“You must do it,” he told her. “I can’t do it myself. Not even with the pain hidden away from me. I lack that kind of courage.” In three steps he was before the arch, watching the hungry feelers and barbed vines rise up from it like serpents, questing curiously through the air. Nyrgoth turned back to her, arms out. “Take your steel. Cut here.” The place he marked was beneath his ribs, close to where the demon’s servant had gutted him. She could just see the pale line of the wound, as though it had happened a generation ago. “Cut, and what you unleash shall undo the demon, if anything can. But be swift.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, but she had her blade out, tip scratching a bead of blood from his belly. There were stories, of course: one hero of the ancients had to unseam the Firebird that had carried them across the night, to release all the good things of the world that it had swallowed. Another had gone across the world cutting apart scattered seeds of the Tree of Changes to birth the first Coast-people. Stories, myths, contradictory parables. True without being real. But this was real.
“Lyn,” he said, “I have been without purpose for a long time. At least let me be useful to your world in this way.”
“Tell it to me without your shield. Tell it to me in your real voice, with your real self behind it,” she challenged him. She was having difficulty keeping the sword steady, her own hands were shaking so much.
“This is me, all of me.” Behind her the metal servant righted itself abruptly with a tremendous rattle of loose plates, and she twitched and drove the blade two inches into his gut. His face went white, but somehow he conjured a smile.
“Yes. But all at once, please. There’s a limit to how much I can hold back the pain and still function.” He reached out with his fingertips and touched her hand, clenched about the weapon’s hilt. “Lyn . . .”
She lunged, driving the weapon into him and then drawing it out with a twist to free it from his flesh, as she’d been taught. He made a soft sound, almost of revelation. Then she had staggered back two steps, feeling the crawling horror of the demon clutching for her from behind, the horror of what she had done from the front.
Nyrgoth reached with crooked fingers, driving them stiffly into the wound, clawing into his own body and fumbling there, teeth gritted, eyes clenched shut. Then, with a great cry, he tore something free, that was the size of Lyn’s fist and ragged with gore.
“Lie there, no matter what happens to my body,” he got out, and dropped the bloody trophy before the arch, and then howled at the sky, at the demon, at the world, “Do it now! Now!”
He dropped to his knees and she was rushing to catch him, feeling his long, awkward body slump into her, shivering and twitching. All around her there were things breaking away from the demon’s massed corruption, shapes part-human, part-beast, merged, blended, clumsy on too many limbs or too few. She lifted her red sword and resolved to make them pay dearly for her last moments.
Then the servant, the worker, had lurched over to her, almost knocking her down. She struck at it with her sword, carving a bright scar on its metal hide, but it just stood there, whining and whirring. Incredibly, Nyrgoth pawed at it, painting it with his blood. His lips moved, and she read one word there.
On.
He tried to fight her, when she hauled him up. That might have been because he wanted her to leave him; it might have been because the pain had broken through his barriers so that being bodily dragged over the back of his servant was agony to him. She had no time for niceties. By the time she was astride the creature herself, she didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
“Whatever you’re going to do,” she told the thing, “do it now.”
She almost fell off, when it lumbered into the air, every metal part of it protesting and its innards roaring as though it shared all its master’s pain. She clung to it and to Nyrgoth’s body, watching the eye-twisting arch recede, watching long flailing tentacles thrash from the demonic overgrowth to reach for her, then fall back down like cut ropes. The servant carried them away, shuddering through the sky, losing height abruptly with stomach-lurching drops, then clambering skywards again, listing perilously to one side.
Behind her, the world turned to light and fire.
Lynesse
BACK HOME AT HER mother’s court, of course, nobody believed a word of it.
It would have been worse if Esha and Allwer had not turned up. Lyn knew exactly how much worse, because they were long days behind her. They had not been carried part of the way by a flying monster. Not that anyone believed that either. For those days before Esha knelt before the throne of Lannesite and told her story, Lyn felt the full lash of her mother’s bitter disappointment. Not a new vintage, you’d have thought, save that this was the final straw, the very last act of her least dutiful daughter. And when Lyn had recalled their ancestor Astresse Once Regent and her bargain with the Elder sorcerer, her mother had just shaken her head and castigated her for squandering such a resource at the whim of a foolish girl. As far as her mother was concerned, Lyn was just a grown woman who had not put away her childish toys. The world was built on trade agreements and intelligence reports and what the next harvest season would bring. Stories of heroes and demons were for the fire, for drunken nights, for children.
Then Esha arrived at Lannesite, breathless, using up all her own credit at court for an urgent audience with the queen. She explained what they had seen under the demon’s aegis—no more than Lyn had seen, but Esha Free Mark was a marginally more reliable witness.
She had seen the fire from heaven. She had seen Lyn descend, riding the monster and with the sorcerer’s body slung before her like a trophy. She’d seen more than Lyn had, then. Lyn had been inconsolable, weeping, seeing only that corpse. Esha had, instead, watched the world around them.
She told how the demon’s mark had begun flaking off everything it clung to, the scales blowing away like dead leaves and turning to rust, the little black eyes cracking and shrivelling. What was left beneath, when that covering was thrown back, had not been pretty. The trees and beasts and people of the Ordwood had been eaten away, blended, recombined in experimental ways as though by some mind that had no idea quite what they were or how they worked. Esha and Allwer could confirm every trace of the demon was disintegrating.
Which had left Nyrgoth Elder.
They had no way to help him. He seemed dead, but perhaps “dead” meant something different. Perhaps it meant something less permanent. If they only could . . .