Alaskan Fury (65 page)

Zenaida laughed at her.  “Once I
take your soul, I’m going to hunt down your djinni and make you watch as I
castrate him while he sobs like a child.  He didn’t even try to fight me last
time.  You know that?  He just stood there whimpering.” 

If I lose…
  Kaashifah felt
a stab of panic, thinking of ‘Aqrab.  The singer.  The poet.  Doomed to torment
by her sister’s blade, if she failed.

I can’t fail,
Kaashifah
told herself, her heart hammering as she remembered ‘Aqrab’s gentle hands upon
her, his shy smile when she showed him her paintings. 
I can’t.

“Oh yes,” Zenaida laughed. 
“Think about that, sister.  Think of just how
much
I’ll make him beg me
to kill him, while you watch from the spirit realm.  I’ve had
eons
to
practice.”  She started walking in a circle, twisting the blade in smooth,
blazing arcs.

She’s an Inquisitor,
Kaashifah realized, horrified.  She thought of ‘Aqrab on the rack and her heart
became sick. 
My fault.  It would be my fault…
  Then she caught
herself. 
No! 
Her spine tightening with resolve, her words soft, she
said, “That is
not
going to happen,
Yngvöldr
.  I am the Blade of
Morning.  Today, you will see why.”

The sound of her name made Zenaida
flinch, but only for a moment.  “I’m wondering,” she sneered, “if I should make
him fuck me first.”  She spun her sword around elegantly, watching Kaashifah. 
“What do you think he would do, sister, to save himself?  Would he fuck me, if
I gave him the choice?”

The petty, crude disdain in
Zenaida’s sneer made Kaashifah’s fingers tighten on the hilt of her sword, a
welling of Fury rising on a hot tide within her.  “You’re a fool if you think
you’re going to get that chance.”  Then she stood there, holding her claymore
out behind her, brazenly poised for a huge swing, waiting.

Seeing the great arc she planned,
Zenaida laughed.  “You’ve spent too much time with the poet, sister.”  Then,
blinded by her own Fury, Zenaida charged.

Kaashifah dropped her sword,
ducked under Zenaida’s swing, and, surging power into her fingertips, slammed
her fingers into the break in the feathers between Zenaida’s abdomen and
thigh.  She punched through tender flesh and tendons, tightened her fingers,
and ripped them out.  As Zenaida was screaming and beginning to down-form from
the shock, Kaashifah caught the Damascus steel blade now loosely-held in her
fingertips and wrenched it from her sister’s hands.  Twisting, she lunged back,
spun, and, as her sister’s eyes were widening, lopped off Zenaida’s head.  Then
she cut what remained in half.  Then quarters.  Her last blow severed the
pieces with such force that the sword shattered in her hand, leaving her
fingers white-knuckled around the pommel of a ruined blade.

Through tears, Kaashifah kicked
each piece apart from each other, then fell to her knees as she waited for the
soul to release and come to serve its penance.

It took several minutes, but
eventually, she felt the tether between their souls tightening, and felt
Zenaida’s bitter spirit struggling against the pact it had made, its form
taking slow, wispy shape upon the bloody tarmac beside her.  When Zenaida’s
soul materialized beside her, its wrists were bound by the shackles of the
Pact, and her sister’s face was twisted with hatred.  “You were playing me. 
The whole time.  You were pretending to be weak so that you could reap my
soul
.” 
Her words were filled with venom, accusing, brimming with loathing.

Kaashifah looked away.  She had
seen such a look before, when she had won her last duel.  It had begun three
thousand years of misery.  “I told you I wasn’t trying to kill you, Zenaida,”
she said.  “You weren’t listening.”  All around her, the winds were beginning
to pick up, lifting the dust and debris off of the runway in swirls.

“You were
lying
,”
Zenaida’s fade sneered at her.  “Setting me up!  To trap me in servitude.”

“No,” Kaashifah said softly. 
“That was
your
goal, sister.”

The wind began howling around
them, a growing, rising shriek that Kaashifah could almost see.

“And I would have done it, too,”
Zenaida said, her face twisted in detest.  “In an
instant
.”

“I know,” Kaashifah said softly. 
“It’s how I knew you would accept.”  Quivering in the face of her sister’s
hatred, Kaashifah took a deep breath.  Unable to face Zenaida’s revulsion for
the rest of her life, knowing she was a coward, knowing that it was no mercy,
Kaashifah said, “I release you of the Pact, sister.”

Immediately, the bonds around
Zenaida’s ethereal wrists began to disintegrate.

Her sister stared at her,
obviously shocked.  “You would
free
me?” Zenaida cried.  “When you could
have
used
me?”  It came out with a cry of amazement, of open-faced
gratitude.  Kaashifah could see shimmering tears on her sister’s ghostly face,
could see the childlike awe and genuine thankfulness, and once again thought of
the woman who had been betrayed by her sisters, long centuries before.  “Thank
you.”  It was tentative, like a child that had long been locked away, and she
sniffled, wiping her eyes.  “Thank you so much.  I was so wrong about you.”

Kaashifah turned away, ashamed
and disgusted at herself.  “Don’t thank me, sister,” she whispered.

At that, the winds began to
coalesce around them, taking form.  Winged forms.  Dozens of them.  Hundreds. 
Their wings lit up the frozen tarmac of the airstrip until it was almost too
bright to see. They surrounded Zenaida, whose newfound childlike innocence
suddenly parted in a flash of terror.  “Oh please, no!” Zenaida cried, stepping
backwards.  “No, I’m sorry, please!”

And she
was
sorry,
Kaashifah realized, her heart twisting in mourning, but it was far too late.

The winged figures, hundreds
strong, their wings so searing that the entire runway became filled with a
blinding white light of unearthly radiance, stood gathered around Zenaida,
waiting in silence.

After it became apparent to her
that those she had murdered weren’t going to attack her, Zenaida straightened,
seemingly gaining confidence.  “You want to condemn me?  Fine.  I don’t need
your love.  I went seventeen centuries without love!  Because of
you
. 
Because of
your
lies!  I will find my afterlife elsewhere.  I don’t
need
you.”  She turned and started shouldering her way through the silent gathering
of angels.

Goodbye, sister,
Kaashifah
thought.

A moment later, the unearthly
howl of dogs shattered the silence.  They bayed, the sound longer and more
sinister than anything that could be produced by the First Realm.  Zenaida
hesitated in shoving her way through her dead sisters, cocking her head at the
sky.  Then, when the Hounds bayed again, her eyes widened and she started
scrabbling to get through, shrieking.  As Kaashifah watched sadly, Zenaida took
to the air, her ethereal body slipping up into the howling winds, radiant wings
flapping frantically to gain altitude.  Around them, more Furies were
appearing, male and female, ringing outward from where Zenaida soared skyward,
heads tilted to watch her.  Hundreds of them. 
Thousands.

The baying came again, except
this time, the sound was upon them, a howl from many throats.  Zenaida saw her
silent brethren parting, saw big black bodies moving lightning-fast between the
radiant wings.  Then they were jumping,
flying
, spreading light-eating
black wings, their nightmarish jaws snapping in anticipation as they climbed towards
Zenaida’s feet.  Zenaida screamed and beat the air faster.

Kaashifah turned away, unable to
watch.  As the pitch of Zenaida’s screams shifted from terror to agony,
Kaashifah collapsed on the ruined tarmac, staring down at the dragon’s favored
sword, focusing on nicks and scratches in the ruined blade.  She had broken it
in half with the force of her last swing, severing her sister’s spine.  Seeing
its blade pocked and dented, its painstakingly-folded steel shattered by that
final cut, Kaashifah felt her shoulders start to quake.

I killed a Sister,
she
thought, in misery
.
  She thought of her birthmark, the one she had
carved from her skin a dozen times, only to grow back in exactly the same spot,
with exactly the same etchings.  Her entire life, she had struggled to stop it,
to fight it, but it had happened anyway.  It had been a warning for her, one
that she had failed to heed.  She listened to Zenaida’s screams die over the
howling of the dogs, then heard the silence descend back upon the ruined tarmac.

She let the broken haft of the
sword fall from her fingers, where it clanged upon the icy asphalt beneath
her.  All around her, the glow of her brethren’s wings continued to light up
the area like it had been bathed in the radiance of heaven.  Kaashifah didn’t
even see it, so deep was her wretched misery.  The look of hope on Zenaida’s
face, the bewilderment, the heartfelt, childlike
gratitude
…  She hadn’t
tried hard enough to save her.  She hadn’t done enough to bring her back from
the brink.  She’d let the Hounds
kill
her.

She saw the wings move nearby,
saw them part again.

The Hounds come to take the
kin-killer with them,
she thought, without looking.  She pushed her wings
from her body on instinct, though she had no intention of trying to fly away. 
She just felt…more whole…with her wings bared, and, after two thousand years
without them, wanted to die with that small comfort.

But it wasn’t a Hound that tapped
on her boot with a Roman sandal.  Kaashifah frowned at it, then slowly lifted
her head, following the muscular, greaves-clad leg up to the leather skirting
of a Centurion’s scale mail cuirass.  Tilting her head made her vision blur,
and Kaashifah had to wipe at her eyes before she could see his face.

A freckled, aqua-eyed, athletic
young man looked down at her from beneath the polished steel brow of a galea. 
The helmet’s red crest of rank rose above him in a fan of crimson horsehair
that remained still despite the howling wind, and he smelled of leather and
sweat.  Two radiant white wings hung folded down his back, the black tips of
their feathers almost touching the crumbled tarmac at his feet.

…
black tips?

“You broke your sword,” he
commented.  His voice had the richness of an immortal, but the rumble of a man
hardened and tempered by years of battle.

Kaashifah, never having seen a
male Fury before, could only stare up at him, fighting that inner twinge of
wrongness
from thousands of years of taboo.  “Hello,” she whispered, when it was obvious
the young man was paying attention to her, specifically.  All around them, the
gathering of Furies had turned inward, facing them.

But the man only looked at her as
if contemplating a puzzle. 
He comes to take my head,
Kaashifah thought,
wretchedly.

As she watched, the man reached
over one shoulder and, with a smooth motion, drew a sword, one that gleamed
with a
ruby
radiance, the luminescent glow of blood itself.  Great ebony
flanges spread off of the sword in razor points above and below the grip, and
the thick, four-foot blade itself split down the center, becoming two distinct
blades before re-forming into a single point.  Its entire length seemed to
glisten with a liquid fire, bathing the frozen ground around them in a crimson
light.  Kaashifah froze, looking at it. 
That is not the sword of a Fury,
she thought, her heart catching in her throat as it drove little chills down
her spine. 

The man held it between them,
eying it in quiet contemplation.  “It is red to remind its bearer of the blood
that it spills.”  He slid a finger down the ruby blade thoughtfully, then
touched a sleek ebony spine with his thumb.  “Black, to remind them of Death.” 
He touched the spine’s point.  “The flanges represent the pain that must be
endured to wield it.  The emerald in the pommel—” he twisted it so she could
see the magnificent green gem in the base of the sword, glowing like a djinni’s
eye, “—is a symbol of hope and renewed life.”  He lifted his aqua-colored gaze
from the sword and gave her a gentle smile.  “For where War must pass, rebirth
will follow.”

It was then that Kaashifah
recognized the sword.

Immediately she fell to her
stomach, eyes to the icy ground.  She was gasping, her breath coming in steamy
little puffs in the cold winter air, when the Lord of War said, “Sit up, my
Morning Blade.”

For a long moment, Kaashifah
thought she had misheard, and waited for the Sword of War to arc through her
neck and do to her what she had wreaked upon her sister.  The sound of metal
rattling against asphalt heralded a warm hand on her shoulder.  Reluctantly, she
bit her lip and dared to look up into Her Lord’s impassive face.  “Sit up,” He
said, and it was not a request.

Very slowly, Kaashifah got to her
knees, biting her lip, averting her gaze downward.  In front of her, the Lord
of War stood.  He leveled His blade upon her and Kaashifah’s heart sped up.  He
would take her wings.  Leave her mortal.

“You have failed,” the Lord of
War told her, in the tone of ritual, His voice booming outward in a rolling
thunder.  “In three thousand years, you have failed in many things.”

His command.  I failed His
command,
Kaashifah thought, horrified.
 
She felt her wingtips
trembling against the cold ground. 
He’s going to kill me.
  …or take her
wings.  Her fear became so thick it was like molten lead rising into her
throat.

“You have failed to follow in the
footsteps of your ancestors.”

She bowed her head, feeling the
cold sinking of dread.  “I’m sorry—” she began.