Oathkeeper (25 page)

“As you please,” he answered.

“No.” This close she could see the minuscule veins in his black sclera. They did not appear to pump blood, but some dark fluid composed of Uled only knew what. “You can't push me away by ‘As-You-Please'-ing me, you old irkanth. That was before my time, and my father refused to shout an order to the Aern.”

“Kyland.” Kholster closed his eyes, and Wylant knew he was remembering her father, wished he could share with her that image of an elf she'd barely known. “He was a good soldier. I would have named him . . . Vhoulk (Redeemed) or Tesset (Forgiven) if he had lived to see my vengeance. Some name to spare him.”

“Not Aiannai?” Wylant asked.

“He was an Oathbreaker,” Kholster said, “but it was not the Aern to which he broke those oaths. He would not have liked to see us married, but perhaps he would have come around.”

Kholster pulled away.

Wylant wanted to ask him so many questions in that moment, she couldn't even list them all. Conversations could be like that when you were married to a being more than ten times your own age. She'd long since adopted a habit of picking one and going with it. Otherwise any discussion had the risk of becoming an interrogation.

“See?” She waved her hands through the space between them. “What is this?”

“I want to make certain I don't overstep my boundaries.”

“What boundaries?” Wylant closed with him again. “I'm your wife. You're my husband. I stayed away because I thought you'd hate me if . . .” She looked at Vax and hoped he understood.

“I don't hate you.” He touched her leather doublet, tracing the crown-shaped stitching at her shoulder before letting his hand drop to his side. “I love you. And I think you know that, but as for boundaries, you called me ex-husband not too long ago. I am pleased that appears to have been a misunderstanding, but . . . you did not used to require armor in order to have a conversation with me.”

“I—” She wanted to say it wasn't armor, just clothing, but it was every bit the armor he claimed it was.

“You never answered my question,” Kholster interrupted. Even as her eyes narrowed, eyebrows furrowed, he clarified. “Do you want them? Do you want my scars on your back? I can replace the ones you have. . . .”

She took two steps back without meaning to, and Vax found her hand before she'd consciously known she wanted to hold him. His markings maintained the new level of detail they'd had in Kholster's hands—stylized scars. His father's scars. Flowing like molten metal Vax became a warpick, and she knew that would have been the weapon Vax would have forged if he'd been properly awakened. She blinked away a tear as he morphed again, this time into a sword—her sword . . . the sword with which she'd sundered the Life Forge.

“What would it mean, Kholster?” Wylant sheathed Vax, her hand trembling until she forced it to stop. She didn't remember forging him, but she knew she had done so. She had forged Kholster's son, her son . . . their son . . . into a weapon and had used him to destroy most of his father's people. Eyes closed against whatever answer Kholster had to give, she wished she could remember why.

CHAPTER 18

WYLANT'S MEMORIES

Wylant's eyes widened, lost to recollection.

Standing close by, Kholster waited for her answer to what he must have assumed to be a very simple question. She knew her husband was there, but she was lost in memories for the moment. Just talking to him brought things back from a deep place where she had not realized she had buried them.

“Do you want my scars on your back?” Kholster had asked her the same question early that morning so many centuries ago . . . and she'd said no, not because she hadn't wanted his scars on her body, but because she couldn't spare the time to recuperate from the wounds.

Winter had come, but no cold had come with it. Fire burned in the skies, a pale purple light pulsing and roiling as thousands of elementalists combined their might to hold the Ghaiattri within the Eldren Plains. She had stood on the battlements of Fort Sunder, the eldritch luminescence of the defensive barrier flaring momentarily brighter each time one of the Eldrennai powering it died and fell from the sky.

Wylant waved Mazik away as he worked with her right pauldron, trying to get it to fit even though it was badly dented. The rest of the Sidearms stood nearby. No joking, laughing, or conversation amongst them. Every eye stared either up at the sky or out over the plains at the sea of yowling horned demons, the screeching musical wail of their language so loud, it was hard to be heard over the din.

“What are we going to do, General?” Jolsit, then one of the new batch of Lancers pressed into service, asked. He'd been a glassblower by trade, but he had shown potential in the two exchanges in which he'd already partaken. And he'd survived—unlike half the soldiers at Kevari Pass. “This is the end, isn't it?”

“No,” Kholster had barked, walking out to join them. That she remembered. The image of him strutting, clad in Bloodmane, helm under his arm so the troops could see the grin on his face. It was one of the last times Wylant would feel safe for months, staring at the way his doubled canines caught the light and the single upper left canine, looking out of place without its partner, which Kholster had lost. If she looked closely, she could the replacement tooth growing in, but until it did, he would have a certain rakish (if snaggletoothed) air. “There is a limit to their numbers. That means we can win. Anything finite can eventually be reduced to zero. Any foe bound by mortality can be defeated.”

Like a painting viewed through guttering torchlight, the memory faded and rushed forward. The war had lasted twenty years, but Kholster had been proven right, even if the population of the Eldren Plains had been halved in the process. Vax had been conceived on the eve of victory and had been born . . .

She shied away from that memory, focusing instead on the ceaseless cravings for red meat she'd had while carrying Vax. Aern only gestate for three to sixth months, the length of the pregnancy depending on the iron content of the mother's diet. Abandoning that line of thought, too, she remembered herself standing in formation with her troops at the victory celebration.

King Zillek had managed to look regal, clad in his crystalline breastplate and purple robes, signs of the four elements blazing on his crown—despite the loss of his right arm. Cheers from the crowd went up despite the sour looks on the faces of the loved ones of those who did not have the luxury of being regenerated over and over again within a blood-filled warsuit. Kholster himself had been stripped and dipped, as they called it, a dozen times or more, but the resilience of the Aern and the monstrous death toll incurred by elemancers had successfully warded the Ghaiattri after the wild gates had begun to open, trapping them in Eldrennai territory lest they spread to the rest of Barrone.

She'd watched Kholster ascend the dais to be commended by his master. For centuries Wylant's only memory of those events had been seeing Kholster swing the warpick and kill the king. There had been nothing she could do. She had been forced to retreat and regroup, there had been no way to stop it, but she saw with clear eyes now, as if the key to a box had been finally inserted in the lock of her mind, turned and opened.

Married for as long as she and Kholster had been, she had seen the set of his shoulders change, spotted the crux of decision.

“No,” she'd meant to shout, calling the wind to amplify her voice even as it carried her to her husband's side. “You're free, Kholster! Rejoice and forget Zillek. You can go anywhere now with no one to command you. We can go, and Vax will be born free somewhere far from here.”

No
, a brutish voice had whispered in her mind, as an insubstantial hand closed around her mind,
this is too interesting to interrupt. A civil war to follow the Demon War? I can't risk your stopping that.

And so she'd been trapped there, watching helplessly. If only King Zillek had been less proud and had haggled with Kholster once he'd made his disastrous yet wonderful mistake. He could have secured an alliance with the newly freed warriors without the warpick through the skull he had received. Kholster would have growled and raged and been insulting, but he would have given Zillek peace, Wylant was certain of it.

She had a hazy memory of telling the Sidearms to spread the word about the death of the king and then flying to Fort Sunder where she'd found . . . Uled. The parade of thoughts came into hyper-clarity on Uled.

Cruel eyes set in kind face, whenever anyone pictured the ancient sorcerer, they always seemed to mention that dichotomy of images. His left side, after millennia of mystical experimentation, had become subject to an uncontrollable twitch. Robes that had once been white, cleaned and maintained on a regular basis by myriad fungible acolytes back in the days before Zillek had banished him to Fort Sunder, were spotted with blood and grime.

Tasked with stopping the Aern, there had been only one threat she thought might work, but when dealing with the Life Forge what better expert was there than Uled?

“Destroy the Life Forge?” He hurled a vial of ichor to the pitted stone floor of his lab where it hissed and bubbled on its way to the huge central drain. “My Life Forge?!”

“Would it kill or weaken the Aern?” Wylant waved the fumes away with a touch of elemental power.

“Kill them?” Uled had growled. “Destroy MY Life Forge? Why would I want to do that?”

“We're at war with them, Uled.” Wylant, hands out, low and open, calming gestures, despite the connection with elemental air she was keeping open just in case. “The Aern are killing Eldrennai as fast as they can.”

“Good. More corpses could be useful.” Uled rubbed his hands on his chest. “Fresher might be better, too. War, eh?” His eyes narrowed, glittering as he pinned her with his glare. “Are you going to seize the throne, harlot? I knew you would! I prepared for this years ago when I found out Zillek let you marry my beast. And now you've come to kill me. Well, I'm ready for that, too. I—”

“Kill you?” Was he too insane to assist her? “I came to you for help, you mad old Artificer. We need to save our people!”

A whirring of gears sounded all around her. Nothing visible, but twisting flashes of reflected crystal flickered in the air.

Had it been a mistake to visit him in his laboratory? Perhaps, but no more so than visiting Fort Sunder itself. Normally an Armored would have been stationed here, but Zillek had ordered all of them to attend him at Port Ammond. Even then, Kholster should have announced the offensive with an All Know or by sharing the moment with an All Recall. That he hadn't done so Wylant took as a sign of just how shocked her husband was at being free after all those millennia of slavery. His people were truly running mad in their release. Or maybe he had done all of that, and since she was alone, and his wife, the Aern had all been ordered not to attack her.

Stop it.
She took herself strongly to task.
If you hunt down that trail you'll never come out the end of it with whatever advantage you have left. The insane Artificer or his son are the only options here.

Sargus. The misshapen male's name rose in her mind. He might have been helping Uled conceal his madness. If he had, he might have the knowledge she needed. With that chain of thought, Uled moved from essential to expendable. Which made dealing with him exponentially simpler.

“Listen, Uled,” Wylant cooed, giving the peaceful approach one last attempt. “Consider this carefully. Use that magnificent mind of yours. Kholster is on the warpath. The Aern, even those in this very fortress, are free. I need to stop him. You need to stop him.” She watched his face for any sign he understood her, but all his tells were lost in the trembling twitches of his left side. Were those scars on his face? Close up a spiderweb of pale white lines covered his face, vanishing under his hair line. What had he done to himself? “All Eldrennai need to stop him. We lost more elemancers, Artificers, and soldiers than the Aern because they heal more effectively that we do. Our military might without the Aern is less than fifty thousand, and only a few thousand of those are elemancers of any significant ability. He has over two million troops at his disposal.”

She swallowed hard.

“You think I want the throne?” Wylant took a careful step closer. “There won't be a throne if we don't find a way to stop them. I don't care who rules. I'm trying to save our people, not rule them.”

“Help?” Uled's grin carried with it a pale green pulse of light below the faint scarring on his head. His eyes twinkled, and in their depths Wylant fancied she saw rot and decay. “You want my assistance? Can't solve your puzzle without Uled's inestimable intelligence? Yes. Of course. How can Uled save our people this time? Does he have a plan?” He coughed, gagging, in what Wylant realized was some sick approximation of a laugh. Steadying himself the sorcerer wiped black phlegm from his mouth and onto his robes.

“I always have an idea, a masterwork of thought and foresight.” His fingers writhed like the paws of a raccoon washing its food as if he were fondling the notion in his crazed head. “Not a new race this time. Three was too many. But—” he raised one shaking finger, “—if we could lure him here . . .”

“Kholster?” Wylant asked.

“Useless harpy!” Uled raged, dark spittle flying from his chapped lips. “Torgrimm. We lure Torgrimm here. What would my beast have to do with any of this?!”

Outside Wylant heard the pounding beat of Aern marching in the pattern they used when Kholster was with them. A phrase in Zaurtol: <>

“So that was why,” she muttered. “He wanted to make sure Uled stayed here. He wanted to kill you himself.”

Uled's upper lip curled into a sneer, revealing pearlescent teeth that had once belonged to Kholster . . . right down to the doubled canines, which looked so out of place in an Eldrennai's mouth. Wylant spotted more scarring on Uled's gums. Nothing on his neck or hands. Just his skull, then? What had he done? She squinted. Was he wearing a wig?