi. They were her last. Ramayah squeezed.
I closed my eyes.
And I vanished.
I awoke on the altar.
Lady Frost was there, holding my hand – my right hand. She stroked it like a nurturing grandmother. The flesh looked black and discoloured, and it pulsed with dull pain, but it was still there. My wrist was wrapped in strings of prayer beads and ribbons. One of the shamans was holding my hand, too, thumb pressed firmly into the centre of my palm. He muttered some ward under his breath.
I sat up slowly.
“Easy, girl,” Lady Frost said softly, her expression one of tenderness and concern. “Slowly.”
And then I felt something hard and heavy in my left hand. Stunned, confused, exhausted, I looked at it dumbly.
It was the Spear of Vangrid. As Resi banished me, I had unthinkingly and unwittingly brought it with me. Gripped tightly in my hand, it had cut its way through the aether; now it was here with me on the mortal plane.
Lady Frost’s eyes widened as she saw it. She looked at me. “What happened?”
“I cut the tether,” I said hoarsely. I felt exhausted. “The link between Ramayah and Claver, I severed it. I did as you bade.”
“You did, Helena,” Lady Frost breathed, overcome with relief. She kissed me on the cheek and pulled me into an embrace. “You really did,” she whispered into my ear. “Bless you. Thank you. You have done it. It is finished.”
“Here, drink this,” one of the shamans said gently, offering me some concoction. I took it in a trembling hand, and drank the hot, pungent liquid inside. Immediately I felt my fatigue dissolve away in much the same way I had after a mug of kafé in the Kyarai.
“What happens now? What is the result of severing the connexion?”
“It means that we can kill Claver. Very soon,” Lady Frost said.
“What about Resi?” I asked. Unlike my previous misadventures into the afterlife, which faded like old dreams the moment I returned, this one still felt fresh and visceral. It was as though Ramayah was still there, but a few tens of yards from me, standing beyond the splintered ruins of the chapterhouse. The urge to cower was a strong one.
Lady Frost shook her head sadly. “I know not how you parted, but… we can no longer sense her. At least, not in the Edaximae.”
I steadied myself as a sudden wave of grief washed through me. “He killed her,” I said quietly. I realised that the memory of it would haunt me forever. That was a bleak thing.
“You are certain?”
“I did not see her expire, but her situation was utterly hopeless.”
Lady Frost rubbed my back. “There will be time to grieve, later.”
I nodded, though I did not believe it. Only now did the sounds of mortal battle – how pathetic, how inconsequential it all seemed! – begin to re-register in my mind.
I swung my legs off the side of the altar.
“Even without Claver, we are outmatched,” I said. I could conjure no positive emotion whatever. In spite of Lady Frost’s words, her praise, her encouragement, I simply wanted to fold in on myself. I had neither the stomach nor the strength for more fighting.
Lady Frost signalled to the shamans and the other pagan warriors who had accompanied us to prepare to leave.
“Then we had better do something about it, hadn’t we?”
XXXII
A Sword in the Hand of a Good Man
“Tyranny loves apathy, but it fears a sword in the hand of a good man.”
FROM CHUN PARSIFAL’S THE INFINITE STATE
We mounted our horses and made our way to the Klaran Road. Thralls milled about in the streets, mindless and mute. Corpses lay at their feet, but they did not feast. I saw at least one bludgeoned to death by townsfolk emboldened by their sudden inaction.
We could hear the sounds of fighting all down the Veleurian Road as we rounded the western face of the Arena and charged up through a large housing precinct. Here we were untroubled by the Templars, though the same could not be said for the Sofijan High-Way. At the nexus of the Sofijan, Creus and Veleurian Roads, with the Creus Gate itself but a few hundred yards to the west, a fresh skirmish was taking place where a group of Imperial Guardsmen had collared perhaps a thousand from the volunteer companies and were forcing them to hold the junction.
Here, Templars were bunched up outside the Temple of Creus and the College of Prognosticators – the latter now just a burnt shell. Something had happened to stymie their advance, which was odd, for there were many thousands of them and they should have been able to sweep through such a small defending force with ease.
I flinched. In and amongst the Templars was an explosion, something which I first took to be blackpowder since a great plume of detritus and vaporised human tissue burst into the air. But then I saw another one: the body of a Neman priest buckling, launching into the air, splitting in half, and landing amongst the Templars like a pile of wet laundry.
“That is your work, Helena,” Lady Frost said from next to me. She sounded like a proud parent.
It took me a moment to realise what she was talking about. The priests took their powers from Claver, and Claver was drawing his power from Ramayah. In severing the connexion between Claver and Ramayah, I had cut off their ability to sustain these magicks. Just like the priests in the inner sanctum of Keraq, their bodies were overfilling with malign energies; and with no way to discharge the powers, they were bursting apart.
“To the Temple of Nema, quick,” Lady Frost said.
We crossed over the Creus Road well to the west of the fighting, down a succession of small roads and alleyways where frightened city folk called out to us, desperate for some update on the state of the battle, and then down a southern branch of the Dubravkan Road before it turned into the Dubravkan Bridge. We approached the Temple of Nema from the north, dismounted, and entered.
I had followed Lady Frost and her pagan life guard blindly, for she had moved and acted with such surety; but now that we were in that enormous cathedral, I wondered just what on earth we were doing here. It seemed as though we had done little more than damn ourselves. If the Templars stormed the Temple of Nema there would be no way out.
I voiced these concerns to Lady Frost as we moved through the northern part of the cathedral, but all she would say was, “It will happen here.”
Eventually, we came to the main chamber. Here, bustling around the great deer-headed colossus of Nema, was a collection of several hundred knights – a ragtag outfit of Hauners, pagans, Saxanhilde Templars, and some of the bolder Sovan volunteers. They moved with great purpose, ripping up pews and forming barricades.
In the centre of this mass was Vonvalt.
I ran directly to him. He turned to me, his cloak gone, his armour dented and scratched, and with a large welt on his forehead where it looked as though someone had made a good go of braining him. He offered me a tired smile, unprepared for the tight embrace which I gave him.
I felt his hands against my armoured back as he returned it.
“We did it,” I said, fumbling out the Spear of Vangrid. “We cut the link. His power is gone. Already we can see the priests dying. Exploding!”
Even this piece of unbridled good news was not enough to coax any sort of optimism from Vonvalt. The best he could do, as he gripped me by the shoulders, was nod. He looked absolutely exhausted, physically and spiritually.
“Well done, Helena,” he said tiredly. “Truly. You are magnificent. There is no one else who could have done it.”
The words sounded leaden, hollow. My own sense of achievement, a brittle thing already tempered by the death of August – not to mention Heinrich and Sir Radomir – shattered. Precisely what was it that I had done? Ten thousand Templars stood more or less unopposed on the Veleurian Road. So what if the priests were dead? They would take the city by the end of the day. Those Legionaries fleeing west from the Kova would be crushed between the immovable object of Sova and the unstoppable force of the Confederation armies. I had endured unimaginable horror and taken on enough mental trauma to last ten lifetimes, and the end result was the same. Claver would attain the throne; it was just that he would do it as a mortal despot, rather than an immortal one. We had stopped Ramayah, but Claver would have years, decades, to rebuild the Church and scour every inch of the Empire and beyond for the lore which would let him try again.
Even all of this felt insignificant as the forces of Oleni battled the forces of Kasivar in the holy dimensions. Who was to say that all of this meant anything? A small skirmish in a war for the right to grant the gift of life itself.
“Resi?” he asked quietly, as though he already knew the answer.
I simply shook my head. Vonvalt gritted his teeth. “Well. That is that, then.”
We both stood in silence for a few moments as the people around us laboured to barricade the entrances. Here, then, under the watchful eyes of Nema, we would make our last stand. I might have faced the end with courage if I had not seen souls being dragged away from the Plain of Burden to Hell.
Something thumped in the distant warren of chambers, something that might have been the smashing of heavy doors.
I looked at Vonvalt.
“Here they come,” he said.
“It is not too late,” I replied. “We can still prevail here.”
It was nonsense, of course. We had not a hope of winning.
“No, Helena,” Vonvalt said tiredly. He pulled his sword out of its scabbard. “This is very much the end.”
I stood next to him near the colossus. In front of us, knights and soldiers readied themselves for the inevitable. I watched many offer up a prayer to Nema, kissing their hands and touching the marble hem of her dress, not knowing that the statue’s celestial namesake and her soldiers were utterly preoccupied with a battle of their own.
Not knowing that their prayers were useless things.
“We must try,” I said. I wished Heinrich was next to me. I wished Sir Radomir and Bressinger were still here. “We cannot let this evil win.”
Vonvalt sucked in a deep breath. “Sometimes, Helena, evil wins. That is the way of the world.”
I felt a surge of anger flush through me. “You are not the man I once knew.”
Vonvalt looked at me sharply. It was funny; of all things I could have said and done, it seemed like that, above everything else, wounded him.
The crashing, clattering sound grew. It was as though the temple was being overcome by a tsunami of steel. At least the whispers had gone, the chittering, the buzzing, the trickling sound of phantom blood rivers. The peril we faced was of the purely mortal kind. After everything I had seen, the thought of being stabbed didn’t trouble me much any more.
Eventually the doors were smashed down. With a great blast they flew off their hinges and crashed down on to the marble floor. Standing front and centre of the Templar host, framed in the doorway, was Claver.
Vonvalt actually growled – an animalistic cry of rage.
“JusTICE!” Claver thundered as the Templars around him surged forwards. The main hall came alive with the sound of steel on steel as the attackers crashed into the barricades and the defenders killed them. It was insane; the first two or three ranks of Templars were entirely reckless with their lives, assaulting with none of the prudence one would have expected from soldiers on the verge of an historic victory.
Vonvalt lurched forward. I tried to stop him, but he charged away from the colossus with such a sudden turn of speed that I was left shouting at his back. I ran after him, as did most of the rest of us, save for a few of Lady Frost’s life guard.
The barricades were being ripped to pieces by frenzied Templars. I watched pagans with spiked war hammers lurch forwards and smash the closest Savarans right through the tops of their skulls, but more Templars were right behind them, grasping and grabbing at the pews and wrenching them away. Some didn’t even have a choice; as more Templars crammed into the main hall they crushed the front ranks together. Soon the whole mass of enemy soldiers was practically immobile.
We resumed the busywork of killing. Pinioned Templars who were squeezed into the barricades were stabbed ruthlessly anywhere they were unarmoured. Faces, throats, hands, all were hacked at. Many of the corpses were left stuck upright. I saw one man with his nose and lips sliced off looking about frantically, screaming, his arms locked in place by his fellows. Even when a pagan smashed the top of his head with a hammer, with such force that one of his eyeballs bulged out of its collapsed socket, he could not move.
No effort was being made to stop this senseless and chaotic advance. It was the height of madness. Why go about attacking us in this way? It seemed to me all they had to do was burn the temple down with us in it. But Claver was in charge of these men, and Claver was driving them forward with cruel and bloody exhortations. What was the point of it?
I looked at the priest. He looked back at me. For all he hated Vonvalt – and he hated Vonvalt – I think in that moment he might have hated me more. And he was right to.
