The Archon's Assassin (41 page)

Where did he get such power? How could he do this to her?

Her hands blazed incandescent, and for an instant she saw bones beneath the skin—

—Fire!

A curtain of fire blocking her path. Fire again. Like in her dream, only… these flames were white. And they did not burn.

They dispersed, and she dropped her hands.

A cowled figure stood directly before her. At the urge of a soundless prompt, she reached for the black sword.

Streamers of argent suppurated from the figure’s hood in response. They died down when Rhiannon withdrew her fingers from the pommel.

“It is fruitless to argue with him further,” the figure said. It was a man’s voice, though rasping, almost sibilant, like the wind whistling through a forest. “Even I have given up.”

Rhiannon shielded her eyes from the glare beneath the cowl. Her joints felt unhinged, and she barely resisted the compulsion to kneel. Only her residual anger toward Aristodeus kept her standing. That, and an overwhelming sense of awe that defeated even her body’s need for prostration.

“You’re… You’re the Archon.”

“And you are Rhiannon Kwane, sister of Samuel.”

“Sammy?” Thrill and disappointment wrapped themselves around her innards, competing for her attention.

Sammy?
Was he all right?

Shog him, he’d left her, hadn’t he? Left her like she was nothing. Her little brother. Did he need her now? Was she forgiven? Because it sure felt like he blamed her for what Gaston and the White Order did to Mom and Dad. Did he have any idea what Gaston had done to her, too? No, of course he didn’t: she’d not told him. You don’t tell kids that sort of thing.

“He and I had an understanding,” the Archon said, “but he is no longer bound. Your brother guides the Barraiya people now, in Huntsman’s stead. He is the hands and feet of my sister’s chosen land, Sahul.”

“Your sister…” She racked her brains for the connections. It was all in there, she knew, from all the tales Elias had told her; from his epic masterpiece, which she’d endured in rehearsal, even if she’d been pissed senseless during the show. “Eingana.” The snake goddess. The statue Sektis Gandaw had used to power his Unweaving. The giant serpent who’d found her life again and swallowed the Technocrat whole.

“Yes, I see the resemblance,” she said. It was no good: despite her attempt at humor, her legs were only supporting her because she’d hit on exactly the right point of balance. She was trembling all the way up to her cheeks, and her teeth chattered.

“Appearances can be deceptive,” the Archon said. There was a lightness to his tone, which might have been amusement.

“So,” Rhiannon said, “you didn’t show up to tell me Sammy’s missing me?”

He held her gaze squarely, though he dimmed the conflagration of his cowl so she could bear it. “Sammy is lost to you. He is unmade and made anew, as are all Clever Men of the Dreamers. It is necessary, so they can hear the breathing of Sahul, connect with the spirits of the hybrids like the strands of a web.”

Sammy.

It took a moment for the waves of sorrow to break over her, until the implications of what the Archon said tugged at her incomprehension, gave her an escape route from grief. “Sahul is alive? Really alive?” Like Huntsman seemed to believe.

The slightest movement of the Archon’s hood conveyed what she took to be a shrug. “It was seeded by my sister after her violation, as was all your Earth. Few have the ears to hear, especially in the wake of Sektis Gandaw’s reign. But I did not come because of Sammy. I came because of your daughter.”

A renewed surge of anger steeled the muscles in Rhiannon’s legs, tensed her arms all the way to her fists. “Well, she’s right here,” she said, flicking a look behind at the door, which had closed behind her. “Go in. Help yourself, because everyone else does.”

“If I were free to act,” the Archon said, drifting closer until Rhiannon’s back was pressed to the cold metal of the door, “I would have killed her at birth.”

What?
Like a hammer blow to the head, the Archon’s words robbed her of the power of speech.
Killed her? Killed my daughter?

This time, the sword didn’t wait for an invitation. It leapt from the scabbard to her hand. Black flames danced in mockery of the Archon’s white. They seethed with her anger, swelled, streamed off the blade in ribbons of fuligin.

The Archon flinched and drew back. “Be wary of your allies, Rhiannon. Power must be paid for, sooner or later.” He raised a hand. It was porcelain-white beneath the billowing sleeve of his robe. With the merest wave of his fingers, he quelled the black sword’s ire, and a sob—or was it a mew?—echoed silently in Rhiannon’s mind.

Slow as she could, assuaging her rage with every measured breath, she re-sheathed the blade.

“Shall we?” the Archon said, indicating the door.

Rhiannon punched in the code Bezaleel had given her. True to his word, it worked, and the door slid back.

She strode straight to the glass wall, but her daughter was gone. Only one of the homunculi remained, tidying up the books and gadgets that had been Saphra’s education for the day.

She could feel the Archon’s blaze on her back, not scorching, as it should have been, but excoriating her all the way down to the bone. She faced him once more, perched herself on the edge of the desk.

“She’s a child.” She could have been chastising herself.

“And a child should have a mother, should it not?” the Archon said, as he glided into a slow orbit around the room. “Not a user, an abuser, a manipulator. Not a philosopher.”

“Try telling him that.”

“I have done. He and I disagree on many things.”

“And he always gets his own way?” Rhiannon said. “I thought someone as high and mighty as you might put him in his place once in a while.”

The Archon chuckled. “Let us just say our aims converge, his and mine, though for different reasons. But in some things, our actions take divergent paths. We disagree on the dwarf, for example.”

“Nameless? What, do you want to kill
him
, too?”

The Archon stopped his circuit and hovered closer to her, the hem of his robe mere inches above the floor. “Sometimes, not to act is a far greater crime. On occasion, the candle must be snuffed out before it starts the house fire, which next becomes a burning city, maybe even sets the surrounding woodlands ablaze. There are no foreseeable limits to the devastation one small flame might cause.”

“But you can’t do that, can you?” Not if what Aristodeus had said were true. “You can’t kill him yourself—”

“I didn’t say I can’t. But I won’t, unless I have no choice. Like power, action has its costs, and for some of us they are equal and opposite. All that I do thaws the ice that holds the Demiurgos a little and cedes his will more reach into the worlds. I have found, given the disasters that have followed each new act of mine, and my brother’s counter, that it is better for me to do nothing directly.

“But I mentioned the dilemma of the Nameless Dwarf only as an example of how Aristodeus and I differ in our opinions of what should be done. What needs to be done. Ultimately, however, we are at war with the same foe.”

“Yeah, I figured that much. What I don’t get is, if you stopped the Demiurgos before”—assuming Elias had his facts right, which was by no means certain—“why can’t you do it again?”

The Archon waited a moment before he replied. He may have been surprised by the question, or maybe he was still vexed by his failure to defeat the Demiurgos for good.

“I prevented him from further ravaging my sister, but when I cast him into the Void, he endured. It should not have been possible. Supernals have, from time to time, traveled from our world to yours, but for the living, there is no return. Only the dead of your cosmos may travel the other way, though their passage has long-since been blocked by the emergence of the Abyss. He should have perished.”

“But instead,” Rhiannon said, “he threw up the Abyss about himself, is that right?”

“First the ice,” the Archon said. “It surrounded him like armor. I can only surmise it was his abject fear of the Void that gave it being.”

“That makes no sense,” Rhiannon said. “How can ice exist in the Void? How can anything?”

“I cannot answer—”

“And what would have happened to you? You cast him there. You acted directly, didn’t you, in order to kill him?”

“Yes, but…” Flames guttered within the Archon’s hood. He let out a sound like a gasp. “It was me! All these aeons, and it has taken a…” He waved a porcelain hand at Rhiannon, as if he didn’t know how to say “useless bitch”. Finally, he said, “woman. It has taken a woman to intuit what I should have seen from the first. I assumed the Demiurgos’s will is what kept him in existence: a will stronger even than the hunger of the Void. But now I see it: there can be no will in the Void. There can be nothing. It was my direct act against him that awarded him the justice our balance demands. But rather than my death in return, his dread of oblivion granted him the paradox of perdurance in the heart of nothing. It made for him a breathing space, one he has inflated with each new act of mine. And each soul, each tormented soul that seeks passage to the Supernal Realm, is caught within his web, adding its own substance to the reality of the Abyss. Every new death becomes a defiance of the Void.”

“Glad I could be of some help,” Rhiannon said. “But what the shog has that got to do with my daughter?”

The Archon reeled away from her, then recommenced his circuit of the room. “You have given me much to think on; much to ponder. Alas, you have also given me cause to rely more than I would like on the machinations of the philosopher. There is no other of this cosmos positioned to oppose my brother as he does, though I believe him to be overmatched. Perhaps the Liche Lord has the lore, but he lacks the will. I rather think my brother’s wiles suit Otto Blightey’s penchant for cruelty.”

Rhiannon pushed herself away from the table and stalked after the Archon. “So, you’re going to leave Saphra alone now?”

The Archon stopped abruptly. “It is more a matter of what you are going to do. I had hoped, given your indifference to the child, you might see the wisdom of nipping her life in the bud, before things are allowed to go too far.”

“You want
me
to kill her? Are you shogging crazy?”

“It is likely that you will. I see many possibilities, but in each of them, either your world is annexed to the Abyss, nothing more than dust and smoldering ashes, or one of you slays your daughter: you, or the girl’s father.”

No
,
Rhiannon cried silently. She stumbled into the wall of glass.
Not me. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t
.

“Fine,” she suddenly said, her old fury filling her veins like vindication. “Tell you what, I’ll stick it to the bald bastard instead. I’m never killing my daughter, do you hear? But he might, and I don’t plan on giving him the chance.”

She was halfway to the door with the black sword in hand, when the Archon’s voice froze her mid-stride.

“Do you know who he is? Do you even know who this father of your child is?”

Like she’d been concussed by a thunderclap, Rhiannon couldn’t speak; couldn’t articulate a single clear thought.

She felt the warmth of the Archon’s approach. “What has he told you, Rhiannon?”

Everything. He said he’d told me everything.

She felt the air pressure behind her alter. It grew dense with the threat of an explosion, and the warmth turned to heat.

“How he failed to prevent the Unweaving that first time?”

She whimpered that she knew.

“How he fell into the Abyss?”

She dipped her head.

“How he can come and go as he pleases?”

He’d said as much while they watched Saphra with the homunculi, but he said there were limits, that he got snapped back.

“Did he tell you the Abyss is timeless, by virtue of its proximity to the Void?”

“Yes,” Rhiannon managed. “In his tower. He trained me for months, but when we left, only hours had passed.”

“Did he tell you he can visit the past? Never the future; always the past.”

The champagne! Oh, Nous, he said something about the champagne, about where he’d got it from—

—Mine comes, you could say, fresh from the wreck.

The champagne that had allowed him to
—

“He wanted a second chance, Rhiannon. I call it hubris. He calls it necessity. He really believed he was the only one capable of stopping Sektis Gandaw. When he fell, he saw deeper into the true nature of the evil he confronted; caught a glimpse of the puppet master. But still, Gandaw had to be stopped, else all the worlds would fall—all this side of the Void, that is. I agreed with him. I agreed, and we planned together, but then he went too far. In his arrogance, he claimed he’d been close to victory, and that it was only the Technocrat’s harnessing of my sister that thwarted him: he could not withstand the power of a Supernal. He begged for my sword, wanted so urgently to wield it in a second attempt to stay Gandaw. When I relented, it burned his hand. It rejected him. Which tells me his morality is deeply suspect.”

“I thought you’d be just fine with that, seeing as you want my daughter dead.”

Rhiannon hoped he’d react. She even turned to face the eruption, but instead he calmly explained, “It’s a matter of proportion, Rhiannon. The needs of the many—”

“Don’t you dare!” she said. “Don’t you dare feed me that crap from the Liber!”

“Forgive me,” the Archon said, withdrawing a little. “And forgive me for what I must now tell you. Aristodeus isn’t just trapped in the Abyss yet able to appear here, in two places at the same time. He is also two people.”

Rhiannon’s head swam with the idea. That didn’t make any sense. Two people? Like Nous and Ain were supposed to be one and the same, though father and son? She opened her mouth to ask, “What do you mean?” but her jaw locked, and all she could do was stare blankly.

“Aristodeus is also Shader. They are one and the same.”

The eyes! The chill blue, swirling to gray.