undying legion 01 - unbound man (63 page)

Her expression was almost a smirk. “This one does.”

Clade held out a hand. “May I?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Let’s just say I want to see for myself.”

She scowled, turning her head as though about to refuse; then, with an abrupt motion, she reached out and dropped the locus in his hand.

He felt the difference immediately. All the familiar features of the binding were still there — the long, narrow spine through the object’s axis; the block-like sections at one end that served as primitive receptor nodes; the irregular spikes at the other that bound the object to Azador — but they seemed twisted somehow, a reflection of a thing rather than the thing itself. Usually the pieces combined to form a basic sensory locus, a contrivance by which the god could monitor the activities of the bearer, even if that bearer had never been bound. In this one, however, something about the sorcery had somehow been…
reversed.

“It’s still tied to Azador,” Clade murmured. “But instead of the god looking out, you’re looking in.”

“I don’t know about that,” Eilwen said. “It just feels different when there’s an Oculus near, or another one of these. A normal one. But I’m not really sensing other people, am I? I’m sensing… it. Or the link to it.”

“Something like that.” Clade handed the subverted locus back. “How did it happen?”

“Long story,” Eilwen said, her tone curt. “Let’s just say I got caught in some ugly sorcery.”

Clade let the evasion pass. The woman was beginning to talk freely now, her earlier proclamation of hatred apparently forgotten.
No, not forgotten. But she’s looking for something too. Something she wants from this discussion.

She put the locus away. “Your turn,” she said. “What next?”

Next? There was no next, not in his mind. This moment, this place, with Azador and the golems and the binding, was the terminus of all his plans. If he’d ever had hopes beyond this point, he no longer remembered them.

“Azador won’t just let me go,” he said. “If I get away, it will send people after me. Try to kill me.”

Eilwen sat back. “So you’ll hide,” she said. She sounded disappointed.

“Yes,” Clade said. “I’ll hide. For a while, at least.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Gather resources, I suppose. Find some friends.”

“Why?”

Because Azador won’t give up. Not ever.
But that wasn’t the real reason.
Because I still believe it can be done. The restoration of the Empire. Renewal of what was lost. Impossible dreams. The cause.

“The Oculus stood for something, once,” he said. “Now it just stands for Azador.” He paused, waited for Eilwen to meet his gaze. “I mean to take it back.”

Something flickered in her eyes. “A war.”

He blinked.
A war?
“Yes, I suppose so.”

“You want to fight Azador.”

“I do.”

Eilwen gave a fierce grin. “So do I.”

And there it was. He was not her enemy. Azador was. By allying herself with him, she could strike it down at his side.

If he was fortunate, it might even be true.

He hesitated, allowing his indecision to rise to his face.
Prove it.

She stared at him, uncertain. Then, slowly, she drew forth the damaged locus and held it out, her hand open.

Clade nodded. “Very well.” He waved the locus away. “Keep it. You’ll need it for your first task.”

She nodded, a bright yearning in her eyes. “What task?”

He smiled. “You’ve already killed one of my men. How would you like to kill two more?”

Chapter 25

To the upright, justice.

To the merciful, compassion.

To the humble, grace.

Holy Gatherer, grant us the assurance of your reward.

— Liturgy of the Thirteenth Hour
Tri-God Book of Prayer
Pantheon of Anstice

Arandras sat by the edge of the lake and watched the sun crawl across the sky. Clade’s note lay crumpled in a ball on the rocks beside him, quivering in the faint, breathy breeze. Wavelets lapped gently just beyond his feet, the sound as changeless and unrelenting as the screaming inside his head.

It was Chogon all over again.
You have a Valdori dagger in your possession. I have your wife. Choose one.
And he had chosen the dagger, not because he wanted it more —
Weeper, no, never that
— but because this was
wrong,
because accepting those terms was the same as giving in. He had made his stand, resisted the urge to yield, to corrupt himself by becoming complicit in the other man’s abominable coercion. If the price for his refusal had been his life, Arandras would have paid it gladly.

Instead, the gods had taken Tereisa.

And now, beyond all reason, they offered him a chance to choose differently.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was a chance to repeat the decision, to prove the quality of his character beyond all doubt.
Given all that you now know, all that it cost you, would you make the same choice again?

How much is your integrity worth?

The wording of the note did not fool him. The implication was clear. Narvi and Mara were prisoners, somewhere within the caverns, and their lives were in his hands. He could choose to do nothing, allow them to die. Or he could offer a trade. The coin was different this time, but such differences were irrelevant. Golem army or ancient dagger, human life or a single copper duri, it was all the same. Coercion was coercion, whatever clothing it chose to wear.

Yet another man’s power could not be wished away. Defiance carried consequences, always. He’d been blind to that in Chogon, or else he’d ignored it, unwilling to believe that the gods would allow him to suffer for doing right. Now he knew better. And in response, he had clung to his principles all the more fiercely, because he had paid for them with the blood of his wife, and neither the world nor the gods could ever exact a higher price.

So why in the hells am I finding this so hard?

His friends languished somewhere beneath the cliff, their captor awaiting his decision.
My friends.
Clade had used that word in his note; whether in hope or presumption, it was impossible to say. But it was true. Mara, who had stuck with him from the first sighting of the misplaced letter, doing the things he couldn’t, trying to give him a chance at peace. Narvi, who had never turned him away, forgiving his slights time and again until at last Arandras had found a betrayal too great to overlook. Both had given of themselves, over and over, amassing a debt which he now found impossible to ignore.

He’d never sought such friendships, not since Tereisa’s death, and this, right here, was why. Such bonds did not bring strength, no matter what the poets said.
They weaken you, undermine your certainty, arm your enemies against you. They dilute you, thinning you out until you’re as much them as you are yourself.
He’d done nothing to lead either of them on, offered no reciprocity to encourage them. Somehow it hadn’t mattered. They’d staked a claim on him regardless.

He couldn’t let them die. Not like this. Not again.

And if saving them meant turning his back on all he held dear, well, he’d done that already. He’d stood by as Isaias was coerced, his own selfish compulsion triumphing over his sadly ineffectual conscience. He’d betrayed the Quill, treating them as though they were no more significant than the golems they’d come to find. Hells, he’d done the same to Druce and Jensine all the way back in Spyridon. He was stained already, irreparably so. Whatever honour he’d thought he had lay trampled in muck. There was nothing left to preserve.

Arandras bowed his head, expecting tears, but none came.
Of course not.
There was no substance to him, not any more. Perhaps there had never been.
I am an empty shell. No dreams for the Dreamer, no tears for the Weeper, and nothing to trouble the Gatherer when I die.

All that remained to him was to save Narvi and Mara, to pay whatever needed paying to discharge their debts of friendship. The golems would be part of that exchange, no doubt, if they hadn’t been taken from him already. The demands of his conscience had lost their hold on him some time ago, it seemed; bonds of sorcery and ties of obligation would soon follow.
Then I will truly be an unbound man, free from all that hinders and restrains. Nothing will ever have hold over me again.

And then, with neither weight nor anchor to hold him down, he would simply drift away.

The sun crept westward, sinking slowly toward the jagged teeth of the Pelaseans. Arandras smoothed the note, reading the words one last time, then stood, folding the paper over and tucking it away. The air was still, the lake a sheet of glass, silver and blue. Only the soft caws of scavenger birds disturbed the silence.

Time to go.

A different woman stood in the entrance to the cavern. She was shorter than the other, slight of build, and there was no pan of water at her feet. She looked up at his approach, a flat expression on her face.

Arandras halted at the rock that had borne the note. Something flickered in the corner of his mind. He extended a questing thought, felt it brush against a faint alien presence. The golems.
He doesn’t have you yet, then.
Perhaps he had simply been too agitated to sense them before. He was calm now.

He tried sending a command, instructing the golem to speak, but there was no change in the whisper-thin presence.
Too far.
They were just too far away.

“All right,” he said. “You win. Tell Clade I’m prepared to offer an exchange.”

The woman nodded, not meeting his eyes, and said nothing.

Arandras frowned. “Did you hear me? I said I’m ready to make a deal. That’s what he wants, right?”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said, glancing at him for a moment and then away again. Her voice was toneless, dismissive, as though speaking to a disliked pet. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

“No, that’s not —” He broke off, took a breath. “The note said I had until sunset. I need to see him before then.”

“Relax,” the woman said. “Nobody’s killing anyone. There’s been a change of plan, that’s all. He’ll come when he’s ready.”

There was a disinterested conviction in her tone, as though what she was saying was too banal to be worth lying about, and he found himself exhaling in relief. “All right. Good.” He would wait, at least for a while. “Can you tell me how my friends are?”

She shrugged. “Alive,” she said, and there was something strange in her tone, something almost like regret.

Arandras stepped forward, studying her face. She returned his gaze, looking at him as though he meant nothing more to her than the rocks around him. Her eyes were dull, numb. Lifeless.

She is Clade’s,
some part of him whispered.
This is what he’s like. This is what they’re all like. Callous and unfeeling.
He shivered.
Inhuman.

And he was about to give them an army strong enough to overrun the entire Free Cities, and probably Kefira and the Gislean Provin too.

I can’t.
The woman stared at him as though sensing the shift in his thoughts.
I can’t. Mara, Narvi, I’m sorry. I can’t do it.

He stepped forward again. Clade was inside, but so were the golems. Maybe if he got close enough, he’d be able to reach them, tell them to —

The woman whipped out a dagger and held it before her, her face hard and her lips thin. “No closer,” she said. “Not even a step.”

They had a chance to kill me before,
he thought.
But they didn’t, because they don’t want me dead.
He studied the woman’s taut face.
She won’t stab me. She won’t.

“I’m going into the cavern now,” Arandras said. “Like it or not, I’m going in. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me.”

He stepped forward.

•

Eilwen stole through the empty doorway, ignoring the twinge in her knee and edging further into the foul miasma exuded by the so-called god. The egg thrummed against her flesh, pulling her on, urging her to make the kill. She drew back her arm, her fist clenched around the dagger’s hilt, and struck.

Sinon collapsed on the rough stone with a thud. There was a flare of alarm from the god; then the presence was gone, vanishing in an instant as though swallowed up by the air itself. She bent over, wiping the dagger clean on her victim’s arm and replacing it in its sheath.

The beast within her purred its approval.

She ignored it as best she could. She no longer followed its whims. She was a soldier, and she had a mission to complete.

The golems knelt in rows before her, their attention directed to the far corner. Eilwen stared, captivated by the grand, unnerving figures. This, then, was what had drawn the Quill and the Oculus to such a remote place. They were wondrous, yes, and awe-inspiring, and everything else she’d sensed beneath Clade’s words as he described them to her. But more than anything else, she found them terrifying.

With an effort of will she turned away, leaving Sinon’s body where it had fallen on the low platform. A solitary golem stood motionless by the wall, shackled hand and foot, its tiny yellow eyes staring sightlessly at the chamber’s far wall. A thrill ran up her spine as she turned her back on it and strode from the room.
Don’t think about the golem. Think about the mission. The mission is what matters.

Her task was straightforward enough. Kill the remaining two Oculus sorcerers, then hold the entrance to the caverns. There was a man outside who might approach her or try to enter the caverns; she was to prevent the latter, as Clade would soon commence work on a binding which was absolutely not to be interrupted. The man was inexperienced in combat, or so Clade believed, so she should have little trouble keeping him out.