Shadow's Edge nat-2 Read online

  Together, Vi and Kylar fought. Kylar was capable of aerial moves Vi couldn’t even comprehend, flipping off walls and the pillars, always landing on his feet like a cat, always leaving bloody furrows with his steel claws. Vi had less strength, even with her Talent, but she was quick. The ferali morphed again and again. It became a slight man with a living chain that it whipped around its head and flung around the pillars, hoping those mouthy links would catch either one of them. One of the links snagged Kylar’s sleeve in midflight. It flipped him off balance and he crashed into the floor. The ferali pulled the chain in until Vi’s sword passed in the inch between Kylar’s skin and his sleeve and freed him. Kylar didn’t even pause. He was just up and fighting.

  Then the ferali was a giant with a war hammer. Marble exploded as it laid about itself with the huge weapon. Kylar and Vi ranged through the illusion of battle on the throne room floor, fighting as desperately as those men and women fought.

  As they fought together, Kylar and Vi began to not just fight in unison, but with unity. As Vi understood Kylar’s strengths, she could move, counting on him to react appropriately. They were warriors, they were wetboys, and they understood. For Vi, who had always had trouble with words, battle was truth.

  She and Kylar fought together—leaping, meeting in mid-air, pushing off to go flying a new direction before the ferali could respond. They covered each other, saved each other’s lives. Kylar clipped off the end of a bone mace Vi could have never avoided. Vi said, “Graakos”—and jaws closed on Kylar’s arm and then bounced off.

  It was, for her, a holy moment. She had never communed with another, never trusted another so implicitly, as she communed with and trusted Kylar. In this, through this, she understood the man in ways a thousand thousand words wouldn’t have revealed. They were in total harmony, and the miracle was how natural it was.

  At the same time, despair rose in her. They cut the ferali a hundred times. Two hundred. They attacked its eyes, its mouth. They cut off parts of its body. It bled, and its total mass decreased by a few pounds, but that was all. They cut it and it healed. But they could never make a mistake. Once that skin touched theirs, they would die.

  ~I also cut.~

  Kylar alighted on the side of a pillar and stopped. Runes were glowing in ka’kari black edged in blue along his arm. He stared at them. “You what?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Vi said. Her eyes were on an enormous spider chittering on the floor in front of her.

  “Stupid! How slow am I?” Kylar said, dropping to the floor.

  ~Is that a rhetorical question?~

  The ka’kari poured a dark liquid from his hand onto his sword. But then the liquid solidified as a thin sword. Kylar cut left and right and spider legs went flying. It wasn’t like hacking through bone, he was shearing them off like butter.

  He dodged back, and the spider gathered its legs to itself, but this time, the stumps kept bleeding. They smoked and wouldn’t allow new limbs to be grown there. It morphed back into the man with swords for arms, but now the wounds were on the man’s chest, still flowing with blood and smoking. It roared and attacked Kylar.

  Kylar slashed left and right and the sword-arms tumbled across the floor. He rammed the ka’kari into the ferali’s chest. With a sharp motion, he pulled it down to the creature’s groin. Smoke billowed, blood gushed. Kylar yanked the sword up, making another huge cut.

  He saw it too late. The ferali’s skin drew back from the sword, like a pond might crater when a stone falls into it, only to burst upward. The skin rushed up the sword all at once.

  It engulfed Kylar’s hand.

  He threw himself back, but the ferali, limp now, fell forward with him, attached to his hand. Kylar jerked the sword back and forth and smoke gushed from the ferali as he gutted it, but it didn’t lose its grip.

  Kylar reached for a dagger, but he’d used them all in the battle. “Vi,” he shouted. “Cut it off!”

  She hesitated.

  “Cut off my hand!”

  She couldn’t do it.

  The skin twitched again and it rushed up his forearm.

  Kylar screamed and twisted. A blade of ka’kari formed along the ridge of his left hand and he cut off his right arm. Released from the pull of the dying ferali, he collapsed backward.

  He held the gushing stump in his left hand. A moment later, black metal shimmered in every exposed vein and the bleeding stopped. A black cap sheathed his stump. Kylar looked at Vi dumbly.

  Ten feet away, the ferali’s corpse was oozing. It began to break apart, weaves of magic unraveling. The mouthy skin rippled and evaporated and then all that was left was stinking ropes of meat and sinew and bone.

  “That,” the Godking’s voice said, “was impressive, Kylar. You showed me some things that I wasn’t aware the ka’kari could do. Most instructive. And Vi, you’ll serve admirably, and not just in my bed.”

  Something in Vi snapped. In the last two days, she’d changed everything. A new Vi was fighting to be born—and the Godking was here, saying nothing had changed. The new Vi would be a stillbirth. She’d go back to being a whore. She’d go back to being the same cold, hard bitch.

  She’d thought that life was the only one open to her, so she’d borne the unbearable. But having seen a way to be a woman she didn’t hate, she couldn’t go back.

  “Get it through your fat head, Gare,” she said, even as she felt magical bonds wrapping around her limbs and Kylar’s again. “I won’t serve you.”

  Garoth smiled godly benevolence. “The feisty ones always make me hard.”

  “Kylar,” Vi said. “Snap out of it. You gotta help me kill this fucking twist.”

  The Godking laughed. “Compulsion doesn’t hold on everyone, Vi. The Niles’ magic would have freed most people. About nineteen years ago, there was some Ceuran slut that I seduced during a diplomatic trip. I sent men to collect her when I found out she was pregnant, but she ran away before they got there. When I found out she bore a girl, I dismissed the matter. I usually have my daughters drowned—it’s good practice for my boys, it makes them tough—but it wasn’t worth the effort. Compulsion, Vi, only works on family, and sometimes not on boys. You—”

  “You’re not my father,” Vi said. “You’re just a sick fuck who’s about to die. Kylar!”

  “Now Vi, let’s not get all teary-eyed,” Garoth Ursuul said. “You’re nothing to me but five minutes of pleasure and a spoonful of seed. Well, that’s not true. You see, Vi, you’re a wetboy I can trust. You will never disobey me, never betray me.”

  Vi was gripped by terror tighter than the magic that bound her limbs. Possibilities were dying on every side.

  Kylar stirred. His eyes came back into focus. He wiggled his eyebrows at her, trying to be charming. The outrageous cuteness of it cracked her paralysis. His pale blue eyes said, You with me?

  Hers answered him with a fierce, desperate joy that needed no translation.

  Under his breath, Kylar said, “You take his attention, I’ll take his life.” He smiled and the rest of Vi’s fear blew away. It was a real smile, with no desperation. There was no doubt in Kylar’s eyes. Any additional obstacle—whether magical bonds or the loss of an arm—would only sweeten his victory. Killing the Godking was Kylar’s destiny.

  “You leave me no choice,” Garoth Ursuul said. He pursed his lips. “Daughter, kill Kylar.”

  The ka’kari opened and devoured the bonds holding Vi and Kylar. Vi was moving, beginning a flashy, eye- grabbing stunt.

  Then …everything stopped.

  There was a gap of volition. In her mind’s eye, Vi was leaping through the air, flying toward the Godking, her blade descending, his face twisting into a rictus of fear as he saw that his shields were gone, as he realized she’d defeated his compulsion—

  But that was only her imagination.

  A shock of impact ran up Vi’s arm. Her wrist flexed as if to complete a horizontal slash through a heart, but she saw nothing, knew nothing except that there was a b
lank.

  The gap cleared, and Vi was aware once more. Her fingers were uncurling from the familiar grip of her favorite knife. Kylar—so slowly, so painfully slowly—was falling. He drifted toward the floor, his head arcing back in a slow whiplash from having her knife rammed into his back, his dark hair rippling from the shock. It wasn’t until he hit the floor that Vi realized that Kylar was dead. She had killed him.

  “That, my dear daughter,” Garoth Ursuul said, “is compulsion.”

  69

  Kylar pushed through the fog in a rush. In a moment that seemed out of joint, as if time didn’t work the same way here, he was back in the indistinct room, once again facing the lupine, gray-haired man with his hair pure white on one temple.

  “Two days isn’t going to cut it,” Kylar said. “I need to go back now.”

  “Impertinence last time, demands this time,” the man said.

  The man cocked his head, as if listening, and Kylar was again aware of the others. They were invisible when Kylar looked directly at them, but definitely there. Could he see them a little better this time? “Yes, yes,” the Wolf said to a voice Kylar couldn’t hear.

  “Who are they?” Kylar asked.

  “Immortality is lonely, Kylar. Madness need not be.”

  “Madness?”

  “Say hello to the grand company of my imagination, gleaned from those profound souls I have known over the years. Not ghosts, just facsimiles, I’m afraid.” The lupine man nodded his head again toward one of them and chuckled.

  “If they’re not real, why are you talking to them and not to me?” Kylar asked. He was still angry and this time, he wasn’t going to take the man’s chiding or his mysteries. “I need your help. Now.”

  “You’ll find such urgency hard to hold onto as the centuries pass—”

  “It’ll be real hard if Garoth Ursuul takes my immortality.”

  The Wolf tented his fingers. “Poor Garoth. He believes himself a god. It will be his undoing, as it was mine.”

  “And another thing,” Kylar said. “I want my arm back.”

  “I noticed you managed to lose that. You actually pulled the ka’kari out of every cell of the arm you lost. Was that intentional?”

  “I didn’t want the ferali to have it.” Cell?

  “A wise thought, but a poor choice. Do you remember what they call your ka’kari?”

  “The Devourer,” Kylar said. “So?”

  The Wolf pursed his lips. Waited.

  “You’re joking,” Kylar said. He felt sick.

  “Afraid not. You didn’t have to fight. What the ka’kari did while coating your sword it could have done while coating your body. You could have just walked through the ferali.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Because you cut your arm off instead—and pulled the ka’kari out of it first—your arm won’t grow back. Sorry. I do hope you can fight with your left.”

  “To hell with you! Send me back or Ursuul wins.”

  The man gave him a toothy grin, as if being damned amused him. “Sending you back two days early will cost me,” his eyes flicked up. “Three years and twenty-seven days of my life. Sort of like the rich stealing from the poor, wouldn’t you say, immortal?” He held up his burn-knotted hand before Kylar could curse him. “I’ll send you back if you make an oath to me. There’s a sword. It’s called Curoch, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that it’s intensely desired by any number of powerful factions. You know the town of Torra’s Bend?”

  “Torras Bend?”

  “That’s the one. Get the sword and take it there. Go into the wood, past the oak grove, stop forty or fifty paces from the edge of the old forest, and throw Curoch in.”

  “Is that where you live?” Kylar asked.

  “Oh no,” the man said. “But something else does. Something that will guard Curoch from the world of man. If you do this, I will send you back now, and when you deliver the sword, I’ll make your arm grow back.”

  “Who are you?” Kylar asked.

  “I’m one of the good guys. At least as much as I can be.” His golden eyes danced. “But I want you to understand something Acaelus never did: I’m not a man,” he paused, grinning, and Kylar did indeed wonder how much humanity was behind those lupine eyes, “to cross lightly.”

  “I figured.”

  “Are you in?”

  “That’s odd,” the Godking said, coming to stand over Kylar’s corpse. “Where’s the ka’kari? I sense …it’s in his body?”

  “Yes,” Vi said, unable to stop herself.

  “Fascinating. I don’t suppose you know what all it does?”

  To her horror, Vi found herself answering. It hadn’t been a direct question, so she veered as hard as she could. “No. I know it makes him invisible.” She’d tried to say “made,” but she couldn’t force the past tense into the sentence. She hoped he didn’t notice.

  “Well, regardless, your lover will have to wait. I have a massacre to attend.”

  Vi screamed and grabbed Kylar’s sword. Garoth watched her curiously. The sword swung in an arc—and stopped. She stopped it herself. She couldn’t do it.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “Funny thing is, I learned compulsion from one of your southron mating rituals—ringing—but you people completely misunderstood its true power. Anyway, feel free to watch the battle—and stop grunting, dear. It’s unbecoming.”

  Abruptly, his eyes went vacant. Vi tried to move the sword, but it was impossible. The compulsion was undeniable.

  As the wytches released the ferali, Vi sat on the steps before the throne to watch. But even that terrible spectacle couldn’t hold her attention.

  She should have given up long ago. All her fighting was a farce. She’d done everything the Godking had wanted her to do. She’d killed Jarl and she’d killed Kylar. In the years to come, she’d doubtless kill hundreds more. Thousands. It wouldn’t matter. No one else could ever mean what Jarl and Kylar had meant to her. Jarl, her only friend, dead by her hand. Kylar, a man who had somehow stirred …what? Passion? Maybe just warmth, in a cold dead heart. A man who could have been …more.

  She hated every man she’d ever known. It was man’s nature to kill, to destroy, to tear down. Woman was the giver of life, the nurturer. And yet …Kylar.

  He stood athwart her suppositions like a colossus. Kylar, the legendary wetboy who should have been the very quintessence of destruction, had saved a little girl, adopted her, saved a woman, saved nobles who didn’t deserve saving, and tried to leave the bitter business. Would have left it, too, if not for me.

  If not for Vi, Kylar would be in Caernarvon, leading some sort of daylight life that Vi couldn’t even imagine. And what was it with Elene? Kylar could have had any woman he wanted, and he’d chosen a girl covered with scars. In her experience, men went for the hottest bitch they could get their cock in. If the bitch was hot, they didn’t care that she was a bitch. Kylar wasn’t like that.

  Vi had an awful flash of intuition. She saw Elene—a woman she’d never met—as her twin and opposite. Elene had scars an inch deep, but beneath that she was all beauty and grace and love. Vi was all ugliness except for the thin veil of her skin. Kylar’s love was a mystery no more. The man who could see past Jarl’s murder could easily see past a few scars. Of course he loved Elene. Or had, before Vi killed him.

  Kylar had said he would come back. But he wouldn’t come back. The Godking had won.

  Vi pulled her knife out of Kylar’s back and rolled him over. His eyes were open, blank, dead. She closed those accusing eyes, pulled his head into her lap and turned to watch the Godking massacre Cenaria’s last hope.

  70

  All pretense of scholastic detachment was gone. At first, the magi had to strain to see the ferali. It entered the battle virtually unnoticed.

  Within a minute, one of the mages said, “McHalkin was right. I thought he made it up.”

  “We all thought he made it up. What does this mean about all those other cr
eatures in his writings?”

  “Gods, it’s just like he said. It’s being ridden, possessed.”

  On the battlefield, the beast’s presence was becoming known. It had become a great bull, plowing through the lines of Cenarians. Whatever gashes the soldiers managed to inflict were quickly filled, and the creature grew.

  The clamor of battle, the shouts of rage and pain and ringing steel had been drifting up to the promontory since the battle began. Now, new sounds rose: screams of terror.

  The enormous bull lumbered out the side of the Khalidoran line. Half a dozen men, some still alive, were stuck to the beast. It paused as it digested them and began rearranging itself. The ferali curled into a ball and sheets of plate metal bobbed to the surface of its skin. It unfolded itself and stood.

  The ferali now wore the shape of a troll. It was three times the height of a man, its skin was armor and mail and gawping little mouths. It had even taken into itself the swords and spears of its dead opponents, which now bristled from its back and sides.

  The Cenarians’ first reaction was surprisingly heroic. They charged the beast.

  It was futile. It beat its way through the lines, never moving so fast that the Khalidoran line couldn’t close behind it, and everywhere it went, killing, it was careful to lift every man it had killed or maimed in one of its four arms and stick him to its skin, or impale him on the spears on its back. One would be devoured, and then the next, and the next, and the next.

  If the soldiers even wounded the beast, the magi couldn’t tell. Never slowing, it tore apart line after line.

  In the face of that inexorable death, General Agon charged part of the Khalidoran line with everything he had, trying to escape. By luck or leadership, hundreds of his men joined him, all attacking one place, desperate. The Khalidoran line bowed and nearly broke, but the Khalidoran prince Moburu’s cavalry reinforced the line until the ferali waded through the ranks to get there. Abruptly, the charge broke off, and the Cenarian generals tried to get their men to charge another way. But the din of battle, the confusion of being ringed by the Khalidorans, and the terror at the ever-enlarging beast was too much.