Notes of music dancing like motes of light on an ethereal breeze, the flute’s song lulled my reclining mind into a dreamless slumber in which the only sensation was satisfaction, the feeling of putting your feet up on the table after a long day of toil. I floated in the empty blackness, buffeted by warm winds, borne by them far beyond the cares of mortal flesh, need and worry and want. Here was the bliss we all sought. Here I could rest.
I sit with Mum and Dad in Firenight Square. I sit between them. The twins are babies: Mum has Jaroan in her lap, and Dad has Jaid.
I look up at them, from the one to the other.
I can’t remember, can’t recognise their faces.
When Em shook me awake, noises ringing out, at first I had a flashback to the night of the Incursion, being awoken in almost the exact same spot, hearing the Mourning Bells –
But this wasn’t the Bells – it was my glyphstone. Em had clearly already answered hers, and all the eyes in the room were focussed on the two of us, questions on every set of lips.
“Wha…? What’s going on? Em?”
“Kas, they’ve escaped.”
“Wha…”
Tranquillity extinguished, a solitary candle-flame before the tidal wave, flattened such that it was as though it had never been.
I didn’t need to ask who, why, where, even how. There was only one question:
“When?”
She backed off as I rose to my feet, and even she seemed shocked by the iciness of my voice.
“M-minutes,” she mumbled. “Zey killed two vatchmen. Zey think one of ze ozzers voz in zeir pay.”
I hissed. I wasn’t going to make any more mistakes.
My imps hadn’t found Nighteye – but this pair of scum weren’t shapeshifters protected by seers.
I raised both my arms, stabbing my hands straight out at the walls in either direction, then turned my upper body ninety degrees, bringing them down to my sides again.
Seventeen gungrelafor entered Materium through my portals: twin-horned faces were poking over the backs of chairs, short tails flicking behind the curtains, wing-tips protruding from under the couch…
Teleporters.
Most of the others in the room had some idea what to expect; despite his inexperience with this kind of thing Linn managed to keep his stern fortify-face, but Atar shrieked, staring around in horror, and Em tried to calm her down –
But I wasn’t really listening.
Zabalam, awaken.
“Feychilde?” he crooned in my head.
These men. Remember them.
Then another gesture birthed the gremlin onto our plane.
“Show them Orven. Show them Wyre.”
He took the images from my mind and, while everyone but Em watched on in astonishment, he swiftly built the illusion of the two murderers in the centre of the room, almost capturing their likenesses perfectly – it was close enough that I felt the irrational urge to attack the glamours.
By the time he was done, Atar had calmed down, staring in awe instead. Linn’s expression still hadn’t changed, his outward demeanour giving off disapproval, if not a faint whiff of outright contempt.
I didn’t care.
I cast my gaze around at the imps and barked in Infernal: “Cutterwells Watchtower, Sticktown. Start there, move out. They’ll likely be indoors.” Each of my minions looked a little different, and I smiled thinly when I found the one who’d acted as my messenger to Zakimel back in Zadhal. The gungrelafor was on top of the curtain rail, leering. “You, Pinktongue – report back to me. Now, go.”
Seventeen heatless red flames consumed them instantly, vanishing right there off the furniture.
Almost immediately everyone started speaking, but I had no time for them now. I just flicked my eyes to the people most important to me, giving them a look as I started materialising wings and drifting towards the wall. The hand I reached out in front of me as I moved increased in transparency. By the time I reached the plaster and bricks I would pass right through them –
I brought Zab back into my being, then used a blurring effect to disguise what I did with the amethyst rift, summoning and joining with my vampire.
“Kas – vait!” Em was blurting.
“Catch me up,” I murmured just before entering the coldness of the physical boundary, keeping my fang-distorted face turned away from the others.
Within seconds I was out. It was night. I was free.
I flew north-east, as quickly as I could fly, but before I passed over the Greywater I saw Stormsword sweep through the sky above me; then her flight-spell enveloped me, and I could really put on some speed. My glyphstone’s buzzing was becoming increasingly loud, increasingly distracting – I was tempted to just lob the damn thing in the river. Common sense won out, and I graced it with a moment of my attention, enough to stop the incessant trilling without it pulling me into the trance.
I knew full-well what it said, what it portended. I didn’t need to hear it in person – that would just drive me into a rage.
More of a rage.
Oldtown was a blur beneath us – then we passed over the Blackrush and central Sticktown. Below, a few revellers ambled idly through snow-coated streets; even the mudflows of my home district looked picturesque from up here. Many more would be indoors, enjoying their Endfeasts by meeting friends at bars, or relaxing in their homes with their families gathered around them.
As I should’ve been. For the first time, I felt it bite at me: the sheer normalcy I’d lost, becoming Feychilde… I could’ve hidden my sorcery, moved more slowly, carefully…
But what I’d gained… My parents’ home. The twins’ futures. My amazing girlfriend. Friends. Prestige. Power.
It all tangled together, the good with the bad, and at the heart of it all was this man.
Wyre Lulton. The low creature whose vicious mind had fired the muscles, the extension of his arm that brought the blade down, eagerly cutting Mum’s throat, piercing Dad’s heart as he sacrificed himself pointlessly, trying to intervene when it was already too late.
That’s what the witnesses had said. But they’d lied, all of them, motivated by fear or greed or both, motivated by Wyre Lulton to condemn his own brother Toras to the gallows.
Maybe he didn’t kill them like that. Maybe their murders had been less gruesome in actuality than the horrible tale I’d been told. But maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it had been worse.
I promise, Mum and Dad. I’ll make sure he hangs for this. I’ll put him in the noose myself if I have to. Put him in the noose, kick away the stool and watch.
If he hadn’t killed them, I wouldn’t have been there that day, where a fairy and a faun spun their first web about me. Wouldn’t have been granted authority over fundamental forces of existence.
I owed it all – the good and the bad, the Good and the Evil – to him.
Pinktongue appeared in a red flash, checked my trajectory, then spun and teleported again, four wings flapping to keep up.
“Master!” he croaked. “Follow, if you still seek the Wyre Lulton!”
He blinked away, skipping ten yards each time, and within five seconds I had my course corrected.
Towards home.
“Stormsword!” I cried.
It was needless. The flight-spell she’d put on me seemed to make her aware of my change in direction – when I looked up at her she had already gotten out ahead of me again.
When her voice came back to me, it was the softly-spoken tenor of a confident highborn, the winds carrying Stormsword’s words: “You know that if they resist, they can be killed. They are active murderers. The watch themselves issued the edict.”
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I didn’t know that, but it made sense.
A satisfying kind of sense.
Just a few seconds after I saw the trail of destruction, the imp croaked again: “Master!”
Pinktongue blinked down towards the street.
I focussed my vampiric senses, descending like a winged shadow, and the ‘how’ of their escape was instantly made plain as I saw them moving up the roadway.
Gods-dropped inkatra.
They weren’t in hiding. They weren’t indoors. They weren’t doing any of the things I’d have done in their situation. Quite the opposite.
Inkatra. The first few times, users were incredibly unfocussed. The drug took hold of their thoughts, eroding their inhibitions, twisting them into indulging their primordial instincts. A forceful personality, like a gang-leader, could possibly rein them in, even on their first go of the stuff. But Wyre wasn’t going to be taking orders from anyone else – and he had taken the herb himself. I could tell that much – the man was thirty feet tall.
There was nothing to indicate Orven had taken it, or the ex-watchman still in his uniform – those two ran along behind the titanic crime-lord, avoiding the huge sloppy ditches he left in his wake, the falling timbers that showered down like deadly hail. Ah, no – the watchman moved with oily precision to pull Orven away before he was buried beneath someone’s furniture; a divination trait… The three others I could see were definitely on the drug – there was a ridiculous sorcerer fascinated by the world’s weakest-ever shields that surrounded him, a man exuding frosty air from his hands, and a giant white bear that still only came up to Wyre’s knee. All of them moved as one, all seemingly in the same state of ecstatic misery.
They weren’t heading to my home. That wasn’t what the boss’s instincts had compelled him to do – no, nothing so complex as vengeance. They were heading to their own home, their former base of operations – and Wyre’s main motivation appeared to be simple annihilation. As if by destroying the place he’d lived in for years he could just take it all back, have it all over again.
Or maybe it was just that he knew there could be no escape from my wrath. There was no hiding. The magical herb couldn’t conceal him for long, not without him perishing from over-consumption.
If he wanted to go out with a bang, he was going about it the right way. He stumbled through Helbert’s Bend as though he were a child running amok in a toy shop filled with matchstick houses; he was literally pulling down the fronts of structures as he went wading towards the base, a river of debris flowing behind him. What was worse, it seemed many of the inhabitants were being drawn towards their windows before he arrived – to see what was happening, what that awful din could be – only to be pulled down into the plank-strewn snow along with their walls.
There were injuries, and cries of distress, and delicious-smelling blood-puddles – but my mind was shaped like an arrow and it knew its target.
The life of Wyre Lulton.
As I descended towards him I held up my hand, forging a tremendous blade of force that would shatter his huge, druidry-reinforced sternum, pierce his massive heart with good-will to all men, a Yearsend gift to the human race bestowed in a torrential red rain –
My azure sword gleamed as I raised it –
Yet the wane slowed the thought, blunted the tip of the arrowhead.
The happy memory had only faded, not died.
“You are a good man. A strong man.”
A good man. A strong man.
A bad man. A weak man.
What was the dividing line? Who got to decide? Could I be considered good for killing them, ridding the plane of their stained existences, robbing the dark gods of the power they gained through the base actions these men committed? Or would I automatically serve the dark gods’ aims, darken my own soul, even when I sought justice? Was it nobler to accept that sacrifice, lose my high ground – take lives to save lives, stop the chaos in its tracks? Or was it only my rage speaking, my own desire to simply vanquish them, rip them apart?
I descended, but I slowed; my arm fell limply to my side, my vast sword dissipating. My eyes looked up to Stormsword, and hers down to meet mine.
I couldn’t do it, and she knew it now. She knew me, and I knew her. I could tell it all from the way she came to a screeching halt.
She could help me, couldn’t she? She could help this weak, useless man?
I could surrender it to her, couldn’t I? This burden?
That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? I wasn’t a good man, or a bad man. A strong man, or a weak man. I could play at being grown-up, which was what my society expected of me.
But I remained a boy. I couldn’t make my own choice. I couldn’t own it.
As I’d expected, Stormsword halted only to draw back her own arms, raise her fingers to the skies.
Even as Wyre plunged into another house, heedless of the wails as he ripped through a bedroom and spilled its contents into the street, Em coaxed down the lightning.
She didn’t let it fall upon him at once – the thunder laughed, as loud as an avalanche, and she gave him a few seconds to stop, raise his face and look up at her –
That animal expression, twisted in anger and fear and hate, would stay with me until the day I died.
I could see it, reflected in his overlarge eyes: the crackling ribbons of white fire were immense, stretching like pillars from her hands to the vaults of the heavens –
And then the air fell silent; the lightning leapt down, and that was the end for Wyre Lulton.
She didn’t scorch him, or let him suffer. She simply executed him.
Where in one moment stood a thirty-foot, living breathing human, there now stood a thirty-foot statue, charcoal, grey-black throughout, trapped in its last moment of anguish.
I didn’t see her swinging the sword of white light, the hundred-foot blade of pure dancing electricity that rushed down at his neck – but I saw it connect, saw it effortlessly part the crumbling head from the crumbling shoulders.
He’d taken inkatra for druidry, for self-augmentations. She wasn’t taking any chances. It was like Winterprince had told us, that day we first met him.
Druids don’t regrow heads.
The charcoal boulder landed with a thump, losing almost half its mass into the sludge. The body followed it, collapsing down where it stood.
There, Mum and Dad. There. It’s done. Look.
They weren’t here, so I floated in the air, looking down for them.
The remaining Bertie Boys decided to fight rather than flee, but I didn’t move to help. She didn’t need it. She focussed on the other druid, and Stormsword’s namesake beheaded him, the huge bear’s-head sailing through the air – meanwhile, she seemed to unconsciously form elementals of debris and mud, frost and excrement, towering creatures rising from the very substance of Sticktown to grasp the diviner tight, smash the sorcerer’s shields, overwhelm the paltry wizard. They were surrounded, compressed, submerged – and this time she gave them no airway.
She drowned them.
All of them decided to fight rather than flee – all except for Orven. The vile excuse for a human turned tail and fled, running off through the drop like he always did.
Until its snow-capped arms reached up for him, dragged him beneath the surface.
He too didn’t rise again, and I watched it all, bemused.
I felt it when they became tools for my magic, corpses my mind could reawaken, crude intellects my power could restore, torturing their souls with a nigh-unbreakable anchor to the inner planes…
I came to attention, then I noted the arrival of Bor and Tanra, saw them helping people out of the wreckage, Em adding her powers to the relief effort –
So many people…
Instincts finally kicked in, and I realised. I could hear them screaming, but I didn’t care. I could smell the wounds, but it only tempted me.
Gods, how do Shallowlie and Netherhame deal with this?
I was less experienced, less knowledgeable than I’d thought. I’d avoided joining with the bloodthirsty eldritches for a reason, and I was now living with the consequences of my decision, one moment at a time. It exposed a callous streak in me I didn’t know existed.
I expelled and dismissed my vampire with a single definite intention, then whipped about – I brought Avaelar out, started shifting timbers with satyr-strength, seeking out pinned victims with the wraith-form, swiftly whittling down my quota of healing potions –
It took over fifteen minutes, and that was only thanks to Killstop and the other diviners who’d shown after someone put out a general call: Star and Dimdweller. Glimmermere – Imrye – arrived just too late to treat a girl whose head was crushed by a beam. I didn’t have much time to think, relying on pure emotion to drive me from place to place – it wasn’t difficult, to bring myself to help people.
It was the other thing – harming them – killing them – that I had a problem with. Doing this, the meagre rescue-work, the grunt-level magician-labour – that was what I was good for. That was what made me a ‘good man’, a ‘good boy’. If it didn’t have ‘Soulless Evil’ painted in big bright letters on its Anti-Life Crown and a dead champion’s body for a garment, I was incapable of taking action.
I didn’t kill the killer of my flatmate, never mind the killer of my own parents. If I’d killed Wyre this morning, that girl Imrye failed to save would still be alive, still have a future – but it had been stolen away by his malice, by my cowardice… I didn’t even kill the heretic in Firenight Square, whatever that sorcerer said at the battle over the heath – the spider-druidess could’ve got away and messed with my head too, if not for Winterprince’s intervention. And I didn’t kill Everseer when I could’ve, in the battle at the library, and she went on to kill… who knew how many people.
Everseer…
Why had Tanra not foreseen all these events today? Was it really inkatra messing with her head? And where was Timesnatcher in all this? Surely he’d had plenty of opportunity to deal with his twin arch-sorceress problem by now, given his particular repertoire of skills… Had this whole thing been invisible to them all?
I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know. Once we’d done all we could and the local authorities took over, I made my excuses and headed straight back towards Rivertown with Em. I was just sick of it, sick of it all. Sick of myself most of all. Em had killed Wyre, and I found it magnificent to watch, even now when I played it back before my mind’s eye. Then she’d drowned five other men in filth, and while I experienced a kind of horror when I considered these deaths, it was more muted than I would’ve liked. A horror at arm’s length. A horror that you know ought to be dreadful but just somehow falls a little short of the mark, almost into the bearable category… Were they less culpable than Wyre? What right did I have to choose between them, decree death for one but mercy for the rest? All agents of the law, from watchman to magister to champion, were licensed to kill the escapees if they resisted – and they did take aggressive postures against Em when she attacked them. As futile as it had turned out to be, they did resist.
But did they? Really?
I looked over at her as we flew – she met my eyes and smiled.
She didn’t have the eyes of a killer… not anymore. She was just her.
I smiled back.
I didn’t care if the Bertie Boys didn’t stand a chance. I didn’t care that Orven ran. So, they could have lived – perhaps she didn’t need to kill them. But, almost certainly, they would’ve gone on to murder others.
And so despite not needing to kill them, she took by choice the more difficult road. She shouldered the burden of their deaths on behalf of those who would live out full lives thanks to her action here today.
She was a good person. Better than me.
I flew closer to her, took her by the hand, and brought us to a stop. We were hundreds of feet over Oldtown’s ancient ruins, the zone of Mund time forgot. Now that we were no longer moving, the snow drifted slowly down past us, zig-zagging softly on the breeze coming down off the mountain.
“How cold is it?” I asked.
“How… Kas.” She smiled again, then brought herself inside my embrace, lying her head sideways against my chest. “You really vont to know.”
“Show me.”
The breeze was as glacial as I’d expected. I shivered, and suppressed the urge to become insubstantial.
“It is exhilarating, is it not?” she breathed, nestling even closer.
“You… You did it, Em.”
“You knew zat I vould. I did it for you.”
“You did it – just for me?”
“Of course. It’s vot you needed. Zat’s vot I’m here for.”
“I love you.”
Her chin tilted up, swimming cobalt eyes radiant like stars.
“I love you too, Kas.”
“Move in with me.”