Vesik 04 - This Broken World (29 page)

“Gettysburg,” I said. The horror of what Foster’s words meant began to sink in.

“Why?” Sam asked.

“It’s the worst thing that happened here,” Foster said. “It’s the strongest memory running through the land. The Old Man and Ezekiel don’t care about the collateral damage. Their power is uniting different points in history.”

“We have to stop this,” I said.

“Out of our league,” Foster said.

A pile of boulders moved in the distance. “Aeros,” I said before I glanced back to Sam and Foster. “Get back to Zola. I’m going for Aeros. He’ll know where Vicky and Happy are. We need them.”

Sam nodded.

“Keep her safe,” I said to Jasper as they started to run. Sam didn’t even give me a nasty look.

I angled away from Sam and Foster. “Aeros!”

The god swung around between me and an approaching line of rebels. He looked different. The stone of his face was smoother. The scars where Gurges had cut his arm open were gone.

I took a step back as I realized he was not the Aeros I knew.

“This is not your time, boy. What are you doing here?”

“Happy and Vicky. I need to find Happy and Vicky.”

Stone ground as he turned to look over his shoulder. “I will not know them for many more years.” He turned his attention back to me. “The ocean of time was not meant to bend like this.”

A series of high-pitched whines sounded as bullets ricocheted off the god’s back.

A cluster of people ran at us from the far edge of the field. As they closed the distance, I could tell most of them were black. They wore rags and some still had manacles fastened around their ankles, broken chains dangling behind them. I felt sick to my stomach. A woman ran at the front. Her braided hair passed her shoulders.

They were almost halfway across the field when three cavalrymen broke from the sparse line of trees behind them. One of the men pulled out a pistol and shot into the retreating group. One form went down. I heard screams go up as one of the figures turned and faced the cavalry. Light flashed from their hands and half the rider’s body disappeared into a misty cloud of blood.

The man—I was sure he was a man now, as I could see a beard—picked up the small body and slung it over his shoulder. The group continued running.

Someone further down the line shouted orders. Smoke and fire erupted along the clearing, causing the Confederates to take cover at the other side of the field.

The cavalry stayed in pursuit. They were going to reach the group before they made it to cover. A younger child struggled to keep up with the group. No one saw what was happening. I couldn’t watch it. I ran onto the field with a shield held out in front of me.

A flicker of recognition crawled across my brain as I came closer to the men and women running at me. Metal charms were woven into the young woman’s braids. I raised my pepperbox.

“Get down!” I screamed it as loud as I could, trying to project my voice over the thunder of the battlefield. “Down!”

The entire line dove near my feet. One cavalryman’s eyes widened before the shot took him in the chest. The other was already on me before his comrade hit the ground. The focus came into my hand smoothly. The blade flashed out and took the head from his horse in an explosion of gore. He had a split second of terror before the blade cut him cleanly in two. His upper torso was still grasping a gun, so I followed it to the ground with two shots from the pepperbox.

I could feel the blood covering the right side of my face. It wasn’t mine. It didn’t matter now.

“Move!” I said to the group as they regained their feet. I jogged beside them, keeping a shield held high as the rebels began firing again. Small cracks and pings and explosions of electric blue light lit the air beside us as my shield stopped a dozen rounds. It wasn’t long before we made it to the tree line and the relative safety of Aeros’s bulk as he finished dispatching another cavalryman.

I turned to look at the group. My eyes passed children and young women and a man who had to be over sixty. My gaze fell on the bearded man. He embraced one of the black women like she was the only thing that existed in the world, as though no bullet or sword could ever touch them. She turned to me and met my eyes.

“Thank you, son. Ah don’t think we would have—”

My jaw dropped open and a shiver ran down my spine. “Zola?”

Reality shimmered, and the battle that should not have been in our time vanished.

“Zola?” I said in a tiny whisper.

“It was,” said a booming voice from beside me. I looked up to find Aeros. He was in exactly the same position as he had been in the past, only now he bore the scars from Gurges and the tiny pits and fractures I was used to seeing.

I couldn’t stifle another shiver that ran down my limbs. “You … remember?”

“I do,” Aeros said. “You saved many lives that day.”

“But it was today.”

“Time is a strange bedfellow.”

Something sizzled in the distance. “Happy … Vicky. I need to find Happy and Vicky.” I turned my head back towards the ridge, where the battle must have been escalating between the Old Man and Ezekiel. “What happened?”

“I do not know. Come, let us return.” Aeros sank into the ground. I was sure he would beat me there, even as I broke into a jog.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I
stayed low, tracking Ezekiel and the Old Man as best I could from the thinnest of shadows. The ghosts around us were frozen in time once more, but they were all sharp and far more vivid than one would expect.

Ezekiel deflected a blast from the Old Man that could have leveled a city block. “You always were the Fae’s lapdog,”

The Old Man laughed, his eyes locked onto Ezekiel. “I will not be denied my vengeance.”

“You?” Ezekiel said. “How do you hope to stand against the power of Anubis? I control more power than your feeble form could ever contain.”

I thought I may be able to find an opening, some way to help. The power those two necromancers wielded became more insane by the minute, and I didn’t think I’d be able to so much as make a scratch from a distance.

The Old Man circled and glared at Ezekiel. “There are some things you do not know,
father.
I threw the ice queen into the depths of hell!”

“She was weak,” Ezekiel said, inhaling deeply and raising his head toward the heavens. “My will is done, Leviticus.”

“I won’t let you destroy an entire city,” the Old Man said. He raised his hand and curled it into a fist. An inky darkness rose from the ground beneath him and covered his arm. “Not like Philip. Not like Pilot Knob.”

Ezekiel laughed. It was slow and dead. He enunciated every sound of his laughter until his mouth opened wide and he laughed in earnest. If I can call that stuttering, maniacal screech, laughter. “Pinkerton? He never had the stomach for that.”

I strained to hear what Ezekiel was saying. What the hell did he mean Pilot Knob hadn’t been Philip?

“I
destroyed Pilot Knob,” Ezekiel said. “A small favor to remove that miserable town. Demons can be so very useful, do you not agree?”

“It's time you met your death, Ezekiel."

“Unlikely.” Ezekiel extended both his arms out in front of his body, palms facing each other. Gravemakers started rising out of the ground around him. The slow, oozing mass of rusted bark and inky blackness rose around Ezekiel, clothing his entire body in death.

Once more the ghosts around the battlefield moved. This time I saw the artillery crews reloading shells and repositioning the cannons. Pale horses jerked at their reins and danced at the edge of the field.

“Old tricks,” the Old Man said, and the roar he released … it wasn't human. The muscles in his arms bulged and tore as the tendons of his neck raged against his skin. The chaff of a gravemaker crawled out from within his own body, lacerating flesh and cascading down the Old Man’s body. The rusted bark covering his arms dripped blood.

Ezekiel took a hesitant step backwards. The battlefield roared to life. The sharp report of a rifle was quickly followed by a hundred more.

“You killed my wife.” The Old Man flexed his arm and ley line energy lanced into his palm. A cannon fired nearby, and the earsplitting report faded as the projectile whistled through the air. The ghosts closest to the Old Man took on a vivid color as the timelines were brought crashing together once more. “You raped my daughter.” He paced toward Ezekiel’s blackened form. “And my son ...
my son!”
In that moment, the power of a gravemaker was forever seared into my vision.

The Old Man blazed across the battlefield. Soulswords as bright as the sun lit from either of his hands. As he closed on Ezekiel, he began to turn in an impossible dance of power and light. The blades carved furrows into the field. They elongated and flicked forward like whips before they vanished into the earth, sending dirt and rocks into the air.

Ezekiel backed away quickly, and I stared in awe and horror as a mass of gravemaker flesh crawled up his neck and over his face. It settled into a distinct form. A form I recognized as that bastard turned his head to the side. The face of a jackal was brought to brilliant life as Ezekiel parried the Old Man’s first strike.

I could finally see why ancient illustrations of Anubis always bore the jackal’s head. Black eyes shone from either side of the long face, and Ezekiel moved as fast as the Old Man. Another parry met with a quick thrust that the Old Man barely avoided.

Ezekiel turned as the Old Man struck again with a lightning bolt of force that sent dirt and debris thirty feet into the air.

After a time, my brain registered the line of shadows forming halfway down either side of the ridge. They stared up at Anubis and the Old Man as the two dueled beneath the bright moonlight.

More of Gettysburg began rising around us. Cannons thundered, men screamed, and the dead fell everywhere.

Anubis struck quickly, feinting with an off-balance lunge that shifted impossibly fast into a sweeping arc.

The Old Man met the attack and grunted as electric blue sparks exploded into the air around them.

Ezekiel didn’t even sound winded when he spoke, and his voice was deeper through the mask he wore. “Do you understand, Leviticus? You cannot defeat me. No matter how much rage you summon. No matter how much injustice you face. I will always win.” His arms shifted forward and the Old Man shouted as a flash of power sent him sailing ten feet backwards.

His feet struck first, digging deep divots in the earth as he buried his gravemaker-clad arms in the dirt before him. “So be it. You’ve brought this end upon yourself.” The inky black substance of a gravemaker flowed over the Old Man’s face, sealing off the rest of his body. I watched in horror as dead, milk-white eyes opened to stare at Anubis.

The Old Man flashed forward, his soulswords meeting Anubis’s defense in a blinding explosion of sparks and lightning. The sound was a burst of electronic static, amplified a thousand times.

One of the gravemakers screamed, and I could no longer tell who it was. Four soulswords met between the blackened forms. Golden lightning exploded between them, igniting the dry grass at their feet.

The battle around us was in full force. I could see Confederate troops aligning near the base of the hill. Madness, I thought to myself as I realized they were going to charge the artillery stationed all around us. I could smell the gunpowder and the burning field. Smoke began rising from the grass.

The ghosts didn’t seem to register the fight between Anubis and the Old Man, but I saw them trip and stumble over the shadows on either side of the ridge. It slowly dawned on me that they couldn’t see the Fae.

Part of me wondered why the Fae weren’t doing anything. They were simply watching the titanic clash of father and son as the Old Man tried to wipe out Ezekiel. Part of me wondered why
I
was only staring at the fight in slack-jawed astonishment, when a thousand words of warning came crashing back to me.
They are beyond you.

A cannon fired nearby, and the blast vibrated my entire body. I looked up and cringed when I realized it hadn’t been a cannon shot. An entire artillery unit had been wiped out by a misfire. A split, broken cannon laid in a pit of dead men. One soldier was howling in pain, holding his midsection and screaming for help. The screaming stopped a moment later.

The Old Man glanced at the carnage, and Ezekiel didn’t miss his chance. He ran the Old Man through to the hilt. I heard someone scream “No!” and watched helplessly as the Old Man fell to the side, clutching the wound in his stomach.

There was a scream above us, and it was fury incarnate. A bolt of bright orange sunlight streaked across the pale, moonlit night. I stared in awe as Edgar connected with Anubis’s head, slamming the god into the dirt. Earth and grass billowed out around Edgar as he landed, the force of the impact forming a small crater. The look on Edgar’s face was pure rage. He was settled into a three-point stance, one hand up in the air as he snarled at Anubis. His fiery armor glistened as he launched himself into the air once more.

Ezekiel was already back on his feet. “Ra,” he said. “So predictable.”

Edgar streaked toward the jackal’s head. Ezekiel sidestepped him and brought his arm down in a vicious strike. The blow connected across Edgar’s shoulders and smashed him into the earth. Edgar slid through the dirt and rock on his face, his armor illuminating the blood and flesh as it was torn away from his exposed features.

I stared as he came to a stop, unmoving in the shadows.

“Amun Ra,” Ezekiel said. He stalked toward the downed Watcher. “Pathetic little god.”

The scream that sounded behind Ezekiel was beyond rage. My eyes followed that unholy noise back to the Old Man. He was on his feet once more, only his bulk was greater, and he looked to be as tall as Aeros, or more. The chaff of gravemakers flowed into him without end as he grew into a fifteen-foot giant.

“Fool.” Ezekiel changed course and stalked toward the Old Man. “I will end you.” Ezekiel’s bulk grew to match the Old Man’s in an instant, and I wondered how many gravemakers truly walked the battlefield. I could still see more in the distance, wandering among the skirmishers further down the field.