Clay spared a glance for Ganelon (forced by his shade through a gap in the outer wall) and Matrick (sweating and sparring furiously against his own double) before rushing to Sabbatha’s aid. The daeva was backed against the ruined fort, ducking as the bone scythe struck shards from the brick above her head.
Shadow was turning just as Clay hit him from behind. The druin weighed so little Clay found he’d misjudged his momentum. They both pitched forward—which was fortunate, since Shadow hit the wall, spun, and brought the scythe across where Clay’s head might have been were he not facedown on the ground with a mouthful of dirt. Sabbatha seized the opening, stepping in to deliver a steel-shod punch that Shadow somehow managed to dodge. Her fist cracked stone as if it were dry plaster.
“Fuck,” she swore, but before she could try again Shadow darted past her, shifting his hold on the scythe and levelling it for another swing.
Clay surged to his feet just as the druin attacked. He thrust Blackheart toward the tip of the scythe and was relieved when it didn’t split the shield down the middle. It did pierce through, however: he could see the pale glint of its tip just inches from his grip. Clay tilted Blackheart abruptly, wrenching the scythe from Shadow’s grip.
“No!” The druin dove frantically for his weapon, but Clay stamped down on the haft, grinning like a village bully as his enemy tried in vain to retrieve it.
“Hey,” he said, prompting Shadow to look up at him. When he did Clay swung his hammer backhanded, catching the druin alongside the head and laying him out cold. Clay turned to Sabbatha. “You okay?”
The daeva was leaning against the wall. Her eyes were wide with fear and fury. “Thanks to you,” she replied through gritted teeth.
Clay nodded once, his feet already taking him toward the open courtyard, where Gabriel was giving ground against the ettin’s hulking shade. The thing was moving terribly fast, and Gabe couldn’t hope to keep up with it for long.
Just then a heavy punch clipped Gabe and sent him stumbling into the rim of the ancient fountain. He inadvertently avoided the phantom’s next swing as he went spilling over the ledge. The statue shattered overhead, raining stones and dust.
Clay raced past Matrick and his double just as Moog hurled a chunk of old masonry at the king’s shade. The shade used a pommel to smash the piece in half, leaving itself open to Matrick’s attack. The daggers darted in, staggering it, and then Matrick unleashed what remained of his energy, his hands a blur as he savaged the thing with a barrage of killing slices. It dropped a moment before Matrick did, and neither of them were getting up anytime soon.
Gabe was on his feet, but barely. He managed to fend off one of the phantom-ettin’s attacks, but was grievously out of position as its other fist rose to pummel him.
Clay decided to yell, but then realized he was already yelling. The phantom half-turned in alarm, so when he hurled himself into the side of its knee it toppled awkwardly, pinning him to the ground beneath one of its legs. He craned his neck in time to see Gabriel launch himself from the fountain’s edge.
Vellichor was clasped in two hands, the stars of an ancient world visible beyond the blade. It came chopping down, and Clay felt the body above him jolt as both the phantom-ettin’s heads were sheared away at once. The hulking shade crumbled into an astonishingly small pile of dust, and for a few breaths Clay simply lay on his back without worrying whether or not something or someone was still trying to kill him. He heard a distant clang, then another, and suddenly remembered seeing Ganelon and his doppelganger spilling out through a breach in the wall. He forced himself to rise. Nearby, Gabriel was doing the same.
His friend flashed him a jaded grin. “How’s your back feeling now?”
“Broken, I think,” Clay replied, but still he staggered toward the sound of fighting. He heard Gabriel follow, clearly exhausted, his sword scraping on the ruined flagstones behind him.
If Matrick and his double had looked like a pair of sparring cats, Ganelon and his phantom were tigers, prowling in circles, conserving their energy for brief, brutal attacks that left one bloody and the other oozing wisps of black smoke.
Clay and Gabriel drew up short, neither in a hurry to enter the fray. You didn’t stand between the surf and the sheer cliff, did you? Or step between two charging bulls and pick a side. You simply stood and watched, because to intervene was pointless and very obviously stupid. Nevertheless, Clay hoisted his shield and prepared to do just that.
But then Ganelon glanced over, stopping Clay in his tracks. Clay, in turn, held out an arm to stop Gabriel, and when his friend opened his mouth to ask why he told him, “Don’t bother. I think it’s over.”
By the time he looked back it had already begun: Ganelon sprang forward, Syrinx chopping in sideways. The phantom matched the swing with one of his own; metal screamed and sparks bloomed like fireworks through which Ganelon was already moving, shouldering his opponent off balance as he whirled with the momentum of his deflected axe, slashing in from the opposite side. The double was already moving to defend itself—because it was, after all, a mirror of the man with whom it fought.
But what does a mirror know? What can it show us of ourselves? Oh, it might reveal a few scars, and perhaps a glimpse—there, in the eyes—of our true nature. The spirit beneath the skin. Yet the deepest scars are often hidden, and though a mirror might reveal our weakness, it reflects only a fraction of our strength.
Ganelon had been born into slavery. He’d watched as his mother was flayed to death, and had murdered seven men a day after his eleventh birthday. He’d crossed the desert on foot, without food or water, gorging himself on the flesh and blood of vultures foolish enough to think him dead. He’d hacked his way out of a sand maw’s belly and slashed his way into a castle guarded by four hundred men. He’d killed 2 gorgons, 4 giants, 17 harpies, 1,978 kobolds (which accounted for nearly 1 percent of the entire kobold population) and had slain an innumerable legion of awful things besides. Oh, and he’d killed a chimera pretty much by himself. Ganelon had spent nineteen years frozen in the dark, alone but for his festering thoughts, counting dust motes as a nomad counts stars on an endless journey.
The phantom, however, had done none of these things, and so when Ganelon poured not only his strength, but his power into the blow that followed, Syrinx smashed through the southerner’s shade as though it were a spiderweb made of glass. It shattered into smoke and was instantly, utterly, destroyed.
Which left Clay wondering why the fuck Ganelon hadn’t simply done that in the first place. He might even have been foolish enough to ask had Moog not shouted suddenly from inside the fort.
“Larkspur, wait!”
Gabe’s face went pale. “Did he just say—”
“He did,” Clay confirmed, already slogging back through the breach in the wall.
It was dark in the courtyard, save for the smouldering fire and the eerie blue light of the forest moon. Moog was sitting on the ground beside Matrick, and Clay followed the aim of his out-flung arm to where Shadow was awake and on all fours, spitting out blood and a handful of jagged teeth. To where, more worrying, the daeva stood over him with the scythe in her hands.
Larkspur, or Sabbatha (Clay wasn’t sure which of the two he was looking at now), reached out and closed her metal talons around the druin’s sagging ears, yanking him upright. There was wild fear in Shadow’s face, the horror of an immortal gazing into the empty void of oblivion. He opened his mouth as if to scream, but only gaped in terror.
“Sabbatha!” Clay shouted. He saw her hooded eyes flicker toward him for one instant, but in the next the wicked bone blade lashed out, beheading one of the very last druins the world would ever know.
Chapter Forty