Vesik 04 - This Broken World (8 page)

“Impadda!”

The smile that stretched across his scarred face was terrifying. He angled his shield down, attempting to scoop mine up. He hadn’t noticed my shield was half buried in the ground. He met with a wall of force. The field lit up with the explosion of energy. His shield rebounded from mine and flung his left arm out to his side.

His grin died, and I knew he’d realized what had happened.

“Pulsatto!”
I said.

The wave of force took him in the chest. Already off balance from the shield impact, he went down hard and cursed.

I scooped up the focus from the stone beside me.

“Yield to me,” I said.

“He’ll recover too fast to close on him with that,” Dell was saying as I threw the focus at the Old Man.

I growled as I gestured at the focus, slowly closing my fingers into a fist. It was as though a heavy spring was trying to prevent each finger from forming into a fist. It was a familiar feeling. A powerful feeling, and the Old Man actually winced away from the golden blade as it exploded from the spinning hilt. The blade sank into the earth a foot from his shoulder, leaving the focus a couple feet in the air.

“I yield,” the Old Man said with a shallow laugh. “Well done.”

I released the soulart and the focus fell silently to the earth.

I walked over to him and held out my hand. He picked the focus up and handed it to me before taking my hand.

“I generally don’t like to hit old people,” I said.

He laughed again and brushed the dried grass off his legs. “You better get used to it.”

Dell punched my arm. “That was brilliant, Damian! Burying the shield in the ground? I couldn’t even see it through the grass.”

“Neither could I,” the Old Man said. “Alright, one more round of sparring, then we rest.”

***

Dell was quite a bit worse for wear when we finished late that night. He collapsed into the bottom bunk with a grunt. The Old Man stayed outside. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but I was worn out enough I didn’t particularly care.

I wasn’t in any shape to jump up to the top bunk, so I dragged the old oak night stand a bit closer and pulled myself up off that.

My bed was occupied.

Whiskers twitched and the mouse squeaked before scurrying to the edge of the bed and flinging itself at the faded curtains.

“The hell was that?” Dell asked.

“Mice. Well, one mouse anyway.”

“Ugh, am I sleeping on mouse crap?”

“Quite possibly,” I said, pulling the sheets back.

“Fuck it. Don’t care. Must sleep.”

I rolled over and stared at the ceiling, dimly lit by the fire flickering in the stove in the living room. Deep orange shadows danced and fought across my vision.

“He’s pretty intense,” I said.

“That’s one word for it.” Dell’s voice was muffled, and I was pretty sure he was face down in a pillow.

“He’s pretty damn good, too,” I said.

I heard Dell shift and his voice became clearer. “Yeah, until he loses it. The shit he’s done over the last two thousand years.” Dell’s voice grew quiet. “Do you know about his family?”

“Zola told me a little bit.” I knew Ezekiel had given the order to have his family raped and murdered.

“They tied his family down on top of him and did that,” Dell said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. “What would you do to the man responsible for that? Where would you stop?”

I remembered all too well what had happened to his family. I’d seen glimpses of it when I’d touched his power with my necromancy. The night I slayed Prosperine. The night we lost Carter and Maggie to that monster. What would I do to someone who did that to Sam, or my parents, or my friends? “I imagine I would tear little pieces off of him, starting with his toes. Skin him alive. Drop him in a barrel of salt. Something dramatic.”

Dell let out a quiet laugh. “Way I understand it, you’d cram their souls into a dark bottle.”

“That
is
fairly satisfying,” I said, remembering what we’d done to Vicky’s murderers.

“Doesn’t it make you wonder where the line is?” Dell asked. “Where’s the line? Or is there one?”

I laced my fingers together and rested them on my stomach. There was a time I wouldn’t go near a soulart. I thought it would damn me as a dark necromancer. Now I wasn’t even sure dark necromancers were necessarily evil. Things were simpler when it was all black and white, when Zola told me how things were, and that’s how they were. No debate. No curiosity. What was, was.

Then I read Koda’s book.

“Did the Old Man tell you about the book?” I asked, dancing along a dangerous line.

Dell was silent for a moment, and I wondered if he’d already dozed off.

“What book?” he asked in a voice that told me he knew exactly what I was asking.

“What do you think of soularts?”

Dell exhaled and shifted on the bunk below me.
“That
book. I think they’re dangerous. I think an unwary man could kill himself with his own incantations. Or worse.”

“I was surprised that soularts weren’t forbidden because they could consume your soul.”

“They still can, you know? It’s a risk with the most powerful incantations. Is it true what the Old Man says? They were really forbidden because of their sheer power?”

“You didn’t read the whole thing?” I asked.

“No, just a few pages.”

I wondered why the Old Man kept some of it from Dell. “Did you read Koda’s account of the Nameless King? No written history is thought to exist with that much detail.”

“No. It’s probably not important if the Old Man left it out.”

He trusted the Old Man to some degree. I suppose I did too, but he still scared me. I fell silent for a bit, focusing on the shadows parading across the ceiling. Many centuries ago, before the Fae hid themselves away from the world, the Nameless King altered his own hand with a soulart, binding it to some primal power no one could identify. He used it to carve out the Warded Ways. In the early days, they’d been a boon, but it didn’t take long for the courts to realize what kind of damage the Warded Ways would eventually create. The Nameless King refused to stop, even as the world’s ley lines began to collapse into the voids. Then the voids started bringing forth Old Gods and the rumblings of the Eldritch Gods.

“You know it was Glenn, Gwynn Ap Nudd, who rose up against the Nameless King and began the Wandering War?”

“Yes,” Dell said. His voice was quieter. Sleep was overtaking him. He was going to need rest before running with the wolves.

“Journey well,” I said. I wasn’t sure where I’d heard the phrase, but it seemed right for the time.

Dell mumbled something and started snoring a moment later.

I stared at the ceiling, jealous of Dell’s easy sleep. Darker thoughts had been keeping me from rest. Thoughts of my friends wounded in battle, of Nixie and her Queen, and the latest nightmare, the awful story of my birth.

Beware the Watchers. His master will reveal the path. Raise him well.

What did that mean? What are the sons of Anubis? And what does that make me?

CHAPTER TEN

“A
gain.”

“Again he says, always again,” I muttered as I picked my aching body up out of the grass again. Bloody hell, I hadn’t been so beaten down by training or practice since I was a kid with Zola. I wiped the blood off my lip and spat onto the ground.

“I’m eating lunch,” I said. “If you’d care to join me, super.” I stomped off toward the cabin, crossing the patch of ground where Zola and the fairies had helped me bury the various pieces of the demon, Azzazoth.

Dell had been gone when I’d woken up that morning. The Old Man told me he’d said goodbye. I’d miss him. That was for damn sure. The Old Man was like Zola without a sense of humor.

I let the front door smack closed behind me as I stomped into the cabin and angled straight for the old fridge. I opened the freezer. The Old Man had said Dell had left me a present in the ice chest. I figured he meant the freezer. There was an oblong pack wrapped in butcher paper and twine. I pulled it out and slammed the freezer. The twine came off easily and I tore the butcher paper off.

A blue bag of frozen chimichangas greeted me. I stared at them for a moment and blinked.

The front door opened and squeaked as it closed behind the Old Man.

“How the hell did he know?”

“Zola told us.”

I looked at him, at the scars that turned his face into a roadmap of pain and history. It was easy to forget what he’d been through. That he’d lost family and friends. Friends who might have lived if they’d just trained a little harder.

I blew out a slow breath and laughed quietly. “You want one?” I asked as I tore open the bag.

He nodded.

I slapped two down on a plate that was probably not microwave safe, pushed the handle down on the ancient microwave to open the door, and fired it up.

“Thanks,” I said without looking at him.

He didn’t respond, but he really didn’t need to.

I dug around the fridge and turned up some sour cream. It was extra sour, being slightly expired, but I figured we’d survive. “Sour cream?”

“I … suppose,” the Old Man said.

The microwave dinged. I pulled the plate out, then cursed and juggled it briefly before sliding it onto the counter. It was definitely not microwave safe. I wrapped my hands around the cold tub of sour cream for a moment before I started slathering the chimichangas. I tucked some paper towels under the hot plate, tossed one of the chimichangas onto a separate plate, and then balanced both with a couple sodas and a handful of silverware.

The Old Man had a TV tray set up in front of the couch and I snorted a laugh as I set his lunch down on it. “Old Man indeed.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I heard you talking to Roach about Koda’s manuscript.”

I nodded as I sat down in the old orange chair.

“You left out many things.”

“I didn’t know what you’d told him. I figured he was safer not knowing some of the things in that book.”

“There is truth to that,” he before taking a bite. He frowned slightly, chewed, and then swallowed. “Not bad.”

“You mean awesome,” I said around a mouthful of food.

He laughed quietly, and I saw some echo of the man he might have been a long time ago. “What I truly wonder about,” he said, “is whether Dell is safer not knowing everything, or if it puts him in more danger.”

“Why didn’t you tell him about the Nameless King?” I asked.

The Old Man’s soda opened with a crack and a hiss. He took a long drink before he looked back at me. “Dell is not strong enough to face an Old God on his own. I don’t want him to read of the Eldritch Gods and the dark-touched. He is stronger than he realizes, but for him to be effective in battle, it would be best if he did not realize just how outmatched he is.”

I looked at the Old Man for a moment, but I didn’t speak. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.

“Does that seem cold to you?” he asked as he looked back to his plate.

“A bit, but I think I understand.”

“You have not seen war, Damian. There is a reason that training soldiers has not changed much in the past two thousand years.”

“I would think it’s changed quite a bit.”

He nodded. “In some ways, in regards to technology, yes. At its core? How you train a man to move forward and keeping fighting as his friends and family are dying at his side? That will never change.” He took another bite of his lunch and set his silverware down. “I sent hundreds of men to their deaths believing in the lies of courage, honor, and glory. It was my job. And I was damned good at it.”

“Rome,” I said.

“All over the empire,” he said. “After I … changed. It was only after that I came to understand what I was. Or at least came to understand part of what I was. For centuries I wandered. Hunting Ezekiel, yes, but joining any fight where I could get someone else’s blood on my hands too. I called Nixie an ally in some of those battles.”

“She told me a little bit.”

He nodded again. “That’s enough reminiscing. Finish your lunch and meet me out front.”

I finished my chimichanga and looked at his plate as he left the cabin. Every last scrap was gone. I smiled as I gathered up the dishes and washed them in the sink. The well water was cold, but I barely noticed. I’d spent more than my share of time washing dishes in that sink over the years.

Nixie hadn’t told me too much about the Old Man, but I did know he had fought in the war between the water witches. The war where Nixie’s queen rose to power. That was around the time the Roman Empire finally collapsed. Next time I saw Nixie, I was going to have to persuade a bit more information out of her.

The sun was lower in the sky than I expected when I joined the Old Man beneath the oak tree. We’d eaten a much later lunch than I had realized. More like dinner. A cool, gentle breeze was a welcome respite from the heat of the midday sun we’d been training in before. He was throwing dirt on the smoldering ashes of the fire pit. They hissed as the last ashes disappeared, but I could still smell the burning wood.

“I think I could have been a pyro in another life.” I took a deep breath. “That is just an awesome smell.”

The Old Man gave me a sideways smile. I was pretty sure he appreciated the change of topic.

“Come. Tonight we train on the rocks.”

“What?” I said.

“We are going to train with Aeros.”

“Umm, what?”

“You’re driving.”

“I’m … we’re … how does one train with a rock?”

“If I didn’t know better I’d think you were nervous,” he said, wiping his hands off on his jeans.

I cleared my throat. “Nervous might be a slightly strong word.” I fished around in my pocket and found my keys. I started spinning them on my index finger. “I hope you’re ready for a bouncy ride.”

“I used to ride chariots through roads with ruts deep enough to swallow the wheels.”

I stopped spinning my keys. “You just don’t intimidate easy, do you?”

“No. Your staff and your backpack are already in the car. Let’s get moving.”