The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (133 page)

He had no other way to stop it.  Even his flesh was no barrier.  And he no longer had the strength to unmake the Portal magically.

If someone else didn't get here with the sword, he'd have to kill himself.

Concentrating on his shaking hand, he slotted the prism into the hole in his chest.

It fit.  Instantly the light fractured, scattering rainbows across the floor below, and the heat cut off like a furnace door had been slammed.  He twisted it deeper and smiled grimly as its edges severed two of the six extruding strands.

Before him, the bright shape of the Emperor unraveled.

*****

Cob could see his arm cast in shadow against the glare, but he no longer felt it.  Smoke drifted lazily before his face, stinking of seared flesh; the robe smouldered across his chest, the hair at his temples crackling and fuming.  Within, the Void shuddered as its gateway narrowed.

Then the beam broke.

For a moment, he thought he'd gone blind.  But the blankness thinned, revealing the dark blotch of his hand and, beyond, a landscape of vertiginous swirls and smeared colors.  When he blinked, his eyelids grated over eyes too dry to water.

No
, he tried to say, but his lips cracked at the motion.  His tongue felt like a leather tab.  The Void still filled his innards with cold, but the rest of him was seared tight. 
No, it's too soon.  I haven't been cleansed.

I'm still here.

He tried to take another step, but his foot sank through slush into fracturing ice.  Balance shot, he would have tumbled if not for the clawed hand that dragged him back.

Arik
, he thought.

It wasn't a comfort, because he couldn't understand what he was seeing.  Colors still swarmed the room, and there was no one on the dais where the Emperor had stood—just a collapsing white mass that had once held the shape of a man.

A cry of denial caught in his throat.  To have come this far, only to be cheated of his purification—

To have come this far only to realize it was a trick.  A lie.  Nothing left to pin his battered loyalty on, or pretend could still redeem him.  No god, no leader, no Emperor at all.  Just a burning eye staring out from the center of the throne, blinded by the object that scattered its light in all directions.

A shape slumped behind it, tangled in white cords.  Enkhaelen.

Kill!
screamed the Void.

There was a gap at his feet, dark water foaming up from the depths as if trying to reach him.  Pieces of melted bridge sagged sideways or subsided into it, a broken archipelago.  Yards away, the edge beckoned, but he had no strength to leap.

The ice cracked.

A furry arm hooked him off his feet, pulled back, then flung him bodily.

He hit the floor on his burned side, the pain locking his muscles and making his heart stutter.  Then numbness stole in, enough to distance him from his damaged flesh, and he struggled up in time to see Arik push off from the bridge himself.

Too late.  The ice crumbled beneath his clawed feet, sapping the strength of his leap, and he disappeared below the edge with a terrified yelp.

The sight smacked away Cob's inertia.  He tried to reach out with the Void like he had with the Guardian, but all that did was increase its invasion.  He couldn't feel the ice or the dark water or the things that seethed within it; he could hardly feel his feet.

“Cob!” snapped Dasira nearby, and he looked over to see her squared off against a few persistent White Flames.

At her heels lay the silver sword.

He didn't want to turn from where Arik had fallen, but it was the only choice.  Above, four blazing strands ran out from a kaleidoscopic center to create patches of insanity on the dais.  Writhing facsimiles of body-parts rose—a hand here, an arm there, a portion of a face, a leg—as the Emperor struggled to reconstitute himself, only to lose cohesion.

At the heart of it all, Enkhaelen grasped for something on the dais floor.

He didn't need the Void to goad him onward.  Oblivion was the only answer to a menace like that.  Kill him—

Suck the soul from his corpse.  Extinguish the Ravager.  Quench it all.

He moved forward as if pulled.  His good hand found the hilt of the silver sword and hefted it, eyes never wavering from the spot of light.  Dasira moved into his shadow to take on the White Flames coming from the other side—not many, but enough to make her grunt with effort, her blade leaving a murderous trail in its wake.

The first step trembled under his foot.  There was a softness to the white material like walking on cushions, and he noted spots where blackness had eaten through the fibrous interior to expose raw stone.  Further up, two cocoons bulged subtly beneath the surface.

He couldn't think about them.  The silver sword hung ungainly in his hand, half-melted, and as he ascended, he felt the Void's doorway narrow—taking his numbness with it.  A blazing thread twisted toward him to extrude fingers as long as his arm, but he staggered past their slow growth and they closed on nothing.

Enkhaelen looked up as he crested the last step, eyes like holes in his wasted face.  He was stretched far past the edge of the throne, his left arm horribly dislocated but half-trapped in the Palace stuff, his right arm clawing at the floor.  Before him lay a familiar green-robed body; a few inches from his hand was a knife.

Catching the necromancer's shoulder, Cob hauled him upright and recoiled before the free hand could grasp him.  Enkhaelen slumped back against the throne, panting; he seemed past resistance, but Cob kept his distance as he hefted the sword.  It was too heavy for one hand, so with effort he forced his burnt fingers around the hilt too.  Adrenaline was all that kept him moving, but that was fine.  One blow and this would be over.

As he raised the sword, his gaze fell to the concentric circles carved into the necromancer's chest.  The Seals.

'Kill me and they will snap back into position.'

That was what he'd told the Outsider.  That was why he had to die.  But suddenly the
snap
took on a greater significance, and Cob saw in his mind's eye the aftermath of the Sealing.  The sigils in the sky, the beam of power that had pulverized the Pillar of the Sea, the rise of the Rift, the sinking of Lisalhan.  And more.  Disasters that affected the world to this day.

If they happened again—even in miniature—the death-toll would be staggering.

Bring them all down
, said the Void.

He lowered the blade, aghast.  He couldn't do it—but he had to.  There was no other way to close the Portal.  Enkhaelen had carved his spells into himself so that only his death would end them; now he sat on the throne as if waiting to be killed.

“Is this what you want?” Cob asked.  “What all of you want?  Another lost age?”

Enkhaelen made a horrible sound somewhere between a retch and a cough, and Cob glimpsed something blackish trapped behind his teeth, resisting his efforts to spit it out.  His gaze, pained and weary, gave no answer.

It's the only way.

Cob gritted his teeth.  It was a lie—it had to be.  Staring at the circles, he tried to remember.  They'd already been there when Erosei arrived, inked and scarred deep into the flesh.  It had taken a ritual to pull them open, and then filaments had come through, just like those that blazed at the edges of the kaleidoscope crystal.

Reaching out with the sword, he tried to cut one of the filaments, but it burned straight through the silver.

“How? 
How?
” he shouted.  The necromancer made a throat-slitting motion.  “No!  You opened the way, so show me how to close it!”

The necromancer cocked his head, then beckoned.

The Void urged him forward hungrily, and he hesitated, afraid of what they'd do to each other and to him.  But Enkhaelen pointed at his eyes, so he cautiously bent his head toward his foe, to the Void's frustration.

Fever-hot fingertips touched his eyelids—

—and six wings bloomed from the necromancer's back, blazing white, stretched tight on a rack of titanic layered wheels that he knew on sight were the Seals.  The marks on Enkhaelen's chest were just their tethers; the real ones radiated unearthly colors, each slipping in a different direction at a different speed with the substance of his soul stretched like tendons between them.  Though he glowed near-white where he strained to hold them in check, the rest of him was a faded ghostly blue, like a flame about to die.

They all overlapped at the center of his chest, but though Cob saw the gap through which the Light came, he couldn't see what held it open.

He stepped back, shaking his head.  If the vision was true, then Enkhaelen hadn't just scribed the Seals into his flesh—he'd bound them to his soul, which he shared with the Ravager.  If he died, they might both be torn apart.

You have no responsibility toward the spirits.

“Shut up, Void,” he growled.  He was still missing a piece, but he was running out of time.  The sword felt like it had doubled in weight, and—

The sword.

Raising it, he set the melted tip to Enkhaelen's chest and watched a tracery of magic unfurl from the first circle and dissipate.  Connected to it, the rest of the spell lit up: a web that crossed all six circles to hook into the hole and hold it open.

The Seals were on the spirit side, but the linchpin was here.

He knew what he had to do.

“Sorry,” he told Enkhaelen, then shifted his grip to the sword's blade, pommel pointing out like a hammer-head.  An absent prayer, a wind-up, then he swung it hard—straight into the center of the necromancer's chest.

Its impact punched the prism through the hole, shattered the opening-spell and slammed Enkhaelen back against the throne, probably cracking a few ribs.  A blast of heat and light came through the gap—but then it snapped shut, severing the remaining Palace strands.

The chamber went dark.

*****

At first, Dasira didn't understand what had happened.  Her back was to the dais, her steps taking her in a defensive arc around it but never up, and like her, the White Flames she fought knew better than to cross that line.  So when weakness hit her like a great hollow fist, she let out a cry and struggled to keep her feet.

But the opportunistic assault she expected never came.  As the fist closed tight around her chest, she looked up to find the White Flames in the same straits, some reeling away, some crumpling, others clawing at their featureless helms.

The fist squeezed, and she gasped as every thread in her body delineated itself in fire.  Her bracer convulsed, then emitted an acidic heat: the ichor of last resort.  Her lungs hitched.  There was no reason for it to come out, not with so much of her innards and musculature replaced by Palace fibers, unless—

She looked up at the dais and found it sagging like wet cloth, its component strands separating lifelessly, its surface dark.  A faint scattered radiance remained in the walls, like confused fireflies trying to swarm; as she stared, they spilled across the slumping dais and into one of the cocoons, making it glow.

Then even that faded, leaving only the stars to glint through the holes in the roof.

“Cob—“ she started, but the ichor in her throat cut her voice off in a rasp.  She fumbled with Serindas, trying to press it to her bracer—to steal its vitality no matter how little was left—but the piking thing wouldn't respond.  All it did was pump ichor, and as she sank to one knee, she felt her heart jitter under its toxic load.  She couldn't breathe, couldn't rise.

Her legs went dead.  The blade dropped from her nerveless hand.

I should have known.

This was the penalty for what she was and what she had chosen.  She was bound to the Palace and the Light, and where they went, she would be forced to go.  Her time spent living at a distance had not made her immune, and Enkhaelen's patch-job—the one he'd warned her about—had only tied her more closely to the place of her rebirth.

Now that it was gone, nothing could sustain her.

No!  I won't be taken!  I can curl up in myself, resist, survive...

But the parts of her bracer that controlled her muscles had already deadened, leaving her powerless, and as her sensory threads frayed and died, she felt herself disconnect from it.  For the first time in forty-five years, she did more than wear her body.  She inhabited it.

Someone was coming.  She heard the footfalls, the shaking timbre of a voice, but the sounds wouldn't connect.  Her eyes had slumped closed, but she didn't need sight to recognize him.  His arms were gentle as they wrapped around her.

Her lips wouldn't move.

I don't want to go
, she told him anyway.

I wanted to follow you into the future.  Into something better for both of us.

Cob, I'm sorry.  You'll have to go without me.

Can you ever forgive—

*****

“Das?  Dasira?  No...come on, open your eyes, open your
pikin' eyes!  No!  No, no, no!  Darilan, curse you, don't you dare!  Don't you—
“