Vesik 04 - This Broken World (10 page)

“Impadda!”
The shield came up beneath my hand, and softened the blow as I hit the granite plateau hard.

Aeros changed the angle of his attack, using his momentum to pivot his entire body further than any human could possibly move.

I cursed and raised another shield. He caught the edge of it as I tried to jump away, propelling me even further. I sailed several feet through the air before meeting up with the earth again. My feet slid through one of the standing pools of water as I lowered my hands to catch my balance. The rock was smooth, but still cut into my palms as it passed beneath them.

I heard the Old Man laughing. He stood on top of one of the larger boulders, his feet an arm’s length above my head.

“How do I fight him now?” I asked.

“I have no clue,” he said.

The earth shook as Aeros ran at me. The thunder of his granite feet pounding across the plateau caused my heart rate to spike. The friendly smile I’d come to know was entirely absent on the face of the Old God. If I did something stupid, he was going to add my name to his fucking wall.

I braced myself to move, so the rock pile punched the ground. The Old Man was laughing again as I lost my footing and hit the ground hard. The grinding wail of an avalanche filled the air.

It took me a moment to realize it was Aeros screaming as he ran at me again. He didn’t have a weakness I could see. The only times I’d ever even seen him stunned he’d either been struck by another god or hit by one of Philip’s soularts.

Soularts.

The focus was in my hand a split second later. Timing would be everything. Maybe two more steps and he’d be on me. The soulsword ignited in my hand and I struck the plateau in front of Aeros’s next step. There the plateau was a shallow angle where the rock sloped toward the tree line. I leapt to the side. I saw his glowing eyes brighten as he put his foot down and a three-foot section of the plateau slid away.

The Old Man slapped his leg and started laughing.

The Old God actually cursed as his leg went out from under him. He fell onto his back and sheer inertia carried him off into the trees in a stream of shattered rock, cursing, and the deafening crack of broken trees.

I let the soulsword fade and looped the focus back into my belt.

“You alright?” I said into the hollow of smashed trees that led down the hill.

I heard an exaggerated sigh as Aeros started picking himself up. “Yes. And a fine strategy, Damian. There was little chance I could stop my movement.”

“You were going to flatten me.”

“That would be unwise. I do not believe I would like to deal with your master if I flattened you.”

“Well done,” the Old Man said. “Gather some wood. We need a fire. Help convince some of these damn mosquitos to go somewhere else.”

“Are we staying here?” I asked.

“For a while,” the Old Man said.

“We’re meeting an old friend,” Aeros said, lowering himself to sit on the ground.

“Pretty damn young friend compared to us,” the Old Man said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
he firewood request didn’t annoy me nearly as much as I would have thought. I’m guessing it was the small compliment the Old Man paid me. Even something as simple as “Well done” almost seemed like a glowing compliment. Damned manipulative bastard.

I let Aeros and the Old Man exchange quips about just how old they were as I started down the hill of shattered trees to gather some wood. I was hauling the third load of broken branches when I realized we weren’t alone.

Something rapped three times on the asphalt path near the bottom of the hill, near the destroyed boulder. I seriously considered asking if there was raven in the park, but managed to keep my mouth shut.

“Ah’ve never seen this place such a mess.

My face split into a wide grin. “You’re just in time. The Old Man and Aeros are talking about how old they are. They’re waiting for their ‘pretty damn young friend’ to show up. Any idea who that could be?”

A gray-cloaked figure climbed nimbly through the rubble until it was standing beside me.

Zola pulled back her hood and smiled. “Ah might have an inkling.” Just listening to her old-world New Orleans accent was like coming home. All the insanity of the coming war faded, if only for a moment.

I laughed, dropped my bundle of branches, and hugged my master.

“Hugs?” she asked. “How bad has he been, boy?”

“Oh, he’s not so bad.” I paused for a moment. “Although Dell might disagree with that.”

“Ah suspect he would,” she said before she smiled. I couldn’t see her eyes very well in the dark, hidden within her sunken face as they were. Only a glimmer caught the moonlight, a flash that made her dark, wrinkled skin seem more like the drawn cloak of a deadly predator.

“Come, let us visit,” she said.

I quickly gathered up the branches I’d dropped a minute earlier. Zola’s knobby old cane cracked loudly on the granite surface as she climbed the last few feet to the plateau.

“No fire?” Zola asked as Aeros came into view. “No food? No greeting?”

Aeros’s rocky face fractured into a smile. “Adannaya, our young friend.”

“Ah’m afraid the only reason you’d call me young is to soften me up for some bad news. Or a favor.” She stopped a few feet away from the Old Man and rested her hands one atop the other on her cane. “Which will it be today?”

“We seek only answers,” Aeros said.

“From times forgotten,” the Old Man said.

“So the light does not wither.” Zola frowned at the pair. “That is a very old code. Older than me.”

“Older than me,” the Old Man echoed Zola’s words.

“What news?” Aeros asked.

“Do you know of Hern’s rivalry with Glenn?” Zola asked as she sat down on a stone closer to the Old Man.

“Yes,” Aeros said.

“No,” the Old Man said.

“Vaguely. Sort of,” I said. “Cara’s mentioned it once or twice.”

Zola gestured at the pile of branches I was setting up in one of the dry pools. “You going to light that or keep rearranging it like a damned flower pot.”

I let out a short laugh.
“Minas Ignatto.”
The thin rod of flame ignited the wood in a heartbeat.

“Ah knew you weren’t useless.” She gave me a sideways glance.

“Hern is not the most stable of gods.” Aeros crossed his arms and the sound of grinding rocks filled the quiet night. “It was not always so.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

Aeros’s glowing, yellow-green eyes rolled to meet my own. “A great many things, Damian.”

“It was probably Glenn that sent him over the deep end,” the Old Man said. “Glenn won the rights to the Wild Hunt and banished Hern.”

“Why would a king care about the Wild Hunt?” I asked.

“Foster would stab you in the eye for asking a question that stupid, boy,” Zola said. “It’s one of Cara’s favorite stories. Glenn led the Wild Hunt to destroy the Nameless King.”

I frowned, and then I realized what she was talking about. “Hern’s story is woven into Glenn’s ascension? The Wandering War?”

“Yes,” Aeros said. “Hern fought on the side of the Nameless King, even after Glenn conquered him and displaced him as the leader of the Wild Hunt.”

“Most of Hern’s power was tied to the Hunt at the time, wasn’t it?” the Old Man asked.

Aeros nodded. “Yes, he was weakened to near-mortal levels.”

“What reason could he possibly have to stand against Glenn like that?”

“Zealots rarely use reason,” Aeros said. His voice had become more quiet than I’d ever heard it before. “Hern was one of Faerie’s mightiest lords. Glenn destroyed him. His mercy was no mercy at all in Hern’s eyes.”

“But he serves Glenn,” I said. “One of his generals or some such thing, right?”

“It’s easier to stick a knife between a man’s ribs if he trusts you.”

“Glenn is soft,” Aeros said. “He may go to war with Ezekiel, but I do not believe all of Faerie will follow.”

I glanced at Zola. Her face was stone. “You agree with Aeros, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Ah’ve seen it. Hern still has followers loyal to him. You will need to step softly in Faerie. The Queen of the water witches would support Hern.”

“She is long a fool,” Aeros said. “She will lead her people into oblivion.”

“Not if Nixie has anything to say about it.” The heat in my own voice caught me off guard.

“Do you understand, young one?” Aeros asked as he stared at me. “A civil war among the Fae could destroy this world faster than Ezekiel can dream it. If the Seals fall, the Old Gods walk the earth once again.” Aeros’s whisper broke into a gravelly explosion of sound as he gestured with his hands. “The dark-touched devour humanity. In the end, the Eldritch rise. When the shadows we abandoned to the darkest reaches of existence find us. This. World. Will. End.”

I shivered. The passion in Aeros’s speech terrified me. Completely and utterly terrified me.

The Old Man flipped a smoking twig into the fire as he took a drag off his freshly lit pipe. He smacked his lips and spoke from the side of his mouth. “This is going to be interesting.” He blew out a breath and turned to Zola. “Anything else to share with a couple old men?”

Aeros laughed softly, and I had a feeling it was because the Old Man referred to
him
as a man.

“Falias,” Zola said. Her tone was reserved, sober. “Ward saved many lives there, but the city was lost. Cara spoke to me of Falias, but only briefly. Glenn will use it to gain sympathy.”

The Old Man nodded and blew out a streamer of smoke. “It would be a practical rally cry. Everyone in Faerie, and even some of us not in Faerie, want Ezekiel’s head for the loss of that city. Among other things.

“Would I only have the chance to carve his name into my walls …”

“You can be somewhat scary, you know that?” I said to the mountain of rock beside me.

“Keeps the neighbors away,” Aeros said.

I blinked, and then I was laughing so hard no sound was coming out. The Old Man juggled his pipe when it fell out of his mouth, casting lit tobacco across the stones in his surprise. Zola chuckled and shook her head.

“Ah must say, Ah needed that.” Her mouth curled up into a broad smile. “Just remember, boy, step carefully in Faerie. The Fae are not always the most reasonable creatures.”

“You probably could have asked Nixie to tell me that.”

“Perhaps, but Ah needed to get away for a time.”

“I’m sure Nixie is busy with the war effort,” the Old Man said.

I nodded and looked around the circle. Orange and red light flickered around us, casting everyone in and out of shadows. These three people were my inner circle, outside of the wolves and the fairies. They needed to know.

“Do you all know what Nixie is doing?” I asked.

Zola nodded, and a small knot untied in my gut. I despised keeping things from her.

“If I had to guess,” the Old Man said, “she is working to dethrone the Queen of the water witches.”

“As well she should,” Aeros said.

I narrowed my eyes at the Old Man. “You’re not guessing at all, are you?”

He laughed and lit his pipe again, using a burning twig from the fire. “No, son. No I’m not.”

“We should still keep quiet about the revolution,” Aeros said, his voice nearly as quiet as the buzz of a cicada in the distance.

I shook my head. “You’re all in on it already.”

“I have known much of what happens in the courts of the water witches since I … helped them.”

“Helped them,” Zola said before she snorted. “You destroyed a continent.”

“It was a small continent,” the Old Man said.

“Hmm …” Aeros’s voice vibrated the stone I was sitting on. “Atlantis.”

“The most advanced civilization in the world,” Zola said. “No match for your temper though, were they?”

The Old Man man’s expression didn’t change. He pinched his pipe between his teeth. “Queen wanted to drown the world. Ezekiel thought to help her. I took care of it.”

“Atlantis?” I asked. “As in
the
Atlantis?”

“You destroyed man’s greatest wealth of knowledge,” Aeros said.

The Old Man’s eyes moved to meet the Old God’s. “I saved as much as I could. Once I realized that damned contraption was all that was keeping the island afloat, I saved what I could.”

“Only to have it burned,” Aeros said.

The Old Man pointed at Aeros with the stem of his pipe. “How was I to know Caesar’s war-mongering would burn that library down?”

“Alexandria?” I asked. It was the only famous library I could think of from the Old Man’s time.

“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “Alexandria.”

“You were in the library at Alexandria?” Zola asked. “You did not tell me this.”

“I was in many places,” the Old Man said. “Most of them have been destroyed, or lost, or forgotten.”

Zola was quiet, and focused her gaze on the Old Man. For some reason, perhaps the same as me, she didn’t prod the Old Man any further. His face looked drawn, and I was fairly certain he had a good idea of what had been lost.

“We saw Aideen,” I said, trying to draw the conversation in a different direction.

Zola nodded.

“How’s Foster doing?”

“Foster’s fine,” Zola said, “as are Cara and Aideen. They are worried, of course, but why don’t you ask what you really want to ask?” She turned her head toward me, a knowing smile on her face.

“Whatever do you mean?” I asked, gesturing with my palm up and eyes wide.

She snorted. “Nixie is well. Fact of the matter is, she won’t stop asking me how
you
are. It is quite … annoying. Ah imagine it will be better for everyone once you two are together again. Some of the stories Foster told me …” She rolled her eyes.

“He shouldn’t have listened in to our private conversations,” I said.

“He may be scarred for life.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Ah don’t know. He asked Nixie about your phone sex habits many times.”

The Old Man and Aeros looked at each other before the Old Man coughed over a laugh.

“What?!” I said. “He what?”

“In the river?” Zola said. “Foster says you two had some long distance—”