The Warlord's Domain (33 page)

Aldric’s eyes were closed and his features without expression, almost conveying the illusion of sleep until illusion was destroyed and the reality made plain by the black dirk jutting from his chest. Already he was growing cold and there was no color in him; all the color had leaked out on to the floor, as red as…

As roses…

Kyrin pulled the borrowed helmet from her head and flung it clattering clear across the room. She would hate the color and the scent of roses for the rest of her life. As grief gave way to awareness of the eight guards staring through the still-smoldering doorway, she realized that
the rest
was measured now in seconds. Their lord was slain and his assassin was beyond their reach, but whether impelled by loyalty or by more mercenary motives these were men who wanted to kill someone—and she was the only one not dead already.

Her own long stabbing-sword was belted at her hip, but at first Kyrin gave it only passing thought. The cooling dead-weight across her thighs had taken away whatever desire she might have had to prolong an inevitable and now enviable end. Kyrin was not fond to live. At long last, and too late, she began to understand Aldric and the Albans.

Without the helmet they could see she was a woman, but at least there would be no nonsense this time about keeping her for later, “for dessert.” They were too enraged. They would carve her as the main dish on revenge’s table, and it would be quick—perhaps too quick even for pain, although in her heart she knew that thought was foolishness.

Kyrin closed her eyes and shook her head. Nothing made sense anymore, and shaping a decision from the confused whirl within her mind was as lifting some great weight. Oblivion. Peace. To go where Aldric was. To die… that would be good. But to die well. Maybe it would be better to go out fighting after all. She owed these bastards so much—they and what they represented.

“Soon, my loved,” she said, letting Aldric’s body slide gently to the floor as she came to her feet and unhooked the sheathed
estoc
from her belt. “Very soon. Wait for me…”Kyrin raised the sword level with her face, one hand about its hilt and the other on its scabbard. The guards fanned out, watchful and suddenly uncertain, eager to slaughter her and at the same time reluctant to make the first move. There was too much of death and desperation in this room to leave any space for error. Kyrin could feel it.

She forced herself to smile at them across the
estoc
blade as she slowly drew it from its scabbard, and saw at least one flinch as she dropped the empty scabbard to the ground beside the empty husk which had been her lover. That one had made the connection, and knew she had neither reason to live nor fear of dying. In his career he would have seen many such, and none left free to swing a blade would have gone alone into the darkness. Kyrin met his eyes, concentrated on him and made her forced smile grow tight and cold and predatory. He was afraid… that left seven who were not.

The seven poised their swords and came for her in a single rush.

The release that was death gave only a surcease to the pains and terrors of the flesh. Those were past and done with, an ugly memory and no more. What remained for Voord was worse. Far, far worse, he had died in debt, with what he owed still barely collected…

And dying was no escape from demons.

The cool un-warmth on Aldric’s skin was suddenly swept away by an iciness that ground through to the marrow of his bones and the very core of his spirit. Darkness became dawn, and was flushed by an unwholesome light that was the livid color left by blood settling through the tissues of a days-dead corpse. All of that dark untrammeled world contracted in upon them, until the boundary of what had been infinity was the inside of a mirrored sphere as wide as the gulf between the living and the dead.

Issaqua crossed the boundary, following its prey.

For all that the demon was hunger incarnate, it still smelled of roses. The perfumes carried with it a reeling drunkenness that even here set the senses swirling like strong wine, but that was the last remaining trace of the Bale Flower which Aldric had seen twice before. In the here and now beyond death, where all was made naked and unadorned, there was no place for the foul-fair semblance of a monstrous blossom. No need for anything at all but truth at last—a truth that was reason enough to set Voord screaming.

Issaqua’s shape had warped from the softness of rose-petals into a thing of fangs and drool and chitin, the glistening armored bulk of its first, worst child. It was a shape that Aldric knew of old, from dreams that lurked beyond the gates of sleep and from a reality that was worse than any dream. It was a shape that he could name: Warden of Gateways, Herald of the Ancients.
Ythek’ter auythyu an-shri
.

The Devourer in the Dark.

Ythek Shri swung its eyeless armored head to study them, and Aldric felt that unhuman consideration sweep over him like gust of winter wind. There was a promissory recognition in the demon’s gargoyle glower, a recollection of the Devourer’s last meeting with this puny scrap of living meat which had dared give it defiance— and worse, had won. It stepped forward with that raking grace he knew so well, stalking on triple-taloned claws across its own curved and distorted reflection that was thrown back and back again from the mirrored limits of the world. Aldric held his ground and returned the demon’s regard with as much composure as he could summon. He had made no pacts, owed no debts, and the Law of Balance that lay behind all things extended even here. Ythek Shri could not harm him.

Voord… was not so lucky.

Kyrin stared at the oncoming swords with less fear than she would have believed. They glittered coldly in the wintry light streaming through the shattered wall, and were for all that threat no more than her keys to the door that kept her from Aldric’s side. Sharp keys, and painful, but of no more concern to her now than any of the other means to an end that she had employed in her brief life.

She laughed, a grim sound that was more than half a sob, and met them halfway across the room with the cut that the Albans called
tarannin-kai
, twin thunderbolts, a horizontal figure-eight that jolted either side in flesh and sent someone’s fingers pattering across the floor. The charge broke, guardsmen scattering in every direction— and Kyrin pirouetted like a dancer, cut backhanded and felt first impact and then a spray of wet heat. She was not fencing in the Jouvaine style she had been taught but fighting for her life—or at least a good death—in the ruthless Alban fashion which Aldric had favored, where any move that failed to draw blood was wasted. A return cut clashed on the forts of her sword, and as the force of the stroke glissaded uselessly against her hilt she counterthrust hard into an unguarded shoulder. The meeting steel rang and grated. It was not the harsh wild belling of Widowmaker’s hungry blade, only the shrill chime of common metal—but metal that was hungry enough without two thousand years to teach it appetite. Kyrin’s boot slammed up to drive the air from a guardsman’s lungs before her sword ripped out the little that remained. For that first frenzied minute their fear of her desperation was as good as a weapon—and then a blade bit into her side and all fear and hesitation vanished.

Kyrin cried out, a sound that was more shock and outrage at the violation of her flesh than any reaction to pain—the pain of such an injury would come later, had there been a later. She clapped her hand against the spurting wound, missed her balance for an instant and almost at once took another cut that opened her thigh from hip to knee. This time, Kyrin could not help but scream as. she reeled sideways and fell down onto the broken marble paving of the floor.

Everything went black and when her senses came wavering back, the first to return was taste as the tang of blood and oily metal flooded her mouth, dribbling from the smeared sword-point resting against her lips. Kyrin stared up at the soldier whose boot was under her chin. There was no pity in the man’s face, nor in those of his companions. As the blade pressed downward and clicked against her teeth, Kyrin clenched them uselessly and shut her eyes.

Aldric watched with revulsion as Voord cowered in the presence of his nemesis, then turned, screaming—always, always screaming—in an attempt to flee. It was useless; here, where all places were the same place, there was nowhere for him to run without the glinting black bulk of the Devourer there already, waiting. As the once-Warlord stumbled to a terror-stricken halt for the tenth or the hundredth or the thousandth time, Issaqua the Shri grinned at him with a mouth that was the mouth of Hell.

It made a slavering noise, and its great triangular head split wide apart like the petals of a flower—except that no flower possessed such a ragged infinity of dreadful teeth. The spikes and blades of those fangs dribbled glutinous saliva as they ground together with a sound like shears, and strings of vile slime dripped onto Voord’s upturned face. His shrieks rose to an incoherent squeal that was beyond screaming as Issaqua stooped down from its fifteen feet of height and opened its crooked claws in a rending embrace that ended when Voord came to pieces…

And was restored, to do it all again for as much of eternity as the demon desired.

Aldric stared in horror for a long second while the mangled fragments which had been Voord became Voord again and tried to escape. Except that here there was neither escape by flight nor escape by insanity any more than there was escape by death. Issaqua’s talons clashed shut on nothing, mocking him by missing as he flinched frantically aside, then opened wide and reached for him again.

They jarred to a halt as Aldric blocked the way.

He had seen what had happened to Voord—what even now was happening again to Voord—and was consumed with a fear that was as far beyond earthly terror as he was now beyond life. Fear and honor had fought together for the longest of times, and yet it seemed only the barest instant before honor won. Aldric had not driven his
tsepan
into his chest, had not given up that life, freely and without bargains, to preserve Voord from torment only to see it happen now.

The Devourer’s monstrous head jerked backward as if it had been burned. It reared up hissing to its full height and snarled like torn sheet steel. There was intelligence in that sound, but it was not the sort of intelligence which could be bargained with. Voord had made that mistake and was paying for it now. He had forgotten that Issaqua was a demon and its processes of reasoning were uncluttered by pity, or mercy, or remorse. There was only the Law of Balance, a logic cold and hard and unforgiving as a razor’s edge. Cause and effect, action and reaction. Guilt and punishment.

It was all that kept it from doing to Aldric as it had done to Voord, and somehow, from somewhere, he knew. The icy aura of fear which hung around Ythek Shri did not fade, but rather it ceased to chill his flesh. Voord was behind him, cringing on his knees like a beaten dog and whimpering so that Aldric’s stomach turned sick inside him. There was nothing now, neither fear nor threat nor past hatreds, that would make him step aside and allow Issaqua to reach its prey, for all that the prey was lawful and condemned to this by his own actions. To do so would make his death a worthless gesture and no freely-given gift at all.

The Devourer’s fanged maw gaped, drooling, and made a softly bubbling hiss that was heavy with malice. Only the Balance stood between Aldric and an eternity of anguish, the Law that not even one of the ancient powers could flout with impunity. And yet, for all the bindings and restrictions that hedged it, Ythek, Issaqua, the Herald, the Devourer, was subject to at least one all-too-human failing: a failing Aldric had seen too many times, in himself and others. It was rage, that very special single-minded rage which comes from being flouted, mocked, denied, defied. The rage that makes fools of the wise and strengthens the weak. The black and brooding fury that blinds to all thought of consequence.

The pallid, deathly light began to fade, taking on the colors that Aldric had seen once in the petals of a rose— crimson and black and purple as a bruise. Issaqua’s spiked and jagged bulk melted back into the shadows as night returned to the world beyond death’s door. Yet the demon was so much darker than the darkness that Aldric could still see it as a silhouette, a hole ripped in the very structure of things through which all light and hope of rebirth were leaking out. The heavy reek of roses clogged his nostrils and the sound of the Song of Desolation was in his ears—and in his head, repeating like some grim litany, were the words of the prophecy he had read in Seghar; only words then, but a threat now. Or a promise.

The setting sun grows dim

And night surrounds me.

There are no stars.

The Darkness has devoured them

With its black mouth.

Issaqua sings the Song of Desolation

And I know that I am lost

And none can help me now.

Issaqua comes to find me

To take my life and soul.

For I am lost

And none can help me now.

Issaqua sings the Song of Desolation

And fills the world with darkness.

Bringing fear and madness

Despair and death to all. . .

From out of the darkness, in a blur of fangs and claws that were as black as a wolfs throat, Issaqua came for him.

Kyrin lay on her back with a boot across her throat and the point of a sword in her mouth. Fresh blood, her own blood, was trickling from the cuts the guardsman’s sword had made in her lips, but its point was still poised on her teeth and no further. AH it needed was a little pressure and the blade would come crunching down, but that pressure was withheld. She still lived.

A hot wind burned one side of her face, and its source became a glow of light that she could see even through her closed eyelids. Someone swore, and all of a sudden the blade was gone from her teeth. Kyrin’s eyes snapped open. The soldiers still surrounded her, but she was no longer the center of their attention. She took the only opportunity that she was likely to get and rolled frantically sideways toward her own discarded
estoc
as fast as her wounds allowed. Aldric had always said that there were good and bad ways to die, and what had threatened her was one of the worst. He had not lived long enough to make her Alban by marriage, but rather than be butchered on the floor she could at least be Alban enough to die in their way—quick and clean on her own sword’s point.