His determination bought him a single step, a second. He surged ahead, yelling himself hoarse, and the sea of scampering imps broke around his shield like ice beneath a ship’s prow. Suddenly he was stumbling clear, looking up to see the Infernal looming overhead.
Breath like a blizzard engulfed him. Clay closed his eyes for fear they would freeze in their sockets. Snow and chips of ice blasted his face. Frost formed on his beard, caked his eyelashes, and set his body trembling. His shield was suddenly too heavy to lift with one hand. It dragged him off balance, and Clay watched hopelessly as the Infernal’s whip curled against the grey sky above …
Gabriel shouldered him aside; Clay hit the ground as the whip thrashed the air above his head. Before it could recoil Gabe slashed it, severing it, and then squinted down at Clay.
“You good?” he asked.
“G-good,” Clay managed through chattering teeth.
The demon straightened, a sound like an iced-over lake groaning beneath the weight of something titanic. Its eyes, deep and dark as winter wells, looked on as Gabriel approached, unhurried, Vellichor dragging a furrow in the black earth behind him.
Its sword came chopping down so fast Clay barely saw it. Faster still was Gabe, who stepped aside so casually he might have been sliding past someone in a crowded room. The Infernal grinned, clearly amused. A flurry of snow gusted between teeth like shattered tombstones.
The grin fell away as Gabriel began running.
The demon’s growl was the rumble of a distant avalanche. It took a backward step, startled, shifting the grip on its sword so the flared tip would be too wide for Gabe to dodge as it came thrusting toward him.
Gabriel jumped. It wasn’t graceful, and if he hadn’t timed it right the sword would have sheared him clean in half. Instead it ploughed into the ground beneath him, and Gabe landed on all fours on the broad, frosted flat of the blade. He sprang to his feet, sprinting up the sword’s length as the Infernal tried to wrench it free. By the time it did Gabriel was almost to the hilt, leaping as the weapon’s momentum sent him soaring.
For Clay, the next half second spanned the lifetime of a glacier. Gabriel hung suspended in air, both hands on Vellichor’s grip, the blade rising behind him, bright with the bloodred sun of another sky.
Swung with every ounce of strength Gabe could summon, Vellichor split the ice at the Infernal’s throat and cleaved deep into its neck. Snow and sleet erupted from the wound like a storm gusting through an open door. The demon staggered, swayed, and crashed in a disastrous heap.
Gabriel hit the ground running. He’d left his sword lodged in the Infernal, but it hardly mattered now.
Rose came rushing out to meet him, and once again it seemed to Clay as if the world itself ceased turning as the distance between father and daughter fell away. Only the two of them remained in motion, scrambling like swimmers in mirrored oceans, drawn inexorably toward the surface of each other by the very breath in their lungs.
Rose staggered, overcome by exhaustion. As she pitched forward Gabe went to his knees on the mud-slick earth, sliding beneath her as she fell into his arms.
And now it was they who huddled, frozen together in that single, singular moment, as the world around them went on spinning.
And spinning.
And spinning.
Clay found Lastleaf in the corpse-littered stretch between Gabriel’s mercenaries and Castia’s refugees. The druin had suffered horrible burns along one half of his body, where the scale of his armour became fused with the charred flesh underneath. Part of his jaw was missing, and his eyes—one gold-bright, the other scar-ravaged—gazed sightlessly at the cloud-torn sky.
He’d been trampled by his own Horde as they’d scattered in the wake of the Infernal’s fall, and for a moment, despite all he had done to deserve an end such as this, Clay felt a pang of sympathy for the druin. We are each what the past has made of us, he had said on the Isle at Lindmoor, and Lastleaf’s past had made of him a bitter, broken, terrible thing.
The Heathen was lying on top of his sword, which Clay figured he had better take before someone else did. He slung Blackheart over his shoulder and knelt, gingerly turning the body over so as not to—
No.
Clay’s heart froze.
Please, no …
His mouth went dry. There was a sound in his ears like a deep drum booming. Clay felt his hand begin to tremble violently as his fingers closed around Tamarat’s bloody hilt.
“Oh, Lastleaf,” he whispered, as he pulled the void-black blade from the awful sheath it had made of the Heathen’s heart. “What have you done?”
Epilogue
Home
The following is an excerpt from The Same Old Song by Kitagra the Undying, Court Bard to His August Majesty, Emperor Matrick of Castia, first of his name:
Should you wish to learn what became of those who survived the Battle for Castia, I suggest you visit either your local library or your favorite pub. What you find in the library might be closer to the truth, but what you hear in the pub will no doubt be the better story.
If you insist on reading, Born in Fire: The Rise of the Watch is one of my favorites, as is I, Jain, which details the exploits of the brigand turned world-renowned mercenary after she left the Silk Arrows and began her solo career. The Sound an Eagle Makes gives a good summary of the battle itself, although the simply titled Castia, written by Syd (son of Barret) is widely considered the most comprehensive account of that auspicious day.
The members of Saga survived the battle miraculously unscathed. For all they endured during their journey to Castia, they incurred little but bruises during the rout of the Heartwyld Horde. It was, incidentally, the last time all five members of Saga would fight alongside one another.
Matrick Skulldrummer remained behind in Castia. He spearheaded efforts to repair the city, and when it came time to appoint a new governing body (most of the old one having succumbed to the plague), the people of Castia decided it was high time they had an Emperor after all. There was a vote, and Matty won by a landslide. He gave up drinking for good and arranged a peaceful separation from his former wife, Queen Lilith of Agria. He invited his children to visit him in Castia, and it surprised no one but their mother when they opted to remain by their father’s side.
I need tell no one what became of Arcandius Moog, as he is among the most well-known and celebrated scholars of our time. Of any time, for that matter. In the aftermath of Castia’s liberation, he paid another visit to the witchdoctor Taino. After months of study Moog returned to, and rebuilt, his tower east of Conthas, where he developed a drinkable cure for the rot.
It is the firm belief of this humble revenant that Arcandius Moog is one of the few figures in all of history (aside, perhaps, from Clay Cooper) possessed of the moral fortitude to do what he did next.
He gave the cure to everyone. For free.
Moog never remarried, and though I suspect his involvement in one or two covert liaisons, it is clear to all that his heart belongs, even after so long, to his deceased husband, after which he named his miraculous potion: “Freddie’s Finest Curative Cordial.”
Ganelon bid farewell to the band and made his own way back to Grandual. We must conclude that somewhere along that fraught and forlorn path he decided that the world to which he’d returned to was not a place where he belonged, since his first stop east of the forest was the prison in which he’d spent a long, dark decade trapped in stone. The keepers warned him not to venture below, but those who tend the Quarry are pale, frail, and all but blind, so they sure as hell couldn’t stop him from doing so. He said to them, rather cryptically: “Wake me when she gets here,” and then descended, alone, to the lair of the Basilisk Broodmother, whose gaze renders living flesh to stone.