Gabe shook his head. “I wasn’t the one who summoned an army in the first place,” he said. “I didn’t lay siege to Castia, or threaten the Courts with annihilation if they dared to intervene. This is your doing, Lastleaf. Or would you prefer I called you Heathen?”
The druin’s air of conceit vanished like that of a debt-ridden king confronted by his creditors. He opened his mouth to speak, but then his mismatched eyes fell upon the scythe Larkspur had planted like a flag in the blood-soaked earth. Clay saw a slew of emotions warring beneath the Heathen’s calm fa?ade, but they remained below, subtle as sharks in shallow water.
“Ashatan,” he said, and the wyvern bowed beneath him. The druin dropped to the ground, ducked beneath the arch of a leathery wing, then reached behind him and withdrew the topmost sword from its scabbard. Clay had seen this one before, at Lindmoor. Scorn, Shadow had called it: obsidian black, laced with molten fissures, so hot it folded the air around it with shimmering heat. In the same moment the matriarch loosed a screeching roar that reeked of rancid blood and made Clay’s skin crawl with primal fear.
While her thralls rushed Lastleaf all at once, Larkspur looked to the sky, which was Clay’s first clue that it was about to come crashing down upon them.
A brood of black wyverns was plummeting from the grey clouds above, a twisting, shrieking spiral of wings and claws and snapping jaws that touched down like a cyclone in their midst. The daeva sprang away as one hit Ganelon with the force of a collapsing roof. The warrior let go his axe and howled as the raptor’s clenching talons tried squeezing him to pulp. Larkspur came out of a roll near her planted scythe, tore it free, and leapt to Ganelon’s defense.
Thankfully, the spectacle drew a whole company of mercs to the clearing. Vanguard was among them, and so were Barret’s sons and the other Wight Nights. Aric Slake, who Clay had last seen losing a card game in the Riot House, rammed his spear, Hawkwind, deep into a wyvern’s breast. Jorma Mulekicker, whose right eye was now a bloody hole, charged into the fray, and May Drummond, who had apparently survived being trampled by a boar after all, limped by his side.
Clay returned his attention to Lastleaf in time to see the druin plunge Scorn into the earth before him. The blade’s bright fissures drained to black, and the ground beneath the charging thralls detonated. Slabs of stone and red-robed bodies exploded skyward on a swell of splashing magma. Those who weren’t thrown clear staggered, some pitching into pools of molten rock. One monk tried without success to escape his burning robes, while another floundered helplessly in foot-deep lava. Clay swallowed a surge of bile as he watched the man disintegrate before his eyes.
Lastleaf left the searing sword buried in the ground and was reaching for Madrigal’s scabbard when one of Larkspur’s more dextrous thralls got close enough to throw a punch aimed where the druin’s throat should have been. There was a warbling sound as the second sword sang loose, and the monk was rewarded for his effort with a cleanly severed arm.
The man tottered, not quite dead, until the Heathen shoved him backward into the molten pool.
Matrick was on his back beneath another of the matriarch’s brood, squirming from its talons, rolling clear of its stabbing tail, and jamming his knives up into its belly every chance he got.
Clay spotted Moog retreating from a trio of yellow-eyed orcs. He almost headed over to help, but the wizard pulled a weapon from his bag that looked like a blue staff and a white staff had been locked together in a closet with the lights off. Clay recognized the Twining Staff immediately as one of the few magic items Moog had crafted himself and could have pitied the orcs for what was about to happen. The wizard gripped the staff with both hands, shouted a string of esoteric gibberish, and then held on for dear life as the Twining Staff began beating the living shit out of the three unfortunate orcs.
Larkspur, meanwhile, relieved the wyvern attacking Ganelon of its head, shearing through its neck with Umbra’s sickle blade. The warrior rolled free of its grasp—dazed, but not outwardly harmed—and scrambled to retrieve his axe.
Mere heartbeats had passed since the black brood attacked, but Clay felt exceptionally useless for squandering them, so he was almost relieved when Lastleaf’s voice demanded his attention.
“What else did Shadow tell you?”
The Heathen was stepping slowly around the glowing pothole between them. His eyes never left Gabriel, even when Deckart Clearwater came out of nowhere and swung his double-hafted hammer at his head.
He’s got a chance, thought Clay, since surprising a druin was the only sure way to offset the prescience, but Lastleaf stepped just ahead of the blow. In one fluid motion he turned, long blade whistling, and chopped Deckart into halves.
For a moment it looked as though Gabe might rush him, trying (likely in vain) to catch the Heathen off guard, but Lastleaf was too far away still, and Gabriel had never been one to shy from a little prefight banter if it meant a chance to mentally unbalance his opponent. Clay wasn’t confident that was an option here, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
“He told me about your mother,” said Gabriel. “About the sword your father made to bring her back from the dead. He said you stole it from him.”
Clay’s eyes wafted to the bone-white scabbard on the druin’s back.
Tamarat.
“I nearly killed him with it,” said Lastleaf. “You’d think he’d have happily given his life for that of the woman he claimed to love. But instead he fled and found you.”
A snuffing sound urged Clay to look past Gabe’s shoulder. A minotaur had found its way clear of the larger melee and into the clearing. In paintings such monsters were always rendered as huge, hulking beasts, but in truth they were a head shorter than most men, which was probably why they had such famously short tempers. They also, for reasons even a scholar like Moog could only speculate on, intensely despised the colour red, which just so happened to be the colour of Clay’s armour.
This one was missing a horn and sported a wound in its abdomen that would probably kill it within the hour, but in the meantime it appeared to be sizing Clay up for an attack. With nothing but a shield to hand, there wasn’t much Clay could do but watch his friend’s back, so he edged nearer to Gabe’s shoulder and kept an eye on the beast in his periphery.
“The truth is,” said Lastleaf, who was getting dangerously close now, “Vespian didn’t make the sword for my mother’s sake. He made it for his own. So he wouldn’t be alone. So he wouldn’t have to—”
“Shut up,” said Gabriel, deliberately provoking. He inched his left foot ahead of him, turned his right boot outward. His knuckles went white on Vellichor’s grip.
The Heathen, just strides away now, looked suddenly irritated. “It wasn’t Tamarat my father was after. It was me. If he had taken it from me—”
“Shut up,” Gabe repeated, smiling now.
“He would have killed me with it,” the druin sputtered, “to bring her back.”
“Nobody cares,” said Gabriel, who was better than anyone Clay had ever known at pissing people off—and sure enough, Lastleaf’s affected cool dissolved in an instant.
Clay was (yet again) trying to wrap his mind around the fact that the Winter Queen was real—that she would have been resurrected if Vespian had actually managed to kill his son with Tamarat—when the druin surged forward, and the fight that could very well decide the outcome of the entire battle—and possibly the fate of humankind along with it—began in earnest.
Which was, of course, the same moment that stupid runt of a minotaur lowered his head and took a run at Clay.
Chapter Fifty-two
Sheer Dumb Luck